Leanna Kay

If you saw Lauren last week at the city pool, you’ve probably already made your report to child social services. She’s taking swim lessons this summer and I swear someday in therapy, she’ll have to work out why her mean parents made her brave the terrifying depths of the city’s kiddie pool.

This is a place where you habitually …..Okay, I’m pausing here because this is not for the feint of heart. If you’re easily scared, please go surf the Peace Corps websites. I’ll give you a minute…..

Okay, now that the wimps are gone, here goes…. the pool is a place where you habitually get WATER IN YOUR FACE!

Yes, I said it. There’s water. And it sometimes touches the skin on your face. I know, I know. The horror of it all. When Lauren gets one little drop of water on her face, that’s the end of it. She has to stop the lesson, get out of the pool and wipe until all moisture is gone. This is a process that repeats itself a dozen times in a half and hour lesson.

I just don’t understand this fear of something so innocuous as water because Lauren can be quite brave. For instance, she started training the family dog when she was still in diapers. The beast outweighed her by fifty pounds and had twice the teeth. Maria was a jumpy dog who’d get right in your face with breath bad enough to knock a grown man on his butt.

Yet my tiny three year old threw herself into dog training with fearless glee. She’d toddle after the dog, yelling “Maria, SIT!.” If the dog didn’t immediately obey, Lauren would grab her collar and repeat, “I said SIT.” And down the dog would go. The dog still obeys her to this day.

If I yell a simple command at the dog, she looks at me like I’ve lost my last shred of sanity. Then she trots off to find something dead to roll in. For Lauren, the dog will obey complicated demands. “You sit here. Now pour the tea for my dollies. And when you’re done, serve us up some cookies.”

My point being, the child is no coward. You’d think that a kid who could command a beast wouldn’t be the slightest bit fazed by a bit of H2O. After all, it’s just water. It’s not a jumping, slobbering beast she’s demanding bow to her every whim. It’s the stuff that comes gushing out of your faucet in a very non-scary way.

The half and hour swim lesson seems to go on forever. When it’s finally over, Lauren always hops out of the pool and runs grinning to me.

“Did you see me, Mommy? I did a good job, didn’t I?”

And of course I praise her. If towel face wiping were an Olympic sport, this child would have the gold medal all tied up.

Well as of today, my husband has had fourteen years of marital bliss with me. Let me tell you, he is ONE LUCKY MAN! And he’d be the first to agree with that statement if I didn’t have him tied up in the basement away from the internet where he could contradict me and let you in on the horrible truth. The horrible, shocking truth being that on the very rare occasion, I can be a teeny bit difficult to live with.

For instance, there was this time about ten years ago when I backed the car into the garage door. The event would fade from memory but for the fact that the door has never raised properly since.

Don’t judge me too harshly because actually the accident really was Bob’s fault. He’d parked the car in the garage a wee bit too close to the side. How was I to know when I backed up doing fifty miles an hour that the garage door track would catch on the side mirror and tear the thing off? He’d be the first to take the blame for the car incident if he were ‘available’ (ie not tied up in the basement away from the internet).

Then there was the Ya Ya Sisterhood Incident. This is a movie I was dying to see while on bed rest pregnant with the twins. Bob claimed this was a show no man with an ounce of testosterone would watch for fear of emasculation. And yet one night he surprised me by stopping at the video store and renting it for us to watch together. (And he suffered no ill consequences I might add.)

While we’re on pregnancy related demands, how can I forget the months where I craved meat? I mean seriously craved. Had a cow wandered into our back yard, I would have waddled after the thing with a knife and fork in hand. Bob grilled steak after steak and patiently waited for me to eat mine first just in case I wanted part of his too. (Or maybe he was just afraid I’d stab his hand if he got between me and my juicy protein.) This is also the man who quickly removed my dinner dish when the meat craving suddenly passed and the mere whiff of charred flesh sent me running to the bathroom.

This is also the man who bought me both nursing pads and menstrual pads in the same grocery shopping trip. He stood patiently at the front of the store holding the super absorbent nursing pads while the clueless check out girl tried to scan them and when they didn’t ring up had to ask, “What are these?”

Where many a man would have slunk away and come home empty handed, Bob patiently gave the girl a mini lesson on lactation and stood his ground while the line backed up and the clerk loudly did a price check.

Yep, this is ONE LUCKY MAN! I could go on and on, except I hear pounding coming from the basement. Let me just sum it up as follows. Marriage to me? In a word - BLISS. … Yeah, that’s it.

Now that I got your attention, just to be clear - there are no infants in this house. The “stork” which arrived in my yard last week was a bright pinkish orange flamingo with a baggie hanging around it’s neck for contributions for the Relay for Life.

Apparently it’s a money making project for the cancer society whereby you’re stuck with the bird until you pay up. You put money in the envelope and add the names of friends you want to embarrass so the flamingo can then move to their house.

This particular bird came from the same aunt who I was blogging about earlier in the week, so you might think this was retaliatory. Except the “stork” appeared before the blog. Maybe it was a preemptive strike on her part.

The day the bird arrived, my husband drove right past the thing and did a double take. With the baggie hanging around its neck, the flamingo looked just like one of those storks people put in their yard when a baby has arrived.

Only we’ve sold the baby equipment and gotten rid of all the diapers. So when Bob came into the house, you can imagine his panicked expression.

“Honey, why do we have a stork in your front yard? We don’t have any babies. Do we?” I swear my big manly husband’s voice broke on the last part.

I quickly explained and put him out of his misery.

“Mommy,” Chris asked. “What’s a stork have to do with babies anyway?”

So we told the kids about how people sometimes believe that babies come from storks who carry newborn babies to their parents.

Drew piped up (and I am quoting him word for word. I swear I didn’t make this up.) “Mommy, that’s utterly ridiculous!”

I was still amazed at the eight year old’s command of the English language when he followed with, “So where exactly do babies come from?”

At the age of eight, the truth of where babies come from would sound more ridiculous than the stork story. I was trying to formulate my reply when Chris piped up.

“Drew,” he sighed dramatically like he’s the older brother even though he’s younger by a whole minute - a whole sixty seconds which will plague the poor kid for the rest of his life. “Everyone knows where babies come from.”

I held my breath as he answered.

“They come from their Mommies’ uteruses.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Drew said.

And here I am gearing up to tell them all the details when off they go to swing. Obviously that was enough information for now.  So Bob and I beat a hasty path to the “stork” to pay up and get it moved to some other unsuspecting parents’ house.

Last week I bought this book at a yard sale. From the cover, I knew it was destined to change my life because it was a book about cleaning smarter and faster. With this book, my house was basically going to clean itself while I sat around sipping Mai Tais and surfing the internet in search of answers to the mysteries that have plagued the universe. The number one mystery being - ‘what in the heck is a Mai Tai?’

So a few days ago while the dust collected around me and the dirty laundry remained heaped in the hamper, I sank down on the couch to learn the magic of my new self cleaning house. By the first chapter, I knew I’d wasted my yard sale dollar.

According to the book, many of us waste precious time cleaning that which is not dirty. The book made this startling revelation. “It is not necessary to vacuum and dust EVERY day!”

EVERY DAY? Are these people insane? I grew up thinking you’d burn the motor out of your vacuum if you turned it on more than once a season. And my aunt taught me that you needn’t actually dust before having company. You just spray the lemon scented Pledge in the air to give the illusion of a clean house.

I read on in the book to learn that mopping doesn’t have to happen after each meal. You can leave that task for every three or four days.

Every three or four days?!! I thought you just mopped when the floor got sticky enough you had to call 9-1-1 for help freeing your stuck feet. Obviously this book was meant for people who actually clean their house on a regular basis.

Me? I was hoping to find hints on how to make the mold in the shower disappear without any actual work on my part. This book let me down.

Apparently I need to write a book of my own. Maybe I should give my aunt a call so we can start brainstorming helpful cleaning hints for those of us who don’t actually like to clean. Our book will start something like this:

As I sit here typing this, my right leg is bruised from running into a fallen log, my ankle is itching from poison ivy or bug bites- maybe both, and my leg muscles are sore from hiking up muddy hills.

You’re probably wondering what I was doing. Fleeing from Lebanese terrorists? Hiking out of the wilderness after a plane crash? Saving the rainforest from destruction?

No, actually the kids and I were traipsing around local parks looking for cheap plastic toys. In exchange for all my physical misery, I’ve been rewarded with a rubber ball and a small plastic car. So who’s the smart one now?

The kids and I have been sucked into a new hobby called geocaching. Check it out at www.geocaching.com The idea is that people hide boxes of loot and print the GPS coordinates on the website. You then go treasure hunting to find the small boxes usually filled with cheap toys, dice or key chains. If you want something from the box, you have to leave something.

It was worth the bug bites and poison ivy to see the boys’ faces when they found the boxes.

“Mom!” They shrieked loud enough to alert the Lebanese terrorist to our coordinates. “We found it! We found it!!”

You would have thought we’d found the Holy Grail instead of a box filled with McDonald’s Happy Meal toys. Now all I need to do is find another box filled with Calamine lotion, band-aids and bug spray.

Well school is officially out for the summer and my kids have set about on a mission of intense scientific exploration. The experiment involves determining how quickly three fighting kids can turn their mother’s hair into a swirling mass of gray. Considering it’s only been twelve days, they’ve made quite a bit of progress. I think I’ve seen three gray hairs sprout just in the last twenty-four hours.

So far, they’ve fought over who gets to pick the television show, who gets to pick the type of cookies we’re going to buy at the store, who gets the first bath, who gets the last bath, who’s going to get Mommy that bottle of Grecian Formula…. and it goes on and on.

Thankfully, they only have so much energy for fighting. Because between these spats about nothingness, I’ve observed some genuinely loving behavior. Like the time last week when Drew hurt his ankle and Chris did his chores without being asked because “well, just because he was hurt Mommy and I didn’t want his ankle to feel bad.”

Then there was the time Lauren brought the chocolate cookies to the table because, “Chris likes these best, Mommy.”

And I can’t forget Drew jumping up to help his sister because she was crying and needed help finding a book.

Maybe I’m wrong about the scientific experiment to turn my hair prematurely gray. Or perhaps they saw the applications for kiddie military summer school on my desk and decided to stop fighting. Hey, we graying old Mommies have a few tricks up our sleeves too!

This week, I had to take Drew to Children’s Hospital to be fitted for a brace (he sprained his ankle playing soccer with his brother). I hate to drive in the city, especially when I don’t know where I’m going. I also hate to drive in the rain.

Guess what? It was pouring down rain and I got lost three dozen times getting to the office. I would have left bread crumbs to find my way home if I hadn’t thought the monsoon would wash them away.

The things we do for these kids we love.

So after the appointment, I thought I’d just follow the nicely marked interstate signs and breeze right back on home. Yeah, right. I followed the signs for a few miles into a really bad part of town and then there were no more signs. Probably they’d been ripped from the poles to be used as roofs on the homeless shacks.

Then I saw it. A wino about to pee in a side alley. I hit the door lock and immediately I hear from the back seat -

“Why are you locking the doors, Mom? Is it because of that brown person over there?”

We live in a culturally non-diverse universe. I’ve tried to instill understanding in my kids, but they don’t really know any “brown” people so they have no associations to connect with race.

“No, it wasn’t because of the brown person,” I said, treading carefully.

Stereotypes can be so easily conveyed to kids. I should know. I was born blonde and nope, I don’t know how many of us it takes to screw in a lightbulb. Granted, being blonde is far easier than being a lot of things, but the first time I stepped into a high powered law firm I saw how it made people treat me differently. And it just drove home how harmful preconceived notions can be.

So, I don’t want my kids growing up thinking ‘brown’ people pee in alleys.

“Why did you lock the door then, Mom?”

“It wasn’t because of the brown person. Maybe I hit the lock button by accident. ….. Hey, if you ever want to see Daddy again, help me look for interstate signs.”

And there it was - the highway sign beckoning me back to my culturally non-diverse life. The sign had another guy leaning against it.

“Mom, why is that man leaning on the sign, drinking out of a paper bag?”

Dear Lord, we need to get out more. Or maybe we just need to ban soccer playing at our house.

CHRIS: I’m watching both of you two.

DREW AND LAUREN: So?

CHRIS: I can tell on either of you just like that.

LAUREN: So?

CHRIS: Well, Lauren, you’re being badder so you’re in the higher position of getting in trouble.

LAUREN: Am not.

CHRIS: Are too.

LAUREN: I’m not going to be your friend.

CHRIS: I’m telling…. MOM!!!

Well it’s now officially summer which means that I am the only one here to answer my kids’ constant questions. Mom, why is the sky blue? Mom, how do you make water? Mom, why is my brother’s piece of pie a millimeter bigger than mine?  Mom, what’s a millimeter?

Because I’m spending ten hours a day saying, “I don’t know.” … “Ask your father.”…. “Stop complaining and eat the pie.” and so on, I will only be blogging twice a week - the goal is Tuesdays and Thursdays.