And Then, Suddenly, I was the Worst Mom in the World.

I was cleaning out Penny’s lunch box yesterday when I discovered the following:

A special lunch-box note from me to Penny . . . written by Penny.

Possibly the saddest thing ever.

I don’t know why I’m “Nancy” instead of mom. I picture all the little lunch eaters pulling out their notes from home – notes from their thoughtful, loving mothers; and then Penny eagerly pulling out her forged note, “Oh! Look! My mom loves me too!”

And then some kid saying, “Why doesn’t  your mom just write ‘Mom’”?

And Penny frantically thinking, “Oh no! I knew I didn’t get this right! I’m found out!”

Meanwhile, around the house, she has glued popsicle sticks, and colored pictures, and left (at every turn) things like this for me to discover:

I would resign as mother  immediately . . . only, the gypsies haven’t come through town lately, and I don’t really know who else to give my kids to.

I did leave lunch-box notes in all the kids lunches today. And, on Penny’s, I was liberal with my doodled flowers and  Magic Marker  use.

But. It’s probably too late.

Ah well. Anders and Jesse haven’t started school yet. I can just chalk these older kids up as a loss and start fresh with those two.

(Kidding! Kidding! Quit your crying.)

Meanwhile, down on the farm:

I spy: brother and sister arm wrestling; Pikachu; a little, light bathroom reading; little feet of someone who thinks they have a grand Hide-and-Seek spot; the shoes of someone who has more important things to worry about than insignificant details such as “right shoe on right foot”; and . . . a cookie given to someone who was told they couldn’t have it, but then kept crying for it  -- which really doesn’t bother me at all now that we’ve established what kind of mother I am (see blog post title).

And, to be totally fair here, when I said lunch notes for everyone, I didn’t technically mean everyone. This morning Abe told me how funny it would be if some kid (NOT himself) got a note from his mom in his lunch box that was one of those cards that talk when you open them. He explained how, for the unfortunate student, having everyone hear the nice things his/her mother had to say would be much like getting a Harry Potter “Howler”.

I see.

No lunch-box love for that little stinker today.

I’m waiting ‘til I can find one of those cards . . .

It’s an Easy Cheese Christmas?

Our little Advent Calendar with its 24 tiny drawers is supposed to give the kids some new and exciting Christmassy thing to do each and every day. Instead it often merely outs me as a failing mother.

The kids have a paper stuck to the fridge with the agreed upon rotating order of who gets to open the box each day. Every morning they rush downstairs with a “Can we open the box now!? Where’s Daisy? It’s her turn to open the box! Wait! Goldie isn’t down, you can’t open the box with out her!” but very often there is actually NOTHING IN THE BOX!! Nothing. “I’ll have the box ready after school,” I’ll quickly say . . . but even then . . . sometimes in a mad dash to make something, anything seem Christmassy (with five minutes remaining before they burst in the door from school), I end up putting something like this in the box:

They did make some good designs though. True there was the moment when I had to call a full halt to the proceedings to announce that, “Nobody can cry if people can’t guess what your design is . . . because sometimes it’s hard for people to tell what pictures made of . . . cheese . . . are.” But then, all went well, and my designs were particularly oohed and ahhed over for their unbelievable true-to-lifeness, and everyone had a grand time, and of course it eventually degraded to kids making dots and saying things like, “It’s a nativity scene from very far away”.

At least it isn’t as bad as the time, several years ago, when they opened a drawer to find a paper that read, “Clean the house to get it all ready for Christmas”. Abe and Daisy still haven’t let me live that one down. Apparently there is no Christmas cheer in cleaning. And, an added bonus to this one: the excitement of having the rarely seen (and slightly creepy) squeeze cheese in our house entertained Goldie for several days as she used it on all sorts of things including Honey Comb cereal. (Penny and Jesse must still retain their early survival instincts as they wouldn’t touch the stuff and, in fact, seemed slightly terrified of it).

So . . . Merry Christmas? 

Don’t Judge People . . . Well, Maybe Judge Them for Some Things, but not for Other Things . . . Like Coming Late to Church Things.

We should never judge one another. No. Never. Because, take little things. Like, oh, say . . . I don’t know . . . just off the top of my head: someone coming in very late to sacrament meeting. Or, maybe not just one someone. Maybe even . . . like . . . SEVEN someones. And let’s say they are trying to sneak in all quietly with downcast eyes, but they are having to step over and past other seated-on-time people’s knees, and five of the seven are actually rather small and rather irreverent and probably not having properly downcast eyes at all.

See. You want to judge them. You want to say, “Come on! Church doesn’t start ‘til 11:00! Get here on time.” I mean, I want to judge them because that would certainly never be me. But, I don’t because who knows really? I mean any number of things can happen, if you think about it, between one walking out their front door (with church only a half block away and ten minutes to spare) and one actually arriving at said church. Yes, any number of things.

For example, they could be heading off happily – pleased at their perfectly curled girls’ hair, and their overall promptness. And then, who knows? Maybe their two year old might see a wasp of some sort, and he might think to himself, “I ought to catch that wasp post haste!” and he might catch it, and then the mother – who was poised and pleased as could be – might turn and see her two year old shaking his little hand and sobbing and she might, through instinct or experience (one can never be certain with mothers) say, “Oh no! Did you get stung?? Did you pick up a bee??” And as she runs to him, she might notice an angry and disgruntled little wasp crawling away. And she might know, “Yes, you did pick up a bee . . . or something very like it.” And she might scoop her son up and think about how he is always swelling up and having allergic reactions to everything. So, she might decide she ought to give him some Benadryl and probably ought to find his epipen to bring along just in case, and she might be about to run in to get those things when a neighbor might drive by (in a perfectly timely on-time-to-church fashion) and that neighbor might stop and say, “Umm . . . I think you have a chicken on my front porch.” And the mom holding the crying toddler might say something like, “Oh . . . is it grey and kind of little . . .” as if, perhaps the neighbor is mistaken. As if it might possibly be someone else’s chicken (in a neighborhood where chickens do not live and are, quite probably, not allowed).

So, then the mom of this little group might run in and tell her husband (who is still tying his tie – which seems odd as they were all out on the front porch, with ten minutes to spare, ten minutes ago) that a chicken is loose and might possibly be leaving unmentionable things on a very well swept, well kept neighbor’s porch. And then she might shout for another daughter to find a little cloth to wrap around the stung brother’s hand (as some sort of placebo comfort mechanism), and that daughter might open the closet in the bathroom and purse her lips and think and think about which little cloth would be best as the mother is reaching rather frantically for it. Then, the mom might go to the medicine cabinet and stare and stare – trying to find the Benadryl, but not finding it – even though it is directly in front of her (because maybe she is a little frazzled and slightly less poised by this point). But eventually she might find it and give it to her sad little son as she continues to remind him about not picking up bees because that is just what they do.

Then, the mom might go back outside – only not really thinking that now they will all get to church, but thinking, “I wonder if they’ve caught that chicken yet.”

And she might look down the street and see her husband and several of her children trying to slowly hem in the chicken – only to have it pass them. She might then watch them all leap and dive and miss (time and again). And she might think about how these neighbors had workers there sprucing up their yard “just so” for several hours the day prior to this one, and she might wonder a little about the chasing of the chicken through flower beds and the like. And she might think it is a little embarrassing that her family is chasing a chicken across this yard in their Sunday best instead of sitting reverently in church in their Sunday best. But then she might remember that her neighbors can’t see because her neighbors are all at church already (or, possibly in a drunken slumber – as all neighbors who aren’t at church would certainly be).

And, in the end, she might find herself actually enjoying the sight and chuckling to herself as her husband instructs his young helpers to “make a tight circle” and “walk slowly” and, in the end, when a brave leap allows the husband to catch the squawking chicken (pretty much by its tail feathers), she might be laughing out loud.

Only, then she will see that it is about ten minutes past the hour, and the girls’ hair and dresses might not look quite so proper anymore, and the older son might be happily brushing dirt off of the knees of his pants. Still, the sight might have at least calmed the wasp-stung smallest boy. And, in the end, they might all make their way to church and walk in at the very back – only to have the very back full. So, they might make their way sheepishly up a few rows and have to climb over several people to find a place to sit, and the boy (who nobody in the congregation knows was just stung by a wasp) might start to cry loudly about needing his little cloth wrapped around his hand (even though nobody recalls which hand anymore – not even the boy).

And that is why we shouldn’t judge people at all. Mostly at all if they are late to church (or don’t go to church – because some judgmental people might say something like, “oh, they are probably all drunken and asleep anyway”). Because true, most likely that is not a scenario that would occur (heaven knows how I came up with it), but it could possibly occur, or something kind of like it, and I just thought it would be a good and important thing for us all to think about . . . 

Disturbing Postscript to the Last Post!

Those chickens! They are not worth their salt. No, they can’t be trusted at all. Unreliable. Flighty. Mike went to check on them this morning – to see how they were adjusting to their new precious eggs (as opposed to the DUDS they’d been sitting on) only to discover they’d flown the coop! Or the window well rather.

Mike had just been praising them – hinting that I could never be the mother these hens were (because when have I ever been willing to sit on my kids for 21 consecutive days? – never mind the whole carrying them inside of me as they grow larger and larger for NINE months). But who’s the good mother now?

And, actually, one of the two broody hens has half heartedly returned to her little clutch – but she doesn’t seem to be exhibiting the kind of fortitude I expect from a chicken who is serious about this hatching eggs business. The other has simply turned up her beak at these new eggs: insisting that she, for one, won’t be found raising some other hen’s little brats. Can you imagine? What foolish pride. Fine, go back to sitting on your plain old yolk and whites eggs. See if I care. Bad chicken. I now officially prefer the black hens to you – even though their front breast feathers keep going missing and I constantly avoid looking at them because they look kind of gross that way.

Charts Charts Charts

This morning Abe showed me a little behavior chart in a Bernstein Bears book that he thought we might want to try. It basically listed certain behavioral offenses and what the associated punishment would be. For example: Hitting – Sweep the floor. “Sure,” I said, “We could make a chart like that for family night.” And then I began thinking just how many charts we have had during the short span of our child rearing years. There have been chore charts and posters and jars for filling with good behavior beans. There have been treat boxes and potty charts and everything in between (those last two lines totally sounded like a Dr. Sues poem. If I was feeling adventurous I'd continue this whole post in that vein, but I am not).

I don't know why we have been so fickle with our charting. They start out strong and eventually lose steam. I won't say they have done no good. They have. We have had bouts of success with various things such as trying different foods, being unselfish, finishing daily chores. Occasionally they have curbed some poor behavior before it got too out of control. But in the end, they all sit and sit unused and are eventually tossed out.

Our most recent “chart” was me saying that I was now giving them points for each time they did something (like get dressed) the first time I asked. It worked wonderfully for about two days – kids were running to brush their teeth or put away their pajamas before I could even think to ask again. Eventually, however, the fact that points were neither being recorded nor rewarded seemed to halt the momentum we'd been gaining.

Another one that faired mediocre at best was the cup for beans. Every time they were unselfish and let the other person have their way I would add a bean to the cup – when it was filled they'd get a trip to the dollar store. It too started out great with Daisy insisting Goldie sit where she wanted, and Goldie happily handing over toys to Daisy, etc. Unfortunately no one reckoned on just how many hundreds of beans it would take to ever fill that darn cup and so, about an eighth of the way full it too lost its novelty. If it was going to be ten years before the dollar store anyway, may as well selfishly get what you wanted once in awhile.

Anyway, I am totally making this new chart with my kids come Monday night. They will love it, and for about three days I am going to have some really good kids or else a whole lot of cleaning done. I love a good chart.

The Telephone

If you ever need a listening ear, give me a call. I'm really really good at phone conversations because my kids never ever begin acting insanely the minute I get on the phone -- ever. Just to show what I'm talking about, I thought I'd copy and paste my sister Megan's email she sent me Saturday night.

. . . But seriously I just wanted to thank you now for that awesome conversation we had today. It totally rocked.

Me- Hello?
You- What are you up to?
Me- Im just coming home from.....
You- Hold on......OK so what are you doing?
Me- O I am just coming home from Pocetello we had to go get...
You- Hold on.............................. Ok so I have to tell you that Ashley's baby is the cutest thing in the universe! he is the most perfect baby and so cute and round, like if I tuck his legs in he fits into a cute egg shape.
Me- O I know I need to come down see him some how. If only I .......
You- HOLD ON...... OK well I will talk to you later. Love ya.
Me- Ok love you.

CLICK.

That just reminded me of the last time my friend Jessica called. She left me a message that went something like this, "I don't know why you won't answer your phone and talk to me. You think just because you have FIVE kids, you don't have time to answer your phone?" And then, presumably at the realization that I have five small kids, she laughed and laughed and laughed some more -- not with me, mind you, but at me.

Anyway, I think I'll go call both those girls right now -- because a simple phone conversation with me will be punishment enough for their mockery!

A Dose of Reality

I know, I know, my life is pretty much perfect here in blogging land. We are bedazzling and playing in the leaves and freeing little mice and on and on until you are all plain miserable at the perfectness of it all (with the one exception being that you can feel at least a little smug about my recent lack of smarts). We all like to post our happy times and cute times and so sometimes we forget that people have normal not so perfect times. To celebrate that, I thought I'd give you all a nice dose of reality for one evening.

Mike has had to work super late this week so the kids and I have been on our own. Tonight I decided to let them carve their pumpkins. All was going so well as I helped scrape their seeds and let them scoop them out. I took a few pictures and was even thinking thoughts to the tune of, "Who came up with carving pumpkins? That was only the best idea ever. And why are my kids so darn cute and good?" Goldie happily instructed me how to carve her pumpkin and was seeming pleased with the results. Penny wandered about trying to eat off of the giant spoons we were using to get rid of pumpkin seeds. Daisy carved her pumpkin quite expertly with not so much as an ounce of help from me (though I wasn't altogether certain she should have the knife). Abe worked on carving the face he had painstakingly drawn on his pumpkin. All was quite perfect.

Then . . . Abe cut off one of his pumpkin's teeth. He immediately began to despair that all was lost, but I quickly found toothpicks and promised all would be well once we stuck it back in. He then wanted me to finish the job of cutting. Unfortunately he had drawn very tightly spaced detailed little things which made cutting them out nearly impossible. Soon I had severed another tooth -- more assurances of the toothpicks sticking things back in place were followed. We made it through this just as Penny decided things were no fun anymore and began to whine. Abe insisted I cut out the "beard" on his pumpkin -- which was pretty much touching the mouth and the bottom of the pumpkin. Careful as I tried to be, in a moment or two of minute error, the pumpkin's lower jaw was completley severed! (I can't type that now with out chuckling, but at the time it was the last straw). The reattached teeth now unattached themselves and Abe began to cry and insist that he didn't even want a pumpkin. About this point Penny took up serious serious scream crying -- yanking and pulling on me. I tried to calm her (though I was getting frustrated) as I vainly told Abe we could still fix it or we could do a totally new pumpkin tomorrow -- even as he grumped off to the other room his life and any fun of the evening apparently ruined. The girls were begging for candles and Penny was now hysterical as I tried with mounting frustration to fix the disaster of a pumpkin and call hopeless reassurances (hampered by Penny's cries) to Abe.

By the end, as I forced Abe to come take a picture with his makeshift pumpkin (jaw loosely attached -- one tooth lost for good), tried to calm Penny who had really no apparent reason for her total and sudden insanity, and did my best to scoop up pumpkin pulp and newspaper (one handed due to Penny)-- dropping half of it all over the floor because the newspaper had disolved, I am not sure whether I was ready to start crying myself or simply start screaming.

gg

Still, after a few tense moments I determined to try and salvage the miserable evening by going ahead with our planned tradition of cider and doughnuts. I warmed cider as I tried to get the furious Penny into jammies so I could just put her to bed. Abe sat gloomily by needing and not getting my attention. I set the girls' cups next to them saying, "It's very hot, wait til I get you a spoon so you can sip it. . . ." I turned my back to lift Penny from my bed where I'd left her only to hear a sputter and then cry of anguish as Goldie apparently tried to gulp her cider (oblivious to my words), spilled it everywhere in her shock and began to sob.

uu

Anyway, it didn't get too much worse after that because I put everyone to bed post haste. But, amidst all the joy and fun there are plenty of those moments sprinkled in. It is alright. Even as I sit here now with the sound of Abe turning pages in his room (I can hear that over the baby monitor -- which means he is under his covers with a flashlight reading instead of sleeping), I think (well, partly I think, "How am I supposed to handle another baby?"), but another very real part of me thinks, "I am grateful I am a mom. My kid's are great kids. That wasn't really so bad and even almost makes me chuckle now -- more often I need to remember that I will shake my head and laugh later. Life is pretty good."

But I want to be a genius!!

In yesterday’s post I made reference to The Chinese Water Torture. (Side note to Jana: I don’t know why or how Troy was able to drop water in your eye, but he had it all wrong. My brother taught us that your head was put in such a position that it couldn’t move. Then a small but consistent drop of water would be allowed to land in the exact same spot on your forehead for hours – perhaps you are placed under a leaky faucet? - until, presumably, you go insane. I don’t know if the Chinese have ever used such a torture, but if they have, I must say – horrible though it may be – I would have to choose it over most other tortures).

So, back to what I was saying: Yesterday I referred to The Chinese Water Torture . . . only I called it The Chinese Water “Torcher.” Huh? What is that word? Like a hot hot thing? A torcher? Sigh. Mike fixed it for me – very carefully of course so as to in no way insinuate that I am anything but brilliant. But man, I might be not so bright after all. That makes me mad. It isn’t usually spelling so much, but look at my posts. Have you ever seen such awful haphazard punctuation, etc. in your life? I like to write with . . . ummm . . . animation? Something. Anyway, that is tricky to punctuate and you would have to wake up pretty early in the morning to pull one over on the old “writing like a crazy person talking.” I mean, when do I really legitimately use all of these: -- and these: . . . and when I end something crazy in parenthesis that ends a sentence but doesn’t end the sentence I was writing do I use a period in the parenthesis? What if my sentence ends when the parenthesis do? Can I really just throw commas in anytime I feel like a little pause? I know Kimberly and Gayle are probably shaking their heads in an “It’s hopeless, Nancy.” sort of way (did I punctuate that wrong?) What about that? Ahhh! Because they know the answers and one answer would be to not write like a rambling maniac, I guess. Sigh again. I don’t want to seem stupid. I need a Harbrace Manual. Only, Mike was trying to help me figure out how to punctuate some awful sentence once by looking online at information and as far as we could tell, there were no circumstances when such a sentence ever should exist to punctuate. Anyway, this is the worst. Now you will all begin paying close attention to my mistakes. I need a post editor. Anyone up for the job? That way I can appear brilliant with out having to actually be brilliant! And really, that is good enough for me because I don't really care if I'm a genius so long as people think I am. Appearances are always my utmost priority.

Bad Tooth Fairy

My mission, here on my blog, it is beginning to seem, is to bolster the confidence of other mothers by giving them one example after another of my motherly failings -- refusing to allow my children to exercise their creative minds in crafts, never making a princess skirt for my daughter, etc. Well, if seeing my weaknesses helps just one of you out there to think, "I guess I'm not such a bad mother after all," then my purpose is served. (Don't worry, my kids are resilient, they'll be fine). Anway, here is one more instance of my being a less than perfect mother.

Daisy lost a tooth on Saturday. It was her first and she’d been dying to lose a tooth, so we made quite a fuss over it. Then, on Tuesday, Abe lost a tooth. It was his seventh. I thought we’d seemed excited enough, but apparently not. That evening he came to me and questioned, “Mom, why do people get so excited about some people losing a tooth and not so much about others?” I tried to cheer him up and tell him we were excited but we just thought he was more used to losing teeth by now or something. Still, you’d think after my son hinting that he was feeling a bit left out of toothy attention, we would not have let things end up in such a manner that he would have cause to tell me the next morning, “Well, the tooth fairy didn’t come last night.” -- which is exactly what he did have cause to tell me because no, the tooth fairy did not come. She forgot all about the lonely, hardly paid attention to, seventh tooth of my son. Man, bad mom. Still, last night the tooth fairy did leave him this dollar: Yah, it’s a shirt. Sweeeeet.


P.S. I am not such a bad mom now anyway because by performing my motherly duty of complaining loudly that I couldn’t make my daughter a princess skirt, I inspired the pity of a very wonderful sister who sent this in the mail (along with a letter saying it was from her fairy godmother and telling her how she was a real princess up in heaven, etc. It made me cry. Nice.):

Bad bad mom!!

This here “skirt” pretty much proves that I am the worst mom in the world. Mike bought me a sewing machine several months ago. From the start, Daisy begged for a princess dress. I told her that might be beyond me but assured her we could make a princess skirt just as soon as we got some material. Then, just to try the new machine out, I sewed the rough shape of a “skirt” on the only material we had in the house. It wasn’t really meant to be the “princess skirt” or even a skirt at all really – I mean look at it. No hem, no elastic waist, no glitter, nothin’. Sadly, after several months of me saying we’d make her skirt “soon,” she gave up. That alone wouldn’t have made me feel so bad, but she’s done it with such cheerful resignation. She somehow manages to actually keep this “skirt” on for hours. She tells everyone that it is her princess skirt and someday we may even sew some cute things on it. She happily claims that she’s all set to be a princess for Halloween now (though she did decide to at least make her own very sad little paper excuse for a crown). Seriously, what kind of a mother am I!!?! Someone, make that poor girl a pretty skirt!