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?
Archive for the 'Hallmark Moments From Hell' Category
What we have here is a failure to communicate.
Published September 1, 2007 Country Living , Hallmark Moments From Hell 3 CommentsA most memorable mess.
Published August 23, 2007 Hallmark Moments From Hell , Homeschooling , Parenting 7 CommentsRebel 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.
The opposite of reverse-reverse psychology.
Published May 25, 2007 Hallmark Moments From Hell , Snippets 4 CommentsConversation between me and my 4-year-old yesterday morning:
4-year-old: Mom, can I paint?
Me: Sure you can…right after I clear away the breakfast dishes. Wanna help?
4-year-old: Okay.
Me: Thanks. I appreciate it. How about a hug?
4-year-old: Uh…. No.
Me: What? No hug? Why not?
4-year-old (breezily): Well, you’ll just have to wait until bedtime. Sorry!
Me: Oh c’mon. Just one hug.
4-year-old: Nope.
Me: Please? Pretty please?
4-year-old (still breezy and sing-songy): Uh-oh… Sorry, Mom… I can’t hear you… You’re whining…
Anatomy of a birthday party.
Published April 30, 2007 Dysfunction Junction , Hallmark Moments From Hell , Parenting 7 CommentsMy youngest daughter turned 4 years old yesterday. So we had a birthday party. And invited all the family. And they all showed up. Here’s how it went:
We were up at the crack of dawn thanks to my 6-year-old who decided to wake up my 3-year-old 4-year-old by singing that song from Barbie and the Twelve Dancing Princesses — you know…the one that Barbie sang to the little triplets in the movie on their birthday? Yeah, that one. That’s what I woke up to. That song. Over and over again.
I figured I’d better get the girls up and feed them a good nutritious breakfast before the party. So we had chocolate chip cookies with juice and watched some Cartoon Network, because that’s what birthdays are for, dammit.
About an hour later, my husband got up and staggered out into the kitchen for some coffee. Then we got showered and dressed and started Cleaning The House. This was the Semi-Annual Three-Hour Pre-Party Pick-Up event in which many bribes were offered to and accepted by my 6-year-old. During this time, my 4-year-old had at least three tantrums because she didn’t understand the concept of bribery very well and kept trying to just TAKE THE MONEY and it didn’t go over very well.
At 11:00 am, I left the house to go pick up the cake — this year it was a half-sheet white cake with techno-color buttercream frosting with the Babes of Disney, as my husband (drooling helplessly, and not just because of the frosting) lovingly refers to them, dancing all over the top.
By some miracle of timing, we got the house clean, the food ready to grill, and balloons stuck to the mailbox by the time people started showing up.
At 1:00 pm, the official start-time of the party, my husband was grilling things, my father-in-law was standing by to take over the grilling should my husband suddenly collapse for some unknown reason, my step-mother-in-law was asking me if I need any help waxing the floor or reorganizing the junk drawers, and things were rolling quite nicely.
At 1:05 pm, my 4-year-old was finished eating her hotdog and wanted to open her gifts. RIGHT NOW!!!! No one had actually arrived at the party yet except for Grandpa and Grandma, but she still wanted to be into the wrapping paper RIGHT NOW PLEASE. I told her we needed to wait for everyone else to arrive and she agreeably said, “Okay, well then let’s have the cake.”
Just repeat the previous paragraph about 200 times, and that will bring us to about 2:00 pm, when our last guests, my sister (who’s 8 months pregnant and had been sitting in a car for almost 2 hours) arrived with her husband and their little 16-month-old daughter. They pulled in to our long driveway, and immediately upon exiting their vehicle, rushed over to the GIANT FROG HEAD in my back yard, pointed at it and laughed hysterically, saying to each other: “There it is! There it is!”
They’re, like, big fans of this blog. And they’d just experienced the moment that you yourself had never even considered: a live-viewing of the GIANT FROG HEAD. After that little I’ve-Just-Died-And-Gone-To-Mecca moment, I approached them and offered hugs and kisses and most importantly, a police escort clear path to our one and only bathroom for my extremely pregnant sister.
(cue theme from Mission Impossible)
We made a break for it, dashing across the wide lawn, dodging hot grills, tricycles, and pint-sized cousins, and just as we managed to get through the kitchen, where various other dear old aunts and uncles desperately tried to block the extremely pregnant woman from reaching her destination with exclamations of HOW WONDERFUL she looks, our own mother casually sauntered from the kids bedroom across the short hallway into the one and only bathroom we’ve got and bolted the door shut behind her.
(fizzle-out theme from Mission Impossible)
Forty-five minutes later, my mother emerged from the bathroom, freshly showered, hair soft and shiny, eyebrows plucked, nails manicured and said: “Oh, did you need to get in here?”
Forty-five seconds later, my sister was done in the bathroom, and we were ready to open some presents!
My 4-year-old found something she JUST LOVES in the third package and immediately rushed off to play with it in her room alone where no one can find her so she won’t have to share it. We coaxed her back to the livingroom and got her to open more gifts but she soon found another item that must be played with Post Haste, and so my 6-year-old took pity on her and opened the rest of the stuff.
Not long after all that, my birthday girl had one more massive tantrum because she kept trying to take the one little gift that had been given to my 6-year-old. She had mountains of new things to dig through, but she just had to have her sister’s stuff. So I removed her to her room to discuss it. She didn’t want to discuss it. I told her we needed to discuss it because it was almost time for cake. She said she didn’t want cake. I sighed and got up to leave. As I was leaving the room she began to shriek at the top of her lungs: WAIT! I WANT MY CAKE! over and over again.
It took about a half-hour to diffuse that one. And finally, we had THE CAKE:
You’ll notice in the photo there that a wisp of her hair came quite close to those lit candles. It’s amazing her whole head didn’t just go up in flames. It’s that kind of thing that makes you realize that God is watching, and that He’s probably hoping for the piece with the yellow rose.
You know what the best part of doing the cake is? (No, not the yellow rose….that’s for God. Don’t mess with the yellow rose, okay?) The best part is that once the cake is cut and handed out, my hostess duties are over. That’s when I find a chair and a plate, and scarf down whatever’s left from the buffet. I sit and survey the damage, listen to the sugar-charged screaming voices of exhausted, over-stimulated children, and pronounce it all the best day we ever had.
Happy Birthday, Baby Girl.
I hereby dedicate this blog entry to my husband and implore him to cease and desist.
Published April 16, 2007 Hallmark Moments From Hell 3 CommentsNot only does my husband like my new blog, he really likes BEING in my new blog.
Here I was all worried that he’d be offended by the things I was writing, and it turns out that he’s actually really enjoying the whole thing. Every day — and I mean Every Single Day — he approaches me with some odd comments or alarming body movements or a combination of both or (God Help Me) more heavy metal songs with made-up-on-the-spot lyrics about brushing your teeth, and then after he’s done, he’ll say: “Can you put THAT in your blog?”
So, in an effort to MAKE IT STOP, I offer you this rare opportunity to eavesdrop on a typical conversation between me and my husband. On this occasion we were making the long drive back home from Grandpa’s house in a heavy spring rain storm. We were making our way through a construction area and saw a sign that said TRAFFIC FINES DOUBLED IN CONSTRUCTION AREA.
Husband: “Why don’t they make it triple? If they tripled it, people would really pay attention.”
Me, shrugging: “I guess so.”
Husband: “Or quadruple! If they quadrupled it, no one would speed through here! Ever!”
Warily, I glare sideways at him.
Husband: “Could you put THAT in your blog?”
I shake my head silently and watch the road.
Husband: “I don’t remember what comes after quad, but could you—”
Me: “Quint. Quint comes after quad. Like quintuplets.”
Husband: “Oh! Right! So if they—”
Me: “And after that comes sex. Like sextet.”
Husband: “Yeah, I knew THAT one, but there’s kids in the car…”
Me: “And after that, comes sept. Like Septuagint. And then comes oct, you know, like octagon? And then, after THAT comes non, like in nonagenarian, remember my friend Lois wrote all those poems about being a nonagenarian? And then after that—-”
Husband: “Yeah, okay…um…I don’t want to be in your blog anymore.”
So, who wants to go outside with Dad and ride bikes in the driveway?…anyone?…anyone at all?
Published March 30, 2007 Hallmark Moments From Hell 6 CommentsWhen you upload photos from our camera, they appear in the order they were originally taken. Yesterday, after uploading a smallish batch, I found another folder my husband uploaded that contained the hundred or so photos we’d taken since moving east. It covered everything from leaving our old house, to the temporary apartment we lived in for a month to moving into this little rental house. Naturally, I started flipping through them…in order…and pretty soon I came to the following sequence:
Here, my husband had managed to catch my 3-year-old in the act of falling off her bike. And when your little child takes a fall, you naturally
a) call out to her “ooops, you’re okay” and hope she’ll just brush it off,
b) rush to her, pick her up, check for bleeding, consider a trip to urgent care, or
c) take a picture of her pain.
Here, my husband has clearly chosen OPTION C.
Here, my daughter, realizing that her father has chosen OPTION C, is running into the house where her mother, who is eternally doing dishes and folding laundry (and wishing for the upteenth time that the girls would STOP taking all the clean matching socks from their drawers to use as pretend diapers for all the beanie babies), will drop whatever it is she’s doing and immediately administer OPTION B.
While OPTION B is occuring inside, here’s what happens next outside, according to the evidence on the digital camera:
Here my 6-year-old, who has witnessed the whole thing, is giving my husband THAT LOOK. You know the look I mean. The look that (if I raise her right) she will someday give her own husband when he does something like this. The look that says: “nice” (and says it in the same tone that the pelican sitting on the open sea said to the other pelican when it looked like he passed some gas in Finding Nemo.)
So, while one daughter is inside receiving OPTION B and the other daughter is giving him THE LOOK, my husband’s next thought clearly must have been:
“Oh, look. A tree.”
because that’s what he took a picture of next. And immediately on the heels of that, he must have thought we needed YET ANOTHER picture of our cars, because let’s face it, you can’t ever have enough pictures of the minivan and the old Honda:
I’m gonna print this one out in high resolution and get it framed and hang it up with the other dozen or so pictures of our old Dodge truck. Oh, look, there’s our old cat hiding underneath the minivan. She’s kind of a wimp, but we’ve had her for 14 years, so we put up with it.
And for those of you who think my husband has been roasted enough, here’s the next picture in the sequence:
Here, with OPTION B duly administered, my 3-year-old has returned to the outdoors and gotten back on her bike and is ready to ride again.
The camera doesn’t lie, my friends. Keep it in mind.
Yesterday afternoon, while outside playing, my 3-year-old was hopscotching without a rock while my 6-year-old rode her bike up and down the driveway. I strategically placed a lawn chair in front of the barn/garage in the hopes of sitting down and being able to see both girls at the same time (which was hopeless, by the way, but that’s not what this post is about) and sat down (briefly) near the hopscotch grid. My 3-year-old finished a hopscotch run with a dramatic flourish and then wandered over to me in my chair and asked:
“Mom, what’s a servant?”
“A servant?” I said. “A servant is someone who cleans up after you and does whatever you tell them to do.”
“Oh,” she said and then mulled it over a few moments. Then she smiled and said: “Oh…right. Like you. You’re our servant.”
I tried to explain the difference between a mother and a servant, but I’m sure it was lost on her. I’d love to get into it here, really delve into the feminist-political ramifications of it all, but I’ve got a shitload of dishes to wash.
By hand.
See?
It’s 5:45 am. A beautiful (albeit freezing) dawn is breaking. But that’s not what awakens me.
Instead of the twittering of brave winter birds and the hint of February sunshine behind the shades, what jolts me awake are the blood curdling shrieks coming from the bathroom, where my 6-year-old daughter has been for the past ten minutes, using the potty and then losing herself in whispered songs and daydreams. But now, the dreams have taken some sort of horrific turn for the worse and she’s in there screaming as if all the hounds of hell (not to mention Hannibal Lecter and Freddy Kruger) have broken through our thin veil of existence and they’re about to rip her throat out.
I lurch out of my half-doze and I’m trying to leap out of bed to rush to her side, but the shrieks have paralyzed me, and the very air around me has taken on the consistency of maple syrup, and the screams continue to peal out (in fact, in a certain part of my psyche, they’re still going on, endlessly, forever and ever) and still I fight it, kicking sheets and blankets away, trying to swim out of the maple syrup murk of knowing my daughter can sound like that, and I’m yelling, “WHAT? WHAT IS IT?!” as I’m trying desperately to get to my child before the axe murderer that is surely hiding behind the shower curtain can hurt her, when the screaming simply stops as suddenly as it began, and my daughter says, her voice the model of calm and decorum:
“Oh, never mind. I thought there was a spider on me. But it’s just a piece of fuzz.”
Without any possible hope of getting back to sleep after that little situation, I get up and head for the kitchen and I run into this on the way:
This is my younger daughter. She’s three. And when I say she’s three, I mean she’s really really REALLY three. She is not afraid of spiders. Yet. Right here, I suspect she is wondering two different things: 1. why is her big sister so afraid of fuzz, and 2. why in the name of God and all the saints have I not yet fixed her a 5-star breakfast????
Terrible twos, my ass. Two ain’t nothin’ compared to three.
Welcome to my world. Come on in. You can leave your alarm clocks at the door. There’s coffee if you want it, but around here, you don’t always need it.
