Somebody Stop Me Before I Sign Again

You would think at forty-eight, I'd know something.

But just as crocuses pop out of the ground in the spring, I sign up my kids for activities and so the mad scramble to get from point A to point B begins anew.  It always seems so innocent before we begin.   The 7th grader wants to run track. I'm thinking, that's great.  Her older brother runs track.  

The 3rd grader wants to do soccer.  I'm thinking, awesome, she didn't get to do basketball because they didn't have enough people to field a team so she'll love it.  

I've only signed up two people.  Given my past track record, where I signed up three for basketball,one for singing lessons, and three others for ballet, I thought "I've matured. I've come to know how much I can manage. I no longer overstuff the crust of our lives with cheesy after school and weekend activities."  It's just two kids. How bad could it be?   Well... track practice for the 7th grader is on Wednesday, the same day as CCD which used to be on Tuesday but I had to switch it to Wednesday because soccer practice is at the same time CCD would be on Tuesday.  What was a one trip out one trip back day, is now a game of car mom ping-pong.  

Saturday...son gets bus ride to track meets most times, but not always.  Daughter gets no rides to track meets.  They are everywhere.   I also forgot about band, which has a concert on Sunday in Downtown DC.  

This sort of mad schedule doesn't include the new wrinkle of not having a machine that can take all of us, or the two months to go reality of our oldest needing to get from his work (at a school) back to the campus (for a class) and then back to work in the middle of the day, twice a week.  It's a class he can't miss, but which requires either the invention of a teleportation device, mutant flying powers or me driving over after the kids are put on the bus, to take him to the campus from school and wait around for an hour and then back again before home.  I'm thinking of lacing his birthday cake with radioactive waste and rooting for the mutant powers.  

So I'm adopting a new policy.  I have ten kids.  Each of you get a month long activity.  Two months we get off.  If you don't like the sport allocated to your 30 month period....have some cake.   If you grow wings and can get yourself from point A to point B, I'll sign you up.  

Splinters

Every year I begin a crusade. I believe children should be shod when they go outside. Shoeless Joe Jackson and his fellow barefoot comrades view the coming of crocuses and planting of gardens as a sign to lose any footwear they may have consented to wear during the winter months. As a result, I have been known to begin loading the car an hour prior to an appointment only to be sabotaged by a single shoe.

If the people who determined when to show clemency about being late for appointments, witnessed my struggle to get all of them into the car, only to spend a frantic 30 minutes tearing apart couches and beds to locate a single pair of not necessarily matching but left and right shoes, only to then bargain with the shoe gods and being willing to accept even just two shoes the same size that are for the same foot, they’d just give me a standing appointment…when you show, it’s your time.

I have also in sheer desperation, given my eldest daughter a twenty and told her to go into the Walmart and come back out with one size fits all slippers for whoever it is that is missing footwear.

So you’ld think I’d be gung ho about being barefoot but having had small children for the past 16 years, I’ve also taken out my fair share of splinters. The most memorable one I helped remove from my three year old son during the course of a family party. He’d been playing on the wooden deck on our house and got a huge one in his left foot. He was in tears. We were hosting the party but spent the bulk of the next hour soaking, working with tweezers, but nothing was working and he was in hysterics.

My brother tried to calm him down by explaining the situation. My son was having none of it.

“If you don’t let us remove the splinter, it will continue to hurt.”
“IT HURTS NOW!”

“If you don’t let us remove the splinter, it could even become infected.”
“I DON’T CARE!”

“If you don’t let us remove it, the infection could be serious.”
“SO?”

“So your parents who love you want to remove the splinter so you won’t get sick or be in pain or die.”
“I DON’T… WANT… TO LIVE!” he gasped, holding and hiding his foot from my tweezers.

I voted for more soaking at this point.

Over the years, I’ve learned tricks like having the kids close their eyes while I remove the foreign objects from their toes and that handing them an ice cream while watching television is also a good anesthesia. I’ve also given up explaining why splinters need to come out entirely.

But I’ve also come up with a solution for splinters and summer and shoes. You don’t have to wear shoes if you can’t find them, but then you must wear socks.

Thick socks.
Thick Soccer up past your knees socks.

They don’t have to match.

One morning of enduring those heat insulators on one’s feet and we’ll have no problems from June until September with locating footwear.

Now, if only I could devise a similar solution for winter.

Jack Bauer vs. Moms of America

Because the series "24" is coming to an end, this piece will lose it's humor shortly after the show loses its shelf life.  As such, it is time for a rerun because these babies will never be found on a best of DVD.

The running gag/conceit on “24” is that Jack Bauer never gets to do anything to maintain himself, eating, sleeping, using the bathroom, showering. He's always on the go.

Big deal.

Moms have been enduring this sort of relentless timed to the second hard press scheduling for years. Every fall, if you just look at the mini-vans lined up after school you’ll find not one but multiple examples of women talking on their cell phone while writing in a calendar, skimming and signing papers and providing two or more minors with the specialized equipment they’ll need for their afternoon activities, along with a snack. That’s all in the fifteen minutes they’re stuck in the slug line waiting to drive away from the school.

Jack Bauer searches through a myriad of places to find the stash of weapons or suspect or bomb he needs to find with mere moments to spare.

Yawn.

Try finding three pairs of clean white socks from the laundry for children who forgot to lay out their stuff the night before, while fixing five lunches, making sure each gets their breakfast and has their backpacks, lunches, diorama’s, permission slips and gym clothing for the day all before 7:30 am. Also, please remember to take out the garbage, remove the two bikes from the driveway and the car’s on E.

Jack Bauer sometimes resorts to unethical methods of getting information.

Hah! Like we mothers didn’t see that one coming. In the afternoon, after casually offering to charge the eldest’s cell phone, we check the numbers in and out. Moms specialize in benevolence that masks other motives. “I noticed you put your hair back yesterday in a pony tail, it looked nice.” Is mom code for “Your hair looks like the body of an emu, please find a brush and attack it at once!”

Intrigue and espionage? Please, moms invented it. Most mothers usually have more than one child who is a good mole for kid information, both about school and domestic issues. Some have been known to switch the baby monitor to other rooms, helpfully hidden under a pile of laundry, the ultimate camouflage. We conduct unauthorized search and seizure raids to evict illegal television watchers during homework time, and have special vice units (Dads) for serial offenders.

Jack Bauer doesn’t recognize proper authorities in some situations. He often deals with apparently cataclysmic explosions. He uses his wits to survive.

The parents of adolescents everywhere are nodding their heads at this one. We cope with unexpected emotional teen age equivalent of land mines at any waking moment, and must disarm them without so much as a paperclip or a welding rod. We do not recognize opening a locked door within our own home as breaking and entering, we monitor incoming and outgoing email, phone conversations and do background checks on all personal contacts. The HSA has nothing on us!

Jack Bauer has never been known to sleep or use the facilities in the course of a vigorous 24 hours. Parents do this on a regular basis, or irregular, depending upon your meaning. As an aside, all our 24 hours are vigorous, or at the very least, exhausting.

Jack Bauer still hasn’t eaten.

While abstaining from food might help with never getting to use a public restroom, most parents, even Jack's find it isn’t a healthy habit. Just as surely as Jack gets terrorists to spill the beans, we could make Jack eat them. Moms and Dads everywhere, say it with me, “You sit down and you’re not moving until everything on that plate is gone!”

Time Out for Time Management

*Sorry I missed posting yesterday* Here's Your Chocolate Fix!*
Families with more than two children know the transition from man to man to zone defense in parenting takes many forms.

Some of the changes are in perception. For example, mini-vans and SUV’s seem oddly small and hand me downs no longer seem shabby.

Others are in policy; the five second rule gets extended to about a minute. Bathing is an every other day affair with the option to push to a third. Bedtime is strictly enforced, whereas television viewing options and time limits are often relaxed.

With three or more children, parenting becomes much more pragmatic and purely functional. There is none of that “hush that blanketed the house during nap time.” Having a child chug the dregs of your left over diet coke is no longer cause for alarm. The purity of the first baby’s diet, which never saw French fries until after the age of two, has given way to frustration, as the youngest just “won’t eat her Chicken McNuggets.”

But the greatest change in family policy and procedure is in the arena of transportation. Once one is past three kids, getting from point A to point B requires a pre-factored half an hour devoted to purely loading and unloading. Subsequent children necessitate factoring in ten additional minutes per minor to account for lost shoes, trips to the bathroom, negotiating car seats and memory recall about where one was actually going. With nine, I’ve had to accept that I will make it within 45 minutes of being fashionably late.

Now, I really hate being late. So I keep tweaking the system. To date, I’ve tried pre-packing a diaper bag and laying out the clothes the night beforehand. I’ve tried keeping their shoes in the car and spare socks in the back pocket of the driver seat. I’ve considered dressing them and myself before going to bed. We’ve even set our clocks to be ten minutes fast to help trick everyone into leaving earlier. That works until I start calculating the fake ten minutes into my schedule, or someone helpfully resets the clock to the actual time.
Enter reality.

I had made an appointment for our youngest. “I want you to bring in the baby for a weight check up on Friday at 8:30 before any sick kids come into the office,” The receptionist said.

The nurse was helping me out, letting me in before office hours. I agreed despite every mom cell in my body screaming “ARE YOU INSANE?!” But I told myself, I can do this. I just needed to plan out my attack.

The next morning started badly. I woke up at six thirty instead of six. Getting them dressed, fed, cleaned up from being fed, loaded in the car plus the diaper bag, the double stroller, purse, cell phone, keys, appointment book, coats, socks and a change of clothing for the child that was wearing pants with matching holes in both knees, we were on the road by 8:50.

When I made it to the parking lot, it was 9:20. It took every ounce of moral courage to not fake the sign in time on the sign in sheet. (9:37).

“Mrs. A!” the receptionist beamed. “You’re early.”

“What? My appointment was at 8:30.”

“It’s tomorrow. Today’s Thursday.”

“Right. Thursday.”

I looked at my four under the age of five children, all dressed, all fed, all ready to go somewhere. We were ahead of schedule.
“Can we wait?”