Earth Farts

There are some things about having a boy - and a pre-teenish one at that - that makes you realize, as a mother, that you will never relate and must just simply enjoy.

People have often said that boys, no matter what their age, never grow up and pretty much stay teenagers for their entire lives. And I see it now with B and how his childish ways are bubbling through the surface all the time...and the kids are at a point where they LOVE IT...and the potty humor just doesn't go away...(and I must admit, even my girly girl C gets a kick out of it).

This morning, we wake up to a misty foggy spring day...the cherry blossoms are at their peak, it's damp and that pungent, mulchy smell is in the air. E leaves the house, takes a step outside and says, "Wow, it smells like the earth just farted!"

Yup, just gotta enjoy!

April Fools Abuelo Style

This morning (a wednesday), I was in my bathrobe getting ready for work...I'd slept in a little so I was running a little late, and E shows up and says..."mommy, you're going to be late for work...oh my gosh!" and before I could say anything he says...April Fools!

I paused for a minute and said, "Well, of course I'm like this right now...we don't have work or school today." He looked at me and opened his beautiful eyes with this look of uncontained excitement...and then I said, April Fools!

He chuckled and realized I'd got him good. Then it made me think of my dad and I shared with E how on one particular April Fool's day (I was probably in middle school), my dad knocked on the bedroom door to wake us up for school - like every other day - but on this day, he said to us...school just called it's been cancelled for today. And WE WERE THRILLED and rolled over back to sleep.

My dad - who is never a jokester just didn't know what to do....and he felt so bad, that he and mom decided to not ruin it and just let us stay home from school that day. After that I always half-expected not to have to go to school on April Fools....

It was a nice little memory to impart on E - he got a kick out of that!

Soccer expectations

My daughter's first soccer practice is today. I'm really excited.

I don't want to impose my ideas too much on her - pressure is not what I want to do in this situation...but I can't help wanting her to be the next Mia Hamm!

Maybe it's just that I couldn't even venture thinking about that for my son since he has the blood condition from prevents him from really being competitive on the field...but she, with all of her allergy/asthma ailments, she CAN do soccer...and she has all the elements to be a good player.

She's tough. She's a gazelle of a runner. She's confident. She has an older brother and has watched him play soccer for years and she's just so cute running around in her ponytail!

I'm hoping that she gets the soccer bug and enjoys it. I wish I'd had more sports as a kid - one of those things I really "want to get right" with mine.

IPhone Taxes

For xmas I got the season's hottest gift...the iphone. This was a much bigger deal than I realized because before the iphone I had a dinosaur cell phone. Needless to say, I'm not that hip...but I'm really enjoying the device, and my kids covet it.

I've tried to refrain from letting them use it too much - fearing that they'll break it or inadvertantly delete email or just somehow ruin the thing. Over the last few months, I've been loosening up a little. I let my daughter play pac man at TJs because she was under the weather and doing me a favor being so good at the store. I let my son write in the "Notes" section at gymnastics practice because he was being a good doobie. I like the notes section - he and I will write a couple sentences then pass it off - we're having a little iphone chat...he likes doing it and gets some writing done (writing isn't his forte) and it entertains him, I enjoy hearing his thoughts (because oftentimes he doesn't share them) and I have a little record of what was on his mind on a particular day.

He's become increasingly obsessed with the iphone. He now wants an itouch.

So yesterday he asks me the following..."what kind of taxes do you pay on your iphone?"

Taxes?

Oh, he wanted to know what the monthly costs were for having an iphone!

a glimpse into teenagerdom

The last 6 months or so, my son and I have struggled...or shall I say, my son has struggled and I haven't known exactly what to do and how to be helpful or what I should do as a parent.

We have our good moments - really great moments reminiscient of what things were like before his little world got a little more complicated. And then other times, things are bad. Really bad. Like he hates me more than anything else in the world bad. Or, bad as in I tried to be funny to diffuse some tension and that was such the wrong thing to do (of course, what the fuck were you thinking).

I'm at a loss a lot these days. I want to connect and be there but it's not really happening the way I think it should, or thought it should.

There are times when I just want to quit this job.....the whole thing - the whole mom, wife, good family person thing. I want to leave, get in a car and reinvent myself, change my identity, be part of the witness protection program.

do something completely different and forget the life I have now. start fresh, do it all over again and do it MY way or at least the way that I want to do it now, after the fact, after I gave it my best shot.

Because right now, when I tuck my baby boy to bed and he is tense and doesn't want to look at me and is stiff as I hug him goodnight and wipes his forehead after I've kissed him...it's not what he wants. it's not what he needs. and I feel worthless... and I wonder why I signed up to do this whole parenthood thing in the first place.

Type D? M? Z? or OMG, no...A?

So, I was having lunch last week with my boss and colleauge who both have kids and are both gay - aka no wives, mothers, etc. in the household.

We get along great, know each other quite well and are brutally honest with each other. I love hanging out with them. It's so easy and they're always complimenting me on all things girly. It's awesome.

Our conversations always circle around to kids at some point or another. I have the oldest ones in the bunch. So, I'm the defacto seasoned veteran parent, and only mom.

My boss, who has a 3 year old, starts talking about how he and his daughter have discovered playdough and how wonderful it is. And then I innocently respond and ask, "Have you ever made playdough before?"

WRONG QUESTION.

Man, did I get lambasted with the whole - "who has time to make playdough? oh, of course you do ms. get up to run in the morning, as you knit, pta president!" They went on and on.

"Seriously, how hard is it to make playdough?" I thought to myself and then it brought me back to those early days as a mom when I was absolutely DONE with parenting after a few weeks because it was just so damn hard.

One of the many things I found so hard about it was the lack of control of my schedule, my time, of what I wanted to do.

And I realized that most of my life, I had thought I was a really laid back, flexible, calm, relaxed, spontaneous person when in reality I wasn't. It was all relative. I had somehow surrounded myself with people much more type A than me, so by comparison, I believed I was more like a type M...just your average person.

Not so. I realized that I was in fact probably a type D...and had managed to surround myself around a ton of type As, Bs, and Cs....but in the grander scheme of things, I was truly a type A type. No way around it.

So, making playdough was yet another revelation into who I truly am. Completely, utterly type A no matter how I try to disguise it.

Resurrecting Calvin

A few weeks ago, I arrived to pick up my son from an afterschool playdate and found him absorbed in a star wars comic book. It wasn't a flimsy, magazine-like comic book, but rather a paperback sized, fairly thick comic book highlighting stories of the star wars series.

He was so engrossed that I asked the mom where she'd found the books...the library.

I LOVE THE LIBRARY.

I don't know what it is, but my kids - who aren't always perfect little angels - somehow transform into erudite, good-natured kids as soon as they enter the library walls. I am amazed by how enthralled they are by all the books and I feel as if somehow, I've contributed to this and it always makes me want to give myself a nice pat on the back.

Anyways, I decided to find a few more comic books at the library - a nice departure from the novels he's been reading for a while - and couldn't find them. So I went to the resource desk and asked the librarian...

"Um, I'm looking for these star wars comic books that look like paperback books?

"You mean "Graphic Novels?"

"Oh. Yeah. Graphic Novels. Sure."

I love it when a new distinction is thrust upon you that way - making you feel unpolished and yet enlightened all at the same time. Like instead of red wine you now understand there's pinot noirs and cabs. Like instead of beer there's ales and pilsners and stouts. Like instead of lettuce there's arugala, romaine and endive.

So she showed me to the graphic novels section. WOW. Who knew? It's a whole genre that I didn't even know about...and the interesting thing is that there are tons of them and some of these books are THICK and ELABORATE and most are intended for a teenage/young adult audience! CRAZY!

The nice thing was that there were graphic novels that were more age appropriate for my 6 and 8 year old and it's been fun to explore these. It's a great departure from your run-of-the-mill picture books or kids fiction. We've also learned about interesting characters like Houdini and I've caught a glimpse of how my munchkins see the world and what they pay attention to in the elaborate pictures found in these novels. A picture can reveal a lot if you pay attention.

And then, as you think you've entered into new territory you realize your life has come full circle, or your adult life that is.

After a few visits to the graphic novels shelf, my son discovered Calvin and Hobbs. And loves it. Just like his dad - who when I first met him, was a C&H fiend. In fact it was one of the things I found so endearing about him. Endearing because among this academically intense graduate school setting with all kinds of higher math that I couldn't even begin to understand, there were Calvin and Hobbs books everywhere. This juxtaposition between calculus equations and calvin and hobbs humor was one of the things that made me fall in love with him.

So, now for the past few weeks, Calvin and Hobbs is in our lives almost every night as we read silly strips and get a good laugh, and I see my husband in my little boy and I just shake my head and think how life repeats itself, in many ways.