Book Review: See How They Run

Title: See How They Run

Author: Lorilee Craker

Publisher: Waterbrook (Random House)

Date: 2004

ISBN: 1-57856-488-3

Length: 199 pages plus 3 pages endnotes and advertising material

Illustrations: black-and-white author photo and drawings of toddlers’ toys that look like Ken Westphal’s cover drawing

Quote: “Toddlerhood scares me. I’ve been through it all the way once with my firstborn…I have three months to go before Term Two ends…)Term Three is just a twinkle in our eyes right now as we fill out the paperwork to adopt…) Right there in those parentheses, you can see that toddlerhood must not be that bad if I’m actually going…through it a third time.”

This is a mildly witty, unobtrusively Christian review of what Modern Psychology tells us about two-year-olds, as vetted by the author’s friends. If the jacket drawing is not enough to turn you off the idea of giving birth to a future toddler, on the grounds that you and your spouse are likely to produce a child who looks a little less like a butterfly-fish than that, you might want to read the actual toddler tales inside the book.

Baby-sitting for sprogs at this stage of life is probably the key to success with abstinence-focussed education for teenyboppers. With its frank discussions of screaming and kicking toddlers, fighting and biting toddlers, toddlers at the stage of self-control where the male or Maximum Gross-Out Model can gush flu virus in at least three directions all at once, See How They Run seems like an ideal gift for any teenaged girls you catch showing any interest in teenaged boys. If Craker’s and friends’ anecdotes don’t extinguish every trace of Teen Romance, someone might have to volunteer to take the risk and leave the girl in charge of an actual toddler.

I was not thrilled by reading See How They Run. Due to my mother’s poor health, I started to be held responsible for infants and toddlers before puberty (even my brother occasionally earned a quarter by baby-sitting for half an hour, at age six), and it was a tremendous aid to celibacy. I can vouch for some of the tricks Craker and friends describe using with their toddlers, firsthand or at least secondhand. Careful reading of this book would be a good way to prepare for your first encounter with a two-year-old if you’ve not lived with one before. But who wants to live with a two-year-old?

Well…I spent considerable amounts of time with some of The Nephews when one of them was two years old. I must confess…I enjoyed it. At an age when most children make their parents want to run away, that one was a pleasure to know. But he was a very special two-year-old who snacked on raw vegetables, rarely watched television, and kicked and screamed only on two occasions all year; and during at least one of those two tantrums I think he was right. Some people do produce two-year-olds as precociously congenial with humans as that child was. Nobody can afford to expect they’ll have one. Even my brother, in many ways “the perfect kid” my natural sister bitterly called him, had mostly given up biting and kicking but was still a howler at age two. My natural sister was a little monster and, based on what I remember about myself at less disgusting stages of life, I’m sure I was another.

The ones that screech? If I’m on the jury, the maximum charge of which a person who killed a screeching two-year-old is guilty would be third-degree homicide, an involuntary reaction to pain, for which having to listen to a counsellor explain the concept of ear plugs is probably as much punishment as anyone needs. (So I’m saying it here.) Craker doesn’t say it but, if obliged to spend time around a two-year-old, bring ear plugs. They leave enough brain cells in a functional condition that you can remember to lock the screecher in the nursery and go to the far end of the house until quiet lets you know that the little beast has either worn itself out and gone to sleep, or made itself sick and become interested in ways to spread the mess over the entire room, or maybe managed to sonic-sweep out its own brain. But most likely it’s asleep, looking angelic as it dreams of more diabolical ways to torture adults.

I prefer kittens. I say this on a day when the kittens in residence still think it’s terribly clever to show off that they’ve learned how to foul the path. If you do not have a big estate to keep in the family, you'll probably agreed after a few days' baby-sitting that almost any other lifeform is easier to live with than a human toddler. 

If you are determined to have a baby, there are all kinds of ways they annoy and embarrass people that this book doesn’t even mention, but on the other hand they do sleep a lot. Craker mentions this but at less length than she describes the many ways toddlers gross us out. The tot’s early-to-bed time and nap time will become the high points of the day. You can’t count on them lasting long enough for a really good re-creation of what you did to get stuck with this toddler in the first place, even if you did it the oldfashioned way and didn’t fill out forms—but you might be able to get through your e-mail, or a book, or a simple household chore.

It gets better, of course, in another year or so. Toddlers learn to control their hands and feet better; in hindsight it seems that they turned into children who could walk and talk and use the bathroom even to bathe, all by themselves, too fast, and you barely had time to enjoy the brain-picking munchkin stage before they were in primary school and the next thing you knew you had teenagers to deal with. There is a tendency to feel nostalgic about toddlers, which must be resisted. At least, if you do have three or four bedrooms to fill up, Craker's  provided the good example of filling those rooms with adoptive or foster children.