There Is No Joy in Mudville

For two days, we had an involuntary fasting from the television. The kids had lost the remote.  No one was willing to look for the magic controller box thingy to make the channels reveal all their mindless glory and so they had to do without.  Mom wasn't interested in searching for it either.  I suggested that the desired object MIGHT be below the laundry that had piled up on the couch.  But the problem was, there remained the Wii and the gameboy DS and two computers so my kids were not hard up for screen entertainment. 

Still, the littles all recognized they wouldn't get a shot at the high tech stuff and trundled outside to play on bikes and experience a touch of spring.  I made dinner, silently basking in the glow of having my children enjoying the great outdoors.  Then I saw what they were doing.

One daughter had parked her bike over a large crater of mud.  Her training wheels straddled the asphault allowing her main wheel to skim the surface.  She then pedaled with all her furious four year old might sending a spray back onto her brothers and sisters who tried to get away but not before caking their white school shirts.  I banged on the window.  "No spraying mud." I shouted and went back to fixing dinner.  

Then while feeding the baby, I heard giggles and splashes and odd plunk sounds.  They were dismanteling the driveway and throwing chunks of the asphault they had broken free into the mud puddle.  I banged on the window again.  "NO Throwing Rocks! AND NO dismanteling the Driveway!" 

Unnerved, I began setting the table for dinner, mentally telling myself that I'd have to have a few shower before they ate or endure mud caked all over the kitchen.  Then I heard screams that had that touch of manic indicating they were having much too good a time.  Rocks and bikes had failed to get them sufficiently filthy such that they were now jumping into the puddle with both feet and pretending to squash grapes.

I went to the laundry pile and pulled out towels and four sets of pajamas.  I ran to the bathrooms and turned on the showers and began escorting the muddy little people in one by one.  I'd misscounted and needed one more towel by the time I was done.  Going back to the laundry pile, I picked up a terry cloth towel and there it was, the remote.  The bikes had been left outside blocking the driveway such that I had to send older kids out to restock the garage.  There was also a whole new two loads of wash awaiting as a result of outside play today, and several pairs of shoes that needed scraping. 

Putting the remote on the mantle to keep it safe, I privately vowed.  "I don't care if it's 80 degrees outside tomorrow and nature in all it's glory has burst into view.  They're going to be watching TV!"

Brave New World

When I was a teen, one of the coolest girls in the senior class drove me to school.  She always was perfectly dressed and she'd drive with her hands flexed on the steering wheel to allow her nails to dry.  With her best friend in the front seat, I got a glimpse into a more polished and avant guarde atmosphere than I would ever experience in high school as they punched the radio stations incessantly searching for the next song they'd allow to play through to completion.  They knew all the cool songs and all things artsy. I kept wondering where they found out all this stuff; like there was a secret club that only certain people were initiated into during those formative years, and that it was on a need to know basis.  I hero worshiped enough to imitate.

Being a first child, it had never occurred to me to be fickle with the radio. I'd always just waited for the next song.  Now, there were buttons to push.  I tried driving like she did with wet nails but I'd always forget and snag the polish on something such that by the time I got where I was going, my fingers were sticky goey ugly messes.  Three car accidents later, I became faithful to two stations for the rest of my teen years, but the temptation to engage in perpetual flipping from one station to another stayed.

Now as I enter the age of having a teenage daughter, a state from which I will not leave until some time in 2026, I am learning a whole new way to have ADD with music as she sat at my computer pulling up song after song from two radio stations dueling online playlists.  She was bopping along, cranking one cool tune after another of songs I knew we didn't own as she worked and I had to ask, "How do you do that?"  She indulged my ignorance and now, I will be even more distracted from life than before. But again, I'm peeking into a cooler rarer world than I normally dwell.  

It's as fun as I remember and while I know I still couldn't keep my nails dry and work the mouse at the same time if I tried such a thing, maybe with the next technological upgrade it will be possible. In the meantime, I'm hoping not to have any computer crashes as a result of my new found distraction.

What About....*

Struggling with writer's block, here's a piece from last May.

Conversations with five year olds are always interesting, even when they’re repetitive.

They understand that there is give and take, but never that a specific subject matter has been exhausted. We were at McDonald’s. The circumstance of getting into and out of that particular establishment on this occasion is worth a separate treatment in the blog, but suffice it to say, I’d managed to order and get all three, the 5, 3 and 2 sitting in a booth with the baby and me on the opposite side. Our food arrived and my son took the occasion to notice the warning stickers on the entrance, NO BARE FEET, NO SHIRT NO SERVICE, and NO DOGS ALLOWED.

“Can dogs come in here?”
“No, see the sign? They don’t want fur on the French fries or the chicken nuggets.”

“Or the chocolate milk.”
“Right.”

“Can horses be in the restaurant?”
“Well, they’re a little big don’t you think?”

“What about monkeys?”
“Monkeys? Can you imagine Curious George and his pals in this place? They’d be playing with the soda machine and making a real mess.”

“I guess you’re right. What about….jaguars?”
Maybe it was the hardening of the arteries from the French fries but I was starting to lose steam on fielding these questions. “Um…they’re endangered and prefer the jungle to a fast food franchise?”

“You’re smart Mom.” The two toddlers are nodding in agreement with their brother. I sipped my diet coke. Maybe I could answer a few more questions.

“Monsters!” my daughter pipes up. The other side of the table is collapsing into giggles.
“Monsters? They’d eat up everything. They’d drink all the chocolate shakes! There’d be no fries or burgers or cookies for anyone else.”

“Oh…right. Okay…how about cats?”
“Well, if we let cats in, I think the dogs would get very jealous and then we’d have to let them in and can you imagine this place with cats and dogs inside it? What do you think would happen?”

An elderly gentleman walked by, watching this 20 questions grueling of why an establishment of this fine caliber would be so discriminatory against all God’s creatures, great, small, endangered and imaginary. He gave a little wink. “I think they should let bunnies in young man.”

“I like bunnies. They’re soft and we could catch them.” My son happily agreed. “They should serve carrots with the happy meal so we could feed the rabbits.”

Now, the manager of the restaurant had seen to it that we got to sit and have our food brought to us. I was very grateful given the number of littles I was seeking to corral. She came by at this point, “Can I get you folks anything more?”

“Yes. We want bunnies allowed to eat at McDonald's.” my son explained.
Not missing a beat and earning my eternal love, she responded, "Oh...well, they could but see, they don't have any money."

I'm glad that the world can still bend to the nonsense of a five year old boy. Now I just have to come up with an answer to his follow up question in the car after the meal, "Hey Mom, the rabbits could work for the Easter Bunny! How come you didn't think of it?"

The-thee-the-the-tha-that's all Folks!