Stealing the Newspaper

Babygirl and I were walking around the block Saturday. Actually, she was riding while I was pushing her in the umbrella stroller. We passed Sleeping Beauty’s driveway and Babygirl spied a newspaper lying near the ivy. “Paper!” she said.

“Yes, paper,” I repeated. And I kept pushing her.

“Paper!” she said again, with urgency. I can read her mind and I knew she wanted that paper. She loves to pick up the plastic-wrapped newspaper from the driveway and carry it into the house.

She began to pull at her seatbelt and said, “Walk! Walk!” I unbelted her and let her walk. By now, we were a house or two down from Sleeping Beauty’s house. She turned and headed back towards the newspaper.

Now, Sleeping Beauty’s house is a house obscured by vegetation. It reminds me of the fairy tale in which the castle was overtaken by thorny bushes while Sleeping Beauty slept under a spell. The two-car driveway is now a one-car driveway because half of it is covered with ivy. The ivy has crept up the front of the house. Moss has taken over the roof. An overgrown flowering tree hides the front windows and the door. Once a year, the man who lives in the house mows his lawn. Once.

Babygirl makes a bee-line for the newspaper and grabs it, triumphantly calling out, “Paper!” She brings it to me like an obedient cocker spaniel. I say “thank you” and say, “Now, you want a ride?” I figure I will get her back into the stroller and then toss the newspaper back into the driveway as I hurry Babygirl away. She’ll never know.

Just then, an upstairs window slides open and the man appears. He says, “HEY!” I am holding his newspaper and he looks at me as if I am about to hotwire the gigantic late model pick-up truck which is parked in his driveway. I smile and say, “Oh! I’m not going to steal your newspaper. She just wanted to hold it. I’m going to get her in the stroller and put it back.”

He’s staring at me as if he might pull out a gun and shoot me. And also as if he does not speak English.

So I say again, “I’m not going to steal your newspaper. Okay?”

He says, “Oh, sorry.” The window shuts abruptly.

I put Babygirl into her stroller and toss the guy’s newspaper back into the leaf-littered, ivy-covered driveway. I’m pretty sure that guy was the Wicked Ogre who is holding Sleeping Beauty captive.

And because I just realized that my thumb is bleeding all over my space bar (I grated it along with the cheddar this evening) I will leave you to conclude this tale with your own clever ending.
The end.

Heartbreak in the Backyard

YoungestBoy loves pets. Unfortunately, he has lost three pets in his short six years.

Millie the Cat was dispatched to Kitty Heaven shortly after Babygirl’s birth. Millie the Cat developed some kind of neurological condition which required Kitty Antidepressants. I’d shove the pills down her throat and she would vomit them up and then scratch herself until she bled. We agreed that sending her to Kitty Heaven was the most compassionate thing we could do for her since there was no cure for her mental illness. None of the boys noticed that Millie the Cat was missing for about three months.

Greta the Dog was a furry, sweet Newfoundland. We raised her for two years. Then she nipped at TwinBoyB and a week later, nipped at YoungestBoy, drawing blood on both of their faces. She was returned to the breeder and placed in a new home. We just couldn’t take the chance of having 100-pound Greta nip at a baby.

Fred the Snail was captured on our driveway in May 2002. He lived a happy, uneventful life in a vented pet box, hidden under the long drapes in the dining room. Then over a year later, he was moved to an upstairs window and the afternoon sun boiled him in his shell.

YoungestBoy cried hard when he lost each pet. We replaced Millie the Cat with Shadow the Cat. Greta was replaced with a giant stuffed animal. But snails are hard to find around here.

And then, a miracle! After dinner yesterday, we were hanging out in the backyard. Babygirl was riding her trike over the grass, TwinBoyB was using a giant magnifying glass to turn a slug “inside out” and YoungestBoy was hunting for more slugs. He came running around the corner shouting, “Mom! I found a snail!”

Clutched in his chubby hand was a snail half the size of my pinkie-fingernail. Its shell was translucent. While we watched, the tiny head stretched out of the shell. I couldn’t believe it! In my 39 years of life, this is the second snail I’ve seen in the Pacific Northwest. (Other than snails that live in the water, of course.) What a lucky boy!

I said, “What are you going to name him?”

YoungestBoy thought for just a moment and said, “Replacement Fred.” He went inside, got a Mason jar and put a few tasty leaves in the jar for Replacement Fred.

Awhile later, YoungestBoy says, “Oh no! I dropped my snail!”

“Where?” I ask.

“In the grass somewhere. I was running and holding him in my hand.”

Sigh. Then we squatted on the grass and tried–in vain–to locate tiny Replacement Fred. YoungestBoy cried. I said, helpfully, “Well, maybe you can find another one.”

YoungestBoy said, “Mom, that was just a lucky stroke. I will never find another snail.”

We looked under the rocks where YoungestBoy found Replacement Fred, hoping Replacement Fred had a brother or a sister. Nope. Replacement Fred must have been an orphan or a runaway. YoungestBoy spent a great deal of time in the backyard before lunch, hunting. He found a bunch of potato bugs (he calls them roly-poly-olies). One even hung upside down from a stick, wrapping its teeny little legs around it.

But it’s not Replacement Fred.

Replacement Fred! Come back! We promise not to forget you in a sunny windowsill!

Finally! Chicken & Egg Mystery Solved!


Mr. Know-It-All-TwinBoyB and his twin, Mr. Know-It-All-TwinBoyA

My twin boys have reached that magical age where they know everything. I figure this stage probably lasts until they are well into their college years. As a reasonably intelligent 39-year old woman, I regard their superior knowledge with great hilarity.

Last night at the dinner table, they explained to me that God created two eggs and that’s how we got chickens. He didn’t create just one egg, or two male eggs, or two female eggs, but a male and a female eggs so chickens would result. Always playing the Devil’s Advocate, I said, “Well, maybe God created the chicken and the chicken laid the eggs?” They dismissed my folly without even a pause. Their knowledge was unshaken.

A couple of weeks ago, they were explaining HIV to me. They were learning about AIDS at school. I was probing to see what they were being taught and said, “So, how do you catch HIV or AIDS?” And one of them answered with a twinge of disdain, “You don’t catch it! You just have it!”

This morning, while we were staring at the tea kettle, waiting for its whistle, TwinBoyB remarked that he wanted to see the “vapor.” I said, “Well, look, there’s the steam now!” And he said, “No, Mom, you can’t see steam. You can only see vapor. Steam is invisible.”

I started to argue, then stopped myself. What is the point in pointing out fact to a kid who already knows it all?

It’s going to be a long decade.

Stuff That Really, Really Drives Me Crazy

1) Break-downs of major appliances. My trash compactor decided to go on strike. Unfair labor practices or something. Well, too bad for Mr. Trash Compactor. He’s going straight to the landfill where he can lounge around with refrigerators who freeze eggs and washing machines who will no longer agitate. I paid Mr. Sears Fix-It Guy a hundred bucks last time Mr. Trash Compactor quit working. I will not pay anymore. Mr. Trash Compactor, buh-bye!

2) Bowls and glasses which break upon impact. Geesh, I’m so sick of sweeping up broken glass and then vacuuming up the remaining shards so baby feet will not be punctured.

3) Gritty floors.

4) My boys’ horrible aim. Now, listen. I don’t have one of those things, but I have used the garden hose and it’s just not that difficult to hit a target! I’m sick to death of my boys’ bathroom which smells exactly like an outhouse. I don’t camp because I hate the stench of outhouses.

5) Really bad, stupid, inattentive drivers. But we all hate them, so I will move on to number six.

6) Stubbing my toes on errant shoes. Why can’t people at least kick their shoes out of the path of my feet? Seriously? When I kick off my shoes–which admittedly, I leave in every room of the house–I put them in corners and tuck them into nooks so no one will trip over them. No one extends this same courtesy to me.

7) Thinking up dinner plans every night. Preparing dinner every night. Hearing people say about dinner, “Ewwwww, that’s nasty.”

8) My kids discarding their trash randomly. Mr. Trash Compactor probably quit working in response to my kids’ complete disregard to his feelings. The only person who likes to put trash in the compactor is Babygirl. But then again, that wasn’t trash she just put in there.

9) Late people. I am not exactly always prompt, unless I’m with my husband, Mr. Fifteen Minutes Early, but I do arrive at my appointments and obligations within five minutes of the start-time. My siblings think that if you merely arrive on the same day. that’s close enough. That’s why we had Easter Dinner at noon. And 1 p.m. And 2 p.m. My sister brought her kids’ to YoungestBoy’s fifth birthday party an hour late. And it was a small party. She arrives chronically late to work–forty-five minutes, an hour, whatever, and takes my neice and nephew to school late. Every day. My sisters and my brother claim this is a family trait, but it’s not. It’s just rude and inexcusable.

10) Doing things out of order. I am sequential by nature and I tend to get frazzled when I have to do something in the wrong order. I get crazed when I am interrupted ten thousand times in the middle of something.

This explains my general insanity. Stay tuned for even more exciting details and enter our sweepstakes to win a stay at Western State, Washington’s finest mental institution!

On Being a Good Mother

I sometimes hear mothers say with great confidence, “I am a great mother!” This is often in tandem with a complaint about a mother-in-law’s meddling ways and criticisms, but still. There are women–mothers–who absolutely know that they are doing a fabulous job.

I am not one of them.

I worry. A lot. About whether my kids will be the ones who inhale glue or walk on railroad tracks or become fixated on pornography. I waste time wondering if my boys will grow up and marry cold-hearted women who are bossy and sarcastic and then blame me. I am terrified that my kids really won’t remember anything except the times I scream, “This is driving me crazy!”

Maybe that’s why I take so many pictures. We always look really happy. The kids seem to be having a great childhood. Yet, I have no confidence that I am a wonderful mother.

See, a wonderful mother plays Monopoly with her kids whenever they ask. She makes a hot, homemade breakfast and packs a delicious, nutritious lunch that her children eagerly eat. She doesn’t wear June Cleaver pearls, but she does have on matching clothes and a cute haircut. And make-up. She never yells and her laundry is always caught up. Oh, and she doesn’t fly into a frenzy when yet another glass bowl bites the dust right next to the baby’s feet. She needs no time to read, to think, to shop, to write, to talk with grown-ups. She is completely, slavishly devoted to her children, even the older, smelly ones.

I fret that the boys are going to freak out some day about the fact that they are adopted. I worry that they have fantasized a Perfect Mother in their heads–she probably resembles the Perfect Mother I have in my head. I torture myself with the reality that the twins cannot remember the times they slept on our floor in the middle of the night and the times we took them to playgrounds and the times they ran through the sprinkler and rolled in mud and shrieked with laughter. They’re approaching the “I’m bored, this is not fair, no one ever listens to me” stage of pre-adolescence. They can’t remember the first four years of their lives when they were the center of our universe.

Most recently, I have worried that the addition of the younger children has robbed the older children of everything–of our time, of our money, of our attention. YoungestBoy was born just as the twins went to kindergarten. I couldn’t be the Room Mother. I couldn’t go to their baseball games. I couldn’t practice with them so their baseball games weren’t so humiliating. I answered, “No, the baby is sleeping,” too many times to count. I shushed them constantly.

They have to share a room. They have to share their toys. They have to be nice to YoungestBoy, even when he’s being a pain in the neck.

And then, just when things were getting manageable, we had Babygirl. YoungestBoy was four and a half.

I do not recommend this spacing. At all.

I wish for each of my kids that they could be Only Children. I wish they had their own room, their own space, their own solitude. (Or maybe that’s just what I wish I had!)

I can only be cut into so many tiny little pieces. I feel like the kids get their piece and whine, “No fair! He got a bigger piece!” I am never enough.

My hope is that what my kids lose–attention, time, money, things–are outweighed by what they gain–companionship, lessons in getting along with people, lifelong friendships with their siblings, experience, compassion, generous spirits.

My ultimate fear? They grow up, never find meaningful work, never find lifelong love and blame me.

(Yes, this is another premenstrual syndrome entry. My neurosis comes in regular cycles. How convenient.)

I’m Married to the King

That’s right. Did you know I was a Queen? Yes-sir-ee-bob, I’m the Queen of Laundry and I’m married to the King of Naps.

How can a person nap when he’s slept until 8 a.m.? How can he nap in the morning and then nap in the afternoon? How can he fall asleep at 10:30 p.m. when he’s napped half the day?

If I nap, it means only two things: I am pregnant or I am sick.

If I nap, I will be unable to sleep well at night.

If I nap, I will wake up grumpy and out of sorts and dazed.

He is kind of cute, though, stretched out in the recliner, mouth agape, hands folded on his stomach as if he’s laid out in his coffin, escalating snores. Long Live the King!

Eighty-One Dollars Worth of Fun

Update: I feel perfectly fine today. Weird, huh?

We went to The Fair today. Not the big fair, but the Spring Fair, held on the same fairgrounds as the regular fair. Earlier in the week we’d talked about going, but then I decided it was just going to be too expensive and the kids already did a lot of fun things this week.

But this morning, my husband returned from taking Babygirl for a ride in the car and reported that the weather was nice and that he was thinking about taking the boys to the fair. So we all went.

Admission: $26 (And that was half-off)
Ride Tickets: $15 for 20 (4 or 5 tickets necessary for each ride)
Lunch: $26.25 (for me and three boys)
Games: $13.75

The kids each had between $10 and $15. They were eager to spend it on games, but I insisted that we first watch a demonstration. We walked all the way across the grounds, found Barn J and arrived in time to watch Border Collies demonstrate how they herd animals. In this case, they were herding about five ducks with great stealth and skill.

The woman asked if any child would like to volunteer to herd the ducks–to demonstrate how difficult it really is to get the ducks to go through the various obstacles. YoungestBoy raised his hand and was chosen along with another boy in a red shirt.

Watching them chase the ducks was worth the price of fair admission. Ducks quacking, kids laughing, ducks scattering. When a duck is separated from the remaining ducks, they call it a “duck split”, which YoungestBoy thought was very funny. He pictured the duck in a bowl with whipped cream and chocolate syrup on it.

But enough educational stuff, Mom. There were games to play, rides to ride!

I went on a ferris-wheel type ride with YoungestBoy and TwinBoyB. TwinBoyA opted not to ride. He is not fond of rides at all. While we rode, TwinBoyA played a game involving a dart and won himself a stuffed animal. YoungestBoy and I played a game involving balls and racing horses. I won, but of course, gave him the animal (an orange monkey). Then we had a string of bad luck and lost dollar after dollar after dollar playing games. In disgust I said, “We may as well just toss our money down that drain!” (We conveniently passed a storm drain at just that moment.)

Kids are optimists, though. I wasn’t, but most kids are. They were sure they’d win, so they kept spending until their pockets were empty. Even my pockets were empty by the time we left. We did manage to bring home four little stuffed animals and one poster.

My husband pushed Babygirl around in her stroller the whole time–he mostly just kept her moving and that kept her happy. She put on her very sad face when we first entered the fair gates, but when she spotted the animals–llamas, sheep, dogs–she cheered up. She’s a slow-to-warm-up baby. (She immediately went down for a nap when we got home. I’d like to nap myself, but I have other kids to take care of and a mountain of laundry with my name on it.)

YoungestBoy and I rode one more ride–some contraption that circled around and then swung up and down. I think it was called a “hurricane.” I don’t know, but the centrifugal force kept YoungestBoy plastered to my side and caused an ache in my neck. At the peak of the excitement, I had a sudden vision of the cars being flung into the air and grabbed the bar a little tighter. YoungestBoy thought it was great fun.

When we left, YoungestBoy said the day had been the best day of his life. I guess that was worth $81.

On the way home, my husband’s cell phone rang to report that our friend in the hospital has been moved from one hospital to another. He’s undergoing emergency surgery for a brain-bleed. This does not look good. So, my husband’s at the hospital. I feel so sad for our friend and his family. Sigh.