Reader. Writer. Thinker. Homeschooler. Insomniac.
4-year-old: Knock-knock.
Me: Who’s there?
4-year-old: Banana.
Me: Banana who?
4-year-old: Knock-knock.
Me: Who’s there?
4-year-old: Banana.
Me: Banana who?
4-year-old: Knock-knock.
Me: Who’s there?
4-year-old: Banana.
Me: Banana who?
4-year-old: Knock-knock.
Me: Who’s there?
4-year-old: Banana.
Me: Banana who?
4-year-old: Orange ya glad I didn’t say banana?
RegularDad and 7-year-old, laughing: But…you SAID banana. You said it already.
4-year-old: Oh…. Well…. Wait. Let me start over.
A couple of months ago, my 7-year-old lost another tooth. She went through this thing where she lost about four of them, one right after another, on an almost weekly basis. And of course, that last one, I completely forgot to put the money under her pillow. RegularDad was working nights most of that month, and I don’t sleep well when he’s on nights, and I was pretty ragged by the time I forgot this one last dollar. I woke a little before 6:00 am, with the awful realization that I’d forgotten. I got up and padded downstairs to get it and tried to sneak into her room with it, but of course she was awake already.
What is it? she asked when she saw me approaching her bed.
I have a confession to make, I said to her. I’m the tooth fairy.
She smiled a little and nodded.
I forgot to give you your dollar last night, I said. I’m sorry about that. And I handed her the money.
That’s okay, she said, taking it with another smile.
Don’t tell your sister, okay?
Okay.
She took it pretty well. Probably because she’d already figured it out. And what she hadn’t guessed on her own, her older friends had already explained to her.
I thought we’d gotten through it pretty well. But then, as Easter approached this year, she began to ask repeatedly, Are you the Easter Bunny? and I’d just laugh a little and change the subject. I know she knows. But I’d like to keep the magic going for my 4-year-old for at least another year.
But then, in the days right before Easter, her question changed to Gee, I hope the Easter Bunny doesn’t FORGET. Mom, do you think the Easter Bunny will FORGET us this year?
And I realized she was worried that I would forget to do Easter baskets.
It went on for days. She asked repeatedly what we thought about the Easter Bunny. Was he real? Would he forget? Should we leave a carrot? Or a picture? Gee, I hope he doesn’t FORGET. Do you think he’s gonna FORGET? It could happen you know. After all, the Tooth Fairy was getting a bit forgetful, as we all can attest to. Hey Mom (with conspiratorial double winks) remember that time the Tooth Fairy almost FORGOT to leave me money???? Remember that???? Wasn’t that SOMETHING????
We were all pretty tired of it by Saturday. RegularDad finally said to her that he would discuss it with her on Monday evening, but that she really needed to DROP THE SUBJECT until then.
So my plan was to do Easter Baskets, and also leave out little gifts for them that were just from ME. So they’d get something from the Bunny, and something from me, and it would be different items, and that would settle the question once and for all. At least until my 4-year-old gets older.
I also stayed up extra late to DO the baskets. RegularDad fell asleep early. I stayed up and didn’t even go get the stuff from the car until it was almost 11:00 pm. By the time I was done with everything, it was after midnight. I’d put the baskets together and hidden them. And I’d put out little flower-planting gifts for the girls on the table at their places. One was a sunflower kit, complete with seeds, potting soil, and a pot. The other was a set for sweet peas. Also self-contained. I also put out a card and a box of gourmet jelly beans in RegularDad’s place.
Finally, as 1:00 am approached, I staggered upstairs and fell into bed, hoping for at least 5 hours of sleep before the girls got up to find their baskets. And when I awoke to hear them whispering and giggling as they searched, I was just exhausted. Great, I thought as I heaved myself out of bed, this is gonna be one of those days when I feel like I only got 2 hours of sleep. I glanced over at RegularDad. He was still sleeping. I left him there to get a few more winks and went downstairs to the living room. It was still dark, but for us that’s normal waking time. The girls always get up early to make sure they see RegularDad in the mornings before he leaves for work.
My 4-year-old had already found her basket. And she’d already started in on the jelly beans. I helped her pick up the grass that was starting to spread all over the carpet and put it back in her basket. My 7-year-old was still looking for hers. But in her mind, the basket should have been left out someplace easy to find, because she simply refused to open any closet or cabinet doors to see if it was there. Where could it be, she said repeatedly, as she wandered through the rooms of the house, obviously not looking for it.
I was tempted to tell her to look in some closets, but I held back. This had to be the final test, I figured. The final, agonizing, irritating test to see if I was the Easter Bunny or not. So, I held my tongue and watched her wander around. And just as I was about to give in and mention the closets, I happened to glance at the clock in the dining room.
It was a little after 3:00. As in AM. As in — Not Morning. NOT MORNING AT ALL. As in: it’s the middle of the night. As in: no wonder I feel like I only got 2 hours of sleep. I ONLY GOT 2 HOURS OF SLEEP.
I immediately confiscated my 4-year-old’s basket and sent them back to bed. I had to yell at them a little bit, and there were a few tearful moments. And RegularDad woke up and asked what the hell was going on, and when I told him, he got out of bed and admonished the two of them Quite Sternly to STAY IN BED until it was light outside.
And after that, I lay in bed, eyes wide open, watching the hallway. Because it was only a matter of MINUTES before one of them would get up and try to go back downstairs. I remember telling them each at least once to GET BACK IN BED RIGHT NOW, and then I simply passed out from sheer exhaustion.
Sometime later, I awoke and saw that dawn was breaking and my 7-year-old was standing in our doorway. Is it time, she asked. Not yet, I said. And then I fell asleep again.
At 7:15 am, I woke again, and my 7-year-old was standing in the doorway again. I turned to RegularDad and asked him to get up with them and let me sleep in a bit. He did, and a few minutes later I heard him in our 4-year-old’s room asking: Where did you get all these jelly beans? Where?
I lay there, confused. I had her basket right there next to the bed. Could she have snuck in and gotten her candy without waking me? I seriously doubted it. Then I worried that she had found her sister’s basket and taken all those jelly beans. And then I remembered the box of jelly beans I’d left on the dining table for RegularDad. And I heaved myself out of bed once more and crossed the hall to her room.
She’d gotten the whole box open, found an empty egg carton someplace and was sorting them all by color while she sang a little song to herself.
Those were for Daddy, I told her. Those were my gift to Daddy. And then I turned and walked away. I crawled back into bed where I stayed until a little after 9:00. I had strange dreams. In one of them, I was smoking again. Sitting in the girls bedrooms, just puffing away. Eventually I got out of bed and went downstairs for coffee. The girls greeted me with smiles and hugs and offers of jelly beans. No candy for Mommy, I said. Just coffee.
Much later on in the day, my 4-year-old confessed to me that just before she’d gotten into Daddy’s jelly beans, she’d opened up the sweet pea planting kit I’d left for her on the table.
There was a bag of brown stuff in the pot, she said.
Yes, I said. That’s the potting soil. You plant the seeds in it.
Potting soil? she asked.
That’s dirt. You plant the seeds in the dirt and sweet peas will grow.
Dirt, huh? she said. No wonder it tasted funny.
but they still wouldn’t last five minutes when facing my bored, coming-down-with-a-cold 4-year-old.
The magic marker marks happened during our history reading today, when I (foolishly) left my pink-magic-marker-wielding 4-year-old in visual range of this book so that I could use the bathroom. I was gone only moments, but that’s all it takes.
The scissor-situation is a long-running battle in which I desperately try to keep all scissors hidden and locked away until someone actually has a REASONABLE NEED for such an item, while my 4-year-old (mastermind that she is) continually manages to find those hiding places and consquently reclaim the scissors and then use them to give haircuts to every single Barbie and stuffed animal she can get her hands on while I’m busy on the computer working that freelance project I took on so as to be able to finance her up-and-coming homeschooled education.
The clump of hair you see next to the recently-re-confiscated scissors is from the large stuffed horse she got for Christmas this year. Said horse now has a significantly shorter tail and mane, and I now have to wash all her sheets and blankets because that’s where she was sitting when she took on that enormous styling project and there’s stuffed animal hair clippings everywhere.
She’s coming down with a cold, the weather outside is dreadful and dreary, and it’s just THAT kind of day around here.
How much you wanna bet that even the Gorgons would run screaming in the opposite direction?
So, I’m trying to upload pictures for you, but, for some reason, WordPress isn’t cooperating tonight. So, I can’t upload everything I wanted to show you. But, here’s a bit of the living room.
The dining room (also used as the school room) is off to the left. There are 3 bedrooms up the stairs, and a hall bath. The master bedroom is smallish and painted a nice, delicate shade of pink, but it does have it’s own bathroom, which is nice. Here’s a shot of that:
Yep. That’s a hot pink toilet seat. Even the guy doing the inspection got the giggles when he saw it. RegularDad promised me that the first thing we’re going to do to this house once we close is install a dishwasher. But that was before we saw this toilet seat cover.
How much do you want to bet that installing the dishwasher is the second thing we do?
Anyway. Here’s a shot of the finished attic that makes for a fourth bedroom. 
Ideally this would be a better size for a master bedroom, but since there’s no adjoining bathroom, it’s going to be my study. Oh, we’ll put the futon up here too, for when Grandma comes to visit, but that’ll only be a couple times a year. For the rest of the time, this will be My Private Space. This is a good thing to have if you’re a homeschoolin’ mama like me. This, along with the large yard, and various other little details I can’t show you because WordPress is having some sort of cyber-PMS moment, makes that kitchen and all the upgrading required worth every penny.
I’ll try uploading some more shots of the outside tomorrow, once WordPress is finished having its little tantrum or whatever it is.
It’s like when someone says to you, I’ve got good news and bad news. What do you want first? And unless you lived your entire childhood in a sealed plastic bubble with no cultural input whatsoever, you always say, Gimmee the bad news first.
We’ll start with the bad news, then. THE KITCHEN:
Somebody cue the theme from Psycho. Even the Brady Bunch had a nicer kitchen than this. Look at that tile backsplash. Just look at it. Here, have a closer look:
It’s an HGTV wet dream, is what it is.
I guess at this point I should confess that I now spend every free waking moment watching whatever happens to be on HGTV. I even put the channel on when the kids are around. What the hell, I figure. It’s G-rated. The two of them are getting all into it with me. They particularly love to watch House Hunters. Whenever that one’s on they snuggle in with me, and when it’s time for the buyers to Make Their Decision, the girls are all like: PICK THE SECOND ONE!! THE SECOND ONE!!! And then when the utter schleppos pick House #1 because it’s got a finished basement, the kids are all: Oh man! No Way!!! House #2 was so much closer to work! And what about the price? That’s way more than you wanted to spend! Oh well. Can we watch Dragon Tales now? And I’m all like: No way! Deserving Design is coming up next! Who wants popcorn?
But I digress.
So, the inspection went quite well. Except for the fact that the people that lived there were color-blind and sheltered enough not to realize that as the years passed more modern conveniences were invented to Make One’s Home More Efficient and Entertaining, the house is in remarkably good shape. It’s got good, sturdy bones, as they say. All we have to do is completely hollow it out and start over.
During the inspection, the owner’s daughter showed up just to check in and say hello. The actual owner has reached that point in life where she needs to move into a nursing home, and that’s why this house is for sale. The daughter is acting as power of attorney. The good news here is that no one actually up and died in the house recently. So I won’t need to call Ghost Busters. But the bad news is that this will be an EMOTIONAL SALE. This woman could not stop talking about how she grew up in that house. How wonderful it was. What a great neighborhood it was. How it had the BEST SCHOOLS EVER. I just nodded and smiled and kept moving into different rooms whenever she started to mist over.
It’s not that I wasn’t sympathetic. I was. Really I was. But I only had a few tissues left in my purse, and I needed them just in case my 4-year-old (who’s just about over that little cold, but not quite) started hacking up vast quantities of phlegm. I just couldn’t handle it when this woman would get all emotional about things like this kitchen that needs to be put out of its misery remodeled as quickly as possible.
“We even replaced the stove!” she moaned at one point, her eyes watering ominously.
“Oh,” I said. “REALLY?”
“Yes,” she breathed. “Isn’t it great?”
“Why…yes…,” I stammered. “It is.” And then I escaped into the dining area only to be ambushed by my realtor, who immediately asked: “Homeschooling, huh? Like…how does that work? Do you do…like…math…and stuff….?”
Here’s the stove, by the way. It’s not even digital, for God’s sake.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do love this house. It’s got a lot of great things about it. Like separate bedrooms for the kids. And three working toilets. All I am saying, is that the kitchen (including that fossil of an oven) is not exactly a Primary Selling Feature. I’ll post out more pictures of different rooms tomorrow. I’d do it now, but it’s almost time for Design on a Dime. And after that, Decorating Cents is coming on.
I am so into Decorating Cents right now.
In the end, it’ll be a great house. We’ll paint. Rip up carpets. Add some chair rails and crown moulding. And next summer, we’ll Deal With That Kitchen In The Proper Manner. I’ll let RegularDad buy some new power saws. He’ll love that. It’ll be fabulous.
And after we’re done remodeling, we’ll look back on these days and laugh gently as we reminisce about the owner’s daughter and how after she told me the beautiful-family-moment story of How They Replaced Their Oven in 1973, she wandered over to RegularDad and told him what a great place the neighborhood was. How some of her happiest childhood memories were of those lazy summer afternoons when she and her brothers would sneak off to the nearby park and light up a bowl and pass it around. Those were some good fucking times, my friends. Absolutely the best.
Man…I just so totally love you guys right now.
Really.
Well, my 4-year-old is sick. She’s got one of those congested coughs that just sounds painful. Like: oh, poor darling! let me give you a hug AFTER you’re done coughing that crap up because it sounds like it just HURTS and I don’t want to catch this one. You poor baby! But don’t touch me, okay? ‘Cause I don’t want to cough like that. Ever again. If possible.
These are my more maternal moments, let me tell you. When the kids are sick, I just dive right in, don’t I?
It brings to mind one night a few years back, when my 4-year-old was still a baby and I was out having a Mom’s Night Out. During that one hour in which I was Not At Home, she came down with some sort of stomach bug that caused her to projectile vomit all over the hallway, her door, and not to mention RegularDad himself as he dashed through the upstairs with her in his arms, desperately trying to make it to the non-carpeted bathroom.
All I know is that just as I’d relaxed into my second cup of coffee, and the fabulous talk of poets and poetry, my cell phone started beeping. (It was a minor miracle that the thing was actually on and charged in the first place, because it usually wasn’t. Or if it was, I’d always manage to forget the thing back at the house. Cell-phone savvy I’ll never be, my friends. I seem to have missed that happy little boat. If someone were to ever hand me something like a Blackberry and ask me to use it, my head would probably explode.)
So, after a few surprised, frantic minutes of digging through my purse I managed to find the thing and turn it on, knowing it was RegularDad, because no one else had my number.
“Hello?” I said.
“Gah!” he yelled. “Gah!!!!”
“Hon? Is everything okay?”
“GAH! Guh! Guh….”
“Hon?”
“GATORADE!!!” he finally gasped out. “You need to stop on your way home at get LOTS OF GATORADE!!!”
“Um…okay…”
“The baby’s sick! She just puked all over the place! It’s EVERYWHERE! On the walls! ON ME!”
“Okay, hon. It’s okay. I’m on my way.”
“You don’t need to leave early. Just stop and get some Gatorade on your way home, okay?”
“Pedialyte. Sure.”
“What?”
“Pedialyte. You mean Pedialyte, hon. Babies don’t drink Gatorade.”
“WHAT?”
He was at the end of his rope, I could tell. All I had to do was say the word ‘Pedialyte’ one more time and he’d snap. Envision, if you will, that scene at the beginning of Pulp Fiction when Samuel L. Jackson is hollering: SAY ‘WHAT’ AGAIN! to that kid before blowing him away, and now imagine RegularDad covered in spit-up, holding a sick baby and yelling into the phone: SAY ‘PEDIALYTE’ AGAIN!
Yeah, it would have been just. like. that.
“Gatorade,” I said. “Right.”
“It’s in my EAR!” he yelled. “I gotta go!”
“Okay. Bye.”
I hung up and filled in the women sitting around the table looking at me funny. Then we wrapped up our poetry session as quick as we could and I stopped at the store for some Pedialyte. I got two flavors. Just in case.
Things were quiet back at the house. I took the baby from him and surveyed the situation. Yes, indeed, the walls in the upstairs hallway were splattered with quite a bit of…well…you know. And so was RegularDad’s head. And shoulders. And a little bit had run down his back. But the baby was smiling and RegularDad was calmer.
“Sorry,” he said. “But it was just…EVERYWHERE.”
“That’s okay.”
“I’m gonna go take a shower.”
“Sure.”
He disappeared into our bedroom. I set the baby down on the floor with some toys and grabbed a box of baby wipes and started using the wipes to clean off the walls. By the time RegularDad was out of the shower, I was almost done.
“Wow,” he said. “You’re using wipes?”
“Sure,” I said. “Why not?”
I sent him downstairs to fill a bottle with some (ahem) Pedialyte, and we put the baby to bed.
There have been times when I’ve been the one paralized by puke as well. But RegularDad was there to back me up. We complement each other well in this way, as we do in so many, many others.
Now, a few years later, our youngest is sick again. But at least it’s not a stomach bug. These little colds come and go. On sick days, we have PJ-All-Day Day. No one has to get dressed if they don’t want to. And if you want to watch the Little Mermaid over and over again, that’s okay.
Just get well soon, kid. But don’t sneeze on me. Okay?
Well…the shoe dropped. And just as I suspected, it’s one hell of a clog.
The soup came out decent. The bread, a bit short, but tasty. The kitchen, a mess. And the basement…
has wasps.
Yep. Wasps.
I went down there today to start a load of wash and saw a wasp buzzing around the washing machine. Oh crap, I thought. Ho hum. Better get the spray. So I trooped up the steps for a can of Raid and when I returned, I noticed the wasp had moved to one of the window wells. And was crawling around…next to…another half dozen wasps or so.
And I retreated back up the steps in a hurry.
RegularDad is, of course, at work, and cannot instantly rid me of the wasps in the basement. But he promises he will take care of it first thing in the morning.
At dinner, I told the girls to stay out of the basement.
Why? they asked.
Because there’s wasps down there. Daddy’s gonna fix it tomorrow. Just don’t go down there.
At bedtime, my 7-year-old told me she’d just seen a wasp fly over her head in the living room. I spent 20 minutes searching the house (with my trusty can of Raid at the ready) but couldn’t find it anywhere.
Are you sure it was a wasp? I asked her. Maybe it was just a stinkbug. (We have dozens of these damn things all over the place these days. What a nuisance they are!)
I don’t know, Mom. It looked pretty thin.
For her pre-bedtime reading material, my 7-year-old selected a nature encyclopedia she got for her birthday. She turned immediately to the page on wasps and began to do research and draw diagrams of how exactly those pesky wasps could have possibly gotten into the basement in the first place.
At 8:25 pm, I went into their room to check on them and noticed this activity, particularly that the page on wasps had a simply ENORMOUS illustration of said insect and told her to put the book away. I told them I had to make a phone call in about 5 minutes and that I would be on the phone for a while. They were allowed to get out of bed to use the bathroom, and also to tell me if they found a wasp in their room.
Precisely at 8:30 pm, I sat down to make my call. The very instant I sat down and lifted the telephone receiver, they both appeared with big wide eyes in the kitchen.
Is it a wasp? I asked, setting the phone down with a sigh.
No. A spider. A really big one.
We all trooped into their room and sure enough, a large, dark, furry spider was creeping around on the floor. I could have just stepped on it, but I had that can of Raid right there at the ready, so I stuck it out and pushed the button, and of course, I didn’t have it aimed properly, and it shot right at my 4-year-old instead of at the spider on the floor. I stopped the spray immediately and checked her.
Did it get you? I asked, patting her pj’s with my hand.
No, she said. Not really.
Not really? I asked. Does that mean ‘just a little bit’ or ‘not at all’?
I quickly sprayed the damn spider and stomped it for good measure, and then went to get a damp cloth to wipe down my 4-year-old’s face. Just in case.
Gee, Mom! they said, all excited (and really, bedtime certainly had taken on an excited air this evening). That stuff smells GOOD.
Fabulous.
I got them back into bed and, still lugging my can of Raid, went to make my phone call. And here I sit, 2 hours later, still looking for this damn wasp. There’s no way I’m gonna be able to sleep tonight. No way.
Wait! I think I hear something near the window…. Nope. Nothing.
It’s probably waiting for me under my blankets. I’m sure it’ll crawl right up on my pillow tonight and just buzz me a lullaby. Dammit.
This is a picture of my 3-year-old nephew and my 14-year-old cat, taken not too long after my nephew had eaten a large piece of birthday cake at the party we had this afternoon for my soon-to-be-7-year-old.
What more need be said?
Rebel over at the Looney Bin is running a contest in which we all relate our most messy moments, and when I read her post and Heather’s entry with the Vicko Vapo Rub, I remembered this little event from a few years back.
About a month after I quit my job and began my career as a crazy mother obsessed with giant frog heads stay-at-home-mom, we decided to put our little house on the market and buy something bigger. So we packed up a lot of our junk and cleaned the house, and I somehow managed to keep it clean on a day to day basis and also managed to get us all out of the house whenever there were showings. This was, for the most part, exhausting work. Add to this the stress of making the adjustment to life at home with baby and toddler, and it made for a stressful couple of months.
One afternoon, I put my baby down for a nap and my 3-year-old down for her rest time. She’d given up napping earlier in the year but still rested during the day. I left her door open and went down to the kitchen for some coffee and then the phone rang and I started chatting with a friend, and I was really feeling good about myself, you know? Both kids down for a nap, coffee brewing, a friend on the phone. Boy did I have my act together!
And when I heard my 3-year-old’s bedroom door snick softly shut, I didn’t give it a second thought. Probably doesn’t want to be distracted by my voice while she’s resting, I thought.
A half an hour later, I finished my chat with my friend and went upstairs to check on the girls. The baby was still sleeping, and when I listened in at my 3-year-old’s door, all was quiet. I opened the door very gently, expecting to see that she’d fallen asleep, and saw instead that she’d gotten hold of a large jar of Vaseline and had smeared the stuff all over everything.
And when I say everything, I do mean everything.
It was on the walls, the bed, the pillow, the sheets, the blankets, the carpet, the stuffed animals, the windows, the lampshade, the doorknob, the toys, the mirrored closet door, the clothes, the furniture, not to mention the 3-year-old herself.
She was still working on the mirrored closet door when I walked in on her, and the look on her face suggested that she knew exactly how I would feel about such an activity. She sensed somehow that this was just not quite what I meant when I said rest time. And just as I managed to utter a somewhat strangled “oh…oh no…no hon…uh…no no no…” the baby in the next room woke up and started to cry.
It took almost 2 hours to clean up the mess. I think the worst part was the closet door. It was a mirrored double-sliding door, and it took about a half hour just to do that. And just when I thought I was done, I slid the door to the side to close it, only to find that the mirrored door behind it was also covered in goo and I still had lots of cleaning up to do.
Or maybe the worst part wasn’t even the closet door at all. Maybe the worst part was discovering later on that the air conditioner we stored in her closet had also received a good slathering of goo. It took another whole hour with Q-tips dipped in rubbing alcohol to clean in between the metal slats.
It’s so hard to say, really, what the worst part of that little cleaning adventure really was. But on the brighter side of things, at least no one stopped by to see the house that day.
That was the day I truly embraced my new life as a SAHM. That was the day when it all came crashing in on me and I realized how my life had changed and what my future looked like. That was the day I learned to NEVER trust that quiet little snick of a toddler’s bedroom door closing. If you had asked me on that day if I would be willing to consider homeschooling, I would have run screaming from the house all the way back downtown to ask my old boss for my job back.
I stand before you today and assure you that if your toddler goes quietly into rest time with a gentle, complacent smile on her face, she’s got something up her sleeve or in her mouth or tucked in a sock, and whatever that something is, it’s definitely something she shouldn’t have. And yes, if you think it’s too quiet in there, then it IS too quiet in there, and you should definitely go check and see what’s going on in there.
I mean right now. Stop reading this and go check. Right now.
You’re not still reading this, are you?
Dude. Go check.
This is a portrait in watercolor of ME done by my 6-year-old yesterday afternoon.
This is, apparently, what I look like after a completely frustrating half-hour in which the girls are cleaning up their room before they are allowed to paint. So much complaining and whining and compromising (and cajoling of the 4-year-old by the 6-year-old who Just Wants To FREEKIN Paint) went on that I just about Lost It Completely and did a little bit ‘o yellin’.
I don’t usually make them clean up before painting, but they’d emptied the entire contents of the closet on top of the usual clutter of stuff that litters the floor in there, and it was SO BAD that I was sure we were breaking all sorts of fire codes, so I made them clean up their room first today.
And after all that, I was so IRRITATED that I didn’t let them paint their Most Supremely Awesome Wooden Model Horses that they REALLY wanted to paint and just let them have plain old boring watercolors and paper. And the masterpiece above was the end result. And the sad thing is, it’s a pretty good painting. Yeah, I’m a bit jaundiced in her representation, but the facial expression was probably dead-on.
There seems to be this growing collection of Angry Mother Artwork in my house.
Here for instance is a picture my 4-year-old drew of me with marker a few months ago:
This was right around the time she reached one of my favorite milestones – starting to draw people. I just love this milestone. It’s such fun! Except for THOSE moments, like the one above, when my then 3-year-old, approached me with this particular gem and handed it to me and said:
Here, Mom. I drew this for you. It’s a picture of you being mad because the cat got in the house and pooped on the floor.
I took the paper with thanks and later on, scribbled a few clarifying points on the back:
Actually, it was my toddler who LET the cat in even though the cat is NOT ALLOWED in this house. And then, it was the toddler, not the cat, who pooped on the floor.
Notice my thick, free-falling grey tears. And the little angry pink crinkle in my forehead. Again, maybe not everything is the right color, or drawn to scale, but for a toddler, it ain’t bad.
Trust me, if your 3-year-old let the cat in, then pooped on the floor and tried to blame it on the cat, you’d look like that, too.
By the time they’re teenagers, I’ll probably look like this.
And the girls will probably paint it just beautifully.
Doing my part to show the world that the homeschooling community is more than just a bunch of crazy funda- mentalists. There's plain old regular crazy people who homeschool, too. Like me.
Email me:
regular_mom at yahoo dot com
