Leanna Kay

** Your children have spent the entire weekend fighting and you finally just walk out of the room telling them to “fight to the death and let me know who wins.”

**The Boy Scout popcorn arrives at dinnertime and you convince yourself that cheese popcorn satisfies both the dairy and grain requirement for a well-balanced meal.

**School gets called off for lack of electricity and after crying and raging to the Duke Energy gods, you drive to the school superintendent’s house with kerosene lamps and chalk. After all, the pioneers didn’t need electricity to educate their children so neither should modern teachers.

**You’re so tired of hearing the Spongebob theme song that you take the telemarketer’s call and chat him up until you see the credits roll.

**When your kids act up in church, you remind them that they’re in God’s house and then threaten them with eternal damnation because after all, God can see every time they pull their sister’s ponytail or steal the pencil from their brother’s hand.

**You pretend while you’re on your computer blogging that you simply cannot hear the words, “MOOOOOOOOMMMMMM, HE TOUCHED ME!!!”

**You actually check when your child asks you to make sure they got clean the body parts they can’t see.

**You sneak into your children’s rooms at night and risk waking them as you bend over and kiss their cheeks because they look so precious when they’re sleeping.

**Even though you know a new day will not automatically make your children want to hug each other or share their toys, you get out of bed anyway and hope for the best.

I was recently reading an article about dementia. Apparently there’s this phenomenon called “happy dementia.” This is a mental disorder that strikes the people who spent most of their lives being royal pains in the butt. These people have spent their adult lives harassing the cashier at WalMart for not checking out their Depends at warp speed. These are the people who berated the kid at Taco Bell for putting too much lettuce in their taco salad. These are also the people who spent every Christmas haranguing their professional baseball player son for not being an all-star quarterback. In other words, these are the people who have spent their entire life being unhappy and letting the world know it.

Apparently as their brains succumb to dementia, people who have defined the concept of “jerk” gradually become the kind of patient happy elders you see on drug commercials. Only these people are happy without the drugs.

Well after reading about “happy dementia”, I have come to the conclusion that this sucks rotten eggs for the rest of us. I’ve spent my adult life being kind to people. I’ve gritted my teeth and smiled while the cashier at WalMart slowly rang up my purchases. I’ve never once been unkind to the kid at Taco Bell even when it became crystal clear that he couldn’t read any of the buttons on the register. I never even complained when my taco came out looking suspiciously like a burrito.

Why have I been so nice? Because I’ve been waiting my turn to be rude. I’ve spent my adult life waiting to get old enough to become a stereotypical grumpy old woman. I was biding my time until I got to the age where you’re allowed to be rude and people must forgive you simply because you’re old.

Am I going to be deprived of my opportunity to tell people off because my mind fails before I get my turn to be rude? Will I be so happily demented that I’ll lose the opportunity to tell the Taco Bell kid to go back to school and learn to read? Will I be deprived of the chance to tell my kids how to run their lives?

This whole concept of happy dementia has totally ruined my plan for retirement. That plan being me spending my days going from person to person and telling them what they’re doing wrong in my elderly opinion.

Maybe I’ll just have to put my plans into action a little sooner. I probably won’t tell off the Taco Bell cashier today. But I will give him an eye roll. Watch and see if I don’t.

We mostly watch Disney and Nick TV in our household when the kids are still awake. When I was a kid (back in the dark ages), you used to be able to watch network television as a family. I still remember sitting with my parents sharing wholesome shows like Little House on the Prairie and the Cosby Show. We’d light a fire in the cave and adjust the rabbit ears on the stone television and sit back for a nice evening of family fun. It was always good to have a reprieve from being hunted by Sabertooth tigers and T-rexs. At least that’s how my kids envision my childhood. And who am I to burst their bubble and tell them that we actually had running water and electricity? It came in handy when scrubbing the etchings off the cave walls.

My nostalgic childhood has long since passed. In this modern world, network television is a tricky area to navigate with children. We were watching Survivor last Fall when an obviously gay contestant revealed his sexual preferences on air.

“What did he mean by that?” one of my sons asked.

“Time for more popcorn,” I announced as I thought about how much I was beginning to love Spongebob and Fairly Oddparent cartoons.

Even though I’m usually careful about television shows, I did turn on Nanny 9-1-1 the other night. The episode was about a couple who had a five-year-old son and twin girls who were three. The problem in this family imminently became clear from the first five minutes of the show. Let me pause here so I can come up with a politically correct way of saying this.

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Okay, here goes. The problem was that the parents were crazy raving lunatics. They spent so much time screaming at the children that they didn’t realize no one was listening except the neighbors. After about ten minutes of listening to this non-stop yelling, my finger was poised over the channel change button on the remote.

“Mommy,” Chris wiggled next to me in the chair. “I’m so glad we don’t live in that house.”

“Those parents are mean,” Lauren agreed.

“I love you, Mom,” Drew piped up. “You’re the best.”

And suddenly compared to the lunatic parents, I became Mom of the Year. Maybe network television isn’t so bad after all.

I had a busy week at work with loads of issues I didn’t feel like dealing with. The problem with working at home is you get easily distracted. I’ve had this particularly bad file on my desk for a week now and every time I look at it, I get the strong urge to go do laundry. I don’t care if I all the clothes are clean and I have to create the laundry. When I see this file, clothes MUST get washed immediately.

Yesterday, this case was looming at the front and center of my desk because I really needed to get it done. So sensing the urgency, I did the only reasonable thing a woman in my position could do. I cleaned the sinks in our bathroom. I scrubbed the toilet and mopped the floor. Then I decided the closets needed organized. Anything to avoid work I didn’t feel like doing.

I was on my knees in the bathroom closet organizing the toilet paper rolls when it hit me. I’d somehow journeyed from the land of procrastination to the country of the certifiably insane. What kind of crazy does it take to meticulously line up toilet paper rolls?

Luckily I caught myself in time and went to do something way more important. Like organizing the pantry. After all, I’d seen a couple cans of green beans whose labels weren’t facing front and center. Can’t have that, now can we?

I rarely travel and never leave my children. So when I went to Maine last week, I had to find the appropriate guilt gifts to take back to assuage my conscience for leaving the poor children without their mother for four entire days. I know they were probably sobbing their eyes out at their grandmother’s house where supper consists of ice cream cones followed by king sized candy bars. Oh the horror at not having Brussel sprouts for an entire week.

When I left, the only thing Drew asked for was a snow globe. I found a cute one that had a moose holding a lobster on a dock in the ocean. What says Maine better than a moose with a lobster? When you shook the thing, it rained iridescent snow onto Mr. Moose’s antlers. I immediately bought it and packed it away at the bottom of my carry on.

Big mistake.

When they x-rayed my baggage for the return flight, the security officer immediately got me out of line and started the interrogation.

“Does this bag contain a snow globe?” From his tone, you could have just as easily inserted the words “rocket launcher” for snow globe.

“Yes, it’s a moose,” I stammered because I now remembered all the warnings I’d read when I reviewed the packing rules forbidding liquids. But when I’d been standing in the souvenir shop facing the Lobster Moose, I hadn’t been thinking of him as a terrorist threat.

“It contains liquid.” Now he’s looking at me like I’ve just confessing to eating my young. “I need to open your bag and see it.”

Of course I told him to go ahead. I don’t think you can refuse an airport security guard unless you’re in the mood for a full body cavity search.

The security guard started rooting through my carry on luggage in search of my “weapon.” Of course the snow globe was packed at the bottom of the bag so by the time he reached it, my underwear was strewn through out the security check point. He should have known a middle-aged woman who wears cotton granny panties is not a threat to national security. But apparently my moose was.

When he pulled it out, he came face to face with the perceived threat. It was a moose…holding a lobster. How dangerous can it really be? Was I going to take over the plane with a snow globe? Okay people, listen up, I have a moose and I’m not afraid to use it.

The security officer looked it over and determined that we were probably safe because the liquid was less than four ounces. He didn’t mention the fact that it was a MOOSE HOLDING A LOBSTER.

I recently flew to Maine to visit my college roommate. I haven’t flown since before 9-11 and to be nice to myself, I’ll just say I’m a nervous flier. (Sounds better than a terrified maniac who leaves fingernail imprints on her armrest because when the landing gear drops it sounds like something important just fell off the plane.)

Because it’s been so long since I boarded a plane, I paid rapt attention when the flight attendant went through the safety speech. I was the only one who actually got out the safety card and followed through as the attendant described the proper method for putting on an oxygen mask. I felt like screaming at my fellow passengers to listen. “I can’t help ALL of you with your masks if this tiny little plane goes down.” That’s what I was thinking, but I didn’t say it out loud because I didn’t want anyone to think I was worried even though my fingers were white from clutching the safety card..

The man sitting in the exit row wouldn’t have been much help in case of an emergency. He was on the phone as the flight attendant asked if he had any questions about getting the door open. Hello! Have the man demonstrate it so we all know he’s capable of opening the thing in case we need to bail out. No, that’s okay. We’ll just call Fred or whoever it was he was speaking to on the phone and Fred can help us operate the safety door as we plunge to our deaths.

I arrived in Portland safely. And my friend didn’t even comment when I knelt down and kissed the solid ground. The return trip to Indiana was a little more harrowing. I’ll try to post on Thursday about how I almost wasn’t allowed to board the plane on account of a terrorist moose holding a lobster.