Rolling in Dough

My high school was on what was referred to in the brochure as an “urban campus.” That sounds hip and kind of gritty, but all it meant was that the school was in the city, and not on a very large lot. Because it would have been impossible to constantly track the locations of 250 kids from 8:30 to 3 every day, we were given the freedom to leave “campus” (read: the building) during our free periods and at lunch.

There were several places we used to go, with the closest being a small liquor store on the ground floor of a nearby office building. The school brochure always reinforced that our patronage was for the purpose of purchasing chips and sodas. There was a Roy Rogers and a Burger King where we could get (comparatively) real food, although in later years the Burger King was deemed too far away for a single free period or lunchtime visit. Technically it was completely off limits, but if you had two free periods in a row they couldn’t very well stop you from venturing down there. However, if you did go, it was wise to keep it on the down low and not come back to school wearing one of the paper crowns they gave out to little kids, but that big kids always asked for, advertising your misbehavior. The frequency with which this happened might surprise you. Or not.

There were a few other sandwich shops—a Vie de France, a sub place—and then there was a Giant Food store. The Giant had what was then an exciting new feature: a salad bar. In a little round foil pan with a plastic lid you could, if you were me, drown a pile of unsuspecting iceberg lettuce in Ranch dressing, and pelt it with fake smoke flavored “bacon” bits and croutons that tasted of herbs, salt, and dust. Then you could wander over to the bakery and buy a cupcake festively decorated for the next major holiday with lavish amounts of shortening-based frosting.

There were a few kids who engaged in a more repulsive dietary ritual. They would buy an economy size tube of chocolate chip cookie dough, and eat it all day long. I confess I did this at least once that I can recall.

On the way to school, you’d stop at Giant and buy the roll. Then you’d risk enraging your orthodontist by using your teeth to rip off the little metal crimp that closed the plastic tube. The dough was cold, so you’d start out breaking it off in chunks, eating it on your walk the rest of the way to school.

Once at school, you were forbidden to take it into the classroom, so you’d leave it in your locker, where it would slowly soften to a goopy paste. Any time you visited your locker between classes, you’d squeeze out a mouthful. At lunch you’d polish off a bit more, although rarely did anyone finish a whole tube.

This is because eating nothing but cookie dough for five or six hours straight is one of the most repulsive things you can do as a human being. By about third period (around 10 a.m.), you felt faintly ill. Just before lunch period you were sort of regretting your decision to spend your entire lunch stipend on cookie dough. By the time lunch was over, you would swear this was the last time you’d consume cookie dough for the rest of your life, even though that meant you were ostensibly eschewing cookie dough for the next 70 years, give or take.

Kids generally only did this about once a year, because gross. Somehow we’d forget from one year to the next how revolting the whole experience was, and we’d do it again, only to recall that it was completely vile. We were kind of stupid that way.

Unfortunately, it’s not like the lunches I consumed on other days were so much more balanced and nutritious. I think there was a period of about four years when my lunch budget was a dollar a day. A dollar would buy you a 16 ounce soda, a bag of potato chips (or Nacho Cheese Flavor Doritos, which were a hot newcomer to the snack chip world), and a candy bar. Later I could afford to eat more lavishly when I started supplementing my allowance with babysitting money. I’m kind of surprised that prior to that time I didn’t develop some vitamin deficiency-related disease normally associated with seventeenth century sailors on long voyages, or third world inhabitants.

I will say that knowing what I ate when I was away from my parents during high school makes me a little scared for the period of their lives when my kids have control over their culinary selections when they’re away from home. I think you can understand why.

Have you ever overindulged is something and regretted it? Were your eating habits in your youth when you were away from your parents sketchy at best? Have you ever asked for a Burger King crown, even though you were at least a decade too old to wear one without the possibility of ridicule?

Rats. No Really. Rattus norvegicus.

Rats are assholes. You probably already knew that, but I’m restating it, just in case anyone out there was thinking, “On the other hand, maybe rats aren’t so bad…” No, rats are assholes, period. I say this because there is a community of them that apparently thinks my car is a mobile toilet, parked in the driveway for their convenience.

As a point of clarification, we live in a semi-rural area, with lots of natural habitat for rats and other wildlife. We have deer and pheasant, as well as coyotes, that also live near us. So the fact that we have rats living around our house is not really cause for alarm. Well, other than that the assholes are getting in my car, of course.

This is not the first time we’ve had a problem with them. Two years ago we went on a fairly lengthy car trip over New Year’s (and let me just go on record as saying that never again will we drive seven fucking hours over mountain passes, through throngs of holiday weekend skiers, to stay two nights—two nights—at a resort, no matter how fancy or nice or amazing it is. Fuck that shit). While we were out of town (of course) the car started acting up. If we dropped under 40 m.p.h. while we were driving there was something that would kick in and not allow us to accelerate back up again. We’d have to turn the car off to reset this thing. Guess how fast you can go when you’re in holiday traffic on snowy mountain passes? Not over 40 m.p.h., that’s how fast. So it was something of a nightmare getting back.

We managed to limp home, and the next day my husband took the car to the dealership to be repaired. The guy told him that rats had nested in the car engine, and chewed through some wires, which caused the problem. I’m sorry, that was rats? I didn’t know whether to laugh or throw up. He said he was doing four and five of this kind of repair a week, because in our particular minivan model there was a very easy way for the rats to get into the engine, and apparently a rat or rats who are bigger assholes than most rats had spread the word. So four hundred dollars later, we had a rat-free car.

 That's the little fucker. He cost me four hundred bucks. He's dead now.

The guy at the dealership recommended some moth balls in the engine compartment, because he said rats don’t like the smell of camphor. I didn’t bother pointing out to him that neither do humans. So my husband went out and bought some, and stuck them in the car. The first time I got in to drive it after that, I had forgotten about the moth balls. I sniffed.

Me: “What’s that weird smell?”

Kid: “I don’t know, but it smells like a porta-potty.”

Then I remembered the moth balls.

Me: “Oh, right—Daddy put moth balls into the car to keep away the rats. Well, that’s great, but now I feel like I’m driving the world’s biggest Randy Kan.”

Plus, anyone else see the foreshadowing in that child’s remark? It’s like the rats heard him and went, “Hmmm...you may have something there…” Assholes.

Fast forward to earlier this week, while my husband is doing something productive and undoubtedly tool-related in the garage, I am standing in the driveway with a glass of wine (like you expected me to be doing anything else). As I’m standing there, I see a rat run over to one of our cars, and shimmy his nasty little ass up into the engine. Mother. Fucker. I shriek for my husband, who sends me to his office to get a pellet gun revolver we have, while he grabs the air compressor out of the garage. I open the hood, and he goes back eight or so feet with the pellet revolver and squats down in the position assumed by cops just before they yell, “Cover me!” to their partner and rush out into the crossfire to kill the bad guy. (To answer the question this presents, no, there is no way in hell Axel Foley was going to hit the rat on its way across the yard. I’m pretty sure he intended the revolver and the stance as intimidation devices, trying to scare the rat into giving serious thought to just who he was messing with. Like the rat was going to care.) On his command, I spray the air into the engine, scaring the little bastard out. He (the rat, not my husband) runs across the driveway, and ducks down into hole in our retaining wall, which is clearly his nasty little burrow. My husband watches where he goes, then proceeds to fire half a dozen pellets into the burrow, unquestionably hitting nothing. I think he just wanted an excuse to fire the pellet revolver.

So here’s what I don’t get—he’s clearly got a place to live. What’s he doing in my car, other than pooping? It’s summer, so he’s not seeking warmth (which was the explanation offered by the dealership in January two years ago). There’s no food in the area—two years ago there were some leftover pumpkins from our Pumpkin Fling that they were eating, before climbing up into our cozy warm car engine. So I can only conclude that this shithead of a rat is using our car as a toilet. I wouldn’t be surprised to find a little stash of male rat’s magazines in there if we were to take the whole thing apart. Dirty little creep.

I hope he’s made out his will, because I have purchased rat poison. My neighbors had (and may still have) rats in their crawl space, and set all kinds of traps—snap traps and sticky traps. None of them worked. I don’t know what their rationale is for not wanting to use poison. Their kid is old enough not to eat it (he’s 10, and doesn’t go into the crawl space anyway), and they don’t have any pets who might get into it. The hell with it, I say—fry, you little bastards, fry.

Lost

My son came to me this morning with a tooth he’d lost. I flinched with revulsion and said, “Gross.”

Now, before you label me a bad mom (not that you’d necessarily be wrong), this was the 11 year old, and the tooth was one of his molars. Parents of younger children, know this now: tooth loss gets progressively less cute as they get older. I remember well those first few pearly little drops under my son’s pillow. The excitement with which he rushed to me to show me the dollar my husband had left in its place the night before. His anticipation of spending said dollar on yet another pack of fucking Pokemon cards.

I remember when I started losing teeth. And just as my children do, I recall clinging to them until they were just dangling by a single root and my parents were begging me to either pull the tooth out, or let them do the old tie-a-string-around-a-doorknob-and-tie-the-other-end-to-the-tooth-and-shut-the-door gimmick. As an adult, I honestly think that’s one of the grossest parts of tooth loss—the refusal to just have it over with and pop it out. The loose tooth finally gets so loose that it changes position regularly, and can end up at a 90 degree angle to the rest of the teeth, sticking straight out like something out one of those scare tactic pictures at the orthodontist’s office showing people with various dental deformities who did not heed the advice given them and failed to invest thousands of dollars in corrective devices. And it looks nasty.

Only one of my kids was ever brave enough to just have it over with. One of the twins had a really lose tooth that was turning my stomach on a regular basis, and finally one day my husband and I said, “Just pull it out—it’ll come right out.” So he said, “OK” and did it. He got two bucks for that one, and a note from the Tooth Fairy saying that anyone who was brave enough to pull out their own loose tooth (and save their mom a lot of gross out, although she didn’t mention that explicitly) got extra money for it.

We’ve only had a couple of tooth related crises. I’d have expected more with four kids all of whom have big mouths. The first one came when my oldest went over his bicycle handle bars after hitting a rock. He face planted onto a gravely patch and scraped his gums. I took him right to the dentist, who did xrays and assured us there was no damage to the permanent teeth (he still had his baby teeth). Unfortunately what we should have been concerned with was the swelling and bruising around his left thumb which, four days later, turned out to be a buckle fracture that required a cast for 3 weeks. You know I made a point of noting that one on my Mother of the Year award application.

The second incident concerned one of the twins, who was bouncing on the trampoline with his older brother. The twin’s mouth came in contact with the older brother’s head, and it appeared that it knocked one of the teeth loose. Because I am such a wonderful mother (see: broken thumb, four days) I had no recollection of who had lost which teeth (I mean, shit, they do have a ton of them between the four of them), and was convinced that this was an adult tooth. I tried to get him into the dentist, but couldn’t get an appointment until the next afternoon. With strict instructions not to wiggle it, and to eat only very soft foods, I sent him off to school. The next afternoon I was in a panic because the tooth was obviously looser than it had been. When I got him to the dentist, the hygienist looked at it and said, “I’m pretty sure that’s a baby tooth.” “Really?” I asked. “Pretty sure. Dr. Wilson can confirm it, but I’m pretty sure.” Um, oh. Ha ha.

It was.

Well, thank goodness, but I still felt pretty dumb.

The last one (to date) involved my daughter and my oldest son. They were horsing around, and to this day I have no idea what happened, but somehow he managed to knock out one of her front teeth, which was not already loose. Now, one good thing about loose teeth—they really don’t bleed much. Although the blood does taste bad (or did to me), it’s not a very lengthy experience. Rinse your mouth once or twice and you’re fine. Let me assure you that a tooth that gets knocked out, which is not supposed to come out shortly anyway, bleeds like a stuck fucking pig. It seems like it's waves of blood and while it does stop fairly quickly, while it’s happening you’re convinced that the person is going to need a transfusion if it keeps up. My daughter was fine, of course, but she did sort of look like a hockey player for a couple of months.

And I have to confess that almost everything about this process makes me faintly ill, but still I save all their teeth (all that I can—we’ve had a few that got swallowed when they came out. Ew). Why? Every parent I know has a little box of kids’ baby teeth somewhere. Or, in my case, multiple little boxes since I can never seem to find the box I put the previous lost tooth in. And the thing is, even if I had a gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you which teeth belonged to which kid (although I suppose I could make it up, because it's not like the guy with the gun to my head would know the difference). What am I going to do with them? Frame them? Mount them and wear them as earrings? Use them for DNA identification? And yet they come out, and I stick them in a box somewhere.

Although I must say, now that the oldest has started losing really big teeth, I think my days of saving his are over, because molars are seriously icky when they come out. They're so disgusting that it's tempting to skip putting money under their pillows and just give them five bucks to not show it to you in the first place. It's too bad: the big ones would probably make pretty impressive earrings.