I feel like all I ever do is ask you guys for advice. This is turning into sort of a Dear Heloise column, except Heloise is the clueless, neurotic one with splintery floors and bad wallpaper.
Dear Heloise, You’re a wreck. How could you not consider polyurethane? Sincerely, Us.
Continue Reading 42 comments July 1st, 2006
The Bouncy Cabana drove me to it. Spank! Spank! Spank!
Continue Reading 34 comments June 14th, 2006
Don’t worry, I slip her bread crusts and chocolate milk every twelve hours or so.
Continue Reading 28 comments June 1st, 2006
“I didn’t realize Sophie was reading,” said a friend, the mama of one of Sophie’s pals, after Soph was over her house for an afternoon playdate.
“I didn’t either,” I said.
Soph had apparently been deciphering a slew of words for her buddy during their playdate. But at home, she gets mighty cranky if anybody asks her to read a word on a cereal box. Why is she hiding her Spidey powers? Why, I ask you?
Yesterday she opened a present from her cousins, which included a camera. She held it up and said, “Look! It’s waterproof!”
W-A-T-E-R-P-R-O-O-F. On the camera box.
“HOW DID YOU KNOW THAT?” we yelled.
Sly shrug.
“YOU CAN READ?” we yelled.
“No.”
“WHEN DID YOU LEARN TO READ?”
“I’m not going to tell you that,” she said. She walked away with her W-A-T-E-R-P-R-O-O-F camera.
Is this how it happens? I have been cruelly shut out from her world of reading discovery. It’s bad enough she’s got her little sister calling me ‘Mom’ now instead of ‘Mommy.’ My heart can’t take it. She started reading and I missed it. My little stealth reader. I could W-E-E-P.
33 comments May 22nd, 2006
I want to like weekends. I try to like them. But my children expect me to take them outside or play with them or something.
But our kitchen was in bad shape. Not just bad from my pathological and completely pitiful attempts at remodeling, but crusted crockpot and four-day-old blender residue and spilled potting soil and unidentifiable gunk on the floor bad. So I snapped on the rubber gloves and began scrubbing and pouring Clorox on everything. I told the girls to go play, something I was under the impression mothers were entitled to say once in a while. I thought it was a reasonable request, the kind of thing that even Ma Ingalls or Coretta Scott King might have said from time to time, while wiping their hands on their aprons and looking sturdy and respectable and fine.
Sophie was having none of it. She sat under a table alternately hollering and weeping: “You never do anything fun with me! I hate this house! I don’t like anybody who lives in this house! I want to be adopted by somebody and go live somewhere else!”
I told her that wasn’t going to happen, because Angelina and Brad have a lot on their plate right now.
“WHAT? WHY NOT?”
“Because Daddy and I would have to agree to let somebody adopt you. And there’s no way we would do that. We’re keeping you. So you’re stuck with us.”
She followed me into the bleach-reeking kitchen. “Why are you talking nicer to Hannah? You ALWAYS talk in a nice voice to her and in a mad voice to me!”
“Well, maybe it has something to do with the fact that Hannah is not yelling in my face and telling me she wants to live with somebody else.”
Soph flopped miserably against the counter.
“Don’t!” I bellowed. “Bleach! Chemicals! Don’t lean against the chemicals!”
She yelled, “THEN WHAT CAN I DO IN THIS LIFE?”
“You can do a lot of things in this life! You can go into any other room in this house! You can play with all of the toys you have, and that is a LOT OF TOYS! You can go to the bathroom! You can draw a picture! You can read a book! You can do all of these things RIGHT NOW!”
She stomped out of the room and immediately began fighting with her sister over a deflated soccer ball. Because this is also something she can do in this life.
I kept on scrubbing and greedily inhaling Clorox fumes, hoping for chemical-induced transcendence.
The day continued skiing poorly downhill. When I asked Soph to clean up her room before bed: “WHY DO I HAVE TO CLEAN UP MY ROOM BY MYSELF BUT YOU ALWAYS HELP HANNAH? YOU NEVER HELP ME! YOU NEVER HELP ME DO ANYTHING!”
“I never help you with anything? I help you all the time! I am your mother! HELPING YOU IS ALL I DO!”
As I huffed off to the bathroom with her cheerful little sister (who gets really really really sunny and serene when everyone else is grumpy), I heard Soph mutter under her breath, “THIS IS THE BADDEST LIFE I EVER HAD.”
52 comments March 19th, 2006
Well, now you’ve gone and done it.
Continue Reading 13 comments February 20th, 2006
Throw eggs at the mean people with the spoiled diabetic kid! They deserve it! Even if they are Canadian, which I so am not buying.
Continue Reading 23 comments February 19th, 2006
After yet another psycho big-sis moment, I grab our resident ax-murderess-in-the-making and sit her down for a nice wholesome chat.
“Soph, I’ve noticed that when you hug your sister, your face still does this thing.” I demonstrate the vicious lockjaw of disturbed love.
She likes this. She likes this very much. Mommy is so funny when she is trying to be a Good Parent.
Continue Reading 57 comments February 14th, 2006
“In the car she unwrapped it as much as she could and hugged it the whole way home,” David reported.
The prophecy, fulfilled. My destiny, fulfilled. My life has not been in vain. It feels so good to cross a prophecy off the list.
Continue Reading 52 comments January 29th, 2006
Sophie was losing her patience, so this weekend I hammered and glued and painted just enough to get the old dollhouse—the one my grandfather built for me in 1974—into ready-to-play-again condition. I’ll sneak it out of her room at night to feed my obsessive need to add more trim, like painted wooden butterflies and stars and hearts and tiny red lanterns. Can’t. Help. Myself.
See you at the housewarming.
Continue Reading 26 comments January 29th, 2006
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