Category: Humor

Sweet Summer Funtimes — And the Living is Mumblety Mumbelty

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Wondering about the great life decisions I made to get to this point? Check out the last Sweet Summer Funtimes update here.

Day 25 – One son was up at 5:00 in the morning moaning and sniffling because his nose was stuffed up. Yet for some reason he refused to blow his nose, preferring to act as some sort of horrific alarm clock of misery for the rest of us. When I finally marched in there and forced him to blow his nose, he was fine. Not stuffy at all. For the rest of a day he enjoyed and I stumbled through, bleary-eyed.

It was Reptile Day at my daughter’s camp. Reptile. Day. Seeing this on the calendar sent her into fits of apoplexy. She envisioned slo-mo attacks from prehistoric critters like camp was suddenly going to be gladiator situation. She did not have fun that day. I’m sure some kids did. Kind of kids whose parents let them have reptiles in the house as or dinner.

Day 26– This morning the weather was a balmy 60 degrees and raining. The boys insisted on wearing shorts to camp. I think it’s some sort of warm light/macho/Braveheart thing. I’m just not sure how it’s those things. Meanwhile, I’m in a sweater.

They’ve taken it upon themselves to practice the piano for over five hours a day on and off. When they’re not playing “Clocks”,

they’re trying to figure out pieces with the hunt-and-peck method, which I do not recommend to anybody who has an eardrum. Occasionally they take a break from banging on two different pianos of the house so they can play Rock Band. My children have many gifts, but the gifts of Rock Band mastery and tone accuracy are not among them. (Un)fortunately, the ability not to get bored singing “R-O-C-K in the U.S.A” 100 times in a row is one of them. I know some of you are saying “Encourage them! It’s wonderful! I have to force my children to practice piano.” To which I say, after much twitching, there has to be a middle ground. I think we’re fighting on the same side this war. It’s a War on Sanity.

Day 27 – Camp drop-off can be a shit show. No matter how early we all get up, for some reason, it’s a race out the door. Once at the various camp drop-off points, it’s a demolition derby, aided and abetted by strollers 2 or 3 across (two separate moms), and dogs, and the crying kids, and the campers who all crowd the sidewalk, making my hasty escape rather difficult.

It’s ok, though. I’m perfectly delightful because of all that. Like, camp drop-off delightful.

Day 28 –  Took the youngest to gymnastics. We continued her classes to keep her skills up because God forbid she loses all momentum on her falling down every three seconds into a foam pit. I sit for an hour in a loud, smelly, hot gym and watch my daughter making sure I’m watching her every move. I made the mistake of looking down at some point because I thought perhaps I’d caught fire, and another kindly let me know that my daughter was trying to get my attention and didn’t she at least deserve that?

It’s like taking them to the pool without the trench foot.

Day 29 – No sleep because everyone in the house, including the dog, snores. I may have taken the kids swimming. I  don’t remember. Pretty sure they ate today because all over the house are wrappers from all the snacks I hid from them so I could eat them after bedtime.

Day 30 – no sleep again last night, mostly because I didn’t get any snacks yesterday. One child begged me to let him sleep in my bed insisting it would be “fun.” He sleeps like he lives – uneasily. Lots of tossing and turning. I honestly don’t know how dragging myself around but I’m feeling and looking and probably smell like a carcass at this point. Somehow my husband sleeps through it all. Fortunately, he took on the Costco responsibilities, because I’m pretty sure had I gone, the 20-pound container of peanut butter-filled pretzels would have seemed like a good idea.

Husband brought home a 5-pound bag of almonds wrapped in coconut, bathed in chocolate. He is a good and wise man.

Day 31 – Kids. They can’t just take the easily-accessed strawberries and wash them themselves. They prefer the strawberries to be decapitated and sliced and cored and butterflied or julienned or something that good parents probably do.

They’re not suffering, though. Today I went into the random kitchen appliance drawer, the one with all the measuring cups and potato peelers and the stuff I use once a year. I saw the ice cream scoop. Now, I don’t usually bother with the ice cream scoop, because (a) they don’t work that well and (b) I usually just eat it out a pint anyway. If I’m putting things in bowls because I’m feeding the children and I don’t want them to think that it’s appropriate to eat out of the pint. So, long story short, the ice cream scoop is more a placeholder, if you will. Something people have in their random appliance drawer and something non-heathens probably use. But there it lay, that scoop. And it was filthy. With ice cream. Melted chocolate to be exact. Probably Ben & Jerry’s. One of my kids tried to use the ice cream scoop to get him/herself ice cream, then in an effort to “clean up” and/or hide the evidence, put the scoop back in the drawer. The kicker is that the drawer is literally just a half spin away from the dishwasher, and I’m so tired these days if I’d noticed it at all, I just would have assumed I’d gone classy for awhile and didn’t remember. Anyway, cleaned out that whole drawer. All members of the house deny doing it.

Day 32 – July 4th, the original Brexit. If the amount of neck-dirt, chocolate on their faces (despite not eating any chocolate), and ability to narrate 32 minutes of fireworks nonstop is any measure, it was a success from which we may never quite recover.

 

Sweet Summer Funtimes – The First Full Week

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Wondering about the great life decisions I made to get to this point? Check out last week's Sweet Summer Funtimes update here.

Day 4 – Feeding the children was a little sporty today. Scoured the depths of the pantry for lunches, because I haven’t grocery shopped out of fear of wrangling three kids in the cereal aisle. Told kids that Triscuits and cheese is too a continental lunch treat!

Kids started an art installation called Band-Aids A-plenty. It’s cool and magical because every day I find 6000 wrappers and used bandages that I pick up and throw away and then they reappear the next day. I think it’s a commentary about the fragility of life and how we also need to take care of our planet.

New word — bouleversé, which is apparently French for summer break.

 

Day 5 — Heard the children excitedly working together on something in hush-hush tones. This tends to set off warning systems in any mother’s head, so I peeked in to see them going under furniture and through bags searching for coins. I oh-so-casually mentioned that if they happened to find anything that needed to be thrown out/donated they should do that, because I’m hopeful and apparently never met a child before. YET — after thirty minutes they had made a donation pile and thrown away some nasty stuff that had been lodged in various crannies. I dub this day the Feast of the Under Bed Miracles.

 

Day 6 – For several hours, kids played catch with the Magic 8 Ball. In the middle of the playing field was a giant tom-tom drum that somebody who is no longer welcome in my house gifted to us. Constant drumming remniscent of an approaching army let me know that my children need lots of practice catching balls, Magic 8 or otherwise.

Added Excedrin to my shopping list, should I survive all this fun long enough to make it to the store.

 

Day 7 – Let the kids have some ice cream on the front porch/driveway. When I joined them about 10 minutes later with a spoon I notice there was some Vanilla Chocolate Chip that had melted on a plate they left in the sun. Fortunately my kids love me enough to stop me from eating what was actually quite accurately-deposited bird poop.

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Day 8  – Child saw hummingbird at the feeder and other two thundered over to the window like a herd of wildebeests. Many tears were then shed that the hummingbird flew away. I spend the afternoon writing bad poetry about being a hummingbird.

 

Day 9 – Took the family to the pool, an exercise in watching the kids flail about pointlessly in the water while screaming at me to watch. For some reason, all of the men and boys at the pool started competing to see who could do the stupidest splashiest jumps off the diving board to their own amusement and to the second-hand embarrassment of everyone else there. My husband stopped after he, and I quote, “broke his butt.” He limped over to a deck chair and we both watched in horror as our clumsiest child, who’s never met a surface he couldn’t impale himself on, slipped as he went down the length of the diving board, slicing a quarter-sized piece of skin off his thigh, thus ending the first pool visit of the season much like we ended the last pool visit of last season. Fortunately, it only took 45 minutes to get the kids from the pool to the car 100 feet away, as they were “freezing” and “so cold” on this 95-degree day. Injured child limped bravely and not-at-all dramatically toward the car. I asked if he wanted to see a doctor or if he wanted to go home and get a snack. Snacks won the day, as they usually do.

 

Day 10 – Waking up now means getting a medical report on accumulated bug bites, including size and itchiness level. Also got an update on the diving board wound, and a slide show presentation of how said wound had bled into the bandage and then started to scab up. You can all look forward to those photos in this year’s holiday card.

 

Day 11 – The kids entertained themselves by trying to figure out a song on the piano. I know that sounds great on the surface – they’re being creative and they’re problem-solving — but it’s a trial and error process that involves banging out the part they’ve already mastered, then hitting every wrong note until they finally arrive on the correct one, and then starting over and getting it wrong, and finally starting over again and getting it right but then having to figure out the next note.

Went to the library, which is a place I always called the amusement park until they learned how to read (which I suppose is my fault for taking them to the library). Shout out to the tween next to me at the new junior high fiction section who intently picked at a massive scab he had on his arm. At least I know my gag reflex is fine.

 

 

Sweet Summer Funtimes — Week 1: Preparing for Takeoff

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The first in a series of posts that are supposed to be weekly but probably won't be because it's summer break and I will probably be incapacitated by ALL THE FUN within a few days. 

In order to both record the summer fun and to be considered fun at parties that I'm not even invited to, I will share with you weekly notes about my family's dangdongdarnit summer fun. Short notes, though, because I am too busy making Sweet Summer Funtimes to have much time do anything like hide in my office and write while they knock at the door and wail plaintively. 

In fact I would assume that the Funtimes will be so time consuming that by mid-June, these entries will be but two words.

But since this last week was mostly preparation and anticipation, I have many words. Pre-fun words.

May 31 — T-2 days.  Two more days of school. There have been “countdowns to summer” going on at school since mid-March. The excitement has been ramping up with special theme days to commemorate these perfectly teachable days, and today the kids are celebrating attaining educational goals with Crazy Hair Day. I like this one because I just let them go to school without having to comb their hair or wet it down or at least run their fingers through it. They should call this day One Less Thing to Fight About In The Morning Day, Thank You. For once, bits of last night’s dinner miraculously encrusted in the kids’ coifs is thematic rather than just gross.

Still a little gross, though.

June 1 – T-1 day. Kids came home from the penultimate day of school (Clean Out Your Desk Day) full of energy. They have extra room for energy because in preparation for summer they have defragmented and largely wiped their brains of 90% of what they’ve learned this year.

The sun peaked out from behind a cloud and the kids begged to go to the pool. The fact that it was 55 degrees mattered not. “Are you sure? It’s gonna be cold,” I said over and over. We belong to a community pool which means the pool is solar-heated except in the shallow end where the toddlers hang out.

They were sure.

I quickly deforested my legs, which I had let grow wild over the winter in an effort to save on both shaving cream and leggings. We went to the pool –  the kids in swimsuits and shorts, me in a swimsuit and parka. After spending 25 minutes lotioning them up, putting up the daughter’s hair, showering per pool regs, finding a good spot in the sun, then having the kids make me watch them dive off the board, they spent exactly 42 seconds in the water before they decided they wanted to go home. I was only slightly less irritated than I would have been had they made me watch them do somersaults or jump off the diving board ten million times. I got three blue-lipped, shivering children dressed and took them home,  where they promptly asked for hot chocolate while they ground their SPF 50-greased up bodies into the couch.

D-Day. Last day of school. Kids were surprised I knew all the words to that chestnut, “No more pencils, no more books, no more teachers’ dirty looks.” I helped them tote home 147 pounds of school work and old snacks that had been lovingly preserved in their desks and backpacks all year, and we all promptly collapsed, rousing only to answer the door when the pizza delivery dude brought dinner. All hail summer.

 

First Official Day of Summer — Kids spending the day in the deep study of magnetism, by which I mean they are all on top of each other laughing and screaming. It’s charming for about 10 minutes. Then I begin to regret not living in a community with year-round schooling.  I really want to open the windows and air out the house but don’t because the risk of neighbors hearing my yelling outside-voice-parenting is too great.

Day 2 — Sent the children outside to go play in the backyard, damn it. It was not an idea that they took to readily.

Have changed my name to Clodor. You Game of Thrones fans will understand.

Day 3 — Called in a bunch of favors and planned for a playdate for tomorrow. Kids woke at the crack of dawn (5:16 AM) and proceeded to come into my bedroom and tell me that they were bored.