• Down to the river to chill

    So what to do when you are sick and tired of the same old-same old? Load all your little hellions into the van and set off on An Excursion!

    But only after you tell them that you will all be going on An Excursion—they scream YAY!!—and will therefore be missing out on the Sunday night movie—they FREAK OUT WAAAH!—at which point you give them a lecture about if they can’t be flexible with movie night then you’re going to have to NIX MOVIE NIGHT ALL TOGETHER. Because, it’s summer time, guys, and that means that we don’t need to be entertained by that little evil box SO JUST GET OVER IT ALL READY.

    Then be happy when everyone quickly readjusts their attitudes and runs around squeezing into too-small suits and stealing your sneakers because you have been negligent in buying them any clothes because it’s just too dang expensive and you hate squandering entire evenings on kid-centric shopping trips. And besides, you spent all the allotted money for clothing on some yoga pants because how you look is more important than how the kids look because they can get away on their youthful good looks and you can’t, so there.

    When everyone is in the car, take a picture of yourself out the window. Don’t bark.


    Then take a picture of your lap via the flip-down mirror and be happy because it looks semi-hipstamatic.


    Take a picture of the pack in the back.


    Take a picture of the convenience store and the man you married exiting it with a luxurious bag o’ Lays.


    Then tell the kids to cut out all the happy screaming because some paranoid person will walk by and think you don’t feed them. (You don’t really say that.)

    Get to the swimming hole, because that’s what it means to Go On An Excursion in your house, and be a little worried about all the drunk adults running around throwing cups of water on each other, swearing, and—Mom! They’re snogging!—yep, snogging. In your Harry Potter house, PDA is known as snogging.

    The creek is quite high and fr-fr-fr-freezing cold. While the kids go about the business of acquiring blue lips, you entertain yourself with the steller combination of running water and different apertures and shutter speeds.

    You take a crazy number of pictures of your kids looking like drowned rats.


    In between times, you steal pictures of your husband.


    Your son strikes up a friendship with another preteen—your husband even sees them bond with the oh-so-cool fist bump that you know your son has never done before.


    Which is kinda funny because just that very morning your husband had a conversation with some fellow church goers about how homeschooled kids don’t really know how to socialize, though your husband wasn’t saying that, of course. And then your husband says, “Our homeschooled son is out there making friends with complete strangers and here I am, a product of public schools, cowering in a corner,” and you laugh and think to yourself, I need to blog about this sometime.

    Some friends meet up with you, and your daughter begs their baby and enjoys some quality cuddle time.


    As you watch her hold the baby with one hand and eat with the other while observing the creek-side action, and then, when the baby fusses and she automatically starts to jiggle her leg without ever looking at the infant, you think the thought that has crossed your mind many, many times, “Now would be the time to have another child. I wouldn’t have to do anything!”


    Because this seven-year-old child of yours would be perfectly capable of doing everything for the baby, except for breastfeeding—and she’d probably try to do that, too—plus, you have two older kids who could do everything as well.

    At this point in your life, a baby would be a delicious piece of cake.

    But it ain’t gonna happen, so you shake the thought and snap a picture of your friends’ extremely adorable and precocious daughter.


    And then the snoggers leave and your friends leave, and your kids are so frozen stiff you’re afraid they might make like a board and float downstream so you pack it all up and head home.


    This same time, years previous: barbecued pork ribs, fresh strawberry cream pie (I’ve made two already this spring) (And check out the awesome, no-shrink pie crust while you’re at it. It’s awesome.)

  • The saturation point

    Written yesterday afternoon…

    I just woke from a deep, late afternoon nap, the kind of nap that leaves your face streaked with crease marks and your body feeling like it has sunk into itself.

    It’s the kind of nap that I almost never take.

    It’s the kind of nap that I’ve been craving.

    It’s been a little rough around here lately. Yesterday I cried the ugly cry in front of all four of my kids, and at one point—the point where I wailed “You guys are my favorite people in the whole wide world and I can’t stand being with you because all you do is FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT!”—the three oldest burst into tears, in unison.

    It was the scene straight out of The Sound of Music where Maria sits on the pinecone at the dinner table and then covers for the naughty children which causes them to start boo-hooing.

    Though in our case there was no mild sniffling. We don’t do anything mildly in this house, not even crying.

    We were a sight to behold.

    I’m not sure if it’s me or the kids, or maybe a little of both. All I know is I’m exhausted, worn out by all the bickering and crying and yelling. I don’t have any more tricks up my sleeve. Nothing works anyway, so it’s probably no big loss, though the lack of options does leave me feeling vaguely desperate and resource-less, like a hopeless lumpy of a mother.

    It’s not that there’s anything big going on here. No, it’s just a combination of little things, the gist of which is that I wake up in a good mood, eager to get to my day, to read to the kids, work on projects, do my cooking/gardening/writing, to just hang with my gang because they are so incredibly interesting and creative and fun. But then my hopeful early-morning expectations get blown to smithereens by this scene, times three hundred and twenty-six:

    *a child has a full-on hissy fit over the size of the cereal bowl or some such nonsense
    *a child scream names (“sexy head” is a new favorite) at anyone who dares to look in her general direction
    *a child stares pointedly at the screaming child who does not want to be stared at
    *a child crouches at the table like a wild animal and drips milk over table and floor

    And that’s all in the first ten seconds of breakfast.

    As I go about putting out fires, separating children, meting out consequences, distracting and directing and redirecting, the wind whooshes right out of my sails, taking all my happy-thought goals and dreams with it, and I’m left drifting, bobbing up and down on the endless sea of attitudes and chores. It’s depressingly disappointing.

    To top it off, my feet have been aching like I’m eight-months pregnant, I pierced the palm of my hand cutting boiled eggs with a curved knife blade (duh), and I’m sick of not spending money.

    And here’s where I reach full siren mode—in my head, anyway. I WANT A VACATION! WAH! I WANT SOMEONE TO ANTICIPATE MY EVERY NEED! I WANT TO GO OUT TO EAT! TO THE MOVIES! TO THE BEACH! I WANT TO BUY SOME NEW CLOTHES! A NEW COFFEE PRESS! A NEW CAMERA LENS! I WANT WANT WANT! WAH WAH WAAAAAAH!

    And since I can’t do or have those things (they wouldn’t fix anything anyway, sniff-sniff), I’m left with much more down-to-earth (though equally highly improbable) wants:

    *I want everyone to talk in hushed tones
    *I want everyone to walk—no, tiptoe through the house
    *I want everyone to come when called
    *I want everyone to do the tasks they’re asked to do the first time they’re asked to do them
    *I want everyone to smile angelically
    *I want everyone to say “please” and “thank you” and such sundry pleasantries as “would you like help with that, dear sister?” and “oh, you want to play with the toy that is mine? But of course you may, dear brother!”
    *I WANT THE CHILD WHOSE VOICE SOUNDS LIKE A FOGHORN TO STOP SOUNDING LIKE A FOGHORN BECAUSE IT IS DRIVING ME CRAZY.

    And no, I am not PMSy. Why do you ask?

    And lest you think it is complete pandemonium and chaos in this house of mine, let me assure you: it is complete pandemonium and chaos.

    And still, we keep everlastingly at it. In the rare moments of calm between the foghorn bellows, marathon name-calling sessions, and flying fists, I make a conscious effort to kiss curly-haired heads and stinky-boy necks. I pin the dishwasher’s hands to her side in a big bear hug. I make eye contact with each pair of blue eyes and smile, if only for a second. This rough patch too shall pass.

    And then there will be a new rough patch, sohelpmegod.

    The sheer intensity of it is enough to lay me flat.

    Shortly after that ugly cry of mine, my son walked through the kitchen where I was getting lunch together, sighed heavily and stated matter-of-factly, “It’s what it means to be a mom.”

    I think what he meant was, You just discovered the toughest part of parenting, Mom.

    Yeah, boy. Did I ever.

    Signed,
    Fed Up to My Eyeballs

    This same time, years previous: the ways we play (ironic, no?), rhubarb tart and rhubarb tea

  • One dead mouse

    Before my story begins, let me say this: mice do not freak me out. Back when I was a pipsqueak, I used to raise them for science. And I don’t mean for my science lessons, but rather for the much broader definition of science—the intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment (thanks, wicky)—by selling them to real, live scientists at auctions. I cleaned the mouse cages, fed them, held them, and got bitten by them, no big deal. (Also, it was a much smaller operation than I’m leading you to believe.)

    So see, mice and me are cool.

    However, I do not like mice. They stink up my stove, pee and poop everywhere, and are, in general, totally, absolutely, and completely vile.

    Live mice, in particular, totally piss me off. As in, at the mere sight of one I will whip off my flip-flop and smack them senseless. I’ve been known to bait them with crackers and trap them in plastic bags and then wail the living daylights out of them in the middle of the night (while living in a storage shed in Nicaragua).

    (Also in Nicaragua, I was awakened one night by a mama rat—RAT!—pawing through my hair. I had fed her pack of nekkid babies to a dog and she had come back to haunt me to pieces, I guess.)

    Lately, our phantom mouse, for we do indeed have a phantom mouse, has made several appearances. One night I was sitting on the floor counting money, wearing a bathrobe and not much more, when the little gray demon shot across the rug in my general direction (remember, I was only wearing a robe) and then veered off under the sofa.

    If that mouse had chosen to dive under the terry cloth tent—eeeeee! Makes me tingle all over just to think of it.

    Another time it appeared when I was just stepping out of the shower. I heard John shrieking downstairs so I quickly wrapped a towel around me and ran to save him. (Why do mice always catch me half dressed? What’s up with that?) We, and a not-yet-sleepy Baby Bandaids Nickel, barricaded off the shoe room in an effort to catch the poor trapped rodent and then, neck hairs a-raising, heavy shoes gripped tightly in our hands, we gingerly slid boxes and tins aside until—EEK!—the mouse streaked out of a corner, crashed into the barrier, leaped into the air and scurried off into another corner, John and I, thunking and yelling all the while and never once hitting the darn thing.

    The second time the mouse made a run for it, John knocked down the barrier in his effort to get the mouse, and the little bugger zipped through my legs on its way to the washing machine. I spun around, walloping frantically, and though I thought my slipper once made contact with something soft, it got away.

    Or so we thought.


    This morning I noticed that it was kind of stinky over by my desk. I poked around a little but nothing was to be found.


    As the stench grew stronger, it slowly dawned on me that it could only be one thing—a dead mouse. (So I did whack the thing after all! Hooray!)

    With the smell intensifying by the second, I was left with no choice but to pull the fridge out from the wall.


    With each tug on the fridge, the smell worsened, and when I saw wet spots on the tile floor I realized the dead mouse was indeed stuck underneath and was—how to put this delicately?—smearing every time I gave a tug.

    I promptly called it quits and rang up my knight in muddy work boots.

    “Are you serious?” he said. “You really want me to come home for this?”

    “Um, yeah,” I whimpered. “It’s really bad. We can’t stay in the house. Please?”

    And then, for extra pathetic points, “I feel like I’m going to throw up.”

    So home he came to do the dirty deed.


    He didn’t much complain about the stench—he’s way too tough for that—and instead got right to work jacking up the fridge on wooden blocks and dropping to his knees to investigate in his trademark, no-nonsense manner.


    But when he went to scoop up the rotting mouse in a wad of newspapers,

    a silhouette of John dry-heaving

    he dry-heaved loudly and repeatedly, much to my raucous amusement.


    A few minutes with the vacuum and a bucket of bleach water later, the job was done and my knight hopped into his white pick-up, put on his stunner shades, and took his leave.


    So, to summarize:
    1. I was kidding you when I said that mice and me are cool. I don’t know why I said that. In reality, mice give me the shiver-iver-ivers.
    2. It’s really clean under my fridge right now.

    The end.

    This same time, years previous: strawberry ideas