Nothing is Every Easy in the House of Noah

Nothing Is Ever Easy in the House of Noah

By: Shane Wiglesworth (Step-Dad and Noah Whisperer)

Nothing is ever easy.
At least not when you have a Noah.

But thanks to a multitude of prayers for patience, and a healthy supply of good drugs, we manage to survive.

The trouble starts when we forget his ADHD medicine, the magical potion that helps him manage impulses and transforms him (temporarily) into a polite, socially acceptable version of himself. Today was one of those days.

“Shane?” called Miriam down the stairs. “Did you give Noah his ADHD medicine yet?”

“Nah,” I replied. “Not yet. I’m waiting until it’s closer to time to leave for Riley’s field hockey game.”

“Okay,” she said, a note of caution in her voice. “Just don’t forget.”

The problem is that Noah burns through ADHD medicine like your kid going through the candy bag on Halloween. A dose that lasts eight hours in a normal kid lasts maybe two and a half in him before it’s completely gone. So we try to hold off until it is necessary.

Fifteen minutes later:

“Hey, babe,” she calls down again. “Did you give him his medicine yet???”

“Not yet,” I responded, trying to keep the irritation out of my voice. I don’t like being constantly reminded to do things. Is it a wonder that we husbands have developed such well-honed selective hearing capabilities?

Anyway.

“We’re not leaving for another ten minutes.”

And during those ten minutes, I completely forgot to medicate the boy. Please, no inward comments from the peanut gallery. Off Noah, Riley, and I go to her Field Hockey game where I spent the next two and a half hours paying for that mistake.

At one point during Riley’s field hockey game, she had control of the ball, and I reached over to tell Noah to cheer for his sister (since he’d been loudly cheering for the other team’s Riley earlier). That’s when I noticed his new fashion statement.

He’d found a red marker and decided to pretend it was lipstick.

You can imagine how that turned out. If you are curious, just hand a red marker to your three-year-old daughter and tell her to “pretend to be Mommy.” The results will be about the same. I sighed shook my head but decided it wasn’t worth it to comment. I knew he was looking for a reaction, so I decided not to give him one.

A few minutes later, he decided to have a barking contest with a little lap dog sitting in the bleachers a few rows up from us.

Then comes the grand moment. Noah decides to fully embrace his inner dog and starts licking the morning dew off the metal bleachers.

“Noah! Stop!” I barked. I lowered my voice and continued in a stern growl. “That’s disgusting!”

At this point, Noah did something he rarely does: he made eye contact. And while maintaining that steady, defiant gaze, he slowly leaned back down and ran his tongue along a good foot of bleacher surface.

He did not blink, and his eyes didn’t waver from mine.

Now granted, this isn’t the worst thing he’s done. here was that one time in Ocean City when I caught him halfway through licking the inside of a public toilet bowl. I yanked him back with a sound that can only be described as a heroic shriek.

But this time, it was the audacity, the fact that he looked me dead in the eye and then gave that bleacher a long, deliberate lick that made me shudder.

“Eck.”

Instead of making a scene, I decided to remove him from the situation. I had brought a softball with me, so I took him out to an open field to play catch.

Of course, as soon as I toss him the ball, he picks it up, walks over to the baseball field fence, throws it over, turns to me, says, “Done,” and walks back to the bleachers.

And for the grand finale, he treated Riley and me to his full-volume “Huy-ya-ya” chant, performed nonstop and without mercy for most of the forty-minute drive home.

When we finally returned home, I realized it was too early in the day for a glass of Sagamore (roughly 11:30 a.m.), but boy, was it tempting.