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.