Another reason moms aren't boys

For the record, telling boys, "You're shaking the whole house," will not discourage them from doing whatever loud, thumping, crashing activity they're doing. In fact, if they're like my boys, they'll probably say, "Cool!" and assume you're cheering them on.

I know this because I work from home. My desk backs up to the wall on which their new Nerf hoop is located.

I cannot concentrate during a game of what they call "Contact Basketball" because they do shake the whole house, and I cannot edit a magazine about Glasgow, Kentucky, when it sounds like they are literally killing each other.

When I do get up and check on them through the glass door, they all pop up with innocent smiles. The youngest gives me a thumbs up, saying cheerfully, "We're okay!!!"

BTW, do not Google "basketball injuries" if you're queasy about bone stuff.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

The No. 2 rule at our house...

Christmas Eve Eve freakout

I was so worried about getting to Kroger early to beat the crowds that I left the house without my list. Those who know me know that I am helpless at Kroger without my list. I will just wander aimlessly throwing kumquats and garlic bread in my buggy.

I was NOT going to drive back home, so I had to call home and get one of my 13-year-olds to read the list over the phone to me. This was no ordinary list but a list that covered Christmas dinner plus regular meals for five people for four other days.

The kid translates fine except for my weird abbreviations: He really gets hung up on "crm of chkn."

I also happened to forget my Honeybaked Ham reservation number, but he read that to me too. After all was bought and done, I felt pretty blessed to walk out carrying a $50 ham for Christmas dinner.

And I did get back home by 10 a.m.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Click here to read about yet another reason my youngest child may need therapy in a few years.

Heaven and nature sing

This is Owen's choir teacher, Ms. Deanna. He really loves her and has always wanted to go to choir practice, even on weeknights, because she is so sweet and makes it fun.

So, big ups to Ms. Deanna for making choir cool!

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Our countdown calendar says fourteen days until Christmas, one day until Mom loses it.

Growing old together is fun!

Last night Tim couldn't find the Chap Stick in its usual spot. He opened the junk drawer and pulled out a tube of Herpecin, which is awesome for cold sores. Even so, the tube looks a little different from Chap Stick.

Since his arms are not long enough to read stuff properly, he held it up and asked me, "Is this Chap Stick?"

I answered affirmatively.

"OK, good," he said. "I just wanted to make sure it wasn't glue stick."

Too much togetherness

Last Tuesday morning the Explorer wouldn't start. No problem, really. That's why we're a two-car family, right? We got Owen to school, then I took Tim back to work and left the truck sitting in the driveway to think about it and come back to me when it had a better answer.

When it still wouldn't talk later that night, Tim charged the battery for a while. Nothing. OK, no big deal. We weren't trying to pack it up and drive to Memphis for Thanksgiving.

Big John Deere hat-wearing boy comes with a tow truck on Wednesday morning and hauls it to Gateway, where I anticipate it will be fixed by that afternoon, maybe Saturday, since it's a holiday and all.

Get the bright idea to Google possible answers, since I self-diagnose all the time anyway. Internet thinks it could be anything from a spark plug to a fuel pump, since it's clearly not battery related. I mean, everything battery-related works. It just won't start. But I don't want a fuel pump for Christmas!!!!!!

Wait and wait and wait and wait to hear from Gateway. Drive past the parking lot twice during the week and see the truck sitting innocently. Wave.

By Sunday, when we're all tired of driving around with three boys sitting shoulder to shoulder in the back seat of a sedan that seats four "comfortably," we have this conversation:

Owen: (leaning over as Tim takes a turn too sharply) Whooooaaaaaaaaa!

Mason: (shoving little brother) Get off me!

Owen: It was an accident!!!

Henry: (leaning dramatically over onto both brothers) Weeeeeeeeee, I'm having an accident too!

Owen and Mason: Hey!!!!!!! Stop!

Tim: (frustrated) If you don't stop, I'm gonna have an accident on all of y'all!

Henry: (after pause) Eeeewwww.

And that, America, is why we drive an SUV with three rows of seats.

Pick up truck Monday afternoon with the bizarre news that there is not a thing wrong with it. Merry Christmas, Gateway and Lund's Towing.

Mommy's working

So it is the last day in November, and I have only written 18 posts, counting this one. For those of you paying attention, I was attempting to follow the spirit of NaBloPoMo and write a blog entry per day.

I did not.

The bright side is that, if you scroll through my archives, I have written more posts this month than I have in the history of this blog. I call that a victory.

More to come.

Christmas card outtakes

It's the boys' favorite part of Thanksgiving, and by favorite I mean most dreaded - taking the Christmas card photo. I like the outtakes the best, though, because they show their true personalities.

I can't send these out, though, because my grandmother would call me from Land Between the Lakes all mad because she can't see the boys' faces. And then we would get into how long it's been since I'd brought them up there for a visit and everyone's holiday would be ruined.

So enjoy these now while they last!

If it's on the counter, it's fair game

We have not reached the point in our family where I am responsible for cooking the entire Thanksgiving meal, but I do make some items to take the pressure off my mom.

Yesterday I made green beans from my Memphis Junior League cookbook, macaroni and cheese, and a tarte tatin for dessert. I'd swear that almost every time Mason, my hungry child, would walk through the kitchen, he'd point to something and say, "What is that? Can I eat it?"

Plain macaroni noodles? Sure. Cheese? Yes. Almond sliver? Go ahead. Sugar? Mm-hmm.

Phyllo dough out of the box? WAIT!

Pull up a chair

The first Thanksgiving that my oldest nephew, Walker, sat down at the “adult table,” I didn’t know how to act.

It’s not like we were telling dirty jokes in the dining room, but it just never occurred to me that, at age 15, he’d want to be there with us geezers. He’d always seemed happy at the kids’ table in my mother-in-law’s kitchen with his two brothers, one sister and four younger cousins.

He’s a smart kid, like all his siblings, who must have outgrown the tedious mealtime banter with my then-fourth-graders and 3-year-old Owen, who had learned enough information to be dangerous.

Back then, for instance, you could just mention how good the Easter ham is, and Henry would randomly say, “The Inuits didn’t have to do anything to their food. They just buried it in the snow to keep it from getting spoiled.”

Then Owen would hold up his fork and add, “This is the Jaws of Life. If Nana’s house catches on fire, call 911. I’m a fireman.”

Why wouldn’t a high-schooler want to stay for that?

At my parents’ house, it’s easy. I’m an only child, so there was no kids’ table. We all fit at one table there and, as long as there are Sister Schubert rolls and Owen hasn't gotten up too early, holidays go nicely. At my in-laws’ house, it’s more involved. There are three sets of brothers- and sisters-in-law with eight grandkids. That makes for a lively kids’ table, though most of them aren’t kids anymore.

Now we have a house full of tweens, trapped somewhere between kids and teens, who are in holiday limbo because they no longer use the phrase “go potty” but they aren’t old enough to drive themselves home.

During my tween-year family gatherings, the only thing my adult relatives knew to ask me was, “How’s school?” Then they’d go back to discussing taxes or football and I’d hover over the dip bowl.

When my twins were 10-year-olds, they claimed they still preferred the kid’s table because, as Henry said, “I understand what they’re talking about.”

“Yeah,” said Mason. “I don’t have to listen to how Joe fired Betty today on The Bold and the Beautiful.”

Even Walker would agree that’s not all we discuss. Besides, if the kids move to the adult table, we’ll have a new audience for those old stories we rehash about the time David tried to stop the blender blade with his finger. Or Tim’s exquisite display of Boy Scout skills when he saw David cut his face on a fence and yelled, “Run home! Run like the wind!”

Both of them are still making oldest bro Steve pay for the year they had to wait to see what Santa brought until Steve took a shower.

Walker may start taking his plate out to the porch, though, because now we just grill him about college and, of course, girls.

HOW many days hath November?

So it's Nov. 23, and the little thingie on the right side of this blog says I've written 13 posts in November.

Hmmm, I'm not exactly following the NaBloPoMo rules of one post per day.

I could have done a few like this one on Fussy. SO funny.

Instead I'll blame it on basketball, because it has taken over our little house here. JV tryouts are tonight, plus Tim has agreed to coach a rec team the big boys formed, and you know what that means. I am the official administrative assistant of rec bball. Woo HOO!

I've been all about basketball to the point that I almost forgot about Thanksgiving. Eeep!

Why, yes, that is a log in my eye

I've been going to church for, like, my whole life now, but I'm not getting any better at it.

It's not church's fault, of course. It's just that there are so many other people there messing up my holy experience.

My entire family manages to get out of the house early on other days, but on Sundays we act like we've never done it before. In fact, I've written before about how a visit to church is an opportunity for all seven deadly sins to pop up. I sin all the other days of the week, but shouldn't I do it less, not more, at church? God is REALLY watching me on Sunday, right? Shouldn't I be at my best while I'm in His house?

I think God's onto me.

The main thing working against me on Sunday, besides pride and judgment, is that I don't deal well with crowds. My church is really big and has a lot of people trying to get to different places in a hurry. It wasn't always that way. It had a beautiful, normal-sized sanctuary when I started going there in 1991, but it has grown tremendously over the past two decades because it is so awesome and so many other people want to attend. My husband started going there in 1978 as an eighth-grader, and it's where we want our boys to grow up, too.

I just hope the church experience doesn't kill me before I get to see that happen.

The breakdown begins before we even arrive. With so many faithful followers, our church naturally has parking "issues." To relieve some of those issues, they implemented a shuttle bus to ferry people to and from an empty office parking lot across the street.

My family used to ride the shuttle bus, but I'll tell you the truth. I shied away from the shuttle because those folks were just too damn cheerful for Sunday morning. Am I the only one who finds it hard to be sweet after an exhausting car ride spent convincing 13-year-olds that, no, they are not the only boys on earth who have to wear long pants and a collared shirt to church?

Maybe it's also the fact that my body is two decades older, too, but some mornings before we're even done with church, I am worn out. After we forgo the shuttle and park a quarter-mile away, we get upstairs to the balcony, where we like to sit so our 6-year-old can see everything. We used to choose our seat according to whatever activity we needed to watch our kids doing, whether they were acolyting or singing in the choir. Lately, however, a new factor has come into play: the overly fragranced parishioner.

If I didn't already have a headache after the drive to church, I will have one after sitting near a woman who has on too much perfume. It doesn't matter if I'm in front of, next to or behind her, that overwhelming smell will keep me from focusing on the "Our Father" no matter how hard I try.

All I can do is watch carefully next week and hope she heads the other way. But then I'm judging again, right? In church! Zap!

Still, you never know who's going to overdo the Estee Lauder on any given Sunday.

Other worship service regulars who mess with my holiness include the Toddler who Colors Very Vigorously. And you thought coloring was a quiet activity! It always enhances prayer time when mom stores the crayons in a metal box or a Velcro pouch.

Some men in my church have begun letting their Sunday clothes speak for them, especially in the fall. When their favorite college football team wins the day before, they'll wear the school logo or colors to church the next day. Now, I don't have a problem with a tie that has little tigers or even tiny gators on it. But if you're 54 years old and you wear a crimson Alabama T-shirt to church under your suit jacket, I think you're violating, like, the whole book of Matthew. We're supposed to be praising God, not Nick Saban.

Zap!!

After we stand up and sit down 27 times in the service, with all the "singing" of songs I still don't know because I can't read music, we have to run our 6-year-old down two flights of stairs to his Sunday school class and then find our own class on another floor, with a possible trip to the cavernous youth area downstairs. In heels. When that's over, it's time to head to the back of the parking lot to our car. That's all before 11 a.m.

Whew!

I'm not the only one still seeking peace in the sanctuary. Last week I ran into a friend in the hallway, and she had such an exasperated look on her face, I asked, "Are you okay?"

"No," she huffed. "You will not believe what I just saw."

She had just left the casual service that has praise music with a band, which I can't stand, but that's another post for another day. My friend is not a complainer, though, so I was really concerned about what got her riled up.

"We were praying, during the final benediction, and I kept hearing someone talking. I looked over, and this woman was standing in front of the stained glass window talking on her cell phone! During the prayer! She was trying to cover the mouthpiece to keep it quiet, but I kept thinking, 'There's a door right there! Why don't you just step out?!'"

No, nothing is sacred anymore.

Really, I love my church. Besides the whole eternal salvation thing, I love sitting close to my family in the pews, because I can't make my older boys sit next to me any other day of the week. I love seeing my kindergartner recite "Our Father" by heart. I love looking down at the choir and seeing my friends' babies, who somehow along the way grew up and drove themselves there. I feel for the ministers, who do this three times on Sunday and once on Saturday night.

The fact that I can't turn off my powers of observation when I'm there is my problem.

So, why do it, you ask? If it's so stressful, why not go to a smaller church, if a big church is "not for you"?

With my luck, I'd find a small church where the membership was just my family plus Mr. Alabama Fan, Mrs. Estee Lauder and their children, Miss Vigorous Colorer and Little Pew Kicker.

And me, Church Lady in Training.

Part of a complete breakfast

I get a big laugh from the fun names grocery stores come up with for their store-brand products.

So-called generic items, especially cereals, have come a long way from the days when stores only sold "corn flakes" or "crisp rice" in black and white boxes. Now stores have figured out how to make a reasonable facsimile of the best-selling cereals, and most generic items are packaged and named similarly to their more expensive competitors. Kind of.

It's not a stretch to see why Kroger calls their version of Cap'n Crunch "Crisp Crunch." Henry's favorite, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, becomes Cinnamon Swirls. Yawn. The funniest names go to the unique cereals. Special K has been around so long that I never stopped to think about what a weird name that is. Kroger's version is called "Active Lifestyle," which doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.

General Mills popular Chex cereals - corn, rice, wheat and the other siblings - are called Bitz at Kroger. Kroger execs must think the letter Z is marketing gold because they've added it to many of their new products, including a Hot Pocket-like item called Stuffz and the charming Ice Cream Sammiez. I'm surprised they don't go ahead and name their frozen corn on the cobs "Corn Totz."

Publix is getting in on the act too, with Fruit Spins for Froot Loops (which part of the food pyramid is "froot"?) and Apple Express, which are second-rate Apple Jacks. Whenever I see Kroger's Apple Dapples, I say it the way Bill Murray sang out "Razzle dazzle!" in Stripes. Please click on that link. It'll make your day. ("Just like last night, only better!")

Where was I? Oh, yes. Does Malt-O-Meal still call their version of Cheerios "Scooters"? hee hee

My award for best generic cereal names goes to the Crispix knock-offs.

I could not believe Crispix has been around since 1983, so I looked it up. It's true! Along with Wheaties, Crispix is one of the most expensive cereals, usually around $4.19 per box. It took a while for the generic versions to come out, but some companies obviously spent more time thinking up the names. Publix took about a minute, I'm thinking, to name their version "Crispy Hexagons." Mmmmm!

At least Kroger tried to be cute with "Hexa Grains." Harris Teeter makes eating cereal fun with "Crisp 6." Get it? 'Cause a hexagon has six sides? And if you say it fast, it sounds like Crispix!

No combination of letters and numbers will convince a kid that "Marshmallow Treasures" is the same as Lucky Charms.

But maybe I'm not the best judge of names. I still think the best cereal of all time was Kaboom.

Live and Learn

Note to self: Never use Ritz Honey Butter crackers to top a casserole. It tasted like creamy chicken with cookies on top.

Trust me, don't do it.

Getting in the Christmas spirit

I don't shop at The Fresh Market often because I'm not rich or an empty-nester; that seems to be their target market whenever I go in there. I mean, I don't think Fresh Market carries the box of 44 fish sticks, if you know what I mean. But my mom and I strolled through yesterday because Fresh Market always has a great holiday candy display that gets me in the giving mood.

I should have taken a picture of the candy, but I couldn't think once I passed the pastry case in the one photo I did take.

I have to go lie down now.

FarmVille turned me into a nag

Ever since my twins started playing "FarmVille" on Facebook, I've been hearing some weird conversations in the house. It all started when one of their friends, of course, told them about the simulation game where you start with a bare square of green and plant crops, tend animals, and try to earn enough coins to build a house and there's something about fruit trees and I don't know what all.

What I DO know is that ever since they started FarmVille, we've regressed to a lot of the old computer-related conversations we used to have - mainly, how much they're over their time limit. Apparently life in FarmVille is as fraught with anxiety as real farming, because last week when they were going to be gone overnight, Mason was fretting about when some plant was going to be harvested because if he didn't get to it within the time limit, he wouldn't get any coins and all his hard work would be for nought!

The other day I was working at my desk when I heard Henry calling his brother to shoot hoops in the driveway. Mason said, "Let me harvest my soybeans first!"

That's something I never thought I'd hear in my house.

Knocked out with one punch

When my older boys accompanied me to Kroger the other day, they nearly died from embarrassment when I dared to say goodbye to one of the baggers by name.

All I did was say, "See ya later, Clayton." You'd have thought I'd danced naked on the check-out scanner, the way they shushed me and tried to hustle me out the door.

I don't see the big deal. I see Clayton almost more than I see my husband.

Deck the halls with pilgrims and turkeys...please!

While driving around Brentwood today I noticed that both Brent Meade and Fountainhead subdivisions have decked out their entrances with Christmas decorations. So I guess it's on, y'all.

Still, I wish somebody would just designate a day already when everyone is supposed to put up their outside decorations at one time so we wouldn't have to endure these awkward few weeks when some people hang tinsel and garland while others, like me, still have pumpkins on their porches.

It's bad for my chi to see competing seasonal gee gaw out there. It absolutely drives my son Henry insane. He gets so put out when he thinks people or stores bypass Thanksgiving and head straight for Christmas. I would not be surprised if he starts a "Give Thanksgiving its Due" Facebook group.

I guess not everyone wants to extend their "harvest" celebration one minute longer than they have to. If you think about it, though, at no other time during the year does this seasonal overlapping take place. You never see valentine hearts competing with Christmas lights or shamrocks getting in the way of the Easter bunny.

Wait, I just noticed that Thanksgiving is at the tail end of November this year, which means there'll be less time between Black Friday and Jesus's birthday to get all my decorations up. Guess I'd better go chuck those punkins!

Iran is for lovers?

One of the top headlines right now is the story of the three American "hikers" detained in Iran for supposedly crossing the border from Iraq illegally.

Hiking in Iraq? People do this? Seriously?!!

I know I have a very small circle of reference since I am not a world traveler. I mean, I'll do stuff, as you can see from that very old photo of us at Rock City. But the stuff I do has to be near an interstate and some kind of truck stop or Wal-Mart. Call me pedestrian, but my knowledge of the Middle East comes from news sources, and those lead me to believe that the only people going to Iraq are military. I am quite happy to stay in familiar areas and leave the roaming to those so inclined. You won't find me signing up for the Peace Corps, and the last flight I was on left me so impatient to get back home that my fidgeting nearly got me tagged as a security concern.

Still, it seems pretty obvious that the Middle East should not be a recreation destination. I haven't seen any brochures luring people to "Cruise the Gaza Strip" or trumpeting that "What Happens in Yemen Stays in Yemen."

An article on cnn.com is not clear about whether the three hikers worked in Iraq and were out for a "relaxing" weekend or went there specifically as tourists. It says they stayed in a hotel and were warned many times by the hotel owner to stay away from their destination town because of its proximity to the unmarked border with Iran. Iranian officials say the three are spies, but I'll bet they say that to all Americans.

Lots of folks revile the suburbs, where I live, as hell on earth. Of course, they aren't that bad, and maybe I'm just unaware of a growing market for vacation packages in war zones.

Just let me know if you see any bumper stickers that say, "Pakistan: Land of Enchantment."

The zen of Mondays

I've grown to enjoy Monday because it's my chance to reclaim the house from the weekend pillaging that inevitably takes place when we're all home.

Putting away crayons, DVDs, newspapers, blankets and whatever else we left in our wake is all part of getting my mind set right for the week. And laundry...so much laundry to wash, dry, fold and put away. Every Monday, the hampers seem to hold enough clothes for a weeklong trip. My kids manage to change clothes at least three times a day on the weekends. Our weather being as schizophrenic as it is now, with cold mornings and warm afternoons, it's common to find sweatshirts mingled with shorts. Somehow, even when I think I've washed every thing in this house, no one can find that perfect hoodie or just the right shorts to wear to school.

Still, I perform this ritual every Monday, and it feels good. Katherine Paterson said, "What a gift of grace it is to be able to take chaos from within and from it create some semblance of order." That's how I like to think of my mundane Mondays, anyway, as I picture myself with a bullwhip and a stool facing down all that crap that didn't get put back last night. Even with our nightly prep-for-school routine, not everything is in its place.

Just cleaning out my e-mail inbox and emptying the refrigerator door of notices about events that have passed helps settle me down mentally. If I can accomplish that, I will have done the world a favor.

Book 'em

So I did something today that I've never done before. I got fingerprinted.
I hadn't been arrested, so this post probably won't be as exciting as you'd hoped. It was all part of the extremely rigorous hiring process in my local school system. I was hoping to spice up my life by working a few days a month as a substitute teacher at my kindergartner's school. So I dug up my old grad school transcript and my real Social Security card and attended a new hire orientation. All that still wasn't enough; I had to fork over a refundable $48 to get fingerprinted for a background check.
With all the headline-making, teacher-student scenarios inspired by that old Van Halen song, you'll be glad to know that our school system is doing its best to keep your kids from being locked in a classroom with a raving maniac.

I guess fingerprinting has come a long way since the days of Dragnet or even NYPD Blue. Of course, it's digital. I had to place my fingers just so on a touch pad that relayed a digital image to a computer screen and deemed them acceptable or not. Guess what? Mine were never acceptable. My fingerprints failed! The poor Official Fingerprint Lady had to try three times for each finger and thumb! It was a day of firsts for her, too.

"Well, I guess your ridges aren't very deep," she mused as she smashed and rolled my fingers on the screen in an attempt to capture an acceptable image. "I've never had one where I had to override all ten."

See, I AM special!

By the way, you can't go just anywhere to get fingerprinted. The school system's current list of approved locations included some random security agencies, but only one place in my county, about 20 miles from my house. It was at a UPS Store! I really wanted to go to the Guns and Leather location in Greenbrier, but that's two counties away.

After holding hands with the nice UPS lady for about 15 minutes, I finished and turned to head back home. She did have some parting words of advice for me, though.

"I guess if teaching doesn't work out, you'd be perfect for a life of crime!"

Don't even tempt me.

Read me read me read me

As I sent my husband an e-mail this morning, I did all the things I normally do to make it stand out in his inbox. At his work address, he gets approximately 117 e-mails per hour. I am not exaggerating. So I need to do all I can to make sure he sees my urgent messages. I usually type the subject in all caps, which in Internet-speak means yelling. I also don't ever include "Fw:" in the subject line because he has been known to skip over something if he thinks it's a frivolous chain letter I'm sending, which of course I would never do. As a last resort I hit the "High Priority" button.
Since he works approximately 117 hours a day and we have three kids at home who all want to talk to him at once when he does get here, Tim and I really don't talk TO each other that much. We rely on e-mail. I also recommend e-mail as a marriage-saving device as it allows you to "discuss" things without using a tone to which your partner may object.
The problem is that people are wearing out the "High Priority" button so that nearly every e-mail he gets has been designated a high priority. I mean, who's going to click on the "Low Priority" button? Why even send an e-mail if it's just a low priority?
Since everyone thinks their message is SO important, that leaves me just sitting here waiting around for him to tell me what he wants for dinner while he scrolls through and determines whether a work project really is falling apart or if he's just one of 32 people copied on a management manifesto.
Of course, I think all my e-mails should be of the highest priority to him. That's why I think there should be a "From the Wife" button similar to the high priority button. That way he'll know immediately what the next job is on his to-do list.

NaBloPoMo Day 1

November is National Blog Posting Month. Since it takes longer for the power of the Internet to reach us here in Tennessee, I am just now getting this news.
Inspired by the Fussy one herself, I will try:

Things I like

Hostess Ding Dongs
birds singing
red wine
shopping very early in the morning
flannel sheets
green left-turn arrows

Things I don't like

monkeys
twisted police dramas on TV
kids who sing Broadway style
emptying the dishwasher
already being awake when my alarm goes off

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Why we had two types of Halloween at our house this year.

Dude, that bible story rocks!

Last weekend, Tim served as a counselor on the youth retreat that the twins attended, so our house was the location for Owen and Mama's Weekend of Fun.
I had forgotten, though, that Tim always covers the bedtime shift, which around here includes the bedtime reading session.
So my 6-year-old and I snuggled together the first night to read a section from The Beginner's Bible, a cartoon-illustrated compilation of Bible stories given to Owen by our church when he was about 3. It's really well done, with each story titled and written in plain language so kids can easily grasp the meaning.
Well, mostly it's written in plain language. Friday night I opened the book to the marked page and jumped right in with my most impressive read-aloud voice: "The Lame Man."
In the second I took to gather my breath for the story itself, Owen burst out laughing.
"The lame man? Why would they say that?!" he asked. I realized immediately how much influence his older brothers actually have on him.
"Well, it's a different kind of lame," I began. Still, Owen giggled into his blankie.
"It's not 'lame,' like, 'Dude, that is so lame,'" I said, but the surfer voice I chose to use only sent him into a wiggly, giggly fit. Not the state of mind you want at bedtime.
"That is so lame," he started saying. "Dude, you are so lame! Ha ha ha ha!"
"No, he's lame because he can't walk. 'Lame' also means you can't walk."
"Bwa hah ahaha. Dude, you can't walk. You are so lame," Owen said. At this point, I'm not sure even Peter and John could have gotten him to listen.
Finally, to calm him down I just kept reading until the next story when Saul sees the bright light and becomes Paul. It worked because there just wasn't much funny about that.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column.

Remember the Ns, Ss and Es on your elementary school report card? Well, the whole process has gotten a bit more complicated.

Before you pull out into traffic...

Thrice in the past week (yeah, I said "thrice")I have had close calls with other drivers in MY OWN neighborhood.
I've been driving along after dropping off Owen at school or on my way back from Kroger and I've had to pull WAY over to avoid an oncoming car because the other driver was still going through their cockpit checklist.
They were either turning on their phone, looking for sunglasses, or fixing their hair in the mirror. Two of the times, the driver didn't see me until I was on them and I honked.
I've heard a lot about how hazardous distracted drivers are and saw a statistic that 40% of "accidents" are caused by them. Based on my personal experience, it's getting worse.
It's tempting to think of driving as an automatic body function, but it's not. We all could use a return to awareness, especially those of us who've been driving for a few decades. We think we've got it down. I also think a lot of folks don't consider neighborhood streets to be worth the same level of caution as "city" streets. So they think nothing of hopping in the car and pulling out, using the "slow" drive to save time while they check phone messages, fish out their wallets, or check makeup.
Another danger zone for distracted drivers is near the fast-food drive-thru. I was making my way out of the Kroger parking lot this morning when a woman who had just left the Chik-fil-A in the same shopping center nearly T-boned me while searching the bag for her Chik'n Minis. I'm telling you, she never saw me. She almost had her head down in the bag as she drove past, and then she turned around to hand something to a kid in the back seat. Completely clueless.
All I'm saying is take a second to finish your business before you start driving again, people. It won't make you that much later if you pull over after you leave the drive-thru and use two hands, both eyes and your whole brain to get the food distributed, then you can use them for driving.
We need to be less concerned with saving time and more concerned with saving lives.

Oops

As a matter of fact, I DID write a new column for Brentwood Home Page this week. I just forgot to link to it here. So now you can read about what rejection feels like.

You won't find us where the wild things are

We are not big puppet people around here. My husband and I both have always found puppet shows particularly cringeworthy, and it looks like that aversion has passed down to our kids, especially Owen.
Well, the twins weren't morally opposed to puppets the way Owen is. They at least would watch Sesame Street, and I have always given credit to Sesame Street for teaching them letters and numbers as well as, you guessed it, cooperation.
Owen, on the other hand, gets pissed if you try to leave the TV on a program with puppets. His unexplained opposition to this kind of kid's show is legendary around here, so we're usually watching the History Channel, the Military Channel, Discovery or House Hunters, which teaches a surprising amount of geography. I guess his one exception is Phineas and Ferb, which is hilarious enough for adults but has no snotty twins calling people "loser."
So I wasn't too concerned about hitting Fandango to get tickets for Where the Wild Things Are. Though it's a classic, we don't even own the book. Owen said he had seen that book at preschool, then went back to playing Star Wars. Tim brought it home from the library because, of course, neither of us had read it since childhood.
You know what? I thought it was a terrible kids' book. I really could not believe that Maurice Sendak would start a book and then just stop writing in the middle when it's getting good. I guess when it came out it was a fun idea to think about kids going to their wild place. But I much prefer The Salamander Room for imagination.
My interest in the movie version of the wild things piqued when I heard it was directed by Spike Jonze. Still, I'll stick with what I think are Jonze's most important contributions to date, which are showing us that Christopher Walken can, in fact, dance like a mofo and introducing us to his spoof with the Torrance Community Dance Group performing to the Fatboy Slim song Praise You.
There be genius, and it won't depress my kids.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Read about a first-timer's experience at the Susan Komen Race for the Cure.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Read about why I'm not nervous around old cemeteries anymore.

My Spell-Check is gonna hate this one

I have this weird fascination with how people choose their children's names. It had been a latent obsession until I saw the show Toddlers and Tiaras on TLC and noticed the high percentage of kid pageant contestants who have "misspelled" names.
How can someone's name be misspelled?, you ask. It's their name; can't it be spelled however their mama chooses? Yes, of course, but most of these names are just otherwise normal names that have been spelled almost phonetically, which, to me, is misspelling.
A pageant mom probably won't name her daughter "Brittany." She'll name her "Bryttanee." A most recent example straight from a T&T episode is Sparkal Queenz. I swear, I did not make that up. And I am not the only one who has noticed this. One person who really dislikes this trend has a blog called "I Hate Your Kid's Name." It is hi-larious, but it does not tippy-toe around the subject.
Another way odd names have popped into my life is on school worksheets. I remember when the twins were still in elementary school, the politically correct compulsion to use as many multicultural names as possible got out of hand. Just trying to fill in the blanks on a vocabulary sheet was like trying to read a chapter in the Old Testament. The boys would get tripped up by these out-of-the-blue names like, "If Akbar has two apples and he gives one to Elodie, how many does he have left?" Dick and Jane must be too old school.
I doubt Japanese students who are kicking our butts in math are reading worksheets that say, “Madisyn has five shelves that can hold eight paint cans each. How many cans do the shelves hold in all?”
In full disclosure, I must admit that in second grade I tried to change the spelling of my name and signed all my school papers, "Jyll."

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Find out why the best may be too good for me.

More crazies by the hour

I have now reached that magical time in my life when all three boys are in school "full-time." For years I've heard friends gush about how a mom's day goes so much better, compared to a preschool day, with an extra hour tacked on each end.
From what I've experienced, though, the best thing about Owen finally reaching kindergarten, besides no more $350 preschool tuition checks, is that I can get to Wal-Mart before 9 a.m.

This week's Brentwood Home Page column

Read all about how picking up your kids from school can be so unexpectedly stressful.

Alone time

Rain magnifies things.
On rainy days, when everyone is home and we have nothing to do that night, no prior commitments to force us out of our comfy house, the rain makes us all feel happier to be together and thankful for each other and for time.
Even tasks like homework and dishwashing aren't so offensive because, thank you Jesus, we don't have to rush around town and get wet and frustrated with each other when this one won't hurry up or that one won't stop saying "pineapples."
On rainy days when I'm here working by myself, though, the weather forces me outward, mentally. It makes me think about the ones who aren't here.
I walk from room to room and notice things I don't see when the boys are there. I'd never noticed how Henry rearranged his bulletin board, so I sit on his bed and take note of what's important to him. In Mason's room, I roll my eyes at the perpetually unmade bed and see the collection of Coke cans he's started on the bookshelf. Their desk areas look more lived in as they settle into becoming more serious students.
At the end of the hall, so close to my bedroom it could be called a closet, is Owen's door. Last week he taped a paper medal to it, one his kindergarten teacher gave him that reads "Super Star Student." It's so weird to me because I've never thought of my baby as a student. He's a little old man trapped inside a little kid body, but he's not a student yet.
His room probably looks a lot like whatever's going on inside his brain, a very busy amalgamation of all the themes he has loved in his six years of life: farmers and tractors, fire fighters, Davy Crockett, soldiers, Indiana Jones and Star Wars. There are a lot of weapons in that room and a lot of depictions of battles pinned to the walls, but they're all arranged with a tender love and reverence by a little kid who respects hard work and can't tolerate puppets.
At the other end of the house is the playroom, where the floor is littered with remnants of their favorite thing to play together, "city." On a good day, all three boys get together and build a sprawling pretend world using parts from all our buildings sets, including wood blocks, Legos and old Thomas the Tank Engine tracks. The older boys are lucky they have a baby brother because it lets them remain kids a little while longer. The baby brother is lucky because he has two older playmates who are much more energetic and creative than his mom. They will move a couch out of the way of an oncoming Thomas track or construct a football stadium for the city from a shoebox, almost always happily. At least until he starts yelling out, "Pineapples!" again.

Star Wars cake

Not too much technical detail, but fun to do. Plus, as Owen pointed out, the clone guys on top were like extra presents.

...And you smell like one too!

So it's FINALLY not Owen's birthday anymore. Next year, I must remember to plan his party as close to his actual birthday as possible.
This year Owen's birthday fell on a Wednesday. I scheduled his party for Sunday afternoon. Somehow Owen surmised that all the days between his actual birth date and his party counted as his birthday. All I know is that by Sunday, I was officially over this whole birthday thing.
I know, I know. I do this to myself. Birthdays are only as big a pain as I make them. But I wanted to make this birthday special for Owen because he has always been our "understanding" child. That really means we end up taking advantage of the fact that he is the third child, both agreeable and eager to please. The last two years we've had a family party for him. "It's just as fun as bouncing in some inflatable castle with your friends! Grandparents! And cousins! Cake! You'll love it!" We told him his present would be a family camping trip.
Somehow, between sports schedules, work demands and parental exhaustion, we did not make good on his birthday camping trip until this past July. Ten months later!
So I wanted this birthday to be like a "real" kid birthday. I let him pick the venue. He chose Glow Galaxy, mainly because he wanted to sit in the big throne in the party room and wear a crown. But the party wasn't until Sunday. To make up for his having to attend kindergarten all day on his birth date, I planned through the cafeteria manager to spring for ice cream for everyone in his class at lunchtime. They actually suggest this now as an alternative to sending in homemade treats, and I was glad to do it.
I prepaid for the ice cream and showed up to the cafeteria at lunchtime. I told everyone we ran into that day that it was Owen's birthday. He got to go to a middle school cross country meet to cheer on his big bro, and all the big kids told him happy birthday. So by Wednesday night, as my mom used to say, I had had too much birthday.
Then he woke up on Thursday with that famous quote, and I knew I was in for it.
He talked about the party all day, every day. It really did seem like it was his birthday 24/7. The mailbox seemed to overflow with cards containing cash. Neighbors bearing gift cards stopped by. I spent Saturday making a Star Wars-themed cake, which was for the better because it distracted me during the Tennessee football game.
Then Sunday finally showed up.
Glow Galaxy wasn't my first choice, but it also wasn't my birthday. His friends came, he got to wear a crown, and he sat on a throne. He also woke up the next morning with some random 102-degree fever and has missed the past two days of kindergarten.
Like my mom used to say, I guess he had too much birthday.

When did birthdays become birth weeks?

Owen turned 6 yesterday. He woke up this morning and said, "Day 2 of my birthday is off to a good start."

They love us in New Hampshire!

Thanks to my husband's cousin Sherri Porter, who actually got HER husband Denny to turn the car around so she could get a photo of this sign on the way to the White Mountains in New Hampshire. It turns out the High Tide Cafe's seafood chicken is so good, she says, they stopped to eat there on the way back. We're going nationwide, baby!

There's no food in your food

I think it was Neil Armstrong who said, “Houston, did y’all pack my Gatorade Xtreme?”
OK, maybe that’s not his most famous quote, but I’m sure Armstrong and his Tang-swilling Apollo crewmates would feel right at home eating out of a typical school lunchbox these days.
It's time for me to get back into the lunchbox mindset, and I'm starting to feel like I’m preparing my brown-baggers for a space voyage every time I pack lunches for school. Nearly everything I put in looks and is named like it’s packaged to endure a three-year journey to Mars.
Take Go-Gurt “portable yogurt,” made by Yoplait. You rip off the end and suck it out of a plastic tube. The Danimals Crush Cup is even worse. No complicated spoon needed, and no crumbs to float away and get stuck in the instrument panel.
The flavor names sound like a nuclear acidophilus reaction is imminent. While mom is content with blueberry or peach yogurt, kids have been hypnotized by commercials to believe they need “watermelon meltdown” and “extreme red rush,” whatever fruit that’s supposed to be.
Fruit Roll-Ups and Fruit-by-the-Foot are favorites with my kids. It’s basically fruit (and sugar) jerky, but the name’s the thing with this product. My picky eater wasn’t interested until he found out I had bought “Tropical Tango Twister,” which may or may not be in the citrus family.
I guess adjectives I grew up with, like “great-tasting grape,” aren’t convincing enough. Food marketed to kids can’t just be food anymore. It has to be extreme and fierce and thermostabilized with lots of other descriptors you’d hear in the halls of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.
For a few years now we’ve seen snack foods miniaturized even as our butts and guts have maximized, so that lunchboxes are full of Mini Oreos, Baby Goldfish crackers and, occasionally, baby carrots with itty-bitty ranch dippin’ cups.
By the way, you should know that Pepperidge Farm has “flavor blasted” those innocent little Goldfish.
The metamorphosis of beverages is the most hilarious, though. To improve “the science of hydration,” the guys at Gatorade have taken the same four or five fruit flavors we’ve always had and added “fusion” or an X to the name to make it seem different.
Thanks to the science of marketing, I have to search Mapco’s drink cooler for Cascade Crash or X-Factor flavors on the way to my kids' games.
Of course, as a child I was enthralled with the Sprite Lymon ads. Who didn’t beg their mom to glue a half a lemon to half a lime?
In fact, it’s probably good that my TV-loving generation wasn’t the first to land on the moon. It wouldn’t have sounded as cool to hear, “That’s one small step for man, one nice Hawaiian Punch for mankind.”

The inevitable

I’ve been thinking a lot about a mom I used to know named Laura. We weren’t friends; her daughter was in the same preschool class as one of my twins. Still, she was one of my favorite people to see four days a week because she always smiled, and her daughter was sweet. She didn’t gang up with some cronies in the school entrance like a sorority clique, ignoring anyone who didn’t serve one of her purposes. She walked her kid in, spoke a few friendly words to any moms who also happened to be there, and went on her way.
I was fascinated by her because she just seemed above it all, but not in a snobby way. She had a life waiting for her, you could tell, but she wasn’t trying to prove it to anyone. And she influenced me a lot.
See, some moms behave the way they probably behaved in high school, the way a lot of grown guys act like frat boys when they get together. A really good blogger I like to read calls them the Muffia, because they can be pretty intimidating if you’re just trying to get your kid in the door and to the right classroom. They’re the ones who drive the biggest SUVs, park where there’s not really a parking spot (oh, wait, I used to do that sometimes), talk really loudly about the awesome stuff they’re doing, and wear kitten heels on field day.
So if you know you’re not one of the Muffia (and you know when you’re not), it’s a relief to come across someone who just is open and friendly to everyone, even someone like me who dares to wear house pants to preschool drop-off instead of True Religion jeans.
Sometimes during field trips or class parties, Laura and I would talk, and I found out that her preschool daughter was her third child, not her first, which would explain why she was not one of the giddy sorority types. She had done it all before, and she could control herself in the presence of her peers.
Not only was this her third child, but there was a significant age difference between her first two and her third kid. Kind of like how Owen is seven years younger than his brothers. At the time, I just had the twins, but hearing Laura talk about her family and the perspective the age difference gave her made me consider having another child someday.
Up until then, I always said, “No way, no how. Never, never, never again.” Caring for the twins as infants and toddlers was so hard for me that I told myself that we would always be a family of four. Then during the twins’ last year of preschool, when they were 5, I lay awake one night and realized that they would both leave the house for college at the same time and that would be it. I didn’t want that.
Now my third child, the one who is seven years younger than my first kids, is barreling toward kindergarten, and I think about Laura a lot. One thing she told me as we finished up that last preschool year was that she couldn’t wait for summer. I shivered because, with the twins, I was at the preschool any time the doors were open, looking for something else to entertain my two boys, someone else for them to look at and talk to instead of me. A change of scenery, if you will.
“No, I’m really looking forward to this summer,” Laura said, “because it’s the last one before they start real school. I’m just really going to enjoy my time with her because once you get on that school schedule, you don’t get off until they graduate.”
She was speaking from experience, and I knew she was right. She didn’t see her child’s childhood as something to get through. Moms can and should enjoy it, too, and I do now, thanks to Laura.
My 13-year-olds don’t give me good pajama hugs anymore, but my 5-year-old still does. I’m so glad I have him, even though a party of five is way harder to seat at a restaurant than a party of four.

Latest Pictionary puzzlers

Since Pictionary is pretty much the only board game I can play without falling asleep, we tried again tonight. Here's the latest list of the best "right before they get it" guesses:

"Flying saucer" comes out "sombrero in the sky"
"Junk mail" = "trash letter"
"Smoke ring" = "smoky knuckle"
"Sweat" = "sunny armpits"
"Tailbone" = "worm bone"

For the record, the 5-year-old never makes these insane guesses. He usually is right on the money. Or "near the dollars," you might say.

Agritourism Update

My tomato cages finally succumbed to the Better Boy tomatoes. You'd better not try to cage those Better Boys! What I'd like to know is when are the Better Boys ever going to go ahead and turn red?! We've all grown so tired of waiting that I've just been plucking them and frying the green ones.
Last summer was the first year I ever planted vegetables. I had three squash plants and two tomato plants of some variety that I can't recall. I only know they only produced about 12 maters total. And I got mad when the prickly squash plants poked my kids as they tried to "harvest" them, so I vowed never to plant squash again. Revenge is a dish best served with melted butter and cracker crumbs. The boys don't eat squash anyway!
Hence the two Better Boy tomato plants.
One thing that acted right in my garden this year was the one peony plant. I don't like to get too ambitious, you know. After hanging around three years, deigning to bloom once, this year the peony produced bloom after bloom, all spectacular. I'd love to take credit, but in truth I'd forgotten about it over the winter.
My other foray into botanic futility sits on the sill over my kitchen sink and reminds me of the "wonders" of nature countless times each day. The two flower pots are the size of shot glasses, and the Easter Bunny brought them. Way back in April. They are supposed to be strawberries, but they are the no-growingest plants I have ever encountered. The boys faithfully water them, but I don't see us pulling in a bushel of strawberries this season.
Those pots will make decent votive holders.

Not enough RAM

I’ve discovered a new twist on an old mom trick.
Sometimes when we're mad, moms will run through a list of names of everyone in the family until we remember which kid is standing in front of us. You remember the old Bill Cosby joke: "Come here, Roy, er, Rupert, er, Rutabaga... What is your name, boy?! And don't lie to me, because you live here, and I'll find out who you are."
This roll call is not limited to moms of multiple children. I’m an only child, and if I made my mom mad enough, she sometimes called me my dad’s name and even the dog’s name before she remembered who I was.
My twist on this trick is that I now apply it to the kids’ electronic stuff. They have so many portable electronic devices now, each with its own specific name, that I cannot keep them straight.
Say it’s mealtime, as it usually is in our house, and I need someone to set the table. I happen to stop whichever boy is running through the kitchen at that moment. I point out the small, black rectangular device on the table. It doesn’t go there, and we all know it doesn’t go there. If we want to eat and we don’t want to lose the expensive toy, it has to be put away WHERE IT GOES. So my kid waits while I run through our inventory.
“Mason, whose Gameboy, uh, DS, um, Ipod is that?”
My twins, who are in the middle of middle school, don’t have cell phones yet, so the list is not as long as it could be. Shameful, I know, but we’ve been using the Ipod Touch as a test to see how they’ll keep up with a phone.
Of course, whatever is on the table never belongs to whichever boy I’m addressing, so I have to continue holding the steaming hot whatever I’ve cooked and explain how, from the goodness of his heart, he needs to put it WHERE IT GOES. As usual, WHERE IT GOES is never near where they leave it.
I think it was also Bill Cosby who talked about “idiot mittens,” the kind attached by a long string that ran through your coat sleeves so they didn't get lost when you removed the coat. I’m not saying my kids are idiots, of course, but based on our summer experience with little electronic things, I may look into getting them a kind of idiot phone, something I won’t continually find all over the house. They have to keep up with it or else they get a Jitterbug.

Camp fever

Is your child enrolled in a camp yet?
School was out before any of us realized it, and now we’re smack in the middle of summer break. Most moms, library-weary and waterlogged from the pool, are seeking something else to occupy their children, I mean, enrich their kids’ summer.
Around here, there is no shortage of camp choices. Fortunately, most camps are well organized and beneficial. The number of offerings is staggering. When I was a kid, your choices were overnight summer camp or YMCA day camp. In the ‘80s, specialized classes like computer camp hit the cultural radar.
Now there’s every kind of sports camp, dance camp, art workshops, space camp, horseback riding camp, chess camp, Spanish immersion camp, summer history camp at Travellers Rest, cooking camp at the Young Chef's Academy, drama camp, cheer camp and about a hundred others.
Locally, the FSSD Young Scholars program consistently gets rave reviews for its class selection and organization. Not every program, though, is done so well. Some are glorified babysitting for $150 per kid. Most are very expensive if you enroll multiple children, and classes can be canceled at the last minute because of low enrollment.
Other times camps are hit by random acts of government. When my twins were 8, I signed them up months in advance for zoo camp, which I assumed would be a weeklong wildlife experience from 9-3 every day.
Because Metro government cut funding to the program that spring, organizers were left without a school bus to take the kids from the round-up point at Croft Middle School to the zoo itself. A zoo board member donated a smaller van, which meant kids would visit the zoo every other day.
I didn’t expect my boys to be leading elephant rides, but with it being called ZOO camp, I did expect them to be at the zoo. It turned out to be much more of a classroom experience than they anticipated, with an emphasis on conservation. That being said, the boys had fun, and the counselors brought small animals from the zoo to the kids on the days they didn’t go.
I’m thinking of starting my own camp next year, though. For only $99 per child, I will conduct a “domesticities experience” where your kids can learn valuable life skills while having a ball cleaning my house. An after-hours session on cooking dinner will be available for an extra fee.
For those who prefer outdoor play, my husband will offer a weekly lawn-mowing and Weed-Eating camp for half the price.
Sign up early so your kid won’t be left out!

Worlds Collide

On the Fourth of July I was trying to remember what we had done on the last major patriotic holiday, Memorial Day. Ah, yes! We celebrated it by finally attending the Tennessee Renaissance Festival.
I say finally because we’ve been avoiding it for the past 14 years or so. It is heavily advertised each May, and with Owen’s obsessive interest in weaponry and uniforms and his increasing ability to understand TV commercials, we were not getting out of it. It didn’t help that the twins kept singing the Free Credit Report.com renaissance fair jingle.
Two obstacles loomed: the ticket price and Tim’s lingering opposition to people in costumes yelling at him in fake accents.
Ticket price was a concern because adult admission was $18 each. That’s more than I want to spend on something I’m not sure I’ll enjoy. It’s a little easier to expand your cultural boundaries if you’re only going to invest a few dollars. Our family would have had to lay out more than $40, but we persisted. It was the event’s last weekend, and we were drawn in by the promise of a royal jousting tournament.
So here’s my suburban mom summary of the renaissance festival. If you do both the castle tour and the jousting tournament, it’s worth it. It’s not worth it just to laugh at the people in costumes because that gets a bit creepy after a while. It’s one thing when the players are in authentic renaissance-era garb. For some reason, though, the “come dressed as your favorite renaissance character” guidelines must have loosened to include any heavy-set woman who wants to put on a corset and those who wish they were pirates.
You have to deal with the corset crowd first because they do not care that the corsets push up not only cleavage but also back fat. I also doubt the Renaissance corset designers had to deal with this much body ink. The only place you’ll see more tattoos on women is Nashville Shores.
There are lots of guys who probably work at Subway during the week who come dressed like Robin Hood. Apparently, however, the pirate people have become such an issue at the renaissance festival that they now have an area called Pirate’s Cove, where they don’t seem so out of place. See, Captain Jack Sparrow did not live during the Renaissance, but that doesn’t deter them.
They do have some fun games like an ax throw, which is much harder than it seems, and cool booths that sell weapons, corsets and fairy stuff. ??
At any rate, we skipped the castle tour. I very much wanted to see it because Mr. Freeman built it himself, but I didn’t want to see it badly enough to wait in that hot line to ride an un-air-conditioned school bus/shuttle.
Trust me when I say that the jousting tournament made it all worthwhile. We all sat agog as world champion jousters (did you know they had those?!) really went at it. But I’m certain we said fare-the-well to the renaissance festival and won’t be going back anon.

Sounds like...

I only recently played Pictionary for the first time. It's turned out to be a good game for our whole family because everyone, even the 5-year-old, can draw something.
I never knew, however, that the funniest part about playing Pictionary is not making fun of everyone's marginal artistic ability. It happens when you look at your team member after they didn't figure out what your drawing represented and say, "How could you get that close and not get it?" In other words, why would my husband say, "It's a, uh, a speaker...in...your earhole!" Why would he not just say "hearing aid"?
Other gems from our last round include "spinning rocks," Mason's guess for Rolling Stones, and "ramp a kid goes down next to the swings on the playground." Just say "slide" already!
Tim definitely had the most obtuse guesses, which should be no surprise because it's pretty much how he communicates on a daily basis. He explains things in a vague, deconstructed way, such as,"You know, the guy with the thing in that place that time?" and expects me to translate. So I guess I should not be surprised that instead of "vampire," he said, and I quote, "A flying bat man...through the air... with fangs."

So that's why it's called VACATION Bible school

In the book of Matthew, Jesus said, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them.”
However, I do not recall Jesus ever saying, “Let the little children attend every vacation bible school in the county so Mom can get some cheap, scripture-based babysitting.”
I was unaware that people were sending their kids to multiple vacation bible schools until one year a schedule conflict kept my kids from attending VBS at our church. I wondered if they could attend at a friend’s church.
Believe me, missing VBS is a loss for our family because our church puts on one heckuva bible school. I don’t mean hymns, Hydrox and pineapple juice. With crafts, outdoor games and multimedia presentations, our church serves nearly 500 happy kids that week.
Like most kid stuff, VBS has mutated into something that can seem huge and chaotic. Our volunteers pack a lot into those three hours a day, and they manage to keep the message at heart.
I just never noticed how many churches advertise their vacation bible schools as community outreach. I always assumed those ads were for people who don’t go to church, or “the unchurched,” as I’ve heard them called in committee meetings.
But then I heard a woman at the pool veritably bragging about signing up her daughters for three consecutive vacation bible schools.
“It’s cheaper than any camp, and I get a few hours off,” she giggled to her friend. I moved away in anticipation of the lightning strike. Fortunately, the Lord is more forgiving than I.
If your first-grader truly needs a Bible immersion program, then I guess hitting every VBS you can get into would do it. Most of the local churches use variations of themed curricula from Cokesbury or LifeWay, though, so your child might tire of it by the second week.
We all know parents who would drop off their kids almost anywhere there’s an adult with a name tag on and a craft to be made. That’s the beauty of church programs, though. Regardless of Mom’s intent, the kids will have some fun, sing a few songs, eat a snack and learn about God. The churches don’t care how you get there or why; they just want you to show up and get the message.

Dads rule

As we approach our national day for fathers, it is my journalistic duty to blow the lid off a secret society men have kept to themselves for too long. It’s called Dad School.
My own dad finally told me about Dad School one day as he helped me pack the car for college by consolidating the contents of two large suitcases into one duffel bag.
“I learned that in Dad School,” he said before highlighting a few points of the Dad School curriculum.
Most dads, it turns out, are not the hapless extra children in the family as portrayed on TV and at Bunco. In fact, much like stuntmen, dads have to be really good in order to pretend to be really bad at certain things. These valuable skills can only be perfected after a rigorous program of study at Dad School. A sampling of classes:
Dad Cooking Quirks
Once a man becomes a dad, he is only allowed to cook a few things, but they must be prepared in the most complicated way possible, with much Shogun-style flipping of utensils and jars of “secret” ingredients, which are usually cinnamon and garlic salt. Dads hate herbs.
After preparation, the meal is given a special name to make it seem better than Mom’s version, such as Alacapooper Macaroni.
Dad at the Drive-Thru
When Dad’s meal burns, the family must go out. The drive-thru, however, seems like a persistent problem for dads, who cannot master this marvel of modern technology. In Dad School, fathers learn new ways to embarrass their families by taking classes like How To Pretend You Can’t Understand the Order-taker, Concepts of Confusing your Kids’ Food Choices and Advanced Fast-Food Lingo.
My husband, a father of three, cannot exit a drive-thru without muttering about how you can talk to a person in Japan on a wireless computer but, at Back Yard Burger, somehow the only word you understand is “waffle.”
My own dad, an honor student in the lingo class, once ordered a Wendy’s single with mayo, lettuce and mayonnaise.
Mall Etiquette for Dad
This class is required for all dads with daughters. Contrary to the myth, dads do not hate to go to the mall. It’s almost like continuing education for them, a chance to show off their expert dad mall-walking stance (innocuous facial expression, hands clasped behind the back) and to pick up tips from all the other dads waiting outside Kirkland’s.
In fact, if you see a dad inside Kirkland’s, you’ll know he’s a Dad School dropout since, for Dad School alums, scented candles really are like kryptonite.

Dreadlocks optional

I wish I could buy this house just because of the address. Then I would joyfully sing the lyrics to Eddy Grant's 1983 smash hit every time I drive down that street into my driveway.

"OH, we're gonna rock down to..."

You know you know the words.

Diamonds on the soles of her shoes

I know I live in Brentwood, and there's a lot of discretionary income in this community, but I don't think I'll ever get used to the idea of folks wearing $250 sandals to the ballpark.
At our last T-ball game, the opposing bleachers looked like a cast party for Desperate Housewives, with all manner of white jeans, satin tops, spike heels and gigantic leather bags. Our side had a couple who dress like Felicity Huffman, including me, but only a few. It's not like Civitan Ballpark is THE place to be seen, and that red baseball dirt stays with you, if you know what I mean.
Yet more proof that I'm merely a junior varsity mom running in a varsity world.

One reason I'm usually a step behind

If Owen comes running into the house and says:

"Lucy just went kablooey on Catherine's GPS man!"

he means:

"The dog just barked like crazy at the UPS man next door!"

I may frame it

During a recent game of Pictionary at my parents' house, this is what Owen drew to show "angry."

Footwear, above all

Since we took our family vacation early this year, I'm offering my helpful advice on how to go from an "after" to a "before" on your summer vacation.

1) Choose shoes based on looks, not function. I was so excited when I bought my adorable Crocs Patricia sandals. (Crocs also makes wedges now! I know!!!) I stood in Macy's and proclaimed, 'These shall be my Disney sandals!' because they are comfy, somehow very lightweight yet supportive. Also, they're Crocs, so it wouldn't hurt them to get wet since we'd be riding Splash Mountain and sitting in the Soak Zone at Shamu Stadium. I hurried home to plan all my Orlando outfits around these vaunted shoes.

I did not anticipate 95 degree weather in early May or the Florida humidity. These, coupled with a 12-hour car ride and many more hours standing and walking than I am used to, caused my feet to swell and the evil Crocs sandals rubbed a nickel-sized blister on the top of my left foot. Actually, I knew by the time we walked across the concrete prairie from our truck to the Seaworld entrance on our first day that my feet were in trouble. Of course, I'd packed Band-Aids in case THE BOYS needed them, but I used at least a dozen that day.

2) You might not think a blister would affect your look. That leads me to tip #2, which is the blister walk. I had to modify my walk to compensate for that blister as much as I could, so other Seaworld visitors must have thought I was smuggling baby sea lions out between my knees as I hobbled across the park. I resisted complaining audibly and instead chided myself for thinking I could be cute at a theme park. On Day #2 at Animal Kingdom, I still refused to succumb to tennis shoes and wore my bathroom flip-flops because they didn't rub the blister spot. After only an hour in the simulated jungle, my legs were so tired that I walked like the 80-year-olds. Actually the 80-year-olds were doing great on their scooters and Hoverounds. Between the motorized old folks and the stroller brigade, we were about the only people walking!

3) Ride the wettest rides first, so your freshly sprayed hair will get soaked and form an impenetrable crust that looks wet all the livelong day.

4) Drink much more lemonade and Diet Coke than you usually do since that's what you can get in your refillable Disney mug.

5) Accidentally leave your expensive face soap at the Hampton Inn in Cordele, Georgia, so that you have to use the super fatty Mickey soap provided by Disney resorts.

6) Slather sunscreen on your face, especially if you usually don't, then try to put on blush as you normally would. Coppertone does wonders for powder makeup, making the colors more vibrant and clownlike.

7) Finally, accept the fact that no one at the theme park except your youngest children ever looks at you. They are all just trying to survive the crowds with their own family members intact. Fashion is not a consideration. If you want proof, scroll down to the photo of my boys in front of the Animal Kingdom gate, click on it and look at the crowd in the background. That's what everyone looked like. See the grown man wearing Mickey's magical wizard hat? People wore that stuff all day. I saw dads wearing rhinestone-studded, princess-themed Mickey ears that their daughters had discarded on the Peter Pan ride. NO ONE cares what you wear. By the third day I did something I would never do in Brentwood. I pulled out the only pair of capris I'd brought and wore them with my tennis shoes, which mercifully did not hit the blister. And I walked from Pirates of the Caribbean all the way to Buzz Lightyear's Space Ranger Spin with nary a limp.

8) Don't forget to pose for pictures without sucking anything in so you look pregnant. Clutch your giant lemonade as if life depended on it. Be sure to turn so that the angle showcases the fleshiest part of your arm. Ahhhh, success! I've included the above photo for demonstration purposes only. You results may vary.

How much is a dent, anyway?

Me, to the 5-year-old: "Owen, you're breaking my No. 1 fashion rule for boys. I cannot allow you to wear that black T-shirt with those navy blue shorts."

Owen: growls loudly, once he understands that he is not in actual trouble: "GAAARRRR. I like it. I like it. I WANT to wear it. I don't care about fashion one dent!"

Me, surprised by his ferocity: "Well, your dad will be happy because he doesn't care about fashion one dent either."

Photographic evidence

Feast your eyes on the back row of the vehicle. Click on it to get a good look. In this photo taken on the Dinosaur roller coaster at Disney's Animal Kingdom, my four men are being attacked by a giant T-rex (guess there's no other kind) just as they think the ride is coming to an end.

I, of course, bailed as soon as I read the sign that said it was a turbulent ride. But even 5-year-old Owen, in the green T-shirt, is more of a man than I. He actually looks more afraid than I am comfortable with. Tim and Henry both look surprised, but Mason, in the orange, just looks annoyed. He said, "I wasn't scared. It was just SO LOUD." I don't think the couple on the front right feel the same way.

We Survived Orlando 2009!

We took the boys out of school for a few days and hit the theme parks over Mother's Day weekend. The good news is that no one threw up the entire five days! We had record-setting July heat but not July crowds, so it worked out. But 95 degrees in Orlando is a beast. When I get a chance to sit down, I'll post my Theme Park Beauty Regime guaranteed to turn you from an "after" into a "before" in ten minutes. We only had time for Seaworld, Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom, but I got to watch my boys get soaked by Shamu on Mother's Day. Good times!

We decided we might have enjoyed Disney's Hollywood Studios more than Animal Kingdom after all, but planning an adventure that is fun and doable for 12-year-olds and a 5-year-old is hard. Owen rode every ride he could board, including Splash Mountain, Kali River Rapids and the deafening Dinosaur roller coaster in Animal Kingdom. Check back for the most hilarious photo from that. It was the only time I felt compelled to hand over an extra $20 to the Disney folks. Did you know they take a photo of you as you pass the scariest part of the ride and that you can see them immediately after you jump off?! Yes, I'm sheltered, but we spent most of our visit riding rides and then running to the photo station at the end to see who made the goofiest picture.

Oh, and thanks to our most excellent strategy, we were the very first people to ride Pirates of the Caribbean on Tuesday. Yes!