Parenting Network: Shows for Modern Moms and Dads

Tune into Parenting Network for a great new line up this season! Parenting Network offers a range of shows specifically for parents, covering timely topics such as whining, temper tantrums, and teenage angst. There’s something for everyone on the Parenting Network! The best thing is that we understand how real life moms and dads live—our format offers ninety seconds of programming followed by a four minute commercial break to give you the opportunity to referee fights, clean up cat puke, and change the laundry. Grab a bowl of goldfish crackers and a juice box and join us for the fun this Fall! Here's a sneak peek at some of what's coming your way!

Teen Clean

Parents pay the show’s team to completely clean out, repaint, and update the décor of their teen’s room while the teen is away for a weekend. On Sunday afternoon the parent reveals the refurbished space to their child, resulting in the teen having a complete breakdown over the invasion of their privacy, and the disposal of their precious “stuff,” crying that their parents just don’t “get” them.

Tween Jeopardy

Using the same format as the iconic original, Tween Jeopardy’s topics target the interests of modern tweens and teens (Minecraft, the Kardashians, proper eyebrow grooming). The twist? When contestants present their answer-in-the-form-of-a-question, the other participants and the host tell them they’re wrong, and argue with them. The show will be moderated by a different guest presenter each week, including pop idols Zayn Malik, Harry Styles, and Zendaya.

What’s For Dinner?

Three moms are challenged to make dinner with what they can find in the show’s pantry (consisting primarily of Cheetos, canned tomatoes, snack size boxes of raisins, and mayonnaise), in between helping three children to complete math and spelling homework, and finish a science fair project assigned three weeks ago, completely ignored at the time, and now due the next day. The winner is the parent not actively having a nervous breakdown at the end of the show.

School Countdown

Kids have twenty minutes to get ready for school—get dressed, brush their teeth, collect their backpacks, and get to the school bus. Every episode offers a special challenge such as

•          I can’t find my homework. No, I swear I left it right here.
•          I need a green pot holder, four plastic soda bottles, and a traffic cone for a project today or I get a zero.
•          Have you seen my shoes?

Viewers will be on the edge of their seats to see if the kids make it to the bus on time!

Are You My Family?

Join in the hilarity as four families swap kids around, sending them to live with other parents! The children discover that all parents are mean, make their kids do homework, and refuse to let them have unlimited screen time. Parents learn that all kids are whiny assholes sometimes, which of course they already knew.

Easy Living Summer

Follow the summer vacations of three families. Watch the parents’ resolve slowly deteriorate until the kids are eating popcorn and American cheese slices for breakfast, watching television and playing computer games all day long, and staying up until midnight every night. Share their pain as the kids morph into unresponsive zombies, hell bent on unlearning every particle of information from the previous school year. Each show ends with the parents confessing the complete abandonment of their will to live. You’ll cry and plead for the sweet release of death along with them!

How to Humiliate Your Tween or Teen

Parents have been unintentionally humiliating their kids since the first time Cain said to Eve, “You’re not really going to wear that outside are you?” Sometimes, however, even the best parent feels an urge to take the opportunity to inflict a little of the searing shame they felt at their own parents’ behavior. I offer here some insight into the best way to do that.

As sensitive as kids are to what they label “weirdness,” just by being yourself you’re likely to succeed. But with very little extra effort, you can really knock it out of the park. This extra effort takes the form of perceived nonconformity. If your kid thinks you’re not like the other parents, it’s sufficient to cause him or her to want to dry up and blow away with embarrassment.

Here are a few steps that I promise will reap results:

Step 1: Acquire a tween or teen
This isn’t hard to do. The simplest (and by “simplest” I really mean “most common”) way is to have a baby and wait ten years.

Step 2: Expose yourself to their music and deem a couple of their songs “kinda catchy"
If it were up to your tween, you wouldn’t listen to any music. You would be someone who reached adulthood, and ceased to consume any form of melodic sound. Why? Because then you would have no opinion on what they’re listening to, nor would you have a bunch of weird old people stuff that you liked to listen to.

The music our kids listen to isn't that far removed from what we ourselves listened to (although I will say it sort of disgruntles me when a popular song starts off with the opening riff from "Tainted Love" but turns into a rap song), so it's not hard to find at least a couple of songs you like among theirs. Then, in spite of the fact that clearly every other parent likes Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off," your kid will be mortified that you know the words and can sing along.

A car seat butt dance to any song is tween humiliation gold.

Step 3: Get dressed
There will come a time when nothing you put on your body will satisfy your teen. Everything you don will be deemed “weird.” Asking, “And just what do you want me to wear?” after you have changed three times to try to find something satisfactory to wear to an event with them will illicit only the very frustrating response, "Just, like, what all the other moms wear!” Pointing out that your wardrobe is almost identical to every other mother of every other eighth grader will be futile. You will need to stop trying to pacify, and use this as an opportunity to disgrace your child.

Obviously you don’t want to make a spectacle of yourself either, but picking a single thing—unusual earrings, a slightly wacky scarf, unconventional shoes—and wearing that with a simple pair of jeans and t-shirt will suffice. Your teen will be convinced that everyone in a two mile radius has noticed this aberration, and is tittering behind their hands about it with everyone else within the two mile radius. You win.

Step 4: Talk to them
It’s bad enough that you exist, but then you want to, like, communicate with them. And sometimes you try to use their vocabulary. Translate it into their native tongue, as it were. Remember how ghastly it was the first time your own mother declared herself “grossed out to the max”? 

So it is with your own teen or tween if you tell him or her you want to take a selfie to post on Facebook, end a sentence with “BOOM!” or use a “verbal hashtag” (ex. “I was singing along to ‘Shake It Off’ and my friend Jennifer said, ‘I totes love that song!’ and I was like ‘hashtag Swiftyrules’!”) they will be appalled and disgraced at your unseemly behavior. Kids are convinced that their language is unique and cool long after it’s become mainstream. The reason kids are constantly coming up with new slang terms is to try to keep grownups from using their vocabulary.

In closing I want to assure you that while it’s nice to make the effort to humiliate your child, you don’t really have to try that hard. As I said, parents have been unintentionally mortifying their children since the dawn of time, simply by having the audacity to exist. Sometimes your presence will be sufficiently awful for them that you may even find yourself feeling sorry for them. Those feelings are likely to evaporate as soon as they say, “Do you have to play those dorky ‘Purple Rain’ songs all the time?” so it’s always good to have a few retaliatory strategies in mind.

A Parent's Dilemma

What do you do when you really can’t stand one of your kids’ friends? My kids have this friend that all four of them adore. I’m so sick of hearing his name, I can’t even tell you. We were pretty free of him this summer, because he wasn’t at their camps, but now that school is about ready to begin again, they’re starting to invoke his name. Repeatedly. It’s like they say his name over and over, just to remind themselves that he exists. All during the school year they talk about him incessantly. Since one of the four people who reads my blog might be his mother (she isn’t), I’ll just use an initial to identify him.

All day while we were doing back to school shopping and organizing, all I heard were things like:

“I bet Z will be surprised I was able to get all my school stuff into my backpack!” Why does my son think the kid gives a shit that he was able to get two containers of Clorox wipes, a box of tissues, a binder, and three packs of pencils into a backpack? I’m his mother, and I’m not even that interested in the fact that he was able to do that.

“Mommy, is Z in my class?” I have no fucking idea, but I sincerely hope not. They’re hepped up because I was able to find out a few people who were in their classes through Facebook friends, but I am most decidedly not Facebook friends with this kid’s parents. (More on that in a minute.)

“I bet Z will get a blue binder like this one, so I’m going to get this one!” Well, it frankly doesn’t matter what Z does—you should do what you want. Please yourself, not your friend. He doesn’t have to use the binder all year, you do.

The kind of sad thing is it’s not really the kid I dislike. He’s not really a bad kid. I just get tired of hearing his name fourteen thousand times a day. It’s actually his parents that are the real problem. Z, age 9, is their oldest, and they’re on the young side--I’d be surprised if they were 35 yet--and they’re young for being young, if you know what I mean (and if you don’t, what I’m saying is they’re kind of fucking immature). I’m not sure what the dad’s deal is but at some point it was communicated to me, by my kids, that the dad thought my oldest was “a bad influence” on his kid, and that Z “shouldn’t listen” to what my kid said. I believe they were talking about something of tremendous global significance and far reaching consequence, like Pokemon.

Well right there I think this guy’s an asshole, right? Does he remember the kind of smack he talked when he was 10 or 11? Kids that age--especially boys--are always instructing each other on matters of importance (to them) and slinging shit because they really don’t know what the fuck they’re talking about. The first rule of tween is, “If you’re not sure, make some shit up that sounds plausible and say it with conviction.” It’s where we get urban legends like the couple out parking and the guy with the claw hand, and the bug infested beehive hairdo. If it weren’t for pre-adolescent kids (and gullible morons, of course), Snopes.com would be out of business.

The other unforgivable sin they’ve committed is that they haven’t RSVP’d to my kid’s birthday parties.

I’ll admit, I’m a real asshole about RSVPs. Even back when they were paper invitations, and we had to pick up the phone and call to respond, I found it unforgiveable when people didn’t. They’re busy, I’m busy, but I took the time out of my schedule to mail them an invitation, now they can take 90 seconds and call me back to tell me if they’re coming. The fastest way to get on my shit list is to not let me know if you’re coming to my functions. You didn’t bring a hostess present? No problem. I don’t get a thank you note after? I could care less. If you told me you enjoyed it as you were leaving, and said thank you, we’re good. But if you couldn’t bother yourself to acknowledge that I extended an invitation, and let me know if you were coming or not, then honestly? Fuck you (not you-reading-this, but you know, the collective non-RSVPers).

And today it’s even less forgivable. Evite means that you open it, you read it, you decide if you can come, and you click a fucking button yes or no. If people can’t even be bothered to do that (and some, it would seem, cannot), then it’s not just fuck you, it’s fuck you with mustard and every time I see you know that I am judging you in the judgiest way.

 

See those buttons? You click them. Not fucking hard.

Oh calm down, I hear people saying. Aren’t you getting a tad worked up about something that’s really a little thing that you should just let go? You know, don’t sweat the small stuff, right?

Well, on the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, no. I have to buy food and provide beverages. If I don’t know how many people to expect, I have to overbuy on the off chance that the rude non-RSVPers decide to show, and then I may end up throwing out food. Really not something I can afford to do, you know?

But then there’s the specific situation with this kid. My twin boys are 9, and as different as they can possibly be in every way. One of them is outgoing, the class clown, everyone’s best friend. He has a million friends, and everyone who meets him loves him. The other one is shyer, more reserved, has fewer friends, and feels things much more deeply. This is the kid I found at age seven crying in bed with a picture of one of our cats two months after it had been put to sleep. A cat, I should point out, who had lived entirely in our basement for four years previously, and was ten years old when this child was born. In short, a cat with whom he’d had very little interaction over the years, and yet, there he was, sobbing his eyes out because he missed the cat. Sweet Jesus.

For the past two years this kid has invited Z to his birthday parties. He generally has a guest list of about four kids. The first year it was a sleepover, and I sent out the Evite comfortably in advance. No response. Finally I saw the parents at a community event and flat out asked if he’d be attending. Naturally they had no plausible way out of it, so he came. It was fine—like I said, it’s not really the kid that bothers me.

This year it was a party at the rock climbing gym. Again, Evite sent, again no response. This year I put my foot down. If his mother was too self-involved and generally rude to even respond, then frankly she could go fuck herself. Where I come from it’s basic manners to let someone know you’re attending a party. But I’ve covered that rant.

No, what really raises my blood pressure is that this is the sensitive kid. This is the kid who will take it most to heart that his friend, or really, his friend’s fucking mother doesn’t care enough, and doesn’t have sufficient social graces to let us know that they won’t be attending, for whatever reason. Until the day of the party he kept asking me if Z’s mom had replied. Every time I said, “No, sweetheart, I’m sorry, she hasn’t,” I felt like I was killing a little piece of his heart. My son even mentioned it to Z several times in school, and I know Z mentioned it to her, and still this bitch couldn’t get off her rude, lazy ass and say yes or no.

I flat out told my kids that this was the last time this child was invited to any function sponsored by our family. I explained that it wasn’t Z, but his rude fucking mother (I’m summarizing) that I objected to, and that I was done with her bad manners. I explained that if you’re blatantly rude often enough, people stop inviting you to things. Clearly Z and his family don’t care, but I want my children to understand that people will treat them the way they treat others. You’re invited to parties and completely ignore the invitations? Expect them to stop. I guess the next time I see an Evite that says “Z’s Birthday Party!” (Z did invite them to his birthday party earlier this year—I RSVP’d and even clarified how many of my four children she was expecting, because I have manners, bitch; I was hoping that modeling the behavior for her would be a hint. I should have known better), I will delete it without opening it. And you can bet your ass that’s what’s going to happen. Vindictive, and maybe a little juvenile? I won’t argue. But you don’t fuck with my kid. You make him sad, you hurt him, you fucking deal with me, and I’ll play on your childish level if that’s what it takes to get my message across to you.

Why Cheese Sticks Suck and Other Whining

I love my children, but like all kids with all mothers, they have a few habits that make me want to chew broken glass. With four of them, this is inevitable, but of course they each do their annoying thing on a random schedule, so that I’m being bombarded by irritating behavior from all sides, and then I lose my shit. I think I might even be OK if they did the annoying thing(s) on some sort of timetable, and those who weren’t scheduled to be annoying would hold off. You know, my oldest could take 9 to 11 in the morning, the twins would each take a shift from 11 to 1 and 1 to 3, and then my daughter could work clean up from 3 to 5. Clearly by the time 5 p.m. rolled around, I would be ready to retire to my room and pluck out my eyebrows, one hair at a time, with my fingernails.

There are some little habits or behaviors they all share, and some that are unique to specific children. The one thing they all do that sends me in to a snarling rage faster than anything else is leave fucking cheese stick wrappers everywhere. Partly it’s the fact that they eat roughly 27,319 cheese sticks per child, per week, and that might be a conservative estimate. Of course, every stick comes in its own little plastic sleeve. They grab the number they think they will need before the next commercial break (approximately 2,642) and take them to the living room. Here they peel the plastic off of each stick, one by one, and carefully deposit them on the end table next to the couch. At the next commercial, they hop up to fortify themselves (with more mothereffing cheese sticks), and walk out to the kitchen leaving the two thousand plus goddamned wrappers on the table. Holy. Fucking. Shit.

I have tried everything to discourage this behavior. I’ve scolded, I’ve threatened, I’ve even praised when on the rare occasions they do manage to remember to take a lone wrapper out and chuck it in the general direction of the garbage can. Hell, I’ve praised them for even looking at the wrappers before getting up and getting more cheese sticks (“Thank you for acknowledging the pile of cheese stick wrappers on the end table. Next time maybe we can take it a little further, and actually touch them before getting up to get more. Good job!”). I think the only “cure” for this is going to be when they move out. Is 12 too young for a kid to have his own apartment? It is, isn’t it. Fuck.

The oldest, being a tween, has some special annoyances all his own. The one that has a fingernails-on-the-blackboard quality for me is, “C’mon please?” He asks for something, usually more of something he’s already had—more candy, more soda, more computer time—and I say, “No, you had your half hour computer turn today, you don’t need another one.” The immediate response is “C’mon please?” I’ve taken to saying “Don’t ‘c’mon please’ me. If you say that, there is no chance I will say yes to this request.” And since he’s just said it, guess what? Sometimes he stomps off to sulk, sometimes he gets mad and has a tantrum. Most of the time he just resigns himself and goes and finds something else to do. But I still hate “C’mon please?”

One of the twins is a total smartass (no clue how this could have happened). When he’s annoying, he knows it. It is one hundred percent intentional. The oldest with his “C’mon please” isn’t trying to annoy, he’s trying to plead, and just happened to pick a phrase, tone, and inflection that annoys. The smartass is just being a smartass, plain and simple. One of his favorite techniques is to ask, “What’s a [whatever]?” I’ll say something like, “First we’ll go to the grocery store.” He responds, “What’s a grocery store?” I say, “You’ll find out.” He says, “What’s a you’ll find out?” You see where this is going. And being nine, he doesn’t know when to stop because he’s about to get his ass kicked. About the only way to discourage him is to stop talking to him.

And then there are the “what ifs.” I tell my children, if X happens, Y will be the consequence. And all of them (but especially the smartass) have seven thousand what-ifs they need clarified. Most of them are either ludicrous or impossible, or both ("But what if we fill the house with chocolate pudding?" "But what if a cow gets elected president?" etc). On my death certificate, where it says, "Cause of Death," the doctor will write, "What If."

Another one all four of them share is the inability to tolerate anyone (other than themselves, of course) standing directly in front of the TV set. Why they can’t sit the fuck down is beyond me. We have thousands of dollars’ worth of furniture in the living room—chairs, sofas, ottomans—and they park their asses smack in front of the goddamned set. Of course the other three shriek out “MOOOOOOOVVVVVVVEEEEUUUUHHHH” like a chorus of outraged beef cattle. What I find so amusing is that they all do it, in spite of how livid they know they get when their siblings do it. Children are just shit at self-awareness.

Related to “MOOOOOOOVVVVVVVEEEEUUUUHHHH” is “STOOOOOOOPPPPPPUUUUUUHHHH.” It’s generally expressed with the same degree of outrage, and has the same extra “UH” syllable on the end. This one is employed in a myriad of situations, everything from one of them checking the “Guide” on the satellite with the remote while everyone else is watching the show, to any touching, looking, or breathing that’s found to be objectionable (which is to say, just about all of it).

Although I’m not sure if it qualifies as an annoying habit as much as reflection of my failure as a parent, their complete inability to go to bed quietly is beyond maddening. When you read parenting magazines, they urge you to make bedtime a quiet time. Pajamas, stuffed animals, sleepy books about bears and bunnies, a reliable routine that just oozes warm fuzzy cuddles. Bedtime at my house? Picture Grand Central Station at 5:30 p.m. on the Friday of a three day weekend with crowd control provided by a platoon of Marines on their first day at Parris Island. Only louder. And less organized.

My hope is that they’ll eventually grow out of these habits. I’m fairly confident they’ll be replaced by new annoying habits, possibly worse than these. They’ll have the advantage of being novel, I suppose, and because they’re new, they won’t be quite as annoying as the current ones, which I’ve been dealing with for several years now. And eventually the new habits will become old annoying habits. It’s a bit depressing when you consider it.

However, now that I really think about it, if my experience with parents and in laws is anything to go on, eventually tables will turn, and they’ll be driven to the brink of insanity by the fact that I tap the top of my Diet Coke can three times before I open it (what? That keeps it from exploding—am I the only one who does this? Yeah, I know it doesn’t work; it’s a habit), or that I refuse to make my lists in my “To Do” notebook in anything other than pencil (and that I have to find the “right” pencil—I like a soft, dark lead, and go back and forth between mechanical and “traditional” based on my mood). And those are just the ones I recognize. I’m sure I have more. I might even develop a few more tics, just in case I don’t have enough now.

Because I’ll be honest with you, now that I give it some thought, I am really looking forward to this.

Caution: Children At Play

I was an only child and I hated it. Actually I hated it. Even though I probably got more in the way of experiences (like getting to go on vacation in places like England and Ireland) and toys (although not some of the ones I wanted most), I still hated it. I was lonely a lot of the time. My dad developed Parkinson’s disease when he was fairly young (he was 32, I was 2), and my mom ended up having to work to support us. She worked long hours, he wasn’t always mobile or feeling well, so I ended up on my own a lot. I used to long for someone to play with. I knew kids with siblings, and I knew their relationships with them weren’t always Connect Four championships and let’s play pretend, but there were times when they played nicely together, and I envied them those times. As a result, I swore I’d never have an only child, and I have four that are all fairly close together (the widest gap is four years, between the oldest and the youngest). Now I expect them to play together, and sometimes they even do. And when they do, I’ve noticed that they go through an interesting series of phases.

 

Phase 1: "There’s No One To Play With!"

This one always gets me. Dude. I endured three pregnancies just so I would never have to hear anyone say that. Morning sickness, the world’s itchiest fucking stretch marks, and feet that got just big enough that my kick ass cowboy boots I’d had since college didn’t fit anymore. All so you would never know the feeling of being lonely, and wanting the companionship of someone your own age on a rainy day when there seemed to be nothing to do. There are three other children in this household. Go find one of them and engage him or her in play. Because guess what? I am not going to play with you. Not Clue, not War, not Monopoly. Go find a sibling and ask them to play Clue or War or Monopoly with you. There’s no one to play with, my ass.  And no, you may not watch TV.

Phase 2: "UGGGGGHHHH I Don’t Want To Play With My Brother"

Yeah, see above. This gets a pretty high rating on my Tough Shit-O-Meter. Go find him and STFU. Of course, this is the phase that includes the most declarations that there’s nothing to do, and that they are so booooooooorrrrrred. They are never amused to hear my stories about being an only child and not even having anyone to not want to play with. It’s usually these stories that drive them away and push them into the next phase.  

Phase 3: The Picking Stage

Having been thrown together in an unwelcome partnership, one child decides that, fine, I will amuse myself with this sibling. He generally begins by picking at, pestering, or otherwise bugging the child he’s been sent to play with. (I’m using the male pronoun across the board here, because with three boys and a girl, in every combination of my children, at least one of them has to be a boy.)  It might be toy taking, teasing, or poking/prodding type behavior, but whatever it is, it causes the other child to become highly agitated. It’s not quite what I had in mind, but it occupies one of them. The other one spends the whole time yelling “STOOOOOOPPPPPPPUUUUUHHHHH!” This phase lasts for anywhere from ten minutes to forever.

Phase 4: The Playing Stage

At some point, they make a peace of sorts, and work out an activity that’s amenable to both parties. Lots of times the poking/prodding behavior becomes more mutual, and they end up in wrestling matches, usually in my living room. This does not thrill me for many reasons—the fireplace/hearth in the living room being a perfect surface for head smashing, the lamps being perfect for knocking over and breaking, the fact that they’re so fucking loud about it—and I end up banishing them to the basement or outside. Still, playing is playing and I am grateful for the consensual interaction. The only downside is that this phase has an uncertain duration. They may play together nicely for an hour or more. Or it may last only six minutes. In either case, it’s inevitably followed by…

Phase 5: The Attempted Murder Stage

Sooner or later, someone takes a liberty in the game. Someone oversteps their bounds, usually physically. These are boys (and one girl with three older brothers) after all—it’s almost always a push or a shove or a trip or some other form of perceived physical abuse. The victim always swears it was, “on purpose!” and, “for no reason whatsoever!” the abuser always claims repeatedly that it was, “on accident!” Either way, the victim inevitably accuses his sibling of trying to kill him. Oh yes, that’s right—he was hoping that he’d step on your foot, injure a toenail that would become infected, and cause your death by sepsis. Give me a fucking break. I’d say 90% of the time, the initial injury inflicted is in fact an accident. It’s a seven- or nine- or eleven-year-old who gets too enthusiastic in his play and accidently hurts the other person. But that doesn’t stop them from moving to the next phase.

Phase 6: The Revenge + Tattling Phase

Now that one person feels they’ve been abused, the gloves are off. They do what they can to harm one another, each feeling that they’re entitled to retribution for the wrongs done them by the other. They never try to hurt each other seriously (I would assume if they really wanted to cause serious harm that they’d just beat each other with one of our many baseball bats). It’s always small, stupid things. But with each offense comes a tattle. “He hit me!” “He threw the airplane right at my face!” “She pushed me off the chair!” Oh for fuck’s sake. My reaction to this is usually to dismiss them initially, then when they start getting to a point when they’re mad enough that they might genuinely hurt one another, I’m forced to separate them. And so, we transition to another phase.

Phase 7: The Time Out Stage

Usually they get sent to their room in an effort to put an end to Phase 6. It’s not really intended as a time out per se, because a time out in my mind implies a disciplinary measure that forces them to stop everything, sit quietly, and reflect on their choices. Sending them to their room—where, yes, they have toys and books and other amusements—is intended only to redirect them, and physically distance them from one another. Sometimes the tactic will be dividing the four of them among the two parents, separating the most recently acrimonious pair. My husband will take two of them to Home Depot, for instance, and I’ll take two of them to the library. Either way, they find a new focus, and are removed from the presence of the child with whom they were most recently doing battle, even if it’s for only a short time. Eventually the time out or errand comes to an end, and they are once again drifting through the kitchen, pestering me while I’m trying to do important things (like write a goddamned blog post, for the love of biscuits) and they start all over again.

“There’s no one to play with!”

Fuck. Me.

Note: I do play with them sometimes, of course. It’s not that I don’t want to interact with my children. But roughly half the times when they ask me to play, I genuinely can’t because some chore or task that is integral to keeping our household functioning requires my attention.

If the Shirt Fits...

I know teachers aren’t fazed by much that kids come up with. If they’ve been teachers for any length of time, they’ve probably seen just about everything there is to see. Be that as it may, I still feel a twinge when I realize I’ve sent my daughter off to school without brushing her hair. For the third day in a row. To counter this, I’m thinking of coming up with a new line of t-shirts, or possibly stickers that could be stuck on kids without their knowledge, with explanations that will cover for me on days when I’m sure the teacher is compiling notes to pass along to CPS, and it looks like today’s transgressions might seal the deal.

The first one in my line is for my daughter and others like her. It will say “I refuse to let my parents brush my hair.” This will go a long way toward explaining the snarls and mats. Beyond hating to have her hair brushed, my daughter loves hats and hoods. She won a polyester hat (at the fucking carnival) that looks like the face of a cow, with two long flaps that hang down over her ears. She wears this hat day and night. She sleeps in it, she wears it to school. The only reason she takes it off is for baths, and then under protest, so you can bet taking it off so I can brush her hair isn’t a priority. Plus wearing a hat or hood causes hair to snarl up and get ratty, and since she won’t let me brush it, that just makes things worse.

The next one will also be for my daughter, but also for slightly younger kids. We’ve all seen kids in outfits that were clearly of their own design and consist of Ninjago pajamas, a tutu and three winter scarves (and maybe a hat that looks like the face of a cow) or whatever. Or little girls who insist on wearing their Snow White dresses everywhere, including the pool. But not all adults realize that these outfits stem from equal parts stubbornness (on the part of the child), and exhaustion and a reluctant acceptance that defeat is the only option (on the part of the parent). While it might be a challenge to get them to put them on, for these kids I would offer a shirt that reads “My mother thinks this outfit is as strange as you do.” They’d have to be in fantastic patterns or insane colors so that kids would be inclined to include them in their sartorial repertoire. I suspect this would also be a big seller in a large sticker that could be stuck on their backs as they were walking out the door (“Hurry along, little Kyndle, we don’t want to be late” the parent would say, placing a sticker-covered hand gently between their shoulder blades).

Another one for younger kids that I wish I’d had when my children were small will be for those times when their outfit is bizarre or inappropriate, but not because of the ramrod will of a four year old determined to wear his or her “favorite shirt” for the 15^th day in a row. This is for those times when a child is dressed by his or her father, and that father happens to be one of “those” fathers. I don’t want to generalize—not all fathers have strange ideas about what constitutes an “outfit.” Some recognize that a child who is wearing a bathing suit and mittens is not a child who is wearing an ensemble fit for an audience with the Queen (or even a day at preschool), even if they do happen to be wearing matching socks. I’m fairly sure that 80% of the time my husband was in charge of dressing our children they were decently covered in something that didn’t look like he’d upended the dirty clothes hamper over their heads and called it a day. But for those days that missed the mark, I would have liked to be able to have them walk around with the disclaimer, “My daddy dressed me today” somewhere on their person.

Beyond their appearance, I worry about the things that might come out of my kids’ mouths. I am no saint when it comes to my language, I freely admit this. I have been known to describe myself as sounding like a drunk longshoreman with Tourette’s syndrome (note: I am not a longshoreman, and I have not been diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome). As you may have noticed, I use the word “fuck” the way the English language uses the letter “e” (which is to say, often, and with enthusiasm). But I don’t talk like that in front of my children. My children might occasionally hear, “What the hell is going on here?” or “Go brush your damn teeth right now!” But these are in extreme circumstances, like when my oldest son knocked out his little sister’s front tooth that wasn’t ready to come out and a Niagara Falls of blood was the result, or when I’ve sent them to brush their teeth five times and they’ve lied to me all five times. Then, yes, I use a mild swear word (mild: damn, hell, bastard; serious: shit, fuck, asshole).

But apparently they hear this sort of thing somewhere. I assume from kids who have older siblings. That’s where I picked up all my cuss words. Thank goodness for Ashely Templeton whose older sister taught her all the bad words, and she taught them to me. As we all know, that’s where that kind of thing often comes from, even when they’re very young. When my daughter was a toddler, there was another girl in her room at daycare who had a 19 year old brother. When nap time rolled around, and she didn’t feel like napping, she was known to sit on her mat and yell, “Fuckin’ bullshit! Fuckin’ bullshit!” in protest. I’m fairly confident her mother wasn’t the source that.

And sometimes it’s not even swear words, but potty stuff or goofy stuff. One of my twins has been calling his siblings “nose hair” in fits of frustration (“No, that’s MINE! Give it back, nose hair!”). My daughter went through a phase where she called everything “suckers.” (“Oh look I dropped those suckers. I better pick those suckers up.”)

However, as a parent, I never want the school staff to think they incorporate those words into their vocabularies because of exposure to them at home. So I would sell a shirt that said, “My mother doesn’t know where I pick these things up either.” An alternative for kids with older siblings would say, “I get my vocabulary from my older brother/sister.” That one’s a little sketchy, I suppose, because the teachers may simply assume that the older sibling is learning from the parents, and passing it on. Still, I’m hoping the teachers assume that the older kid picked this sort of thing up on the streets and taught it to the younger kids, since that's probably the reality.

So that’s my idea for a kids’ clothing line. I think it’s highly functional, and that parents would benefit from it. As I said, a few of them would need to be offered in sticker form as well as on shirts. They’d make great birthday presents (for the parents’ birthdays, of course), and I bet they’d be hot for back to school. Then I could go to parent/teacher conferences and not feel like I need to spend the first ten minutes explaining why my daughter’s hair looks like she was fathered by a reggae singer, and that her gutter mouth is not my fucking fault.

Get to Work

A couple of months ago we decided it was time our children had some regular chores. Up to that point, we’d forced them to help out sporadically, usually with the same result: they’d grudgingly do what we asked badly, and we’d have to do it after them. This time we decided to insist that they contribute to their own maintenance. Normally I’d muck out their rooms once a year, when my husband took them on a Boy Scout family camping trip over Memorial Day weekend. I’d drag everything out from under their beds, and everything they’d jammed in their closets in the last 364 days, and get rid of the garbage and the cheap ass fucking carnival stuffed animals. You know the ones—shit like a stuffed banana made out of crappy polyester that, had they seen it in the garbage, they would declare their favorite stuffed animal ever and oh my god how could I be so cruel as to throw it out?!?!? You know, the one they didn’t even miss when I actually did throw it out over Memorial Day weekend last year? Yeah, that one.

That used to take me all three days of the long weekend, and it was painful. So now they were instructed that they were going to have to muck out their own rooms weekly, and I would get to spend Memorial Day weekend drinking Mai Tais and having my nails done or, you know, cleaning the rest of the house. I made up a checklist and printed out copies. Each one has the same thing on it: remove the sheet from your bed, take it and all dirty clothes to the laundry room, put a new sheet on the bed, pick up all stuffed animals, pick up and vacuum one room (living room, dining room, mudroom/kitchen or hall), and a couple of lines for ad hoc write-in stuff. Each item has a check box so they can keep track of what they’ve done. Chore time is around 9 a.m. on either Saturday or Sunday (sometimes their sporting events interfere with the Saturday window).

The first two or three weeks went pretty well. It was a new thing, and they felt a sense of accomplishment when they were done. Then the novelty wore off, and that sense of accomplishment wasn’t sufficient to counter the drudgery of actually doing the chores. Congratulations, kids: you’re now prepared for life. These days they go to their rooms, ostensibly to do their chores, but they whine and fight and do everything but pick up their rooms. I think they may actually drag stuff out and make a bigger mess. So we have to ride their asses and make sure they’re making progress. I say “we,” but I think we all know who “we” is. Because interestingly, there always seem to be several “outdoor” tasks that become super ultra high priority and require my husband’s immediate attention as soon as the kids are sent off to do their weekly jobs. But, you know, I get it—those cardboard boxes aren’t going to break themselves down, y’all.

And of course, I hear how mean I am. This weekend my insistence that they pick up and vacuum a single room on the main level was labeled “child abuse,” and “forced slave labor.” I was declared to be the meanest, worst mom ever. (Two superlatives at once; you can imagine my pride.) I pointed out that I do every other fucking thing—the laundry, the cooking, the bathrooms. I suggested that if they were so unhappy about vacuuming the living room, they were more than welcome to clean the toilets. This was met with eye rolls, of course. It’s their most highly developed skill.

I’ve tried a reward system, but it kind of backfired. One week I was planning to run some errands (interesting errands, not just the grocery store, so they all wanted to go) and I said I would take two kids along. Whoever finished first would get to come with me. Problem number one is that of course we only have one vacuum cleaner, so whoever got the vacuum first was going to finish first. Problem number two was that my daughter stopped working entirely, crawled under a blanket on the floor of her bedroom, and started crying. When I finally pried out of her why she was crying, it turned out that she really, really wanted to come with me, just to spend some time with Mommy. This is a radical change from even a couple of months ago, when I would be leaving the house in the morning and would say, “Do you want a hug and a kiss?” and she’d think about it for a second and go, “Nah.” So the fact that she wanted to come with me was odd (although not unwelcome), and she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to finish in time to get her choice. Result: tears. So that kinda sucked (she got to go with me, even though she wasn’t the first one done).

These are tasks for which they do not get paid. I’ve had this debate with other parents, asking opinions on if they should get an allowance for maintenance work. I’m on the fence—I think about the “real world” that they’ll have to live in one day, and no one is going to give them a medal when they empty the fucking dishwasher and change their sheets. On the other hand, when you go to work you do get paid for your contribution to the overall success of the organization, and contributing to the success of the organization is what I’m asking them to do in this case. So for now they don’t get paid for making their beds and picking up their clothes, but they do for cleaning windows and dusting baseboards (I hate dusting baseboards, and they’re closer to the ground. They can do it, and I’ll give them a buck for it).

There is a downside to having them pull their own weight, and that is that I can’t get rid of the crap as easily. When I was doing it over Memorial Day weekends, I’d just dig everything out and make a big pile in the middle of the room. Then I’d pluck out the things that were just garbage, like all the stupid plastic slinkies from birthday party goody bags (have you read Kristin’s rant about goody bags? You should. Go ahead. I’ll wait), the aforementioned crap stuffed animals, random bits of unidentifiable toy (I don’t understand—I have some awareness of every toy that enters our house, one way or another, and yet I’m constantly finding little pieces of shit that I don’t think I’ve ever seen before; how is this possible? And what the hell are they?), and other precious gems that they would clutch to their bosom and shriek in outrage if they thought I was even suggesting that we get rid of it. I’ll just have to go into stealth mode to get rid of whatever replaces the stuffed banana.

Wallowing in Their Own Filth

Can someone explain to me the aversion children have for cleanliness? It seems that my children are not just oblivious to dirt, but actually actively dislike the concept of cleaning, be it themselves, spaces, or inanimate objects.

When I was a child, I don’t recall being particularly violently opposed to the habits of personal hygiene. I didn’t squawk about baths, and my parents didn’t have to threaten me with dire consequences to get me to brush my teeth. Or, you know, shit, maybe they did and I just don’t remember it. I do remember my father monitoring my tooth brushing a few times, but in my mind it was more of a tutorial than strong arming me into doing it.

My children, however, actively protest any behavior that relates to keeping them even moderately sanitary. If they had it their way, they would stink, be filthy, and have rotting cadaver breath. They would wear the same clothes for days on end, and in their bedrooms it would appear as though we had chosen a product called “sweat pants and cartoon character shirts” as a floor covering.

Two of them will willingly take a bath as long as I a) let them in the tub together, b) let them use my “big” (soaking) bathtub and c) provide them with 7-10 gallons of foaming soap each to spray on each other and themselves (my daughter spends the entire time in the tub insisting, "I'm ELSA" and making Olaf out of the foam. Oh Frozen, will you never release your grip?). The other two I practically have to physically drag into the shower and hold there until the water washes away the fumes and my eyes stop tearing. Of course these are the two who are the most fragrant if they don’t bathe for a day.

Part of the reason they get so ripe is because they have favorite clothes that they’re loathe to remove from their person. Like ever. The oldest has been known to sleep in his clothes (changing into pajamas is so exhausting, y’all). My daughter regularly changes her favorite shirt (by which I mean she reevaluates her options and picks a new one, not that she removes the old one and puts on a new one. God forbid) and will wear the new favorite for as many days as I will let her. The problem is knowing what shirt she has on. She wears a sweatshirt almost constantly, with a t-shirt under it. It’s the t-shirt she won’t change. Sometimes I just have to guess: “You’re wearing the same shirt you had on yesterday, aren’t you? Go change it.” Her slightly defiant look, and hundred and eighty degree turn to stomp back upstairs are generally the only indication that I was right.

Getting them to change their underwear is a special struggle. Sometimes I have to stand there and watch them remove the old ones and pull on the new ones. Based on their expressions and the huffing and sighing that goes on during the process, I can only assume that changing their underwear is only slightly less physically and emotionally traumatic than pulling off their eyelids and putting on new ones.

Tooth brushing is another despised activity in my household. I suppose when I was a kid I didn’t feel like I had hideous breath when I woke up. Little did I know I was probably dead wrong, or I was if my own children are any indication. They will go to the most phenomenal lengths to not brush their teeth. I’ll send them back two or three times to do it, and each time they’ll lie and say they have, and I’ll check their teeth and, hey kids, the same brown shit that was on your teeth five minutes ago is still on your teeth, you did not fucking brush your teeth. And then I have to send them back to brush them again and it would be so much simpler and less of a waste of time for ALL of us if they’d just fucking brush their teeth the first time I sent them do to it. And they’re just fucking around—it’s not that they don’t like the toothpaste or don’t know how to do it. For whatever reason, they just don’t want to use a bristled implement and a flavored paste or gel to scrub the foulness off of their various oral protrusions so they don’t have breath that smells like rotten meat rolled in poo.

And their fingernails. One of them regularly comes home from school looking as though the extracurricular activity for the day was harvesting potatoes. The kid has so much soil under his fingernails, that’s the only conclusion I can draw. And when I insist on scrubbing it out, you’d think I was torturing him the way he carries on. It’s ten times worse if I actually insist on trimming his nails at the same time. You remember that scene in “Gone With The Wind,” when Scarlett is standing in the doorway when the doctor has to amputate the guy’s leg and there’s no anesthesia? That guy could take lessons on expressing excruciating pain from my kid having his nails trimmed.

I’m wondering how long it will be before I can look at them and not know the exact contents of their most recent meal or snack. Anything chocolate or tomato-based is particularly inclined to give them away. I’m having a hard time convincing them that it’s ok to wipe your face with a paper napkin. They are not a priceless commodity, nor treasured heirlooms that need to be preserved. Just use the damned napkin.

As a reformed slob (and not always a successfully reformed one) I’m willing to give them a pass on their rooms, up to a point. They have to put all dirty clothes in the laundry room once a week, change their sheets, and pick up all the stuff on the floor, but I don't give them too much grief about the condition of their rooms generally. The only thing I did insist on was that when we got the dog I told them if they wanted the dog to be allowed upstairs, they would have to keep their rooms immaculate, because he would chew and/or eat anything that was on the floor. In a decision that proves they carry more than a fragment of my genetic material, they decided that was way too big a pain in the ass, and the dog just wouldn’t be allowed above the main level of the house. Which is fine with me because there’s no dog hair up there, and as it is on the main level, I sweep up enough hair every other day to make another dog. I can’t understand why this creature isn’t bald by now.

I suppose one day they’ll discover the opposite sex, and then I’ll be sorry I wanted them so clean. They’ll lock themselves in the bathroom and take half hour long showers and I’ll have to listen to the fights about who’s been in the bathroom for how long and that they need to get out. I understand from friends with older kids that the boys will end up smelling like the entire Axe display. But I will say I won’t miss the constant struggle to get them to brush their teeth and change their underwear. The fact that these episodes always seem to happen in the morning is most unfortunate, because they are one of the main reasons that I drink. I think if I started drinking at 7:30 a.m., the neighbors would talk. More than they do now, I mean.

Seasons Change

If you have children, you have a slightly different take on the passage of seasons than people without children. I don’t necessarily mean things like back to school shopping and having to buy three hundred glue sticks, or planning vacations around Spring Break and that sort of thing, although those sorts of things are undeniably part of parenting. What I mean is that the seasons as we parents know them are aligned with the seasons of non-parent adults, but that we think of them a bit differently. As with real seasons, although the calendar defines them as beginning and ending on certain days, their true length is determined by the climate in which you live.

First up is Summer. Summer is the same to a parent as it is to a non-parent, for the most part. Summer starts in about mid-June, and ends when everyone goes back to school in August or September (depending on your school district). For parents, there’s a bit more stress about what to do with the kids for a couple of months, but mostly there’s little difference. We all spend July and August wishing we could have two months off of work, and talking amongst ourselves about the fact that year-round school isn’t such a bad idea.

Once summer ends, we come to the season that a parent thinks of as “I left my coat at school.” If you don’t have a child, this is the season you know as “Fall.” This is when it’s cool enough in the mornings that one needs a coat or jacket, but by afternoon the sun has warmed things up to the point that it no outerwear is necessary. Thus children, who have little ability to apply the rules taught by even the most recent events of history, or to think and plan ahead (in this case, that it was chilly this morning, and that tomorrow morning it will quite likely be chilly again) leave the coat hanging on the hook in the classroom. Only the next morning, when—surprise!—there’s a nip in the air, and Mom asks after the jacket they had the day before do they think that it might have been a good idea to grab it. This will continue until necessity (which is to say, the outdoor temperature) dictates they put it on when they leave school to go home.

This season is followed closely by “Where-are-the-gloves-you-wore-yesterday-I-don’t-know-I-lost-them.” Non-parents call this season “Winter.” It begins when it actually gets cold enough that kids stop forgetting their coats (which, as I mentioned, happens when it’s cold enough at the end of the day that self-preservation forces them to remember to wear the coat home), and ends a really, really long time later. Depending on where you live, you could spend upwards of six or seven months having the same conversation every morning about the gloves or mittens from the previous day and where they might be. Parents invest significant percentages of their income in gloves and mittens. In fact, as a parent of four children, I estimate that my investment in gloves to date is roughly that of the GNP of Belgium (which is almost as much as I’ve spent on Pokemon cards). And my oldest is only eleven.

Finally, after months and months of the glove purchase-wear-lose-purchase-wear-lose cycle that is Winter, it starts to warm slightly. The sun is a bit higher overhead, things like crocuses and snowdrops may bloom. Even if you don’t notice these things, as a parent you will know the season is changing because of a phenomenon that I think of as Wearing Shorts Inappropriately. As soon as it’s even remotely warm (read: when a grown up could stand to be outside for more than sixty seconds—but less than ninety seconds—fully clothed, but without a coat on), children come traipsing downstairs wearing shorts instead of long pants. As a responsible parent, you say, “You can’t wear those—it’s only supposed to be forty today. Go put on long pants.” And then, if you have my children, they employ the guilt whine. This is when they say, “But I don’t have any long pants,” in a tone that is both complaining and accusatory. They don’t have any long pants because you, neglectful parent, have failed to purchase them any. They are Practically Unclothed. And as a result, they were forced to pull out these shorts that you’re now giving them a hard time about wearing. You…big meanie. So you go out and buy them two or three pairs of long pants instead of buying more mittens.

Once it gets a little warmer, there’s another brief period of “I left my coat at school” before everyone gets out for summer vacation and it’s warm and all you want to do is take two months off and not have to worry about coats, gloves, or improperly implemented shorts. In retrospect, maybe year round schooling isn’t such a good idea. At least I get two months when I don’t have to stress about the correctness of or deficiency in my children’s wardrobes.

Baby Fat

I just spent [redacted] hours watching the footage of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge leaving the hospital with their new baby. (Although since I guess I just said hours, plural, you know that it was more than one. So much for my ability to conceal information. This—along with about four thousand other reasons—is why I’m not a spy. Anyway.) So yes, I spent a long time watching it on a live feed, and listening to BBC anchorpeople desperately grasp at any straw they could think of to fill air time with chat until William and Kate finally finished packing up their toothbrushes and iPods, saying their thank yous and goodbyes to the hospital staff, and came out to show their new baby to the world.I

I will say right off that I love the British royal family. I don’t care that they’re outdated, I don’t care that they’re ridiculously wealthy and getting richer at a time when the government is choosing to slash budgets and eliminate services and blah blah blah. Sorry, don’t care. I feel for the people who are being impacted by those cuts, but I still love me some royals*. And I love Kate. I realize she has a team of people to help her look great, but at the end of the day, she’s responsible for those people, and they do the job she’s paying them to do. And I don’t think she’s lazy—I think they’re being very, very careful how they bring her into a job that has her living in a fishbowl, and in which she did not grow up, as William did. The family learned a hard lesson from Diana, and they’re taking it to heart with the next generation. They want William and Kate and their children to have a successful family life, because they may be royalty, but at the end of the day, they’re still human beings. Good for them.

But this wasn’t intended to be a rant in defense of the British royal family, nor was it intended to be a dissertation about Kate Middleton’s assimilation into said family. The subject of this is me, of course, and something of which I was reminded while watching Kate meet the press with her new son.

One thing I noticed about Kate during the whole exchange outside the hospital is that she still looks six months pregnant. Which is as it should be. Don’t tell me about that former Playboy bunny chick, the one  who named her daughter Rainbow Brite or whatever it was, who left the hospital in her size 0 jeans and was back to her original -2 size within a week. That’s a lot of bunk. I don’t care if it really happened, it’s not the norm. Most women walk out looking some version of still several months pregnant, and continue to do so for another six months to a year after the baby is born (granted, looking fewer and fewer months along as time goes by). That’s normal.

My first baby was a single birth, and so I followed said pattern of looking a bit expectant for a number of months after he was born, and gradually getting back to a reasonably normal size. My second “child,” however, was twins. I gained the same amount of weight with them as I had with the first (thirty pounds—which is the normal, recommended amount for those of you keeping score), but most of that was baby. (I am proud to tell you that my twins were 6 pounds 13 ounces, and 7 pounds 15 ounces at birth, which birth occurred at 34 ½ weeks, with 35 weeks being considered full term for twins. Thus, they were about as close to term as one could hope without actually being full term, and also very big and healthy. Go, me, right?)

However, because they were such big babies, and because I did, after all, gain thirty pounds, I was absolutely humongous. I have since said that I was visible from space, and that at one point NASA approached me to discuss the possibility that I could be used as a landmark to help guide the shuttles back in to the Earth’s atmosphere. The only reason the deal fell through is that I would have had to stand outside for multiple hours during the whole of the shuttle’s anticipated reentry period, and it was hotter than Hell the summer my twins were born (as it always is the summer one is pregnant).

I think you get the picture—twins, enormously distended stomach, weight gain. Right. So the twins are born (on the Friday before my scheduled c-section because of the early signs of preeclampsia, which bummed me out because I wanted to make it to my actual date, plus I’d eaten a bunch that morning and they made me wait eight hours until my stomach emptied out and I was hugely uncomfortable—no pun intended—the whole time I waited for that to happen, but that’s another story. Which I guess I just told. Moving on.) and because I had major surgery, I’m in the hospital from Friday to the following Tuesday, at which time they let me go home.

So we load up our new infants in their new car seats, snap them onto our new stroller, and head out. We’re on our way down in the elevator, and the maternity ward in that hospital is on something like the 8^th floor, so we have a short ride. There’s another guy on the elevator, along with an older woman who, you can kind of tell by their chemistry and the way they interact, is his mother in law. My husband, being a reasonably friendly sort of fellow, asks if they're visiting a new mother. “Yes, my wife,” the guy replies.

Alex looks at him and says, “Your first?” The guy nods.

“We have one at home, and these are our second—twins,” he tells the guy.

The guy glances at the babies, and at me, and a strange look crosses his face.

“Wow,” he says, “One older kid, two new ones, and another one on the way?”

Huh?

His mother in law is horrified.

“Jim!” she gasps, “This woman just had twins. You can’t expect that she’s going to look anywhere near her normal self! It’s nothing like having only one.”

I, on the other hand, am about ready to bust my c-section sutures. Because any second I’m going to start howling with laughter. Are you kidding me? Dude, these babies are three days old. Do you realize what you’ve just described isn't even biologically possible? How could I possibly be pregnant again? What do you think? That I was actually carrying triplets, but one of them wasn’t cooked enough, so they left it in there for a couple more months to finish off? Priceless.

To this day I giggle about it. I know his mother in law was appalled, but I wish I could tell her how much pleasure that story has given me over the years.  What was to her a major faux pas (“Not only did you reveal your complete lack of understanding of the human reproductive system, but you basically just called this woman ‘fat’ to her face.”) was downright hilarious to me.

I was reminded of that whole episode while I was watching Kate show off her new baby, her puffy belly still intact. I hope Kate can maintain her sense of humor as the eyes of the world watch her (now descending) stomach. I’m sure she will, and I’m sure she’s very grateful. She has a beautiful new baby, and is lucky enough to have all the time, resources, and physical help she wants or needs. And I’m guessing there was no one going down in the elevator with them, either.

*if you’re not already aware—or can’t tell—I am an American. I sympathize with the plight of the British working classes, and those affected, but my love or hatred of the Queen and her brood will in no way impact their circumstances. I have zero power to bring about change in the British social system, since I have no say in the British social system, not being a British citizen. I just wanted to make that perfectly clear.

Of Lice and Men

Sorry, this one is going to make your head itch. We’re talking about. Yes. Lice.

It's largely self-explanatory, I think.

From my Facebook status:

H    Husbands: Here's a tip--when your kids come home with lice, and you decide to wash stuffed animals, resist the urge to wash every one they've come in contact with since birth. That 35 year old stuffed dog of your wife's that they've been walking past while it was sitting on the bench in the mudroom for the past month? Yeah, not really a candidate for the Anti-Lice-Wash-a-Thon. Especially since I can predict with a fairly high degree of certainty that it will EXPLODE IN THE WASHER AND LEAVE LITTLE BITTY PLASTIC BEADS ALL OVER EVERYTHING. I'm psychic, you see. Now if you'll excuse me, I have some vacuuming to do.

But just in case, some back story.

I got an email and a phone call from my boys’ after school program. All three of them had them. To improve matters, my husband was at an evening meeting at his office, probably not arriving home until 8 or later.

I went and picked them up, then stopped at Rite Aid to get the tools to deal with the situation. I left the boys in the van with strict instructions not to unlock or open the doors, roll down the windows, touch the radio, mess around with the stuff in the glove box, spill anything from their lunchboxes, or get blood on the inside of the windows. The usual admonitions of the mother of three boys who is planning to leave them to their own devices for anything longer than 18 seconds.

When I went in to Rite Aid, after chatting briefly with a friend I bumped into who winced in sympathy with my plight and then made a mental note to go home and check his daughter who had had a playdate with my daughter two days earlier (he didn’t say it, but you learn to recognize facial expressions, especially the, “Oh crap, LICE?!? Dear god, please no” facial expression), I headed for the pharmacy counter. The girl asked if she could help me, and I said, “Please—I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with hunting around. Just point me to the lice treatments. I have three children with lice. Kill me now.” The pharmacy assistant quickly directed me to aisle 13. You can’t tell me that’s not a coincidence; these drugstore layout people have a bone dry sense of humor, I tell you. Upon arrival there, I learned that lice eradication has come a long way in the 35 years since I’ve had any experience with it. If the current pricing for various lice-elimination products is any indicator, it is now a multi-billion dollar industry.

In my day, when I got lice twice as a child, there was one product. It was called Quell (or something) and it was toxic as hell and smelled just as bad. Your mom slathered it on your scalp, waited ten minutes and then washed it out. Then she went on a cleaning frenzy and rented one of those termite tens and had the house fumigated. Well, that’s what my mom did.  Lice wasn’t that big a deal to me. All I did was itch and deal with the treatment.

Today there are multiple products with clever, wry names like Nix and Rid. There are shampoos or whatever they are, sure, but there are also “comb out gels” and sprays for non-launderbles like furniture and stuffed animals. There are even kits that come with everything you need, including the beloved fine tooth comb (some things apparently never change).

I grabbed one of the complete kits and a bottle of wine (had to cross the store for that; here’s a tip for those drugstore layout types—wine goes directly next to lice treatment. I promise your impulse-buy-add-on sales will skyrocket) and checked out.

After gathering up my (surprisingly lice-free) daughter, I headed home to open what came to be known as Salon Mama (that’s pronounced mah-MAH).

I confess that as a general rule I suck at making unpleasant things fun. My mother was one of those who felt like the way to deal with unpleasant things was just to power through and get them behind you. Never mind trying to twist the situation to make it remotely amusing and therefore less traumatic. Just get it over with. It was very Teutonic of her. Which was sort of understandable, because she was quite German. German descent, you understand, but a combination of German and Dutch, which made her both stoic and tight –fisted, which sounds horrible, but wasn’t that bad because from somewhere she got a decent sense of humor that kind of tempered everything, but that didn’t change her outlook on unpleasant situations.

But somehow I came up with this ridiculous accent—a sort of British Indian thing with a weird twist—and I started calling my children “Sir” and pretending we were in a beauty salon and I was offering them all sorts of treatments—in addition to the hair coloring we were currently applying, which would turn his hair the most BEE-OO-TEE-FUL shade of purple, would Sir also care for a facial? No? Some new makeup?  No? A manicure? No?

You get the idea.

So with one thing and another, I got them all treated, combed out, and into clean liceless pajamas.

While I was doing all this, I had set my husband, who had bowed out of his meeting early, to the task of getting all their bedding through the wash and making up their beds with some makeshift coverings (flat sheets and spare blankets, mostly) that would allow them to go to bed before 2 a.m. Our washer has a sanitize cycle that washes in water that I think is quite literally boiling hot, but it runs for over an hour and with sheets + blankets + comforters + blah blah blah we were looking at an ETA of somewhere after midnight before it was all washed and dried. So we made do, and sent them all to bed under random throws that I’d gotten for $10 at Disneyland because I’d spent over $50 and suchlike. It wasn’t going to kill them for a night, and it didn’t.

However, now we come to the stuffed animal part of the story. Naturally all their “favorite” stuffies were going to have to have a long hot bath. I don’t give a damn what those tags say about surface clean only. My dryer is just this side of industrial—it’ll dry them through. I have no fear of moldy stuffing. Of course this was what they found most devastating—going to bed without stuffies? Unthinkable!

We made a deal to wash them right off and return them to them in their sleep so they would wake up in the morning with their stuffies. It was a compromise that was accepted grudgingly, but it was accepted.

One of the twins has no real concrete attachment to any one stuffy. Oh, sure, there’s Muffin the Moose, and any one of three stuffed Mickey Mouses (Mickey Mice?) but nothing that he really can’t be without. So long ago I offered him Poochy to see if they’d take to each other and he’d have a constant comfort animal. I’m not sure why I felt like he needed one, since he clearly doesn’t feel that way, but humor me. It’s one of my quirks.

Poochy was mine as a child and he’s hung around, He’s a beanbag dog with a stuffed head and a pom pom nose that fell off years ago. He’s brown with white ears and has frankly seen better days. There have been a couple of surgeries over the years to keep his innards from leaking out, some more successful than others. This kid isn’t really a stuffed animal guy, as I’ve suggested. So for a long time (over a month) Poochy has been hanging out on the bench in the mudroom, just watching the world go by, I guess.

When my son was trying to decide what, if anything, he was going to sleep with last night, I tossed him Poochy and said, “Here, take this.” Up he trotted to his room for bedtime.

What happened next will likely remain a mystery for the ages. But you can probably figure out what the result was.

Yes, Poochy found his way from the “clean” pile to the “contaminated” pile, and took a spin in the washer at my husband's hands. I found this out when I went to switch the blankets and comforters from the washer to the dryer. A little tick-tick-tick-tick sound like…well, frankly like little plastic beads bouncing on a tile floor accompanied the removal of the first item, and every subsequent item thereafter. In the middle of the load I found a deflated, damp Poochy.

When I IM’d my husband to tell him what had happened, his comment was, “Oops.” Yeah, oops. And of course, there was the obligatory “dog house” joke. What a comedian.