Black Friday

Further proof that I am a mean mom:



I didn't even try.

Happy Thanksgiving

I am grateful for many things this Thanksgiving...chief among them my own little turkey, who has brought me and my family so much joy this past year.

It's incredibly humbling how one's perspective of life changes in the face of near tragedy.

In Thanksgivings past, I used to be thankful that I had such cute/smart/funny/amusing children.

This Thanksgiving, I am just grateful that they are all here.

The Turkeys that Weren't Pardoned

Every year, we eat Thanksgiving dinner with our neighbors. When left to their own devices, Chuck, Helen-Marie, and their college-aged daughters pass over the turkey and stuffing in favor of homemade ravioli and made-from-scratch garlic bread. Fortunately they have me and my awesome cooking to save them from themselves.

My children spent the first part of the day fighting with each other in the basement. After lunch, I suggested that they take a break from the festivities and make seating placards for our dining room table (I'm one step away from Martha Stewart, I know). The process of tracing one's hand into the shape of a turkey took almost an hour. An equal amount of time, or so it seemed, was spent writing our dinner guests' names onto the pieces of paper.

Tragedy struck when Cortlen's turkey plopped himself onto the place setting next to the one occupied by Camber's turkey.

"You can't sit there!" my accommodating daughter screamed. "That's Helen-Marie's seat!"

Cortlen's turkey did not like to told what to do, especially by a bird with a bad attitude and pink toenails. He responded by ripping off those toenails, and the legs to which they were attached.

Although fatally wounded, Camber's turkey mustered enough strength in her dying breath to poke a hole through Cortlen's turkey with a fork.

Sadly, only four out of the eleven people eating dinner at our house tomorrow will know where to sit at the table.

The rest of the turkeys perished in the skirmish.

Death by Chocolate

Every December, my elementary school's PTA hosts a holiday basket auction. Each classroom in the school is assigned a basket theme, a disproportionate number of which include the word "Italy" (ie. "A Night out in Italy," "Breakfast in Italy," "Under the Tuscan Sun"). My daughter's teacher was one of the unfortunate few who were absent on the day that the lots were cast. As a result, she got stuck with a theme that lacks any overt reference to the Motherland.

"Our theme is 'Death by Chocolate,'" she apologized.

I attempted to alleviate the teacher's feelings of failure and ancestral shame by suggesting that we fill the basket with Italian chocolates. The letter I mailed to my daughter's classmates' parents asking for donations reiterated this request.

My plea for assistance was heard and answered. Here is what was sent in:


As room mother, my job is to tastefully assemble the donations in a large basket. The baskets will be auctioned off at the annual holiday family dance next weekend.

For several reasons, I am expecting that my basket will draw a record number of bids.

****
Any similar tales of agony?

The Kindness of Strangers

At the end of last week, I took a quick trip to visit some family members who live out of state. My husband took off work to stay with the older kids and I took Cameron with me.

Due to traffic control problems, my return flight was delayed for almost four hours. All of the passengers on my flight were in really good moods when we finally boarded the plane at 10:30pm. The trio sitting directly behind me served as notable exceptions to the rule. They were all in exceptionally good spirits, due in large part to the extraordinary number of alcoholic spirits they had consumed at the airport bar earlier that evening.

Cameron fell asleep shortly after takeoff only to be jolted awake a few minutes later by a round of obnoxious laughter bellowing from the back seat.

One of the rioters was using her toothbrush to comb her neighbor's hair.

If that's not funny, I don't know what is.

Cameron woke up from his nap fussy...and with a fever. I was rustling around for supplies in the diaper bag when he threw up all over himself, me, and the empty seat next to us.

A pattern is developing.

The Good News: The sight of so much vomit silenced the revelers.
The Bad News: There were 2 1/2 hours left in the flight

I dealt with the unfortunate circumstances by locking myself and the baby in the airplane lavatory. And cried.

I emerged from the lavatory with a whimpering infant and eighteen paper towels stuffed down my shirt.

When I returned to my seat, I found the woman who had been sitting in the middle seat in the row across from me wiping down my seat and personal effects. The sight of a complete stranger elbow deep in my son's vomit made me cry harder.

Without a word or a wrinkled nose or a rolled eye or a long sigh or a snippy comment or a piece of helpful advice, the woman cleaned up the mess and returned to her seat, where she proceeded to pick up her novel and read it as if nothing had happened.

I have had plenty of interactions with strangers that I hope that someday I will forget.

This I hope I will always remember.

Money Down the Drain...Literally

My older children are walking metal detectors. It seems that every time we are out in public, at least one six-year-old wins the lottery in the form of a blackened dime found in the gutter or a rusty penny pried out of a sidewalk crack.

Yesterday afternoon, Kellen screamed "I'm rich!!!!!" after finding a flattened nickel in the parking lot of Old Navy.

Due to the growing concern that my thirteenth-month-old might find some of his siblings' coins lying around the house and put them into his mouth, I confiscated everyone's loose change and put it in a basket next to the kitchen sink.

After several hours of staring longingly at the basket, my boys asked if they could count its contents.

"We just want to make sure that it's all there," they said.

The baby was napping so I agreed.

Unfortunately, I underestimated the weight of 327 pennies, 24 nickels, and 17 dimes. The basket slipped out of my hands and 368 coins slid down the mouth of the garbage disposal.

I spent the next 15 minutes fishing slimy pennies out of a sea of last night's dinner scraps.

"Why are you throwing my pennies away?" shrieked Cortlen. "WHY?"

Someday my son will know the answer. For the next 30 years, however, he will believe that I am the meanest mom in the world. Or the craziest.

Probably both.

The Free Turkey

My grocery store runs a special promotion every November. If you spend $300 in qualifying purchases, you get a certificate for a free turkey that feeds 4-6 people.

To my horror, I realized at 11:15pm on the last day of the promotion that I was short of the target by $60.

"Please tell me you are not going to the grocery store right now," said my husband. He said this in a way that made my midnight shopping trip seem ridiculous and even unnecessary.

The truth of the matter was that I wouldn't have been able to sleep that night or live with myself the next day if I knowingly let the opportunity pass me by.

I filled my shopping cart with dry cereal.

"That sure is a lot of Honeycomb," observed the man standing in line behind me.

Despite cleaning out the store's stock of generic brand Cheerios, I still found myself $5.64 short at check-out.

A wave of panic rushed over me. Thankfully, the cashier was moved to mercy.

"I'll just give you the certificate for the turkey," the woman whispered. "You're close enough."

With the voucher in my hand, I felt redeemed.

"Thank you," I whispered back.

The woman smiled and looked at her watch, which was fast approaching the time of the store's closing. "Clearly it's important to you," she replied.

As I loaded the sixteen boxes of cereal into my trunk, my heart swelled with happiness and joy. I couldn't help but feel cheered by the discovery of a kindred spirit, another person who seemed to understand the logic of expending great sums of money and time to get an object for "free" that can be purchased for less than $20.

***
Any more kindred spirits out there?

Peel-and-Stick Laminate

Later this week is the annual First Grade Pirate Party at my kids' elementary school. A few weeks ago, I sent a note to the event coordinator volunteering to help decorate the gym. The note I received in reply thanked me for my willingness to come up with six pirate-themed reading games instead.

Usually I am against bait-and-switch routines, but I agreed to fall victim to this one after my friend Tina hinted that such acts of martyrdom might be recognized at the end of the year assembly in the form of a plaque or large trophy.

What initially appeared to be a manageable assignment was made infinitely more difficult by the friendly reminder that none of my pirate games could include weapons, water balloon launchers, allusions to alcohol, or choking hazards.

"I have nothing," I told my husband, throwing up my hands in defeat.

"Why don't you make a memory game using pirate words?" he suggested.

My husband's idea made me want to poke my eyes out, but I went through with it because it provided me with a legitimate reason to purchase a roll of peel-and-stick laminate.

If I was taught nothing else by this experience, I learned that laminate is underused in higher education. College professors should use it more often: it makes things look more impressive and official. The clip art treasure chests that I printed off the Internet gained instant credibility once I covered them with a see-through layer of plastic film.

I showed my husband the finished products.

He wrinkled his nose. "Aren't you going to laminate the poster board too?" he wanted to know.

That wasn't part of my original plan, but once he made the suggestion, it became a necessity.

Laminating such a large surface proved to be almost more fun than I could handle. Despite (or perhaps due to) numerous attempts to lay the poster board flat on the sticky paper, the finished product was plagued with several air bubbles and large creases, attributes I tried to obscure when I dropped the items off at the event organizer's house on Saturday.

The Offender

"My, what happened here?" the woman said, peering at the poster board. "Are those carpet fibers?" she asked, pointing to a cluster of beige clumps in the middle of the sign.

I explained the limitations of DIY laminate to no avail.

"Hmm," the woman said with an amused smile. "You should have done your laminating over here." She pointed to an object in the corner of her living room, which she identified as her personal laminating machine.

I have never wanted anything more in my entire life. Now I know what to put on my Christmas list.

"Feel free to re-laminate to your heart's content," I said as I walked out the door. The woman threw back her head and laughed like I had just told the funniest joke in the world.

A few choice words ran briskly through my mind as I got into my car, but just as quickly as they came, my feelings of hostility gave way to feelings of compassion.

All I had to do was come up with six games. The event organizer is responsible for producing a pirate-themed snack. My heart goes out to the person who will be spending the better part of the next three days suspending small schools of Swedish fish into 137 cups of blue JELL-O.

****
ARGH! In my haste to rid myself of the cursed poster board, I forgot to take a picture of the finished product. You'll just have to imagine its awesomeness.

Friends with Benefits

Our family cat is missing a few brain cells, but is smart enough to know that befriending a baby brings rewards.

Earlier this week, I went out to dinner with a group of friends.

If only I had thought to distract them long enough to swipe a few choice morsels of food off their plates.

*****

Hey! Check this out! One of my old posts has taken new life (with my consent) as part of a recent Washington Post article.

Life is Hard When You're Six

The world was unkind to my daughter this morning.

She was forced to take a shower.
Her hairbrush went missing... again.
The cereal she was served was disgusting.
The orange juice was too warm.
The milk was too cold.
She remembered that popcorn chicken day at the school cafeteria was yesterday.

The straw that broke the camel's back wasn't the strange discovery of her toothbrush in the cats' water bowl, but my refusal to let her brush her teeth with it afterward.

Life is hard when you're going through pre-pre puberty.

Parent-Teacher Conferences

This afternoon, my husband and I have meetings scheduled with Cortlen and Kellen's kindergarten teachers. I wasn't worried about the kind of report cards that my children would receive until several neighbors (who have children in my boys' classes) went out of their way to provide me with unsolicited play-by-play rundowns of their own parent-teacher conferences. I had no idea that Stephen Hawking was once our neighborhood's mailman.

Everything was straight gold stars, double thumbs up, and green traffic lights. One precocious girl even interacts with her peers on a third-grade level. That is what her mother told me at the bus stop this morning. The woman was wearing a jogging suit and new white sneakers. I was wearing one brown sock and one black.

"Your gene pool is a little shallow," I told my boys over lunch. They cocked their heads and looked confused.

"And we moved into this neighborhood after the smart mailman left," I explained.

Stolen Goods

Last week, my mother-in-law (who lives in California), paid us a visit. I've been married for twelve years and have known Sue since I was twelve, so needless to say, we feel pretty comfortable around each other.

It's probably because I feel so comfortable around my mother-in-law that sometimes I do and say things that make her feel uncomfortable. Case in point: the food court at Target. Last week, one of my sons threw a temper tantrum in the middle of it. The problem started when I deliberately and maliciously placed four fewer kernels of popcorn on his napkin than on his siblings'.

"Now I'm taking your popcorn away," I announced after two warnings only escalated the volume of the complaints.

My mother-in-law nibbled on her nails and shifted in her seat as I carried my son out to the parking lot.

"Grandma! Save me!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.

Sometimes I make my mother-in-law feel uncomfortable. On her most recent visit, she returned the favor.

One morning, while the kids were in school, I took my mother-in-law to a local sporting goods store where she purchased a number of Christmas gifts for my kids including two baseball helmets and two equipment bags.

A few days after she returned home to California, she called me with some bad news. She didn't remember wrapping the equipments bags. In fact, she didn't remember leaving the store with them.

"The cashier probably put the bags in a separate bag and forgot to give them to us."

That evening, I returned to the store with my receipt. Two very nice teenage employees looked up from the games they were playing on their cell phones long enough to point me in the direction of the baseball gear.

"Take what you want," said one of the employees.

The next afternoon, my mother-in-law called again. "The helmets weren't in the bag we brought home either!" she remembered.

Back to the store I went. This time, I was greeted by the store manager, who was very concerned about my story of missing bags and helmets and possible employee theft.

The manager took my receipt and disappeared into the back room. He was gone for almost fifteen minutes. When he returned, his face was very serious.

"I have something on the security tape that I want you to see," he said.

My palms grew sweaty as I felt my adrenaline surge. I have always wanted to be the victim of a non-violent crime. I immediately began to wonder if I would be called to testify in court, and if so, what I would wear.

"So here's the tape of your transaction," the manager said, pointing to the television screen. Footage of the store employee ringing up our purchases was followed by very clear footage of the employee putting all of the items into bags and us leaving the store with those bags. There is even footage from a camera placed outside the front of store of us loading the bags into my car and driving off.

I half expected a police officer to jump out from behind a plastic ficus plant and handcuff me on the spot.

I apologized profusely and promised to return the equipment bags within the hour. The instant I left the store, I called my mother-in-law.

"You just made me feel very uncomfortable," I told her.

After my mother-in-law laughed herself silly, she apologized for her mistake.

*****
P.S. I made my husband return the equipment bags so he could feel comfortable too.
P.P.S. We found the equipment bags and the helmets in the hall closet.

George Washington's Letter

(a George letter but not the George letter)

Earlier this week, I taught a seminar at a local university on the history of the book. I gave the presentation in a room filled with documentary treasures: several medieval manuscripts, a sixteenth-century Bible, a colonial American hymnal, and several textual artifacts from the Revolutionary War.

The audience consisted largely of retired professors, librarians, and undergraduates who were promised extra credit in exchange for attendance. They were a lively bunch, especially the two students seated in the back row who fought boredom by drawing stick figure sketches of a woman who looked a lot like me hanging from a noose.

My audience was most alert when I finished my presentation and invited them to take a closer look at the items on the table.

"You can touch anything except for the letter written by George Washington," I told them.

To their credit, the college students did their best to avoid the letter. In the end, however, most managed to accidentally manhandle it.

"I told you not to touch it!" I shrieked at two sophomores.
"We didn't!" they replied in unison.
"I saw you pick it up!" I said.

A few minutes later, I caught another student attempting to lift the letter off the table with the eraser end of a pencil.

"For real?" I asked, snatching the letter away from the two/twenty-year-old.

A long lecture followed about the importance of good listening skills. I explained that no one was allowed to touch the letter because the oils from our fingers can damage the paper and smudge the ink.

In the middle of my sermon, one student raised his hand.

"Yes?" I asked, visibly annoyed.

The student apologized for interrupting my moralizing speech, but thought it prudent to point out that at that very moment I was holding Washington's letter in ungloved hands.

The Thief in the Night

Late at night, after everyone goes to bed, I hide my kids' homework folders in strange places: underneath the seat cushions of the sofa, behind the video game console in the basement, on a pantry shelf next to the fruit snacks.

I do this because I want to ruin their lives and make them miss recess.

While I'm at it, I usually rummage through their dresser drawers and remove all of their college logo t-shirts and pants with elastic waistbands. I also leave one of their sneakers in the garage where it belongs and throw the other one into the back seat of the car.

When I have time, I scatter all of the parental permission slips that I just filled out two hours earlier onto the kitchen floor and walk over them once or twice for no apparent reason. After haplessly kicking them around for a few minutes, I crumple them into tight balls and throw them at people, or threaten to throw them at people. When I'm super bored, I leave the permission slips on the counter and bribe the cat to gnaw on their corners. If the family pet doesn't make a complete meal out of the addition and subtraction worksheets, I finish the papers off by shoving them in the shredder or burying them alive in the recycling bin.

I am a thief and a homework murderer.

Or so my kids believe.

*******
Anyone else accused of the same crimes?

Game 5

My husband's company gave him two tickets to Game 5 of the World Series, which was played last night in Philadelphia.

I like the Phillies, but I liked the idea of having $5,000 in my pocket a whole lot more. That is how much our seats were going for on the Black Market.

"Selling the tickets is tacky," my husband reminded me. "Plus, this will be an experience that you will remember for the rest of your life."

I told him that a trip to Hawaii would be equally memorable, and could be experienced without long underwear and ear muffs.

After I finished mourning the loss of what might have been, I had a great time. My family loves sports and the experience of being at a World Series game was nothing short of incredible. It was way better, in fact, than paying off our student loans or a week-long vacation to a tropical island in the dead of winter. Way.

Halloween Pictures

When I went to take pictures of my kids in their Halloween costumes on Saturday night, I found that my camera's memory card was full. Full of awesomeness.











These photos, plus an additional 87 pictures of monkey, serve as as the primary reason why I am reluctant to invest in a nice camera.

Good News and a Good Opportunity

1. Remember Chandra? She was one of our special moms featured for Mother's Day. Chandra made me smile she sent me a limerick about her struggle with infertility:

There once was a blue "mom" with no kiddies
Who tired of those inquiring old biddies!
So she wrote to a blog,
to quiet her sobs,
Feeling guilty for having the 'gimmies!'

Well...Chandra recently emailed me with some good news...she's three months pregnant!

Congratulations! We are all very excited for you.


2. It recently came to my attention that another one of my special moms needs a little help. Summer Strickland, a mother of five, has a little guy named Mason who was born with a serious congenital heart defect called Hypoplastic Left Heart Syndrome. You can read more about this special family HERE. Mason's friends and family are holding an auction in a few months to raise funds for Mason's medical treatments, which may include a heart transplant.

Photos courtesy of Blue Lily

If you own a small business and are willing to donate something of value to the auction or to Mason's treatment fund, I will put your company's 125x125 link button on my sidebar for a month or two. Email me at themeanestmom at gmail dot com if you're interested. Please include subject line "Mason."

Update 11/2/09: WOW. Thank you for your response. We're good to go with auction items for the time being. Thank you for your support.