Life down here on earth

Sam waxes poetic

The kids bring home mounds of paper from school everyday.  Right before they toss their backpacks to the floor in the kitchen, they each throw a (sometimes huge) pile of papers onto my computer keyboard.  The pile consists of the usual school information: don't forget to bring extra clothes on Field Day, here's a list of symptoms that mean don't send your kid to school, please send in donations for the silent auction, and completed school work. 

Jack's completed work is, frankly, pretty boring.  Math and social studies worksheets and the like on which the questions are answered mostly correctly. Sam's school work, on the other hand is very entertaining.  On his spelling tests he's drawn stick figure men shooting each other and screaming "Die!" to which the teacher marks in red, "Draw at home, please!" One day he wrote Jack's name at the top of all his papers to which the teacher marked in red, "Don't do this again!" He's very, let's call it inventive, when it comes to his writing assignments.  "My dad is my hero because he saved me from drowning." or "On Spring Break in Texas I got to drive a truck!"

Yesterday in Sam's pile of papers was an assignment which read, "Write a haiku about where you live and what you like about it."  There was a reminder of a haiku's formula:  5 syllables in the first line, 7 syllables in the second line, and 5 syllables in the third line. Sam's haiku was:

I like it here, dude.

This place totally rocks, dude.

It is awesome, dude.

Next to his haiku on the page, the teacher had written a small "ok" as if this wasn't exactly what she was looking for.  As if she didn't want to give him credit, but, technically, it followed the rules.   (Which, come to think of it, is a line Sam often walks, technically following the rules.)

I told him that, aside from the 5-7-5 rule that defines the form of this type of poem, there aren't really rules in poetry and it can be whatever you want. And then I taught him this haiku I learned on the Internet a few years ago:*

Haikus are easy.

But sometimes they don't make sense.

Refrigerator.

He was practicing it in the car on the way to school so he could tell his friends.  I'm pretty sure his teacher is really looking forward to the end of the school year.

 

 

*I guess you really are strange if you have at least two favorite haikus.  Here is my other favorite one.  Imagine a Venn diagram where one circle is Spam fans (the meat- not the email), one circle is Shakespeare fans and one circle is haiku fans.  Where those three things overlap is where this haiku fits:

Man wearing white shirt
Drops meat, causing greasy stain;
Cries, "Out, out, SPAM dot!"

Not just playing dead

When I opened my eyes this morning Sam's face was just inches from face  saying, excitedly, "Mom! There's a vulture eating a dead possum in the road!"  Wow.  Just what I like to hear first thing in the morning. Although Sam seemed pretty happy about it. Indeed there is a dead possum in the road in front of our house and it's providing breakfast for the many vultures that live around here. 

"Dead possum with vulture" makes an odd juxtaposition to my quiet suburban neighborhood. Usually the road kill ends up on the busier roads. I recently heard of some parents who wouldn't take their kids to the new nature movie, Earth, by Disney, because watching animals stalk and kill other animals was too upsetting even after Disney removed the blood and gore.  Don't come to my house, then, because we've got the circle of life right here in the cul-de-sac.

It was just the kind of thing that reminded me I have a place to take note of that kind of thing. So I came over here to say that I'm still alive.

We went to Texas for Spring Break, which has become a nice tradition.  The kids love it there.  The ranch is always busy with pickup truck rides and shooting lessons, confetti egg fights and hay bales.  And they get to do all these things with their cousins, which is why we now call it "Cousin's Camp." Click the photo below to go to the photo album.

 

So much better than Valentine's Day

It's a holiday, so I'm lying in bed 20 minutes past the time I normally get up, trying to sleep in even though my mind is already racing with things to do today.

Two boys shuffle into the room in brighter moods than you would think this early in the morning.  "Hi, Mom!" they chime.

"What are you doing in here? I'm trying to sleep."

"We came to snuggle," they say.

As they huddle under the warm blankets, one on each side of me, there is a collective sigh of contentment.

After a moment one says, "I already took a shower.  No one even had to tell me. I just knew I needed it."

"Yeah, when you can smell your own self it's pretty bad."

The other says, "I can smell my own breath.  I probably should brush my teeth."

"Yes, you probably should."

And then, just as quickly as they arrived, they are up and leaving.

"Wait! Where are you going?"

"We're going to play Wii, " says one.

The other says, "Happy President's Day, Mom.  I love you."

And they are gone again.

It was THIS BIG!

First, a little background. The kids play this game on the Wii called Animal Crossing. You are a little character with a cute little house in a town full of cute animals with their own cute houses.  You wander around and fish in the river or plant flowers or chop down trees.  You buy and sell things at the store.  The raccoon who runs the store sold you your house and you have to earn money to pay him back.  You sell fruit or fish or other things to earn this money.  You can take your time paying him back.  Raccoons aren't the type to rush you about that sort of thing.

Now, here's the story.  I was downstairs fiddling with the camera on my phone when I heard a horrific wailing.  Then there was yelling and the sound of a few things being thrown and then stomping.  I stopped what I was doing and waited.  You know how it is when you are driving and you first hear an ambulance siren somewhere in the distance?  You know you need to be prepared for it, but you don't yet know where it's coming from or where it's going so you continue on slowly knowing that any minute that siren will be blaring directly next to you.  It was like that.

And the wailing came running down the stairs in the form of an 8-year-old in his underwear and the only word I could make out was "chicken nuggets."

It took a while to sort out the story, but here's how it went down. Sam was fishing (in the game) and had his sights, or bobber, on a really big one (you can see the fish's shadow under the water) which he was certain was this one rare fish that is worth a lot of money.  At a crucial moment, for we know fishing is all about timing, Jack jumped at Sam and yelled in his ear, "CHICKEN NUGGETS!" which caused Sam to jerk his hand and the fish got away.

Sam was furious.  You don't know pathetic till you have a little boy curled up in your lap crying because, "I needed that money for my LOAN!"   He kept going on about how those fish were rare and he wouldn't have any of our saying that he couldn't be sure what kind of fish it was or that there would be others.  Who would have thought that Sam's "one who got away" story would come from a video game? 

I made the mistake of chuckling a bit about the "chicken nuggets" part because that's a pretty funny thing to blurt out of nowhere. This only made Sam more angry and gave Jack the idea that he was off the hook because he was funny.

Sam's temper doesn't show itself that often, but when it does it's a doozy.  He didn't speak to Jack for the rest of the night and slept in his own room instead of the top bunk in Jack's room for the first time in months.  They both went to sleep a little sad.  Jack, because he's been reading scary books at bedtime and likes to have company in his room to ward off the ghosts and Sam, because he wasn't sure when he'd be able to pay his mortgage. I didn't tell him there's a lot of that going around these days.

A Christmas Tree Story

We did it again.  I blame it on the cold.  And Home Depot.  In California, there was a Christmas tree farm across the freeway from Magic Mountain, just a few minutes from our house.  They  set up all the trees in rows and labeled them as to type and passed out candy canes to the children.  I've seen a handful of Christmas tree lots around Nashville, but none anywhere near us, so we are left with Home Depot.

Home Depot throws all their trees in piles and Greg has to bring his own knife so we can cut the twine and unfold the tree to see if it's suitable. Basically, you can't open up a tree that's been tied up for days and hold it up in 3 square feet of space and try to determine if it's lopsided while your kids are running around with 5 other kids you don't know and yelling, "Mom, look at me!" from the top of a precarious stack of trees.  Plus it's really cold.

Last Thursday it was really, really, really cold when we opened up our second tree and said, "It seems a little bigger than it's labeled, but the shape is fine. We'll take it!"  And the kids and I went to sit in the car while Greg and the part-time holiday Home Depot worker put the tree on the roof of the van.

Have you seen Christmas Vacation?  Where Clark Griswold opens up his tree and it's so huge the branches bust out the windows of the house?  This tree is not that bad, but  it's close.  It took 3 of us to get it in the house and set it up.  We thought we were buying a 9 foot tree.  We measured this one at nearly 12 feet. 

After that, I was so intimidated by its size that it sat there for several days just being imposing and daring me to come at it with a string of lights.  Predictably, I ran out of lights three feet from the top and had to buy more.  Jack refused to go to the store with me because, he maintained, we made a mistake by getting such a huge tree and we would never need those extra lights again, so why buy them? We should just leave that part unlit and explain to people who come over that we accidentally bought a huge tree because it was mislabeled.  So practical, that one.

I admit that after this tree was set up, I spent an hour or so looking at pre-lit artificial trees online.  They definitely have their appeal.  But I love having a real tree.  Each tree has it's own personality and it's own story.  There's the one we got for a discount because it had a huge gap in one side, the one with our ornament breaking record,the one where we broke the tree stand, and the one where I cut the lights with the pruning shears.   I'm always disappointed when we first get them home and then they eventually transform into something magical. That's what Christmas does for things.  It makes them magical.

Our tree is on it's sparsely decorated* way to being magical.  Greg is already thrilled because he thinks this tree will go down as "the one that made Shelley decide to get smaller trees."  As for me, the more I look at this tree, the more I think it's not all that huge.  It's working out just fine.

As long as someone doesn't turn on the ceiling fan.

 

*I bought lights, but I refuse to buy more ornaments, too.

Taking it to the next level

Jack had a birthday a couple of weeks ago and we spent one Saturday night up to our ears in boys.  Pizza, Laser Tag and Guitar Hero, that sort of thing.  Also, there was a viewing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.  Which, in my opinion, is a great movie to fall asleep to.  It's so hard to concentrate on what they're saying that if you're the least bit sleepy you'll just drift off.  Those accents also make it harder for 11 year olds to decipher the inappropriate bits, which is a bonus.

So Jack is eleven now, which I have to say, is freaking me right out.  On one hand, he's so much fun to have around, most of the time anyway, but on the other hand- too fast!  It doesn't help that he's totally embracing the new marketing definitions for kids his age. Ever since he turned 9 he's been proclaiming himself a "tween." I've been alternately ignoring him and telling him you can't be a "tween" until you're 11.  The night before his birthday he said, "When I wake up tomorrow I will officially be a pre-teen." Ack!  No. No pre-teens.  Do they discuss this stuff at school?  Do you get to lord it over your "tweener" friends once you become a "pre-teen"?  Sort of like being the first one to get your driver's license only better because you don't spend the next year hauling your friends around wishing they'd just give you some gas money once in a while.

That night, the night before his birthday, Jack asked if I would snuggle up on the bed with him and read before lights out. I couldn't help but snap, "Oh really?  I don't think pre-teens need to snuggle with their mommies at bedtime." 

He laughed and said, "Aha! But you said I'm not!" We decided that, at the very least, he wasn't a preteen until his actual birthday the next day so it was okay to curl up on the bed with our respective books. Besides, I figured I should take advantage of that sort of thing while it lasts.

The next day I decided to embrace my new role as a mother to a pre-teen person and do what those mothers do best. Mortify their children in public. So I drove up to the front of the school in this:

It worked like a charm.

Silver Lining.

So we're having this really weird Gas Shortage/Localized Panic going on around here. 

I first got the word from Greg on Thursday night when he met me at football practice and said, "All the gas stations on my way home from work are out of gas. Shell has some. You should go now and fill up your tank."

The Shell station in tiny Nolensville only had premium by the time I got there.  I was third in a short line and paid $4.29 a gallon for premium, which is probably normal, except I don't normally buy premium. The next day, Greg got gouged at a gas station whose credit card reader was "broken" and who had lost all their pencils or something so they couldn't write receipts for how much you paid.   It's a good thing I listen to Greg because I live in a bubble and had no idea there was a shortage in the works. I was at a quarter tank and if I had waited I would have hit this:

On Friday, I went to the grocery store and the line at the Kroger gas station was 2 hours long. The line looped around the parking lot and then out into the road. Notice the poor guy broken down in the line. If you see a traffic jam, you know it's because some gas station just got a tanker full of gas. Everyone I know, except the friend who's turning in her lease car this week and has a tank to burn, is staying home and conserving the gas they have.

Since I'm sitting on 3/4 of a tank of gas, it's not so bad for me and the best part about this whole thing:  The pickup line at school has been super short! I have always wondered how many of those people were in my position and HAD to pick up their kids and how many were doing it for other (possibly good, probably not) reasons.  Now I know. I'm on to all those folks clogging up the line just because they've got to get to piano lessons or something.  You folks stay at home and enjoy the bus like God meant you to. You don't know what you've got till it's gone is all I'm saying. The line is 1/3 the usual size and no one is sitting in their car at the front of the line with their a/c running 2 hours before school lets out. They must be saving their car idling time for the line at the gas station. All this means I get in and out and back home in record time. Is it wrong to hope the gas shortage could continue just a little longer?

A big bang

What made me laugh this week was a fashionable woman with a huge Costco cart full of over-sized Costco-type items and two (two!) giant dog beds trying to get all her purchases into a tiny convertible Porsche.  It was pretty entertaining watching her teeter on four inch heels as she punched the fluffy dog beds into the nooks and crannies of her car.

I, on the other hand, was loading my car with giant containers of vinegar and baking soda because last weekend Jack wanted to make something he called "hand grenades" (lovely, right?) and nearly died because we were out of plain vinegar and I wouldn't let him use my bottle of rice wine vinegar to blow up Ziploc bags in the back yard.  He made me swear on a stack of The Dangerous Book for Boys that I would buy the supplies so he could do this "thing"- I don't know whether to call it a project or an experiment or what- this weekend.  Why, oh why, can we not just weave those little potholders or glue seashells on picture frames or any other normal craft activity?

I am not joking when I say that I caught him watching "How to make a smoke bomb with $2 worth of household items" on Youtube the other day, so if I can channel that desire into something along the lines of Vinegar+Baking soda= Exploding Ziploc Bags, then I figure I'm doing okay.  Although now that I type that it occurs to me that vinegar and baking soda is probably just the gateway-drug for bigger explosions. 

I guess you could call this media-okra (c'mon, that's funny!)

Our CSA box of vegetables this week included a handful of okra.  Always my favorite vegetable as a kid (duh-it's fried!), I've never EVER made it myself.  I think I may have added it to a gumbo or something, but I don't really count that. 

When I was frying this up tonight (in olive oil, not bacon grease, fortunately. Or unfortunately depending on how you want to look at it.) I couldn't help but smile. I told Greg it smelled to me like growing up. Like my childhood. Like Grandma's house. If I had known, I would have cooked some years ago.

It didn't smell like growing up to Greg, who didn't discover okra until he moved east and discovered Meat and Threes, but he enjoyed eating it. Even the kids loved it and gobbled it up (duh- it's fried!)

Did June Cleaver have a college degree?

Jack was studying for a science test. I had scanned the material he was studying and as I was folding laundry I started to quiz him on the phases of cellular mitosis. "Okay," I asked, "What happens during Anaphase?"

"Hey, how do you know this stuff?"

"I know you think you're smart, but where do you think you get those smarts from?"

I should know better than to ask a stupid question. He didn't even hesitate, "Dad."

"What? Dad?!" I cried, flabbergasted.

He backpedaled.  "I don't mean I get ALL my smarts from Dad. Just MOST of them." He was not being sarcastic in the least. He means everything he says very literally. I knew he believed it to be true and was trying not to hurt my feelings.

I gave him an out. "Okay, I know you mean that you and Dad are both strong in math, but I'm good at things, too.  Different things. Do you know what I'm good at?"

Again without hesitation, "Housework?"

I was shocked like Mr. Darcy after Elizabeth Bennett's rejection, "So this is your opinion of me?" I started to argue with him and then reconsidered. Why did I need to justify my intelligence to a 10-year-old?  This is what you get for sacrificing a career to follow your husband around the country.  Dad is the smart one and Mom does the laundry. Great.

I retreated to my position of power, "Just go upstairs and brush your teeth and get in bed!"

Realizing that the whole conversation was funny, I related the story to Greg the next day when he returned from an out-of-town trip (probably conferring with a brain-trust or whatever it is "smart" people do when we dunces are at home drooling in our oatmeal.) 

Greg thought it was funny for a completely different reason. "Wait," he laughed, "Jack thinks you're good at housework?"