On Your Marks, Get Set… TORTURE!

A while ago, DH showed the girls how to play an old snowboarding game that’s on our XBox. All of a sudden, they are obsessed with snowboarding.

All of their toys have caught the snowboarding bug, too. At random moments during the day O3 will have a Little People horse on a playing card, or her soft doll standing on a small book, or some miscellaneous little puppy perched on a plastic dish, and she’ll yell, “Ready? Set? SNOWBOARD!!!!” The toy will slide around the floor/table/countertop on its makeshift board and do all sorts of tricks. The girls have contests, races and snowboarding games with each other. And, of course, they beg to play “the snowboard game” on the XBox.

Tonight, in the bathtub, all the toys in the tub received their very own brand-spanking-new snowboards (foam bath shapes make excellent boards, apparently). There was only one small problem: we were in the tub. And everyone knows you can’t snowboard in the tub.

Imagine, had you not known the detail of these first three paragraphs (like my husband, who didn’t realize that his snowboarding video game had carried over to today’s play), and you hear two little girls in the bathtub shouting:

“Ready? Set? WATERBOARD!!!!”

You can see how that could be a tad confusing.

The Afterlife Needs a Better Ad Campaign

My 8-year-old niece was here visiting the other day. She told us:

“Well, people grow old and then they die. And then they go to heaven. And then they have a… well, they have a deadly life.”

On a completely unrelated topic, S5 was building something with Legos.

“This is my standing-up volcano,” she announced, setting her triangle-shaped construct on the windowsill. “Don’t touch it, or it will interrupt, and kill everyone!”

Well, if we are Girls, Interrupted, then at least we’ll have a deadly life in heaven.

A Gift for Every Occasion

Here’s an idea that took care of at least two of the 9,320,235,412 pieces of art the kids have generated thus far:

1. We started off with a watercolor painting that the girls did on regular old copy paper. I laminated each painting with laminating sheets, cut the laminated pages in half, and creased each half to make a “cover” for a book.

2. I cut some more copy paper – about four sheets for each book – just slightly smaller than the cover, then creased and stapled them inside the cover to make the “pages”.

3. Since the girls were using these particular ones, I covered the staples with clear packing tape to help prevent them from getting scratched. Et voila! A sweet little book for them to write in or give away as a gift.

They each gave one to Grandma for her birthday. I am still patting myself on the back for (a) coming up with such a clever gift that is both sentimental and functional, and (b) getting rid of some of the kids’ artwork without feeling guilty about it. Score!

Better Luck Next Time

The girls got a hold of some yarn and were playing with it.  This is not new.  Normally, they like to wrap the yarn around and around and around a toy, until the toy is wearing a sort of fiber-fat-suit.  Or they will tie it around a toy, then tie that toy to another.  Or – most famously – they will tie it to a piece of furniture.  I should mention that a “tie” involves about fifty overhand knots, which are not terribly hard to undo but can become very, very time consuming.

Today’s adventure was slightly less benign.  It involved tying yarn around wrists and ankles, and running, and there were possibly staircases involved; and I could (with my keen mother’s future-telling sense) forsee such play disintegrating into something rather hazardous and potentially involving trips to emergency.

“O3,” I admonished, since she was closest and in earshot, “this is not a good idea.  You girls could get very hurt.  Be smart about how you’re playing with the yarn.”

Without missing a beat, she replied:

“Tomorrow, I’m going to be smart.  Today, I am playing this game with S5.”

Summer Ritual

Every summer since 2001, except the year S5 was born, I have had a garage sale. One year I had more than one, since I helped my mom with hers. It’s become a sort of summer routine to clear things out of the house/attic/garage/basement and try to pawn them off sell them to someone else who might get some use out of them. It’s part of that whole “reduce, reuse, recycle” thing. You understand.

I really didn’t have much fodder for snarky commentary this year. Folks did not line up like vultures hours before the sale began. No one showed up hours after the sign went down in the afternoon. No one really had much to say except annoyingly nice things like “thank you”, “good morning”, “boy, it’s a hot one” and “good luck with your sale”. I sold a lot of things that had been accumulating, made a little bit of money, and that was that. Ho, hum.

S5 really got into the garage sale thing today, though. While I was setting up the tables, she went into the girls’ room and brought out some items of her own, and then proceeded to mark them for sale.

And then, without any prompting or actually any involvement at all on my part, she proceeded to set them out on the table. She was so confident and purposeful that I made it a point to give her full rein on this little project.

Of course I couldn’t help but sneak out afterwards to see what she had come up with. It was very clever. Very clever, indeed.

In case you’re not sure, that says “5 CENTS DOOLL”.  A bargain, apparently due to the fact that she is without clothes.

Next she brought out this fella:

followed by a little giraffe:

and, finally, this guy:

Yeah, I’m not completely sure what her pricing strategy was, but she was so proud of her garage sale contribution that I left everything exactly as she had it. And, when someone came and offered to buy her giraffe and DOOLL and pup (for approximately twenty five cents, or whatever this very kind, indulgent woman had in her pocket at the time), S5 handled the transaction all on her own, and seemed very satisfied at having entered and mastered the realm of casual retail.

I may just put her in charge of the whole damn thing next year.

Daddy’s Girl

We are still in Florida for another few days, and my older daughter is missing her Daddy.

It’s quite sweet.  A few nights ago, she just gave a plaintive, “I miss Daddy,” in a soft voice.  But last night after our evening telephone call home, she literally burst into tears and sobbed completely for several minutes.  Part of it was tiredness, but she is old enough now to have part of her mind focused on present circumstances while another part lingers over memories and other places.  It is a sign of growing up.  

O2 misses her dad, too, but she’s distracted enough not to dwell on it as such.  S4, though, is really and truly her Daddy’s girl.

Hip Hop

We’re enjoying a pleasant Indian summer here before winter starts in earnest. Today, the girls took their chalks outside and made a hopscotch game.

I helped them with numbers 1-12, but S4 complained that “that’s not what I wanted!” Apparently, she wanted the game to go all the way to 20. And so she [who is so annoyingly like her mother] took the chalk and finished the job herself.

The girls don’t have a complete grasp of hopscotch’s more intricate rules and regulations, like the thing about not stepping on the square that your rock lands on. But that’s okay. I never got all the rules, either.

O2 got in on the action, too.

At least they both play by the same rules, which cuts down on the squabbles.

Seems like just last week we were learning how to hold crayons, and now we’re drawing hopscotch games. My heart hurts when I think about how fast they’re growing up. But I’m also terribly proud of them, too.

Singularly

My youngest demonstrates her grasp of plural and singular.

O2:  I love you, Mama.

Me: Oh, I love you too, Punkins.

O2: I not Punkins!  I just one punkin.

Me: You’re just one?

O2: No, I not one.  I TWO.

This is what too much Amelia Bedelia will do to your family.  You’ve been warned…

Move Along, Nothing To See Here

My kids and I just finished our first week of homeschool. It went pretty well.

S4 can read now. She can also write her name and most of “Nim’s Island” (but the latter only in black indelible ink on a kitchen wall).

O2 can count to 20 and recognizes both upper- and lower-case letters.

So I figure we can quit until about second grade, right?  (Hey, I don’t know if my kitchen walls can handle kindergarten!)

Martyrdom

I found this post in my drafts folder and have no idea why I never published it. It was written earlier this spring, when I was going through a little bit of a funk. Things are much cheerier now (which probably has something to do with the fact that we’re leaving on Friday for four days of island life), but it’s still very kinda pertinent.

~

The mundane routines of domestic life leaves one with lots of time to think. It doesn’t leave you much time to do things you like, but you certainly have lots of time to think about what you might do if you could. This sometimes gets me a little down in the dumps. Sometimes, I really feel like a martyr.

Maybe that’s sort of an oxymoron, calling myself a martry. I mean, aren’t martyrs supposed to bear their crosses without complaint? (Here I am, complaining.) We’re supposed to martyrize them after they’ve gone to their final resting places, not while they’re in the middle of martyr business.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my mother, and what she was like when she was in my spot- my spot being married, having young kids, enduring loads of domestic responsibility, and all with no gainful (read: taxable) income. She was a really good martyr. (I mean that as a compliment, really!) The one thing I remember about my mom, who is happily alive in central Florida, was her selflessness. My mom was always cleaning up things, making things to eat, waiting on my dad (ugh), taking care of us kids, blabbitty-blabbitty-blah. She never had much help, other than free babysitting services from the grandparents. To top it off, she never got to take much care of herself, short of putting her hair in hot rollers each and every single stinking morning of my life until my dad died. (She promptly went out and got a cut, color and style the day after he was buried. Good for her!)

While we were growing up, mom did it all without complaint, which -I think – is one of the secrets of martyrdom. Oh. Well, then, count me out. I complain quite a bit. I am complaining in this very post, in case you didn’t notice.

I do have some of my mom’s classic martyr-mom traits. When we make breakfast in the morning, I’m still frying up the pancakes while everyone else is eating. By the time I sit down, it’s to limp bacon, an empty egg bowl, and tepid coffee. Most days, I sit for just a minute before hopping back up to get a jump on the dishes, too. After meals, dad and the kids are usually playing in the other room, or wander off to do their own things while I clean up. I often feel sort of sidelined, like I’m watching life from inside the television set or something. Every once in a while, I get really down about the loneliness and tedium that is the life of a full-time homemaker with young kids.

I know how lucky I am to be here, with a happy marriage, a healthy family and a nice home. I have far more things to feel good about than to complain about. This knowledge usually just adds guilt on top of the other emotions, which isn’t helpful. But I think mothers should be allowed to feel some of the negative aspects of the journey. We are human, and yes, it’s sometimes disheartening to have an endless amount of washing, cooking, cleaning, etc., waiting to be done, with little appreciation and even less acknowledgement for all the hard work. But it makes my heart full to see my family benefiting from the fruit of my labors. I love it when my drama-queen DD1 takes a plate of food, her eyes as big as biscuits, and exclaims, “Thank you, Mama!” I love hearing my husband tickling the girls in the other room and listening to them squeal as they get their bellies swizzled. I love the homeyness of it all, the family-ness of this routine.

Besides, someone has to do the dishes and the laundry, right?

Speaking of which….