As if there was ever really any doubt.
Nonetheless, I have secured the hardcopy evidence and now I submit it into the loving care of the internets, who will be sure to NEVER FORGET that in fact, I rate.
This also illustrates how cool I am to not only be palindromic (!!) but also up-side-down-ic. Any which way you spin me, I am clearly the wow-est mom ever.
WoWMoM rulez. (Thanks, IceMage, for the lovely certificate.) (Which I deserve.)
This is how they look, isn’t it? This is the Ubiquitous Suburban Teen Pose.
I mean, not all USTs are quite so gorgeous as the ones I particularly have given birth to, but still. This is how they walk from place to place, clean their rooms, dispense reports on their day, and feed the cats. It is their natural posture, evolutionarily adapted over the 14 minutes it took for the texting phenomenon to grab each child by the scruff and shove a wireless device into their deft hands.
Amazingly, you don’t see many contusions on these USTs. Are they developing virtual rubber bumper car pads, as has been postulated by certain scientific parenting organizations?
Dunno.
But I can tell you that if you want their attention you’ll need to text them, even if you’re standing smack in front of their faces in the kitchen, taking their photograph.
I really was in love with Sesame Street’s Bob McGrath — I wanted him to be my big brother and sing to me forever; hell, I still do — but I don’t remember ever agreeing with him and Susan and Grover or whomever on the “One of These Things Is Not Like the Others” game. I felt like they were totally missing out on a key ingredient in the fun to be had in the universe.
From the beginning I played “One of These Things” backwards, imagining ways to incorporate the odd choice into a game or story or scenario, figuring out ways it did belong. Sometimes there wasn’t much to work with (three big circles and one small one, c’mon people) but sometimes there were possibilities.
One of these things is not like the others,
One of these things just doesn’t belong,
Can you tell which thing is not like the others
By the time I finish my song?
I had to wait until I was in my 20’s in order to discover one of the most delightful of them all.
My younger sister had the singular honor of producing the first grandchild in our family and she did a fabulous job of it. Suddenly we had this precious, curly-headed, fascinating and fascinated boy-creature where before it was just us boring adults. It was like someone had finally added the seasoning to an otherwise bland soup; he was the grand-slam home run by a formerly unknown player. (There, now I’ve done food and sports. Next we’ll add beer.)
One of the times I made the trek up to Michigan to visit him I brought with me a simple gift: an oversized picture book whose bold photos and clean white pages had attracted me in the store. I guess I wasn’t surprised, once I had my nephew in my lap and we were several pages in, when I turned the page and saw one of Bob’s old “One Of These Things” puzzles. There in glorious display was the familar four-square arrangement, this time laid out with a bright yellow rubber duck, a frothy bar of soap, a pretty washcloth (or sponge?), and… a couple of Saltine crackers, which had always a staple in our pantry as I was growing up.
I couldn’t have been happier if Bob himself had joined us.
“These pictures are about taking a bath,” I told the warm, chubby beauty in my lap. “We love baths, don’t we?” Indeed we did.
And of course he also knew which pictured item “didn’t belong.” I pretended uncertainty. “I eat popsicles in the shower,” I mused out loud (I do). His eyes got big. “Yeah,” I continued. “and I love crackers. But I’ve never eaten crackers in the bathtub. Have you?” He hadn’t, and now was getting very still, thought processes in full throttle. “It’s almost your bathtime,” I noted, and paused a moment.
He had an idea! He suddenly began to talk in that excited two-year-old way, stumbling all over himself like a puppy who knows a treat is on the way.
Papa and Meme had overheard the entire thing, and had an entire sleeve of crackers ready and waiting. If they hadn’t had saltines in the house (an impossiblity!) they would have driven fifty miles in 4 feet of snow to get some and been grateful to do so. Did I mention he was the darling of our family? I eyed the sleeve, which probably held thirty of the familiar crispy squares. It just might be enough.
So for many years my parents made sure my nephew had crackers for his bath, and from that day to this, our family tells the story of how crackers do in fact belong in the bathtub.
I think Bob would be okay with it.
Images: Both of those pictures are of me with Scott Alan, our curly-headed wunderkind; you can see that we denied him nothing. The bottom photo is the actual moment of our “One of These Things” revelation. Amazing, isn’t it, how you sometimes get really lucky and capture a story in a photo?
A local author and podcaster friend of mine blogged recently about her daughter’s first f-bomb. It was a funny read, and I thought she parented quite well through the situation. And it got me thinking about how I felt the last time I heard the Ice happily singing the lyrics to Warrant’s (and Poison’s) “She’s My Cherry Pie,” which he most likely downloaded from my iPod.
She’s my cherry pie,
Cool drink of water, such a sweet surprise.
Tastes so good, make a grown man cry,
Sweet cherry pie, oh yeah.
Now. My boys — currently aged 9 to 14 — have grown up in a rock house. Their dad gigs 2 or 3 times a month with one of his bands which covers mostly 80’s hair metal and rock hits. The boys have been to a few of his gigs, the few that didn’t take place in a questionable bar late at night. They hear him practice these songs. They practice them on their guitars and drums upstairs. For that matter, they hear many of the same songs on Guitar Hero and Rock Band, or when they’re in my car with me.
And let’s be honest here: those songs from the 80’s weren’t nearly as explicit as some of today’s music. But it still makes my ears completely red to hear them singing Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way” or Kiss’s “Lick It Up.”
Don’t need to wait for an invitation
You gotta live like you’re on vacation
There’s something sweet you cant buy with money – lick it up, lick it up
So far, I don’t think they really know what they’re singing, although my teenager probably has a clue. For that matter, does ANYone at the Canes games think about the lyrics to the Scorpions’ “Rocked You Like a Hurricane” or do they only know that one riff?
So. What does one do when one’s 9 year old is belting out the Knack’s “My Sharona” (and doing it pretty well)? Does Doug Fieger have kids? Steven Tyler had girls, did he go through this? (They never tell you the important stuff on Wikipedia.) What would Joan Jett do, people?
Come a little closer huh, ah will ya huh.
Close enough to look in my eyes, Sharona.
Keeping it a mystery gets to me
Running down the length of my thigh, Sharona
If you’re me, you flush to the roots of your hair (Omg! Did my kid just sing “You ain’t seen nothin’ till you’re down on a muffin”??!!) and pretend to ignore it. It’s rock, it’s good for you, right? Hey, we turned out okay… I mean, mostly okay. Didn’t we? Didn’t we?
For a long time The Maker wanted to be a dog.
Or a cat — it changed from day to day. He would ask for his food and water to be served in bowls on the floor, made us put a leash on him and throw things for him to retrieve, and above all, he liked to be petted. He barked and meowed and did all the things normal, uh, pets do. Didn’t shed much.
Most of this was during the year he was three, and it was all fine and dandy-o, and even somewhat charming to us and our friends, not to mention the Maker’s older brothers who had always wanted a dog. But one day the Husband came home looking rather harried.
Apparently the Maker had insisted on being a dog and happily going thus from the car (ten rows back in the parking lot) up to the front entrance of the Wal-Mart. Took about five minutes, all told, and since I wasn’t there I don’t know how much he barked.
There may be some limits to how much parents should indulge these little role plays. Can we be retroactively horrified?
I attended my first recital last Sunday.
No one explained to me the rules. And by that I mean that it would go on forever and ever, amen. There were 63 kids on the program, mostly piano players, but some saxes, singers, drummers (!) and a small band. The Maker went fifth, and the Husband said we couldn’t sneak out after. It would have been awkward, anyway, since I (not knowing!!) got us seats smack in the middle of the fourth or fifth row.
The second-best part of the entire program was when the emcee announced our boy, saying “Seth Creech, ‘Are You Sleeping’.” I laughed out loud, and thankfully no one glared at me. I’d have glared right back at them. My boy!
And of course, the Maker was wonderful. He got stuck, but calmly figured out what he wanted to do and did it. I was deeply proud for the entire 55.2 seconds. Longer, even!
And next time I’ll bring a magazine.
I don’t know why we never tried a normal nightlight.
Maybe we did, and it wasn’t adequately addressing our boys’ collective fear of the dark combined with a tremendous reluctance to go to bed. But I noticed one Christmas how hypnotic we all found the scattered stars thrown from a mirrored-ball ornament. After Christmas I found an even larger disco-ball ornament on sale, hung it so it would spin in the center of the bedroom they shared, and gave them each a flashlight.
They were delighted, and we went through so many batteries I had to switch to rechargeable.
By then, the singing part had already become standard bedtime procedure.
The singing got started because each one in turn went through a phase of being scared of the dark. The Ice was terrified of owls, of all things, and began worrying about this at precisely bedtime each evening. The First seemed to fixate on hungry monsters. The Maker, wide-eyed, watched his two bigger brothers for cues as to how he should feel.
The hungry monsters were no match for my ingenuity. I can remember arming the boys with things to say to hungry monsters: “If you’re hungry, you can find something to eat in the kitchen. And food stays in the kitchen.” Also helpful: “It is bedtime, and you need to get home and get in your OWN bed. Right now!” They practiced speaking firmly to the interlopers, brooking no insolence. And I mimed spraying under their beds and in their closets my patented Monster-B-Gone.
The owl issue was tougher. It was not unusual to hear one in the places we lived. So I began singing Dona Nobis Pacem to the boys at bedtime, with my hand on each child’s chest in turn. It worked like a mantra at first; my quiet blessing over them. Soon, though, they sang it with me. Then we started getting four-part harmonies. It sounded pretty darn good. They loved it. The disco ball arrived. The crowd wanted more.
It’s hard to go from Dona Nobis straight into The Itsy Bitsy Spider, or, even better from my perspective, Metallica. At the time I was still leading churches, most of them traditional, and my boys were not only familiar with the United Methodist hymns, but had many of them by heart. So it just seemed natural to go from Dona Nobis into Savior Like a Shepherd Lead Us, and besides, it made us all feel like a bigger, better Guardian had things well in hand.
A Mighty Fortress is Our God! Jesus don’t take no smack from no owl.
Seven a.m., Sunday morning. A freshly-minted seven-year-old tiptoes into my bedroom and hands me an inflated balloon the size of a basketball, whispering (so as not to wake me), “Mom? Can you tie this for me?”
I wish I had a video of this moment. It was a true test of my parenting skillz.
Owl pellets. Cool, huh? The Maker did a paper on them (see below, typed in exactly as he wrote it, though I haven’t included the two original illustrations), then they ordered the pellets from — yes — an owl pellet store. Finally they poked them apart with toothpicks on my kitchen table, and I’m SURE they sanitized it afterwards.
“Owls” by the Maker, age 6
Owls have camoflage. They can sit very still. They can be very quiet. They can fly silently. God made their wings in a special way. At day owl’s pupils get small. At night they get big. And that is because in the day they don’t need as much light. And in the dark, they need a lot of light. What owls eat: Mice, chicks, skunks, rabbits, snakes, frogs, birds. Owls swallow most of their food whole. They cough up what they can not digest. Those are called pellets. Pellets usually have bones and fur in them. Owls live on every continent except Antarctica. Twenty one kinds of owls live on North America.
I can’t wait till the project on llamas. We’re gonna need a bigger kitchen table.
The Ice loves to cook. This weekend he wanted to make biscuits, a favorite for us. I requested a double batch, since the single barely makes it around the table in our family. The Ice has never made a double batch of anything before, so we talked about careful measurements and keeping track. He waved me out of the kitchen, preheated the oven, and happily began.
Ten minutes later I heard a plaintive “Mom, this isn’t right.” Oh boy.
“Did you put in each ingredient twice?” I asked.
“Yeeee-ah,” he responded slowly, “but something’s wrong with it. It isn’t supposed to look like this.”
I peered in to see a soupy mess in the bowl. A whole lot of soupy mess. Yikes.
We ran the check together. “Did you measure the Bisquick in twice?”
He had.
“Did you measure the milk in twice? Two-thirds of a cup, two times?”
He nodded, pointing to the measuring cup as proof. Ahh.
We have a four-cup measuring cup. Since the first measurement on the cup is a giant “1” I knew exactly what had happened. He had measured one and two thirds of a cup in. Twice. Which equals soup.
I shook the Bisquick box — still heavy. “I just loooove biscuits,” I told him jauntily, and dumped in the rest of the box. Well, I do.
We had five batches of biscuits for dinner. They were very good, they were. If you were here, we would share them with you. And send some home with you, too. Some for your neighbors as well.