A) I have the smartest, handsomest, best big brother in the whole world!
B) Wow! That kid sure has a way with the cotton candy! Hope I can wield a stick of floss that well when I get older!
C) Yeah, you think you’re so fricking cool with your big ‘ol puff of candy, while Mom told the woman “No, just a little one for the girl.” Go ahead, show off. Gloat about your diabetes on a stick, leave me with this toddler size joke-of-a-treat. Enjoy your sugar rush, Skippy, and sleep with one eye open tonight.
The kids yelled at me to come look in the bathroom sink.
This beetle had come out of the drain. My son repeatedly flushed him down with a swirl of tap water. And the beetle repeatedly made his way back out. His escapes from the sewer became progressively faster. Clearly, this was not an ordinary bug we were dealing with. He thrived on adversity.
Tough bugs always put me in a Kafka, a la “The Metamorphosis” frame of mind. Any bug that can figure out what a human is doing, strip through the layers of absurdity, clearly that bug was human at some point.
(Suffice it to say, I dispatched with the bug, indulging in my inner 10 year old boy, dousing it with hand soap, shaving cream, and air freshener. I don’t think it came back. Of course, if it did, I’ll only find out late one night when it’s too late.)
I’m re-telling the story later, and I describe the bug, the whole situation, as “Kafkaesque”. And then (as it usually does) my train of thought jumps the tracks. Can you imagine writing a piece, or in a style, that is so unique, so influential, that an entirely new word is made up, in order to attribute it to you?
I let my mind go to the conceited place, and wondered what my mark on the worldof literature could possibly be. Keeping in mind, of course, that since I’ll never be famous, it would have to be something pretty obscure.
What will be Ginnyesque?
Descriptions of breakfast food in semi-pornographic shapes?
Any thoughts?
And hey, while we’re at it, what’s your mark going to be?
I love this country. I feel lucky damn near every day, that I get to live here.
I can relate to Canada. As a nation, it doesn’t really know who it is. If you ask a Canadian what it means to be Canadian, one of the most common answers you’ll get is, “Well, we’re NOT Americans.” But that’s as much as we can tell you. We’ve only been around since 1867. We didn’t do anything spectacular to come into being. No war was fought for our sovereignty; we just asked the Queen of England, politlely, if we could please do our own thing. (She said yes.)
On the world stage, if America is a brash teenager, then Canada is your awkward tween cousin, who doesn’t know where to put her hands while she’s dancing.
But I love this country. I don’t even have the right words to tell you why. So I’ll just show you:
(My undying respect and admiration to anyone who can tell me what’s going on in all 24 pictures.)
I coached soccer this spring. For a mixed team of 5 & 6 year olds.
Here’s what I was afraid of, in the beginning:
-The kids would hate me.
-I would hate the kids.
-The parents would not get my sense of humor.
-The kids AND the parents would realize I was a complete klutz.
-I would fall down/trip/wipe out.
-The other coaches would catch on that I knew nothing.
-The parents would expect little David Beckhams,
and Mia Hamms,
when the best I could hope to deliver would be The Bad News Bears (whom I realize played baseball, but you see what I’m getting at).
-I would start to dread soccer nights, praying for rain.
Here’s what happened, instead:
-The kids seemed to like me. When I see them at the playground, even now, they come up to me, call me “Coach”, want to talk to me.
-At the start of every new shift, I got 3 new kids out on the field, and every one of them was grinning ear to ear, ready to go, excited.
-Very few parents actually had anything negative to say. The comments ran more towards, “You are a good, good woman for doing this.”
-I laughed my ass off. At the kid who scored a goal, but inadvertently hit the other team’s goalie in the package, inhaled sharply, and said, “Oooh! Right in the hot dog!”. Or the kid who played a whole shift peeking out from beneath his dad’s jacket, because he didn’t want to get rained on.
-I watched the most competitive kids discover the art of passing to their team mates, and give up scoring opportunities, just to keep passing.
-I realized that the definition of a good soccer season was different for every single kid. The kid whose favorite part of the game was sitting on the team blanket? Had as great a season as the kid who liked scoring.
The biggest reward of the season came out of my biggest insecurity, though.
I have no killer instinct. No competitive drive, in matters physical.
I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to impart sense of competition to these kids. Because I know that competition is important. It’s how we get shit done.
But it turns out that on a beautiful spring night, when you’re 5 or 6, and your parents are cheering, and you’re running, and grinning, and eating watermeleon, and shaking hands at the end of the game,
Who doesn’t love free stuff? For some people, it’s a duffel bag with the company logo emblazoned on it. Maybe not the coolest item, but damn handy when you’re packing for a road trip that you don’t think your Vuitton can stand up to.
Some people are lucky enough to get actual good shit from their place of work – thank yous in the form of jewelery, gift cards, hell, even electric toothbrushes.
And the really lucky people get swag by association – like tagging along on a spouse’s work trip, for a free vacation.
But I’m a plumber’s wife. And while it may sound glamorous, the reality? Not so much.
Owen came home the other day.
“Hey, I got a free shirt from the wholesalers. But the neck is too tight. You want it?”
Silly boy. I think you know that I do!
Go ahead, feast your eyes on the name of the company you’ve never heard of, the inscrutable piece of heating? cooling? plumbing? equipment depicted, or the inherent, all-encompassing orangeness of it.
(Try not to vomit, from the sheer jealousy.)
But if you’ve read this site for any amount of time, you know I’m a swell chick. An all-around nice gal. A giver.
So, if you can think of any use for this shirt in your own life, or you just truly desire it ever so much, let me know.
I will mail it to you.
(Provided you send a picture of it’s end use.) (No dirties.)
A day in the park. Bag lunches. Sunscreen. Frisbees. A big yellow bus to take them there.
I was a helper. Mom In Charge of Lunches. I waved goodbye to the boy, grabbed the girl, and got into my minivan, started to drive to the park.
But instead of hitting the road, I pulled around the block, and waited, watching the kids stream onto the bus.
“No seat belts?” My daughter has never known a ride in a vehicle without one. Surely I wasn’t letting her brother, her hero, get into a bus with no seat belts?
“No, sweetie, they don’t. I guess they’re…safer, I don’t know, they just don’t have seat belts.”
“He going to die?”
I tailed the bus to the park. Stupidly ignoring everything in my periphery. Focused on the back of that big yellow bus. Convinced that if I looked to the side, into my rear-view mirror, even for a split second, it would happen.
A drunk driver would cross the median. The bus driver would have a heart attack. The bus would fall over an embankment.
It didn’t, of course.
When the kids had played, and eaten 6 watermelons, and maybe burned a little on the tops of their ears, and were deliciously, deliriously tired, it was time to leave.
I was full of sun and happy and relaxed. I asked my son if he wanted to come with me, in my car. But of course he didn’t. The bus ride is half the point of the field trip.
So I went on ahead.
We got out, went to the school’s playground, the girl and I, to wait.
It was 20 minutes before I realized they weren’t there.
They’d been loading the bus as I was leaving. It was a 5 minute drive, ten minutes, tops.
I read this post the other day. The Pied Piper of Hamelin seems like a fairy tale. But there is a historical basis for it. A town lost it’s children. And the fact that my kid was on a bus just made me think of the movie “The Sweet Hereafter”,
which is, in turn, inspired by that same Pied Piper.
My gut churned, and my sweat got cold, and I found it harder and harder to hold my face in a way that wouldn’t freak my daughter right the hell out.
Irrational, irrational, irrational! I kept chanting in my head.
But I still stared down the street the bus should be on, willing it to come into view.
And then it did.
My head swam with thanks, I rolled my eyes at myself, and I gathered up my boy and his belongings and headed home.
Reality cut into my relief, in the form of a couple of whining, tired kids, and the unexpected addition of a playmate, and backpacks, and hats that I didn’t have enough hands for. And I looked up and down the one way street we had to cross. Looked at the half a block we had left to get to a cross walk. Looked at my car, mere feet in front of us.
I made the decision to jaywalk.
I had just stepped off the curb, when a flaming red car came into view, at the very crosswalk I didn’t think I possessed the energy to reach. I held the kids back, told them we’d wait for this car. But the car slowed down. Pulled up to the curb.
A man rolled his window down. A very official looking man in a uniform.
“Hello there. Thought the kids might like some stickers.”
The kids took their stickers, said thanks.
“You kids have a safe summer.”
But he’s not looking at them. He’s looking at me. My face feels like it’s the same shade as his car.
As we’re walking to the cross walk, I mentally slap myself.
“You were so worried, so god-damned grateful that your kid was returned to you, that you decided to celebrate by potentially putting him in danger? Does that make any kind of sense?”
I’m grateful for the drunk driver who didn’t get on the road at the same time as the bus. I’m grateful for the well trained bus driver. I’m grateful the roads weren’t slippery. I’m grateful the brakes worked.
And I’m grateful that I was both served & protected.
(They only want an email address. They don’t want your name, your birthdate, or your “lucky” credit card numbers. I’ve received no spam from them, either.)
Please, take a moment of your time, to send a blonde to wine country, won’t you?
The first one popped out after he ate some fruit leather. No preamble, no wiggling, he just came into the kitchen, bleeding, holding his wee tooth, and said, “Hey guys, check this out.”
He provided this sketch, for posterity:
He’d already heard of the tooth fairy, I’m assuming from his friends at school (in much the same way I’m assuming he’ll learn about sex). So he had no questions, and expected a nice, smooth transaction.
And that is what he got.
The second tooth came out on Wednesday.
He was brushing his teeth, the sink filled with blood, and there was another tooth.
He was mentally spending his impending windfall, when a crestfallen look came over his face.
“Aw, man! My Show & Share day’s not till Friday! I wish I could have taken this in!”
“Well, maybe you could wait, and not put it under your pillow till Friday night”, I offered.
“Or…” And he ran off.
Minutes later, he came back with this:
My kid put the tooth fairy on a layaway plan.
(On a side note, I’m having a dilemma. I saved the first tooth. It’s sitting in an old baby food jar. Seemed like the thing to do. But now that I have two teeth, it just seems kind of weird and creepy. What am I saving these for? Is this really a keepsake he’s going to want to have in 40 years? Do I make jewelery out of them? Is there some kind of a black market, where I could be selling them? I need help, here, people.)
If you’ve done any perusing of the blogroll tab up top, you’ve undoubtedly noticed the last, but not least, entry there, XBox4NappyRash.
And if you were silly enough not to click it and learn more, you’re undoubtedly asking yourself, “What the crap is that about?”
The short version is that a nice man named Martin (who’s from Ireland but lives in the Netherlands but that bit is kind of extraneous, so never mind) has been trying to knock up his wife. Essentially, he’s willing to trade his childless existence, with all it’s fun and frivolity (i.e. things like XBox) for the hard work and drudgery of parenthood (i.e. nappy rash).
I “met” him at Ask & Ye Shall Receive. He made a comment (undoubtedly something ribald and painfully witty) that I loved. Since I hadn’t received my review there yet, I was keeping a low profile (i.e. I was too much of a wiener to comment). But I really wanted him to know I thought he’d made a good point. So I emailed him. And, like any blogger worth her laptop, I overshared immediately, detailing the conception of my second child, the…ahem…unusual tactics involved, and wished him well.
He didn’t obtain a restraining order, and we’ve been reading each other ever since.
A couple of weeks back, he made the big announcement. I read the post. I shrieked. I cried. My husband asked me what the hell my problem was.
“XBox is having a baby!”
Which sounds like complete and utter gibberish, really.
It’s not gibberish, though. It’s some of the best news I’ve heard in a long time.
But wait.
Consider for a moment, if you will, the plight of poor Martin.
For 2 years now, his life has been this uphill battle, facing off against infertility, living a life devoted to the successful crashing of sperm into egg.
What will he do now?
He’ll have to quell the urge to wank into small paper cups. With a pregnant wife at home, that kind of behaviour is sure to be frowned upon by society.
He once referred to his wife as a daft cow. In the nicest of possible ways, but still, he said it. It is my opinion that he needs to find a suitably regal name for his wife, one approved by her, and use it day and night. In a tone of voice that is neither patronizing nor sarcastic. Because if there is one thing a pregnant woman will not abide being compared to, it’s livestock.
He has spent more time peering into a real, live woman’s nether regions than most hardcore porn addicts could ever dream of. (Granted , they were his own wife’s, and they were on an exam table, but still…) What if that experience has ruined him, created a deviancy where none existed previously? Will he be found, lurking around infertility clinics, asking for “Just a peek? Please?”?
I wish him well as he attempts to surmount these new hurdles.
And I thank the universe for finally, finally pulling its head out of its arse, and letting these people make a baby.
