Party Til You Puke

I just heard on the news that some parents are hosting H1N1 parties for their kids. Apparently you find someone infected with the virus and take your kids to that person’s house with the hope that your little tykes will also be infected and develop immunity.

Sounds like a fun party full of wonderful childhood memories, doesn’t it? I can just imagine years from now my children reminiscing.

“Remember the time Mom infected us on purpose with that horrible flu and we thought we were going to die? ... Good times. Good times.”

“Yeah, we were going to have a Russian Roulette themed party, but Party Source was all out of child-sized revolvers. Darn the luck.”

"The trip to the hospital was fun though, right?  I didn't even know what an IV was until then."

Okay, maybe I’m coming at this from an overprotective mothering mode. I confess I’m the mother who always uses the Clorox wipes to sanitize the cart at the grocery store. I have bottles of sanitizer in my purse, my car, every bathroom of the house and the garage (don’t ask.). If my kids sneeze on the sleeve of their shirts, I whip out the bleach and toss the whole snotty mess into the washer.

You can understand why the thought of purposefully exposing my children to the swine flu bothers me so much. I’m probably also a little sensitive because two young people died from this flu in our small community late this summer. When I think of an H1N1 party, I imagine the hostess passing out hospital bracelets at the door.

So if you’re planning on inviting me and my children to a flu party, I’ll have to decline. I think we’ll be busy with safer activities. Like playing with fire or throwing butcher knives at each other.

MAN VS. MOUSE

For the last week, I’ve been engaged in a battle of epic proportions. When I was cleaning out the shed, a mouse skittered out of one of the kids’ toy buckets. After I finished screaming, I did the only logical thing a woman in my circumstances could do. I put the house up for sale and fled the neighborhood with the clothes on my back.


Okay, not exactly. Though that was my first thought after seeing the droppings and the nest the thing was building. Instead, I set out a trap and went merrily on my way.

The next day, Lauren reached into the bin to get a ball and screamed like someone was either cutting her legs off or forcing her to wear red shorts with a clashing pink top. (Oh the horror of being unfashionably dressed). The mouse trap lay untouched at the back of the shed as the thing skittered across the floor, climbed the wall and ducked out a small hole near the roof.

As soon as I calmed Lauren down, I grabbed the trap and put it near the hole. This mouse made my little girl cry and swear off all sports requiring balls. It’s on. It’s so on.

The next day, I opened the shed door to check the trap and there the mouse was again. It skittered up the wall, looked at me with its beady little eyes and practically waved as it made it’s way out the hole. No doubt the thing was chuckling to itself.

“Look at the fat slow woman who can’t climb walls and fit through small holes. Have a salad, lady. Or chew through all the boxes in the shed if you wanna stay thin. That’s what I do.”

I concluded that I had the trap too far from the opening, so I moved it closer and shut the shed door, convinced the thing would now find the peanut butter so irresistible compared to cardboard boxes, it wouldn’t be able to resist.

The next day, I opened the shed door again to be greeted by the mouse. This time, it almost laughed out loud as it saluted me and scampered out its small hole. The trap had somehow snapped and fallen through the hole onto the ground without catching a thing.

Learning from my mistakes, I set the trap a little farther from the edge of the hole, so I’d be sure to catch the little rodent. Guess what happened when I opened the shed door today? Oh never mind. You can probably hear the mouse’s laughter from wherever you happen to be. The trap was sprung, but I’d put it so close to the shed roof that the boards had stopped it from shutting.

This mouse must have done a stint as Jerry in those old Tom and Jerry cartoons. Because you can’t kill it. You can’t catch it. And it laughs at you for being fat.

It’s on. It’s so on.

Juicing Up My Kids

As my kids will tell you, I’m not the swiftest mom in the world until after 9 a.m. Personally I think it’s cruel and unusual punishment to make kids get on a bus at 7:10 in the morning Had I been around during the formation of this country, I would have written some sort of early morning protection clause into the Constitution.


The Lazy Mom Amendment - No mother shall be expected to have any of her offspring dressed or fed until the sun has risen. And under no circumstance shall the dressing and feeding be required to take place before 8 a.m.

I should propose it to the powers that be except they’re too busy reforming health care, jetting off to Argentina having affairs and hiking the Appalachian Trail. But if the Lazy Mom Amendment had been in play this morning, we could have avoided the breakfast fiasco in our home.

When the alarm went off at 6:30, I ignored it until 6:45 which meant I had just fifteen minutes to get the kids fed. I dragged my tired butt to the kitchen to make bagels and pour orange juice.

“Mom, the juice tastes funny,” Lauren said almost the minute she sat down at the table.

“It probably just settled in the container and I didn’t shake it up enough. Just eat your breakfast quickly.” I didn’t even look at the juice because I was watching the clock.

“It does taste kind of bitey,” Chris commented.

“It’s a little weird, but I think it tastes good,” Drew added, taking a big gulp.

“Bitey? What do you mean bitey?” I asked.

“You know.  It burns a little,” Chris said as he took another sip.

I grabbed the container and took a deep whiff. The orange juice had gone hard. I wasn’t serving my kids a nutritious breakfast. I was serving them morning cocktails, literally juicing them up and sending them off to school in an alcoholic haze.

Okay, so it wasn’t that bad. But I still say we need that Lazy Mom Amendment. 

My Poor Tomato Plant

I’ve never had a green thumb. If I’d been a pioneer woman, my poor family would have died from starvation before our first summer. There’d be wooden crosses erected in my children’s memory bemoaning the fact that their inept mother couldn’t even grow a squash. A squash! Everyone knows those things grow like weeds. Only not in my garden.


I tried a full-fledged garden one year when the boys were little. I’d been reading a bunch of parenting magazines which had touted the benefit of growing your own food. No chemicals for your growing child. Valuable time spent together away from the television. Watching the fresh food sprout and grow expands your child’s brain until he’s smart enough to be the world’s first kindergarten-aged rocket scientist.

Okay, so I made that last bit up, but the magazines did really make gardening out to be this wonderful family adventure.

Uh, not so much.

First of all we had to dig and plant the seeds. When you’re a kid, digging’s only fun if it has no purpose. Digging big enough ditches in the middle of the yard to trap the lawn mower? Yep, that’s fun. Digging in the mud in your church clothes? Can’t think of anything better. Digging to make a garden? Now that just seems like work.

The kids dropped their hoes in about two minutes and let me finish the digging part. They came back just in time to put the seeds in the ground. Only instead of evenly spacing them, we had twenty seeds in a clump every ten feet or so. That’s my explanation for why the seeds didn’t sprout into anything resembling the colorful produce on the package.

After that garden failed to produce anything other than some deer food and a bunch of weeds, I swore off the gardening thing. Never, ever again would I try to produce my own food. Why bother when the grocery store stocked everything I needed? Besides that, I have a brother with a green thumb. I could just steal his tomatoes and squash and blame it on the deer.

Then I saw IT. The amazing Topsy Turvy tomato planter. Anyone... and the infomercial did say ANYONE could grow mounds of delicious tomatoes with this wonderful invention. It looked so easy. It looked so foolproof. It looked like something that year’s ago could have saved Pioneer children from certain starvation.


I tried it expecting big results. So you tell me, from looking at the picture. Does this look like a bountiful enough harvest to keep my family from starving?

Looks like I'm back to stealing from my brother, Bill's garden.  And in case he asks, I really did see some hungry deer heading his way.

Farting Trumpets

Drew came home yesterday carrying a young boy’s dream and a mother’s worst nightmare - his first musical instrument. He chose the trumpet, in large part because it looked cool but wasn’t too heavy to carry in the annual parade. Only stupid people choose the tuba. His words, not mine.

Personally I think he picked the trumpet because he could make noises with it that sound like...... Give me a moment while I phrase this in a loving motherly way..........................

..........................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

................................still working on the right words......................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

..........................................................................................................................................

Okay, here it is. When Drew plays the trumpet, he sounds like a lactose intolerant elephant who just ate a gallon of ice cream. It’s bad. It’s really bad.

I made the mistake of using the farting elephant analogy on Drew. After all, he’s a boy. We’d spent the last ten years giggling over gas. I was expecting a laugh. What I got was a hurt look as he ran out of the room crying.

Apparently making fun of his trumpet playing is off limits. I apologized to him and sat through a rendition of some song (I wasn’t about to call it “old man digesting burrito” even though that’s what it sounded like).

“Was that good, Mom?” Drew asked with hopeful smile on his face.

There’s only so much lying I can do with a straight face. “You’re certainly improving,” I said because it was true. It sounded like the burrito had dropped from the stomach into the old man’s colon.

My encouraging words only spurred him on. He played the trumpet until dinner time. He played it before and after bath. He played it while watching television. He played it in bed. He played it until I felt like screaming and begging to be committed to a mental institute where I could finally get some peace and quiet.

Here’s a picture of him playing it at 6:45 a.m. as Chris tries hard not to cover his ears.

After listening to the sounds for a day, I finally got it. The years that little boys spend making fart sounds are meant to prepare their mothers for the sound of the trumpet. Now all I have to do is get a pair of earplugs and keep smiling.

I Want to Live!

We recently came back from Tampa, Florida where we visited Busch Gardens. Bob and I thought taking the kids on an animal safari would be a wonderful way to spend $300. I insisted first thing, that we ride the train through the theme park version of the African plains.

“It’s a train, Mom.” Chris pointed out. “Like they have at the zoo back home.”

“It’s a safari adventure,” I said as if renaming it would somehow make this all seem more adventurous to him.

He was right. It was a train. As we rode through the exhibit, the kids stared at the giraffes and zebras and asked how this was any different from the zoo back home.

“It cost $200 more and it’s much hotter here,” I explained. “Now look at those animals and enjoy it!”

Drew was the only one who actually gazed intently out the window. When we got off the train, I figured out why.

“Mom. I saw the coolest roller coaster on the other side of the giraffes. We have to ride it!”

There is no such thing as a “cool” roller coaster in my book - or Bob’s either for that matter. We’re the kind of people who like to keep our feet planted firmly on solid ground. We’re the kind of people who like to keep down that pizza we had before we saw the roller coaster.

We’re the kind of people who don’t wish to barrel headfirst down a metal path at a hundred miles an hour. We have no desire to tempt gravity and fate by strapping ourselves into a machine whose sole purpose is to flip us upside down repeatedly. . In a nutshell, we’re the kind of people who like to LIVE!

Drew is a ten-year-old boy. At his age, he still feels capable of thwarting gravity. Need I say more?

I looked at Drew’s hopeful little face and said the only thing a good mother could in such a situation.

“Drew, I carried you for nine months. I nursed you for a year. I’ve always been there for you when you needed me. But no way am I riding that coaster with you. Take your brother.”

“What?” Chris asked in horror. He might be ten just like Drew, but he understands the awesome force of gravity.

Being the good mother I am, I gave him a pep talk. “If you’d rather, we can ride the train again.”

Take that You Bad Waves

Last week on the beach, the boys spent countless hours crafting sand castle communities so elaborate only the richest of ocean creatures could ever hope to live there. (See the start of one in the picture on the left.)

Chris built high rise sand homes complete with rooftop sundecks and cable tv hookups. Drew added in tennis courts and landing fields for their pretend helicopter-cars. Truly a paradise for the rich and famous.

After all this work, the boys were very discouraged to watch the ocean lay waste to all their hard work. Both boys strutted into the surf and started punching the waves.

"What are you two doing?" I asked after a few minutes.

"We’re getting back at the ocean for destroying our sand castle village," Drew said as he gave a wave a mighty right hook that barely even moved the water.

"Yeah," Chris added, nearly getting knocked down as he punched a big wave. "Maybe next time the waves will leave our stuff alone."

Or not.





Meanwhile, Lauren was busy running up and down the shoreline in search of tiny clams. (If you look closely in the picture, that's what she's holding in her fingers.)

When we first got to the beach, Lauren had been fascinated by the tiny shells she saw at the edge of the ocean. She kept bringing them to me until I explained that there were tiny sea creatures alive inside that needed to be by the ocean.

"If you take them too far away from the water, they’ll die," I said as I fished them out of my beach bag, afraid of the smell I’d get if the sun baked them in there too long.

I was concerned about the stink. Lauren became very concerned about the happiness of the living creature inside the shell. She’d watch the waves and if any clams washed in too far, she’d run to rescue it by throwing it back into the sea.

Her rescue efforts were about as effective as the boys’ wave punching. But that didn’t stop me from helping her, anymore than it stopped me from adding my own castle to the boys’ new sand village. Because who wouldn’t want to live in a home with a rooftop sundeck and built in cable hook ups?