Tippy Toes and Tantrums

My Report Card Isn't as Good

My kids are still at the age where I love parent-teacher conferences. I generally spend the first part of the conference wondering if the teacher is really talking about my kid and not someone else, then I'm happy that my children manage to act like totally different people at school. At home, I find myself googling "bipolar" because I can't figure out how it is these kids are such maniacs at home, causing me to pull my hair out in exasperation, yet charming and obedient children at school. Maybe I'm the one who needs medication.

That Doggie Fresh Smell

My eyebrows got a long overdue waxing today, but as the final step, my waxing lady used a different lotion, one that smells exactly like the powder or shampoo universally used by dog groomers. Basically I smell the same way my dog does when she comes home from being groomed. I'm slightly concerned a dog product was used on me, after all what does that say about the pre-wax state of my eyebrows? I felt like a shaggy dog between my bushy eyebrows and my hair, which is starting to feel like it's at a Bon Jovi length. The dog product smell isn't helping my esteem. Not to mention, I've got the clean dog smell without the benefit of a clean dog. Our pug has followed me around all morning, clearly confused about what I do when I leave the house. Rest assured Maddie, I am not spending time with other dogs, just the caterpillars who sometimes live above my eyes.

Trick or Treat, Give Me Something Other Than Gingerbread to Eat

Poor Rocket is completely confused by Halloween. He gets the trick or treat part and the costumes, but he doesn't understand that this is really only a one day affair. Every time he sees a house particularly well decorated for the holiday, he demands I pull the car over so we can ask them for candy. Or maybe he just knows that people organized enough to do really elaborate decorations probably already bought their candy weeks ago, and like Rocket, they're ready to go.

 

The annual pilgrimage to the pumpkin patch has been crossed off my list. Taking little kids to the pumpkin patch should be great fun, especially as they get older and better able to handle themselves, but now they have opinions, which include not wanting to humor me with our annual photo on the tractor or they argue about which one of them has a bigger pumpkin. The trip to the farm where we buy our pumpkins wasn't all that bad, even when a large tour bus pulled up and scores of old people piled out. We were the only other customers at the farm, which seemed to draw all of the old people too us, as if watching kids picking out pumpkins was part of the experience. This would have been fine, but almost every man in the group came up to my kids and made a grandfatherly comment like, "Got some big pumpkins there!" Rocket talked to the first person who approached us, then they smiled at the second person, but by the third old person, my kids ignored them or looked bothered by the interruption. I tried to be nice the whole time until one old guy tried to take their picture. That's when I blocked the kids and pushed them into the corn. I don't care how old you are, a man taking pictures of kids he doesn't know is a little creepy. Actually, that's not always true. Once at Stanford we encountered a bus full of Japanese tourists, all snapping wildly with their cameras strapped around their necks who took photos of Rocket at the Rodin sculpture garden. Somehow that seemed less threatening, probably because one tour member indicated to me through pointing that they wanted to include him in their photos and once I said yes, it looked like a paparazzi attack with bulbs flashing and cameras clicking away. I imagined Rocket's picture being shown in horribly boring slide shows to their families back home.

After we left the farm, we headed into downtown Half Moon Bay for hot chocolate and cookies. The kids scouted out the glass case and Clover finally pointed to the largest cookie there - bigger than my hand - shaped like a gingerbread pumpkin man. "You know it's gingerbread, right?" I asked. She said she knew in a tone that implied gingerbread was her favorite and I should have known that. Without question, Rocket followed suit, as he usually picks whatever Clover has deemed best. After we sat down, they nibbled a corner of their cookies, then just picked the sugar parts off. Neither of them ate the cookies because...they were gingerbread. Clover refused to concede the point, insisting she wasn't that hungry, yet she didn't want to bring the cookie home for later. Next time, just get the ghost sugar cookie like I suggested, okay kids?

So Awesome it Hurt

Rocket's poetry slam

Not to be a pessimist - okay, I have to admit that this is a pessimistic perspective - but my first morning alone wasn't nearly as great as I imagined. Somehow I knew I was building it up in my head to an unreachable level of greatness and sure enough, it failed to be great. First, I had to drive carpool to help out my co-carpooling friend and second, I have the early stages of ebola. It shows how far we've come as a epidemically freaked out country when I joke about having ebola and no one remembers what ebola means. If I'd say swine flu, masks would be slapped on and I'd be hosed down in Purell faster than I could blink (mostly because I'm so tired that blinking requires great effort and time).

I spent the first hour of my time alone fighting the urge to do something. I watched a show I'd recorded while forcing myself to not get up and finish the project for Rocket's school, answer email, or gather receipts. I'm too type-A for my own good. For the record, when I was younger, I thought type-A was among the highest compliments; now I just want to watch Models of the Runway for 20 minutes without compulsively multi-tasking. It's not healthy and I know it.

When I later told Kevin about this struggle against doing something productive during that first hour, he said "Good for you...for resisting the urge to do something." This may read as supportive, but it was said sardonically. Another thing I resisted was the urge to hang up on him.

During the second hour, my cold or whatever it is that includes a cough that sounds like a ball bearing bouncing around in a metal box, got worse and suddenly I wanted to rest. I forced myself to flip through Via, AAA's monthly magazine because I had promised myself I'd read magazines during my free time and Via requires the least brain power to get through. I had to look at a magazine or else I feared I'd fall asleep and no alarm could wake me up in time to pick up Rocket.

So that was day one. While not ideal, it was still awesome in its own way.

A few things I learned:
* I talk to myself.

* It's depressing when I couldn't figure out what was wrong with the "before" clothes on What Not to Wear.

* A Febreze commercial was one of the most delusional I've ever seen. A mom walks into her teenage son's room holding a bottle of Febreze. The room is perfectly clean, like this-house-is-on-the-market clean. My room wasn't that clean even after I went away to college. Anyway, the mom claims her son's room smells and since he has friends coming over, she needs to Febreze it. Her son is briefly skeptical, but then gets into it, totally into it in a way that conveys he must be stoned and trying his best to appear normal in front of his mom. Seriously, lady, crack a window. A room that clean cannot smell that bad unless something hidden under the bed or in the closet is decomposing and no amount of Febreze can mask that.

For Those Wondering What it's Like to Have a Sister

Back fat pinch!

For the record, I am neither the pincher or the pinchee in this photo. They're both my sisters. I'm just the one putting it on the Internet for the world to see.

Stitch and Bitch

The good news is that my stitches are out, beginning my return to normalcy. Or so I assumed. I still can't fully bend my index finger and the tip of my finger is numb, which makes simple things like typing more difficult than I expected still at this point. But at least it is getting better.

I was more scared than I'd like to admit about getting the stitches out, mostly because I remember a time when I was naive, back when Clover was born. A resident came into my hospital room four days after Clover's birth to remove my c-section stitches, an action I welcomed as the last step before signing out and returning home. I didn't think about how removing thread sewn into a very bruised and sensitive area would feel. It hurt. To put it mildly. Stitch removal was on my list of worries when I prepared for my c-section with Rocket and sure enough, again it hurt.

Index fingers are tougher than a cut up abdomen and luckily that means I worried about the stitches in my finger for nothing. It felt weird and slightly painful, but it wasn't too bad and it was over in a few minutes.

Stitches have a Frankenstein feel for me. The reminder of being sewn together like a rag doll is disturbing. I'm so happy to have them out.

Today Clover's friend helped flip her over on a trampoline and she landed awkwardly, hurting her back a little. She cried and carried on for a few minutes - although she stopped complaining long enough to run across the backyard to look at a dead bird's grave, then she wondered why my concern for her back had vanished. Later she told Rocket that she hurt her back, then lowered her voice to add, "It hurts as bad as getting stitches." "Um, what?" I asked from the other room. "Oooookkaaay, it hurts almost as bad as stitches...but it's worse than a bee sting." Her argument was undercut by the fact that she's experienced neither stitches nor a bee sting, but lucky for her, her brother doesn't know that. "Oh, sorry Clo," he said while he patted her back, finally giving her the unquestioning sympathy she sought. Now we are all on the road to recovery.

Really, Really TGIF

This week was long and it was hot, which makes a tough week feel harder than it should have been. Now I'm counting down the minutes until the kids are in bed and I can watch the sunset from the (much cooler than our hot house) front deck with a beer in my hand.

We stopped to visit the sheep (and out of frame goat) this morning at summer school. I tried to take a picture of Rocket and the sheep standing about a foot apart, checking each other out, when the sheep let out a loud "BBBBAAAA!" Rocket jumped and ran behind my legs. That's Rocket's head in the bottom of the photo.

Rocket quickly asked to go check on the little chicks, safely inside the classroom.

Next: A Cowboy Up Bumper Sticker

I pretty much thought I'd live my whole life never having gone to a rodeo and I wasn't one bit saddened by the thought. I hate seeing animals distressed, so I never thought of the rodeo as my scene. It's still not my scene, but we did spend the holiday at a rodeo, although it was a junior rodeo, which meant that while there were questions such as "who gets their 12 year old son into bull riding?" the issues of animal cruelty were mostly diminished.

When the calf was roped, the rider released her end of the rope, avoiding a painful take down of the animal. This made squeamish me happy. The girls riding were quite good and we clapped for them all even before the announcer bluntly pointed out that if they don't rope the cattle, the applause was "pretty much all they're going home with." I'm sure the girl galloping on her horse out of the ring after an unsuccessful run was thrilled by the announcer's timing.

Clover told me later that she'd always wanted to go to a rodeo, then she repeated the word rodeo as many different ways possible (row de oh, rode e o, rodeo...) after she announced it's one of the more interesting words in the English language. Also one of the most annoying words when heard over and over again. The day was dampened a little for Clover when I refused to buy her a $40 cowboy hat. The hat seemed like the gateway to bull riding, and I was stopping this rodeo thing here.

Flip Flops of Death

Look out geese, you're next! (The geese are better guards than dogs. Seriously.)

As the garage door crept upward, the kids spotted a spider on the ground, scurrying around.

"It's a Black Widow!" Clover shrieked, always one to jump to the scariest possible scenario.

"I'm scared," Rocket yelled as he hid behind my legs.

I stepped on it with my flip flop and the crowd cheered for me like I was a war hero. "We're safe! You did it!" Rocket kissed my right leg, the one he'd been clinging to. "Brave mommy," he said.

Fast forward to school as we walked to Clover's classroom when the back of my flip flop accidentally landed on a roly poly. A roly poly who already seemed particularly lifeless, I might add.

"YOU SQUISHED THE ROLY POLY! How COULD you DO that?" Rocket cried.

"He's dead!" Clover mourned.

I'd quickly gone from hero to murderer. There's a fine line there and unwittingly I crossed it with my flip flops.

Summer Enrichment

School's out. What better time than summer break to teach kids to fly a jet? It was that or Yo Gabba Gabba.

It was a little ambitious to learn to fly a jet in a single day, so Rocket moved onto something smaller.

He flew this plane pretty erratically too, at one point even yelling out, "I'm going to CRASH!" This caused a concerned toddler nearby to start shrieking, "IT'S SCARY! IT'S SCARY HERE!"

Rocket decided to try the smallest airplane ride on toy in the room, but as he got on, a much bigger boy (maybe seven years old), took the bigger plane right next to it, but unbeknownst to the older boy, his plane overlapped with Rocket's, locking Rocket's ride into an unmovable position. Rocket took it as a highly aggressive act and he popped off his ride, crouched a little, pointed at the boy and with a deep voice yelled, "LOOK OUT!" The older boy was shocked and then kind of scared by little Rocket. I said it was time to go, and as a parting shot, Rocket - still pointing! - gave the boy a growly "watch it!" as he walked by. The older boy looked thoroughly intimidated.

One trip to the air museum and the kid is ready for Top Gun. Mission Accomplished.