Yeah, I know Halloween's over, but I gotta say this

I know one thing my older boys did not do this Halloween: roll anyone’s yard.
Come to find out that there’s been a whole lotta nighttime pranking in my neighborhood lately. Most of it has NOT been as good-natured as the two times my own kids rolled someone, which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago.
Ever since I joked about our buying TP for my kids and a couple of their friends so they could roll another kid’s yard during a recent sleepover, I’ve gotten e-mails and Facebook messages detailing all manner of midnight vandalism.
Of course, everyone now assumes my kids did it all.
So I’ll just set their records straight. They rolled two friends. The friends know who they are. They did not touch anyone’s house or doorbell. They did not spread anything on the windows of anyone’s house. They did not touch anyone’s vehicle or patio furniture.
The only product my kids threw on anyone else’s property was toilet tissue, Publix brand two-ply. No eggs, no paint, no pickle relish. (I know, sick, right?)
They didn’t even fork anybody.
Needless to say, our family won’t be chuckling about our faux delinquents around the dinner table anymore, since my flip remarks probably made most of the people who live in my neighborhood assume my kids are straight outta juvie.
And why wouldn't they? After all, some idiot wrote about it in the (online) newspaper!
Many parents, however, have whispered to me tales of their own kids' failed attempts at neighborhood naughtiness and lessons learned the hard way.
For example, nothing ruins a fun night of TP-ing faster than dropping your cell phone in the bushes.
I also learned (second-hand) that if you plan a night of juvenile jocularity, your getaway vehicle should not have a loud, distinctive muffler that your neighbors hear regularly as you drive out of the subdivision on school mornings.
In fact, the closest thing my older kids came to committing a crime on Halloween is the fact that they are six feet tall and they still went trick-or-treating. Some towns have age limits on that.
They did make an attempt to go out in “costume,” but at age 14 Halloween’s not about dressing up anymore. It’s about getting candy. A LOT of candy.
I think next year we’ll encourage them to hang around here, maybe pull the old “live scarecrow on the porch” trick and leave the midnight TP runs to some other unsuspecting parents.
It just goes to show that one kid’s hilarious joke is another mom’s home maintenance nightmare.

You can meet fun people at funerals

My entire family traveled to Jackson, Tennessee, earlier this week for a funeral. My grandmother's husband Clyde had passed away unexpectedly. Even though he had recently been diagnosed with cancer, we all were just adjusting to the news and preparing for a long battle. Instead, his heart gave out.

I wasn't sure who would be at the funeral home, since Clyde didn't have any siblings and my grandmother's only sister had been dead since 1946. But when we arrived, my dad, after greeting his mom, went straight over to an older man and woman, and they all hugged and looked really happy to see each other.

It was my dad's cousins, Donny and Sookie, who had always inhabited the stories in my grandmother' phone calls over the years. Her niece and nephews had remained close to my grandmother after their mother's death. Donny and Sookie lived in Halls, Tennessee, a tiny town in between Millington and Dyersburg. North of Nutbush, south of Cat Corner. They were always in visiting distance, even when my grandmother moved to the Land Between the Lakes area of Kentucky. And from her stories, I could tell they kept in touch.

I only remember actually meeting Donny once, when I was probably 8 or 9 and staying with my grandmother one weekend when she still lived in Memphis. Donny dropped by the house one evening, as my grandmother was making dinner. One reason I always liked staying with her is because she bought that Parkay squeeze margarine and let me put as much as I wanted on corn on the cob.

We were in her kitchen, and this man knocks on the carport door. My grandmother was all excited to see him. He came in and acted like he wants to show them something. He had this .44 Magnum pistol that he showed my grandmother and her husband, and the room got real reverent, which put me on alert because they were never reverent.

I have no idea why he had that gun. I'm not sure if he worked in law enforcement or security or was simply a permitted carrier. But I do remember how huge it was and how it changed the atmosphere of that room.

At the funeral home, Donny's wife Sookie had a quick smile and a great sense of humor. I don't know how this could be surmised at a funeral, but I noticed it about her right away. We joked about my grandmother because she has an, um, strong personality that's easy to, uh, joke about. Sookie told me her granddaughter worked in Brentwood, and I found myself living a cliche when I started to say something about how it's a shame that it takes a funeral to get us all together and how it would be so great if we could visit more often. I didn't say it, though. I kinda knew it wouldn't happen.

Once I'm in this rut here, with kids and schedules and bank statements and vacation days, it often feels like it would take TNT to blast me out of it.

Still, I heard my dad say something about a reunion, so I have hope to see them again soon.

We'll see.

I have to, though, because my goal is to find out Sookie's "real" name.

This week's BHP column

How much fun is life when your kids are seven years apart? Read all about it here.

Time for a pity party!

I have a personal standard of being about four years behind most cultural trends. It's not a written policy or anything. It just happens that way.

I'm aware of the stuff that's sweeping the nation, as they say. I just don't always participate in it, at first.

Especially books and movies. Whenever I watch the Academy Awards ceremony, for example, I've rarely seen all of the movies up for the big awards. I'm lucky if I've seen one. However, I can usually tell you more than you wanted to know about the plot, who stars in them, and who was killed or hooked up or broke up during the filming of said blockbuster because I read a lot.

I live my life like the perfect reference librarian, full of secondary information I can readily pass along without actually going into the stacks.

No, I'm more like a walking, talking Bible concordance, full of helpful names and numbers but no fulfilling scriptures.

Anyway, now that I'm out of literary analogies, I can admit that I'm not sure what sucked all the joie de vivre out of me (twins). I can't think of many "Jill" things I'd be excited enough about to wait in line for. I've waited in line for plenty of kids stuff, but not by choice. I think the last thing I literally waited for in a long line with anticipation was a coveted spot in the summer session of preschool. So, yeah. That's how bad it is. Now you understand why I get so excited when a new FreeCreditReport.com commercial comes on.

To combat this slow ossification of my life, I suddenly decided to read a best-seller. At least, it was a best-seller about four years ago.

I chose Eat, Pray, Love because I happened to read that its author's second book was coming out, and I thought, "Wow, I never even read her first book." I also saw where Julia Roberts was playing the lead in the movie version of that first book, which means it will get a lot of press, so I thought I'd at least try to be ahead of the trend game this summer.

As I slogged through the book, I got more and more annoyed. It follows this woman's journey to find herself across Italy, India and Indonesia. I enjoyed the Italy section pretty well because I can identify with a European vacation where the focus is eating.

In India, I got bogged down by all the ... meditating. I guess that's what got to me. For one thing, this woman had just spent four months in Italy eating. She then traveled to India for rejuvenation. She challenged herself at a remote ashram by meditating for hours on end, all in pursuit of a quiet mind.

I just gave up. I had to quit reading the book because I could not empathize with this woman. I kept wanting to yell out, "You don't need to find yourself. You need to find something to do! Have a kid or two, and you'll find out who you are real quick!"

But I didn't. I don't recommend self-discovery as a reason to have children. I'm also fully aware that having children is not an option for many. I think that's my point. Our worlds are so different that the person I am right now could only survive in hers for as long as she could thrive in mine.

I can see why Oprah fawned over this book so much on her show. It is so something that Oprah would do. She's all about finding your best self and living your best life, which is more than I can live up to with so many other lives to worry about.

I've always been surprised that Oprah, a childless billionaire, has so much influence over mothers in this country.

I stopped watching Oprah the day she recommended a $40 bottle of hand soap for my guest bathroom. I think I fed the five of us for three days on $40 last weekend.

Reading this book reminded me of the last few months of my Glamour magazine subscription. I used to love Glamour so much that I grew up wanting to work there. I even wrote it down as my first choice when I applied for the ASME internship while I was in college. I ended up interning for Guideposts, which I think was a little bit of God's handiwork because I think He wanted me to go deeper.

Those last few times I read Glamour, I would flip past more articles than I would read. I was married by then, and I didn't want to read about dating issues. I was not employed at the time, so all the career advice bounced right off me. Even the fashion items didn't appeal, so I let the subscription lapse. I missed Glamour as much as I missed Tiger Beat.

I haven't missed Eat, Pray, Love yet, though I may check it out again just to say I finished what I started. But I'll probably wait until my mind quiets down. One of my sources of inspiration was up at 3 a.m. feeling pukey.

As for rejuvenation, a short nap next to a big dog does it for me.

The ties that bind

A friend of mine has been sharing via Facebook her experiences with her mom as her mother endures the final stages of bladder cancer.

As my friend catalogued a list of memories that flooded over her while sitting with her mother in the hospital, she wound up thinking about a time only a couple of weeks ago before the illness worsened, when she took her mother to get some groceries on a recent frigid evening. They got separated in the store, and she looked for her mom by walking aisle by aisle, just the way she used to when she was a little girl and her mom would let her look at magazines while she shopped.

My friend seemed surprised to relive that memory after so many years.

Naturally I thought of the times in my own childhood when I'd look for my parents aisle by aisle in a store, and how my panic would grow with each row I'd pass without seeing them.

Even if I stretched it as a teenager and have neglected it as I've become a mom, the connectivity between my parents and me perseveres.

Now that I have kids of my own, though, I experience it from both sides. Last Mother's Day my husband and I took the boys to Orlando. The entire time we were there, my whole purpose in life was to keep the five of us together as we navigated the theme parks. Of course, Walt Disney World and Seaworld were jam-packed with families, and I devoted all my energy to keeping a hold on that invisible rope that linked my kids and my husband to me. At nearly every transition, Tim and I would even say aloud to each other, "I've got Owen." or "Is Henry here?"

As long as we all were together, everything was fine.

Sometimes the twins would ride a huge coaster without us, but I always felt such relief when I'd see them ambling toward us afterward. It was the same relief I'd feel as a kid when I'd see my parents in the grocery aisle.

It was love.

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.

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.

...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.

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!

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.

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."

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.

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.

Worst Spring Break Ever

This is photographic evidence of what my kids did during Spring Break last year. Thanks to a combination of my husband's inability to take time off work and something we'll call "the economy," my three boys and I spent the week exploring whatever free stuff Nashville offered. Come to find out, that's called a "staycation," and I was apparently ahead of the trend in family travel. When we weren't eating free birthday cake at the Belmont Mansion or climbing the walls at Ft. Negley, the boys got pretty bored outside. So while their friends were bragging about ski trips or Caribbean getaways, you can bet the big boys left out the details about how they Macgyvered our riding toys together.

Thanks to my parents, though, the twins will have something to brag about this year.
I'm sure that what happens in D.C. won't stay in D.C.!