A Rough Morning

It has been a rough morning here at Casa Caballero.  I woke up late (again) and that always means a lot of yelling and rushing which is bad enough in and of itself.  My kids do not seem to understand that "we're running late" means move faster, and I get frustrated.  Even more frustrated than having to get up at all makes me.

This morning, the oldest was really pushing my buttons.  First he comes downstairs in just a t-shirt and jeans.  It is currently 28 degrees outside.  I told him that he will need to go and put on a long sleeved shirt, which causes him to slump his shoulders and roll his eyes at me.  I continue to prod everyone along, calling out "25 minutes until the bus is here!" then "20 minutes!" and "15 minutes!" and I find him sitting in the floor in front of the space heater in the den.  The same kid that I just made go and change into long sleeves, is trying to get warm and just sitting there.  I can feel my temper rising....

Then there is the problem of breakfast.  We have no less than 6 different kinds of cereal, Eggos, Pop-Tarts, breakfast bars, and bagels. However, my 11 year old claims that there is nothing to eat and wants to just have a fruit cup.  As I was explaining to him that a fruit cup is not breakfast, and he is arguing that he'll just eat an orange, I hear the trash truck.  Great.  I missed it.  So now, with 10 minutes to go until they need to walk out the door, he is grumbling into his Cheerios and I am still providing the countdown as I try to get a brush through the 6 year old's hair and the 9 year old is rushing around looking for her library book.

Finally, I yell into the kitchen where he is sipping the milk out of his bowl like he is at a garden tea party without a care in the world that he has 4 minutes to get his teeth brushed, get his jacket & backpack and get out the door.  He gets up and slams his bowl into the sink, splashing milk everywhere and stomps upstairs to brush his teeth.  I am zipping the 6 year old into her jacket and yelling up the stairs to him that he is out of time and he comes slumping down the stairs at a pace that is just above standing still. 

He won't look at me.

The girls both give me hugs and kisses and head out the door towards the corner where the bus picks them up, and I say to the 11 year old "Hey, what is wrong with you this morning?"

He still won't look at me, but I can see his eyes turning red and welling up just a little bit and he says to the wall "Apparently I can't do anything right because I was trying to do what you said and you just kept yelling at me."

Dagger to my heart.  There is no time to address this because the bus is a block away, but I tell him that I love him and that we will talk about it when he gets home.

Sometimes, it is hard for me to remember that he is just 11.  He has been the oldest, my helper, the responsible one, for so long that I expect more of him.  But he is just a kid.  And he is a sensitive kid.  And I can be insensitive without meaning things the way that he takes them.

Yes, I was yelling all morning, but I was not intentionally yelling AT him.  At least not ONLY at him.  I was yelling because it is my nature to freak out and yell to get things done faster.  I yell out the time they have left to make them all move faster, I yell because they are in three different places in the house and I need them all to hear me, and I yell because I am, in general, a loud person. 

He isn't.  He is quiet, for the most part, like his dad.  And his dad often tells me to "quit yelling at him" when I don't realize that I am.   I am also sarcastic with my kids, and usually they love it and laugh, but running late at 6:30 am may not be the best time for me to look at my kid and say something like "Seriously?  A t-shirt?  It is 28 degrees outside and you are wearing a t-shirt? Go put on something with long sleeves." and then follow that with a shout out about how much time they have and that they need to hurry up. 

I will tell him all of this when he gets home.  I will try to explain that I was not mad, just frustrated.  I will point out how he contributed to that frustration, and I will apologize for my reactions to...well, to everything this morning because it was not his fault.  It was not his fault that "we" woke up late.  It was mine.  It was not his fault that the trash didn't get to the curb.  It was mine.  It was not his fault that I was yelling.  It was mine.

Hopefully, he will understand and he will forgive me. 

Probably, he will be over it by this afternoon and not want to talk about it because a heart-to-heart with your mom when you are an 11 year old boy is not something that you look forward to.

But it is definitely going to happen because even if he is over it by this afternoon, I won't be.  I need him to know that I love him and that I am sorry.  I want him to know that he is a good kid and that I am proud of him.  I can't just assume that he knows. 

It's Never Over

So it's Friday night, and I wanted to write a blog because I have been writing freelance stuff all week.  I started this afternoon.  I stared at the flashing cursor thingy (which was totally mocking me, by the way), and I thought "What is wrong with you?  You have written over 14,500 words this week on traumatic brain injury, premise liability, boating safety, and other legal issues.  That was new.  This is YOU.  THIS is your thing!  Write!" 

And still I had nothing.

Sure, I started a few things.  I would write a few words, or a couple of sentences -- I even managed a whole paragraph once -- but I always "backspaced" them away because, well, they sucked.  I was really getting discouraged.  I thought I had lost my blogging mojo. 

I went back and looked at some of my most popular posts and I realized that it wasn't me.  It was my kids.  They were growing up and they weren't doing the same stupid stuff that they used to do.  They weren't shredding the mattress cover or cutting each other's hair or coloring the walls.  My kids are acting more normal and depriving me of great blog material.  No wonder I had nothing. 

Then, as if on cue, the 9 year old proved me wrong.

She was having a friend to spend the night.  We were going to order pizza and watch movies by the fire.  I sent her 2 brothers over to my mom's to hang out until bedtime so they could have girl time (her little sister stayed).  I gave them a snack and I started to watch "Revenge" from last Sunday on the DVR, telling them that we'd order pizza in a half an hour or so.  They went upstairs and I heard giggling and laughing and all was well.

Or so I thought.

Skipping the commercials, it took me 40 minutes to finish my show.  I started upstairs to ask what kind of pizza they wanted, and was met on the stairs by my 9 year old. 

"Mom, I have to tell you something."
"What?"
"We were pranking [her big brother] and....and...."(dissolves into tears).
"And what?"
"And I told her not to but she did it anyway."  (More tears)
"Okay.  Hold on.  Take a breath.  Start over."

This is the tale I was told:  My daughter and her friend wanted to "prank" her brother while he was gone.  It started fairly benign with molding clay on his light switch.  Then they decided to spray perfume all over his room.  Again, although incredibly smelly, also fairly benign and easily fixed.  If they had stopped here, we would have had a little scolding, and gone on with our evening of pizza and painted nails and Disney movies. 

But they didn't stop there.

They took his hair gel and squirted under his comforter and all over his sheets.  Sheets I had just washed.  Now it was getting annoying.  I was going to have to rewash his sheets and his comforter and I was going to have to figure out how to make his room smell like a boy again.

Then she told me that her friend had the idea to paint on his wall with glitter nail polish.  (I don't know why, we were not to the whys at this point, we were stuck on the "what-else-did-you-do").  So the friend got the glitter nail polish, even though my daughter told her not to do it.  She didn't come get me.  She took it into her brother's room and painted on the wall.  She still didn't come get me.  She didn't want to get her friend in trouble. 

So instead, she decided to try to fix it.

(SPOILER ALERT: She made it worse.)

My daughter is very artistic.  She received lots of art supplies for Christmas.  So she went into her room and got her acrylic paints and took them to her brother's room to try to paint over what her friend had done with the nail polish.  Now, to her credit, she expertly mixed about 6 different colors and matched her brother's wall color almost perfectly.  Not that it mattered, since her brother's room is painted with a satin finish, and she was using acrylics.  What did matter, was that in the process of all of this mixing, she got paint all over the carpet. 

THIS is when she decided it was time for her tearful confession. 

I turned to the little girl (whom I happen to like very much) and asked her if this was true and she said yes.

I made my daughter show me the damage.  I got some cleaning supplies and did what I could and I called her mom, my friend.  I relayed what had happened and we both agreed that they should come and get their daughter.  I told her (and her daughter) that I really liked her and was glad that she and my daughter were friends, but they had made a mistake tonight.  I also told her that I really hoped that she could come back another time, but that tonight they had abused the privilege of having a sleepover. 

Now don't get me wrong, I applaud my daughter for coming to me, even though it was a little late.  I let her know through the long discussions that we had tonight that I was proud of the fact that she told me but that I wish she had come to me sooner.  I let her know that there would be consequences beyond the end of the sleepover, and I talked to her about how I understood not wanting to get her friend in trouble. 

I explained that in the grand scheme of life, this was a very small thing; but that I wanted her to remember 3 very important lessons from it that would serve her well throughout life as the bigger things came up:  1) I want her to remember that she made a mistake.  She knew it was a mistake, but instead of confessing, she tired to cover it up and in the end it was a much bigger mess than she or I could handle.  I told her that if she remembered that, she could save herself a lot of trouble in the future.  2) I wanted her to remember that sometimes telling on a friend will keep them out of trouble.  If she had come to me and said "My friend wants to paint the wall with nail polish even though I told her it was a bad idea."  I could have kept all of this from happening and no one would have gotten in trouble.  3)  I told her that I loved her no matter what she did.  I told her that I would get angry at her and at what she does sometimes, but I would always love her no matter what.  We talked a long time.  She was very upset because she knew that she was wrong and because the evening had not turned out like she had planned at all.   She apologized to me, and in the morning she will apologize to her big brother.

I was going to wrap this up with a clever remark, but I am being verbally assaulted on my Facebook page right now and I cannot focus on being witty or clever.  The bottom line is, I realized that my kids still have loads of potential for future blog posts.  They may not be about how they are domestic terrorists who destroy the furniture or how they lock me out of the house so that they can have a butter and cheese picnic, but this is a parenting humor blog (for the most part) and I am a parent forever.  I will always find the humor in what they do and there will always be lessons learned. 

As for the verbal assault on my page, well, that is just more blog fodder for another day.

Waiting For Change

Tuesday, I started writing a post about parental responsibility.  It is going to be a great post when I finish it, but as usually happens with me, life interrupted and now I have a different story to tell first.

Tuesday my youngest goes to preschool, and after I picked him up we came home and I got him a snack of yogurt and pretzels while I went all ADD on the house while making my lunch -- started unloading the dishwasher because I needed a plate for my sandwich, then stopped halfway through to get the clothes out of the dryer and put the wet clothes in from the washer, went to throw away the lint from the dryer and grabbed some chips from the pantry, went upstairs to get some more laundry and remembered I was still hungry, went back to the kitchen to make my sandwich only to start unloading the dishwasher again -- you get the idea.  My youngest was sitting at the table eating his snack as I was running around all crazy, when all of a sudden he started coughing and gagging.  I knew that he was "okay" because he was coughing, crying, and breathing, but I still went into mom-panic-mode and scooped him up and slapped his back, and made him drink all in an attempt to wash down the pretzel stuck in his throat.  He was scared and he said that it was still in his throat, I assumed that the pretzel had scratched his throat and just kept making him drink. 

I finally got him calmed down, and my sandwich abandoned, I was cuddling with him on the couch.  I asked him if he was okay as I stroked his hair and kissed his forehead and he looked at me and said:

"Swallowing that penny was scary."
 

Well of course I FREAKED OUT because I thought that he had been choking on a pretzel.   I probably could have gotten it out when he first started choking and gagging, but silly me, I wrongfully assumed that he was choking on the food that I gave him to eat and not some random object he'd found on the table.  I thought that at 4, we were past the point of putting money in our mouths. 

So I called the doctor, who sent us for X-rays to confirm that it was a penny, that it wasn't lodged anywhere, and to determine best course of action based on that information.  The penny was there, and thanks in large part to my pushing fluids after it first happened, it was in his stomach.  We were told to go home and wait and watch for it to pass.  Call if there was any pain or vomiting, or if there was no sign of the penny by Friday.  In case you've never had the pleasure of dealing with a swallowed foreign object, that meant that I got to catch and go through poop until I found a penny.  My life is so glamorous.

Tuesday -- No poop.
Wednesday -- No poop.
Thursday -- Still no poop, so I called the doctor who asked if this was "normal" for him (and I honestly don't know.  I mean, I haven't closely monitored his poop since he's been out of diapers).  In any case, they instructed us to give a laxative and extended the timeline to Saturday.

Finally, this morning, we had a little poop, but no penny.  Conversations with my little piggy bank revealed that swallowing the penny had hurt so much that he was now deathly afraid to poop because he thought it would hurt again.  We had tried in vane to dispel this fear, but the 4 year old was having none of it, until he finally pooped today.  Now he believes us that it isn't going to hurt, but still no penny.

So the downstairs toilet remains wrapped in Saran Wrap to catch the elusive penny and unavailable to everyone but him, and my box of latex gloves is on the counter.  And I will spend my day trying to catch up on housework and asking the 4 year old every 30 minutes or so if he needs to poop so that I can play with it until I find the penny. 

Sigh. 

Just waiting for change.

Explaining Death To My Kids Reminded Me About Life

Death is hard.  It is even harder when you have to explain it to your children and answer their questions about it. 

This past week, my great aunt passed away.  Now, I don't know if it's a Southern thing, but I have found that many people seem to be surprised that my family had a close relationship with my great aunt.  We have close relationships with a LOT of our extended family -- aunts, uncles, cousins, 2nd and 3rd cousins, great aunts and uncles, -- literally everyone.  We have big families, and we know them and love them and are involved in each other's lives.  So when my great aunt passed, we were sad and we made time to travel to her hometown a few hours south for the funeral.  This was the first funeral for my 2 youngest and I wanted them to be as prepared as possible since death is a difficult concept for adults in many cases and they are only 4 and 5.  Also, they have yet to develop that voice in their heads that tells them "Hey, you shouldn't say that out loud because it could offend someone" so I wanted to try to get a little ahead of their possible reactions to hopefully keep them from embarrassing themselves (but mostly me).  The night before the funeral, I sat down with the 2 of them to discuss what would happen the next day and to answer any questions that they might have.  This is that conversation to the best of my recollection:

So you guys know that Aunt Martha died and that we are going to go to her funeral tomorrow, right?

Yeah.

Do you know what a funeral is?

No.

Okay, well I thought I'd talk to you guys about it a little bit so that you'd know what to expect and so that I could answer any questions that you might have, okay?

(Nods of assent from both)

When someone dies, the people that loved them come together to talk about them and their life and to comfort one another because they are sad that they are gone.  It will be at a funeral home, which is a place especially made for funerals.  Aunt Martha's body will be there, and we will be able to see her.  She will be in a coffin which is a box that they will bury her in. 

In the GROUND? 

Yes, they will bury her in the ground after the funeral.  The funeral will be sort of like church -- we will be quiet, listen to people talk about Aunt Martha and about death, and there will be prayers and maybe singing.  It is important that we sit quietly during this part, okay?

(Nodding)

When the funeral is over, we'll get in the car and drive to the cemetery.

Like the graveyard?

Yes.

Will there be ghosts there?

No.

What about zombies? Will there be zombies there?

No, there will not be zombies there.  When we get to the graveside, there will be a few more words spoken, probably a prayer, and then we will leave before they bury her, okay?  Do you guys have any questions?
 

At this point, I was sort of patting myself on the back.  I thought I had done a pretty good job preparing them without going into unnecessary details that would only confuse them.  I was expecting them to have a few general questions, but nothing major.

Can we watch?

Watch what? 

Watch them bury her. 

No. 

Why?

It's not proper to do that. 

Why?

Because it's just not. 

Where will they bury her?

In the cemetery.

But where?

In the ground.

But where in the ground?

Well, in her hometown.

BUT WHERE?! 

In the ground, next to her husband, in the cemetery, in her hometown.   

(Shocked) You mean they killed her husband too??!!  

NO!  He died before you were born -- he's been buried a long time. 

Like with the dinosaurs?

 So maybe I gave myself a little too much credit.  Or maybe I gave THEM too much credit.  But in any event, I had talked to them about what to expect and I felt a little better about everything.  After a little bit more discussion about death and how Aunt Martha had lived a long time and that she had died because she was old, etc. we went to bed so that we could head out the next morning.

When we got to my aunt's house the day of the funeral, my fears about the 5 year old's lack of a verbal filter were renewed.

Who lives here?

This is Aunt Martha's house.  

But she died. 

Yes, but this is her house. 

She died because she got really, really old, right? 

Yes. 

Just like you will die someday when you get really old, right mom? 

(Okay, thanks for that brutal reminder about my mortality). 

So we got dressed and went to the funeral home.  All of our family was there (including the 11 grand kids from our side of the family) and the kids seemed to be taking everything in and not freaking out at all.  I did have to stop all of the kids from running and laughing through the funeral home during the visitation -- they were playing some version of hide-n-go-seek.  I sent them outside, problem solved. 

The funeral home that hosted my family is very nice and the set up is good because it is adjacent to the cemetery.  When the funeral was over, we only had to drive through the parking lot and into the pretty large cemetery.  As we were winding through the graveyard, the 4 year old looked out the window at the headstones, puzzled:

Wait....are all of those rocks DEAD PEOPLE?!

(the 5 yr. old) Yep!  All them flowers too!

Sooooo.....will Aunt Martha grow into a rock?  Or a flower?

(the 5 yr. old) No!  They don't plant you.  They put you in the ground and then they put the rocks and flowers on top of you.

So you can't get out and be a zombie?

(the 5 yr. old) Yeah.

Creepy.
 

 I didn't try to correct any of this.  I was just thankful that this discussion had happened in the car.

In the end, the service was beautiful, my aunt was laid to rest with respect, and my kids made it through their first funeral with no emotional scarring and no embarrassing comments in front of other people.  Funerals are hard matter how old you are, and I am proud of my kids for the way that they behaved.  They may have had an inappropriate comment or conversation, but they lightened my mood with them.  Their curiosity and precociousness throughout the day were a welcomed reminder that life goes on and that we should always ask questions, be silly, and LIVE while we can, the best that we can.

Seriously? Yep, Seriously.

I am in trouble.  I have been warned by my mother that "You cannot use sarcasm on children, it will only confuse them."  Crap.  I am quite possibly the world's most sarcastic person.  My kids must be the most confused kids on the planet then.  I say "Seriously?" at least a half dozen times a day, and there is rarely a day that goes by that in response to some complaint about how unfair it is that they have to pick up their messes, that I don't respond by saying "I know, you guys are so mistreated." or "Yep, I am a mean mommy.  Now do what I said."  When my kids tell me some absurd reasoning that only makes sense in the world of those under 8, I recount it in the form of a question followed with "Yeah, that makes sense."  For example, when I ask them to pick up the playroom and literally 3 minutes later they come chasing each other laughing down the stairs, I say something like "Hey!  What are you supposed to be doing?!"  And they say "Oops.  We forgot."  My reply is "You forgot?  Seriously?  In the 3 minutes since I told you to pick up, you forgot?  Yeah, that makes sense.  Get up there and get back to it."  It is not entirely my fault, I am going to blame Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. See, I was raised on good, old fashioned, honest sarcasm, courtesy of Warner Brothers.
I learned to recognize sarcasm early on, to laugh at it and move on.  But one afternoon with kids' cartoons these days might explain the real problem.  Have you watched it lately?  Everyone is so happy.  And if they aren't happy, then the entire show is about how everyone is working to MAKE them happy.  I know that kids' programming is fiction, and that it is only entertainment, but it give a seriously deranged look at the world and I am not sure that all of the lessons it is teaching are good ones.  No lie, one of my kids favorite shows is called "Miss Spider's Sunny Patch" and it is all about this spider couple who have adopted all of these bug kids and they all live together in a tree.  Yeah, that's a good lesson to teach kids.  HELLOOOOOOO -- Spiders EAT bugs. They do not adopt them.   Ni-Hau, Ki-Lan:  Kai-Lan spends 30 minutes trying to discover why Tolly, Ho-Ho, and Rin Tu are mad and how to fix it -- in real life she would take her ball and go home.  Dora and Diego are great, but I question parents who would let their kids run around all over the world with a jaguar and a monkey.  Even their story lines are all about making everyone feel better -- I mean, OF COURSE all of the animals ran away from the cougar, they are what he eats.  And I do not think that a real cougar would get his feelings hurt at all.  Then there is "Yo Gabba Gabba" -- singing "I like bugs!  I. Like. Bugs!"  I am not an alarmist, but as a person who carries an Epi-pen in her purse, I DON'T like bugs, and I know that there are dangerous bugs (bees, wasps, scorpions, etc.) and there are annoying bugs (cockroaches, fleas, ticks, ants), and I don't like the idea of my kids being taught to be friends with bugs.  Not that cartoons should be all about "Hey, this bug can kill you!"  or that Miss Spider should eat her adopted kids, or Ni Hau, Kai-Lan should look at Tolly and Ho-Ho and tell them to get over it, or anything like that, but shouldn't there be more of a mix?   Our kids are growing up to be shiny happy people who are going to fall apart the first time things don't go their way.  Well, everyone else's kids anyway. 
I think I will have to disagree with my mother (*gasp*).  I do not believe my kids are at all confused by my sarcasm.  On the contrary, I believe that through sarcasm, my kids will be ready to face the real world with the ability to laugh at themselves, make their friends laugh, and shrug off alot of what might well cripple the fragile psyche of the rest of their generation.  If our kids believe that the world is full of creatures who will only work to make their lives better, then how will the handle it when their team loses, a mean kid singles them out to humiliate, or despite all of their best efforts, they fail?  My kids will be able to say "Well this sucks" and move on.  I do not mean to imply that I am raising 4 little cynics, I do praise them when they do well, and I reward their good behavior.  But I do NOT stop life and turn my world upside down to correct every wrong that is inflicted upon them.  When Bella says in her drama queen manner that William won't play with her, I tell her that I cannot force him to play with her and to play with Lorelei or Jackson instead.  When William says "Bella called me stupid" my canned response is "Well, are you stupid?" and when he says no, I say "Then don't worry about it."  Then I have a talk with Bella about how it isn't nice to call names.  When Lorelei comes crying to me that Jackson took her toy, I tell her to take it back before talking to Jackson about not taking toys away from others.  Kids need to know that they are loved, and mine do.  They need to know that we do our best to treat others fairly, and that there are often consequences when we don't, and mine know that as well.  But they also need to understand that the world will not cater to them,  and mine DEFINITELY know that.  Seriously.