Leanna Kay

The kids and I recently took in a G-rated kids’ flick. I won’t mention the name of the movie because it really wasn’t worth the cost of admission. Or maybe I didn’t enjoy myself as much as I could have because of the annoying couple who arrived twenty minutes late and proceeded to take ten minutes to find the perfect seat.

As an aside, these people came to a G-rated movie without a child. Already suspect in my book considering this was the type of movie no one would see unless you’re using it as a bribery tool to get your kids to do all the mopping, vacuuming and dusting. Not that I would make my kids participate in such long hours of menial labor, of course. Let’s just pretend I’m talking hypothetically in case you’re considering reporting me to the child welfare people.

So this couple comes into the movie without a bribery child and proceeds to disrupt the God awful show for the rest of us. Up and down the aisle they went as they searched for the perfect spot to endure this cinematic masterpiece.

Just so you know, the perfect seat was in the front and involved a lot of loud discussion about proper cup holder placement. I was ten rows back and I could clearly hear the woman going on and on about “not there… over here. We need the cup holder.” In this movie theater EVERY seat had a cup holder. Of course had they arrived before the lights dimmed, they would have known this.

In such rare instances when you’re being bombarded with stupidity on such a loud scale, I think the theater should lift the ‘no popcorn throwing’ rule. A couple kernels to the head might have knocked some sense into these folks.

And next time, they’d be sure to arrive ten minutes early for the movie with a bribery child in tow.

There’s something funny going on in my basement. I’ve heard weird noises down there for a while and I’ve always assumed these sounds were connected to the water heater or the electric furnace. But now I’m not so sure.

I have evidence that the stuff in the Goodwill donation box is procreating. There’s no other explanation for the overwhelming amount of junk that we have. In December, Bob and I donated a van full of small toys, outgrown clothes and other odds and ends. The house was almost clutter free - for two whole days.

Then I tripped over a tiny robot toy I think we got from a Happy Meal. I put it in the Goodwill box with a discarded ballerina doll. Now suddenly two months later, I have THREE bags of stuff to donate to the Goodwill. You tell me there’s not something funny going on down there!

You could point out that between school rewards and Happy Meal junk, we acquire too many tiny, quickly discarded toys. But THREE bags worth? That can only be explained by weird stuff going on in that box in the basement.

Come to think of it when I bagged up the donations, there were some ballerina dolls down there that looked strangely robotic. Hmm….

I would have posted Friday’s blog sooner, but I was chaperoning second grade boys at the Aquarium and had to swim out of the shark tank where they threw me when the teacher wasn’t looking. Just kidding. It was actually the dolphin tank. Second grade boys might be mean, but they’re not old enough yet to be truly diabolical - or to tell the difference between man eating finned animals and the friendly kind.

The trip went well but for the fact that I kept losing the boys I’d been assigned to chaperone. My own kids stuck to me like glue on account of the fact that they’re terrified of being kidnaped and held for years by some evil guy intent on depriving them of Spongebob viewing. (See the post from January 29^th where I explain why my children are now terrified of leaving the house).

These other boys obviously don’t have Mommies who care enough about them to educate them on the dangers that lurk in every corner of the outside world. These kids were content to wander through the Aquarium without clutching to an adult in fear. What is the world coming to?

So at any rate, I spent the day chasing five boys with five different agendas.

BOY ONE: “I’m going to the pet the sharks.”

BOY TWO: “I’m off to play in the bathroom. I’ll be sure to throw enough paper towels in the toilets that our school won’t ever be invited back.”

BOY THREE: “I’ll be over here pulling the fire alarms.”

MY KID: “Mommy, is that strange man looking at me?!”

MY OTHER KID: “Hold my hand tighter, Mom. I don’t want to be kidnaped and raised by rabid coyotes.”

So what did you do today?

Today is Lauren’s sixth birthday!

Because it’s her special day, I offered to cook her anything in the world her little heart desired. I’d have demanded fresh lobster flown in from Maine and chocolate cake with mounds of chocolate icing. But hey, that’s just me.

Lauren’s special meal will be chicken nuggets. She can have anything she wants in the whole entire world and she picks processed chicken parts mechanically squeezed together and covered in breading sprayed with brown food dye. Yum. She also asked for corn - the frozen kind please, and oranges. She’s easy.

But here’s the kicker. For dessert she wants chocolate cake with lots and lots of chocolate icing. That’s my girl!

Lauren was feeling headachy yesterday so I let her watch what she wanted on tv for as long as she wanted. Big mistake. Did you know they play Spongebob Squarepants for six straight hours on Sundays? By six o’clock, she was giggling and feeling better and MY head was about to explode.

Why did I subject myself to the misery, you ask? Because a five year old who doesn’t feel well cannot, and I repeat, cannot watch television unless they are sitting on their Mommy’s lap. I felt pretty warm and maternal about this until the tenth time I saw Patrick trip over his own feet. That’s about when the headache started.

For those who don’t have sick five year olds, Patrick is Spongebob’s friend who has the brain power of Albert Einstein - AFTER a full frontal lobotomy. I don’t think he’s stupid on purpose. Probably he lost his mind after being forced to stare at a yellow sponge for days on end.

Poor guy.

We’ve been working on Valentine’s a bit late since we’ve been snowed in for the last few days. We got snow then it rained and everything now has a good inch of ice on it. Our mailbox even froze shut so someday my kids will have a good story to tell their own children about ‘back when I was seven years old…’ It doesn’t beat my river freezing story, so I’ll still trump the kids. See, there is an advantage to being old.

Even though I’m ancient, in my kids’ eyes anyway, I still remember Valentine’s Day from when I was a kid. And it definitely has a different feel for an adult than a child. For adults it’s all about roses and candy and restaurant meals. For kids, it’s about the cards.

The boys have been very careful in filling out their cards. They read each one intently if it’s meant for a girl to make sure it doesn’t express the wrong sentiment. They in no way want to suggest that any of the girls are cool or awesome. Only the boys get the “Valentine, You ROCK” cards. The girls get the ones that say something like “Hey, you’re not too bad but you by NO MEANS rock.” You have to read between the lines.

At this age, the boys would prefer Valentines for their female classmates that express their true sentiments - “Roses are Red, Violets are Blue, Girls Stink Really Bad, and That Means You.” Or, “Boys Rule, Girls Drool.” Simple, yet to the point.

I spent several hours listening to, “Mom, Do I REALLY have to give a Valentine to Cindy (*name changed to protect second grade privacy). She’s stupid.”

“Yes, Chris. You do. And be nice.”

“But girls are stupid, Mom. Why would anyone want to give them stuff?”

Oh, just wait my son. Just wait…

I’ve recently started going to yoga classes at the Y. Partly because they’re in the evening and I can skip dinner prep, but mainly because as I inch closer to the big 4-0, I’ve noticed my flexibility isn’t what it used to be.

If you’ve never gone to a yoga class, you probably aren’t familiar with the terms. And honestly neither was I. The first time the instructor told us to assume the cow position, I considered slinking out the door because I honestly didn’t want to look like a heifer in front of other people. But the other people were all women and they were looking like cows too, so into the stretch I went.

As a general rule, men do not come to these classes. Probably because it isn’t cool for a man to

pose like a tree or balance like a seal. Or maybe because most of the women wear spandex AND belong to AARP.

However, last week two guys strode into the aerobics room just as we assumed the downward facing dog position (another stretch I almost didn’t do because it sounds like something nice girls shouldn’t be caught doing in public).

In case you don’t know, downward facing dog is the one where you stick you rear end straight up in the air and reach your hands to the ground. That’s what we were doing when these two young studs strode in and stopped, staring wide eyed at the room full of women with their butts stuck straight up in the air. The guys backed out quickly, probably because they were in their twenties and the room’s average posterior age was fifty.

Could have been worse. We could have all been pretending to be cows.

My in-laws came for a visit this weekend. They live far away - by far away I mean six hours which is far enough to discourage random drive bys, but not so far that they can use distance as an excuse to avoid the terrors known as my children.

The in-laws had yet to buy Christmas gifts for the kids and after they settled in, they concluded that the kids could benefit from more toys. I think this occurred to them because there’s a pathway in the playroom where you can actually see carpeting. It’s not a big spot, but you can see a bit of beige peeking out between the mounds of Barbies and Hot Wheels. Can’t have that, now can we?

These people don’t think like normal human beings. They think like GRANDPARENTS! Grandparents are those people who look strangely like the parents you remember from when you were a kid, but who act nothing like the disciplinarians from your own childhood.

Did your parents ever feed you ice cream sundaes because you were still hungry after eating chocolate chip cookies and marshmallows? I don’t think so. But this snack fits right into the grandparent food pyramid built on a foundation of cookies, candy, ice cream and Mountain Dew.

Did your parents ever relent and buy you that cool toy with all the noises and light up lasers that took up enough battery power to light the entire city of Detroit? Of course not. That toy stayed on the shelf for the grandparents to buy.

So despite the fact that my kids have enough toys to share with the kids of an entire Third World country, there we were on Saturday at the toy store looking for more. The boys finally settled on Legos. Before you get all warm and fuzzy and remind me that they could have picked a mindless video game with blood and gore, let me add that the Legos box contained 1443 pieces. Yep, you read that right - nearly TWO THOUSAND teeny tiny pieces of plastic to spread through the house for me to step on and suck up in the vacuum. I was almost wishing for the ice cream sundaes, marshmallows and cookies.

But in the end I shut up and let the kids have their legos. Partly because building worlds out of legos is better than mindlessly blowing up terrorists on the t.v. But mainly because someday (God willing) I’m going to be a grandparent and I plan to do all those things I mentioned above.

When the day comes, I have my eye on a really cool building set with about three million pieces that has a ferris wheel attachment. Cool, huh? Especially since it won’t involve ME being the one stepping on the small toys.

And just in case you’re interested, with the addition of the legos to the kids’ playroom, that unsightly beige carpeting is completely covered.

The kids have been home from school a lot this week because of snow closings and delays due to the cold. If you’re anywhere near my age (upper thirties), you’re probably shaking your head and saying ‘delays because it’s COLD? What’s up with that?’

I don’t ever remember missing school because the thermometer dropped below freezing. I was in second grade in 1978 when the Ohio River froze completely over. When a river freezes over, then and only then can you say it’s cold. (By the way, when I tell the river story, my kids look at me like I’m from the days of horses and buggies. They shake their heads at poor old mom and research nursing home options).

The river didn’t freeze over this week, and yet it’s too cold to go to school. Either we’re raising a new generation of wimps, or else things were just different thirty years ago. Maybe our parents just couldn’t stand us and wanted to get rid of us - which would also explain why we were allowed to sit on lawn chairs in the back of pick up trucks as we roared down the highway at fifty miles an hour. But that’s for another blog.

Suffice it to say, this week’s togetherness did little to cement my kids’ sibling bonds. After about an hour of extra time together, they started fighting over the stupidest of the things - broken toys, lint from the dryer, dead bugs. In a nutshell, everything was mine, mine, mine. If they’d been animals or three-year-old boys, they’d have peed on every toy in the house to mark their territory.

I was about at the end of my wits (read - stark, raving mad and ready for the rest only a straight jacket will bring) when I made them some lunch. I grilled ham and cheese sandwiches which they eagerly consumed. Apparently fighting burns a lot of calories. There was only one sandwich left when both boys asked for another. They agreed to share.

I’m thinking that nothing good could come from this as Chris gets up and takes the sandwich, splitting it in such a way that one half ends up without cheese and ham. He looks intently at the mess and then he hands the good half to Drew.

“Look, Drew,” Chris says. “All the meat fell out of my half.”

It wasn’t the same as a peace treaty, but what mother could ask for more?

I was dusting the television yesterday when a sense of deja vu came over me. It felt like I’d just done this. Because I had. Just like I’d just wiped the sinks clean and scrubbed the toilet no more than seven days ago. Yet here they all were dirty again.

As I was mindlessly wiping away dust, it occurred to me that my life was like that guy’s from the movie Groundhog Day. Every day he gets up and does the same thing over and over. Put my life on a looping movie reel and you’d get the same result.

Well maybe not. The guy in Groundhog Day had an interesting life as a television reporter. Moviegoers watching me dust over and over would eventually try to commit suicide using whatever items they had on hand. Death by an extra infusion of Sour patch kids to the digestive tract? Death by heart attack from extra butter on the super sized popcorn? Anything to put them out of their misery.

Then as I was dusting away contemplating the stagnation that is my life, I head a little voice behind me.

“Mom, look what I can do.”

Lauren completed a perfect ballet turn before giving me the most angelic smile. She’d obviously been practicing because she could finally make the turn without falling flat on her butt. Now that was something different from last week.