Cozi Blog

When Crayons Explode

This morning I was working away in my office when I heard Adam’s voice. It sounded sort of small and distant, as though it were coming across a string and into a tin can held up to my ear.

Strange, since I didn’t have a tin can telephone on my ear. Even stranger, it sounded like he said there had been an explosion in the basement.

Lucy and Alice were in the midst of a giggle fest in their bedroom, so I had to holler at them to pipe down for a second.

Then came Adam’s voice again—through the laundry chute.

 “I must have misheard you,” I called down. “It sounded like you said ‘explosion.’”

“Yep,” he said. “In the dryer. It’s really bad.”

I don’t know about you, but when I hear explosion, basement, dryer and really bad all together in one sentence, I have but one thought:

“Oh no. A rat crawled into our dryer and died and somehow through the process of decomposition accelerated by heat, its guts burst from its belly and are now sliding slowly, cruelly down the sides of the dryer, weaving awful new patterns into our clothing.”

But maybe that’s just me. In my own personal dictionary of life’s little traumas, “bad” by means rats, dead or alive, along with innards of any sort.

So it was good news, then, that the basement explosion involved neither rats nor their juicy bits.

It was a crayon, hot pink, that made it through the wash and into the dryer before it succumbed to the heat and exploded all over every single long-sleeved uniform shirt the kids own, as well as our bath mat and Adam’s pillowcase, which he tossed into the wash yesterday after it got covered in lavender bubble bath.

(This bubble bath business is a long story unto itself, as is the reason the bath mat was being washed in the first place. Let’s just say that the bubble bath meant Alice had to take a second bath right after the first, only this time without bubble bath because the last of the bottle was on Adam’s pillow. And I am pleased to report that it was chocolate on the bath mat, and not what I’d originally suspected.)

In any case, the good news is at least there were no rats involved, unless by “rat” you mean the kid who put the crayon in her shirt pocket. (And I know which kid it was. The shirt looks like her heart burst. It’s sort of gruesome.)

Oh, but I joke, I joke. Who hasn’t put a crayon through the wash? Any kid who hasn’t probably doesn’t color enough. Or that’s what I say to make myself feel better for not checking pockets thoroughly before I toss stuff down the laundry chute.

The hard part, though, is getting the crayon out of the clothes and off the drum of the dryer. But even that isn’t as hard as I’d feared. 

A friend sent along a recipe for removing crayon wax from clothing. The list looked long at first. But then when I went down and compared it to the list of things I’ve accumulated as a parent—Shout, OxiClean and the leftover Borax from the slime we made at Lucy’s “gross and disgusting”-themed birthday party—I realized that I already have it all.

And that is true, in an even bigger way. Stuff goes wrong in life. But when you have the wisdom and support of friends, a well-stocked cleaning supplies cupboard, and acceptance of the fact that small calamities will happen even when we are busy with other things, you feel better, almost instantly.

But I’ve still made it good and clear to the kids that crayons don’t go in pockets. Judging from the looks on their faces when they saw their school shirts, this time they’re going to remember.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Is Nine The New Senior Citizen?

Old people get a bum rap for two things: the early-bird special, and the amount of time they spend discussing their physical ailments.

But you know who does this to an even greater extent?

Nine-year-olds.

Let’s start with the early-bird special. At our house, dinner is usually around six p.m. Adam arrives home then and I do my best to have something tasty on the table, even if the kids and I tend to disagree over the definition of “tasty.” (Their definition: anything from a box.)

It’s not exactly a late dinner we’re having, but Lucy simply cannot wait for the meal to start. Never mind that she devours a lunch that weighs several pounds because she eats like a fruit bat. Never mind that I give her a huge after-school snack; she is forever sneaking into the cupboards and gorging on nuts, fruit leather, raw oats and other assorted items.

No matter where I am in the house, I can hear those cupboards slam, slam, slam, so I know exactly what she’s up to, even if I’ve told her to hold off on stoking her engines because dinner is on its way. (Oddly, Lucy slams the cupboards open; they’re always gaping when I go into the kitchen. We usually look like we’ve just been robbed.)

In short, the child would be happy to have dinner start at 4:30 p.m., and whenever possible, I feed her then. For a while, I worried that she was going to eat her way onto the obesity charts. Wrong. Lucy is made of solid muscle and she can lift her 180-pound father off the ground. She’s a spray tan and a body of baby oil away from being Little Miss Ironpants. Honestly, I am starting to worry that she’ll rip the kitchen cabinet doors right off their hinges.

So perhaps her early-bird special isn’t exactly like the senior citizen one, which is more about chicken soup, soda crackers and fiber supplements. But the way she and her friends discuss their ailments? Now that is like a little corner of Florida has parked itself in my family room.

“Look at this bruise!” “Once, when I was coughing, yellow stuff came out!” “Did you hear that David’s toenail fell right off?”

The worst part, though, is hearing them talk about their orthodontia, largely because it has a show-and-tell aspect. In the weeks before she got her retainer, I heard repeatedly about how a friend of hers had one.

“It hurts,” Lucy said. “Her teeth ache. Her jaw barely works. And she can’t talk right when it’s in.”

“Lucy,” I said. “I had a retainer. They’re not that bad.”

“Oh, but they are,” she said. “They’re terrible. They KILL.”

“Are you worried about your retainer?” I said.

“No!” she replied. “I can’t wait!”

She even brought her friend over to me for a little retainer demonstration the day I volunteered in class. Her friend clicked her retainer out of her mouth and offered it to me for inspection. Unlike my retainer, which was dyed to match the roof of my mouth, this child’s retainer was blue with stars. And lots and lots of saliva.

“Want to hold it?” she asked.

“No thanks,” I said. “Maybe put that back in your mouth, OK?”

“Ish kind of hard to talk when ish in,” she said.

“See?” Lucy said. “She can’t say her Ss.”

When Lucy finally got her retainer on Monday, she was in her night-before-Christmas mood—vibrating with energy. I picked her up in the waiting room of the orthodontist and was practically blinded by her wire-enhanced smile.

“Ish hash a kishen on tah!”

“What?” I said.

“KISHEN!”

She unhinged her jaw and showed me the roof of her mouth. Apparently stars are not the only decorative orthodontia option. You can also get kittens on your retainer.

“But you can talk normally, Lucy,” I said. “Please talk normally. I talked normally when I had a retainer.”

Didn’t we all talk normally when we had retainers? Wasn’t a speech impediment something you wanted to avoid? Like visible underwear and/or head lice?

Not so to kids these days. They celebrate their infirmities.

Because our appointment at the orthodontist’s office was sandwiched between school and Lucy’s back-to-back dance classes, I stopped at a teriyaki joint to feed the kids an early-bird special dinner. While we waited for our food to arrive, Lucy alternated between popping her retainer out of her mouth and snapping it back in so she could mispronounce words for Alice’s entertainment.

“Shee?” Lucy said, “I can’t shay tup.”

“Lucy, you can say cup perfectly well. You are faking it. FAKING IT!” I said.

To no avail. Alice was highly amused and rattled off a long string of words for Lucy to mangle until dinner arrived. And Alice can’t wait for her turn to be crippled by her own teeth.

For my part, I shake my head and hobble behind them, trying not to let anyone know that my Achilles tendons hurt because I played with a jump rope on Saturday. Somehow, I don’t think anyone would be interested.

--Martha Brockenbrough

 

 

Fun Size My Life, Please

Dear Makers of Fun Size Candy Bars,

I am old. Middle aged, as one of my high school students told me two years ago, when I had significantly less gray hair and fewer wrinkles than I do today. A sign of how bad things have gotten: I now have bangs because my forehead looks like an elephant’s ankle. Every day is a bad forehead day, and I’m soon going to have to grow a beard to hide what’s happening with my neck.

Despite my age, however, I do remember the glory days of Halloween, when a child had to trick-or-treat carefully because of the razor blades in the apples and the LSD in the Mickey Mouse temporary tattoos. Both were urban legends, but hey! It was Halloween. The scariest day of the year (after school picture day). This sort of thing only helped the holiday live up to its terrifying potential. 

Back then, fun size candy bars actually were sort of fun. They were heavy enough to make the trick-or-treat bag/pillowcase bruise your ankles, and they were just long enough to seem like they could conceal something deadly.

Fun size candy bars today should be called dollhouse size candy bars. It’s not just my failing eyesight, here. These things are tiny. Lilliputian. My children are suffering because I have to steal two and three candy bars at a time to feel satisfied/protect their teeth/do my part in staving off the childhood obesity epidemic. By tomorrow, their trick-or-treat bags will be empty black holes collapsing in on themselves.

Meanwhile, so many other things in my life and the lives of other parents are now full size.

I’m talking about the size of the car insurance bill, which will now go up because of the minor fender-bender a certain beloved member of my household had last week.

I am also talking about the laundry pile, which, if it were a volcano, would be large enough to be classified as a federal emergency management administration hazard area.

And I’m talking about the parent’s to-do list, which keeps growing like a giant pumpkin. Just this week, I’ve had to track down flu shots and fill out legal waivers for multiple activities, one of which was a birthday party. We’re living in the fun size times of legal liability, flu pandemics and other horrors. Doesn’t it make you miss a good, old-fashioned epidemic, or even the simple elegance of a hidden razor blade?

So this is my request to you, oh makers of Fun Size candy bars. Instead of using your educations and talents to shrink one of life’s sweet pleasures, please direct your attention elsewhere. Make poverty fun size. Make wars fun size. Or, if you want to start really big, make my waistline fun size.

But please stop shrinking the size of the candy. My midlife crisis depends on it.

--Martha Brockenbrough

In Defense of Shouting

The most popular article at the New York Times last week was one with a title I couldn’t resist: For Some Parents, Shouting is the New Spanking.

Almost from the first, the story drove me nuts. After delivering a backhanded sort of praise about how our generation praises our toddlers for blowing their noses, the writer says, “incongruously and with regularity, this is a generation that yells.”

First, could it be any more obvious that the reporter has never chased a toddler with a tissue? Kids this age look at Kleenex as the Devil’s own hanky. So, yeah, it is not all that incongruous to holler, “Buford! Come back here! We have to wipe your nose! No! Not on the couch!” Any kid who submits deserves a “good job.”

Second, I am quite sure this generation did not invent yelling. Perhaps we feel guiltier about it, thanks to stories like these that on the one hand make fun of our efforts to be careful and engaged with our kids, while on the other hand point out how grievously we are failing to achieve that.

In my book, though, the silliest quote comes from the author of a study on the damaging effects of yelling, one Murray A. Straus.

“It affects a child,” he says. (Duh. That is the idea.) “If someone yelled at you at work, you’d find that pretty jarring. We don’t apply that standard to children.”

Yes, it is true that we don’t give children the same perks and treatment a grownup would get at work. For one, they’d have huge temper tantrums if you served them coffee from a vending machine. Grownups shrug and drink it anyway.

More to the point, children are not employees and families are not corporations. Not even nonprofit. It would be nice if they were, though. We’d get much better benefits and vacation packages. (Anything is better than zero.)

But if I were running my family like a business, let’s see....the first thing I’d do, after lobbying my local, state and federal government for massive tax breaks and grants to support my work, is write a policy manual, to be supplemented by intermittent company memos, that explained how things in our little family enterprise would run. I’d also write job descriptions, so everyone knew what their responsibilities were and could refer to them in times of trouble.

And of course, we would have a human resources department to ensure these standards were fairly and consistently applied. I even know whom I’d appoint for the job: the neighbor’s cat, the one who poops on our garden paths and sits on the porch blinking smugly at the dog.

I’d tack memos by the fridge, like this, using inappropriate quotation marks for emphasis just to keep it real:

MEMO: To all employees
RE: Milk

It has come to the attention of management that some employees are unaware of how to tell that the milk carton is “empty.” Employees put empty milk cartons back in the refrigerator and then leave the door open until the lettuce droops and the meat is warm enough to experience a “zombie resurrection.”

We will be holding a “mandatory” milk-carton-operation training session Friday in the break room. Anyone who fails the milk carton test will be subject to immediate outsourcing to a foster company. Plenty of orphans in India would gladly come to work for us.

P.S. Don’t even think about filing a discrimination complaint. Human resources is NOT happy about the milk situation and will not listen sympathetically.

Look, no one likes yelling. But there is a huge difference between regular, bug-eyed berating of your kids and the occasional burst of anger. The first is probably a sign that you’re trying to do too much and you’ve lost focus on what’s most important. Cut yourself some slack, lower your expectations all around, and you’ll feel a lot better. Kids who are yelled at regularly really do suffer.

The second? Well, a little “Looky here, Buster” now and then is how we show kids that there are consequences to doing the wrong thing—breaking well established family rules, picking on a sibling, ignoring a parent. Anger isn’t fun, but it’s something everyone experiences from time to time.

Not everyone shows it by hollering, but it’s not such a terrible thing to do so. If we don’t occasionally show kids how bad behavior affects others, they might grow up and be the kind of people who swipe your lunch from the company fridge without giving it a second thought. Maybe one reason yelling is not routine at work is that parents did their jobs.

Ultimately, there are just two things I wish for: that all families make it through the day without getting pushed to the breaking point, and that the money spent studying obvious things—like the unpleasantness of yelling in the home—instead were funneled to programs that actually made it easier to make it as a family in today’s world.

Even the neighbor’s cat agrees that would really be something.

--Martha Brockenbrough

 

Here's To Non-Reality Families

I don’t know about you, but pretty much everyone I know last week watched the TV footage of Balloon Boy sailing across the country in his dad’s silver contraption.

Adam was at work, and I was theoretically working, too. But for a good part of that horrible couple of hours, we were watching footage of the balloon together and instant-messaging each other. How could this happen? Where were the parents?

The worst part was when the balloon finally landed and rescuers circled it slowly, stabbing at the balloon to let the helium out.

“Why aren’t they looking for the boy?” I typed. “I’d be ripping that thing apart with my bare hands.”

At first it looked like they were going to find nothing more than a body inside. And then they found nothing. Then came word that a cardboard compartment that had been on the bottom was missing. Where was the boy who’d been inside? Along with everyone else, I felt sick.

Alice isn’t much younger than that boy, and to lose her in such an awful way... there just aren’t words to express the hole that would leave in a person’s life.

Now, of course, it looks as though the family staged it all to get themselves a reality show. After their six-year-old barfed twice in a TV interview—what, producers, once wasn’t enough for you to shut off the cameras and microphones?—police had some sharp questions for the mom and dad.

I don’t want to get too judgmental about the family, here. I read this morning that they’d been homeless, and I can see how those circumstances can make a person do desperate, stupid things. They probably did want a reality show, and they put their children in a terrible position to increase their odds.

It’s a cultural problem. These reality shows aren’t “reality” at all. They’re like circus freak shows of previous centuries, piped into our homes 24 hours a day. The same networks that produce these modern freak shows—“Half Ton Teen,” anyone?—keep the cameras rolling when families are melting down or behaving like harpies instead of “real” housewives. They turn tragedy into entertainment and make tons of money in the process. We’re responsible, too. We are the audience that advertisers want to reach.

The sympathetic lighting and inspirational music shouldn’t fool us. These shows profit from people’s misery. It’s gross. We should turn it off. Turning away from these bus wrecks is not going to make people like the Heenes better parents, but at least it will protect their children from being sold out to the highest bidder.

Meanwhile, I’m going to turn my own attention, if quietly, to the families I know and admire. Their lives may not be dramatic enough to be featured on TV, but they’re inspiration and comfort for me nonetheless. They’re the actual reality show, and it’s infinitely more meaningful than the fake stuff. These are the families I see shopping for groceries together, the ones having fun choosing cereal and ice cream. These are the parents I see pushing the swings at the park. The ones who each week conquer mountains of laundry, only to do the same thing all over again the next week without complaining about the hopelessness of it all.

They’re the parents who drive their kids to all the unglamorous appointments: the speech therapist, the orthodontist, the library for that book report. They wipe noses, and cheer their kids through challenges.

It’s this sort of stuff, the patient nurturing, that helps little boys and girls grow up into men and women who want to make something better than a profit. They want to make a better world. Here’s to all of them, and to your own reality.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Do We Need Two Dogs?

Both Adam and I come from large families—he has three siblings and I have four. I’ve always liked the noise that brothers and sisters provide, not to mention all the scapegoating possibilities. There was no question that we’d have a brother or sister for Lucy.

Dogs, though, are a different matter.

One would be enough, I thought. It always had been enough before.

When I was pregnant with Alice, I lost my beloved dog to cancer. It was excruciating. I’ll never forget staying up with her on her last night, stroking her damp fur as she gasped for air and looked at me with pleading eyes. She died the next day in my arms. For weeks afterward, I kept reaching out to scratch her behind the ears, finding only emptiness in the spot where she always lay.

I thought we’d maybe never have another dog. They live such short lives, relatively speaking. And the holes they leave behind are huge. You don’t know quiet in a house until you stop hearing a collar jingle or a tail softly thump the ground as you pass.

But then a friend who breeds golden retrievers called. Would we like a puppy? She gave me the date a new litter would be ready to join a family. It was six months to the day that my dog had died. I took that as a sign, a sign that could not be ignored.

Now, I recognize it was a sign of insanity, because the date was also my due date with Alice.

“How hard could it be having a newborn and a puppy?” I said. “I’ll already be waking up in the middle of the night for Alice. Might as well get it all over with at once.”

For the record, it is very hard, indeed, having a six-week-old puppy when you have a five-week-old baby (Alice arrived a little late).

And, in fact, puppies are even harder than babies. Though newborns of all species eat, sleep and relieve themselves pretty much around the clock. But human newborns keep their dirty bits covered in diapers. Human newborns also do not chew the couch, slip through the fence, and take themselves on adventure walks to the coffee shop down the street.

I have very little recollection of those months of my life. It’s like a gaping hole in time and as much as I look back, I remember nothing of it beyond how cute Alice looked when she smiled, and how cute Rosie looked when she bounded through our just-planted garden, tearing out the new trees and shaking them like weasels. She was like a dandelion puff, only with sharp teeth.

Rosie and Alice are now both five years old. Rosie no longer destroys shoes, plants or furniture. She’s sweet and fun with the kids. But unlike my last dog, who had no interest in others of her species, and really considered herself to be a shorter, hairier human, Rosie loves other dogs. Loves them.

When I take her for walks and she sees other dogs across the street, she leans her whole body toward them. She assumes the play position when we’re lucky enough to pass a potential dog-friend on our sidewalk. She could spend hours wrestling with the dogs at my parents’ house.

I have started to feel an enormous burden of guilt that she spends most of her life separated from her own kind.

Other things counter this, of course. Rosie has been a bit of a disaster dog. She once ate a bee, which stung the inside of her mouth. Her cheek swelled to the size of a large steak. This summer, she ate some crab shells at the beach and needed emergency veterinary care. Shortly after that she was treated for a case of Giardia she picked up somewhere in the neighborhood (apparently a lot of dogs had it).

Without being indelicate, I can reveal I came thisclose to having to replace the carpet in my office in the aftermath. A few weeks later, she did something to the bottom of her foot that resulted in a temporary cast, antibiotics and a plastic cone of shame. (The vet also threw in drops for her Rosie’s bilateral ear infections.)

In short, she is a handful. Only a lunatic would think of adding another dog to the mix, knowing all that we have going on with our jobs and with two kids in school and assorted activities.

And yet. And yet...

When I watch her look out the window and wag her tail at the dogs that pass by, when I think about how happy she would be to have another dog to curl up with at night, I think it’s just a matter of time before I ignore the wise angel sitting on my shoulder and instead listen to the naughtier one in my heart, the one who thinks happiness for everyone in the house—dogs included—is more important than a clean floor and manageable vet bills.

Apparently the bad economy has created a glut of grownup golden retrievers in need of rescue. I think it’s just a matter of time before one finds her way into our home.

Wish me luck.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Picking a Pumpkin

The first weekend in October, we have a long-running family tradition of driving to the country to pick pumpkins from a real farm.

Invariably on the ride there, I fall into the grips of my childhood fantasy of living in the sticks, no doubt because of what I’d read about Anne Shirley, Laura Ingalls Wilder and Sarah Plain and Tall.

Oh, to live in the country beneath wide open blue skies, alongside fields the color of emeralds and chocolates, keeping company with round-eyed cows exhaling sweet clouds of breath on misty October mornings. I’ve even been known to make Adam pull over so I can snag real estate fliers of farms for sale. If you’ve ever had this fantasy, you know what I’m talking about.

It’s a good thing we do these annual trips to the pumpkin patch, because the truth is, I have no business living far from civilization—and the country knows it.

It starts out easily enough. We pull into the long driveway of the pumpkin patch, a stretch of gravel that makes the car bounce like a rabbit. Fun! Isn’t this fun, kids! We park, and through the swirling dust of the lot, I can see the flat orange and green pumpkin oasis bordered by a whispering corn maze.

Picking pumpkins is easy enough. On the way there, Lucy and Alice discuss their ideal pumpkin shapes. Lucy wants a huge oval pumpkin. Alice wants something smaller and rounder. They march through the fields and make their selections, choosing a smaller pair of pumpkins for our house gnomes, Brixton and Blandine.

Then we head out for the real attraction: the pumpkin festival, featuring hammering, a corn pit, sack-racing, hay rides, a pumpkin cannon and a trout pond.

The hammering is just as simple as it sounds. Kids pound nails into a ring of stumps. It’s not the sort of activity we think of when we live in the city. We’re much more likely to say, “Have you had your fish oil supplement, yet? Perhaps you’d like to go to kinderyoga.

 My girls love hammering and if we happened to have any stumps in our postage-stamp-sized garden, I’m sure it would be full of nails in no time. Actually, in quite a bit of time, if I’m going to be honest. Here’s the other thing about city kids: they don’t know how to hammer with real hammers, which don’t quite work the same as the rainbow-colored plastic ones.

The corn pit is my favorite, just because of the words. Corn pit! It sounds dirty, but it isn’t, unless you count corn dust. Again, it’s just as it sounds: a hollow filled with dried corn in which kids can sit, jump, dig and wallow. We don’t have these in the city. They’d be overrun with rats and/or homeless people.
It’s the hay ride, though, that brings me back to my senses.

Literally.

The ride takes place in a covered wagon drawn by a diesel tractor. Wooden benches line the edges, and huge bales hay work as makeshift seats in the center of the wagon. I am allergic to this hay. Wildly so. My nose soon starts to itch.

The tractor drags us to a grassy field where the famous pumpkin cannon stands. The menfolk get out and take turns ejecting innocent pumpkins into the field. Some pumpkins soar a mile away before they’re reduced to unsweetened pumpkin pie innards. Meanwhile, the hay attacks my eyes, which turn red and weepy because they are wimpy city peepers.

I soldier on, explaining to a quaking Alice that no, the cannon isn’t going to shoot us. And I explain to Lucy, who wants to go outside and operate the pumpkin cannon herself, that she is not yet big enough. And then I sneeze about fifty times.

The hay ride ends. The kids want to catch something in the trout pond.

“Fide, I say. Dat will be just fide.” And then I kick myself for not bringing tissues. You really can’t wipe your nose on a corn leaf, no matter how silky smooth it looks. And I know what it’s whispering to me, now. “If you come here, you will sneeze.”

In short order, the girls have jerked a pair of trout from the pond. Dinner. Someone more ruthless or at least more honest than I clubs the trout to death (yet another use for a hammer).  The bag of dead fish in my hand is the only thing keeping me from scratching my eyeballs out. They are on fire.

“Cub on, kids. Tibe to go hobe,” I say.

And then we get into the car. On the long ride home, I stop sneezing. My eyes fade from red to pink.

“I’m glad we live in the city,” I say, as Adam carries the huge pumpkins up the 37 steps from the street to our house. (We wouldn’t want me to touch anything that makes my eyes itch, would we?)

“Grunt,” he replies. And I know just what he means. About this time next year, I will briefly, oh so briefly, beg him to let us live under a wide open blue sky, near an orange and green pumpkin patch. It’s a really good dream, while it lasts.

--Martha Brockenbrough

School Picture Day Snapshots

I don’t know why school picture day always whips me into a lather. Actually, that’s a total lie. I do know, and I will get to that momentarily. For now, though, let me describe a couple of scenes—snapshots, if you will—leading up to today’s big event.

SCENE I: Tuesday. The Lost Sweaters.

Me, to the kids, on Monday:  It’s fine if you wear your uniform sweaters to school, girls, but remember to bring them home. Picture day is Wednesday. WEDNESDAY.

Girls, rolling eyes: Yes, Mom.

Fast-forward to pickup Monday afternoon: Girls, where are your sweaters?

Girls, rolling eyes: In our backpacks, Mom.

Tuesday morning, as I look in their backpacks: Girls! Sweaters! Where?

Girls, shrugging: We don’t know. Are you mad? You sound mad.

Me, rolling eyes: Do not come home today without your sweaters. DO NOT.

Girls, rolling eyes: Yes, mom.

For good measure, I decided on Tuesday morning to stop by the school’s lost-and-found bucket.

Irritatingly, this is right next to the uniform donation bucket, where we have accidentally “donated” three of Lucy’s sweaters to the used-uniform sale closet. Most stuff in the used-uniform closet is fairly shabby, which is why sweaters in new condition, like the brand-new one Lucy lost last year, disappear like lobster tail at an all-you-can eat Vegas buffet.

At $32 plus tax and shipping per sweater, we’re talking about a lot of my therapy budget, people.The good news is, I did find another child’s brand-new uniform sweater in the bucket and sent his mother an e-mail. I am a sweater hero!

Even better, both girls came home on Tuesday with their cardigans. “Look, mom! We have them! We TOLD you so!” 

This brings us to...

Scene II.  Tuesday evening: the haircut

Alice desperately wants to have long hair. I understand this feeling, having suffered it for most of my childhood. She, unfortunately, is blessed with baby fine blonde hair that took forever to fully cover her scalp. I keep it fairly short so she doesn’t look like Gollum or worse, Donald Trump.

As I snipped away with the scissors, ever so gently on Tuesday evening, I recalled myself in the home-barber’s chair 30 years ago.

Scene III. The hideous flashback.

Dad: Stay still. I’m going to trim your bangs. I’ll just follow along the edge of your eyebrows...

Me, looking up at the huge, huge scissors in his hands: OK.

Dad: When you looked up like that, you raised your eyebrows. So your bangs are maybe a little short.

Me, looking into a mirror: My life is ruined.

The resulting picture does not lie. My bangs are a crooked, one-inch fringe resting on my Frankenstein-sized forehead. You know those monk haircuts that look like they’re done with a bowl? That’s not a look that flatters most 9-year-old girls. I was not one of the lucky ones. I do have the picture somewhere. No, I am not posting it to the Internet.

Scene IV. Another flashback.

Me: Mom, my neck is really stiff. I can’t turn my head.

Mom: That’s too bad. It’s school picture day. Do your best to smile.

Me: My life is ruined.

The resulting picture is perhaps even worse than the previous one. In it, I am 12, a sixth grader. Because of my neck pain, I am unable to style my hair, which is still cut in the Dorothy Hamill wedge that was briefly popular six years earlier. One shoulder is up at my ear. My grimace reveals teeth sheathed in glittering, silver braces. I have a new worst picture of my life. And no, I am not posting it to the Internet.

Scene V. Why let the fun with flashbacks end?

It is senior year of high school. My Dorothy Hamill haircut has been replaced with a huge, huge perm. It took two stylists three hours working side by side to wrap all my hair in spiral rods. It is my pride and joy. My crowning glory. If I were ever inclined to leave the school library, I could proudly sit in the groupies section of a Guns N Roses show.

I am ready for my picture. I position myself on the seat, ready to take the last photo of my student life. At the photographer’s cue, I smile, remembering 17 magazine’s advice on taking a cute picture. Think genuinely happy thoughts and your smile will look its very best.

“Cute!” the photographer said. “Wow! What a great smile.”

The next few weeks pass. Every so often, I feel the sweet prick of anticipation. I can’t wait to see my cute picture. At last, after so many years of terrible school photos, I will have something I can proudly swap with my friends.

Finally, the photos arrive in the school office. I dig through the box to find mine. There it is. I tear open the crinkly envelope. I slide out the pictures. I behold the image of me with my bouncing curls, my genuine smile...and my almost completely closed eyes. There’s no other way to say it. I look drunk.

My life is ruined.

This, I suppose, is why I try to give my kids the best possible shot at school picture day. So that they don’t have a lifetime of embarrassing memories and a drawer full of pictures they’re too humiliated to show their friends.

It’s probably wasted effort. After all, I do have some entertaining stories about school pictures gone horribly, horribly wrong. And the truth? I might have cut Alice’s bangs a little too short.

--Martha Brockenbrough

The Annual Halloween Costume Dilemma

People post all sorts of family-related things to the online neighborhood parenting group I belong to: questions about teething babies, advertisements for bikes for sale and assorted calls for stuff to borrow.

I saw a post yesterday that both brought back memories and showed me how far I’ve come in this parenting game. Someone was asking for a Halloween costume to borrow because her preschooler changed his mind and wouldn’t wear the one she’d bought.

She had my sympathy. Last Halloween, Alice refused to wear the fancy robot suit she’d been dying to wear a few months earlier, and even though money was tighter than tight, I got her a last-minute replacement puppy suit.

Since then, I’ve come to believe that all costumes should be last minute, and the lamer the better.

When I was growing up, people basically wore colored pajamas and a mask. Look! I’m Secret Squirrel! Or, Look! I’m Wonder Woman! The only difference was the mask. Then, until you got your Christmas jammies, you slept in your costume and considered it a fun extension of the holiday, even as you wondered how all your candy kept disappearing and why mom was complaining about gaining five pounds.

There’s this expectation today, based in part on the better special effects in movies and TV, that costumes must be awesome, and that kids can keep changing their mind until the perfect idea strikes, even if that happens 24 hours before the actual event.

I’m not kidding about the special-effects part, by the way. Have you seen the original Land of the Lost lately? Forget the crazy science that somehow made it possible for dinosaurs, early hominids and space creatures to coexist.

The costumes were outright terrible. You can practically see the zippers on the Sleestaks. And Cha-Ka...I love the little brute, but he looks like a low-rent Wookiee, and it’s not like Chewbacca came from a particularly high-rent district himself. Could it be any more obvious Chewie’s wearing fur over his huge, huge shoes? Despite that, everyone I knew watched and loved the show and Star Wars. We didn’t expect any better because there wasn’t any better.

I wish the same were true for Halloween.

I thought we were set this year. Lucy has wanted to dress as the fairy warrior character from her favorite book. She has been growing her hair out for a year so it would look right for the part, which is sort of a big deal when you have curly hair that wants very badly to Rastafy itself into a mess of dreadlocks.

But she stuck with it, and for her birthday in August, I got her a rubber knife that looks like the warrior’s weapon. I also bought her a pair of excellent fairy wings.

As soon as she had all the elements of her costume, she changed her mind. “I think I’ll be a vampire.”

Alice pulled the same stunt, though this year, I was ready for it…sort of.

In spring, when Star Wars was all the rage in preschool, she decided she’d be R2-D2. I started thinking about how we might make the costume, and I even tried a couple of our mixing bowls on her head to see which one I’d use to make the paper mache helmet.

“Alice,” I said, “We’ll do this as a summer craft project.”

I regretted it instantly, and every time she asked, “When are we going to make me my bowl helmet? I want to use the paints,” I shuddered.

We never quite got around to it, and I am so very glad because Alice no longer wants to be R2-D2. She momentarily wanted to be Lucy’s fairy sidekick—until Lucy changed her mind.  Now, she’s on to a new costume idea. New this year, anyway. She wants to be the robot she didn’t want to be last year.

I’m all for it, seeing as how we have the costume and everything. In the meantime, I’m just waiting till the roulette wheel of Halloween dreams stops its spinning. I’m sure I can pull something together on Halloween, which is on a Saturday this year. I have to earn the candy I plan to steal from them somehow, after all.

--Martha Brockenbrough

Seven Minutes to School Calendar Heaven

Remember that middle school party game, seven minutes in heaven? I was way too repressed to play it (it involved kissing and closets). Now that I’m too old for such things, I have a new heavenly way to spend seven minutes: on Cozi.

My kids’ school calendar isn’t online yet in a way I can import straight to my Cozi calendar. (If yours is, lucky you!)

I decided I wanted to see how long it would take me to enter everything for my two kids by typing. So I found an online stopwatch, logged into Cozi, and hit “go.”

Seven and a half minutes later, I was done. For the year. Every holiday, half-day, parent-teacher conference day, school play and field trip (at least the ones that are planned) was in there. I even clicked through the months, just to check. Then I took the piece of paper the school sent and dropped it into the recycling bin—one less thing cluttering my desk.

While it would be nice to automatically sync my kids’ calendar with the school one, it took me just a fraction of the time it used to take to write it down in the paper calendar. So I hereby issue a challenge. How quickly can you get the whole school year into Cozi?

I averaged under four minutes per child. Figure out your per-kid average and report back. The winner gets the incredibly prestigious Fingers of Flame award, along with bragging rights and—most important—time to spend on more rewarding things.

--Martha Brockenbrough