Mother Mary

by | Aug 16, 2018 | Life, Parenting

The other night I told my daughter we were going to church in the morning because it was a holy day of obligation. When she argued that it was a weekday and not a church day I told her we were going to celebrate the virgin Mary. I explained that we have all kinds of celebrations for Jesus but just this one day for his mother who was so important. She asked “will there be cake?” I guess it’s not a proper celebration without cake in her mind. I almost lied just to get her to comply, but I knew that would somehow lead to me actually purchasing a cake, so I stuck with the truth.

When I shared this story with my husband his reaction was “I’ll go to church with you if there’s cake!” Now he is sending me photos of cake ideas. He’s going to be really surprised when he comes home to find 24 cupcakes with rosaries on them. He forgets it is summer and I am home with a small child all day – we have nothing but time. So for anyone who didn’t celebrate the Assumption with a little cake after mass – you are doing it wrong.

 

Hello?

by | Jul 13, 2018 | Life

Photo Credit – Nitro Circus

Last week my parents informed me that Erik Estrada – you know, the guy from Chips – was planning to jump a building in Las Vegas on a motorcycle. My first thought was “I wonder if VH1 has some new pseudo-celebrity series that is airing this”. It’s been a little while since some D list celebrity has had a turn in a boxing ring, rehab or semi-scripted vacation that has aired on cable. Danny Bona-douchebag must be making a living at a drive-thru somewhere. My second thought was “I wonder what the insurance coverage is on something like that”. Unfortunately that is just how my brain works. I’m going to go out on a limb and speculate that my Mom obtained this information from watching Fox News.

A few days later I learned that the exhibition in Las Vegas was actually Travis Pastrana beating some of Evil Knievel’s records. I, of course, learned this while stalking Carey Hart’s Instagram account. It’s a good thing I have social media to report news of the non-fake variety. And of course that obsession with heavily tattooed smoking hot motocross guys helps.

When I first received the information about Erik Estrada’s big comeback to showbiz I didn’t think much about whether or not it was legit. As with a lot of information I get from my parents, I gave it a 50/50 shot of being accurate. You see, this is not the first time data has been lost in translation. My dad has left many newspaper clippings over the years about bands he thinks I like or concerts I attended that made the news (often by the amount of arrests). I determined the old man just didn’t know me at all when he left an article about Nickelback on the kitchen table. I almost disowned him right then and there. Over the years he has informed me of more dead musicians than I can count, and almost all of the names he gave me are still alive and well.

Receiving information from him is similar to playing a game of telephone with a three year old. Every now and then he throws something really bizarre at me that I know can’t be true. Like that time he told me Sammy Hagar was the new lead singer of Van Halen. Unfortunately this was one of the few he got right. He also told me some reality television star who bankrupted six companies was running for president. I wasn’t buying it. Once again, he was correct.

My mom is not a whole lot better than my dad, but her misinformation is usually about someone we know. She sometimes gets my cousins confused and I think the one who is pregnant is getting divorced and the one who is divorcing got herself knocked up. I end up congratulating the soon to be single and dropping hints about a great workout plan for the prego. At these times I would feel embarrassed if I were capable of feeling that emotion.

So congratulations to Travis Pastrana for crushing it. And congratulations to Erik Estrada for… well I guess for still being a household name. My parents think Ponch is up to some pretty exciting things these days.

Lake Life

by | Jul 7, 2018 | Life, Screwing Things Up

The view is worth the work

My parents bought a house on a lake seven years ago. Each year we seem to spend a little more time out there and each year my dad somehow acquires more toys for the water. He started out with a couple of wave runners and started adding rafts he could pull behind the wave runners as my daughter got a little older. Then he finally bought himself a boat. And of course he had to buy a bigger raft to pull behind the boat. My mom acquires her own water toys yearly, mostly of the floating pineapple and alligator variety. It now takes about three hours to get all of the water toys ready for us to use for an hour. My dad actually pulls a cart behind his riding lawnmower stacked 6′ high with every type of flotation device imaginable. But we love it.

My dad and the seven year old are the only ones who drive the boat. My dad is the only one who parks the boat because getting it pulled onto the boat lift can be challenging. Sometimes it takes my dad a few efforts to get there. Because of this he usually loads up the boat with enough people and provisions to stay out on the lake for awhile.

The other day my parents had a party for the Fourth of July. All of my cousins and their kids were there and most of them wanted to go rafting. We jumped in the boat and took a bunch of the littles for a ride around the lake. We went around and around, trading places on the four person bouncing couch until I had a permanent kink in my neck and the youngest was ready to head to shore. When we pulled back in we pulled the boat up onto the lift but didn’t raise it, since we would be heading back out. It had been hard to push the boat off and the front end was far enough out of the water that it wasn’t going anywhere. Or so we thought… 

My dad and husband headed into the house for some food as all of the other adults hung around on the deck and in the yard. The kids all took off to play some lawn games and take a rest from being in the water. Ten minutes later I heard someone yelling “you’re losing your boat! Your boat is floating away!” I looked down to the water to see my dad’s boat bobbing in the water about fifteen feet from the dock. It was in between two docks headed right for a bunch of women and children floating around on their little blow up unicorns and flamingos. Luckily my parents’ neighbor and one of his friends were right there and were quickly pushing my dad’s boat back toward the lift. On a side note – I’m fairly convinced that my parents’ neighbor likes our family so much because we are always ready to turn him into the hero of the day. He is fairly consistently bailing us out of some lake dilemma.

Of course this happened when the two people who would know what to do were nowhere to be found. All of the other guys were not even wearing bathing suits and nobody who was outside could be of much help. So, it was apparently going to be up to me to get the boat back with the help of the neighbors. I ran into the water and started pulling the front of the boat onto the lift as the neighbor pushed from the back. Luckily the boat had just started floating away when they caught it so there wasn’t far to go, but we still had to get it back onto the lift.

Luckily the big guns were there. My family has been calling me “the big guns” for a year. I got the name when three guys were trying to push the boat onto the lift last year with little luck. I walked up and said “get out of the way and let the big guns get it” as they all laughed at me. They shut up a minute later when I successfully pulled the boat onto the lift from the front. Truth be told, my ass did most of the work. I pulled on the front of the boat while sitting down into the water. It just sounds a lot better to be called “big guns” than “big ass”.

On this day, we were pretty much in the same position as the day I got my nickname. And I got myself in the same position as before and pulled as I sat back into the water. My ass once again did the work and my arms got the credit. Sorry ass, that’s the way it goes. I was at the tail end of pulling the boat onto the lift when my dad walked out onto the dock after someone had told him what was going on outside. He got in the boat after we had it in position and raised it out of the water a little bit so it would stay secured.

When the littles came running back to the beach to go for another ride my dad suggested we take the wave runners and pull the smaller rafts. I thought it was a pretty good idea considering my guns were done for the day. The kids like the small rafts even more anyway since they fly all over the place and fall off. I opted not to drive for this round of rafting since I had already run into the neighbors’ dock the day before after not being able to find reverse. I have very much secured my position of brawn and not brains in this operation.

You would think that after seven years of part-time lake living we would all be a little better at it. To date we have almost sunk a boat, almost lost a boat, got a boat stuck on the lift, been unable to get a boat on the lift and I have crashed into two docks and run over my dad with a wave runner. Every time I am at the lake I feel a little bit like Eva Gabor in Green Acres, but somehow that water keeps luring me back.

In honor of my big Irish Catholic family I of course wrote this while listening to Dropkick Murphys

Girlfixer

by | Jun 21, 2018 | Being Awesome, Life

My daughter was looking through some of my old yearbooks last weekend. As I flipped the pages and looked at pictures of my class, I was a little shocked at how few of my classmates I remembered. I was also shocked that when I saw the picture of one particular girl I was brought right back to being a twelve year old girl and wanting to rip someone’s head off. Not so shockingly, it wasn’t even the girl, it was her mother.

I went to a very small school. There were less than 15 students in my grade and most of us had been in school together since we were very young. One girl that I was good friends with wore glasses the depth of the bottom of a glass soda bottle. Of course when some of the other girls teased her the words “Coke bottle” were often used. These are the words that I heard come out of the mouth of a girl we will call “Judy” that initiated my feelings of ill will toward her mother.

Judy was the kind of girl who defined herself by her looks. Her entire self worth was wrapped up in the emblem on her popped collared shirts and pink headbands. She spent more time in front of a mirror than a book and her school supplies consisted of glosses and powders rather than leads and paper. Looking back, I can’t really blame her for this, it was how she had been conditioned by her mother who was a walking Ralph Lauren advertisement. I think Judy’s mom was pretty, but it was hard to tell what she really looked like under all the mascara and hairspray. Sometimes her insides showed through which is exactly what kept her in the pageant runner up category. She would never be beautiful with all of her insides making an appearance like they did. She was full of gossip and snarky comments. It was no wonder Judy only felt good about herself when she was making others feel badly about themselves.

Judy never picked on me the way she did my friend. I think she knew better than to enter a battle of wits unarmed. Twelve years of smart assery had left me a relative wit warrior. Having an overly healthy self-esteem, her words would have been like paper airplanes attacking me. I threw grenades. And after she called my friend “Coke bottle” that day, I threw a pretty hefty grenade. I don’t recall my exact words but the message was that even the strongest braces were not going to fix her enormous buck teeth. Although I was a skilled verbal swords woman I was also a prepubescent girl so my natural reaction was to go directly for the jugular. She had no comeback for me other than to scream “BITCH!” which was, unfortunately for her, overheard by a nun walking down the hall. We were both taken to the headmistress’s office and our parents were called. I don’t recall any punishment. I do remember that our mothers had a telephone conversation that night.

In that conversation Judy’s bumbleheaded mother informed my mom that Judy was forced to call me a bitch. My mom asked if I had held her down and made her recite the word. I don’t think Judy’s mom understood what “personal responsibility” meant when my mom used the words and she certainly didn’t understand what my mom was getting at when she was trying to find out how I had coerced poor little Judy into swearing at me. Judy’s mom finally let her insides show and said “maybe if you stayed at home with your daughter these things wouldn’t happen…” My mom is a better person than I am. Where I would have said “maybe if you didn’t spend so much time with your daughter she wouldn’t know what a bitch was”, my mom remained calm and continued the conversation until they finally agreed to disagree and hung up. My mom has told me many times that there is no fixing stupid.

I know those words cut my mom. I know she often felt guilty about being a working mom in a land of stay at home moms. I know this because I used that guilt as a weapon on many occasions. Again, I was a prepubescent girl so my natural reaction was to go directly for the jugular – mother or not. Plus, I was kind of a manipulative little asshole. Those words actually provoked me to be a little more like my mom. I was pretty certain that Judy’s mom truly was a bitch and it was probably because she was miserable with her life decisions. I had always thought that my rebelliousness came from my dad, but I realized then that my mom had been bucking the system my whole life.

Love Cats

by | Jun 15, 2018 | Life, Parenting

Mommy’s Little Monster

Every child in my daughter’s class got a new pet last year. This is what I hear at least. I know of at least three that did in fact get a dog in the past year. But I’m pretty sure the majority of the remaining twenty two first graders did not get a new pet. Unfortunately, this is the one area where my kid wants to be just like the other kids and now she wants a pet.

She initially asked for a puppy but quickly decided that a kitten would be a better choice based on the ease of poop retrieval. We went through all of the things she would have to do to care for a kitten and she feels strongly that she is capable of doing them. I told her that she would need help that her dad and I are not willing to give right now but she was adamant that she could do it all herself. I learned quickly at the start of this conversations that all of her feelings about this subject were strong – vehement even. She is seven, so most of her thoughts and feelings are life changing. She is pretty sure at this moment her life is incomplete because there is no kitten in it.

I asked her how she would get her kitten to the vet, and asked if she would be driving herself there. She replied “Of course not. I’m a child. I can’t drive!” I thought this was a good place to end the discussion, but she proceeded to list the other ways she could get to the vet. My daughter may not be able to drive, but next time I leave her at school I can ask why she didn’t just call an Uber because she is clearly familiar with how to get a ride. Uber was one of five ways she listed to get to the vet. I didn’t even want to ask how she planned to pay for the veterinary services.

The problem with having a clever child is they have an answer for everything. She badgered me for three hours. She negotiated, cried, made promises that she was clearly not capable of keeping and batted her eyelashes furiously until I finally told her to go ask her dad what he thought. I immediately hid in the closet and read a book. She may be clever, but she is also afraid to go upstairs by herself. I had approximately fifteen minutes of silence. When we reconvened she told me that my husband had told her she should ask her grandparents to get a kitten at their house since she spends so much time there. The problem with this is she could actually wear them down or talk them into it and eventually the kitten would end up in my house. This was not a good plan.

I reminded my daughter that we had a cat when she was little. Said cat had actually been a resident in our house for years before my daughter was born, and I was pretty confident that she would be evicted the second we brought our newest member of the family home. Mommy’s Little Monster – Monster for short was an adorable little ball of neurotic fury. The cat was very clearly insane and very attached to me. Go figure. We were pretty sure she would completely lose her shit when we brought our daughter home, but somehow she didn’t. She actually mellowed for awhile until our baby became a toddler and was able to give chase. She finally turned on her after one too many close calls with sticky fingers and a tail and we had to find Monster a new home.

Monster getting her head stuck in a glass – a weekly occurrence

I thought some stories about all of the mischievous things Monster did would persuade my daughter that a kitten was not a good idea. That cat was truly a pain in the butt. I shared how she used to break half of the ornaments on the Christmas tree every year, and how she knocked over my water glass in the middle of the night while trying to take a drink. I shared how she attacked the paper in the printer and sent faxes by lying on the speed dial buttons at 3 am, and how she tried to escape the house every time we opened the door. I told her about the time Monster got trapped in a plastic grocery bag and ran herself stupid around the house until she got stuck behind our bed. When we finally got her out, we found that she had literally scared the shit out of herself and had been bouncing around in a bag full of her own poop for ten minutes. We had to take her into the basement and give her a bath in the washtub after cutting the bag off her body. Everyone involved came out of that experience with new scratches and teeth marks. Instead of being horrified by this, my seven year old found it all hilarious. I had forgotten that one of her favorite activities is terrorizing me, so all of this was incredibly appealing, not appalling.

Unfortunately, I think this is a conversation that will continue all summer. I can’t act surprised, I have seen it coming since she told me about her friends and their new pets throughout the year. She is at the age that pets are entering the picture for a lot of her peers and she is hearing about the fun they are having. I guess it could be worse. Her friend’s mom is pregnant. She could be asking for a baby sibling!

 

 

 

Mother of the Year Part Eleven Million

by | Jun 5, 2018 | Life, Parenting

I finally did it – the thing every parent dreads and hopes never happens to them. I forgot to pick up my kid from school. Actually, her grandparents didn’t pick her up from school, but it was my fault. She had a noon dismissal on Friday and I didn’t let my parents know so they showed up to pick her up at her normal dismissal time and found an empty parking lot. I actually called my mother at 1:30 to remind her that they were picking up at 3 that day. My poor child had already been sitting around for an hour and a half by that time. She was probably already four shades of pink from the hot weather and sun scorching her skin. I had, of course, forgotten to apply sunscreen in the morning.

Now, my seven year old has been able to say “I told you so!” repeatedly about this. The day I abandoned her at school was a special day. It was Conge – which is a year end celebration that has been a tradition at the school since I was a student 500 years ago. There is always a noon dismissal on this day. We actually had a discussion about the dismissal time the night before and I consulted both my calendar and an e-mail about the uniform requirement for that day. Neither of these references said that she should be picked up at noon. My daughter argued that she would be coming home at noon. She was excited about spending the extra time with her grandparents until I told her that she was not coming home early. We went back and forth about it for at least ten minutes until I finally said “if you had a noon dismissal it would be in my calendar, and there would be an e-mail about it.” Right? Wrong.

Pre-abandonment

I even attended Conge. I showed up at 10:30 to take some pictures and left right after the primary school’s lip sync performance ended at 11:15. Had I stayed until the end, I would have been able to take my kid home with me, like every other parent in attendance. But I had things to do and bolted as soon as her feet left the stage. I think I score some extra bad bonus points for this move. It would only be worse if I actually drove through the pick up line and waved before leaving.

But the icing on the bad parent cake is that I didn’t even pack her a lunch. I pack this child a lunch every day. She has hot lunch maybe four times a year even though she begs for it weekly. On this day I told her she could have hot lunch since she was spending the night at her grandparents’ house and I didn’t want her lunchbox to sit for the night. The problem with this is since dismissal was immediately after Conge, there was no hot lunch. All of the kids who stayed in the extended day program brought their lunch. So basically all of the kids went to the extended day room and opened up their lunch boxes to eat. All of the kids except mine who had no lunch. Luckily, she missed most of this because she was standing around outside waiting for her ride that never arrived. It was after all the other kids had gone that a teacher escorted her down to the extended day room to join the other kids. At some point someone gave her a bagel when they realized her negligent mom had neglected to send food.

She looks like this when I pick her up too!

Luckily she was able to hang out in the extended day program for a few hours which she has been asking to attend for months. She is the kind of kid who looks at the bright side so this was the first thing she said to my parents when they picked her up. The next thing she said is that she was worried that something had happened to them. Of course something must have happened for her grandparents to leave her. If it was my day to pick her up it wouldn’t have surprised her at all.

Taking a cue from my daughter, I am also looking at the bright side of this. Technically, I wasn’t the one who left her at school for three hours last week. Her grandparents are the ones who picked her up late. Even though it was 100% my fault, I am pinning this one on them and everyone seems to be going along with my little act. My mom feels so guilty every time it is brought up that my daughter may get her own car out of this before she is even in middle school. Most parents would feel just as badly about this as my mom does. I am not most parents. I am saving all of the guilt for when I forget to pick her up from college or show up late to her graduation.

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