Category Archives: Kids

Just Calm the Elf Down

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I have heard so many people complaining about their Elf on the Shelf this holiday season, to which I would like to say, he is not a real person and he is completely under your control.  If he is annoying you with his unreasonable demands to hide him in outlandishly creative spots, and he wants to come bearing gifts and treats for your kids, it is 100% your fault and you could probably do something about it.  Also, in a matter of days he’ll be off to Florida or Cabo or wherever the elves go in the off-season, so really, just deal.  You’ll be fine.

Also, picking apart a Christmas toy for its over-commercialization and the stress it adds to already busy moms during the holiday season is just too easy.  And to say that the worst thing about the Elf on the Shelf is its message of “spying on kids” – really?  Isn’t that Santa’s whole deal?  I remember being a little wigged out when I first heard “Santa Claus is Coming to Town.”  Oh, you know, “He sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good…”, followed by the screeching violins from the shower scene in Psycho?  The Elf on the Shelf is just an extension of that, and part of the deal we make with our kids every December:  you behave, and I will do fun stuff for you and shower you with gifts and I will take exactly zero credit for most of it.  Now go to bed, I have to write “I LOVE YOU” in powdered sugar on the kitchen floor so you think you live with a magical flying elf.

In other news, I started to worry last weekend that the kids were getting a little too obsessed with all the stuff they want for Christmas.  So we went to the grocery store today, and they each got $10 to buy things for people who don’t have enough food.  My attempted lesson about giving back turned into a miniature (adorable) version of SuperMarket Dash:

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In between the near misses with other shoppers, I think they actually got it.  I steered them towards the canned food section, and J asked how homeless people get can openers, and how will they heat up the canned food, and what will they use to eat it?  And he asked so earnestly and L was listening so closely that it was a lovely little moment in the middle of the grocery store.  And the kids behaved on the way home, and played nicely while I made dinner, and then read stories under the Christmas tree and went to bed so fast.  It was lovely.

And I probably owe it all to my spying little Elf on the Shelf.

Cracking Up

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J and L have been calling each other “stale crackers” for the past few days.  They heard it on Jake and the Neverland Pirates – Jake and his little cartoon hooligan friends run around Neverland saying, “Last one to the ship is a stale cracker!”  Um.  As a white woman whose doctor just told her she’s getting older, I am super uncomfortable hearing my kids call each other stale crackers.  Sigh.

So it got all kinds of Christmas-y up in my house today.  I found the most overpriced beautiful wrapping paper and gift tags at Container Store and wrapped up some toys for my nieces and nephews.  I am sharing the picture with you because, even though my kids politely oohh-ed and ahhh-ed when I showed them a pile of beautifully wrapped presents, you and I both know they really don’t give a shit.  But maybe you do!

Presents

I also made an owl ornament today.  I use the term “made” very loosely, because I just got a $4.99 kit at Michael’s, and stuck a threaded needle through some pre-cut holes in some pre-cut felt.  Wait, is that sewing?  Did I sew?  Anyways, this owl is freaking awesome.

Owl

While I was at Michael’s, I saw a mom and daughter in the scrapbooking aisle who were just about to get into it.  The mom was wearing a Harvard Law sweatshirt, and something about it looked legit to me – not like she bought it on a trip to Boston, or like it was left over from the ’80s when all the cool seventh graders wore college sweatshirts.  It looked like she actually went to Harvard law school.  Or at least that’s what I made up in my head.  I overheard her say to her middle-school aged daughter, “I KNOW what an ink dauber is, DO NOT talk to me that way or you can forget about that embosser…THING.”  For the record, I have no idea what ink daubers or embossers are, and they scare me.

I felt for that woman.  Michael’s totally overwhelms me because the moms in there who are really good at crafting speak another language and have customs and tools that are totally foreign to me.  I imagine that woman was thinking something like this:  “I am a freaking highly educated woman standing in a strip mall craft store and an 11-year-old is smack talking my knowledge of SCRAPBOOKING SUPPLIES?  What have I done with my life.”

We’ve all been there.  Well, maybe not in a craft store arguing over embossers with a surly tween, but in that place where we know we’re working so hard – and we have the wrinkles and gray hairs to prove it – and somehow we’re still totally unprepared for what is coming at us.  Maybe that is why I am in love with my five dollar owl.  I bought it, I read the instructions, I made it, it’s cute.  The end.  Just simple and finite.

Which is pretty much the exact opposite of trying to explain to your 4 and 5-year-old why they can’t call each other crackers.  Can an ink dauber help with that?

Monkeys, Minaj, and More

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So I started thinking that I had nothing to write about today and then I see this:  Image

It is like the universe is telling me to write and is sending forlorn pocket-sized monkeys as its messengers.  If you happened to lose your adorable, tiny, shearling-coat wearing monkey today, he is apparently wandering around an Ikea in Toronto.  And he’s wearing a diaper.  And according to at least one woman in the store who posted a video of the little guy on YouTube, the whole experience was “terrifying.”  OH my god, now I just read that this monkey was locked in its crate in a car, and it managed to get out of said crate, OPEN THE CAR DOOR, and make it across the presumably huge Ikea parking lot to do a little shopping.  That IS terrifying.  The owner wasn’t supposed to have the monkey in the first place, so now the Toronto authorities aren’t giving him back.  What will become of this poor monkey?  Well, at least he’s dressed appropriately for winter in Toronto.  Do you think he’s going to go to a zoo or animal shelter now and be like, “Why the hell are all of these monkeys naked?”  And all the other monkeys are going to be all, “OH, look at fancy clothed monkey in his warm shearling coat and poop-catching diaper, he thinks he’s better than us, let’s eat him.”  Poor, poor monkey.

In other news, sometimes my daughter says something so thoughtful, so sweet, so insightful, that I am in total awe of her.  And then other times, she asks me to call her Nicki Minaj when I pick her up from school.  

I just had to write that down because I don’t want to ever forget it.  

Anyways, by this point in my stay-at-home mom adventure, I expected to have some insightful perspective on the whole thing.  I thought I’d have some clarity about what was better for my family, for my kids, for me.  But instead, I have never felt so old in my life because my body is going batshit crazy.  

First, I tore the meniscus in my knee because I had the nerve to actually work out for the first time in, oh, a year.  To quote my orthopedist:  “Who do you think you are, doing lunges at your age.”  Why I never.  Luckily it wasn’t a bad tear and I only had to wear a gigantic brace and hobble around for about ten days.  But, as my mother always told me, walking like a peg-legged pirate for ten days has its price.  For me, it aggravated a back problem I hadn’t even thought about for like four years and caused me to HERNIATE A DISC.  That is in all caps because it is TOTALLY MERITED.

And of course, my disc has the balls to herniate itself right after my husband leaves for a business trip and I am solely responsible for the kids.  Shit always hits the fan as soon as my husband is en route to his fancy hotel and his expense-account nights out with co-workers.  If not for my amazing neighbor swooping in and taking care of my kids while I whimpered on my heating pad, I have no idea what I would have done.  Well, I would have taken painkillers and drooled on myself – I guess I should say I’m not sure what the kids would have done.

So the worst part of the back pain is behind me, but it has slowed me down for going on four weeks now.  Which means for four weeks I have been feeling useless and not doing the looooong list of things I wanted to do after I quit my job, and my husband has been doing everything.  All while listening to me tell him he’s doing it all wrong (well, he is).  

So that’s why I just don’t have any perspective yet.  It’s disappointing, but maybe also a lesson – that when you have more unscheduled time in your day, there’s more room for stuff to go totally off track.  Or to stop trying to plan stuff and just take care of yourself.  Or that even when you are lying on the kitchen floor in excruciating pain, it will take a good 30 minutes of eating dinner before one of your kids says, “Hey, what are you doing?”  Or maybe I am just getting old.  

I’m going with the first two.

Maybe frogs wear contacts?

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A very wise friend of mine told me this weekend that the key to a successful blog is writing every day.  That way people get invested in your posts and want to look at your blog every single day.  That means that every single day I need to be constantly aware of potentially interesting, funny moments that I can work up into a pithy blog post.  

OR I need to steal funny stories right out of my kids’ mouths.  They are literally sleeping upstairs at this very moment while I am stealing their funny.  Frankly, it is the least they owe me.

So last winter, I was consumed with researching the best summer camp for my kids and picked what I thought was a great one.  The camp seemed to have the right balance of field trips, “academics” (including “peaceful conflict resolution” for preschoolers – WHAT), and of course, inflatable waterslides.  My obsessive research paid off, and the camp ended up being a great fit.  They both played outside all day, L made a bunch of new friends, and J expanded his fart-noise repertoire.  What more could a mom hope for?

On the drive home at the end of the 8-week camp session, I asked the kids to tell me in one sentence about the very best thing they learned at camp.  I truly expected to hear about how they could now successfully avoid conflict or, at the very least, something about waterslide safety.  But instead J says:  “I learned that Jewish people are not ticklish and that frogs do not have spectacles that you can see.”

My mind raced.  Do I deal with the vaguely racist comment first, or the comment that sounds like he dropped acid and now thinks that frogs wear invisible glasses?  Also, ARE Jewish people not ticklish?  Because that is like a superpower, and also, I could not think of a single time that I had tickled my Jewish friends, so oh my god, is he right?  And did I really just ask myself that?  Before I could decide what to say, though, J adds this clarification:  “Wait, not spectacles, what are things boys have?  Testicles!  I mean testicles.  Frogs do not have testicles outside their bodies.  Can I have a piece of gum?”

Sweet jesus, this was too much for me to handle.  In a daze, I focus on not hitting parked cars and mumble something about just because his Jewish friend is not ticklish doesn’t mean that the zillions of Jewish people in the world are not ticklish.  And I hand J the whole pack of gum, which immediately makes L yell that she wants gum, too.  Which is why my children ate an entire pack of Trident on our drive home from summer camp one day.  They thought we were celebrating the end of camp – I was just trying to avoid saying the wrong thing and driving off the road.  

Some days that is still my goal.

Next summer I’m going to try keeping the kids at home.  That way I can teach them my own wacky ideas, and shove gum and candy in their mouths when they say things I don’t know how to handle.  Stay tuned.

One From the Vault

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Several months ago, I marked my calendar that on October 2 Disney was releasing Cinderella from “The Vault.” Well, that day is here. When I ordered it from Amazon on Tuesday I actually felt giddy with excitement that I had the opportunity to buy this movie – like I was in on a secret that all the cool moms knew about. Setting aside the question of what is wrong with me, I would like to know, what is wrong with Disney. Seriously. Do they expect us to believe that there is really a vault? And that their movies are in such demand that people will jump at the rare opportunity to pay too much for them? Well, they are right on both counts. I imagine that the vault is multi-colored and has huge mouse ears.

This is the first full-on princess movie I’ve gotten for my daughter. I’ve been a little paranoid about media in general since both of my kids were little, and recent articles like this don’t really help. I’ve also been conscious of the Disney-princess-machine since I had my daughter, and have shied away from princess things. But then I see an ad for Cinderella and I remind myself of two things: one, I loved princesses and Barbie when I was little and I turned out to be a reasonably productive citizen who just happens to be completely dependent on her husband for the time being (oh my god), and two, it’s JUST A MOVIE.

Anyways, I actually think there are some fine lessons for girls in Cinderella. For example, as a girl, it is awesome to get dressed up and go out — Cinderella needed a break, got herself all fancied up, went to a happening place, and danced with a cute boy. Good for her. Also, it sucks to lose a nice shoe. And being mean to your siblings just never turns out well. Beyond that, if my daughter is so influenced by a movie that she thinks a guy is going to solve all of her problems, then I’ve really screwed up, and not just by buying too much princess junk.

But like all things with my kids, I’m probably over-thinking it. As I type this, my daughter is playing dress-up. She dug past all the fluffy pink tutus and dresses and is wearing a knight’s outfit, holding a shield, and chasing her brother with a foam sword.

Maybe a princess movie would do her some good.