Mother of the Year Part Eleven Million and One

by | Sep 13, 2018 | Parenting, Screwing Things Up

My daughter attends the same school that I went to as a kid. It’s a small Catholic school with many long standing traditions. At the end of school masses and functions everyone in attendance sings the school song, gouter is shared daily and there are service days and conge. Another long standing tradition is the 1:15 dismissal on Wednesdays. Growing up, Wednesday was my favorite day because my dad would pick me up from school and we would go eat french onion soup and hang out. When the weather was nice, he would pick me up on his motorcycle. Some of my fondest memories as a child occurred on Wednesdays.

My daughter has been picked up from school at 1:15 by her grandparents for the last four years. They drove to the school yesterday just like every other previous Wednesday only to find a bunch of younger children waiting to get picked up, but not their grandchild. My daughter is now in second grade which is lower school and lower school does not have early dismissal on any day. I would have known this if I had looked at things like the website, school forms or after school sign ups, but I didn’t. My memory of Wednesday afternoons with my dad was so strong that it never even occurred to me that things may have changed in the thirty years since I ran through those doors to jump on the back of his motorcycle. So everyone in my family was under the impression that my kiddo would get to spend Wednesday afternoons with her grandparents the same way I spent them with my dad, but this is not the case.

Needless to say, my parents were pretty disappointed to not be able to spend that time with their favorite person on the planet, my daughter was sad that she didn’t get to see her grandparents and I’m pretty much where I always am, screwing things up somehow. I did at least get to laugh with the faculty when I picked up my daughter at her normal dismissal time. I told them I would see them at 1:15 next week.

I wrote this while listening to The Chats.

Mother

by | Jun 27, 2018 | Parenting

She might fall, but she might fly.

I was watching the news this morning and there was a story about how a toddler was injured at a playground that caught my interest. In the preview they kept showing a picture of a young mom sitting on a slide with her toddler on her lap, all smiles. I was already thinking that the mom was probably the one who accidentally injured the child, and sure enough when the story aired, it was the mom’s fault – although the story wanted to somehow blame playgrounds as a whole. The mom went down the slide with the child in her lap and halfway down the kid’s leg got stuck on the side of the slide and broke.

Things happen. Kids fall. They fall on playground equipment, they fall off of playground equipment. They fall in the grass, on the sidewalk and down the stairs in their own homes on occasion. The world is a giant test course for kids. But this child was hurt because her mom – who barely fit down the slide solo – decided that the child would be safer in her lap than alone. Her leg got caught because there wasn’t enough room in between the mom’s legs for the child’s legs so they were on top, flopping around unsecured. Of course her leg was going to hit the side of the slide and her rubber soled shoe was going to get stuck.

I have done this exact same thing with my daughter and at the time I had two concerns  – her leg getting trapped under me or both of us falling as one unit off the slide. The second situation was probably more likely since gravity and I have never gotten along very well. I remember thinking that I was much too large for the slide and I was about half the size of the mother I was watching on TV. The thing is, I knew that most times when my daughter was trying to climb something or play on something that my interference would muck up the works. She was better off doing things on her own. Me hovering would likely lead to me somehow falling on top of her or tripping her. The few slides that I did descend with her were at least 10′ tall and she was unable to get to the top of them by herself. If one or both of us had been hurt while on the slide I wouldn’t have blamed anyone but myself. This mom was acting as if she had no blame in what happened to her kid. She actually used the “everyone is doing it” excuse. There is some cult member out there just waiting to stumble upon this woman as their newest recruit.

One at a time please!

There are signs at every playground I have ever been to that caution people that the equipment is designed for children ages 2-12. Some even list the ages as 5-12. This mother was advocating there be warning signs at playgrounds of what could happen if an adult were to use the playground equipment. It’s the equivalent of the little pictures on fast food coffee cups explaining that you shouldn’t dump the coffee in your lap because it could burn you. Do we really need more cautionary signs for what could happen if we don’t use common sense? I think we should just start putting up signs that read “Don’t be an idiot.”

I really didn’t want to blame the mom in this story because we moms get blamed for enough already, but when I saw the mom holding her daughter up to hang on to the monkey bars at the end of the story I decided that this particular mom didn’t really deserve the benefit of the doubt. I imagined the child a few years in the future trying to hang by herself from the monkey bars, falling on her face when she couldn’t hold herself up. Kids don’t learn to hang by themselves when their parents always hold them up. I remember the first time my daughter was able to swing from one bar to the next and how proud she was of herself. This was because I told her for several years that if she wanted to play on the monkey bars she would need to do it herself. I wasn’t going to carry her across because that took away the future sense of pride she would one day feel.

Hang on honey, Mommy’s climbing up right behind you!

The most interesting part of the story was how much playground injuries have increased over the last twenty years. Even though the equipment has become safer, there are more injuries. I would suspect a lot of them are either kids falling off of things the first time their parents aren’t holding them up or the parents otherwise mucking up the works. Twenty years ago children were not having their legs broken on slides all over the place because their parents weren’t insisting on riding tandem. Kids can get hurt enough on their own, they really don’t need mom’s assistance in this area. And no matter how much the lady on the news program blames the playground and their lack of signage, her little girl is still going to grow up and tell the story about how her mom broke her leg when she was a toddler. Welcome to motherhood lady!

I wrote this blog while listening to Dropkick Murphys

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.

Dance Yourself Clean

by | Apr 24, 2018 | Life, Screwing Things Up

First time vacuuming – three years after we moved in!

Cleaning is not my favorite thing to do. In fact, it is something I dislike so much that I am willing to pay someone else to do it, which is exactly what I did until recently. It was decided that since I am now home more that there is no need to pay someone else to clean our house. I must have been daydreaming during this decision making process because there is no way I would voluntarily agree to get on my hands and knees and scrub my kitchen floor. I literally have a recurring nightmare about cleaning the toilet and the cleaning brush flicking little bits of toilet scum into my mouth. I would never knowingly bring this nightmare to fruition. All I know is one day my cleaning lady was no longer coming to the house after my husband talked to her. Since dust bunnies were multiplying and nobody seemed to be doing anything about it, I finally came to the conclusion that I was the somebody that was supposed to be doing something about it. All I could think is there had to be someone more qualified for this job than me.

Growing up I helped clean the house every weekend. My job was to dust. It apparently seemed like the appropriate job for a child who was allergic to dust. I think my mom knew better than to put a piece of metal in my hands and send me to push it around the house banging into furniture. I have blamed this childhood chore for my dislike of cleaning since the first time I had to clean my own house. I know this is a fallacy, but I am holding onto it with both hands. Freud may have been wrong about a lot, but he had a point with his theory that everything is mom’s fault. It can’t possibly be my laziness and sense of entitlement that has caused this extreme distaste for cleaning my own house.

One of my least favorite things to do is vacuum. It doesn’t seem like it would be a hard task to accomplish, but my track record with vacuum cleaners is not good. I once stood in the driveway with our little compact vacuum trying to find the power switch for about twenty minutes. I was attempting to clean out my car with little luck. If I couldn’t even turn the thing on, I clearly was not meant to operate the device. I took that experience as a sign to abort all future missions with vacuum cleaners.

When you vacuum once a quarter, the bag looks like this!

The next time I used this compact vacuum cleaner, the only vacuum I ever used since I moved in with my husband over fifteen years ago, was when my daughter was a toddler. My husband grabbed his phone and took a photo since he was pretty sure it was the first and last time he would ever see me use the vacuum. He even called my daughter in so they could watch me. It was apparently like watching a monkey use a tool for the first time. His positive reinforcement was not going to work on me though. I didn’t pick up another cleaning gadget for years.

Last week something brushed up against my leg while I was walking up the stairs. Since we no longer have a cat, it scared me more than a little. I turned around to see a dust bunny hopping down the stairs looking like a tumbleweed blowing through the desert. The time had finally come for me to attempt this cleaning thing again. Two days later I dragged out the vacuum that I had banished to the guest bedroom closet. I was pleased to see the power switch right near the handle. That cut a good half hour off my cleaning time right there. I plugged the vacuum in and started pushing it around my office, but all it did was push the little bits of paper and fuzz around in circles. It wasn’t picking anything up. I turned the machine off and looked at my husband throwing my hands up as I said “it’s broken. This thing doesn’t work.” He just laughed and told me that the bag was probably full. I gave up and went downstairs.

After another two days I decided to figure out what this full bag situation was all about. I know that vacuums contain bags, I have even ordered said bags online. What I didn’t know was how or when you need to replace a bag in a vacuum. Apparently now was the time and I was going to figure out the how of it. I dragged the vacuum down the stairs, expecting this project to be messy. I was correct in my assessment. When I opened the front door and pulled out the bag, a cloud of dust exploded from the hose and globs of shredded paper poured out. To say the bag was full was a bit of an understatement. The bag was ready to blow, which may explain why the top of it was duct taped to the inside of the vacuum. Somehow I managed to attach the new bag to the hose, put the vacuum back together and drag it back upstairs to finally get to work.

I swear people live in this house!

After four days I was finally prepared to vacuum the portion of our house covered in carpet. I plugged in the vacuum and started pushing. This thing was fancy – it even had a light on the front, you know, for late night vacuuming. Heaven knows when I can’t sleep the first thing that comes to mind is cleaning. I pushed the vacuum through my bedroom feeling victorious for all of ten seconds before the vacuum turned off. No warning alarms, no sucking up half of the curtains, it just died. I checked the switch which was turned to the on position. I even plugged it into another outlet thinking it could have been the power in the house, but nothing happened. No light, no sucking, no nothing. I pushed the vacuum right back to it’s home in the closet and returned downstairs. This settles it – I am not destined to clean. Luckily my daughter has decided that cleaning is fun. Let’s just hope she is not allergic to dust!

Pianist

by | Mar 30, 2017 | Parenting

Driving with my daughter in the backseat this morning, listening to The Little Mermaid soundtrack, she asked “Who is this?” I answered “Alan Menken”. After telling me how wonderful he is she asked about the instruments and if the band all played together or if they recorded like Daddy, one instrument at a time. She said “the piano player is really good” and I replied “a piano player is called a pianist”.  It wasn’t until I finished the sentence that I realized what I had just done. I think we can all agree that I do not do my best thinking in the morning. At least my Mom will be thoroughly amused since I know how much Riley likes to use new words she learns.

 

piano_keyboard-t2

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