Is this helping or not helping?

Crazy sharks

Several times a day, I ask my sons: "Is this helping or not helping?"

Putting socks on their ears when we're 42 minutes late to school already? Feeding the dog WHOLE RAINBOW-COLORED HARD BOILED EGGS IN THE SHELL WHEN MOM IS JUST TRYING TO KEEP THE KITCHEN FROM BEING DYED TECHNICOLOR?!?!

"Is this helping or not helping?" They already know the answer.

Instead of asking them what I would really like to say: "What in the everloving hell are you thinking?!?!?" I hope that by phrasing it as such a question, the boys will analyze what they're doing, what our goal at that moment is, and if their behavior is helping us move toward that end or not. Mostly not.

It's funny that I never ask it when the answer would be "helping." I should probably mix it up a bit. For some reason, I am never as compelled to push the issue when things are going well.

When drowning in laundry and a mix of domestic and farm-based disasters, I've gotten excellent at screaming at my kids: "IS THIS HELPING OR NOT HELPING?!?!?" The one person I really need to ask, though, is myself.

Late-night Instagram scrolling where I feel inadequate? Sucking down that fifth latte in the hopes of finally mustering some energy? Fighting with a random guy with five followers on Twitter for that dopamine hit? Putting off life administration duties until the last minute (::cough filing the extension cough::)?

"Is this helping or not helping?"

When posed (usually yelling) to a child, it's such a straightforward question. I wish I were as good at posing it to myself as I am to them.

Tonight the kiddos did it again. When given the choice to come out and milk with me or get an extra 15 minutes of tv before bed, both boys chose to come outside. I always try to oblige when they pick the outdoors over television, even to my personal detriment.

It's almost always some unnecessary drama when they come out to milk with me - but that's how we learn.

It's not like they're bad kids, but milking is my quiet time for reflection, and my children are essentially well-intentioned, distilled tiny tornadoes. There's a guarantee when you mix a herd of hungry goats, a small shed full of carefully sanitized milking equipment and grain, and two preschoolers who are ready for bed - something will go wrong.

Usually, if the boys are out with me, I can count on at least one goat foot in the bucket. Tonight I grabbed several different buckets, so I wouldn't lose the whole night of work if they ruined one. I didn't realize they would take messing with my milk time to a whole new level.

These days the goat babies are aggressively attacking every udder that contains milk. They're at an age where baby feeding time has moved from a loving bond with their mothers to an attempt to indiscriminately suck dry every orifice available close to their faces like creepy little fuzzy milk vampires.

Generally, only their mothers will allow the violent udder attacks - and they will decrease their tolerance for this behavior until their kids are weaned. Now is about the age when goat babies start to leave bite marks on their moms as they nurse with gusto.

While on the milk stand, though, any doe in milk will stand stoically in exchange for grain. Years of training and patience mean that the does know what they're doing when they get up there. They're consummate professionals. Those goats who would never let someone else's kids near her udder will just stand and munch her treats if she's on the stand.

Because my human kids love the babies and are also expert conspiring chaos agents, they quickly realized that goat babies only want one thing - udders with milk in them.

So, instead of their regular routine of being loud and obnoxious and scaring the goats being milked, which I'm used to dealing with, my sons worked in concert with the goat babies. They waited until they does were on the stand, and I was crouched down on the stool to release a baby into the milk room. It was chaos.

"DAMMIT! IS THIS HELPING OR NOT HELPING?!?!" I screamed as a goat baby beelined for the stand and the awaiting defenseless udder. Goat babies are creepily strong for as little as they are. They spend all day every day just focused on getting milk. It's their sole purpose. I crouched down on the floor and, trying to hold my balance on a children's stool, was no match for a locked-in milk-driven cruise missile.

As soon as I could get up from the milking stool (which sits four inches off the floor, and I am almost 40 - it takes a second) I would grab a goat baby and toss her out. My sons would wait for me to sit back down, position the bucket, reclean the udder, and would then send in the next conspiree.

It was a mess.

For all the frustration, the baby human's second completely clear full sentence (the first was "I love cake, let's make one") came while milking tonight. He looked in the door at my struggles and said, while laughing, "She looks like a crazy shark," as I tried fruitlessly to pull yet another baby goat off an udder while she sucked maniacally at the air that just a second ago had contained a teat.

I guess the parade of crazy shark babies were worth the heartburn.

"Is this helping or not helping?" I guess it's helping.