Category Archive

Miss Attitude

One of the stated reasons that I choose to home educate my children is so that they will be free to follow their dreams so it seems odd in retrospect that I have been shooting down a dream. I only meant to be realistic but it seems that the universe might be trying to tell me something.

My daughter, like nearly every other little girl, wants to be a movie star or a model. I have always told her that it will never happen. She lives in Missouri, not Hollywood. Her daddy is not Billy Ray Cyrus. She is upper-lower class to lower-middle class with no friends in high places. She is pretty, but not drop dead gorgeous.

And I am not, not, not one of those moms. I cringe when I see little girls all dressed up with more make-up on than I own being dragged to ridiculous pageants. I admit that I judge those mothers harshly. I believe they are trying to live their own dream through their little girls.

But it just keeps coming up.

She was asked to help a university student with a research project. They came to our house with television cameras and interviewed her in her room surrounded by her things. She was only four. I asked why they wanted her when they had kids of their own they could have used. Because she would do a better job on camera, I was told. She’s bubbly. Out-going. Not shy.

Then Lexie was asked to model for the Springfield Ballet. She had an hours long photo shoot. She was in several of their advertising campaigns and brochures. She did a fantastic job. They approached us.

Then she was asked to model for the Discovery Center. She had an impromptu photo shoot in the science lab there. I never saw the flier or ad that came of it, but again, they approached us.

And now, tomorrow, Lexie is going to go shoot a commercial. I deliver her at 3:00 looking nice but natural. She will be on KY3. I got the phone call this afternoon. I don’t have any idea why she’s being asked to do this. I’m still shaking my head.

Meanwhile, I’m afraid I’ve been a bad mommy. I’m afraid I denied her a chance to follow her dream by telling her it was stupid and unrealistic. But her dream didn’t give up.

I feel like maybe I should have been dragging myself to ridiculous pageants all these years instead of insisting on science and history and reading. I feel like I should have sent her off to be on Kid Nation when she begged me to. I feel like I should have taken her to that audition in Branson to work in a show all summer even though I didn’t want her to work all summer long. I feel like I should have taken her when the Oscar Mayer Wiener people were in town looking for the star of their next commercial. And so on…

Maybe it’s not too late. Maybe I can say, “All right. We’ll do this thing.” But I don’t know where to start. Where does one sign up to be in a ridiculous pageant?

My apologies to the author of If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.

If you give a kid an African Violet, she’s going to need to repot it.

So you buy a cheap clay flowerpot and tell her she can paint it. You get out the acrylic paints and brushes and she paints the flowerpot. The flowerpot is left to dry and the paints don’t get put away.

That night you stay up too late and since your son is gone visiting Grandma this week, you sleep til noon the next day.

When you get up you find that the kid has emptied eighteen tubes of acrylic paint onto a serving platter since her pallet wasn’t big enough for all of them.

She has painted a wedding gift for her aunt on which she used exactly four of the eighteen colors.

She has also painted a picture on 20# bond printer paper that she wants to enter in the fair. It’s a good picture but she can’t enter it because it isn’t on a canvas. It’s on printer paper. You try to remember where you put the canvases you bought last summer for the fair but realize you have to buy more paint now and groan because those little tubes of acrylics are so expensive. So are the canvases but you bought a dozen of them last year expecting lots of do-overs and she only ended up using two of them.

She has ruined a total of four kitchen towels and her clothes. If there is anything that takes acrylic paint out of cloth you don’t know what it is.

But you don’t complain about any of it. You don’t want to squelch her creativity. And anyway, it’s your fault for sleeping late when you should have been supervising.

So, if you give a kid an African Violet, you’re going to need new paint, new towels, and new clothes. And you’re going to realize that it is time to start stressing about fair entries for this year.

And the violet still hasn’t been repotted.

I went shopping for Mother’s Day cards and was surprised at how many random thoughts it inspired. I spent so much time in the card aisle that I’m surprised security didn’t come check on me.

I tried to avoid seeing the cards for grandmothers but I couldn’t. It was hard to shake the sadness that I no longer have anyone to give them to. It was also hard to shake the guilt over all the years that I still had someone to send them to, but did not.

As I chose a card for my stepmother I hoped that I would not forget to send one to my dad on Father’s Day like I often do. Some years I’ve forgotten to get Mother’s Day cards mailed and some years I’ve forgotten to get Father’s Day cards mailed. I hate it when that happens. I’m always afraid one of them will feel slighted, unloved and unappreciated. Forgotten. I also remembered the year that I found all the Christmas cards addressed, stamped, and under a car seat still not mailed. In February. I don’t forget people. I forget the post office. Really.

I thought about my Aunt Jean who has no children and how I’d like to send her a Mother’s Day card anyway because she has meant a lot to me in my life, and like my grandmothers will not always be there to send a card to. When I was a child, she sent cards and postcards all the time. If there is an Aunt’s Day, I am not aware of it. I opted not to buy one for her but I think I may go back and get one.

Which reminds me of my friend Rachael in Florida, who I have never met in person, and probably never will. Rachael will send me a Mother’s Day card this year. My own kids probably won’t. My husband probably won’t. But Rachael will. I can count on it. I can also count on her to send my kids birthday cards, Easter cards, Halloween cards, and little surprise gifts in the mail. She even made my daughter some jewelry and mailed it. I appreciate Rachael and her thoughtfulness and wish I were half as good a friend as she is. I’ve remembered to mail her son something once. Maybe twice.

I met Rachael on an MSN Group. I’m not very active there any more. I should be, but I’m not. I need to change that but there are only so many hours in a day. My excuse is that I really want to write seriously this year and Gather is the better place to practice that. But my excuse sounds empty. These women are my friends and I have neglected them. So I will send them Mother’s Day cards this year. I wish I could buy them by the box like Christmas cards.

Other friends from that MSN Group come to mind. Karel. I hope she knows how much I value her. I wish she were here. She writes short stories and they are good. She is here, but like Rachael, only to occasionally read my stuff. She isn’t here in the same way that I’m here.

Stephanie. She died on Mother’s Day. She was 29 years old. She had four little boys. One of them was still breastfeeding when she died. There will never be another Mother’s Day when I don’t think of her and wonder how her boys are. She was the kind of mother that I wish I was but never will be.

Then there are my Gather friends. Unlike MSN, I don’t have very many snail mail addresses. I worry that if I send a card to Friend A and not to Friend B, just because I have one address and not the other, if Friend B will find out and feel slighted. I wonder if Friend C should get a card even though she doesn’t have any kids just because I love her just as much as Friend A and have her address.

Thankfully, in the midst of all this worry, I remember not to forget my own mother. I don’t buy mushy, sentimental cards for my mother. It just doesn’t work. I grew up laughing and learned my sarcasm from the best. Flowery cards full of poetry seem like something we’d have made fun of back in the day. Feelings by Hallmark seem somehow cheap and insincere. Better to buy a funny card and tell her I love her in my own words than to buy words written by someone else. But what if I’m wrong and she’s spent her whole life waiting to get a mushy, sentimental card? I certainly can’t write that fluff myself.

I buy cards for my sisters. One sister I talk to almost every day. The other sister I see about once every other year. I don’t buy them the same card.

I wonder if I should buy a card for my mother-in-law or if I should expect her son, my husband, to do it. He will probably forget or wait until they are so picked over that we have to make our own. I better go back and buy her one.

This afternoon I was in the kitchen washing dishes while my daughter was watching Animal Planet.

She came in, as she often does, talking and waving her arms around, telling me all about the mating and reproduction methods of anglerfish. It went something like this:

“The female is ten times bigger than the male and when they mate, the male bites into the female and sucks blood from the female. Each day she absorbs more of him and eventually gets pregnant. Then after she has the babies he is just a lump and he stays there forever. And they stay that way for life. For life, Mom! Then he dies but he’s still there on her back for all eternity and she has to go get a new one.”

“Now, how would you like that, Mom?”

I am somewhat disturbed that my daughter seems to have some idea that reproduction is supposed to be enjoyable for the parties involved.

I just Googled anglerfish and found her account to be mostly true. From Wikipedia:

Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Since individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these “parasites” were the remains of male ceratioids.

With a title like that I bet you’re expecting some kind of deep, philosophical, serious article. You aren’t going to get it. This is another one of my kid stories.

On Easter my daughter came out of her room with a gift for the young man she has a crush on. The envelope was sealed and had hearts drawn all over it. A package of candy was taped to the outside of the envelope.

Every day she asked me several times a day when we were going to deliver her gift so I figured it must be something special. I hoped it wasn’t something she was going to be embarrassed about later, but I decided not to pry so I did not ask her what was inside.

A few days later I saw my friend, Ellynn, who happens to be the mother of my daughter’s crush. I gave her the envelope to pass on. The next day Ellynn called to tell me what was inside the envelope.

It was a picture of the Grim Reaper. My daughter had drawn the picture. I’m told it was an accurate depiction with the robe, hood, and scythe.

We don’t know what to think. I’m sure the recipient doesn’t know what to think either. I did tell her the Christian story of Easter so perhaps this was a religious sentiment, “The Grim Reaper took Jesus!”

That’s all I’ve got.

At 8:30 tonight we realized that we hadn’t had dinner. It was too late to cook and we were too tired anyway. We decided to go to the Golden Corral. I know buffets are gross but I had my reasons. It’s close, a five or ten minute drive. It’s a buffet so the kids can always find something they like to eat. There’s no waiting, and the kids were pretty hungry.

After we ate some real food, I took my son to the dessert bar. He was looking at everything to decide what he wanted. There was this awful pan full of green jello. I wish that I had taken the camera because I can’t describe this vomitous bilge accurately. It was the most awful mess of nasty stuff I’ve ever seen.

My son says, loudly, “What is that gross stuff, Mom?” I took one look at it and busted out laughing. I told him that I though it was ogre snot. We were still laughing about it when we got back to the table, so my daughter had to know what we were laughing about. She made a special trip to the dessert bar just to see it. My husband refused to go look at the jello. Sometimes he can be a real fuddy-duddy.

My daughter then mentioned that they had gummy bears for ice cream topping and that was pretty gross too. I told her that the gummy bears weren’t for the ice cream; they were for the green jello. This started a whole new round of laughter.

Our poor server was in close proximity cleaning tables and doing whatever they do when they are getting ready to close and was hearing every bit of this and trying to keep from laughing.

I took my son back to the dessert bar to get another brownie and decided to fix my fuddy-duddy husband some dessert. I got an ice cream bowl and put gummy bears in the bottom. Then I buried them with the green jello. Of course my son and I were laughing so hard about this that we got the employees behind the dessert bar to laughing too.

We went back to the table and sat the bowl in front of him. Then he did the unthinkable:  He picked up the bowl and slurped the jello and gummy bears down. Me and the kids almost got sick while he sat there laughing at us.

A little later when the server by to take our plates, my husband told her she earned a good tip for putting up with us. I said, “We weren’t that bad. All we did was make fun of the green jello.”

She said that it was green because it is March. I said, “Oh, for St. Patrick’s Day?” She agreed.

Then my husband, without missing a beat, says, “Oh my God! It’s been there that long?!”

I was so proud of him that when I stuck my fork in my apple pie I somehow flipped it into the air and it went flying.

We decided to leave.

Yesterday was the big day that my mother came to town. My mother needed to go to the scrapbook store and a few other craft supply stores while she was in town to get supplies to make the invitations, bouquets, and other things for my sister’s wedding. Not wanting to go there with my kids, she went straight there when she got to town and I arranged to meet her on the other side of town with the kids for lunch since we needed to shop for my daughter’s flowergirl shoes and my dress after lunch.

I loaded my kids into the Crapmobile. I could write an entire article about why my car is the Crapmobile but for now suffice it to say that it has expired tags because it won’t pass inspection until I remove the duct tape that’s holding the headlight in place. The tags just expired the last day of February so I should have been safe from being pulled over until April. They don’t usually bother you if you’re tags have been expired less than a month.

Just a few blocks from our house there is a cop hiding to catch people speeding.  My daughter picks the very moment that I drive by this cop to take off her seatbelt and hang half her body out the window to get some air. She’s on the phone with my sister, who hears me screech, “Lexie, get back in the car! We’re going to get pulled over if you keep hanging out the window!” The cop did not pull out so I figured we weren’t going to get stopped.

After we turned onto the next major street we passed another cop. He was going the opposite direction on a five lane street so he wasn’t going to stop us. We got stopped at a red light and I look into my rearview mirror only to see a cop behind us. I don’t know if it was the first one we passed, the second one, or a third one. But I did know that we were likely done for. The longer he sat behind us at that light the more likely we were to get stopped. The light turned green and I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped on the gas. That’s when his lights and siren came on.

As the cop walks to the car, my motormouth daughter smiles and waves, batting her big brown eyes at him. “Hi Mr. Police Officer! How are you today? It’s too bad you pulled us over. We’re going to meet my Mama Di for lunch and we’re starving to death. Are you taking my mom to jail? She said if I didn’t stop hanging out the window we were going to get pulled over. I stopped so why did you pull us over? If you take Mom to jail who will take me and my brother to meet Mama Di?”

The cop asks, “Do you know why I pulled you over, ma’am?” (Why do they always ask that?)

I say, “I figured it was for my expired tags.”

He says, “Oh. I didn’t even notice that.”

I say, “Crap. I told on myself.”

My son’s voice from the back seat says, “Oh great! Now we’re all going to jail.”

My daughter, who hadn’t ever really shut up, says, “But Mom, you should always tell the truth to the police!”

The cop asks me where my front license plate is. That must be why he pulled me over which is funny since it’s never been on the car and I’ve been driving it that way for years. I say, “I think it’s in the glove box here,” and open the glove box to dig for it. It wasn’t there. I turn around and ask my son, “Eric, did you throw my license plate out the window or is it back there somewhere?” My son handed me my license plate after finding it buried under happy meal bags on the floorboard and I handed it out the window to the cop.

He says, “They expired in 2006?”

I say, “No, I just never stuck the sticker on it since it wasn’t on the car anyway. I think the sticker is in the glove box here. There’s a sticker on the back plate. Will that do?”

My daughter tells him that she has some Disney Fairy stickers he can have.

He tells us to have a nice day and gets in his patrol car and drives away. I think he just wanted to get away.

I’m glad he didn’t ask her why she wasn’t in school.

This is when I should have turned the car around and went home. But I didn’t and a lot more happened to us yesterday.

Cast:

The Pot:  Played by yours truly, aka Mom
The Kettle:  Played by my motormouth daughter, aka Lexie
Striped Hair Guy:  The stylist lucky enough to get assigned to the motormouth kettle, God rest his soul
Extras:  All the other people in a large salon on a busy Saturday afternoon including my stylist

It’s been winter. The dry heat has frazzled our hair and we look like the wicked witches of Bad Hair Day Land. We haven’t had a haircut since early November just before our family portrait. And we’ve got a serious case of the grey-day winter doldrums. It’s time for mommy/daughter day at the salon! That should fix us right up.

And it did. I’m now too mortified to be depressed.

On a positive note my daughter is an out-going, friendly, never met a stranger, perky little thing. When people like my stylist or the neighbors are trying to make me feel better they say, “Well, at least she’s happy.” Really. I’ve heard those exact words before and I heard them again today.

As I was being shampooed I heard her voice all the way across the salon. Her voice carries well. She needs to go into politics. I am certain there was no one in the salon that wasn’t hearing her. She began to talk and she did not stop.

I was hearing her voice as my hair was cut. I stopped hearing her for a bit while I was being blow-dryed. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or not. I heard her while I was being styled. I heard her while my uni-brow was being ripped off with hot wax in the very back of the salon.

I heard her stylist suggest that maybe is she closed her mouth she wouldn’t get hairspray in it. I heard that more than once. I don’t think she heard it.

Now I’m waiting for DFS to come and take my kids away to foster care and cart me off to jail or something. I should probably be getting ready for that instead of sitting here writing this.

She told them about every time in her life that one of our cats has pooped outside the litter box. She told them about my bulimic cat that eats too much then barfs all over the place. She told them about the time her brother made the mess in the bathroom. She told how much she loves being homeschooled because she can stay up all night playing the Sims. She told about our naked pregnant snowlady and how we used strawberry marshmallows for nipples. She pretty much shared every single embarrassing thing about our family and our home.

By the time she was done it sounded like we live in filth and squalor. It sounded like we’re a bunch of backwoods idiots that don’t need no learnin. I was mortified.

Then she asked her stylist about his sexual orientation in regards to his multi-colored striped hair.

Even as this was happening I was planning my lecture series. The lecture about not sharing embarrassing things with strangers and the lecture about what happens at home stays at home. The if-you-don’t-have-anything-nice-to-say-don’t-say-anything-at-all lecture and the don’t ask people if they’re gay lecture. The “Oh, my God, don’t tell people how far behind we are with our schoolwork” lecture. The “No one needs to know how laid back your mother is about bedtimes and R-rated movies” lecture.

Even as I’m forming my lectures in my head I realize that I have told many of the same things to strangers on Gather. I have told even more embarrassing things on Gather that my daughter (thank the fates) isn’t even aware of. To read my articles you’d think all my cats ever do is poop and barf and never where they’re supposed to. You’d think we haven’t touched a schoolbook since before Christmas and you’d be right about that one. (Hey, we have all summer to catch up.) You’d think nothing ever happens around here that isn’t a total fiasco. You even know that I flirt with strange men in the condom aisle.

So the pot has to sit the kettle down and have a talk. I feel like such a hypocrite.

Tonight my husband has the guys over to game. I cooked a very nice dinner and thought I’d have my evening to catch up on Gather. I’m a couple of days behind reading and commenting on my people. First I posted a few recent photo collections and was going to spend the rest of my evening reading and commenting.

Not.

My son frantically called me into the bathroom. I walked in to find this:

My naked son standing in front of the toilet in a pool of toilet water about half an inch deep that covered the entire bathroom floor. A bath towel half in the toilet and half out, dripping everywhere. My son’s cast-off clothing laying in the pool of toilet water. My son yelling, “Mom! I can’t get the poop off!”

Remember, we have guests.

The towel in the toilet was not just any towel. It was one of those decorative towels that people hang on a towel rod in the bathroom and don’t ever actually use. Pale yellow with satin daisies sewn onto it, it now sports streaks of human feces. At least I guess it’s human feces. I never did determine where the shit came from or why it was now on the towel which was now in the toilet. Beats me. Not only is there an ample supply of Charmin in the bathroom, there is also a full container of shea butter baby wipes on the back of the toilet for cleaning one’s ass.

Every bit of laundry in the house was clean for a change so there were no dirty towels to mop up the toilet water with. No, we threw the clean, neatly folded and stacked towels on the shelf into the floor to soak up the toilet water.

Toilet water dripped down the hallway when we carried the soaking towels from the bathroom to the laundry room.

I ran a bath for my son since he was already naked and really, there was shit involved at some point in this debacle. Now he is running naked in front of my husband’s guests and I do not care. I will not care. I am going to sit here and Gather.

Meanwhile the Ro-Tel dip I was making got scorched on the stovetop.

Lucky for you I forgot to grab the camera.

I originally sent this email to our local homeschool group on 12/14/06.

Go ahead and laugh at me now because you will be as soon as you read this. Add to your list of famous last words, “I wonder what that tastes like?”

Several few months ago we were given a very large cactus. Our neighbor was moving to Florida and couldn’t move it. It spent the summer and fall outside. When it got too cold out I brought it inside. Well, the dog was chasing the cat and knocked the thing over. It shot out this milky fluid all over the place when it hit the floor. And I say, “I wonder what that tastes like?”

Turns out it tasted bad, very bad. It was downright painful, burning like fire, swelling up my mouth and throat. Nothing helped. Not water, not milk, not mouthwash. Then I got dizzy and developed a migraine-like headache. I was sick for 24 hours.

Upon googling I discovered that it is not a cactus at all but a succulent of the Euphorbia family. It is highly toxic. Some euphorbias are used to make poison arrows. I have to get rid of it. We have six cats, one dog, and two small children. This thing is only suitable for a home without pets or small children.

It is a lovely plant and I really think it’s too beautiful to simply put out in the garbage. It is in the laundry room under a fluorescent light until I can find a home it. I had to rescue it after my husband evicted it into the bitter cold and I hid it in there. He’s bound to find it and evict it again. So if you have no pets and your kids are older please take it.

What does this have to do with homeschooling? Not much. Sorry about that. But homeschoolers do have a natural curiosity that could cause a story like this to be told.

In 1970 I was five years old and I went to kindergarten. Kindergarten was a one room private school across the street from the big and scary public school where the big kids went. There was no public kindergarten then. My mother had to pay for me to go to the little school. We were poor. Dirt poor. I don’t know how my mother managed to pay for me to go to kindergarten.

We lived in what my mother called The Chocolate House. I don’t know why; maybe because it was brown. It was the closest thing to a tenement that Joplin had. A little over ten years later I would live in The Chocolate House again but that’s another story. I think it burned down recently and I’m glad to know that the chain is broken and my own daughter will never live in The Chocolate House.

The money wasn’t the only sacrifice my mother made the year that I went to kindergarten. I remember some things vividly. In fact, this whole stream of thought came about while discussing fire drills with my husband.

In kindergarten we had regular fire drills. I remember them like they were yesterday. The thing that stands out is this: When the fire alarm went off, we were supposed to pick up our desks and carry them outside. I look at my son, nearly five years old, close to the age that I would have been then. He looks so small, too small to pick up a desk and carry it outside in a fire. I’m sure I was smaller then than he is now. Why did we have to save our desks? Some things never change. It was all about the money. If the school was going to burn down, at least those expensive desks could be saved. So now, carrying my desk out of the building once a month for a fire drill is one of the main things I remember about kindergarten.

I also remember class parties for holidays. This is where that other sacrifice my mother made comes in. She was one of our class party hostesses. She would always be there at those parties organizing games for us, serving treats that she had baked, and all that sort of PTA-mom-type stuff.

Looking back, I cringe for my mother. This had to be the one of the hardest things she ever did. She doesn’t like kids. She didn’t then. She doesn’t now. She doesn’t like excessive noise or chaos. She doesn’t like snotty noses or unkempt clothing. Looking back, I’m certain she’d have rather been having a root canal that be at that school hostessing those parties and putting on a smile for the other moms. She probably didn’t like the other moms either.

I never realized before now, as I type this article, how very alike my mother and I really are. Just last month I signed up to help with a Christmas party for science club even though I’d rather be drawn and quartered than be there surrounded by other mothers and other people’s kids.

At some of those parties, my mother would have been pregnant with my baby sister. I only know that because of the math involved. I didn’t know it then.

In 1970 my husband wasn’t yet born. My baby sister was on the way. I was in kindergarten carrying my desk around.

And my mother was doing the absolute best job she could do at being the kind of mother she thought she needed to be.

Now my kids don’t go to school even though kindergarten is free for everyone. That’s me doing the best job I can do at being the kind of mother I think I need to be. She sacrificed so I could go to school and I sacrifice so my kids don’t have to go to school.

I wonder if some day my daughter will be sacrificing so that her kids can go to school while suffering through hostessing some children’s party that she’d rather not even attend.

There is a thief in my house.

My daughter belongs to the Toys R us Birthday Club so today when she went there to choose her birthday gift she was given a cardboard crown that says, “It’s My Birthday!” and a Mylar balloon. She also gets a birthday card with a $3.00 gift card in the mail before her birthday and we get a $5.00 coupon by separate mail so it’s worth joining. But, anyway…

Her baby brother’s birthday is in three weeks. He has not been happy that Sissy gets her birthday first. He had a tantrum when she chose a cake from the cookbook. He had a tantrum when she went shopping. He had a tantrum when his grandma delivered her gift today.

Tonight after he had his bedtime story and was tucked into bed, I snuggled up on the sofa to read a chapter from Little Town on the Prairie to my daughter. Out of the corner of my eye, I see him sneaking down the dark hallway into her room. Moments later he sneaks out and heads down the hall back to his room. He was wearing the cardboard crown. He had stolen it.

My daughter’s ninth birthday is the day after tomorrow. We were looking at cookbooks together tonight choosing a cake to bake for her birthday when I remembered the year of the Broiled Birthday Cake.

I said, “There’s a Gather article.” Then I said, “There needs to be a group for these kitchen disasters.” And now here we are.

My daughter was turning three years old that year. We had invited friends and family over for a birthday party. Because of this, we cleaned the house. Thoroughly. Part of cleaning the house thoroughly involved removing all the knobs from the stove for cleaning.

Then we made the chocolate cake. It went into the oven less than an hour before the guests were supposed to start arriving. We set the oven dial to “bake” and the temperature to 350 and put the cake in the oven.

Shortly after putting the cake in the oven to bake we began to smell smoke. We opened the oven to find the cake being broiled. The house was full of smoke, the cake was ruined and the guests would start arriving any minute. How did this happen?

Whoever put the knobs back on the stove put the oven dial on wrong so that when we turned it to “bake” it was actually on “broil.” That’s how.

It’s been six years so I don’t remember enough details to make this story as good as it should be but I wanted to share it anyway. I am now leaving for the store to buy ingredients for the chocolate cake she chose out of the cookbook. Wish me luck.

Originally published at Gather on 1/19/08. 

I received three boxes of Nabisco 100 Calorie Packs Nutter Butter Chewy Granola Bars in the mail for review purposes. I did not receive any other compensation or consideration unless Nabisco is so stunned by my review that they offer me a posh job writing ad copy. Hey, it could happen.

I’ve never written a product review before but I figure there are two important things: 1) Do the kids like it and would they ask me to buy it, and 2) Does mom think buying it when the kids ask is a wise choice? Of course, there is also the manufacturers record on environmental issues, their political and charitable donations, and all stuff that to consider.

1) Do the kids like it?

It would seem so. Two of the three boxes are already gone. The only reason the third box isn’t gone is that I hid it so I could get some photos of the product for my review. My eight year old daughter would have preferred to review the Oreo and the Chocolate Chip variety that were pictured on the back of the box but she did like the Nutter Butter variety. My four year old son probably ate more of these than my daughter did, but he didn’t have any words of wisdom for this review. He did leave crumbs in my new keyboard. I hope they don’t draw ants.

My kids are not of the variety that will eat anything they are given, although I’ve heard such kids exist. Mine are more likely to suggest that I mail the rejected food to the starving children who would kill to have whatever food they have deemed inedible.

2) Does Mom like it?

Well, I’m a slacker mom. If the kids will eat it and it doesn’t have a skull and crossbones on the label, then I will buy it. I don’t sweat the small stuff like calories, sugar, fat, artificial colorings, or preservatives. Because of this, I might have been the wrong mom to ask. Or the right mom, depending on how you wanted this to turn out.

The fact that these granola bars only have 100 calories each is wasted on me. I don’t care. Maybe you do. I wouldn’t even have known if it weren’t splashed in large purple letters across the top of the box. I hear childhood obesity is a real problem these days though, so I’m sure this a good thing for many moms. Which brings us to…

3) Things good moms will care about:

• There are six bars in a box. Each bar is .98 ounces. Yes, that is less than one ounce.
• Each bar contains exactly 100 calories. This may explain the odd .98 ounce weight.
• Each bar contains 1.5 grams of total fat of which 1 gram is saturated fat. I can’t figure out what kind of fat the other half a gram is. The rest all say 0. Maybe someone at Nabisco is bad at math.
• No cholesterol. I think cholesterol is a bad thing so it’s good that it isn’t there.
• Each bar contains 120 mg of sodium. I think that is salt.
• Each bar contains 21 grams of carbohydrates. I think that is a good deal less that a plate of spaghetti, but what do I know. These carbohydrates are broken down into 2 grams of dietary fiber and 6 grams of sugar. That’s only 8 grams. Again, someone must be bad at math.
• Each bar contains 2 grams of protein. I don’t know if this is good or bad. I know these are much easier to get a kid to eat than beans are.
• There is no vitamin A, no vitamin C, and no calcium. I find this is not unusual for granola bars. After all, they aren’t fruit.
• There is 2% of the Daily Value of iron. Again, I find this is not unusual for granola bars. They aren’t spinach.
• Nabisco is owned by Kraft Foods. According to opensecrets.org, Kraft Foods Global Inc. PAC contributions for the 2008 cycle so far break down as 58% to Democrats and 42% to Republicans. In case you care.

4) Conclusion

I will buy these. I probably won’t buy them for breakfast food since they are too small for my kids’ big appetites but I will buy them for quick and easy snacks. It would be great to keep a box of these in the car to cut down on trips to fast food joints. You know how it is; every time you get in the car and drive a few blocks, “Mom, I’m hungry. Can we go through a drive-thru?” It’s nice to have snacks in the car at all times.

You better buy them too so I can get that job at Nabisco doing math.

The Tale of the Quarter:

I had a bad day with my four year old son a few weeks ago. We had dropped my daughter off at her reading tutor and were on the way home. Since we were driving by Aldi I decided to stop and get a spiral ham.

If you aren’t familiar with Aldi there are two things to know. First, a person can’t spend much time shopping there. There is only one brand of anything so you don’t spend any time comparing prices or deciding what brand to buy. I can get a cart full of food in twenty minutes. My son was not going to have to suffer long. We’re not talking Wal-Mart the week before Christmas.

Second, you have to have a quarter to get a shopping cart. You get your quarter back when you return your cart. This way they aren’t paying anyone to round up carts. Because you have to have a quarter to shop at Aldi and because I frequently stop at Aldi, I keep a special Aldi quarter in a special section of my wallet. The Aldi quarter does not get spent. It is always there when I need it. My Aldi quarter had been with me longer than my son has. Key word is had.

Once inside Aldi we found a wooden train set on display. They often have special buys on toys during the holidays and this was one of them. My son decided he wanted to play with the train display only to discover that they had glued all the trains and things down. I don’t blame them. However, this discovery triggered the worst public temper tantrum I have ever seen in my life, from my child or anyone else’s. I had no choice. I had to abandon my cart and haul a kicking, screaming, cursing child out of Aldi.

My Aldi quarter was gone. Left behind in my abandoned cart. I grieved for my lost Aldi quarter. I thought about going back to see if I could recover it. I haven’t been back to Aldi since. Not because I’m embarrassed, but because my quarter is gone. My husband doesn’t get it. He thinks any quarter will do.

The Tale of the Nickel:

Today my daughter and I went to the library. They have a little gift shop in the library. She purchased four pieces of nickel candy. I gave her a quarter to pay for it. She asked if she could keep the nickel she got back in change.

Our next stop was K-Mart so that she could pick up a Christmas gift for her brother. There was a bell ringer at the door. She said, “Oh, no! I forgot my money!” and turned around and ran all the way back to the car to get that nickel for the bell ringer. Let me just say we weren’t parked near the door. It is Christmas time.

I know a nickel isn’t much but it was all the money she possessed and she ran all the way to the car and back to get it for that bell ringer. I was proud of her.

Is there a moral to this? I doubt it. I was just thinking of my shame and anger with the quarter and my pride with the nickel and all the ups and downs of motherhood.

originally published on Gather on 12-20-07

It’s been quite the month and when I ever have time I’ll be writing an article titled October, the New Monday, but I must share this little tidbit with my Gather friends without delay.

I had purchased a costume several weeks ago. It was a Renaissance gown and my daughter actually chose it. I’d have never chosen purple. I finally tried it on a few days ago to discover that it was itchy and made my chest look even flatter than it is. The costume had to go back.

Last night I returned it and the clerk at customer service asked me if anything was wrong with it; I presume she wanted to know if it was still saleable. I answered that there was nothing wrong with it but that it itched and I couldn’t tolerate it. My daughter then piped up  in her voice that she only uses when saying something embarrassing in public, the loud voice that carries for miles. She wanted to share that the real reason mom was returning the gown was that it smashed her boobs and made them look littler than they are, which is pretty little.

With the itchy, unflattering costume returned, I went in search of a different costume. I could not find one at that store since I am so picky. I have to be able to wear my silk thermal underwear underneath it since it could be 30 degrees when we take the kids trick-or-treating. It has to be acceptable to wear to the homeschool Halloween party. It can’t be itchy. I’m picky.

My husband insisted that we head over to the costume shop as he did not want to go to every K-Mart, Wal-Mart, Target, etc. in town with tired, hungry kids in tow only to go home empty-handed. I was initially against the costume shop since it is so much more expensive than the discount stores but I saw his point and we headed to the costume shop.

On the way there the conversation turned to boobs when I addressed the concept of TMFI to my daughter who is just beginning to develop breasts. At some point we spoke of implants and the fact that I’d get them if we could afford them so that I could actually buy bras and bathing suits that fit me. My bras are the Almost A cup size and I can’t even fill them up. My husband said that maybe someday he would be able to buy mom some boobs.

We wandered about the costume shop and eventually found ourselves in a little back area by the fitting rooms. Unnoticed by me, this is apparently where the more adult costumes are.

Remember that voice I told you about? The one that kids only use when they are saying something embarrassing in public? This time it came from my four year old son.

“Look Mom! Don’t you want to buy some boobs?”

Up on the wall, well above eye level, was a pair of huge strap-on rubber boobs with large, hot-pink nipples.

At first the silence was deafening. Then everyone in the store began to laugh.

I’m still considering buying the boobs when I go to return the costume that I bought last night. I don’t have enough boobs to fill it up.

There was once an eight year old girl who wasn’t pretty. She wore thick glasses so heavy they rubbed sores on her nose where they sat. The other kids called her four eyes. She had long, stringy red hair. Everyone had long, stringy hair — it was the seventies. Still, the other kids chanted, “red head, red head, fire in the woodshed” every day at recess. She wore hand-me-down clothes that the other kids called high water pants and chanted “bird legs” every day at recess. She had two huge, crooked front teeth that made her look like a beaver so she never smiled in a picture or any other time that she could help it. Her nose was too big for her face. So were her lips.

She was a dismal child and mostly kept to herself. She read books all the time. She loved to read books from the Anne of Green Gables series because Anne was also a red head who wasn’t pretty. Except Anne grew up to be beautiful and loved. She dreamed that the same thing would happen to her one day. She loved A Little Princess because Sara was saved from the mean people in the end. She loved Laura Ingalls and hated Nellie Olsen. She loved lots of books but she hated herself.

Her mother was disappointed with her because she was so ugly and didn’t seem to have any friends. She never noticed that the little girl loved to read and brought home straight A report cards every time. She only saw that the child was ugly.

A few years later the little girl began to write stories but she didn’t believe the teachers who told her she was good at it. She wasn’t good at anything and she knew it because the first thing you have to be good at is being pretty and making friends. Nothing else counted if you couldn’t do that.

A couple of more years pass and you find the little girl an awkward adolescent. One of her teachers has entered her in the state spelling bee. She studies long lists of words alone in her bedroom night after night. No one ever quizzes her or helps her study. The day of the spelling bee arrives and she is dropped off outside a big building and left there alone. She doesn’t know where she’s supposed to go but she finally figures it out. All the other kids have parents with them. All the other kids have people in the audience. Too bad she’s so ugly or she might have parents there too. They must be ashamed of her. She takes 24th place and gets her name in the paper. Second from the bottom, there she is. No one cut it out and saved it.

Fast forward thirty years and you see that the little girl is now a woman with a daughter of her own. Her daughter is very pretty but she doesn’t like to read and she doesn’t care about straight A’s. She watches Anne of Green Gables on DVD instead of reading the books. She won’t be entering any spelling bees.

The little girl that is now a woman is disappointed with her daughter.

I hate Monday. You wouldn’t think that I would since I don’t work outside the home. It should just be another day but somehow it never, ever is.

I don’t especially like kids. I love my own kids. Sometimes I even like my own kids. But if I’m smiling at your smelly, bawling baby you can bet it’s a fake smile. If you are showing me your hundreds of crappy photos of your kids you can bet I’m planning my escape. If you’re bragging about your “gifted” child who knows their ABC’s for the 127th time this year I’m probably choking back bile in an effort to not puke on you.

I’m not answering my phone today. When the phone rings on Monday it’s because someone that has me on their speed dial list for free, short-to-no notice babysitting is calling. It’s always because they are having a bad day or because they have so much to do that they can’t get done with their kids underfoot or because they’re in the middle of the 42nd emergency requiring child care this month.  Why, oh why, did these people give birth if they can’t stand the thought of actually spending an entire day with their own kids?

I am having a bad day. Not answering the phone was ineffective since we still have a door and people know where we live. I somehow have a child here that is not my own even after I thought I had made my stance pretty clear. At least it’s only one this time. I figure they knew that a) I was not going to answer the phone, and b) once they were at the door my kids would make my life a living hell for the rest of the day if I sent their unexpected “play date” away.

I’m not stupid. When you call it a play date, telling me what a great opportunity it is for my poor lonely little homeschooled kids to socialize, but then flee my house leaving your brat behind on your way to go enjoy something I probably haven’t got to do in years, that is not a play date. It’s babysitting.

I have lots to do. eBay auctions that I do for a third party who pays me money are over a week late. My house is filthy. My daughter’s schoolwork is behind. I need to balance the checkbook and pay bills before we incur late fees. All but one of these things would be easier if I could pawn my children off on someone else for the day. They would at least be possible if I only had my own two children under foot. I haven’t been to the doctor or dentist in years. I can’t go and take two small children with me. I haven’t been out with my husband, just the two of us, in several years.

I’d rather be having a root canal than babysitting someone’s kids today and probably any other day.

My husband has forbidden me to ask anyone to babysit for me under any circumstances since I would then be expected to return the favor tenfold. He’s tired of coming home from work and finding a houseful of other people’s kids instead of getting to relax with his own family. He’s tired of having kids still here, not picked up on time, well after midnight on nights when he has to get up early to go to work the next day. He’s tired of having our life disrupted.

I’m thinking of starting some horrible rumor about myself in hopes that I can avoid being coerced into babysitting in the future. It needs to be bad enough that no one will want me watching their kids but not so bad that I end up getting my own taken away pending an investigation. Any ideas?

I tried forwarding my phone to the Child Care Referral hotline last week but my husband got freaked out when he called and left work to see what was wrong at home. I’d hate for my mother to drive seventy miles to check on us if she were to get the same results when calling my phone. Besides that won’t help with the “play dates” at the door that don’t call ahead.

It felt good typing this rant. Perhaps I will make Monday Rant a regular feature. I’ll probably lose all my connections when they find out what a disagreeable curmudgeon I actually am.

Coming soon: Customer Disservice Hotlines