Teen Angst, Karma, and Other Fitting Room Disasters

The day started off on a euphoric note. I’d gone to Old Navy to exchange some slacks, only to find they were ON SALE and I was owed a $15 cash refund.

I’m pretty sure my eyes lit up like road flares. I may or may not have kissed the cashier who was considerably taller than I was…

It was a pleasant surprise.

This was not $15 I wanted to put back in my pocket only to later spend it on some kid’s midweek snack. This was my money. $15 I would turn around and spend on not one, but two shirts. And another pair of pants, because you can never have too many pants. Or in my case, it’s more like I never have enough pants, since something is always getting torn, or stained, or painfully tight around the middle.

So yeah, I bought pants. Woot.

Riveting, no?

The sale was only going to last the weekend, so I figured since my girls both had $25 gift cards to Old Navy, it would be in their best interest to shop while they could get an additional 30% off on their purchases. To get the most out of someone else’s money.

For my tween, this was a pair of jeans and two tee-shirts. Easy peasy. It took all of ten minutes.

For my teen, fickle fifteen that she is, this meant wandering throughout the store in a somewhat agitated state, plucking clothes willy-nilly off the racks, begrudgingly trying them on, only to loathe the way she looked in the full length mirrors, after which she loudly denounced Old Navy and everything it stood for.

According to my daughter:

• The clothes were hideously unflattering and far too modest for anyone between the ages of 13 and 25. They were, however, acceptable for children and mothers, none of whom are very discerning about their appearances.
• The skinny jeans were blasphemously so, being that they were not anywhere near constricting enough to accurately carry that description.
• Old Navy was and IS the antithesis of cool. It was beyond her ability to effectively communicate the level of contempt it inspired in her, the closest she could come was a sound like “bleargghh” accompanied by a violent shudder accompanied by a theatrical eye-roll accompanied by fake retching.

“Seriously, you can’t find one thing you like?”

“Mom!”

“Look at those little shorts over there, they’re simple, you could wear them with any tee-shirt just to hang around the house or maybe go to the beach.”

“Mom! I. DON’T. LIKE. THOSE.”

That hissing sound heard in the immediate vicinity was me releasing some of the pressure building in my head before my brains exploded all over Old Navy’s inventory of generic clothing and mom-wear.

We were coming full circle though.

Twenty years ago I was the angsty teen, loathing every single one of my mother’s well meaning suggestions in favor of tight jeans and black tops and more black tops. While my mother held up brightly colored offerings of linen materials and slitted skirts, I did my own version of the fake retch and eye-roll, which involved a lot of crossed arms, gritted teeth, and the frequent tearful outburst.

It was painful for everyone involved.

We’d wander for hours.

I never liked anything.

I suppose I’m on the receiving end of some kind of payback for the grief I gave.

Still, after 20 years, I concede nothing.

Those clothes my mom insisted I buy?

They really were hideous.

My kid balks at khakis. I wonder what stirrup pants would do to her sensibilities.

Contrary as she is, she might love them just to spite me.

Sigh.

Happiness is a Toy Gun (And a Bullwhip)

We were challenging the laws of physics.

Two Indiana Joneses, working together, simultaneously existing.

He was the Indiana Jones with a gun.

I was the Indiana Jones with a whip.

He led.

I followed behind humming the theme music he insisted accompany him on his mission to find Indiana Jones’s father.

A rescue. Perfect.

Along the way, bad guys were handled (or mishandled). Some of them even lost a few leaves at the end of a more-dangerous-than-you’d-assume-bullwhip. Dangerous to avocado trees at least.

Improvisations that did not amuse the first Indiana Jones:

1. When the second Indiana Jones pretended his/her whip was a venomous snake. That not a snake! That a whip!
2. When the second Indiana Jones pretended the widely ignored exercise bicycle was a horse. What you riding? That not a horse!
3. When the second Indiana Jones tried to snatch the treasure before the first Indiana Jones could get his greedy little paws on all its invisible glory. No, no, no, I get the treasure!
4. When the second Indiana Jones laid down on the trampoline and closed his/her eyes for just a moment to soak in the warm noon sun and the rare cool breeze. Indiana Jones! Indiana Jones! Indiana Jones Mommy! What you doing being dead?

I was not exactly the best candidate for the job. I occasionally got tripped by my own dragging bullwhip. I also managed to lash myself every single time on the back swing. And half way through our game, my throaty man-voice, courtesy of whatever cold I’m currently fighting off, morphed in to a futile squeaking sound only dogs can hear.

Still, we were having so much fun.

I am enjoying this kid. He makes me smile.

He also makes me want to string him up by his itty bitty toes sometimes, but I can overlook those moments.

“What will you do when he goes to school? Who will you play with?” my husband wants to know.

All I can do is stand there and blink. I don’t know.

We’re busy being Indiana Jones.

—–

Happiness abounds on Sprite Keeper’s Spin Cycle. Share your happy.

I Can’t Hear You and Random Tuesday Thoughts

• For the past week I wasn’t entirely sure whether I was feeling sick, marginally depressed, or bored. Turns out I’m sick, because I now have man-voice and my ears won’t stop clicking. Sick with a cold, I mean, not like schizophrenia or anything.

• Yesterday my husband gave our three-year-old a real leather whip to play with. It seemed like a good idea at the time, since he has this new Indiana Jones fixation. So as he swished it around the floor (his arms are too short to actually “whip” it in proper fashion) he kept asking me to introduce him every time he came in to the room with this exact phrase “Look! It’s Indiana Jones with a real whip!” It really was adorable, just not so much by the fifty-hundredth time I had to do it.

• Any thing you do fifty-hundred times is guaranteed to lose its allure.

• The husband and I actually stepped out to lunch on Saturday. Without the kids. It was nice to know we mostly still like one another’s company. Although we spent a bulk of our time together talking about bills, money, and how to make less bills and more money. On the plus side, without the children around, we were able to liberally sprinkle the F-word throughout our conversation. It came in quite handy when we decided to visit Ikea on a Saturday.

• Crowded stores suck. Although, it is much easier to get through clusters of people when you’re not trying to navigate an unwieldy stroller. In your face, Ikea shoppers who couldn’t find adequate child care on a Saturday afternoon!

• Is it just me, or is Ikea set up like a rat maze? I kept feeling like I was being herded toward something. I also left with a strange desire to read books in Swedish.

• Heard from the other side of my bathroom door the other day, while attempting to get some privacy:

In a sing song voice: Have a diarrhea, diarrhea, diarrhea, caca-rrhea.

• My husband is taking a communication course online, a requirement for the degree he’s trying to get. So far he’s been pretty annoyed with the majority of the coursework. Sitting around the other night while we were both wrapped up in our respective tasks he was reading to me from his text book the different types of listening. Of course, I was only half listening.

“Passive listening? Is that what I do when you start talking about car stuff and I do all that nodding?”

“That’s not any kind of listening. That’s called rude.”

• He’s on to me! Quick, create a diversion.

• In my defense, it is a mostly automatic shut-down of my critical listening organs. At the first mention of anything car or gun related, my brain goes in to a kind of hibernation and my ears only pick up every third word. It’s self preservation so I don’t die of boredom.

• Yes, he does love me anyway.

Toss your own random in the pot. Should make something tasty…or lethal. Either way.

Idiot Dog

He started whining near midnight. That insistent doggy warning bell that usually indicates he needs some alone time with a patch of grass to do his business.

Except last night was different.

He didn’t have to go outside. He didn’t have to go anywhere.

When we let him out of his crate and opened up the patio door, he circled the inside of the house instead, whimpering, following my husband and I, and watching us with what seemed like deep concern.

It was concerning.

Actually it was freaking us the hell out.

“Is there someone outside?”

My husband circled the yard armed with nothing more than a flashlight and a neurotic canine. He checked the garage, the bathrooms, made sure all the doors were secured.

“Nothing out of the ordinary. Are the kids alright?”

I checked to make sure they were all breathing but kept myself from shaking them awake.

“Kids are fine.”

The dog laid down in our room, stretched out on the carpet, glancing around nervously.

Every story we’d ever heard where  a cherished dog rescued his clueless owners from certain doom rushed in to the foreground of both our consciousness.

Falls in to wells. Tornadoes. Fires. Catastrophic illnesses.

Why had we never taught our dog to communicate more effectively?

“I swear if I have an aneurysm tonight, I’m going to be so pissed.”

As the dog’s agitation increased, so did mine. So did my husband’s.

I kept nodding off in bed, my heart racing as I slept fitfully, then woke again to the whimpers and the pacing.

He’d leap up from where ever he was resting, then dart in to the living room to climb up on the sofa. (Something he never does, or is allowed to do.) It was weird thunderstorm behavior except there was no storm in the vicinity.

“If there’s a poltergeist in our living room, I’m moving out. I’ll live out of the minivan, I don’t care.”

It went on all. frakkin. night.

Stretches of sleep, sprinkled with dog whining, and angry hisses for him to be quiet.

When my alarm finally went off at 6:30. It took me another 15 minutes to actually be able to see out of my prize fighter eyes. Swollen and blurry, I walked my daughter to her bus stop at a geriatric shuffle.

“You sure you don’t want to drive me?” she asked at the door.

“How can I drive, I can’t even see?”

“Oh.”

After I related last night’s doggy debacle, she immediately chimed in. “It’s got to be a ghost. Ohmigosh, maybe the old man who sold us the house, he died and his ghost came back and is all like ‘get out of my house and stuff’.”

“There’s no ghost. We just had a really bad night.”

“Yeah, your hair looks crazy, that’s why I asked if you wanted to drive.”

“You could have said that, how was I supposed to interpret that I looked like a hobo from ‘do you want to drive?’”

Shrug.

I suppose I should teach my kids to communicate more effectively.

An hour later my dog is still behaving like a lunatic. I expect I’ll spend the rest of the day looking over my shoulder, sniffing around for supernatural entities and waiting for that meteorite to take me out while I blog about the doggy warning I should’ve heeded.

Or maybe my idiot dog just needs some Valium.

He is seriously freaking me out.

Homework Woes

My son and his homework.

Sigh.

Monday through Wednesday I can expect to lose my sweet mild-mannered six year old, to a wailing, uncooperative demon child who refuses to hold a pencil properly and routinely falls out of his chair to flail, full-blown-tantrum style, on the floor.

The culprit, the source of his ire – the dreaded spelling word assignments, otherwise known as “why-is-my-teacher-doing-this-to-me-she’s-sooooo-mean”.

The work itself is simple as is the vocabulary, words like “clothe” and “mole” and “snowman”. Nothing terribly complex, it is first grade after all.

Monday the words are written five times each and ordered alphabetically. Tuesday are definitions. Wednesday sentences.

Easy as pie, right?

Yet, I’m fairly certain there’s a reason these tasks get assigned as homework and not classwork. It’s tedious, it’s repetitive, and getting a room full of 25 fidgety monkeys who are still getting the hang of forming readable letters, I’m sure, can be quite taxing. Especially when you have 500 other things you have to squeeze in to the agenda before the day is through.

So the parents are charged with the spelling words.

Some nights as I try to keep him focused, what I really want is to pound my forehead against the dining room table. Other nights I actually do.

Eventually patience fails me, at which point logic gets flattened with a mallet and fed to the dogs while I pull strategies out of my rear end to try and get him to finishjustfinish his work puhleez.

Okay, “please” is one of the first things to go. He gets unreasonable and soon thereafter I follow suit.

Some days I threaten to take his video game privileges, other days I cancel his Boy Scout meetings, still others I lose my mind, snatch his homework and write fake notes to his teacher explaining why my son won’t have completed assignments to turn in.

I have also, on occasion, told him they’re going to send him back to kindergarten if he doesn’t get his act together.

Which of course prompts another wave of crying and arguing and flailing.

Which incites the older girls, who are staring off in to space working diligently on their own assignments, to pipe up with demands to “be quiet”, “shut-up”, and the one that really gets the ball rolling “stop being a baby!”

Almost-seven-year-olds do not take kindly to being called babies.

Which of course prompts yet another bout of wailing.

Ever have your mommy fails?

Ahead of Myself and Random Tuesday Thoughts

• Sometimes Tuesday’s thoughts come on Monday. Who am I to question inspiration?

• Sometimes Monday’s Tuesday thoughts come when you’re boiling pasta and letting sauce simmer. Which should explain the tomato splatters and lingering garlic smell. Sometimes you have to take advantage of the free time when you get it, which is when nobody is screaming, whining, and/or flailing which also means… Well, it means I should step away from the computer to make sure everyone still has all their limbs intact.

• Okay, they’re fine. Just a weird fluke I guess. Or the kids have been taken over by pod people. I am not complaining.

• Heard yesterday while the cousins were over:

Six year old son: I had a dream that it snowed in America.

Eight year old cousin: No, it snowed in America once. But a long time ago.

• One of the downfalls to shopping without your children in tow is that you have considerably longer to examine yourself closely in a full length fitting room mirror in just your underwear. I never realized how useful it can be to have a fidgety three year old to contain when you’re trying to determine whether or not you need to go up a pant size. Keeping the kid from licking the door handles is preferable to contemplating the expanding pockets of cellulite on my inner thighs.

• TMI?

• I went out Friday night, like a grown-up, for dinner and a movie. I didn’t have to take anyone to the toilet when my food showed up. I didn’t have to ask for a clean fork thirteen times because some kid kept dropping theirs under the table. I didn’t even have to walk anyone outside because their screeching was affecting the other diners’ digestion. There was one kid having a tantrum and running circles around the tables in the dining room, but that kid wasn’t mine.  And the moment when my eyes met the eyes of that kid’s mom, I smiled kindly at her because I was so glad not to be her for once.

• After some really spectacular Indian food, my sister and I watched Sherlock Holmes at the nearby mall megaplex. It was a decent way to spend ten bucks. I like Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law, despite their questionable decision making skills. Sadly, I can’t sit in movie theater seats for more than two hours without my ass going numb and my knees starting to feel like rusted hinges. 90 minutes, Hollywood, keep your movies to 90 minutes or less, otherwise I’m going to need an intermission and a cup of coffee.

• One of the previews we watched was for a movie called Hot Tub Time Machine with John Cusack. It’s about a hot tub. That’s also a time machine. Is it just me, or did someone drop the ball creatively on this one? I enjoyed The Hangover. This looks like The Hangover with a hot tub that sends middle aged men back to 1986. I kept waiting for someone on-screen to tell me they were just kidding.

—–

Make a contribution. It’s good for your brains. All both of them.

Sleeping Geckos Can’t Crawl In Your Ear

My six year old is a little skittish.

He loves reptiles but he generally will not put his hands on one. While my eleven year old daughter is our resident lizard catcher, my son just doesn’t have the follow through. He’ll stalk and pretend to pounce on the baby geckos that are always sneaking in to the house, but when the moment comes to capture one with his bare hands, he always seems to barely miss them, hesitating with a panicky giggle, long enough for the critter to escape.

In this picture he’s holding a hibernating, but still living, gecko that my husband found in the yard. Just getting this kid to put out his hands so his dad could drop the paralyzed lizard in to them, took some convincing. He was laughing anxiously, the look on his face a combination of joy and revulsion. If that thing had reanimated and starting crawling up his arm, I’m pretty sure he would’ve gone in to cardiac arrest.

But for the moment, this fat unsuspecting gecko was his best friend.

Minutes later, I’m pretty sure it was eaten whole by an ibis that swooped in to our yard to forage for food.

Makes you wonder what kind of strange dreams might have plagued that poor guy in his last minutes.

Never hibernate out in the open, something will eat you.

Frozen Iguana Pops and Random Tuesday Thoughts

• I’ve been driving my daughter two blocks to her bus stop because I hate cold. Standing there in the wind, freezing my face off, while her fellow students sit in their warm cars just seems pointless, so I start the minivan and park. With the engine running. And the heater on. It seemed a little ridiculous at first, but yesterday my windshield was iced. I know for those of you up north, a little ice on the glass is not a big deal compared to mountains of snow or frozen streets, but to my warm South Florida blood, it was an affront. I should be complaining about the unseasonal heat right now and threatening to get in a bathing suit. Where is global warming when you really need it?

• Although it is kind of cool that the resident reptiles go in to hibernation at 40 degrees wherever they are. We came across several large iguanas yesterday near a canal, looking dead but not actually. Except for one of them that had been mostly eaten by something else. Of course we turned it in to a learning moment. “See kids, never fall asleep out in the open like that, something will eat you while you’re incapacitated.” The kids nodded gravely before proceeding to poke the dead thing with sticks, at which point we knew it was time to go home.

• A three year old says what?

1. I need a cape, Mommy, I want to be wiener man.
2. My brother just pooped out his food.

• For Christmas, Santa brought me my three year old the Lego Indiana Jones game for Wii. He’s been playing every day, killing Thuggees with his whip, digging up valuable artifacts. Of course, he needs me to play cooperatively with him to help him complete the different levels. I’m willing to go that extra mile for my child, park my ever widening supportive butt on the sofa, and be whatever sidekick he needs me to be. Yes, I could be teaching him to read or solve simple mathematical equations, but you know, he’s learning some very valuable visual skills.

• Things I have been known to shout out during game play:

1. Please stop killing me with your whip, I’m helping you.
2. No, no, stop jumping off that cliff. I know it’s fun, don’t do it again.
3. Alright, give the monkey a banana. Right there, give that monkey a banana.

• What? He’ll learn to read eventually.

• Housework is overrated anyway.

The Un-Mom has random thoughts on Tuesday. Shouldn’t everybody?

Schizophrenic Exchanges and Why Corn Chips Aren’t Worth the Aggravation

The temperatures were dipping and I figured some spicy stew would be the perfect solution. I was just missing one ingredient.

“I’ll be right back, I’m going to the Farm Store to get some corn chips for the soup.”

“I wanna come, I wanna come with you!” Having just undergone his number-two ritual, my three year old had stripped off his layers of clothing and was bouncing around in only a fully loaded diaper.

“You’re not wearing any clothes, buddy. Stay here with Dad, I’ll be right back.”

“NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! I want to come with you.”

“Please, please, take him with you,” my husband plead from his perch on the sofa.

“Fine.”

One very rancid diaper change later.

“Alright, kid, lets get your jacket it on.”

“Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah! I wanna stay home.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll be right back.”

“Noooooooooooo! I wanna go with you.”

“That’s great. Let’s go.”

“Nonononononononono.”

“Okay, I’ll be back.”

“I go with you, Mommy!”

I grabbed the keys, opened the door and let in that rare, biting blast of South Florida chill.

“Noooooooooo. I don’t want to go!” He backed away from me, his eyes wide with horror.

“I’m leaving!”

As I closed the door he darted forward.

“I go.”

As I held out my hand to him he pulled away.

“Noooooooooooo.”

“Fine! Stay. Play with your sister. I’ll be back in a sec.”

I quickly locked the door and headed out to the van, my head down against the wind and freezing rain. I could hear him shrieking on the other side of the door, pounding urgently with his fists. Two seconds later the door opened wide enough for my daughter to shove her brother through the crack, and quickly lock the door behind him.

As he ran down the walk toward me, he wailed, “I want to come with you.”

As I buckled him in to his seat, he screamed, “I want to stay here.”

As I started the car, he screeched, he flailed, he tantrummed in unrestrained (yet safely restrained) glory.

It was like he was having a panic attack. For a while I waited for the meteor the would rain down from the darkened sky and obliterate the van, because obviously this kid knew something I didn’t.

“You have to calm down, dude!” Yes, sometimes I call my kids dude. Also shit-head when they’re not listening and really, really deserve it. “Listen, we’re going out for a minute, then we’ll come right back. Mommy can’t drive with you crying like that.”

Ten minutes and one thousand hiccupy sobs later.

“Oooookay, Mommy.”

“See we’re not going far, we’re just going to buy something then come right home.”

“We almost there? It cold.”

Lesson’s Learned:

1. A clenched jaw makes it difficult to shovel food in your mouth.
2. The Farm Store doesn’t carry regular tortilla chips.
3. Nacho cheese Doritos work just as well in a pinch.
4. When I think I want soup, I should just have a sandwich.
5. The next time I try to leave the house alone, I will climb out the bathroom window and do so under cover of darkness.

Like Mother Like Blogger

She wanted to get her feelings out, but diaries are so passé.

So she did what any other modern, 21st century, emotionally vulnerable teen girl would do. She started a blog.

Then proceeded to splatter the Internets with her tender guts, spewing her innermost feelings on a public forum for the whole wide world to access.

Of course nobody really knew it existed.

So she sent out a link.

To?

Cue the dramatic music.

None other than.

More dramatic music.

The object of her affection. The Busboy of her dreams. The kid who dominates a good 95% of her brain power and who of course was the only subject of said tortured blog post.

Her crush.

Who did not respond or give any clue that he’d read it.

If she’d asked me, as her mother, I’d have advised against it.

But she didn’t.

She asked a girl friend, via text, who after reading the post said, “Sure, do it, if you want to.” Teens can be so ambiguous.

Sigh.

She’d been obsessing ever since.

What would happen next? Would he read it? Wouldn’t he read it? Would he forward the link to 20 or 30 of his good buddies who would all share a good laugh at her expense?

Would the Earth ever stop its infernal spinning?

Wait, that’s not for another two years, right?

He must have read it, she told herself. Things were awkward between them. A new tension existed.

“So did you see the link I sent you,” she finally managed to ask, feigning nonchalance after a week of hand wringing.

Said the boy, “What link?”

Oh. The. Drama.