Quote Of The Day

July 31, 2005

“That isn’t for sale. It’s just a decoration.”

Said to daughter about the candy, which was lining the shelves at the check-out counter of a local shoe store.

Single Handedly Bringing The Property Values Down

July 29, 2005

I live in a neighborhood where it seems everyone has a big landscape crew come in and mow their lawns and do their yard work. Everyone except for us.

Rob and I like to roll our eyes at each other and say things like, “If I am ever that lazy… blah blah blah” But really we just say that to make ourselves feel better. Because we really are that lazy, or at least I am. If we had the money to pay a lawn crew to come in and do the work while I sat on front porch, sipping mint juleps*, thumbing through the latest issue of Better Homes and Gardens, I’d give up ever touching lawn grooming appliances again for the rest of my natural life, and beyond. **

This morning I decided to mow the front lawn as a “gift” for my husband. It is a “gift” because it is something I rarely do. There is something satisfying about the back and forth horizontal lines that the lawn mower produces. I imagine it must be the same feeling that people with wall to wall carpeting get when the vacuum their rugs. Not satisfying enough that I want to make a habit out of doing it though. (Is that clear, Rob?)

People drove by as I was mowing the lawn and stared. I imagine they were saying to each other things like, “Is she the hired help? I thought that was the Mom?” “Look that family has so many kids they have to take care of the yard work themselves!”

Or they might have been saying, “Why is that woman chasing those half naked, small children around yard with a lawn mower shouting, ‘I am going to make mulch out of you, my pretties!’”

*I have no idea what mint juleps is other than it sounds like something you would lazily sip on a porch while your servants fanned you with palm fronds.

** Rob has told me that in a few years I will have my own crew of landscape workers. They are called my sons. Now if I could just get them to fan me.

Quote Of The Day

July 28, 2005

“No when I was a child we didn’t have crayons. If we wanted to color we had to make our own paints out of berries and leaves we collected ourselves… No we didn’t have paper either. We had to paint on the walls of the caves in which we lived. But it really wasn’t that big of deal since we were so busy eeking out our existence in the ice covered tundra, hunting mammoths, and fashioning our clothing out of fur pelts.”

Said by me in response to my children’s never ending questions about what things I had as a child, you know way back in the last century

Long Haired Freaky People Need Not Apply

My oldest son decided approximately six months ago that he wanted to have long hair. LONG hair… like Jesus or Johnny Damon. Whatever. It’s his hair I couldn’t really care less how he wears it as long as it is clean.

Mostly I just ignored the hair growing or made jokes about putting bows in his hair. My joking was all in good fun and my son would laugh. His hair looked awful, like a big poofy mushroom cap sitting on top of his head. Especially when he takes off his baseball cap and the hair on the top of his head is plastered to his scalp and the ends of his hair are curled up and sticking out like a mane around his head. In the grand scheme of things, it isn’t something I want to fight with my son about. However, it drives my husband crazy.

It is one of the very few parenting things that we have disagreed about. Rob keeps asking him if he would like a haircut. And the constant mentioning seems to make my son even more adamant that he is not cutting his hair. I think embracing it takes the rebellion factor out of the equation and shows that we respect him as an autonomous individual capable of making some decisions of his own. And honestly, I just don’t care.

When I was his age I had long hair. Really long hair that was well past my butt. Every morning my mother would put it into two thick braids. I would have to stand up on the toilet lid so that she could reach the bottom of my hair without having to sit on the floor. Every morning would find me in tears as she dragged the brush through the snarled mass of my hair. And every morning I would get hit on the top of my head with the brush and yelled at to stand still. I hated it and hated my long hair. I begged to be allowed to cut it short. Short being a relative term since I really only wanted it to my shoulders.

Well, one day I came home from school and decided that I was going to cut my hair myself. I’m still not sure what possessed me to do it, or how I thought I was going to get away with cutting my hair and my mother not noticing. But I cut one of my braids off above my shoulder.

Then I panicked. And I did the only thing I could think of which was to dispose of the evidence.

And so I flushed my 2 foot long braid down the toilet.

But now the question remained, what to tell my mother about my missing hair. My first thought was to just pretend that I had no idea what she was talking about. I thought that when she came home from work I would just pretend like my hair had always been like that and that I had no idea what she was talking about. But even at ten years old I knew that was just wishful thinking.

Then I got the brilliant idea to pull all my hair back into a single pony tail in the back of my head. that way the short choppy hair would be camouflaged by the longer hair that still remained. I silently praised myself for this awesome idea and resolved to wear my hair in a pony tail for the next few years. Surely my mother would be none the wiser.

But when I tried this I realized I had cut the one side so short that it wouldn’t reach the back of my head, let alone flow nicely into a ponytail.

Then I became desperate, though not quite desperate enough to tell the truth. I called my mother up at work and told her I had just arrived home and looked at myself in the mirror and realized that someone must have cut off my hair at school that day.

She asked the obvious questions like, “How could someone cut off your hair and you not notice?” “Why would anyone do that?” “Wouldn’t you feel someone with scissors right next to your head?” “Wouldn’t any of your friends have told you that the hair on half of your head was missing?” “Do you have any idea who would do that?”

And I gave the obvious answers, “I don’t know.” “I don’t know.” “I don’t know.” “I don’t know.” But the answer to the last question would haunt me and live on in family lore for the rest of my years, “Well, I did see Stacey with scissors today.”

And my mother answered, “Well, we will just see about this Stacy girl when I get home. Don’t worry we’ll get to the bottom of this.” And then she hung up.

Then I spent the next two hours ringing my hands and pacing around our house. I was terrified. And frankly a little incredulous that my mother actually believed my lie, or so I thought. I would find out years later that she spent the two hours laughing and sharing the story with all her coworkers, and all of them collaborating on what my mother should do.

Long story short, many embarrassing phone calls to my many friends and their parents and the school principal, I finally collapsed into a sobbing heap on the kitchen floor and admitted that I had, despite all the believable evidence I had given to the contrary, cut my hair myself.

Which brings me back to my son.

This past weekend Rob offered him cold hard cash in exchange for a haircut. They went back and forth over the amount of money his hair was worth. My son poured over his Lego catalogs contemplating future purchases. Finally they settled on $100.

My son sat outside on the stool wavering in his decision. Finally I said to him, out of earshot of my husband, that his hair could always grow back, but legos are forever. With a glimmer in his eye and thoughts of Bionicles, he picked up the clippers and shaved off the side of his hair.

And now I have four other boys who have felt the lure of cash and decided they want to grow their hair long also.

Quote Of The Day

July 27, 2005

“What are you talking about? I did so give you dinner last night. The banana split was your dinner… Why, yes I do think that it was a nutritious dinner. Dairy, nuts, banana- a perfect well rounded meal. Keep complaining and tonight you’ll be eating beans out of a can with your fork, because there is no way I am cooking in this heat.”

To The Person Who Called My House at 9:43 am

July 25, 2005

I apologize that you were not greeted with the customary hello.

I imagine it was quite shocking to instead be treated to the sounds of two small children screaming, crying and fighting, as well as an older child screaming “shut-up! Shut-up! I can’t hear my computer!” in the background. I promise I am not running a torture chamber over here, despite the seeming evidence to the contrary.

Sometimes my two year old decides to answer the telephone before I can get to it. Normally this is not a problem as I am standing right next to her and she immediately hands the phone to me so I can say hello. No one is any the wiser.

Today, however, I was out of the room when the phone rang. My 2 year old answered the phone and the 4 year old tried to wrestle it out of her hands. The screams you heard were her fighting for dear life to hang on to it. The loud thumps were her her hitting her brother over the head with the receiver. That was followed by his screams.

Wisely you decided to hang up, probably because the shrill screaming pierced your eardrums, rendering you deaf.

Feel free to call back at another time.

On second thought, don’t call back. They have finally stopped screaming and I am not up for a second round this early in the day.

Have a nice day.

Context Is Everything

July 21, 2005

Son: Mom, I can’t help it, I just love to screw. I love screwing. Don’t you just love screwing?

Me: Not on my table I don’t love screwing.

Son: Well, I do. I love screwing on a table, on a chair, on the floor, on anything that is hard really. It’s just so fun. I love the holes. It’s fun to screw in the holes.

Me: (trying not to laugh) I just don’t think I can carry on this conversation any longer, enough with the hole screwing.

Son: Why? Don’t you like to screw holes?

Me: (laughing) No, …I mean yes, …I mean I don’t know.

Son: Well, Dad does.

Me: Yes, that is true.

Son: (yelling to me as I leave the room) Just call me the hole man from now on, because I love holes.

Me: Oh God help me.

(To put the story in context, it occurred right after I discovered someone had driven screws into my kitchen table. This is the reason, when your children do something incredibly stupid, you should never ask “why?”, or at least never ask it in public.)

My Life Is A Series Of Events Too Boring to Discuss

July 20, 2005

I was afraid that taking medication would change me, turn me into some insufferable perky cheerleader. Thankfully that has not happened. I am still dark and cynical and hate Chicken Soup for the Soul stories as much as ever.

But I have nothing to write about. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Nothing.

There is nothing interesting about doing laundry. Who really cares what I made for dinner last night. Or that I cleaned my bathroom, with bleach! The excitement is really too much.

But I have had a few fleeting thoughts:

1) I have been walking around muttering about the whole Harry Potter hype. I just don’t get it. When I see grown ups walking around clutching the newest book to their chest and reading it in their every spare moment, like standing in line at the store, I can’t help but laugh.

2) If you lose a tooth and want to wash the blood off so as not to offend the tooth fairy, it would be wise to plug the drain so that if the tooth slips out of your hand it will not go down the drain. Consider yourself warned.

3) Having a bagless vacuum means that you can sift through and retrieve the lego that have been sucked up. In theory. In reality they should be picked up off of the floor when I ask.

4) If someone would invent a device that hooked on to the harness of children’s carseats that would deliver an electric shock when I pushed a button, I would SO buy one or two, or six. Just a small electrical shock. You know to knock them unconscious for a few minutes. Okay, I am just joking. They don’t have to be rendered unconscious. The electrical shocks alone should be an effective tool to stop them from the constant bickering in the van.

5) The fan perched on top of the television gives my house that extra bit of class that it was previously lacking.

6) My favorite part of my day lately is when my infant son wakes up in the morning. He looks in my eyes so intently and smiles so wide it seems as though his face may crack in half. When he reaches up and grabs my face with his small sweaty fists and pulls it towards his open mouth, it is a moment of pure joy. His world is complete because I am there and it is at that precise moment that I feel my life has some sort of meaning. And it gives me hope that just maybe my heart really isn’t a shriveled black lump of coal that I often think it is. Maybe.

Evidence That Will One Day Be Used Against Me

July 18, 2005

My oldest son had, say it with me now, another baseball game. Rob took him and all the boys to the game. I opted to stay home. Since the game is an hour away from our house and they need to “warm up”an hour before the game, it turns it into an all day long affair. I just couldn’t stand outside in the blistering heat, holding a sweaty squirming 7 month old and chasing a two year old around.

Just strip me of my Nike sneakers, because I JUST. COULDN’T. DO. IT.

I decided to stay home and relax. Oh and to grout the tile in our sunroom, because a 2 year old and 7 month old are the perfect helpers for this type of job. Of course they will sit quietly and watch the Wiggles, for 30 seconds.

At one point my two year old was sitting on top of our piano in the adjacent room throwing CD’s across the room like small frisbees and clapping for herself. And I found myself saying things like, “Wow, what a good throw. You’re good at that!” Because it was either that or have her playing in the tub of wet grout and trying to dig it back out of the floor with her fingernails.

And then when she wanted to have a snack for the twentieth time that hour I suggested that she go get one herself. When she poured an entire box of Honey Nut Cheerios out onto the area rug and the two of them climbed into it eating it by the wet fistsfull, I said, “Oh, yummy yummy!”

Other memorable things I said.

“Please don’t paint on the baby’s back with the grout!”

“Don’t dunk your head in the bucket of dirty water!”

“Go look out the window in the other room and tell me if you see an elephant. Are you sure? Well keep looking, maybe it’s hiding.” This one bought me at least five minutes. And because I am mean I used it several times successfully.

My two littles successfully trashed several rooms in the house. When Rob came home he surveyed the mess and declared it looked like a frat party gone bad. Very, very bad.

I question whether the medication I am now taking, my crazy drug, is working at all. Because all evidence this weekend points to the fact that I am, in fact, still nuts.

But I do have a nice floor.

The Floor
Originally uploaded by the big yellow house.

File This One Under Parenting Advice

July 15, 2005

Son: You know what I really want, Mom?

Me: No what?

Son: A cup.

Me: A cup? Like a water bottle? or a coffee cup?

Son: No, like a cup that goes in your pants.

Me: Oh. Do you need one of those?

Son: No, I just want one.

Me: Why? Are you afraid that you’re going to get hit in your penis with a baseball?

Son: No. I just think it would be cool to have one.

Me: Oh.

Son: Then when I am bored in the outfield I can tap my hands on it and pretend it is a bongo drum I am playing. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Son: Mom? Why are you laughing like that? What’s so funny?

The moral of the story is that you must always question your children’s motives. Even when you think the answer is painfully obvious, it probably isn’t. This will save you untold embarrassment. And potentially save your child from being saddled with a nickname like “penis-drummer” for the rest of his childhood.