Blog Bully

I have a nasty little habit, I'm a blog bully.  It's pretty bad. I love to pressure my friends into starting blogs and then when I wear them down and they can't take it anymore and they actually do start one, then I switch to bugging them to keep posting stuff. It's gotten so bad that I've even figured out my friends passwords and uploaded pictures to their blogs for them and suggested they write something.  How bad is that?

What's worse is that I've even become a ghost blogger.

The other day I knew I'd probably taken things way too far when Mark was online and began laughing.  He looked up and asked me if I'd read a certain somebody's blog because, as he put it, "they're starting to write a lot like you."

"Was it good?" I asked.

"Yeah why?" he replied.

"Just wondering." I said, feigning total disinterest.

Of course I had written and posted the whole thing and now I was feeling like I'd embarked on some sort of nefarious double life my husband has no idea about. The poor guy sleeps at night thinking I'm just some ordinary housewife but little does he know that by night I smuggle my friends passwords, highjack their blogs, and upload the tawdry tales of their life. And, mind you, without any remorse whatsoever.

I wonder if there's some sort of 12-step program for this sort of addiction?  I think I need help.

By the way...have YOU blogged lately?

The Car Cross

My latest confession is a simple one:
I will come back from the dead and haunt you if you put a cross on the spot where I die.  I'm not kidding here. I have a serious aversion the the roadside cross and constantly pray that I never ever die in an auto accident just for this reason. Let me get hit by a train or subway, crash in an airplane into a watery grave, but I never ever want to die on a roadside where some do-gooder can stake a cross in my "loving" memory.

I always believed this tidbit about myself to be an obscure fact not even remotely worth mentioning to family or friends until, to my absolute horror, my brother and his wife actually placed a cross on the side of their driveway. [cue scary shrieking music from your favorite horror movie.]

And while it may have been put there as a joke, because my niece recently and most perilously drove her car off the family's driveway and perched it like a teeter totter over the edge of the ditch---joke or not, I was alarmed that marking ANY tragic site with a roadside cross could become habit-forming.  When I made the ghastly discovery on their driveway my heart stopped. I knew right then and there that I had to teach the whole of my extended family not to ever ever do this again.

That's when I commenced "Operation Cross-Examine"

It began the day I saw the offending object. I stopped my car, tore the vanilla-scented air freshener tree off my rear-view mirror and added it to the cross:

There and then I decided to make weekly pilgrimages to the marker and leave motley mementos until the thing reached the pinnacle of tacky.

Week 2

Week 3

Week 4

Week 5

NOTE: If anyone out there has a dashboard hula girl, send her my way.  There a little scarce in these parts, but she'd be a beauty perched by the dice!


And then finally, I left a poem:

You had but only four wheels

To keep yourself upright

Until a certain teen-aged girl

tried to back you up one night.

Reversing under the cloak of dark 

--such is a teenage fodder

she backed your wheels right off the ledge

and made you a teeter-totter.

This little cross that marks the spot

of that dark and horrible night

It scares me that you'll mark mine too

should I meet with a terrible plight.

So if I die an early death

just leave well enough alone.

A tacky little roadside cross

will surely make me moan.

So for the record, let me set it strait,

a tip for you from me:

If you dare to mark my spot of death

I'll haunt you eternally.

Love, Aunt Stacy

And while we're on the subject.  I don't want anyone to dedicate their car to my memory either.  You know, you've seen those stickers that say "In loving memory of so-and-so" on the back windshield of certain cars.  That sort of stunt will get you haunted for life as well. Especially since most members of my family own cars that are less than desirable when it comes to having my "loving" memory dedicated to.

Can you just see it? On the back windshield of my sister-in-law's forest green 15-passenger van:

"In loving memory of my Aunt Stacy." 

Surely not the hallmarks of one's life.

Cereal Addict

When I started having kids years ago I swore I would NEVER have a picky eater.  I figured this sort of taste tantrum was a simple war of wills and I was sure my will would supersede that of any small child raised in my house.

Ah, naiveté.

Enter child number 3, the pickiest eater on the planet.  This kid is capable of embarking on a most impassioned hunger strike that would impress Gandhi himself, before he will eat anything not to his liking. As far as picky eaters go he is a crafty one.  His tactic is to be as quiet as a church mouse about the whole affair-what we call civil disobedience. His modus operandi is to fly under the radar, go completely unnoticed. Therefore Connor will never complain about what is getting served up for dinner, or when anything he hates to eat gets presented before him.  He feigns interest until you're not looking and then somehow the offending food disappears. He's a master at trompe l'oeil--his specialty: faking a clean dinner plate. After which he will then quickly offer to take out the trash, unload the dishwasher, and rinse all the plates so that you forget that he was ever served a vegetable that could be hidden on his plate or person.

What does he eat?  Cereal. He can't get enough cereal. Which is strange because I HATE cereal--How is it possible that I birthed a child who could love something I hate so much? I've thought about having tests done to see if this kid could really be mine because I'm suspicious he may have been switched at birth. I would rather eat the box the cereal came in than have a bowl of milk and floating debris.  But Connor??  He would eat cereal for every meal for the rest of his life if you'd let him. I don't even buy the fancy sugary stuff either. Just plain ol' Cheerios.

Connor is also a serious carnivore.  If he's not eating cereal then he will eat meat. Or rather, chicken. To this day he will ask what were having for dinner and as long as he hears the word chicken, he will eat it.  So we just tell him everything is chicken. Beef, turkey, fish, we call it all "chicken". We insist there are a lot of varieties of chicken out there. Fishy chicken, Hamburger Chicken, Chicken steak. So far it's worked, although I think he's beginning to catch on.

Now that he's old enough to be a Boy Scout, he's been going on lots of campouts. Which means he's eating meals away from home.  For Connor, these campouts have turned into something that more closely resembles an internment camp as he usually comes home skinny and starving like a POW.  

I found this note Connor wrote about his latest campout:

The next thing that came to his head was sleep. 

After eating half a dozen bowls of cereal he headed strait to bed.  I found him asleep just a few minutes after his cereal binge; fully clothed, remote in hand, totally passed out.

The crash and burn of a cereal addict.

Send Her to the Principals Office!

Chloe brings home piles of papers from school all the time and I usually heap them all in a big basket intending to look at them and see how her school is going.  The stack was getting pretty high, as was my guilt for not looking at them in such a long time which meant I was scandalously not keeping up on how she's doing in class.  I decided to flip through the papers and empty the basket out and it's a good thing I did.  Look what I found...

That's not the alarming part either.  The real scuttlebutt is what the teacher wrote after reading her paper and seeing that Chloe really wanted a little sister!

This sort of thing should have gotten her teacher sent to the Principals office!  Bad teacher!  Very bad teacher!  Remind me never to let Chloe have a genie in a bottle!

Tales of a Room Mother

Years ago, back when I was a very young and naive mom I volunteered to be the room mother for my oldest daughter Cheyenne's 1st grade class. I had no idea how much work throwing holiday classroom parties would be, nor did I have a clue that I had just enlisted in something far more grueling than bootcamp. Little did I know that I would soon experience the most treacherous and painfully longest year of my entire life.  It seemed as if the other mothers wanted me to throw over-the-top parties, fastidiously decorated and color coordinated, all while providing special foods catered to each of their children's tastes and desires--vegan choices, tofu selections, and kosher choices...and then there was me, serving cupcakes to my own diabetic kid and simply pumping her up full of extra insulin to cover the extra sugar! It was a party after all! And parties are full of contraband and taboo sweets. But these mothers did not seem to have gotten the memo on this basic party minutia. They all had very complicated party agendas for their six year olds. And me? All I wanted was to be involved a little more with my daughter's classroom and I found myself in the middle of a crazed party planning extravaganza.  That was the year I learned I was not the stuff a room mother was made of.

But I still wanted to be involved in some way, so, after being granted parole from room-mothering, I spent the next couple of years in pursuit of another way I could be involved with my kids at school.  I tried coming in during reading time and helping kids read.  But I always got too silly with the kids and we ended up giggling too much and ultimately we'd get 'that look' from the teacher.  I tried helping during math time but found it too enticing to give the answers away to the kids who were having a bit of trouble.  I searched high and low for a classroom volunteer job but I never seemed to find a good fit.

Then my nieces and nephews moved closer to us.  Soon I realized if I was ever going to try the room mom thing again, this would be my golden opportunity.  Mostly because they were home schooled. And the fact that these poor kids never heard of room parties!  HERE was my golden opportunity to get involved in a school! So I appointed myself their official Room Mother and it turns out it's the best job ever!  Here's part of my self-appointed job description:

• Throw very laid-back holiday parties on Halloween, Valentines, and End of the School Year--all with gloriously sugary and fattening foods AND without consulting any other mother because there isn't one!
• Bring in the occasional teacher gift with a note that says all the other parents pitched in and got such a great teacher a little token of appreciation.
• Inform my sister-in-law when public school has been cancelled due to hazardous weather conditions and guilt her into canceling home school too.
• Remind the teacher to give days off to the kids for Teacher Inservice Days and Parent Teacher Conferences.
• Field Trip advisor.  This one I take very seriously.  Like taking the kids to Dairy Queen to work on our Blizzard eating skills.

These days the class size at the Shumway Home School has dwindled from six kids to only two.  But I still bring pizza and cupcakes and make sure the kids stop school and have a party.  It's the best school volunteer job I've ever had.

And if I do say so, I think I'm the best Room Mother they've ever had--then again, perhaps they would have preferred a room mom offering up vegan and tofu stuff!

Errand Boy

My latest confession is that I love to use my children as servants. 

But to my defense, I think this horrible lazy streak of mine just can’t be helped.  After all, my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandfather was the bastard child of a Plantagent King.  Which quite possibly means I inherited my slothful need to have a staff of little people to order around--it’s in my genes.

In fact, I’ve seriously considered installing a row of servant bells and assigning one to each child in the house, thus invoking my royal prerogative.

All my kids have been sent on errands.  Mostly the “I’m-upstairs-and-you’re-downstairs-so-could-you-bring-me-something-er-other” type of errand.  Or  the converse problem; “I’m-downstairs-and-you’re-upstairs-could-you-bring-me-the-whatshamacallit-pretty-please” errand.

My kids are pretty good at obliging my odd requests without even letting out a groan.  They just run and do it knowing that it’s just what you do when you have a lazy mom.

Three of my kids are really good at it.  You can ask them to run up or down the stairs in search for the most detailed minuscule thing and they’ll scurry along and bring it back.  My oldest, Cheyenne, was even so good that she could figure out what I was asking for without even waiting for me to finish my sentence.  Mitchell will think ahead and make sure anything else remotely related to the needed object is also brought too, just in case.  And Chloe--no request is too hard, you can ask her to bring a specific color lint ball from an obscure pocket resting in the bowels of a laundry hamper and she will find it and bring it to you.

Then there’s Connor.  Frankly, he's one kid who just doesn’t have the attention span for the odd errand. He listens long enough to ascertain the place to which he must go, but never long enough to actually hear what he is to look for once he gets there.

I think he hears something like a mixture of English and what I like to call "Charile Brown teacher".  Something like,

“Connor, could you run upstairs and Wha-Wha Wha Wha Wha?”

At this point the Connor will bound up the stairs, spins a few circles, then come back down and say, “Wha’d you say??”

I'll re-explain it.  He'll return empty handed and perplexed.

He’ll usually do this two or three times before I just go up/down and get whatever it is myself.

Now it’s become sort of a ruse around our house.  We find his methods so amusing and so he has become everyone’s preferred page, our favorite errand boy, because it’s so funny to see him always return empty handed with his eyebrows raised in total confusion.

But I think last night he finally caught on to our little scheme that sometimes Mark and I will send him for stuff we don't really need just to amuse ourselves--because when I asked him to go downstairs and get something out of my car.  He quickly disappeared and when he returned, instead of coming back empty handed as usual and asking for a do-over, his arms were loaded with everything he could find inside my car.  Every stinkin’ thing...and one hilarious admission.

He said, "I don't remember what you asked for but I'm sure I got it here somewhere!"

That's my little errand boy. 

A Fine Welcome Home

When Mark and I got back from our trip we discovered that Connor and Chloe had made this lovely Welcome Home sign for us:

You'll have to click on it and study the thing. It's a work of art, really.  

Apparently we left just as impending doom settled on the house. This meant that they were very happy to see our return--far more than usual--and made sure to welcome us back with a sketched account of the trauma they endured in our absence.

First, the trash began piling up.  And from the look of Chloe's hand drawn pile of rotten tomatoes, complete with visible rising stench, it must not have been very pleasant.  Of course what they forget is that when mom's away and you prefer those handy frozen microwave meals and delivery pizzas--and all the boxes that come with it, well, trash tends to back up quickly.  Not to mention the fact that their mother isn't home to tell them to take it out! 

Next the toilets clogged up.  Sheesh.  Children really do need their mother apparently.  This doesn't happen that much when I'm home.  What the heck are they doing in there while I'm gone?? I have some disturbing theories, but I will restrain from further comment on this one--you can thank me for that in the comment section.

Then the mother of all tragedies.  The refrigerator peed all over the floor.  Yes, this is true.  No hyperbole here.  Look back at the sign.  Do you see that ocean of water engulfing Chloe's hand drawn refrigerator on the bottom right corner of the sign?  The appliance went berserk in the middle of the night and started spraying water from the door-front ice/water dispenser!  (Perhaps our fridge was in a territorial dispute with our stupid cat.)  In the morning they came into the kitchen with a "slosh-slosh-shlosh" and turned on the light to discover the kitchen was at full tide.  

Which must be why Connor wrote:

Welcome Home

I missed you

p.s. Fix the fridge and toilets.

And Chloe wrote:

Finally, ONE thing that's nice...your bed!

Yes indeed, a fine welcome home.

Nothing But Sea Salt

During our little Boston jaunt Mark and I got to eat a few more lunches together than we normally do.  I began to notice that he always grabbed the same bag of chips day after day. When I asked him why he didn't mix things up a little he simply turned the bag to face me so I could get a good look at it and informed me that they were his FAVORITE chips...

Well then, there you have it. The things you learn over lunch.