by Jen Logan | Jul 26, 2019 | Parenting, Screwing Things Up
At the beginning of the summer I had all kinds of plans for my child. Some of the plans were just for fun, like spend a day at the zoo and check out the zip lining place that we’ve been meaning to check out for two summers. Other plans were more practical, like teach my kid how to tie her damn shoes already. Sometimes I am amazed at my laziness as a parent when it comes to the little things. My husband likes to remind me that our child has been cooking since she was four and reading a year later. But I still cringe when I think about the things she can’t do, like tie her shoes, ride a bike unassisted or roller skate.
As part of some unseen action plan, my dad took mini-me out to buy a bike last weekend. I’m pretty sure this is his way of telling me I am slacking as a parent. He bought her a baseball glove last year and a scooter the year before. This is also coming from the man who put a fur hat on me as a helmet when I was a toddler and padded me up to shoot hockey pucks at me when I could hardly walk, so I’m not going to read too much into it. She got a pretty little white Trek with lime green flowers on it. Her last bike was also white and looked as new the day we got rid of it as the day we bought it. She walked it around the block on occasion and spent many hours packing and unpacking the cute little purse on the handlebars, but even with the training wheels on it, she was terrified to ride. When we forced her to go for a trip around the block she stopped at every corner dismounting her bike to turn it. She was afraid turning the handlebars more than a millimeter would topple the whole package and she didn’t want to get run over by her own bike.
She is behaving much the same with her new, bigger bike. She sits in the driveway ringing the bell and walks it up and down the sidewalk. At least now she actually straddles the bike while walking it instead of standing next to it like it’s a puppy she’s taking for a stroll. Her dad had to cover the pedals with washcloths and duct tape to prevent them from scratching her legs. I’m not entirely convinced she will ride the bike even after seeing her balance on it while coasting for about 50 feet. All I can picture is the episode of Friends where Phoebe is finally learning to ride a bike as a 30 year old.
My child can be great at 100 things but the 3 things she can’t do will take a sledge hammer to my self-esteem. I feel like I am a total failure as a mother when my kid can’t get the little bunny to go through the hole with her shoe laces. Or maybe the bunny is supposed to go around a tree. Or maybe it’s just bunny ears that are supposed to be tied together. I’m not even sure, which is probably part of the problem. Regardless, my kid might still be wearing Minnie Mouse velcro shoes in high school if I don’t get it together and teach this kid how to loop, swoop and pull. This is the stuff that keeps me up at night and keeps my therapist in business.
After realizing summer is already half over, I have been attacking my to do list like a sniper in a bell tower mowing down college students. I have been knocking off trips to the zoo and the movies while reading multiplication tables out loud and picking up books from the library. We spent the morning at our local historical museum where we walked from building to building with no indoor plumbing or electricity and antiques like chamber pots and looms. In a log cabin a woman dressed as a pilgrim demonstrated a toy that essentially taught children the motion to milk a cow. It was a little monkey that climbed two ropes when you pulled them. As my daughter struggled to get the monkey all the way to the top all I could picture was myself lounging on a hay-stuffed couch crying to a pioneer therapist about how my family would probably starve because my daughter was never going to master her milking skills. Luckily there were no sheep shaving games or carrot harvesting challenges or we probably would have been asked to leave due to gross incompetence. We would never have survived as settlers.
I have decided that I need to put a few things on my own to-do list and the first thing is quit freaking out about insignificant shit that I won’t remember worrying about five years from now. I like to put things in perspective by thinking about how I will look back on them in a year or five years. It helps me realize what is worth focusing my attention on. Instead of wasting my time worrying about how I am going to find shoes for my daughter to wear to gym next year, I’ll daydream about her attending Harvard or Yale. Of course she will be wearing her velcro Hello Kitty sneakers as she pushes her bike to class, but she won’t starve!
by Jen Logan | Jul 6, 2019 | Lemonade out of Lemons, Parenting
Family vacations are always a mix of pure joy and total exhaustion. Children don’t acclimate to new settings as quickly as adults so their reactions to pretty much everything are usually a little over the top. They are like little ping pong balls bouncing back and forth between bliss and terror. My mini-me is usually on the verge of wetting her pants with excitement or trying to find a safe place because the sky is falling. Also, once she is excited, there is very little slowing her down. She is like a tiny energizer bunny. Unfortunately, her recovery time from a walk into terror town is of similar length.
We took a trip down to Florida last month to test out the latest Harry Potter ride at Universal. This was not exactly the trip we were planning to take at the end of June, or really at all, but it happened. We had gone to Universal during Easter break and somehow when I planned the trip back in March, I bought two sets of tickets to the theme parks. This sounds ridiculous unless you know me. I buy duplicates of things all the time. In fact, I realized on this trip that I had packed a pair of shorts with a tag still on them that I had worn several times since May. I had not actually been wearing the pair with the tag on them, I had been sporting this pair’s doppelganger for a month prior to buying the shorts I took on vacation. I usually pretend that I intentionally bought duplicates because of my undying affection for whatever the item is, but this tactic was not a good one in the case of the duplicate tickets. I had to fess up that I accidentally bought two sets of tickets whilst confused about how many days and how many parks we planned on visiting. Needless to say, my husband was not thrilled about this trip but mini-me was over the moon, especially since a new ride had opened just two weeks before our arrival.
During our flight down to Orlando, my daughter talked of nothing other than the timing of our riding the new ride, where she most wanted to sit and how many times we should fly through the air strapped onto a metal track during our stay. She vacillated between titillation and crippling fear for the three hour trek. She loves all things Harry Potter but is nervous about roller coasters, so there was much ambivalence. She had watched several YouTube videos of the ride which were apparently replaying on the screen in her brain repeatedly.
Once we arrived, we could hardly hold her back while we checked into the hotel and grabbed lunch. As we headed toward the park (by foot since it was faster than the water taxi), she skipped ahead of us calling back for us to hurry up. When I finally barked at her to slow down and settle down she turned to me and said very earnestly “I know, having kids is hard. Maybe you two shouldn’t have gotten married.” Just like that – mom, these are the consequence of your actions, live with them. She stroked my arm while saying this, the same way I have touched her while doling out a punishment for the last several years. I couldn’t help but laugh. Proud of herself, she skipped off ahead of us again.
My husband and I spent the rest of the vacation blaming every minor disappointment on our marriage. Everything from long lines to the rain that arrived halfway through our third day was the result of our nuptials. Apparently the butterfly effect of all things can be traced back to our wedding fifteen years ago, even the decision for overweight women to wear short shorts. Who knew?! Luckily, the same rules applied to all things that went right. Riding the front car of the new roller coaster wasn’t luck, it was the direct result of my saying “I do” in 2004. If not for our marriage, the ride probably wouldn’t even exist. If nothing else, the recurring joke saved us our sanity while fighting crowds in the sweltering heat.
By the final night of our trip, my family was literally falling asleep at dinner. The fact that the seating at the restaurant was groups of couches did not help. We fought the sleepiness long enough to inhale some sushi before collapsing into our beds. My child’s sudden narcolepsy was of course blamed on her parents’ marriage. I had to point out that this was probably the most accurate assessment of the entire trip. This crew really does wear me out!
by Jen Logan | Jun 26, 2019 | Being Awesome, Parenting
I know one thing to be true. Just when you are convinced your child is a genius, they will do something to completely shatter that belief. The universe has a way of keeping the perceptions of parents in check and it usually involves shaking the pedestal they are standing on after their child does something wonderful.
Over the weekend we attended a church service where my eight year old daughter read the prayers of the faithful. It was a long reading with a lot of unfamiliar words, but she nailed it. She did such a fantastic job that the priest actually paused afterward to commend her. He said she should be a public speaker based on the job she did. I was especially impressed since it was an emotional time for her considering it was her great grandmother’s memorial mass. We had debated even letting her do the reading, taking into consideration her emotions might get the best of her. But she hit it out of the park. I am still receiving compliments about it.
Four hours later, while still basking in the glory of the accolades from my little superstar’s performance, I got a call to come home from the gym immediately. I could hear my little mini-me sobbing in the background that she was afraid she was dying. My husband was trying to comfort her while simultaneously addressing my question of “what the hell is going on?” and quickly losing the battle. He finally blurted out “she ate a LEGO!” and “settle down, you’re not going to die!” all in the same breath.
As I was walking to the parking lot, I received a photo of the LEGO piece she ingested. It was a tiny little tube, about the length of a fingernail. I gave up my frantic internet search after realizing the giant LEGO block I pictured lodged in her esophagus was not the situation we had at all. I did notice that the list of search results all noted toddlers swallowing foreign objects. There was no mention of nobel prize winners, mensa members or ivy league college graduates shoving pieces of plastic down their throats. No wonder I thought that my days of telling my child to keep foreign objects out of her mouth were over – it is apparently a common problem for toddlers.
I’m thoroughly convinced this was my fault. I’m pretty sure my child picked up my proud vibes radiating from five miles away and decided I might be setting the bar a little too high for future expectations. She decided my mommy pedestal needed a good shaking and promptly inhaled the smallest LEGO she could find. Maybe she really is a genius after all. A lazy, evil genius!
**I wrote this while listening to
by Jen Logan | Jun 15, 2019 | Life, Parenting
A few months ago, my daughter was playing catch with her Dad when she accidentally nailed him in between the legs with the ball. Apparently she throws like her mother. She immediately said “Daddy, I’m sorry I hit you in the privates!” As he bent over in pain she continued talking rapidly. “Last week one of the boys in the fourth grade got hit in his privates. He bent over too. Then one of the girls said her Dad calls his privates the wall of gems. Or maybe it was the dangling jewel. Or the family dangler. No, no, it was the family jewels. Why would he call it that?”
I had no words. This rarely happens to me, but I was truly speechless. Part of it was that I was laughing so hard, I couldn’t have answered if I tried, but I also had no answer to this question. It’s not that I hadn’t heard the term before, I just never gave much thought to where it originated from. I also had a strange image in my head of a giant wall of penises since the term “wall of gems” came out of her mouth. My brain was slowly melting.
Before I became a mother I knew there would be many, many questions tossed my way from my child that I would be ill equipped to answer. This was not even in the same zip code as that list of questions. I expected to google “types of clouds”, “books about poop” and “new math” but never did I expect to perform an online search for the origins of slang for penis. And let me tell you, it’s a search I never want to perform again. It was similar to the time I searched “Tinkerbell” only to find it was an incredibly popular name for women in the adult entertainment industry.
By now everyone knows that there are certain things you shouldn’t talk about in front of your children. Don’t talk about what a cranky old man the neighbor is if you don’t want him to know you think he’s a cranky old man. Don’t drop an F-bomb unless you want your kid doing it loudly in the middle of Target. And don’t talk about your poor self-image if you want your kids to grow up feeling confident about themselves. I would like to add to this list, please, do not use old man slang in front of your kids. They don’t know what these strange terms from the 1940s mean and they are definitely going to ask for clarification.
Fortunately my daughter only used the term “family jewels” for about a week. Unfortunately, a few weeks after giving up the phrase she received a ball to the crotch and was so distraught that she screamed “Ouch! My penis!” It only took her a minute to realize what she said and laugh but I think she might have my tendency to scream inappropriate things while in distress. It’s like a form of stress induced Tourettes. I’m expecting the next time she is injured I will hear a thundering “wall of gems!!”
by Jen Logan | May 22, 2019 | Life, Parenting
My daughter loves cooking. She also loves eating and has a pretty refined palate for a child. Tonight, she took one bite of the fish my husband had prepared for dinner and went directly to the refrigerator. She pulled out a jar of capers and half a lemon that had been sitting on the counter and returned to the table to top off her fish. I have to say I loved watching this, mostly because my husband has added extra spice, toppings or ingredients to pretty much every dinner I have ever cooked. I am a three ingredient kind of cook whereas he is a believer in layers of flavor. Apparently his cod didn’t have quite enough layers for our little lass though. As I was smirking at her going to town on her plate like Cat Cora she turned to me and said “What? You know I have to have capers on my fish!” Precocious does not even begin to explain this child some days.
by Jen Logan | May 17, 2019 | Life, Parenting
My daughter had her first communion last week. But first, she had to complete her first reconciliation. She had been talking about this event all year and, of course, I had a few questions for her about the process. Namely, when she needed to confess and what atrocities she had to confess.
I recall going to confession as a child and debating about what to tell the priest and what to keep to myself. It wasn’t necessarily that I was such a bad kid at the age of eight that I thought my sins were unforgivable, I just didn’t want to admit I was wrong about anything. Telling the school priest that I had been mean to my mom or lied to a friend seemed like a not so smart thing to do. I was always a skeptical child, so I was pretty sure the priest was going to blab all of my dirt to my teachers. I pictured them sitting around the lunch table gossiping about what the kids said to their moms and each other. I didn’t want anyone to have any dirt they could hold over my head.
A month ago when my mini-me and I were talking about confession she asked what kind of things I had talked to the priest about when I was her age. I told her it was mostly me being sassy with my mom or not being as nice as I could be to friends. “What do you do if you don’t have anything to confess?” she asked with a straight face. I told her I could give her a list if she needed one. She sounded just like my Dad who jokes that he has nothing to repent for. Unfortunately, she wasn’t joking. In her mind it was a totally valid question.
The day before her first communion was spent preparing for the big day. The kids practiced the readings, found their places in the chapel where they would sit with their families and tasted the wine. I had learned earlier that they give all of the kids a sip of the wine the day before so nobody spits it out on their dress at the main event. My daughter had a rather lengthy discussion with a saleswoman at the shoe store about this as we picked out a pair of white heels. She talked animatedly about how disrespectful it would be to God to have some kid spit out the blood of his son all over the floor. She had already talked to me repeatedly about the church wine. She was scared to drink it because she thought it would taste bad. I wouldn’t go so far as to say she was obsessed, but the wine was on her mind much more than her weekly spelling words or current lego project. I was happy to know it would be put to bed after her retreat.
When she came home from school that day she had two things to share. The first was that she did make a confession and it was that she made me crazy in the morning (which is true). She was not given penance with the rosary, but was instead told to cut it out. She of course shared this information with her grandparents, but did not want to divulge the conversation to me. Smart kid. The second piece of information she shared with her dad (again, not with me). She walked in and promptly told him “Dad, I loved the wine. It tasted so good!” He immediately texted me to let me know that fear was coursing through his veins. Well, that seems about right – my kid worried about the wine for a month and we will now worry about it for the next twenty or more years.
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