Flat Stanley

On the day before Spring Break, each of my boys brought home a paper cut-out of Flat Stanley from school. In addition to entertaining my children over the holiday, my children informed me that I also had to entertain the piece of paper. What's worse, I had to take it everywhere we went it AND take pictures of my sons with it.

This was more than I was capable of doing. It was also more than Kellen was capable to doing. Within five minutes of introducing me to Flat Stanley, my son left his new BFF on the kitchen counter...which was wet.

Like the high school student who manages not to crack the chicken egg he is entrusted to babysit for 24 hours, Cortlen took his role seriously. Wherever we went, Flat Stanley went too.

"Let me see Flat Stanley for a minute," Kellen demanded. We were at the zoo. Cortlen shook his head.

"I'm going to get in trouble with my teacher if I don't have at least one picture with Flat Stanley," he whined.

Cortlen handed Flat Stanley over to his brother. Reluctantly.

Shortly after this picture was taken, something very bad happened to Flat Stanley.

Shortly after that, some people around us started grumbling that some members of my family were hyperventilating too loud for the reptiles.

Shortly after that, we left the zoo. In all the commotion, I forgot to take a picture of what was left of poor Flat Stanley.

Let's just say this: he didn't look good.

My Daughter's Baptism Photos

So bummed right now.

My camera broke last month, but I haven't worried too much about it because I have my phone.

In our church, children are baptized when they turn eight. Camber's special day was Sunday.

Before and after the event, I took tons of pictures. Just a few minutes ago, I sat down to go through them. To my total horror, every picture from the baptism was gone.

Needless to say, there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. All my husband could do in moment of despair was pat me on the shoulder and confirm that the visual record of our daughter's baptism had indeed been deleted from my phone.

Two minutes later, Camber was startled out of her slumber by an ominous presence standing over her.

"Did you erase the baptism pictures from my phone?" I asked.

"My hair looked gross in them," she replied.

I bit my lip so hard that I drew blood.

In unrelated news, this is what 25 yards of dental floss looks like:


If you want more pictures, I've got 37 more on my phone just like it.

Tubing with Parents

This weekend, both sets of parents were in town. My favorite part of the trip was whenever a decision had to be made.

"What do you want to do today?"
"What would you like to eat for lunch?"
"Would you like me to poke out your eyeballs with a hot poker?"

No matter what the question, the answer was the same. "We don't care!!!!"

I am fortunate to have compliant relatives. My husband and I are mentally deficient in a number of a key areas, but we are smart enough to always take our parents at their word.

That's how we ended up at the river.

I had been to the river once before. Last summer, a cashier at Wal-Mart told me about a place inside a local state park where you can float downstream in rented inner tubes.

"I can already tell this is a terrible idea," my husband said optimistically as he pulled into the parking lot. A woman walked past our car, holding an infant dressed in head-to-toe hunting camo.

"It's fine," I hissed. "What's the problem?"

My husband complained that everyone at the river was staring at us.

In the end, all my husband's worrying proved to be unwarranted. Tubing is super fun. On our journey down the river, we passed by a raccoon, defecating into the water. My sons managed to tip themselves over twice. The natural lazy river ended in a makeshift pool, which was filled with people who were either wearing bathing suits that they outgrew several years earlier or no bathing suits at all.

"Nice," my husband said to me, as if I had planned things to turn out that way.

When we got back to our stuff, we found that someone had stolen my sons' football and rifled through our cooler. I left the crime scene and took my toddler to the bathroom. Unfortunately, the door was locked. Several minutes later, a couple emerged, holding hands.

"It's time to go," I announced. "Now." My boys cried the whole way home about their stolen football. My daughter complained that the river water made her skin itchy. My dad was very, very quiet. Tim's parents talked incessantly about the raccoon. My husband didn't speak to me for the rest of the day.

The good news was that I was officially stripped of all of my decision making power for the rest of the visit.

Why You Should Never Try on Your Wedding Dress 14 Years Later

My in-laws are visiting from California this week. As usual, they brought small gifts for the kids. They also brought something special for me. It came wrapped in a plastic trash bag.

"I cleaned out my closets a few weeks back and found it," my mother-in-law told me.

Inside the bag was my wedding dress.

"I have to try this thing on," I told my husband. I was so excited I could barely stand it.

He advised against my plan for several reasons, all of which centered around the unlikely possibility that the dress might not fit like it used to.

"Of course it's going to fit," I told him. Just to be sure, I waited until after 11pm to try it on, the time of the day when good judgment and perspective on what's really important in life are at their peak.

I don't know what happened to my upper body over the past decade and a half, but my shoulder blades appear to have sprouted into wings. My rib cage has also spread at least three inches.

"It's because you've had babies," my husband said matter-of-factly. "Your body changes."

"I didn't give birth out of my rib cage!" I snapped.

After that, my husband didn't make any more comments about the effects of pregnancy on the female body.

I spent the next ten minutes preparing to send my Spanx into battle.

The supportive undergarment was unsuccessful at getting me into the dress but successful at encouraging me to look up pictures of Victorian corsets on the Internet.

"You are overreacting," my husband told me. By now it was 11:45pm and he was trying to sleep.

To prove him wrong, that night I slept in the constrictive shape wear (super duper comfortable) and didn't eat anything for breakfast the next morning.

Still nothing. Evidently rib cages cannot be put on diets.

The Unkindness of Strangers

Over the past few weeks, I have been dealing with a woman at a county office who is being extremely and purposefully difficult.

The woman has a handbook, which she pulls out and reads to me every time I go in to talk to her. Despite being three inches thick, the handbook is very vague when it comes to describing procedures and policies. The purpose for this ambiguity, I have argued repeatedly, is to allow room for common sense.

The woman sees things differently.

To put it mildly, the woman is driving me crazy: she is rude and condescending, sits on her hands, drags her feet, and smiles smugly at me....all because she can.

This situation has played out in different ways a couple of other times in recent memory. In Philadelphia, I knew a woman who stuck her tongue out at me if I greeted her in the hallway. If I didn't greet her, she told everyone that I was stuck up and rude. At the same time, I had a neighbor who decided that I was the worst parent in the universe. Every single afternoon at the bus stop, she had something to say. "Your daughter's clothes don't match." "My daughter said that Cortlen was bothering her on the bus." "I was volunteering at the school today and I saw your daughter running in the hallway."

Shortly after I moved to Florida, the first woman got a divorce and my former neighbor revealed that her husband was an alcoholic and that she was addicted to prescription painkillers.

As it turns out, it wasn't about me after all.

What I learned from the episodes in Philadelphia is that everyone is fighting a battle and sometimes you just get caught in the crossfire. In such situations, my first instinct is always to unleash my own set of arrows, but as experience has taught me, it rarely accomplishes anything beyond extending the sphere of bad feelings.

Because of all of this, I have been trying to look at the woman at the county office with compassion. The operative word here is "trying." Specifically, I've been wondering a lot lately what is so out of control in this woman's personal life that compels her overcompensate by ruling her tiny corner of the fiefdom with an iron fist.

Whatever it is, it must be really awful, because no one, I believe, likes being nasty for no reason. It's neither productive nor becoming. And it lacks, among other things, common sense.

What Flushing Money Down the Toilet Looks Like

"What do you want to do this week?"
This was the question I posed to my children on Monday morning.

It is spring break and my kids are out of school.

Several people suggested that we go to Hawaii and/or buy a horse. There was one vote to bury prized possessions in the back yard and then dig them up again.

Included on all of my kids' lists was the desire to spend lots of money on worthless junk.

"We're not buying anything today," I announced in the zoo parking lot. I made everybody empty their pockets before we got out of the car.

"Aw, no fair!" they cried in unison.

The poor, unfortunate souls pouted their way through the reptile and amphibian exhibits. Two-thirds of them parked themselves on a wooden bench and refused to look at the monkeys. Another put his fingers in his ears when I asked him if he wanted to check out the cheetahs.

For what it's worth, my toddler and I had a good time.

On our way out, I stopped to take Cameron to the bathroom. The three grumps complained loudly outside the door. "This is the worst," they grumbled to no one in particular about nothing in particular. Then it got eerily quiet.

When I came out of the bathroom, everyone had their hands behind their backs and big smiles
plastered across their faces.

"Watcha got?" I demanded.

In unison, they produced these delightful creatures, each made out of 100% plastic, and purchased out of a vending machine for $2.00 each.


"Who has money?" I asked in stunned disbelief. I had done everything short of strip searching them in the car.

Everyone looked at me like I was a total idiot.

"You do," one of my geniuses smirked.

That's when I noticed my open wallet.

That's also when they all started to run in opposite directions.

Cups

After a two-year hiatus, my boys are back in Little League. As my husband and I quickly have learned, a lot has changed since the days of preschool t-ball. One of the biggest differences is the uniform.

Two years ago, the coach was happy if his players were potty-trained. Now he wants them to wear cups. The directive was so important that it warranted two emails and an after practice parent meeting. At said meeting, everyone swore up and down that they would buy protective equipment for our sons before the first game. Except for me. I was in the bathroom during the announcement, scrubbing dirt and sand out of my two year-old's hair after he rolled, like a wet golden retriever, on the pitcher's mound.

Fast forward to tonight--the season opener. Before the first pitch, the coach walked through the dug out and asked each of his players to punch his own crotch. Cup check, he called it.

One by one, each boy knocked on his privates as if it was the front door to some magical palace. Every person's privates made a hollow sound, except for my boys'. My sons glared at me through the chain link fence. Their coach did the same.

"I forgot," I mouthed. Cups are not things that I think about on a daily basis. Or ever.

"I'll go to the store right now," my husband volunteered, grabbing the car keys. By the end of the first inning, fear of the inevitable no longer hung over the baseball field like a dark cloud. With the cups in place, my sons stood a little taller, and batted a little better. When one of them struck out, he took it like the man that he now is.

"Do you want to see it?" Kellen asked after the game. The object was in his bag, hidden from view.

I shook my head. "No thanks," I replied.

I will never forget the look on my son's face. It was as though he had won a state championship, and I refused to acknowledge the trophy.

I feel terrible.

Leprechauns on Parade

Since when did leprechauns become like Gremlins?

My kids came home from school today with horrific tales of leprechauns who peed in their friends' toilets last night and messed up their friends' rooms. One little boy even claimed that a leprechaun bled out in his bathtub.

All of this makes our attempt to poison a leprechaun and auction him off to the highest bidder seem like a benevolent act of kindness.

When I was a child, leprechauns were too busy smoking pipes to be worrying about other people's business. Now that they've kicked the habit, they have lots of nervous energy to burn off.




That's the theory, at least in our house.

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

The Leprechaun Trap

My son had to make a leprechaun trap for school.

The instructions on the homework sheet were surprisingly detailed given that what we are trying to catch doesn't really exist.
Most of the things named on the paper were things that we were not allowed to include on the aforementioned trap; namely, knives of any kind, cheese, rat poison, and homemade guillotines.

To this, my son added his own set of criteria: the trap must have a trap door, quicksand, and a den of pit vipers.

"We're not trying to kills the leprechaun," I corrected. "Just catch him."

My son failed to see the difference between the two.

The leprechaun trap took us seven attempts and two hours to get "right." I use this term very loosely.



Very, very loosely.

Terrible Twos

How can something so cute be so naughty?

Today, while I was at an appointment, Cameron gave my husband a run for his money.

Items sacrificed to the gods and/or partially consumed during my 2 hour absence:

* 1 tube of toothpaste
* 1 bottle of hand lotion
* 1 jar of pickles
* 1 box of baking soda

When I came home, I found my husband curled up in the fetal position on the sofa.

"He's EVERYWHERE!" he cried.

"Where is he right now?" I asked, suspiciously.

My husband pointed weakly to our daughter's bedroom. I found the culprit sitting next to his sister on the bed. She was reading a book. He was coloring on her bedspread with magic markers.

The Fourth Man

Today was my older kids' first soccer game of the season. When the referee blew the whistle, everyone ran toward the ball, including my two year-old son.

"Agh! Get him!" I screeched. My husband tackled our toddler and hauled him back to the sidelines.

[insert back arching/swatting/screaming/going limp]

A few minutes later, my daughter got knocked in the stomach with the ball. While I was reassuring her that a) she wasn't going to die and b) yes, her injury was deserving of a post-game Slurpee, Cameron made another run for it. This time, he got to midfield before my husband (who was on the other side of the field, coaching the goalie) scooped him out of the fray.

"He is a nightmare," my husband said. Most two year-olds are.

Cameron spent the rest of the half sitting on my husband's shoulders. Very begrudgingly.

In the third quarter, he slipped into the goalie net while I was tying my son's shoe. As I chased him down for the third time, several spectators snickered and yelled from their seats, "Go little boy, go!"

Needless to say, we watched the rest of the game from the car.

Mardi Gras at the Animal Kingdom

On Monday, my husband and I took our kids to Disney's Animal Kingdom. Also in attendance was the entire state of Louisiana.

"How many people in the world like LSU?" I grumbled in response to the excessive school spirit displayed by many of the park's visitors.

My husband pointed out that three quarters of our children were wearing Duke t-shirts.

"Why are they all here?" I sneered. I felt like the LSU people were invading my privacy. If you live in Orlando, it is socially acceptable to consider all of the city's tourist attractions to be your personal property.

My husband didn't have a good answer to my question, so I decided to ask one of "them" myself.
The family in front of us in line for the fake safari looked like purple people eaters.

"When all the tourists come in to New Orleans, we head out," the woman told me.

As it turns out, I had forgotten about a little party called Mardi Gras.

I felt slightly guilty after I talked with the woman. I had spent the bulk of the morning whispering "Roll Tide" under my breath as I passed the Louisianians, but now I felt sorry for them. Their visit to Orlando was less of a vacation than a forced exodus.

Living here, I am starting to know how they feel. This week is also Bike Week at Daytona. Given the number of motorcyles parked outside of the local Denny's this morning, I might need to make an exodus of my own.

Open Door Policy

The more children that you have, the more likely that you will not notice a couple more wandering through your house.

This seems to be the general consensus in my neighborhood. At some point almost every day I'll walk into a room in my house and find a seven year-old that doesn't belong to me.

"Where do you live?" I asked the boy who I found in my laundry room this afternoon.

"Down the street."

"Does your mom know you're here?"

"Yep."

For the most part, I don't mind if the neighborhood congregates on my driveway. I do have a problem, however, with extending the open door policy to pets.

For two days in a row, I have opened the front door to my house and a dog has rushed in.

At first I thought it was two different dogs, but my daughter pointed out that between Day 1 and Day 2, the dog had gotten a hair cut.

The dog belongs to a neighbor who has a malfunctioning electric pet fence. The good news is that the dog is very friendly. The bad news is that it weighs 100 pounds and generally has no interest in leaving my house.

Yesterday it took me fifteen minutes and a chicken leg to get the dog outside. Today I didn't have it in me.

The dog stayed for three hours.

***
Last call for the Walgreens $100 Giveaway. The contest ends this week!

My Short-Lived Living Room Furniture

Before moving to Orlando, I sold most of my furniture on Craigslist. It would have cost more to move the stuff down here than it was worth.

For the past six months, we have been sleeping on mattresses and eating off a table with a broken leg. On Friday, I had enough of living like college students. While shopping at Costco, I picked up a couple gallons of milk, some eggs, and a living room sofa.

On the way home from Costco, I stopped at my husband's work and presented him with the receipt. "I need you to go pick up this sofa with your truck. Please."

Like most men, my husband breaks out into hives at the thought of doing something awkward and unreasonable, like asking a store manager to give him something that he's already paid for.

Because he is tired of hearing me conflate living in our house with camping, he agreed to do what I asked.

The sofa looked great in the store and on the picture on the box but not so good in my living room. Like most houses in Florida, mine has tall ceilings. Like many sofas made today, this one was super small. The sofa looked like it belonged in a doll house.

My husband was wholly unconcerned, however, about the scale of the furniture that he had brought home. He was positively giddy, on the other hand, about the fact that he had managed to pick up the sofa without having to engage anyone in a sustained conversation. Because of this, I decided not to tell him that the sofa was going back until the next morning.

"I need you return the sofa for me," I announced at breakfast. My husband's face twisted into agony at the mention of the offensive word.

Return.

All sales are final for my husband. Returning something that is the wrong color or size, or is missing a part, is unfathomable.

"I think it looks fine," my husband told me as he attempted to sit on the miniature sofa. He is 6'3'' and his knees were basically touching his chest.

"It needs to go back today," I told him.

As luck would have it, my husband returned the sofa to the same store manager who had given it to him the night before.

When he got home, he was not in a good mood. "What happened?" I asked.

"They wanted to know why I was returning it!" he cried.

"No!" The Costco people had crossed the line and something had to be done about it.

"What did you tell them?" I asked, almost in a whisper.

"That it was too small for the room."

"And what did they do?" I waited with baited breath.

"They gave me my money back," he answered.

I exhaled deeply. Who knew that returning something at Costco could be so hard and dramatic?

"They were looking at me funny the whole time," he complained.

I assured him that the people behind the customer desk at Costco have bigger things to worry about than the personal hangups of a middle-aged man.

"I'll bet that they won't even remember you," I told him.

Tonight we went to Costco for dinner. As we passed by the customer service desk, a man in a red vest waved in our direction. "Hello again!" he called out to my husband.

My poor husband wanted to crawl into a hole and die.

*****
Anyone have a good story that includes husbands and coupons/store returns? I love 'em!

Mother Hen

My husband was sick for a lot of the past week. Yesterday afternoon, I took the boys to the park. My daughter stayed home with Tim and watched a movie.

Within minutes of arriving at the park, my two year-old son made friends with a couple of eight year-old girls. The girls were perfectly happy to carry my son around on a chaise and feed him grapes, and my son was perfectly happy to let them.

"You two are such good little mommies," I told the girls. "Thanks for your help taking care of him."

The warm and fuzzy feelings were short lived.

Suddenly, out of no where, sprang Mother Hen. She emerged from the back seat of my husband's car with a look of fierce determination on her face. She took one look at the girls holding her brother and started sprinting.

"I would run away really fast if I were you,"I warned the girls. They had no idea what was about to hit them. It was a good thing that they listened.

My daughter spent the next several minutes inspecting her brother for signs of injury. Then she took him to the drinking fountain to wash off the girls' germs from his skin.

"Why did you let those girls hold my baby?" she hissed upon return.

I apologized profusely and begged forgiveness.

"I am never going to let you go to the park without me again," she said.

Clearly I cannot be trusted.

Satan's Slippery Slide

There is no graceful way for an adult to go down a slide at the park. I have learned this both through observation and experience.

My toddler is at the stage where he often finds himself in difficult predicaments, like sitting at the top of a slide and being afraid to go down. No amount of cajoling, reassuring, and/or bribing can get him to take the plunge. The only way he'll go down is if he is sitting between my legs.

No matter how deep in conversation they are with their friends, other mothers always stop and look when they see another adult going down a slide. Sometimes, when I inexplicably stop sliding and have to inch my way down while holding onto my screaming son with one hand and the hem of my skirt in the other, they snicker. This makes the experience all the more enjoyable.

A lot of times after such incidents, I find myself taking pictures of these women from unflattering angles with my I-Phone without their knowledge. Having these pictures stored on my phone for posterity makes me feel better about myself.

"I'll pay you twenty-five cents every time you go down the slide with Cameron," I told my daughter this afternoon.

She just laughed and ran away.

"Fifty!" I cried after her. "One dollar!"

No takers.

****
Haven't put your name into the hat for the $100 Walgreens gift card yet? GET GOING!