Cozi Blog

An Infestation of Gnomes

I'm not really sure how it started, but suddenly, I find myself dealing with an infestation of gnomes.

I'm not complaining. It's better than the rats, because those were a) real; b) doing some sort of nightly dance number in the attic; and c) Alice's topic at Show and Tell on more than one occasion.

Honestly, once with the rats would have been bad enough. But they came up repeatedly, including one occasion when a video camera was running during a visit from the reptile man, so now we have a permanent record of Alice's wee voice making the announcement "We have RATS in our ATTIC!"

Now, the kids are making sure everyone knows about the gnomes. They tell other kids. They tell their teachers. The school principal? He even knows the gnome's name: Brixton.

Lucy, who has slightly better handwriting, composes nightly notes to Brixton and occasionally, to Brixton's more reserved wife, Blandine. She has asked what his house looks like, and where exactly in our walls it's located. She's made an assortment of gifts, including a trampoline from toothpicks and pieces of scrap paper (just as dangerous as the real thing!), a sled made from the mouth of a plastic spoon for Blandine, candles made of crayons, and even a bathtub made from Tupperware.

She and Alice have expressed great concern over the gnome's natural enemy, the troll. At one point, every wall in the house had an illustrated sign proclaiming: WORING! TORLS ON THE MOVE! (Brixton isn't picky about spelling, so why should Lucy be?)

She's even drawn up plans for a troll trap, which Brixton rejected because it called for the use of a live gnome as bait.

A curious thing has happened since Adam and I started writing replies to the troll notes on tiny pieces of yellow paper. We started believing in them ourselves. We actually made a special trip to the store to get Tic-Tacs for the baby gnome, who had a sore throat. And if I close my eyes, I can imagine Brixton moving about in the walls of the house. (I don't even have to close my ears, because the rats? They're back. And I'd rather imagine those little footsteps I hear belong to a bearded gnome in a pointy red cap.)

Truthfully, it can sometimes be a bit of a hassle to sustain something borne entirely of your child's imagination and your own. On more than one evening, Adam has leapt out of our warm bed to go write a quick Brixton note so the kids won't be disappointed.

But you know, as I think about it, this is pretty much the same thing that happens when you raise kids. They're borne of our imaginations. The hassles that are unimaginable to the uninitiated—unplanned bouts of vomiting, endless cleaning, patience-trying phases, school paperwork and jam-packed schedules—are a daily part of the job.

But the sounds our kids make, the questions they ask, and the pure-hearted willingness they have to accept and engage in the big world around them—a world full of dangerous torls, painful sore throats and improvised trampolines—I can't imagine life any other way.

--Martha Brockenbrough

(Martha Brockenbrough is taking time off. While she's gone, we're republishing some of her most popular posts.)

What's in a Name?

One of the most valuable things parents can do is bestow their children with good taste in names. No one ever talks about this. It's not an official part of any parenting manual. But it's important. Oh, it's important.

I read in the news recently that a teenage girl protesting a biology assignment changed her name from Jennifer to Cutout Dissection.com. Seriously. Her driver's license now reads Dissection.com, Cutout.

I'm all for political protest, but why didn't she go with Ann T. D'Section? Same message, but miles closer to normal.

High school can be miserable but it's not a permanent affliction. A name, on the other hand, lasts until death or an inconvenient trip to the courthouse. Why not just wear a message T-shirt and the character-building regrettable haircut, and be done with it? Why change your name and be stuck saying, "Well, in high school…" for the rest of your life?

Her parents should have taught her better.

Most people's first naming attempts don't begin with themselves, though I'm going to make an exception here for the spawn of certain celebrities. Pilot Inspektor and Moxie Crimefighter, I'm talking to you. You have my permission for a do-over as soon as you're of legal age.

My point, and I do have one somewhere, is that it's important to give kids a chance to name a thing or two before they make a horrible mistake with their own offspring.

When Lucy was 3, my beloved dog died. I thought it'd be a great idea to let Lucy name the new puppy herself. She was learning her alphabet and really liked to string together novel combinations of letters.

"What about M-O-I-D?" she said.

"That spells Moid," I replied. "It's quite possibly the worst name in the history of the world."

"Moid!" Lucy said, delighted. "Moid, Moid, Moid, Moid."

Moid is not a name that grows on you with repetition, except in the manner that mildew might creep up the hem of your shower curtain.

But she clung to the name Moid, and we were only saved by the fact that my aunt and uncle gave her a goldfish before we met the right puppy. The goldfish became Moid, and for his short life, seemed to tolerate it, though I'm leaning toward the conclusion now that his quick death was his only means of protest. 

When we did get the puppy, I named her Rosemary. Lucy was angry that Couch Jumper and "Petally" didn't meet my high standards. Still, after what happened later to Tom Cruise when he jumped on Oprah's couch, I'm glad I held firm.

Now we are in the process of assembling our family band. Alice is teaching herself to play the piano. Lucy and I play the violin. With Adam on the guitar, we're a regular honkytonkish/bluegrassish group that knows one whole song, "Bile Them Cabbages."

Alice, ever the logical child, has suggested we name our group "Family Band" or "The Bile Them Cabbages Band."  She also suggested "The Bathing Suit Rockers" because she is lately obsessed with the idea of learning to swim. I rejected this. I do not like rocking a bathing suit. I will not rock one on stage—not without liposuction, a spray tan, and entrance into the federal witness protection program.

Lucy, however, is staying true to her roots. Her suggestion, repeated several times at top volume, is "The Rocking Moids," which sounds like something you might get when you're old, sedentary, and in need of more fiber in your diet.

I am considering it, though, if only to save a future grandchild from having to answer when someone calls out, "Moid!" I don't know, though. Maybe we should get a hamster instead.

--Martha Brockenbrough

(Martha Brockenbrough is taking time off. While she's gone, we're republishing some of her most popular posts.)

The Gift of a Good Dad

My kids can’t keep presents secret. They just can’t. Right now, they’re away with Adam on a beach trip and they keep bringing up the topic of Father’s Day, inviting him to guess what they’re giving him.

Here’s the thing. They have no idea what they’re talking about. They don’t know what we’re giving Adam because I have hidden his presents in our home’s equivalent of Fort Knox, which has a security system made of overgrown dust bunnies.  How they get in the attic and got so huge, I have no idea, but they do well in keeping everyone out. I swear one growled at me.

But maybe I shouldn’t say they have no idea what they’re giving him because they DID pick a horrendously messy and involved craft project from a book several weeks ago. It was just before Mother’s Day, and the girls were discussing the very best thing to make for Daddy. Would it be his own pet rock? A footprint T-shirt? No! The sparkling treasure box!

“Hey,” I said. “Mother’s Day is next. Why aren’t you figuring out what to make me?”

But they didn’t hear me. They were deep in discussion of what they’d put inside the box.

And this, I think, gets at the difference between moms and dads. Of course men and women are of equal value as parents. Families today are lucky to have the most-engaged fathers of any generation.  But this doesn’t mean moms and dads are the same, and the proof of this lies in the presents.

When my brothers and sisters and I were kids, we once got my mom a set of teaspoons for mother’s day. She cried at our apparent disregard for her. But it wasn’t that. We just had no idea she aspired to do anything other than bake us cookies for our after-school snack. (Also, we were idiots.)

My dad was easier, though. One year I got him a small dogwood tree for Father’s Day. It’s in his garden still, and it gets bigger and more beautiful as time passes—just like my regard for my dad. I knew he’d like it because he often said to us, “I want to leave the world a more beautiful place.” Gardening was his way of doing that.

Though he might have claimed otherwise, the things my dad said to us when we were kids were a powerful combination of law and oracular wisdom. When we stayed up past our bedtime, my dad told us “the authorities” were coming. Sure enough, we could hear their knock on the door, and in a panic, we’d dive under the covers and feign instant sleep. Later, he told my brother that the Elephant Man had a parasitic infection called elephantiasis. Dad was just kidding. But my brother reported it as fact to his seventh-grade biology class.

If Dad believed that gardening was the way to make the world a better place, of course he needed a tree for Father’s Day, just like Adam obviously needs a treasure chest for Father’s Day.

This is the thing with dads. They might take some knocks for doing less of the child-rearing grunt work. They might not be the parent kids run to with scraped knees. But this doesn’t mean dads are second-class parents—or that they’re, in fact, doing any less to make the house a home.

Dads are the ones kids want to please. A homerun counts for more when dad watched it. A dress is prettier when dad says it’s so.

Dads are the ones who know how to put stuff together. How to fix broken toys. How to solve problems.

Dads are strong. They can open jars. They can throw kids high in the air, giving them that giddy sensation that comes when one of nature’s first rules—gravity—is broken.

Dads break other rules, too. They don’t require breakfast be fortified with eight essential vitamins and iron. They don’t care if socks match or if hair is brushed.

But they follow the important rules. They’re loyal and protective. They expect us to tell the truth, and to do what we say when we say we’re going to do it.

And they’re brave. They check the mouse traps. They see what’s making the dog go nuts. They set the spiders free.

It’s no wonder my kids want to give their dad a treasure box. To them—and to me—he is a treasure.

This is why, when the kids get home from the beach, we’ll get out the glue and glitter and we’ll make it. We’ll fill it with whatever strikes them as being objects made of awesomeness, which is probably going to be some messy combination of marbles, robot pencil sharpeners and leaves.

So this year, on Father’s Day, I hope every dad gets something that lets him know he’s treasured. That’s one secret that’s just too good to keep.

--Martha Brockenbrough

School Party Madness

A lot has changed since I was in preschool, where the hardest thing we did was learn how to put on our jackets right side up.

Now, kids go to a second year of preschool called pre-K. And the work they do is pretty darned advanced. Lots of the kids in Alice’s class already have excellent penmanship, for example. I have distinct memories from kindergarten. Most of us were just learning our letters, not writing whole words. The teacher would make us close our eyes and feel the covers of our alphabet books, each of which had a large letter on the cover made from scratchy glitter. My favorite was S because S is for skunk, and who doesn’t love a glittery skunk?

Anyway, if my kids get access to a time machine and visit me in the 1970s, they will laugh at me and my primitive ways.

But they’ll also feel sorry for me because they get much better parties than we do. These kids have fierce, fierce celebrations. They blow my mind.

I have vague memories of getting a sticker at the end of the school year. Or maybe an ice cream bar if we had a really nice teacher. And I do recall going to an all-school field day once where we enjoyed tug-of-war, potato sack races and the futility of trying to find the needle in the haystack.

Now, though, every class in school has its own separate party—this is in addition to the all-school party that happened last month. In these class parties, there are multiple activity stations manned by a troop of highly organized mothers and the occasional obedient father.

Among other things at pre-K this year, the activities include a “foot painting” area, where an adult paints a child’s foot, the child somehow makes art out of it, and another parent washes said child’s foot before stuff gets wrecked.

The cynical part of me always expects the worst assignments at parties. You know, like clean-up after the pie-eating contest…that sort of thing.  So I was fully expecting to be on foot-painting patrol this time around.

But the pre-K teacher is well aware of my limitations, thankfully. There are a lot of separate tasks involved with painting a foot, including helping it connect to paper, and handing it off for a good scrubbing. That’s frankly more than I can handle, particularly when you throw in the stuff you sometimes find on the bottom of children’s feet. I made Lucy wash hers just last night after I noticed she’d left what look like chunky-style Cajun seasoning on Adam’s side of the bed during story time. (Sorry, Adam.)

Instead, though, I was assigned to monitor the bubble parade. I was also supposed to bring in a huge jug of bubbles and enough wands for all the kids—something that did not quite go according to plan for reasons that rhyme with “helegated to dusband.”

But, whatever. We parents aren’t being graded on our volunteer efforts, although sometimes, we act like we are. It’s hard, though, to make a reasonable effort and leave it at that. This morning, I even made sure Alice had clean feet inside her socks because I didn’t want the other parents to think of me as the mom with the Cajun-footed daughter.

All in all, it can be a lot of pressure on a person. Why do we do this to ourselves?

The truth of the matter is, our kids would probably be just as happy with a Popsicle and a pat on the head. They are getting out of school, after all. No matter how much things change over the years, the thrill of summer vacation remains.

Dirty feet and all, I can't wait.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Alice is a Droid

Adam and I used to joke that when Lucy got tired, she was like a robot on the fritz. She would walk in circles and say things that made no sense, just like a droid whose batteries had run down.

We were SO wrong.

Of the two of them, Alice is much more droid-like. She takes an extremely literal view of the world, like Data on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” And I confess…I love it completely.

I guess I first detected this on Election Day last year. The family had gathered around the television with a few of my friends from high school so that we could watch the results as they were broadcast. Alice, who’d voted for Barack Obama in her class election, had a very glum look on her face.

“What’s wrong?” I asked. “Your guy is winning.”

“When are they going to RUN?” she asked. “This is BORING. You told me Barack Obama was running against John McCain.”

I could see her point. It would have been much more interesting if there had been a foot race between the two men, and it probably wouldn’t have risked a Constitutional crisis by changing the outcome, if the shirtless Obama photos are any indication.

A few weeks later, Adam returned from a business trip with a small, black bag of chocolate for the girls.

“Alice,” he said, “Go upstairs and get me the little black bag that’s in my suitcase.”

Alice did just as he asked.

“Where’s the chocolate?” he said.

“You told me to bring you the BAG,” she explained. She didn’t need to say, “Daddy, you are such a dimwit.” It was written on her face.

It’s entirely possible that Lucy also would have brought down an empty bag, but only because she’d eaten the goods. Alice, who loves chocolate more than anything, has amazing self restraint. What child will dump out a bag of candy and not even ask for a piece? A robot child.

A few months later, we went to a wedding. Alice kept cruising by the cake table. I don’t blame her.  It was a spectacular-looking confection.

“When do we get cake?”

“After the toast,” I told her. (Adam told her the same thing when she pestered him.)

They finally served the cake, which had fruit in it. Like all good droids, Alice thinks fruit is the work of the devil, so she decided not to eat the cake after all.

“But at least there’s going to be toast,” she chirped.

That’s when Adam had to take her into another room and explain that “toast” has two meanings. Alice did her best not to cry. (Emoting: It’s so human.) It’s not like she’s wrong about this topic, either. Toast at a wedding would be really, really good, especially when everyone is tired and emotionally overflowing and sore in the feet from wearing party shoes.

Alice sealed it for me, though, with her reaction to “Star Wars.” Like a lot of kids, Lucy and Alice like to compare themselves to the characters onscreen, judging which ones they most resemble. Lucy decided she was most like Chewbacca—loud, loyal and hairy. Alice is probably the first child in the history of “Star Wars” to identify with C-3PO, the nerdy protocol droid who speaks 5 billion languages and whose wisdom is routinely ignored by the Han Solo when he’s beating on the Millennium Falcon with a wrench.

I don’t know about you, but most of my life philosophy has its basis in middle school musicals, but that’s probably only because my parents didn’t get cable TV till I went off to college. Thanks to “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown,” I know that Socrates is the philosopher who said, “Know thyself.”

Alice, at age 5, already has her Socrates down pat. For Mother’s Day, instead of the customary self-portrait, Alice gave me an awesome drawing of a pink computer (the desk is red because Alice knows red is my favorite color).

I won’t be surprised if she next year, instead of a birthday party, she asks for an upgrade celebration. Who am I to say no to whatever Alice 6.0 wants?

--Martha Brockenbrough

The Incident

Doesn’t it sometimes seem like kids today are growing up in a different world than the one we had? I’m not just talking about cell phones and the Internet and on-demand television. I’m also talking about the culture. What kids and parents got away with thirty years ago just wouldn’t fly today.

When we got on my parents’ nerves, they’d just tell us to go to Country Sunshine, and we’d get on our bikes and go. It sounds like a nice place, doesn’t it? That’s marketing, people. We lived on a dead-end street, and Country Sunshine was what my dad called the stump where the road ran out.

We also had quite a bit more unsupervised time activities such as:
-    Playing on the roof;
-    Falling out of trees; and
-    Setting assorted things on fire.

It wasn’t that my mom was inattentive. She was, as mothers go, fairly awesome. Not only did she have five kids in five years, she also baked our bread, sewed our dresses, and schlepped us to swim team every morning and music lessons in the afternoons.

If that were my schedule, you can be darned sure my kids would run wild occasionally so that I could enjoy time in the sweet embrace of Valium. My mom, on the other hand, used it to do laundry.

These days, I do not tell my kids to get on their bikes and ride somewhere. For starters, I haven’t gotten around to teaching them to ride yet. And also, I’m way too paranoid.

Not too long ago, Lucy asked me if she and Alice could go for a walk by themselves.

“No,” I said. “You can go outside and blow bubbles on the porch, though.”

Five minutes later, when I went to check on them, they were gone. I did notice a chalk line leading away from the porch. I followed the line down the 36 steps to the street. The line turned left, toward school, and continued in a somewhat wiggly fashion all the way to the house of some friends on the next block.

At the end of the line was Lucy, crouched low so she could add on to her Hansel and Gretel trail. If I could have lifted the line of chalk off the street and tied it around her neck like a leash, I would’ve.  It’s part freaking out about her getting stolen, hit by a car or eaten by a bear, and part a case of “what will the neighbors think?” We live in a world where you’re supposed to watch over your kids 24/7 and if you don’t, you’re a bad parent.

This means that while our kids are more likely to make it to adulthood intact, they are probably losing out on some of the wildest and most memorable moments of childhood.

I relish my own memory of catching my little brother as he felt out of a maple tree by the lake, for example. I once dissected a dead squirrel with a butter knife and fork, and I brought its guts home in a bucket. I saved a sister from drowning—not once, but twice! Even my mom has a story about going on top of her roof with and umbrella and jumping off, to see if she could do what Mary Poppins did.

So what will my kids have?

For the longest time, I thought they’d grow up without these harrowing tales. After last Sunday, though, I’m not so sure.

The setting for their first real misadventure, appropriately enough, was the yard at my parents’ house. Lucy, Alice and three of their cousins were playing on the small lawn where Adam and I got married.

After my grandmother died four years ago, we built a swing set in her memory. So it’s hallowed ground in more ways than one, and the kids really like hanging out there.

Lucy is getting old enough now that you can tell her to watch over her younger cousins. This is what she was doing when her 3-year-old cousin came down to the house in tears.

“What happened?” her mother, my sister, asked. Apparently, the cousin had wet her pants.

Moments later, another cousin came down to the house in tears.

“What happened?” her mother, my other sister, asked. Apparently, this cousin had also wet her pants. But since this girl is 5, it was quite the unexpected development. 

Unexpected, perhaps. But not completely random.

As it happens, Lucy had decided to teach a course called Outdoor Urination Techniques for Little Girls. Two cousins passed. Two failed, which means Lucy is probably ineligible for No Child’s Wet Behind funding.

One of my sisters—the one with a teenager in the house—thought it was hilarious that the kids had consecrated the wedding/memorial lawn in such fashion. The other was less amused. But she’s the one I saved twice from drowning, so by my reckoning, Lucy can give one more inappropriate lesson before we’re even.

Just to be safe, though, I am hiding the umbrellas, and I’m making them all use the bathroom before they go outside.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Lucy's Book of Borft

When I was a kid, my dad had a basement office with a pair of enormous file cabinets. Every so often, he’d take one of our childhood artifacts—a school paper, a class picture or a note—and squirrel it away in his cabinet.

“Your father is a packrat,” my mom would say.

But this is why he had a note from his sister that dates back to the 1930s. It says, “NEDDIE AND JIMMY PRESSED A REAL STICKY LEAF IN MY FACE.”

A face full of sticky leaf is comedy gold in any decade. My dad knows that, and I am honored that my story about Pedro the rogue reindeer who took Santa’s sleigh to the moon earned a spot in the files. If only I’d known more about space at the time, I would have included gory details of what happened when they traveled outside Earth’s protective atmosphere. That’s the stuff of great literature, after all.

I don’t have quite the file space that my dad has, but I keep my children’s best creative works, too. I was recently pawing through the box of stuff from Lucy when she was 5, and found a real treasure: her very first book.

I still remember the day she wrote it. It was a Monday, and I was the class mom in kindergarten. The kids were told to write books. My job was to walk around the room, helping them, as needed, with all the difficult words they might want to use. The rest of the little girls were writing about kittens and ponies and sparkly rainbows and flowers.

“How do I spell unicorn?” one little girl asked.

Lucy’s book, on the other hand, was called “When I Barfed.”

Only she didn’t quite spell it that way. The cover says W I BOFT. Lucy, who likes to plow through life at warp speed, which is all the better to leave Earth’s protective atmosphere, used to consider the first letter of a word to be plenty. She now thoughtfully includes at least three letters out of any given word she might want to write. Progress!

I stood over Lucy and watched her work, curious about where she was going with her story. To me, vomit has much more narrative potential than kittens and unicorns. I did try not to laugh, because laughter in the face of creative effort can also turn children into accountants, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, the world deserves an accountant who will acknowledge that 12 and 21 are not “totally the same” just because they each have a one and a two.

The other children were curious about what Lucy was doing, too, but perhaps for different reasons.

“You’re spelling ‘barfed’ wrong,” one little girl said. “It has an R in it.” 

Lucy, always a pleaser, changed the word to “borft,” which, when you think about it, perfectly captures the actual sound of vomiting. All in all, I think the book is a quiet work of genius. There is just one line on each page, and the book reads like this:

W I Borft

By Lucy

I boft on Mom

I borft on Dad 

I borft olovr my bed 

I borft olovr EVERYTHING but then…  

I felt bedr!

I particularly like the illustrations. In the first, I’m holding Lucy in my arms. My shoulder is covered in Technicolor puke. In the next, Adam stands next to Lucy, whose mouth is open. A line connects her gaping mouth to the puddle of barf on Adam’s shirt. You can practically see it flying there. The next picture shows Lucy sitting on her bed, surrounded by a small sea of vomit. The second-to-last picture, meanwhile, is just a huge swirl of puke. And there, on the last page, is Lucy, looking much better—though she sports a pair of wicked eyebrows.

Her teacher at the time, a 20-something woman with no children, was not amused. I brought her over to watch Lucy work and she didn’t even crack a smile. To me, the little book is a treasure. It only shows that at age 5, Lucy had a certain level of nostalgia for her own youth and the good times we shared. It shows her excellent sense of humor and drama. And it shows that she has her own sense of what’s worth writing about.

It also shows that she has absolutely no remorse about puking on me, her father, her wrought-iron bed or indeed, the entire world.

Maybe I’m just biased, but I sort of see a career for her in Hollywood.

-- Martha Brockenbrough

The Case of the Disappearing Glasses

You know what I like? Matching drinking glasses. Maybe it’s because I grew up drinking out of jars that used to hold cheese, and later graduated to drinking from peanut butter jars when I was in college, but I really like looking inside my cupboard and seeing actual drinking glasses that look like one another. I like arranging them in neat rows. In this one, small corner of my otherwise messy life, there is order.

A few years ago, I bought just such a set of matching glasses. Since then, a few rebels have slowly joined the tribe—mostly ugly, plastic souvenir tumblers from Disneyland. No peanut butter jars yet, but I’m sure it’s just a matter of time, given the way family life works.

Lately, a few of my nice, matching glasses have disappeared.

I’d broken one of them with over-vigorous washing, and I regretted the error. Truly, I did. But when a pair vanished at the same time, I started to get suspicious. Glasses just don’t up and run away. They’re not romantic things, like dishes and spoons.

I grieved my matching glasses and thought about buying some more, but with our plastic tumblers and souvenir pint glasses there, did we really need to spend that money? No, we didn’t. So I quietly mourned my matching glasses and the collapse of order in my cupboard.

There is a secret to finding lost things, though. And that is to look for something else, specifically, a child’s shoe. Who knows what lost things in the world would turn up if everyone stopped to look for a shoe?

This is what I was doing yesterday in those awful minutes of the morning—the ones when you’re trying to get everyone fed, brushed, dressed and out the door to school. It’s always a frenzy of stress and sudden remembering of forgotten show-and-tell items, and it’s worse if someone can’t find a shoe. Lucy couldn’t find her regular school sneakers, so she was clomping around in a pair of hideous, muddy boots that were really, really, really not what to wear to second grade.

“Your red sneakers are between the couch and the window,” I told her. “Just like I told you yesterday.”

She marched over to the couch and plucked out one from beneath the radiator, holding it like it was perhaps radioactive.

“I can’t FIND the other one,” she said, after about two seconds of looking. 

“Aw, c’mon! They’re both there! I saw them! Shoes don’t just up and run away!”

“I CAN’T FIND MY OTHER SHOE,” she said.

I finished stuffing Alice into her raincoat and joined Lucy at the couch. I believe steam was coming out of my ears.

“If I find this shoe that you couldn’t find, so help me…” I said.

There wasn’t a good way to end that sentence, I realized as it was coming out my mouth. If I find this shoe that you couldn’t find we’ll…put it on your foot and go to school?

And of course I found the shoe in about two seconds. I found the shoe, two DVDs, three books, one notepad half filled with Lucy’s fashion designs, some crunchy bits of things that used to be cheddar bunnies, several granola bar wrappers and…my missing drinking glasses.

I also found a spoon, but no dish, so apparently things didn’t turn out all that well for them. Let’s see if the little dog laughs now.

The good news is, the glasses are clean and back in the cupboard, along with the mismatching interlopers.

When you have a family, you can crave order and matching things, and you can do your best to achieve that. But with kids, life is really more about plastic souvenir tumblers, mysteriously disappearing glasses, and magical reappearances just in time to get everyone to school—I can live with that.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Moms are the Best!

Everyone knows who the really famous moms in the world are. But in the United States alone, there are more than 80 million regular moms doing the real work of motherhood day in and day out—without any of the fanfare or fawning press coverage.

We read that the average mom puts in a 13-hour day doing what she needs to do for her family, working paid and volunteer jobs, and doing family-related chores. That means more than a billion hours a day are spent every single day by moms taking care of the rest of us. Think about it. A billion hours a day. Even at a dollar an hour, that’s a lot of value.

But it’s the little things moms do that get us really choked up, especially when we think about that fact that these little scenes play out constantly in the lives of American families.

For example, one friend’s 2-year-old had been working really hard with the sidewalk chalk when big raindrops started to fall from the sky. The mom and her daughter dashed inside only to watch the masterpiece melt in the rain. The 2-year-old did what kids that age do—she melted down. And so her mom took her down to the laundry room, gave her more chalk, and let her recreate her masterpiece on the safe, dry walls, walls that had just been cleaned of fingerprints.

Another friend, who’s going through all sorts of sad times with her extended family, has a tradition of baking her kids any kind of birthday cake they want. This year she set aside her troubles and made a giant rainbow explosion of a cake—just as her daughter hoped for, because moms don’t let their own broken hearts get in the way of their kids’ dreams.

You probably have memories of your own mom reading stories to you at night, or digging through the trash can for your retainer, or of the time she drove you all over town looking for just the right kind of soccer shoes. And if you’re a mom, you’ve probably done these things yourself.

And if that’s the case, you probably shrug and say it’s all in a day’s work. But it’s more than that. It’s a lot more than that. It’s the kind of work that makes everything possible for the people who will one day be running the world.  It’s the kind of work that makes all the difference for us when we need it most.

Here’s to all those moms out there making the future great, one small, quiet act at a time. We owe you more than you could ever know.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Meet Miss Venus Fly Trap

I think I’ve found the perfect pet.

This is nothing against my dog, of course. I love her more with every passing day. Granted, I started at a  pretty low point because she’s only one week older than Alice, and in case anyone is wondering whether it’s a good idea to have a puppy and a newborn at the same time, I can say with certainty that are not enough diapers in the world to contain the mess.

My point, and I do have one, is that I love my dog with all my heart.  But for ease of operation and general usefulness, it’s hard to beat a Venus Fly Trap. They won’t make cute noises or lick you, but after almost nine years of parenthood, I’m realizing that cute noises and licking are sort of overrated. Eating flies, on the other hand, is always welcome.

In fact, Miss Venus Fly Trap, as the kids have named her, caught a fly this morning. I’ve checked on her progress several times. She’s a model for slow, calm eating, or so it looks at this point. It could be that she’s in desperate need of a Heimlich maneuver because the fly is almost as big as her head or whatever you call those serrated pod things that wave around on their slim green stalks.

But until she keels over, I choose to believe that she’s savoring the meal, something I wish my kids would do. And I know other animals, like snakes, could be viewed as good role models because they, too, eat vermin and take awhile to squeeze lunch through the system, but I’m really not up for that kind of drama.

My brother has a corn snake that once got loose. They found it in a Nilla Wafers box with a suspicious bulge in its midsection. It gave me nightmares. I can imagine the same is true for Nilla Wafers, and what have they ever done to hurt anyone? 

It’s not just Miss Fly Trap’s promise to eat our flies and teach my children manners while laying off the Nabisco products, though. She also doesn’t shed. Not fur or skin. Nor do I have to take her to the vet. Nor am I expected to stick my finger in her mouth and brush her teeth with chicken-flavored toothpaste, as you are supposed to do these days with your dog. When her old teeth get tired, they just turn black and shrivel up and then I snip off the stalk and toss it in the compost bucket.

I never thought I’d celebrate anything turning black and shriveling up—not since certain dark thoughts I had about a mean high school teacher. But hey. This is the beauty of middle age: the ability to look at shriveling in a whole new way.

Still, my favorite part about Miss Venus Fly Trap is that she reminds me of my own childhood, and specifically, Mother’s Day. We once bought one for my mom as a gift at the local hardware store. This was after we bought her measuring spoons, which made her cry. Unfortunately, she was not crying Tears of Joy. These were Tears of After All I’ve Sacrificed for You Kids, All You Thought to Buy Me Was Measuring Spoons?

We never made that same mistake again, and by buying a Venus Fly Trap just before Mother’s Day, I am sparing my kids the same fate.

Just to be certain, though, I will state for the record that I do not want or need measuring spoons. Or a kitten. Because we already have a dog I love, along with the perfect pet. Life is pretty good that way.

--Martha Brockenbrough