Tooth Fairy Layoffs?

It's happened again.  The Tooth Fairy has made yet another bicuspid blunder.

It's the same ol' problems I've blogged before. But this time we're getting quite worried.  It's one thing for the Tooth Fairy to be forgetful once, or make the exchange in the wrong location twice, but it's starting to get a bit ridiculous. 

Once again Chloe left a tooth under one pillow and in the morning when she checked under it, the tooth was still there.  THEN after filing her complaint with a parent and getting a little "search" help, we discovered there was indeed $2 left under two other pillows.  Hmmmmmm.  Sounds like a problem with redundancy now.

Chloe and I have discussed it and decided something must have happened to the poor little fairy.  Our theory is that perhaps under these hard economic times there's been a little downsizing going on at the 'Council of Legendary Figures' department (that's what Wiki calls it cause we looked it up hoping to see what the deal was with all the missing loot), AND, in order to keep things in the black we think the Tooth Fairy may have recently suffered a lay off and now the Easter Bunny is doing double duty.

The reason for our suspicions is that most of the time Chloe has to hunt for her money.  It's not always directly under her pillow.  The Easter Bunny would certainly fit that bill.  Perhaps forgetting these are not eggs to be hid, just money to be placed--and under the right pillow to be very specific.  All issues that point suspiciously toward fairy downsizing and Easter Bunny behavior.

Whomever is doing the Tooth Fairy's job, it certainly is not the T.F. herself.  Far too many mix-ups or just plain omissions if you ask us.  Which may be why she got downsized.  We're just not sure what is going on.

Meanwhile Chloe just recently lost 4 teeth in a row.  She's got one left before braces.  And recently she's expressed a sigh of relief saying "It's a good thing I won't be needing the Tooth Fairy for much longer, cause she's losing it."

And I agree.  I've been saying all along that I think all our little overwhelmed fairy needs is a nice vacation or a massage or something.  That should help her get her mojo back.

Pan Plundering & Marker Misdeeds

There are a few things in my life that are absolutes.  It's my personal addendum to the Ten Commandments.  "Self-evident truths" for a quality well lived life.  And thus far, I've always optimistically assumed these tenets were basic ideals readily held by all non-cave dwelling peoples. But sadly, it has become apparent that some folks just never got my memo. And the ones that did, they like to vex me with their feral misdeeds.

Here's my little list of absolutes:

• Chocolate will make anything better.
• Never put Ketchup on your eggs.
• Never use the words "Jello" and "Salad" together.
• Plastic cups are for camp-outs.
• Forks are the superior utensil for eating everything.
• Corelle is not fine china.
• Never, ever, label your kitchenware with your last name.
• and ALL pets should be released into the wild--most especially Edward Scissorhands, our cat.

I get made fun of all the time for these simple standards of truth (mostly by cave-dwelling ketchup people), but no matter how badly I get mocked, I never budge. [And yes, it does seem odd that most of my ideals have to do with food or it's consumption, go figure.]  Immoveable as I may be, sadly it is my fine moral standards that have resulted in a series of serious pan persecutions. 

Over the years I have brought serving dishes or cookie sheets full of homemade something-er-other to some event and because I didn't label the pan with my name, I got back the most wretched baked-on greasy pan that ever existed.  And yes, I know that if I'd just abandoned my ethics and succumbed to the pressure from that do-gooder pan-labeling coalition, I'm certain I'd still have my lustrous well-cared for pans. 

It appears that everyone is under the false impression that their pan is the next cover model for a Williams and Sonoma catalog, and the end result is that I always get stiffed with the one from hell's kitchen.  It's happened so often that I am now the owner of eight of the most dodgy looking baking sheets you've ever seen:

A crust-ridden crisis to be sure.  My poor sister-in-law has suffered through my fowl cries over this awful plight of pan-handling far far too many times, but still I refuse to label them.  I think she's had enough of my ranting because recently someone with her EXACT handwriting tried to help me out and slyly grabbed a marker when I wasn't looking and did the unthinkable...

Clearly, HER handiwork.  A nice and kind sister-in-law to be sure, but a violation of my absolute #7.  Poor Wendy knows me all too well and surely won't be surprised when I scrub it all off with a Magic Eraser and then keep on complaining when I end up with an even crustier looking pans, if that's at all possible. But it guess things could be worse, it could have sparkling pans with my name on them.  Ewww!

Sometimes, when I have trouble sleeping at night, it's because I know somewhere in a kitchen nearby, some pan-plundering homemaker is making a jello salad in one of my pristine shiny pans! [shutter]

Favorites

Over the last couple of years I've been feeling sort of guilty that my own husband was not #1 on my cell phone's favorites list.  As you can see, that honor went to our son Mitchell who has really been my go-to guy when most of my phone calls are made...

I've sort of hoped Mark would never catch on to the fact that he wasn't "El Numero Uno" and have worked very hard to keep my phone out of his hands so he would never discover the shameful truth.

Then recently, the depth of this scandal was wholly exposed.  It was while Mark was running his marathon, when he gave me his phone to hold while he ran his race, that things took a different turn.  At some point I decided to make a call from his phone.

I pushed the phone button

Then, because I didn't know the number I needed to dial, I pushed Mark's Favorites button, assuming there was a good chance the number I needed would probably be listed there (I was looking for Cheyenne):

...and this is what I saw...

Apparently I'm not his #1 favorite either!  

A big grin spread across my face, what a relief!  We've both listed each other as our #2 favorite.  How beautiful is that! And even better, Mitchell ranked #1 on both our phones.  Two years of guilt totally gone!

Then suddenly, I realize that now a new quandary now arises.  Clearly this list will get us both in a wee bit of trouble with the rest of the folks who made the list and a few who did not. I can just see an argument brewing on the methods each of us used for our individual ranking systems-- which should land us both in hot water.

But before our daughter Cheyenne starts crying fowl that Mitchell is clearly both her parent's favorite child, (should come as no big surprise really, perhaps she should learn to troubleshoot more of her parents electronic problems--a surefire way to up her ranking),
I would like to point out that at least Chey made it onto my list.  While she may be ranked fourth behind my good friend Kathy I would like to call her attention to the fact that she tragically doesn't even make her father's top 8 list of favs.  And, even more scandalous, Mitchell is listed TWICE as #1 and #7.

It looks like my 2nd ranked husband has some explaining to do.

Blog Bashing & Care Package Wars

Apparently as my children grow up and move out of the house they consider the best part of their new found independence to be the freedom from the tyranny of my blog.  They realize that the farther away from home they are the less likely they are to be embarrassed by the scandalous postings that oppressed them back at home. And now, apparently, they have each experienced the same earth shattering epiphany: they have discovered their own voice and have decided to turn on me with their own blogs!  Imagine that.

Recently Cheyenne posted incriminating photos on her blog of some silly motorcycle stunts I attempted in the yard.  Then just a few days ago, Mitchell, (who calls himself "Justin" because, well, that's really his name and he's decided to use it again) wondering why he hadn't gotten his first college care package from home yet, decided to take it to his new blog! Can you believe that!  My own children mocking me on their blog! What's a parent to do when that happens?

...Well if you're me, you'd wipe a sentimental tear from your glistening eyes and blush with pride!   Indeed, it was surely
a proud moment when I discovered my children have realized how fun it can be to pester loved ones with their very own blog!

So Mitchell's recent blog post gave me a virtual smack down--albeit a hilarious one, on not promptly sending my poor "homesick" child a care package. [Nice move son. Your most impressive literary work to date.]  A move which was sure to heap such unbearable parental guilt that it was sure to quickly garner him a prompt shipment of tasty goods. Well done!  A quick read of his post and it appears as though his room mate Taylor had a sweet and loving family back at home who missed him so dearly that they were kind enough to send him a trove of treats to show they cared. And poor Mitchell, he was left with an empty dorm room mailbox.
[cue sad music--perhaps, "Everybody Hurts" by REM]

His sinister scheme seems to have worked, since I quickly shipped him off a box of his favorite goodies; microwaveable brownies, hot Cheetos, and Rice Krispie treats (sorry no diet coke, I've discovered the hard way that it doesn't take well to shipping and handling):

Then I studied the photo featured on his blog of his room mate Taylor's care package and tried earnestly to send similar items,  
but with a more unique touch.

So instead of sending him a graphing calculator (any parent can do that), I decided to send him something that would make math more fun: Strawberry Shortcake Flash Cards...

Some unique school supplies like:

this giant eraser...

and instead of sending just an ordinary Popular Science magazine, I decided to mock up a special one just for my wiz-kid blogger of a son (click to enlarge):

His Roommate's Magazine:     Mitchell's Mock Magazine:

I also noticed Taylor's parents sent him a framed family portrait and thought I'd better send a family photo for Mitchell's desk too. But, of course, I just couldn't send a regular one:

Then, probably the most thoughtful and revered gift a college student could ever receive was lovingly placed inside his package:

Taco Bell Gift Cards

So there you have it.  Secret message received, care package sent!

Now...if I can just get the phone number for Taylor's parents so I can call them and insist they WARN me before they send another care package and spare me from being censured in another scandalous blog post by my pernicious progeny.

...Because that's supposed to be my job!

Diabetic Rum Runner

My son's become a rum runner of sorts. The booty was just too good to pass up for Mitchell. He even lured his cousin Kyle into being his accomplice.

This particular scuttlebutt begins with  a confession:
Around our house we're big diet coke drinkers. Sad but true. But with three kids with diabetes sometimes the precarious haze of blood sugars we marinate in every day just won't let everyone have a snack at the same time. And when they all want to eat something but they can't, a glass of water seems like a final insult to their cancelled-out calorie cravings. So whats a family to do? Well this family turned to the drink, Diet Coke that is. All of us, diabetic or not, have become "drinkers of the diet". We call it that because it makes our little habit sound kinda shady, which it is--being DIET and all.  But these sorts of things are a slippery slope. Over the years Mitchell and Chey spun out of control and soon they were drowning their diabetic doldrums by drinking harder stuff like Diet Dr. Pepper. And soon it became their favorite among syrupy swigs.

So recently, when our local grocery store had this sign out front:

I knew I needed to send a picture text to Mitchell ASAP.

Now usually when I text this kid, it takes a while before I hear back. And sometimes my texts get ignored completely. But as you can imagine, he instantly text me back:

Mitchell: "huh?"

Me: "For real."

Mitchell: "really??"

Me: [picture text]

Mitchell: "Where??"

Mitch grabbed his cousin Kyle and headed for the store. They parked just yonder and eyed the booty--it was ALL DIET DR. PEPPER.  Not only that, it was late in the day and there was A LOT of soda left and as Mitchell said to me later, "There's just a small target market for this kinda stuff mom".

I don't even wanna know if they made a million discreet trips or if they just pulled up and loaded the car. There are some things a mother just shouldn't ever know. But what I do know is that the Rum Run ended with the sound of my garage door opening and my kid backing his car into the garage whereby conveniently locating the trunk end nearest the garage's refrigerator.

This is what I found in my garage:

And what ended up being stashed in my garage fridge:

And here's the younger cousins all enjoying a bit of bribed boot-er-y in return for their hushed silence on the matter:

A Rum Run for Diabetics.
Now go and brush your teeth!

Skillmans Don't Fish! ...right??

Growing up, Mark and his brothers spent most of their days out of the house and as far away from a summer chore list as they could get. They'd climb trees, scour the beach for sharks teeth, and hang out with the neighbor kid who later grew up and became a serial killer
(no kidding there, just ask "Snapper"--that's the nickname our little serial killer called Mark) but for most of the summer you could find the brothers out fishing.

Fast forward a few decades and everyone's still fishing except Mark. For him, it was just something to do to in the summer, but for his step-brothers it became their passion. And when I dated him and first met his family I met them on a family campout. When we first arrived at the campsite the tents were all abandoned because they were all out casting lines at the waterfront. And my first glimpse of my soon-to-be niece Dominica was of her smashing a fish on a rock and asking me if I knew how to gut one.

Now when you picture the family I married into, don't be picturing a bunch of red-necks with mullets and hats with fishing lures hooked to the brim. These boys all grew up to be very successful businessmen who travel the world. In fact, if you ever sat next to one of them on an airplane, you'd never guess that under their professional exteriors, lies a bunch of guys who pine at the smell of fish bate.

Recently, the brothers all came out for a visit. And while they were here, one of our kids let the brothers in on our dirty little family secret: We don't fish. They were horrified to hear that Mark lived right next to a lake but that he'd never ever taken his kids fishing there. Silly us, we thought the lake was for wake boarding!

When Uncle Don heard the offending facts, he came marching in to the house and said, "What do you mean you've never taken your children fishing?? Then he raised his hand high above his head and bent his hand to show a level threshold and then added, "That is just one step below child abuse."

He then quizzed the kids who led him out to the barn to scrounge up fishing poles, lures, and tackle boxes that had never been opened since the day they were mistakenly inherited.

It was a sad little scene as I watched my little band of wake boarders cast off the family speed boat for a day on the shore just to hold a stick. With a jumble of fishery stuff they all headed off for the lake. I grabbed my camera and walked up to the lake to take a peek at the messy business of fishing my innocent children had been so easily seduced into. I crest the dam and what do I see? A bunch of turncoats happy to be on the mucky shore.

Uncle Don setting things right.

My progeny of Benedict Arnolds...

Then to my horror, ol' "snapper" caught the fishing bug.

I kid you not, this boat here, it's full of our friends

who normally see us out skiing on the lake.

They stopped to see if their eyes were fooling them,
they thought they saw The Skillmans
 ON THE SHORE

They fished till it got too dark to find their way back down the trail to the house. And get this: They never caught a fish! But they came home all hopped up on stories of the fish that got away.

I thought that was the end of that until late in the evening I looked outside and saw strange lights on my lawn. Uncle Don had them all out hunting by flashlight for night crawlers...

What's worse, is that they woke the next morning and when we asked who wanted to go out for a morning ski, they all snubbed their noses and then asked "Can we go fishing instead??"

We haven't used the boat all week. Mark's scallywag brothers are now all officially banned from my house! I'm totally up for posh vacations with them, but they just aren't allowed to come over here anymore.

Label Lunacy

All I really meant to do was to tame my rag-tag spice cupboard.

I got tired of mismatched slapdash spice bottles cluttering my shelves.  It seemed I could never find the spice I was looking for and ended up buying another bottle only to discover not only did I have that particular spice the whole time, but that I had at least two or three opened bottles of it crammed toward the back of the shelf.  Argh!

I commenced a surefire recipe to subjugate my spices: 
I bought a bunch of deli containers from the local restaurant supply store and then went out and bought one of those new-fangled wiz-bang label makers and  (this next part was a big mistake) plenty of extra label cartridges. 



Then in a fastidious fit that lasted a mere half hour, I conquered the cabinet:

But of course I couldn't just stop there.  My little pantry project escalated into a label mania. No sooner had I finished making my spices all neat and tidy, I was overtaken by an unexpected new passion and became enchanted beguiled by my new label maker.    Soon I was labeling things that didn't even need a label.

Then the kids got bewitched by the machine and started labeling things of their own:

Connor labeled his baseball collection:

Mitchell labeled his collection of computer parts:

and Chloe even labeled her phone:

Quickly everyone in the family discovered that it was possible to be the author of a label and remain blissfully anonymous--impossible to trace. With this new revelation we were soon all fighting over the sticker spewing gizmo and found all kinds of things that had far too long gone unlabeled:

 

 How have we ever lived this long without this extraordinary contraption? It's revolutionized our lives...anonymously.

Commitment-Phob

I must confess that I have serious commitment issues.  Long term relationships are just not my thing.  The one exception is for my husband Mark. Bless that man. I'm not sure any other guy could put up with me or my bizarre shenanigans so I'm fully committed there.  But all other commitments I am quite terrible at. This is why I don't have a manicurist, a hair dresser, or even a doctor that sees me regularly. I just can't commit to seeing other people on a regular basis--even my extended family only sees me on the rare occasion. So my nails are boring and plain, my hair gets cut on a whim by any hairdresser that's open (which occasionally goes really wrong like the time a lady mistook the word "LAYERS" for "MULLET"), and my doctor only sees me when I get sick--which is never--because I can't even commit to having the flu for more than 24 hours. Appointments looming in the future just freak me out. The fact that I've promised to see someone at a specific hour and date sometime in the future just makes me squeamish. Weird, I know.

But it seems that life over 40 is soon going to force me into going steady.  I keep finding gray hairs and I worry that this sort of demonized lamentation will eventually force me to succumb to a rolling appointment schedule with a hair-colorist. I break out in a sweat just thinking about having to schedule time to do this every six weeks. With the SAME person no less, because she's the only one who knows how to "mix my color just right" or so I'm told. But what's a graying girl to do?

Most gals love having their hair done but I've always been one of those awkward no-fuss sorta gals. I like to wear make-up and look nice to some degree but I just don't like gossiping with a gaggle of girls in a salon permeated with stink while I forge my meager attempts to get pretty. But the gray is coming in and I fear a crisis is unavoidable, my care-free non-committal days are numbered.

Unless I just go gray.

Seriously, it's been done. But really? Has it come down to that? Personalities like Stacy London embraced the gray with that bizarre streak in the front of her head but I think she looks like Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd--and she's MY age for pete's sake. Doesn't Stacy know that those misplaced gray patches bring to mind folks like Bill Clinton's mother NOT forty-somethings--and most especially NOT for forty-somethings named Stacy.

But Lady Gaga even went gray and so did Kelly Osbourne, some sort of weird trend that seriously just made them look drab and old. Even Pink did it. But in my opinion they crossed the line into decrepit agedness waaaaaay waaaaaay too early.

But with all this gray-gone-wrong...Maybe it's time to c...c...c...I can hardly say it...(gulp) ...commit.

But then my mind starts to invent all kinds of random scenarios on why seeing a hairdresser on a regular basis could be bad.  Like the whole prison issue, for one. What if I start coloring my hair and then end up in jail?  Seriously, this sort of possibility is no laughing matter. I've seen women on TV doing interviews from jail with 3 inches of ghastly grow-out upstaging their prison-televised diatribes. And while I certainly have no plans to break the law and end up with a parole officer, these sort of problematic possibilities creep into my graying head. WHAT IF? Because once you start coloring your graying head of hair you are in for life. There is no parole there, jail or no jail. You've got to maintain it FOREVER.

Or what if you color your hair for so long that when your eyes go bad you don't even know you've turned yourself into a certified real life blue-hair? This is all seriously dangerous territory.

So here I sit, totally indecisive, on the border between my carefree days of non-committal youth and a wretched future of appointments with a slew of folks I pay to help me curb the rapid decay of old age that is suddenly creeping up, growing out, or sagging.

There are lots of decisions to make.  Grow old GRAYsfully or fight it all the way? And of course, I just can't seem to commit to either plan.