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.

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.

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.

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.

I may frame it

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

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.

The Happiest Place on Earth

...except for Henry.
We posed for this photo on the last day of our 2001 trip to Walt Disney World, when the twins were 5. I found it while looking for photos to show Owen, who now is 5 and will visit Disney for the first time when we go next month.
This picture perfectly displays the dynamics of that entire trip because Henry was not sad. He was PISSED. He did not want to go to that breakfast at Chef Mickey's because he was terrified of characters. We knew this and tried to be sensitive about it the entire week, not forcing him to get too close to any giant upholstered mammals. Fortunately the Disney characters are excellent at backing off when they see that a child is shy or scared.
On the morning documented here, however, I was bound and determined to get my photo, which was included in the pricey package we'd bought. By the time we posed here, Henry had already ignored Minnie Mouse and slid from the booth under the table as a man-sized Chip from Chip and Dale approached us. As we got to the picture area, there just happened to be a ginormous Goofy standing nearby in a chef's coat. Henry balked, I insisted strenuously, and I got my picture. I guess Henry decided he'd make me pay by ruining it.
But I think that face makes it even better. Click on the picture to see it in full effect.

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.!

Age is only a number, right?

When you’re planning to have a baby, you can't understand how important the baby’s birthdate will be.
For example, I learned the hard way that football season is not an ideal time to have a kid, as I had to plan my last C-section around that year’s SEC and Titans home schedules.
We have Big Orange friends whose second child was due in September a few years ago. The dad went to the UT game at Florida anyway, then high-tailed it back in time to see the baby’s head crowning.
Another factor to consider in family planning is youth league sports. Start researching before you get pregnant if you think you might encourage your baby to be an athlete. Find out the age cut-offs for each sport so you can avoid having your child “play up” a year.
“Play up” is a euphemism that means your boy who just turned 12 a month ago will have to step up to bat against a 14-year-old pitcher who sounds like James Earl Jones and is covered with hair. This happened to my next-door neighbor, who said her kid looked like an embryo next to that manchild.
In our baseball league, the birthday cut-off for different age divisions is Aug. 1. My twins were born July 1. So just when they were becoming mediocre in the 7-year-old division, they turned 8 and moved up from machine-pitch to kid-pitch with boys who are almost 10.
I suspect that kid-pitch is the best way dads could stretch an hour-long baseball game to two hours. At this level, coaches are less likely to switch kids around to different positions on the field so “everybody gets a chance.” Usually the boy who is the best athlete on the team, meaning the boy who can get the ball to the person he’s aiming for, is named the pitcher.
This child throws 45 to 55 pitches per inning because the rest of the team is made of boys like mine whose parents have told them they’re playing “for fun,” meaning three out of four will walk, strike out or foul off.
Fouling off is what dad-coaches do when my precious baby finally hits the ball and I start screaming because it looks like it’s going really, really far and, oh my gosh, he’s just getting to first base when some mean dad yells, “Foul ball!”
The hardest thing for me to stomach is the push for kids to be better athletes at a younger age. I almost had a stroke in 1995 when the NBA drafted Kevin Garnett straight out of high school. Now fifth-graders can have pitching coaches, eighth-graders are scouted and high-school phenoms regularly dominate the local sports page.
At this rate, birth announcements will include height, weight and batting average.

Duuuuuhhhhhhhh

I’ve relearned a lot over the years by helping my twins with their homework.
In social studies, I got reacquainted with explorers like Hernando De Soto and Amerigo Vespucci. History is fun; I can handle history.
In science, I learned about electrical circuits as they wired a “house” made of shoeboxes. Very cool.
Then I remembered that I never really mastered the times tables beyond, oh, the sevens. Things get really foggy for me around 7x8. And I don't think anyone calls them "times tables" anymore.
So when they were about three months into the fourth grade and brought home two-digit division problems and pages with fractions on them, I hit a wall and had to say something I never wanted to hear myself saying.
“Uh, you’re just going to have to wait until Dad gets home to find out how to do this.”
See, our house is like one of those “House Divided” license plates, where one half is an orange UT logo and the other half is a crimson Alabama logo. If I were to have a “House Divided” plate, though, it would have a division symbol on one half and a schwa on the other half. Remember phonics?
My husband covers anything that involves numbers, and I am the house expert in the written word. I’m fine with that set-up because I’ve wanted to specialize in the written word since I was my kids’ age. With a journalism degree and a master’s in English education, I just assumed my mad writing skillz would carry me to a place where the hired help would handle the numbers for me.
It’s humbling to find that you’re obsolete by the time your children are in fourth grade.
It’s kind of like that feeling you get when you glance at the nutrition label on a pint of Haagen-Dazs ice cream and realize they intended that pint to contain four servings, not one.
Fortunately, I have a niece and some nephews nearby who are math geniuses, and I can call them for backup the next time Henry has to determine the area of something shaped like Texas.
I should have called the cousin homework hotline the time Mason had to answer this one: “What do we measure when determining weight that we don’t measure when determining mass?” I would have put, “Depends on how many servings of Haagen-Dazs you eat.”
Perhaps our new president will formulate an initiative called “No Parent Left Behind.”

Why I hate the Cumberland Plateau

In today’s episode, we will analyze a growing geographic prejudice against the area known as “The Plateau.”
There is, in fact, a group called Haters of the Cumberland Plateau that largely consists of me and my three sons, though the 5-year-old is only an honorary member with no voting privileges.
We started the club because the Cumberland Plateau gets all our snow, and it’s just not fair. I can’t watch TV news while the twins are conscious because if they see one tiny snowflake on the five-day forecast, they think it’s time to get the “sleds” out.
Not real sleds, of course. We have those plastic disks that slide across the snow because we don’t get enough snow to really go sledding. It’s a shame, too, because Middle Tennessee has all these sweet hills.
Technology hasn’t helped us love The Plateau, either, since folks who live there are having too much fun sending digital photos of what should have been our snow to the Nashville TV weathercasters like some kind of high-tech ransom notes.
Then we end up with cold rain while The Plateau gets big, fluffy drifts, and I have to deal with questions like these before breakfast: Where is The Plateau? Why did they get all the snow? Can we move there? Why do we have to be so close to the equator? Can you check my math homework?
To paraphrase 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey coach Herb Brooks’s comments about the Soviets, I am sick and tired of hearing about how much snow they’re gonna get on the Plateau. Their time is done. It’s our time!
The goal of the Plateau Haters is simple: It’s for the children. Our kids need a really decent snow, significant enough that their dad has no choice but to stay home from work. Bless their hearts; they’re so optimistic when the flurries start flying. At daybreak, they’re planning snowmen and snow angels and snowball fights and snow forts, even though the grass still peeks out because we only got “a dusting.”
Once when we got about a half-inch, Henry found a one-square-foot patch of ice in a dip on the driveway. The boys looked so pitifully happy taking turns, sliding around. “Look, Mom, we’re skating!”
I should be careful what I wish for, since I end up spending the rest of the day counting gloves and forging through the wet, muddy clothes cast off during those fleeting, snow-dusted hours. I can’t imagine the laundry that would be spawned by a foot of snow.
Maybe we only got a dusting last time, but it was ours. Do you believe in miracles? Yes!

Have yourself a military Christmas

I put this tiny Nativity scene on Owen's "desk" in the playroom and found it like this today.

I'll bet the wise men didn't expect to see snipers on the roof protecting the newborn baby Jesus. Joseph apparently keeps up with NFL stats as well.

It's not nucular science

"Mom, when's it gonna be time for munch?"
I looked down at my 5-year-old, who had run into my office after changing out of his church clothes.
"Do what?!" I said. "What are you talking about, 'munch'?"
He started bucking back and forth. "You know, you said we were gonna eat munch after church today."
"Oh, BRUNCH!" I laughed. I tried holding it in because he is a very serious old man inside a 5-year-old body and he hates getting stuff wrong. I tried to soften the blow.
"'Brunch' is when you combine 'breakfast' and 'lunch.' You know, like a 'spork.'" This explanation served as a jumping off point for names he thought they should have given brunch, such as "lekfast" and "brupper."
I enjoy these episodes because they prove Owen has inherited our family's infamous Granddaddy Disease, wherein he gets words wrong in the most entertaining ways just like my grandfather did. Probably the most enduring example is when my grandfather told us my grandmother was stressed out because she had to get her monogram that day. It took us a few tries to figure out she actually was having a mammogram.
On Fireman Sam the other day, a lady called a little boy a "hooligan." Owen said, "What did she call him?" His attempts to repeat it ranged from "hoogleland" to "hoolan" and kept us giggling and punchy for at least a few minutes.
My older boys had adorable baby words, like the way Henry used "cha-box" for lunchbox and Mason would say "walkamama" when he wanted me to come to him. But by age 5 they were pretty much ready for a spot on Jeopardy. Owen's mix-ups persist.
My favorite came out at age 3 when he threw himself backward on the couch and said, "Help me be a afroback (acrobat)."

Code Kablooey

Last night was the first time my 12-year-old twins attended a Titans Monday Night Football game, and we still made them catch the school bus at 6:42 this morning. I'm guessing that the late night is hitting them right about now, as one sits in science and the other in English.

ZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzz

Are you a peeker?

"I'll say the prayer," five-year-old Owen said as my other two boys and I slid into our chairs at the kitchen table before dinner recently. He makes this announcement at every meal, even though he almost always says grace at our table because he is a very bossy boy and does not delegate unless the task requires carrying something. We always let him say grace because, well, we're hungry and we want to eat.
If my husband is home from work by dinnertime, we hold hands in a circle around the table. This is also how I tell if Henry has washed his hands. If my husband is not home in time, we individually clasp our hands in the prayer position because the circle is not complete without him and because I can't reach Owen from my seat without getting my front in my plate.
"God is great, God is good...," Owen began, and I realized as he was almost finished that I had not closed my eyes but was watching him. Yes, I am a prayer peeker. More often than not, I watch my child as he is praying, but I can't make myself feel guilty about it because there is something divine in a child's face that is exquisitely concentrating on thanking God. I nearly tumbled out of the church balcony one Sunday when I peeked over to see my preschooler saying the Lord's Prayer with the rest of the congregation. I didn't know that his father, who is in charge of bedtime, had taught it to him.
Since then, I compulsively peek during group prayers, usually right at the beginning, and I'm thinking I shouldn't do it because no one else is looking, just me. I know I'm probably breaking the eleventh commandment, but it humbles me to see friends, relatives, elders and young'uns with their own heads bowed in relationship with their Lord.
"...Let us thank Him for our food, amen. MOM!!!!"
Oops, busted!
"Owen, you're not supposed to yell at people after the prayer," Henry said.
"Yeah, but Mom was watching me! I saw her peeking," he rebutted. That's when Mason introduced Mr. Bossypants to his first conundrum.
"The only way you would know Mom was peeking is if you were peeking, too."
Can I get an amen?

Trip or treat

Costumes? Check. Jack-o-lantern? Check. Candy? Check. Proof of residency?
Huh?
Surely you’ve noticed that trick-or-treating has changed. Kids don’t just throw on their costumes and run up and down the block with their friends anymore.
I’ve noticed a tendency for trick-or-treaters to migrate. They don’t always stay near home but go where they can get the most candy for the least effort.
If you live in a neighborhood with ¼-acre yards or less, such as Forrest Crossing or Fieldstone Farms, you may only recognize half of your trick-or-treaters as neighbors. These areas are prime targets for migrating trick-or-treaters because all Mama has to do is keep the van idling on a corner in your neighborhood while the kids hit house after house.
One reason so many treat-seekers migrate to denser neighborhoods is that, with one-acre yards like in Brenthaven, River Oaks or Redwing Farms, trick-or-treating is just exhausting. Often, there are no sidewalks, so you just tromp through the grass. By the time a 6-year-old has dragged a dinosaur tail through four or five of these yards, he’s ready to be done.
A lack of sidewalks and fewer streetlights in older neighborhoods usually means no curbs or storm drains either, hence the yearly spike in ankle injuries from tripping over culverts or stepping in ditches.
The payoff when crossing bigger yards had better be worth it. Kids who had to walk an acre only to find that no one’s home invented the retaliatory flaming bag of poo. If you won’t be home, be sure to display the universal Halloween symbol for “not home,” which is to turn off anything in the house that emits light, including the microwave clock.
Most homeowners love seeing adorable princesses and tiny action figures on the porch. But there are always a few kids who are too old to trick or treat and old enough to know it. One Halloween I opened the door around 9:30 to see three towering boys wearing wigs and holding pillowcases. I wasn’t sure if I should give them the Snickers or my silver.
If you just don’t want to deal with the door-to-door process, there are alternatives. Children can trick or treat merchants at the mall, which to me should only be a last-minute rainout plan. Kids also can do what’s known as a “trunk or treat,” where a church or other community group gathers in the facility parking lot and lets kids go from car to car seeking treats out of car trunks.
Just keep an eye on your jumper cables.

Birthday Fun

We celebrated my baby's 5th birthday this weekend with a Candyland cake that I copied from a picture in Taste of Home magazine. We all had so much fun decorating it that I wanted to post a photo of the results.

The perfectionist in me would have made the surface more green like the game board, with green frosting, but the boys all said it's perfect, and each had his own favorite section. I love the Lollipop Forest, made with Dum-Dums, and the twins like Lord Licorice's Lair because they love Twizzlers. It was fun and easy to do, as long as you have a big-enough sheet cake pan!

Personal Ad for Parents

Starting when my twins were about 8 or 9, they’d occasionally come home from a sleepover or an outing with friends with a couple of unsavory habits. They weren’t smoking or anything, but one morning after spending the night with the youngest of four boys, one of mine casually asked, “Is ‘f***’ a bad word?’ or they’d say, ‘We spent the whole night looking up funny videos on You Tube!’”
I remember wishing I could place a personal ad somewhere to seek out like-minded parents who were trying to raise their kids with generally the same ideas my husband and I were. That way I could ask the stuff I wanted to know but couldn’t manage to bring up without awkwardness in a normal front-porch conversation. Something like:

“Parents of boys seeking other parents with boys who have manners and don’t break stuff on purpose. Decent phone etiquette a plus. Picky eaters okay, but cruelty to younger siblings (yours or ours) or a smart mouth won’t be tolerated. We promise to maintain lights out during sleepovers at midnight for younger kids, a bit later for older. If your son has cable TV in his room or unlimited Internet access, our kids probably won’t sleep over there. We can guarantee no (real) weapons at our house and no Johnny Knoxville-type stunts or neighborhood roaming will be allowed. Fun, mom-approved food and drinks available with preset limits. Willing to do drop off, pick up or both.”

If I did get that involved in my kids’ friendships, though, they probably wouldn’t have any friends at all.

Good luck in 6th grade! Don't lose your $150 calculator.

Middle school has rocked for almost two weeks now. My oldest boys have had a smooth transition to 6th grade: bus ride, fine; lockers, fine; teachers, great. I am still adjusting to being a mom of more mature students. In other words, I am trying not to micromanage.
I can’t stop, though, because I have more invested in this school year -literally. It started with two $90 checks I wrote to the school for “supplies,” including PE uniforms, but we had to buy additional pens, pencils, paper and a colored binder for each class.
It’s convenient, and I almost prefer not knowing exactly what I’m paying for, since things started to get ridiculous during elementary school when half their supply bags would be filled with paper towels, wet wipes, Kleenex, Purell and other classroom maintenance items.
Then Mason made the JV football team, for which we would pay a $35 fee plus another $70 on team clothing that is optional unless you are a mean parent who wants to deny your son the chance to be cool and wear a team hoodie around town.
Out of the blue Henry went out for cross country, and my parents generously sprung for designated running shoes since Henry somehow grew into a men’s size 9.5 over the summer. Add another $25 for the cross country fee plus their random team clothing, and you can see why I’m hypervigilant about asking them, “Do you have your cleats? Where are your running shoes?” and oh, yeah, “Did you do your homework?”
My husband advocates the “throw them in the ocean and they’ll learn to swim” approach to back to school, reasoning that one strike for a missed assignment will make more of an impression on them than my nagging. I relented, but then on the third day of school, the math teacher sent home a note about graphing calculators. An experienced mom warned me to get the one that they’d use next year, which happened to be the one the teacher would be using.
Hubby did a preliminary internet price search. After a minute, he called from my office, “How much do you think those calculators are?”
I paid about $9.99 for the one I use at home, so I considered what I thought would be a ridiculous price for a 6th-grade tool. “Ummmmm, $55!”
“They’re $149 each! At Wal-Mart!” he yelled back.
Times two. Ah, the joy of twins. Guess my fall wardrobe will come from Target.

Girls vs. Boys

I don’t know when I’ll stop being surprised that not everyone in the world thinks the way I do.
I can’t reconcile, for example, the way some parents encourage segregation of little boys and girls during group activities in a sort of early Mars vs. Venus brainwashing.
I am not naïve enough to disregard the fact that some gender identification is innate. Most boys will want to do boy things, and most girls will show girly tendencies regardless of parental influence.
I just don’t think adults should go out of our way to polarize grade-school kids any more than they already polarize themselves.
One year when my husband and I taught children’s Sunday school, we had a class with 11 boys and two girls on the roll, only one of whom attended regularly.
If these girls minded being outnumbered, they didn’t show it. But one day at the start of the term, a mom of another girl who was supposed to be in the class stopped in the doorway and said disdainfully, “Oh, no. Look at all the boys!” She then continued down the hall to find a more suitable class for her daughter.
Another time we let them divide into their own project groups of three or four. A mom approached a girl who was happily coloring with two boys and said, “Don’t you want to come over here with the girls?” The child looked confused but went anyway, since the adult leader’s question implied that her choice was wrong.
I’m not one to give dolls to a boy in a misguided attempt to make him equal parts masculine and feminine. I just think people who work with children shouldn’t default to “boys vs. girls” just because it’s easy to do.
When my sons attended a local activity camp last summer, the daily competitions were always grouped by gender. Even the most popular TV shows, like The Apprentice and Survivor, do it. You don’t need a master’s degree to find other grouping techniques, such as having kids pick colored or numbered pieces of paper out of a cup, or even the old “count off by threes” method.
If you’re pitting girls against boys at every opportunity, though, no one wins. If the boys beat the girls, it raises the cootie quotient. If boys get beaten by girls, they see it as a tragedy, and their co-existence becomes even more tenuous.
If they learn to work together early on, though, there’s a chance they’ll feel like they’re at least from the same planet when they get to middle school.
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