Birthday Wishes

Several times a year I am asked by relatives, and therefore have to ask my kids, what they want for their birthdays. I am thankful that they don't give answers like, "An iPad."  They know better than that, because then, without a doubt, they will be forced to suffer through a mini-lecture on iPads and children, and being grateful for what they have, and some kids would be happy to have a meal made from the layer of cast-off crumbs that we find under the kitchen table every night after dinner.  So they would never ask for an iPad. Or anything like that. Especially since they know the passwords to ours, and in the wee hours of the morning, when we are weak-willed and sleepy, they already use this to their advantage.

Instead, my kids come up with these great, imaginative, if not slightly depressing birthday wish lists. Allison turned 6 last year, and asked for the following items: 

• a blue lampshade (because she just got tired of her purple one)
• art supplies (because the twins get into her markers, etc., and mess everything up)
• a new swimsuit (many of her swimsuits are hand-me downs and well-worn by now)
• eczema cream (she's almost out)
• a birthday hug (she never gets enough hugs)

Michael turned double digits.  He asked for:

• a pork pie hat (because he already has a fedora)
• book 3 from the Eragon series (he has books 1, 2, and 4)
• a lock for his bedroom door (the twins keep getting in to his room and messing everything up)
• a birthday hug (because Allison got birthday hugs)

I'm sure this will all change once they become tweens and teens, or when we decide to upgrade to the next version and suddenly have an older iPad just sitting around.  I imagine their sense of entitlement will deepen, and they see the other kids at school with all of their iToys, but we will still fight it. In the meantime, I am happy for them to get their new lampshade, pork pie hat, and of course, plenty of hugs.

Rear-ended Again

Kids, there is a reason they are not letting you on that bus.

My kids, like many others, are fascinated with butts. Not just butts, but also bums, poop, toots, diarrhea, and anything remotely resembling any of those things. They are all precocious scatology experts, no doubt about it. The twins in fact sing a lovely ditty (to the tune of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song) that goes,

My name is Stinky the Butthole Car.

I live in your bum so I can't go very far. 

But every day when I'm driving on my route, 

 I honk my horn, and it comes out like a toot.

ppfffft ppfffft.

It would be cuter if they had made up the song themselves, but they learned it from a grown-up. One who lives in our house. Whose genetic material they have inherited. And it's not me.

One time we went to a store that has one of those contraptions that grinds peanuts into fresh all-natural peanut butter for you- you know, the kind without emulsifiers and added sugar. You have to stir it all the time.  I thought it would be a fun way to learn how peanut butter is made.  They could participate by pushing the button, and then we'd all enjoy peanut butter sandwiches when we got home.  What I didn't anticipate was that when the peanut butter is extruded from the machine, it has the consistency and appearance of... "MOMMY!  IT LOOKS LIKE POOP! IS DAT POOP?!!"  I had to admit to myself that they were right.  Children always speak the truth. But I answered, "No honey, that's not poop. That's peanut butter."

Until we got home, and I made grilled Elvis sandwiches, with fresh peanut butter, banana slices, and a drizzle of honey. Buttered and grilled, with bacon if you have it, on multi-grain bread because we're trying to be more healthy (ha). "Mommy, these are the best poop sandwiches I've ever had." Er, thanks guys. And the name stuck, even for regular poop and jelly sandwiches.

A tiny little Allison!

Not too long ago, I took the twins with me to get Allison's hair cut.  I figured they would enjoy watching other people get their haircut, and it wouldn't really be a huge deal. Until a man with certain plumber-like qualities sat down in the chair to get his haircut right in front of them. With his backside gloriously displayed in the space in the back of the seat. Half a foot of his vertical smile, none of it covered by the stylist's cape. (This was a chain salon, not a fancy place, so the capes were smaller I guess.)  I didn't really notice it at first, until one of the twins yelled, "LOOKEE HITH BUTT!!!"  and then the other twin yelled, "DAT MAN IS SHOWING HIS BUM!!! WHY IS HE SHOWING HIS BUM?!!!"  Allison was cracking up. I glared at her, although it was nearly impossible to feign anger.

I guess it's time to re-implement the "Potty words go in the potty" rule that we used to have when Michael was about this age. Essentially, it means that as long as you go into the bathroom and shut the door, you can yell "poopDIARRHEAtooooooooots" to your heart's content. Just not at the dinner table. Unless we're having poop sandwiches.

They know no shame and
waggle their bums proudly.

Haunted Toys

The bear is innocent!

Now that our last babies are getting older, we are finally able to expunge the house of toys that they have outgrown.  No toys are more gladly tossed or donated than those that we call Haunted Toys.  You know what these are.  The puzzles that are light activated, and bleat like sheep or croak electronically if the puzzle piece is not in place when the lights go off at night. The toys that are motion activated, and if sitting near a heat register, will start bleeping and tweeting in the middle of the night. More than once, we have woken up on high alert, and tip-toed downstairs to make sure our house wasn't being burgled.

Still other toy designers think it's a great practical joke to make toys that don't have off switches.  I choose to believe in karma, because I need to know that someday, those toy designers are going to be stuck somewhere with the mind-numbing toys that they made, listening to the songs over and over and over. Like that guy in the 80s who rolled his car while listening to his Wham! cassette, and was forced to listen to Careless Whispers on repeat for something like 7 hours.

I am the Babbling Bee...
I'll drive you insane, tee hee...

A friend of ours had a baby while we were in between ours, and borrowed some baby toys from us. We loaned them to her gladly, but on condition that she kept one particular toy, the Fisher Price First Sounds Bee.  This particular toy was touch-activated, and had no off switch. She kept her word, and kept the toy, but the song still lingers in our heads.  Even my 10 year old can still sing it. "I am a babbling bee, I'll sing you a song tee-hee... I am a babbling bee.... fiddle dee diddle dee dee..." (Thankfully, and inexplicably, we are still friends with the new Babbling Bee keepers.)

Haunted toys still lurk in the far corners of our house, but they are endangered.  I recall one night when my husband had had enough.  The kids were in bed, we had settled in with our respective electronic toys of our own, and suddenly we heard the horse puzzle go off downstairs.  It was one of those Melissa and Doug puzzles that is light activated, and when you put the correct puzzle piece in its place, it makes the corresponding animal noise. My husband suddenly became insane. "THAT'S IT!  I'VE HAD IT!"  I stayed out of his way while he stormed downstairs to grab the puzzle and take it out into the garage.  Where he proceeded to beat the thing to death with a hammer. He came back upstairs, looking a little crazed behind his normally calm eyes, and said, "Well, that won't be giving us any trouble anymore."

Or so he thought. When I went out into the garage the next day and turned on the light, I heard this garbled "NNAaa-ayy" emanating from the garbage can. If you are a person with no kids, and you never plan to have kids, and for some reason, you really want to stick it to some new parents, I have a list of toys for you.  By all means, do your worst, but remember that revenge is sweet, and a lot of these parents have hammers.  Don't say I didn't warn you.

*Thank you Jill W. for inspiring this post. And Mel, we are long overdue for dinner with you guys and the bee. 

Handing Over the Baton

I’ve been a runner for most of my life. I started running in high school and never looked back. I married a runner that I met on my college team. I ran a few marathons, and stopped running on and off to have children. Four of them, to be exact, including a set of twins, who collectively drive me to continue running. My eldest is now 10, and has just started running. This is not the kind of thing you want to push your kid into and burn him out at an early age, but I’m not gonna lie. I couldn’t be more thrilled. I hope he becomes a lifelong runner, and develops a love for the sport. I’m faster than him now, but I know it will only last a little while longer. I go on short runs with him, and my husband and I have taken him to a few 5Ks. He’s still at the point where he PRs every race. He goes to track workouts on Tuesday nights, and people know his name. He’s the youngest person there by well over a decade- and I’m being generous. He uses his new running watch that he got for Christmas to time his intervals, running them faster and faster until he decides he’s done.

I listen to him list the other sports that he could play- ones that involve balls you have to chase and tussle with others to get, sports where you should be tall, sports where you should be huge, and sports where the ability to perform coordinated lateral movements is the key to success. He sighs as he lists these other sports, and gives reasons why they’re not the best fit for him. “I might as well just run, Mom. I guess it’s a good thing I like it.”

Sometimes in the kitchen he gets twitchy, and dances around while I’m trying to get dinner ready. He picks up things, plays with them, puts them back down. Over and over, until I exasperatedly send him downstairs to the treadmill to run until he is tired so he will stop bothering me. Before he really started running, he’d run a mile and that would be enough. But as he gets into better and better shape, his lack of tolerance for the monotony of the treadmill tends to drive him back upstairs before he’s tired. So now my kitchen problem is back and dinner takes a little longer to get on the table, but it’s worth it for the little running quips he doles out when he’s in the right mood.

“Mom, I think I hit my breaking point today during my run.” He sounds a little too exhilarated for someone who had just hit his breaking point, so I question him further, and he says, “You know, when you get to that point where you feel like you could just run and run forever? Isn’t that the breaking point?” Um. No, honey, I think that’s a runner’s high. The breaking point is something a little different.

I took him to a cross country practice with a local youth cross country team once his soccer season was over. These kids had been running all season, while he had been playing soccer. They were seasoned racers, some super speedy, some just regular kids, and they just had a few big meets left before it was over and everyone would retreat to the slopes or just their warm houses to wait it out until track started. They ran 4-5 miles that day, including a timed interval workout. He had never run that far in his life, but afterwards, he said to me, “Mom! Can I do this instead of soccer next fall? This is great! You don’t have to chase a ball around. All you have to do is run. It’s so much easier!” I didn’t think his former soccer teammates would have agreed, but I told him, “Sure.” I kept my tone casual, as if it was no more or less significant than him needing a new pair of socks. I also told him that he could go to all the rest of the practices that season, if he wanted to. A smile started to tug at the corner of his mouth. I kept my eyes on the road, as I know he will be doing in the decades to come as his feet, which are almost as big as mine, pound the pavement.

Angry Helmet Cat

Somewhere around age two kids REALLY start to exert their own preferences, like what color sippy cup they use and what outfit they're going to wear that day.  Some kids don't care- but my kids are not like that. Both of the girls began picking out their own outfits around this age. During that phase, it can sometimes be difficult to differentiate my daughters' outfits from those worn by toddler transvestite streetwalkers, flourescent hobos, or newly minted Asian immigrants (a look that the kids' grandmother occasionally sports).

This one I'm less sure about.

Accessories by Julia.

This isn't just limited to the girls, however. My little guy Matthew is going through a phase where he insists on wearing a cat tail that attached around his waist with a velcro belt. He has a set of matching ears as well, and prefers to wear both together, although, he is okay with just the tail.  The issue with the ears is that they don't fit very well under his helmet, and he likes to wear that a lot too. In the car for instance, in case his car seat doesn't function properly during an accident.  Or during Easter egg hunts. Or even just eating breakfast. Kids have gotten seriously injured during egg hunts as well as while eating eggs, and he somehow must know this instinctively.  This Darwinian safety trait will almost certainly serve him well in the future, and somehow makes me worry less, because whether or not he is ostracized to the margins of society, at least he will be physically safe.  And if he isn't able to directly avoid confrontation, perhaps his angry cat imitation will at least give people paws.  Oops, I mean, pause.

Needs and Wants

My children are children of the first world. They have a lot of first world problems, like being out of Havarti cheese and having to eat their grilled cheese on sourdough with Gruyere instead. Or not being able to find the other black Mary Jane shoe, and having to wear the red pair instead. Or wondering why the video is taking SO long to load on the iPad. They also confuse the meanings of the words "NEED" and "WANT" on a routine basis.

They might not NEED to use the iPad, but sometimes
Mommy and Daddy need them to sit nicely for a few minutes
while the kitchen cleans itself.

One morning, I was trying to coax the twins down the stairs when Julia (age 2 1/2) halted in the middle of the steps, stuck her hands out, and screamed, "I NEED MY NAILS PAINTED!"  I couldn't compute, and said dumbly, "What?"   She repeated herself, louder this time, because as we all know, when someone doesn't understand your language, the best thing to do is to speak LOUDER.

"I NEED MY NAILS PAINTED!"  

I tried to tell her gently, "Honey, you don't NEED your nails painted. You NEED to come downstairs and eat your breakfast."  That went absolutely nowhere, and resulted in her getting carried, kicking and screaming, down the rest of the stairs. Why? Because her old nail polish had chipped off. Yes, that's right.  Her old nail polish.  She lives in the first world.

More often than an early morning manicure,
what Julia NEEDS are her fairy wings and tutu.
Just having one ballet slipper doesn't seem to bother her.

The best is when I try to point out the difference between NEEDS and WANTS, and this launches a debate between my older children. I'm paraphrasing wildly here, because I can't remember the exact conversation.

Allison:  I need milk.
Michael: You don't NEED milk.
Allison: YES, I do. I need some milk. I don't have any.
Michael: No, you WANT milk.
Allison: No, I NEED milk, because how else will my bones grow?
Me: Listen, here's your milk. I NEED you guys to speak nicely to each other, and say please and thank you.

All I really can do is to try to teach them to be grateful that all of their NEEDS and most of their wants are met, and that they are fortunate to have their health and all of their innate gifts.  And, oh yeah, that they grow up to be hard-working, responsible adults. Who eventually have children that provide as much laughter and as many challenges and exasperated moments as they have given me and my husband.

I would agree with the kids that books are a NEED.
Pants are more of an optional thing.

What is a Kardashian?

I will readily admit that we have too many mind-numbing magazines cluttering up the house. Never mind that they were free as a result of a few about-to-expire leftover airline miles.  We probably pay for it in other ways, such as lost, irreplaceable brain cells that are now taken up with who looked better in what dress, and how the stars buy cereal, milk and eggs just like we do.  Never mind that I take them into work when we are done with them, so that they can clutter up our lunchroom and my coworkers' minds, and perpetuating the paparazzi problem that those poor, hounded celebrities have.  Never mind all of those things, because every now and then, we get some memorable dinner conversations as a result.

Snorkelers:  they look suspiciously like us!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cardassian 

Like one night as we were enjoying a nice family dinner (read: it was so loud you could barely finish a thought), when my son asked, "What is a Kardashian? Isn't that like a Star Trek character or something?"  I honestly didn't know what to say, because I was not sure what a Kardashian was.  I knew for sure they were not Cardassians, although their quest to take over the entertainment empire could certainly be compared to that of the Cardassian regime.  I knew that Kardashians, like Cardassians, wear a lot of makeup, at least for TV cameras.  They also both display a lot of prominent body parts, like neck ridges or cleavage, but other than that, I really wasn't sure. I guess they both have entertainment value? What I could say for certain was that, yet again, Michael had asked me a question that I had a difficult time answering. Generally, I can come up with something authoritative enough so that it's plausible, but in this case, not so much.  I did a little research, meaning that I tried to watch one of the Kardashian shows.  Still, nothing. And quite frankly,  I would have been much better off with Star Trek.  Any Star Trek.

But fast forward a week or two later, to the middle of a rousing game of family charades. My son was halfway bent over, waggling his bottom at us, and gesturing towards it wildly. Any number of answers should have been correct, given that as a 9 year old boy, butts, toots, poop, and all things scatological comprise about 90% of his comedy material.  Instead, and I'm not sure how I feel about this, he exasperatedly yelled, "I'm a Kardashian! Jeez, can't you tell by my big butt?" Sigh.  There must be a better way to spend those leftover miles.

That's uncanny, because I usually wear something exactly like this
when I go bowling too!  They ARE just like us!
http://ypointbeauty.blogspot.com/2010/10/kim-kardashianim-not-drinker-and-when.html