Three stories

1) Owen has been enjoying listening to some old kids CDs. There is one with a funny little song about how awful brothers are:

There goes my brother again

Ruining all of the fun

I know I should love him, I know that it's true

And I will

When I turn

42

But then I heard him singing

There goes my brother again

Being my very best friend

I know that he's clever, I know that it's true

And I'm sure

That he loves

Me too

"Is that from the CD, Owen?"  I know the tune, but don't remember this verse. 

"Kind of.  I changed the words so that they'd be nicer, though."

2) After dinner tonight Chris offered a quick trip to the pool. YAY. POOL. Two minutes later I'm shoving my feet into flip flops when I hear the thunder. 

The kids are upset. 

Sam flops on the ground, despondent. 

Owen and Lilly decide to play outside in the rain. Sam drags himself outside, wanting to be miserable, but unable to resist the opportunity to boss his siblings around. 

They have a wonderful time as I make lunches and load the dishwasher and check Facebook and wonder vaguely what the chances are they will be struck by lightning. 

They come back inside. 

"You guys took lemons and made lemonade!"

"No we didn't," Owen vigorously denies. "We don't even have lemons."  

"It's a saying Owen. It means you made the best of a bad situation."

"When you come in from playing in the fresh rain outside, the house smells like garbage."

3) tonight, Lilly's bedtime pronouncement was, "I really like my life."  

Our little secret

I read an article on Facebook the other day. It was about how you should never have "secrets" with your kids.  Instead, you should have "surprises."  It was kind of semantics, but whatever, right?  I'm taking parenting advice from the Internet, get out of my way.

So when we were driving to target the other day and Lilly says to Chris, "Dad? Remember our secret?" I say, "we don't have secrets, Lilly."

As is often my experience with following advice from parenting articles, this doesn't play out the way I was expecting.

"What?" She says.  "No way. If we tell you then you wouldn't let dad give me gum.  I'm definitely still going to have secrets."

1) dang it, she's right. I totally wouldn't allow that. Now what?
2) hey.  I'm right here. You're terrible at secrets.
3) respect my authority.

Chicken fingers

I was sitting with Lilly this evening, as she lay in bed.  She was pretty asleep.  I thought.  I mean, she was snoring and everything.

Then,

"Mom? Is boneless chicken real?"

It's one of those questions I hate because I'm no parenting rookie and I know this is a set-up. If I say boneless chicken isn't real, she'll be walking around denying that dinner exists. If I say it is real, she's going to make a fool of herself on the class field trip to the farm.

So it's always the long answer.  "All chickens that are alive have bones. Chickens that we eat sometimes have bones, and sometimes the bones are taken out by other people."

"So boneless chicken isn't real?"

Gah. Knock it off.

"Because my friend Jack says a boneless chicken bit him on the finger."

Your friend Jack is full of shit.

Stick Figures

We dropped Owen and Lilly off at a kids-only luau-themed event last night.  Owen refused to wear a grass skirt, but probably has more natural talent at hula-hooping than anyone else I'm related to.  By blood, at least.  Ziggles could be hella good at hula-ing.  Who knows?

Any way, the teacher let the kids take home some tissue paper and people cut outs so that could continue their crafts at home.  They were supposed to use the tissue paper to make grass skirts and glue them on the people cut outs.   

Instead, this morning, Owen comes proudly into my room, carrying two sticks with some red tissue paper taped to one end.  

"Wook!"  he says, brandishing a stick, "torches!"

"Oh, great!" I say.  "Very cool, Owen."

"I used my two favorite sticks," he says, nodding meaningfully at me.   

"You have . . . favorite sticks?"  I am aware that Owen enjoys sticks, but I was not aware that he had, like, permanent sticks.  Like, sticks that he has relationships with.

"He keeps them in a secret place," Sam says, not even looking up from his book.  

"Oh."

I'm conflicted.  Do I want to know where the secret stick stash is?  How many sticks are there?  Is it a land of sticks, with stick rules and stick hierarchies, all bowing to the benevolent Lord Owen?  Where sticks vie in contests of skill and bravery to be his favorite?  

"I wike dem because they wook wike shooting rifles."  

That one time I accidentally joined a cult.

When I was five, I rode a bus to school.

Which is just basically a bunch of kids packed together with no adult supervision.

But it was fine.  We had assigned seats, which was sad because I wanted to sit next to Kim.

In retrospect, it is entirely possible that Kim just didn't want to sit next to me and made up my "assigned" seat.

Nope, thinking about it some more she totally would have just said, "Beth, I'm not going to sit next to you, because you are annoying and nobody likes you.  Sit here instead."

Either way, I sat next this hippie girl who seemed about 25 at the time but must not have, by definition (i.e., riding the elementary school bus), been much over 11.

Anyway, she made me a braided bracelet out of a single string - a feat I still find impressive.

And then one day, she announced she was starting a cult.  She said we could get on TV if enough of us joined.

"What do you do in a cult?" I asked.

"Oh.  Well . . . you don't cut your hair and you let it grow really long . . "

As a side note, I was recently recovering from a bob haircut that my mom tricked me into.

My Mom: "Beth, do you want to cut your hair into a bob?"  

Beth: What the hell is a bob?  "Sure, mom."

"SUPER!"  I said, referencing the refusing to cut your hair idea.  Unfortunately for me, she interpreted it as being on-board for culting.

"She's in!" My seatmate said to the guy behind her.  I think they were co-starting this cult?

Shit.  Even my five year old self knew I didn't want to be in a cult.  But my five year old self was also already a people pleaser.  I was wracked with anxiety.  I couldn't disappoint this 25-year-old, magic-braiding cult leader!

Oddly, I was also self aware enough to know that, whatever a cult was, I CERTAINLY wanted no part of it.  Not because I didn't want to lose my identity, but because I just wanted to go home to my family and play with Barbies.  To hell with hanging out with other people.  A cult was almost certainly going to cut into my Barbie-playing time.  I worried about who else was going to be in this cult, and, to be very honest, I wasn't even sure I wanted to hang out with this girl outside of the school bus.  Single-strand braiding aside, she wasn't a very good listener and didn't follow directions, and that made me uncomfortable.  She often didn't raise her hand in the peace sign the way we were supposed to when asked to quite down and listen, and sometimes she would raise her hand in a peace sign, but then whisper to me that she was raising it for PEACE but not for SILENCE.

Another aside: what was with the raising of our hands in the peace sign in order to indicate compliance with a quite down request?  I mean, at this point, it was the 80s.  Hippies were over.  Also, that kind of seems antithetical to what the peace sign was supposed to represent, right?

Anyway, I went home and confessed to my mom that I had joined a cult and she totally didn't care.  When pressed, she suggested that I write a resignation letter, which I did.  Hand printed it myself.  Not sure what I said, given that I was five and I'm not sure five-year-olds can actually write, but I handed it in the next day.

I have no distinct memory of what happened after that, except for being immensely relieved.

These kids watch the infomercials

The kids have a LOT of fundraisers at school.  It is almost worth Lilly's tuition to not have to participate in all the godforsaken fundraisers.

In addition to the ones designed to support the school, there are a number for specific charities.

One day, the kids got one for Heart Disease.

I think.

It could have been Thyroid Disease or possibly The Gout.

Anyway, we were in the car and Sam asked when we were going to start soliciting donations.

"Sam, I'm not sure we are going to participate in this fundraiser.  There are a lot, and we only have so many friends and family.  We can't ask them for money all the time.  We have to choose something that is important."

"Mom," he says, shaking his head in disappointment, "this IS important.  People are dying out there."

He was apparently paying attention at the school assembly.

"Yeah, Mom." Owen pipes in, "And also you can get a rubber duck dressed like a fireman!"

And this is my little friend

Owen has a little friend at school, and she happens to be a girl.  This apparently results in some amount of teasing, but they've stuck it out so far.

She writes him notes.  The only he brought home yesterday said:

O - outstanding!
W- wears red
E - eats hot lunch
N - neat!

Which is pretty much Owen in a nutshell, right?  That red-wearing, hot-lunch-eating, outstanding kid!

She invited him over for a play date a few weeks back.  We have emphatically NOT returned the invitation because we are social degenerates.

But the day he went over to her house, I was a work and it suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks.



I'd forgotten to tell him not to show her his junk.


Shit.  Shitshitshit.  I felt pretty confident that, without plenty of practice, Owen would FOR SURE expose himself.  Without a doubt.

I was so certain that I planned my speech to the other mom, about how he wasn't sexually harassing as much as he was just a kid who really liked his penis to share in his life experiences.

But she didn't say anything when I picked him up.

So that was a relief.

Also, today, I was watching through the window as the kids were playing in the front yard with the neighbor girl and Owen totally flopped his penis right out.

In the front yard.

Just flopped it right out.

So I still need to have that talk with him.