Another Way I Ruined My Child's Life

Today I ruined Cortlen's life.

He told me this several times on the way home from the bowling alley.

What heinous act of child abuse did I commit this time?

I tried to teach him how to bowl.

"Instead of dropping the bowling ball on the lane, you want to try to roll it," I told him.

On his first attempt, the ball rolled into the gutter.

This tragedy is the sole reason why he ended up losing to his twin brother by 15 points, and his two-year-old brother by 8. At least according to him.



"You made me lose on purpose!" he cried. "It's all your fault!"


"I didn't even make eye contact with you during your second game," I reminded him. "What happened there?"



While the rest of us were putting away the bowling balls and returning our rented shoes, Cortlen threw his street shoes down the lane.

I am still not sure what he hoped to accomplish by this.

On the way home, he repeated the phrase "I hate bowling" 8 million times.

"I'm not going to take you again if you act like this," I warned.

Later that night, we had a little talk about sportsmanship.

"You were a bad sport to try to make me lose at bowling today," he told me.

In addition to being star athletes, my kids are also intellectually gifted.

The Tournament Team

A few months ago, my boys joined a tournament soccer team.

As my husband and I have quickly learned, soccer tournaments for seven year-olds in central Florida (and other places I imagine) are fun, non-pressure filled events complete with sponsor tents and local media coverage. The minute that we arrived at our first tournament, we realized that we were missing all three items required of all good soccer parents: a 60-quart cooler on wheels, a pop up tent, and t-shirts with our sons' names screen printed across the back.

Our boys would have played better in their first game this weekend, we think, if they had personalized soccer bags and a team bus or van like everyone else.

Oh. My. Gosh. I seriously thought that I had stepped foot into the Twilight Zone.

"Isn't this fun?" asked the boys' coach at around noon. My temper was about as high as the temperature outside.

"Yep," I answered briskly.

On the way to the bathroom, one of the coaches from a team named the Orlando Singlebury's Seafood Shack Green Gorillas (name changed to protect the guilty) ran up to me.

"Please keep this on the down low, but we'd like to invite one of your sons to try out for our team." He said this as if he was issuing an invitation to the Royal Wedding.

I am about as interested in royal weddings as I am root canals.

We I returned to our team's tent, our coach issued a timely warning.

"Watch out for poachers," he told all the parents. "They are crawling around like insects here."

A few minutes later, he checked in with me personally. "You're happy with our team, right? You're not thinking of switching are you?"

I glanced over to the son that was causing all the ruckus. He was spitting watermelon seeds at his teammates.

"I say that we fulfill our commitment, and then we're done," I told my husband. "No more of this."

My husband nodded in agreement but kept quiet.

If you don't have anything nice to say, sometimes it's best not to say anything at all.

Babysitters in Training

I had to send an important email this morning and so I told my three older kids that I would give them each a dollar to keep Cameron occupied for twenty minutes.

A few minutes later, I heard my blender eat a spoon.

"Not a good time," I told the four smoothie makers. "I need you to do something less destructive."

Chasing each other around the house with foam baseball ball bats was not what I had in mind.

Neither was building a tent out of all of my bedding.

Or watching bloody videos of shark attacks on YouTube.

"Watch this movie instead for 10 minutes," I begged. "Please."

Why watch a movie when you make your own? I spent a considerable chunk of my evening deleting 100 still shots of my kids' nostrils from my cell phone camera.

At the end of 20 minutes, I had written exactly two sentences.

And forked over $3.

Pet Sitting Services Offered

Our next door neighbors went out of town this weekend, leaving us in charge of Shimmer, their pet goldfish.

Of course, less than 24 hours after arriving at our house, Shimmer inexplicably died.

Now we are faced with a dilemma. Do we replace the goldfish with one from a pet store or do we offer our neighbors one of the frozen goldfish that are, for equally inexplicable reasons, STILL IN MY FREEZER?

Her First Time

It's been raining here all week. This is a good thing because we're having a little drought, but a bad thing because we've run out of things to do.

Yesterday, I took my kids to a dollar movie theater. In the summer, we go there at least once per week. Most of the time, we only see day care centers and people that we don't know. This time we ran into one of my son's classmates from school. Upon seeing each other, the boys ran into each other's arms and immediately began wrestling on the floor. As I pried them off each other, the other boy's mother frantically looked around the lobby.

"Are there others here?" she asked nervously.

I had no idea what she was talking about. "Are you here with anyone else from school?" she asked. "Have you seen anyone else from X Elementary here today?"

When I shook my head, she relaxed and explained that she didn't usually venture onto the other side of the tracks.

That much was apparent.

The woman also told me that she hadn't seen much of the place yet, but she was kind of creeped out by the amount of popcorn ground into the lobby floor and the number of people waiting in line for the bathroom.

We invited the woman and her children to sit by us in the theater. She nibbled on her nails and told me that she wasn't sure that she was going to stay.

"Just pretend I was never here," the woman told me on her way out. I'm no brain surgeon, but I know that' s code for "Don't tell anyone that I was here."

I assured her that I don't have any real friends.

I didn't tell her about those online.