Tag Archives: kids

Useless

June 24, 2010

uselessSo I was doing laundry the other day and ran across the cutest little thing… a training bra. George* didn’t have those. I thought they were silly. I still think they’re silly. And knowing the Nugget got her dad’s sense of humor and silliness, I brought it up last night.

“I washed your laundry for you. Your cute little thing is on top.” Yep, that was me being coy in front of her father. He loves his girl. He shudders at the idea of her being a teenager.

She sees the look and giggles. “He knows about it!”

Hippie looks up with that crazed half-vulcan thing he does, “The training bra? Yeah…”

Of course, Nugget and I must roll with this. “So,” I asked her, “what are you training them to do?”

Best. Answer. Ever.

“To play dead!”

We all laughed. I said I was gonna blog that. And then we started thinking about other silly, useless articles of clothing. I offered up the dickie—the neck sock with no sleeves version, not to be confused with the canadian escapee that tends to live here on the weekends. The teenage boys—bored because my kids are gone for the summer, so they come and hang when we’re outside—suggested boxer-briefs. “They’re not boxers, they’re not briefs, and they’re stupid looking.”

So for this week’s amazingly random garage talk question: What items of clothing, or for that matter, things in general, do we as society accept…that are just simply useless. I mean really. We have cured most life-threatening diseases of the last century but think we have to “train” our boobs? We have landed on the moon, an amazing achievement, and some bozo decides to sell backwards robes to the hoards not smart enough to just wear their own backwards. What else is out there that makes you stop and think “Really? Why?” Come on… I’m in pain… make me giggle!!

*code breaker for those new to the blog: My girl=George, my boy=Kram, his girl=Nugget, his boy=Sauce. Yes, there will be a quiz later!

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What Counts

June 23, 2010

prettyflowerI suck. I know. I haven’t blogged this week. Been busy. Been dealing with the emotional void of my kids being gone for the summer and busying myself with cleaning the house and editing. Here are some fleeting thoughts I’ve had since the roadtrip home…

My son still gives me flowers (see image). He may be gone for a few months, but I had the picture on my desktop and saw it. And smiled. Of course, nothing has changed since was old enough to pick them—he still steals them from random yards. But the thought is what counts.

Amanda “cleaned” her room before she left for the summer. Clean is apparently subjective. I’ve stolen all the laundry baskets back and set mousetraps and mothballs. The crime scene tape will be put up soon. I could clean it for her, but I don’t know what she’s hiding in plain sight (aka the disaster zone) and wouldn’t want to appear to be snooping. I may want to strangle her some days, but I will always respect her privacy. That counts for something, right?

A spotted fawn staggered in front of us on the road trip last weekend. Hippie’s eyes lit up, “I want to pet it! Do you want an adventure?” I pulled over, turned around, and we went back to make sure the stagger was youth not injury. It was motherless but not hurt and ran away from him like a canadian covered in bacon grease. Thank goodness, because then he told me it was the metaphorical midget goat and he was going to grab it and bring it home. No live specimens! But he was trying to be helpful to what he thought was an injured critter. Failed or not, the thought is what counts.

Finally, as you may have gathered from twitter and/or facebook, I threw my back out. Holding the hose in one hand, I tried to heft the mostly empty and now clean pool with the other. The combination of weight (it’s filled with air, it should have been light!) and the twisting action was more than this old gypsy body could take. I froze when my back made that horrible “pop” sound. A few moments later, I realized I wasn’t breathing because I hadn’t taken Lamaze classes. See, this past weekend my sister and I were talking about Lamaze because I didn’t have it and told her I knew how to breathe. My sister claims that Lamaze is to teach you to breathe through pain because it’s our tendency to hold our breathe in pain. I disagreed. The universe proved me wrong. Rather than make up new swear words, I laughed as the thought flitted through my head and began breathing again. Yes, I hurt myself, but I laughed at myself. And so long as we can laugh at ourselves, that’s all that counts…

In the big scheme of things, when life is throwing water balloons at you and stress is breaking your sense of humor, remember what truly counts. If you can’t think of anything off the top of your head, stop what you’re doing and do something that truly counts. Whether it’s a thought, an action, or simply a gesture. In the end, some things count. Others just don’t.

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SSDD

June 16, 2010

summer-vacation-photo-contest_slideshow_imageFriday we hit the road for Wisconsin… again. This time, we’re coming back in a quieter vehicle. This time, we’re leaving the kids behind for summer. It will suck, so I’ll make the best of it and force the time to go quickly.

Yes, I said that.

And my younger self, the 12-year-old that lives just under the surface, is crying a little bit. Summer vacation used to mean the beach and sun, BBQs and picnics, relaxing and giggling and making memories. It meant wishing it would drag on forever and school would never start again.

But I have work to do.

I have a short story due next week that I still need to fix. I have an article due in July that I need to pull from an old blog and make pretty. I have another story due in August that I haven’t even started beyond musing and the first paragraph. I have a novel that needs to be finished before the kids get back in August. And when/if there’s downtime or I need a break, there’s a Big Mac vampire novel to be written. It’s crunch time. I’ll be going back to twice a week blogs and spending a ton of energy beating the muse until she’s bruised and bloody and begging for me to go to the beach, just so I’ll leave her alone for a day.

But right now I’m taking a smoke break and daydreaming of summer vacations past—because I’m a memory lane whore.

I remember fishing and swimming, snorkeling and tubing, and sitting in the canoe just floating with a book at the cabin. Fireworks on the water—both Lake Superior and at the cabin. Moonlight on the big lake, with a boy or a beer, or both. Laying around doing absolutely nothing other than communing with Ra. Bomb pops and ice cream cones. Reading books in the big loft doorway of the garage. Movies and sleepovers. Hanging out with my boyfriend, or the girls, or the gang, as the day dictated. Babysitting and climbing trees. Upgrading from the 10-speed to mom’s car. Train tracks in the rain. Jumping from the lighthouse. Four-wheeling in the pit and flashlight tag in the graveyard. Fires on the beach and parties at the point. Long quiet walks in the woods and picking rocks along the shoreline at sunset.

And writing in my notebooks.

Because even back in high school, when I saw summer vacation as a lazy-fest of do-nothing-and-like-it, I was writing. Poems, short stories, strange passages that would lay dormant until remembered, and occasionally used, years later. Even then I had words to spew, blood to spill. I never traveled without my smokes, my shades, and a pencil in my back pocket.

Some things never change…

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All Growed Up

June 14, 2010

graduation cap 2Thursday we attended graduation for one of the neighborhood clan. It was full of excitement and fun, pride and hope. We poked fun at the band, made faces at Justin from the crowd, and joked that there were seven more of these to attend over the next decade.

Friday, at 12:45 p.m., upon release from the last day of school for the year, my daughter became a senior. A senior. She’ll be the next graduation ceremony we sit through. A year from now, it will be her cap and gown…

I clearly remember that moment like yesterday—when I walked out of school, the last day of junior year, with my head in the clouds and my heart bursting from my chest. I was a senior. Top of the food chain. Almost done. Ready to take on the world.

And I imagine my mother was full of the same fear then as I am today.

My daughter’s not ready to take on the world. She’s still my baby girl. In some ways this is worse than that distant first day of kindergarten, when I sent her off on a bus some stranger was driving, to be cared for by people I didn’t know. She’s going to go off to college (or the Army, as the current flip-flop teen brain is debating) and be around strangers I don’t know, don’t trust, and can’t expect, let alone rely on, to take care of her. She’s not ready.

I’m not ready.

It’s not an age thing. It’s not that her growing up equals me growing old. Age happens—I came to terms with that long ago. It’s the time bomb that is suddenly audible.

Sure I knew the time was coming. Sure I could see the countdown of birthdays gone by and changes in her, both physically and mentally. But now I can hear the actual ticking. Now there’s a permanent staccato beat in the back of my mind.

I have one year. One year to teach her everything I’ve got left to teach. One year to instill the final tidbits of morals and ethics. One year to do whatever damage I have left to do, so she can go off as an adult and blame me for her failures, until she truly becomes an adult and takes the blame for those onto herself.

One year.

It doesn’t seem long enough.

I don’t know who’s less prepared for this—her or me. Hell, I don’t even know if she realizes anything beyond the cloud of “I’m a senior” that she’s currently floating on. She still has trouble with boys. She still doesn’t know how to clean a bathroom properly. She still doesn’t clean her room without being told. She’s not ready for this…

I’m not ready for this.

Can we turn back the clock? Can I have my little flaxen-haired Shirley Temple back? Give me a do-over on the first ten years and I’ll feel better about the next twelve months. But we can’t.

Once upon a time my mom and I giggled at some sitcom, possibly Roseanne, when the mother said, “If they’re alive when you get home, I’ve done my job.” In many ways, that’s true, but it seems to have lost some of its humor at the moment. There’s so much to this job and we’re given eighteen years to do it, but it still doesn’t feel like enough.How the hell do wild animals send their babies off after only a year or two? How?!

One year. Twelve months. It’s time to cram for the exam… and hope for a passing grade.

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8th Grade Civics Class

May 28, 2010

monopolyRemember that class? Where you learned about politics and the economy and monopolies and fair trade? I do…vaguely. But apparently you are allowed to forget ALL those rules come graduation.

Especially for graduation.

I got a letter today from Bubba Joe’s Photography*. They were recently at my daughter’s high school showing the junior class a lovely slide show of the “techniques, props and backgrounds offered for senior pictures.” It read like an informative commercial for the upcoming necessity that is graduation pictures.

And then I got to this paragraph.

Bubba Joe’s is the “contracted photographer” for the school. This means that if your son or daughter wants their senior portrait to be included in the yearbook, that portrait must be taken here.

Woah, wait a minute. I can choose whatever photographer I want, but if I want her in the yearbook I have to either use Bubba Joe for all her grad photos, or pay extra for a special one done at Bubba Joe’s? This miffs me. And not just a little. A quick hop over to Bubba Joe’s website and I find out that the “yearbook only” shots are $24. Hmmm… plus the $75 for the yearbook itself, plus another $200-$300 for the regular grad shots. Wow…

I could veer off into “children are expensive” land, but we all know that. Instead I’ll just hover here in monopoly land. At an estimated 100 students, they stand to make $2400 just for the yearbook shots… and how many parents will cave and do the rest there? Yeah, “contracted photographer” is a nice gig in a land where competition laws are ignored and parents are forced to participate or forever be hated by their child for making them “that kid”. You know, the one kid not in the yearbook.

I hate being forced to do something. I hate being a sheep. And I hate that the Hippie is giggling about this and is totally going to post a response… where I’ll remind him that there are FOUR of them in this house that we will be baaaaa-ing for.

*name obviously changed to protect the guilty, a concept I’m quite new to and still don’t quite understand.

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