Leanna Kay

Okay, I give up. I’ve been meaning to get my Christmas cards out for a month. Considering it’s now a month past the time, I’m throwing in the towel. I know you’ve all been eagerly standing next to your mailbox waiting for the 2007 update. I’ll take pity on you and share the highlights.

BOB -

In 2007, Bob was named CEO of the United States Honda plants. He got pec implants and easily took out the competition in the World’s Sexy Man competition.

Oh, you want the TRUTH? Bob still works at the casket company. He did get a promotion. More hours, more responsibility and hour per hour less money. He didn’t get pec implants but he did have Lasik surgery done. And he’s the sexiest man in this house, slim though the competition may be.

LEANNA -

I spent the year jetting around for awards ceremony to awards ceremony accepting honors for how great I am. In between trips, I learned to kayak and make clothes from wool.

Yeah, right. The only place I jetted was around the kitchen in search of meals that could be thrown together with the last tablespoon of peanut butter, a wilted lettuce leaf and some mayonnaise.

THE KIDS -

Well obviously they excelled at everything. Our kids are so creative. They each perfected their own form of sibling torture. And they did this all without adult help! Aren’t they amazing?

I’d tell you more, but I feel my nose starting to twitch and grow.

The kids had school off for Martin Luther King Day. The holiday was built into the calendar as a snow make-up day. But because we haven’t had any snow days off yet, the kids were free and clear. They were also rambunctious and hateful to one another. School would have been the perfect place for them.

Come on, people on the school board. Let’s plan ahead. You know we’re going to have a snow day. Let’s just go ahead and make it up before the need arises.

Yep, I was having a bitter day on Monday. So I decided that the kids needed a productive way to spend the time off. And by productive, I didn’t mean any of the following: farting contests, competitions to see who can come up with the most creative slur for a sibling, eight-hour computer induced comas, food fights, sister flinging contests, etc…. You know - the “normal” way our family spends a day off.

I made the kids spend part of the day learning about slavery at the Freedom Center museum. Let’s just get this right out. A museum devoted to slavery is not going to be a joyful place. No matter how much you computer animate it, chaining a person up and whipping them because they’re black is just not a happy thing.

After two hours at the museum learning about our woeful past, the kids looked like beaten puppies. They were bothered and I guess that was a good thing. Plus they were actually happy to go back to school.

My work here is done…

I stared at my son, prepared to be amazed at the public school curriculum.  “You can?!”

“Yeah,” he said.  “English and Duck.  Quack, quack, quack….”

We went to an indoor laser tag and jumper play area during peak time on a Saturday night. This was a mistake for several reasons. First of all, the screams from a hundred happy children is enough to make an adult go partially deaf. Well, that was actually the GOOD part. The room was filled with the chaos of a dozen balls winging past my ringing ears and bouncing off the walls. The whole concept made me wonder why the management didn’t add beer and tranquilizers to the adult snack bar menu.

Drew was all for the laser tag as soon as he discovered it was all about shooting people with guns. I’m hoping this is just cool now because he’s an eight-year-old boy and not because of the shooting people thing. That might take some serious therapy to cure.

Chris and Lauren decided to spend their time in the bouncer room. The bouncer room was a gym sized area filled with giant inflatable slides, jumpers and obstacle courses. Lauren was dying to try out the giant slide. Until she realized there were other people doing the same thing. Then she refused to even go up the ladder unless I went with her.

Here’s the thing. Once you get to the top of the big slide, there’s only one way down. And it isn’t pretty when you’re an uncoordinated mom. Lauren went first and I went tumbling after her in a good imitation of a slapstick comedy movie. There were parents at this place with camera phones. I’m sure you’ve seen me on Youtube if you watched the video titled something like “Clumsy Middle-aged Mom Falling Butt First Down Big Slide.” At least the teenaged supervisors got a good laugh out of it.

Lauren asked me to go again. But I pretended to be deaf. Which wasn’t hard considering the twenty preteens who invaded the room sugared up from a birthday party. Luckily Chris decided to play nice big brother and do the slide with Lauren. I was left to rest in peace in a chair on the side of the room near the basketball goal. One of the preteen boys bounced a few basketballs off of my head, but you already knew that didn’t you? Because you saw it on a Youtube comedy clip.

A friend and I recently started a Brownies Troop with twelve girls in kindergarten and first grade. You may have suspected this in the past, but just so we’re clear - I have completely lost my sanity. An issue which became clear last night as we’re in the middle of the troop meeting, trying to have circle time.

Circle time is the period during a Brownies’ meeting where the girls are supposed to sit on the floor in a circle and share something about their week. Apparently the person who invented this concept tested it out on a dozen medicated adults rather than a group of rambunctious girls. A circle is not possible. I’d have been satisfied with an oval. What we got was a shifting hexagon. Or maybe it was an octagon with spurs. Either way, we were out of sync with the Brownie guideline book.

According to the book, we were supposed to encourage the girls to sit quietly and listen while the other were sharing. Again, this concept was apparently tested out with adults on Prozac and not actual children. Girls this age don’t “sit.” They shift right and left on their bottoms and I even saw some feet in the air. Finally, the co-leader and I realized that we weren’t going to get a circle no matter how hard we tried.

So we threw the book aside and took the girls outside to play in the mud and go on a treasure hunt. We were looking for the troop leader’s sanity and we found it! – Buried in the dirt somewhere between the jungle gym and the basketball court.

My kids have recently been introduced to the concept of Webkins. For those not in the know, GET WITH IT!! Webkins is this generation’s techno savvy answer to the Pet Rock. Back in my day (the Stone Ages), we painted cute faces on stones and played with them until we came to our senses and realized that we were actually playing with ROCKS! Yep, we were conned by our parents to play with gravel from the driveway so our parents didn’t have to spend money on expensive toys.

In this day, the kids go on the computer and play with their stuffed animals in a virtual world of materialism where you can use your virtual money to buy everything from food to big screen televisions for your animal. Because really, what stuffed animal doesn’t need a television the size of my living room?

The code that allows you to play on the internet is good for one year. We don’t yet know what happens after the year expires. Probably you can renew your pet’s life for an additional amount of money. I envision if the parents don’t pay the fee, the virtual pet’s room spontaneously combusts on the day of the deadline with a message saying something like, “Sorry Jr., but your mommy and daddy didn’t love you enough to pay the renewal fee. So little Tommy the Turtle had to die.”

If that happens, I’m prepared. I have a pile of rocks and some paint.

Well, it’s official. I’m buying wrinkle reducing make-up from this day forward. I was shopping with Lauren at a store where you got half off today if you were over the age of fifty. The kid cashier took one look at me and asked if I qualified for the discount.

Hey, I’m all for saving money. So the fact that he wanted to reduce the bill wasn’t insulting to me. The part that stung was the kid looking me up and down and determining that I just might qualify for Senior Citizen status. Dear Lord, has having kids aged me THAT much?

The cashier couldn’t have been over the age of, uh twelve. I swear he was playing with Transformers between waiting on customers. And if I looked hard enough, I probably would have seen his Mommy hovering somewhere nearby.

Maybe that explains it. When you’re young, everyone over the age of twenty looks ancient. So to this kid, I probably just looked old because I wasn’t young like him. That could have been it.

But I’m still buying the wrinkle-reducing make-up.