Archive for the ‘kids’ Category

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Can’t remember post title


2008
11.22

Posted in blogging, kids | No Comments »

So I’m sitting on my couch watching my husband play Call of Duty “World at War” which, so far as I can tell, is only differentiated from “World of Warcraft” by a preposition and the modification of a noun.

Oh, and the fact that the players of one game favor t-shirts featuring sports teams and the players of the other favor t-shirts that say “All your base are belong to us” which, when you get down to it, is kind of the difference between contestants on Wheel of Fortune and those on Jeopardy!

Where was I? I don’t remember. Not that it mattered since my train of thought has long since been derailed by the eight ball of coke sitting next to me on the couch. Ok I kid. About the drugs, not the train of thought. I mean, the various trains of thought that go through my head really are derailed quite regularly but not by anything as exciting as cocaine seeing as how I have two kids who do that for me now.

…and now I have no idea what it was I sat down to write about.

See? Kids. Sure, they net you a nice tax deduction but it’s hardly worth it when you take into account the accompanying dementia.

Um… Run to Feed the Hungry is this Thursday before Thanksgiving dinner. Yeah, running! Only three weeks left of school before finals. Yeah, mental breakdown! My friend Patty and I have formed a two-woman marathoning team for CIM on December 7th. Yeah, pain! Finals are coming up. Yeah, brain leakage! I’m taking a ton of photos for a ton of organizations and loving every minute of it. Yeah, digital photography! And! I’ve been “randomly selected” to participate in my first ever embalming lab on Monday. Yeah, cadavers!

So! Who has ten bucks that says my professor will have to peel me off the floor as soon as someone lifts an artery?

I now return you to your regularly scheduled net surfing. I’m going to just sit here in the corner and play with my unnecessarily large beach ball and try to remember why I sat down at the computer in the first place.

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Around here, we don’t make mistakes…


2008
11.11

Posted in family, kids, parenting | No Comments »

…we just have happy accidents. Very costly accidents that take years off our life and earn us a laughable deduction on our taxes, but happy all the same.

Or at least that’s what I say to myself after the second and sometimes third bottle of wine.

So anyway, I have two kids; a male and a female. Not a breeding pair, thankfully, unless you’re into the linear family tree thing. No, they’re a sibling pair, which is worse sometimes when, like right now, I watch them beating the hell out of each other with a couple of very unstable-looking Lego swords while swinging from the ceiling fan and think, Note to self: swallow the cyanide tablet before these people get the opportunity to pick out your rest home.

So the boy-child is now eight years old and can’t seem to get into much of anything. Thus far we’ve tried basketball, swimming, art, running and I’ve even smeared lard all over him and dangled him over the head of the neighbor’s dogs to see if I could inspire his inner Steve Irwin. Nada. The only thing the boy wants to do is play video games.

Which would be fine but for the addition of the girl-child to the bunch. Since she came along I am finding that boy-child’s video games are interfering with his ability to babysit girl-child while I lock myself in our home office to drink white russians and look up old boyfriends on myspace.

Still, video games are what he likes and since I’m the first one to try earning my mother of the year badge by supporting my offspring’s pursuit of their dreams – which apparently involve ending up pasty white and dateless in some video game tournament – I have decided to sacrifice surfing the net long enough to pick up a few requested titles from our local Toys R Us.

Which brings me to my point: have you seen some of the crap that video game makers are passing off for, like, actual cash these days? For instance, Petz! Hamsterz! which involves watching animated hamsters that are slightly less exciting than real hamsters in between pushing buttons that feed and care for them. And, just in case caring for non-existent hamsters wasn’t enough, there’s other versions too in which you can take care of a cats, dogs and birds.

What the hell are we doing to our kids? What ever happened to the glorious gore and blood-soaked violence of a Duke Nuke’em or Call of Duty? Because I’m going to be pretty pissed if one of these days my son shoots up his school and – when asked by some bubble-headed “investigative reporter” what would make him do such a thing he answers – “The depersonalized nature of modern society left me bereft and incapable of feeling empathy toward my fellow man. Also, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t reach the Elite Chew Toy level on Petz! Hamsterz! and that really pissed me off.”

Somehow that’s just not the same as being able to blame the influence of death metal. Or rap. Or some awful first-person shooter game that shows bloodied limbs and entrails and human heads exploding in the wake of a 50-cal round with the type of clarity that only HD can offer.

How am I supposed to blame my childrens’ maladjusted world view on the video game industry if they keep throwing inoffensive tripe such as Petz! Hamsterz! at us?

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Death with training wheels


2008
09.28

Posted in death & dying, family, kids, parenting | No Comments »

We’re organizing a wake this morning here at Matulich Manor, to commemorate the life of Isabelle the Hamster who died last night in her cage after a short illness. Isabelle had developed a worrisome twitch yesterday afternoon that soon graduated to shallow breathing by bedtime and progressed to full-blown-dead by this morning. She is survived by my eight-year-old son and nearly-three-year-old daughter.

I find myself grateful for the fact that the chief mourners are so young; anyone more sophisticated would be quick to recognize that I’m playing fast and loose with the term “wake”.

“Mom, what’s Bailey’s and why are you drinking it by the gallon?”

“Shut up kids, we’re in mourning.”

Anyway. I was prepared for the Find-A-Box-Small-Enough-To-Bury-A-Small-Rodent-In Thing, the When-Can-I-Get-Another-Hamster Thing and No-Mom-YOU-Pick-It-Up-Because-My-Eight-Year-Old-Brain-Can’t-Quite-Wrap-Itself-Around-Eating-Brussel-Sprouts-Much-Less-Touching-Dead-Things Thing.

What I was not prepared for, however, was the overwhelming show of grief by my eight-year-old, who has spent much of the last year catering to the needs of what had to have been the most spoiled hamster in the continental U.S.

For a solid hour after discovering her lifeless little carcass my son sobbed inconsolably in my lap. His pajamas were sopping, my sweatshirt was soaked and the bedding – if it were to have been wrung out – could have yielded several gallons more of “wet”. This wasn’t just a polite shedding of a few tears… this was the real deal.

So I did what any self-respecting mother would do: I told him to suck it up and stop crying like some damned pansy.

Ok, I kid. I rubbed his back and hugged him and tried to refrain from saying something stupid like “Dude, it’s just a hamster.” But honestly? It is just a hamster and when we brought the critter home I – like a million parents before me – figured that there would come a day when it would die and my son would be allowed to experience death firsthand in a way that didn’t overwhelm him. Kind of like death with training wheels.

After about an hour, the boy stopped crying quite as much and that’s when I told him I was sorry his hamster had died.

“Don’t say that.”

“Don’t say what?”

“That she’s dead. Don’t say that.”

“But she is dead sweetie. That’s the word we use when we describe what happened to Isabelle.”

“Can’t we say she’s asleep?”

“No because that would be lying. Isabelle is dead.”

This of course touched off another round of sobbing. Was this cruel? I thought about it briefly and decided that it was not. Death was real. Eternal sleep was just a bit of brain-play used to avoid that fact. The hamster is dead and my son is better off for having to cope with that reality. Even if by forcing the issue I have now qualified myself as the meanest mother in the history of humankind.

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These Are Days


2008
08.21

Posted in blogging, family, fitness, kids, life in california, running | No Comments »

You know, there are times when I want to come type away on this blog about some of the stupid shit I do just because, well, it seems like it would make it less dumb if I were to publish a post and then sit back and imagine that somewhere out there I have several readers who are sitting in front of their monitors, smacking their foreheads and saying out loud, “Dude. I’ve totally done that too.”

As if doing something stupid makes it less so when it is diluted and spread out among a greater sampling of humans. Like buying a Humvee. Or wearing crocs.

Anyway, here is a list of the stupid things I’ve done in the past week that no person in their right mind would ever fess up to:

- backed over something, stopped, rolled down my window and put my head outside – and then without confirming that what I had backed over was not, in fact, a dog or small child or some other legally recognized entity whose annhialation would result in me being sued - pulled forward, and then backed over it again.

- fed my kids several metric tons worth of chocolate, marshmallow and soda before allowing them to ride home inside the car instead of putting them in front and yelling Mush!

- Forgot to wear BodyGlide to the gym so that my running skirt wouldn’t ride up (at least the guy on the treadmill behind me didn’t seem to mind)

- answered the door for a Jehovah’s Witness

- locked my keys in the car

- locked my keys in the car with the kids (who were Not At All Helpful in unlocking the doors)

- locked my keys in the car and gained entry by crawling through the rear window when there was a perfectly good spare clicky-thing just ten feet away

- inadvertently introduced flax seed to my daughter’s diet

- plotted a ten mile run for Sunday, answered the phone, became sidetracked during phone conversation, finished plotting run without really looking, fled house, returned twelve-point-two miles later wondering why I felt so beat up.

Please tell me I’m not alone in this. What kind of goofy stuff have you done this week?

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The Day I Was Kicked Out of the Ocean


2008
07.07

Posted in family, kids, life in california, ocean, parenting, swimming, vacation, watsonville | No Comments »

A couple of weeks ago, just before I seemingly abandoned my blog, my husband and I decided to take the kids on a family vacation. Since he and are alike in that we find the prospect of taking a two year old on a plane about as inviting as performing home dental surgery on one another, we decided to vacation close to home.

Also, the in-laws had taken their RV and skipped town, thus leaving their Santa Cruz County digs, fully-stocked liquor cabinet, porn collection and cache of guns lonely for company.

Kids? Meet Mr. Tequila and Mr. Glock. They’ll be your babysitters for the next two weeks.

Before our vacation I decided to try my hand at triathlons which means enduring the Pacific Ocean’s sub-Arctic conditions which means purchasing a wetsuit which means that somewhere between the words “Honey” and “I’m thinking about doing triathlons” my husband shelled out a few hundred bucks to cover his wife from neck to ankles in neoprene with nary a blowjob to show for it.

But he got even. And how.

So while we’re in SC we decide to take the kids out to the beach. He picked Sunset Beach; a lovely stretch of sandy coastline that shelves gently into Monterey Bay. It is quite a relaxing spot if you are, in fact, intelligent enough to remain on dry land.

At any rate, we arrived at the beach. I had my wetsuit. My husband and kids had parkas. We were ready for an authentic Northern California beach excursion minus the hypothermia that seems to plague bikini-clad tourists who’ve watched too much television.

I’m not going to bother going into detail about the ambivalent signage everywhere that indicated that yes, while it was true that one could technically swim at this particular beach, it was not generally advisable. Not that there were signs that specifically said “Keep Out” or “perhaps you should reconsider” or even “update your life insurance.” Instead, there was a plethora of directions on how to survive should the ocean throw an undertow, sleeper wave or riptide your way.

I’m also not going to bore you with details of waves several feet taller than me, jellyfish and kelp infested swells, or even the fact that I would have had to swim halfway to Japan to get beyond the surfline.

Sufficed to say, things were not going well. I was taking a ton of foam in the face and within ten minutes I felt like I had eaten a salt lick. Have I mentioned that I’m terrified of water? These are but a few of the reasons why – when I saw the nice boy with the lifeguard gear waving at me from the beach – I was more than happy to pack it in.

“What’s up? Is there a problem?” I asked the kid, not that I didn’t know the answer. Of course there was a problem; some idiot at Fleet Feet had set me loose with a wetsuit.

“Um…” The kid started to hem. He didn’t need to talk. His expression said it all, Lady, there’s a whole list of reasons you have no business being out here but you’re a sasquatch and I’m afraid you’ll rip my arms off before I reach #50.

“There’s an awful riptide comin’ through here today.” The kid stammered. He pointed to a red warning flag that was most definitely not there before I’d gotten in the water. Not that it wouldn’t have been helpful to know. “Could you, uh, just swim closer to the lifeguard tower?”

“Do you mean swim closer to it or get out?”

“Um…” The kid looked at me and then looked at his feet.

“Look, what would you do?” I asked.

“Well, I wouldn’t be swimming. Not out here anyway.”

“Can you just tell me that I’m being kicked out of the ocean?”

“You’re being kicked out of the ocean.”

“King Neptune thanks you.”

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Lil’ Sophie has an asshat for a daddy


2008
05.21

Posted in kids, rant, road rage | No Comments »

Just last weekend I walked out of my local Raley’s to find that my vehicle had been blocked in by someone driving a black Ford SUV. I didn’t think much of it until after I had spent an inordinate amount of time buckling my daughter into her car seat and loading my groceries into the back before jingling my keys in the direction of the offending SUV’s driver to indicate that yes! I am planning on, like, getting in my car and driving away now because that’s what we really good parkers do around here: we steer our vehicles into an available space and then? When we’re done shopping? We return to our vehicles and vacate the space for the next person.

Well, despite the availability of dozens of parking spaces Mr. Ford Driver was having difficulty grasping this simple concept. After several minutes of patiently waiting for him to notice my back-up lights at his passenger-side window he hadn’t budged an inch.

I was a little perturbed but managed to behave in a calm manner as I got out of my vehicle to point at it before making little finger-walking motions out of the space to indicate that yes, I did in fact want to leave now and would he please pick an actual parking spot and like, move?

I thought I had taken care of the problem. Surely one would move if – in the course of idling in the middle of a parking lot they had received indication that their car was blocking another? I jumped back into my car and patted myself on the back. After all, I had behaved with civility and managed to avoid murdering a “special” citizen.

Dude didn’t move.

I began to wonder why this guy hadn’t remained on the short bus where his people usually ride quite happily and in compliance with the vehicle code.

I got back out of the car and lifted my shoulders toward the guy in a slightly annoyed yet still family-friendly WTF? gesture. He responded with a gesture that involved his middle finger and was PG-13 at best. That’s when I noticed the dude was no taller than five-foot six.

I could take him easy.

So I went flying toward his car to have a word. I needed to get home and I was tired of this fop indulging his Little Man’s Complex on my time. Well, apparently the fop wasn’t too keen on consequences because, upon seeing six feet of blonde ferocity coming at him, the coward screeched away with a look of panic that indicated he knew he was about to have his ass kicked by a girl.

…and do you know what I saw? As his vehicle retreated? Several inches-high white lettering on the back window that read:

Lil’ Sophie’s Daycare

(916) 214-9960

Now, let’s forget for a moment that I see this vehicle every day at carpool or that these people’s kids and my kids go to school together or that we’re even neighbors. Let’s forget about the profound lack of class and intense stupidity required to treat people – particularly people in your own ‘hood – the way this guy did and focus, instead, on the fact that this moron took a car that acts as a rolling advertisement for a daycare and then behaved like a petulant brat in front of hundreds of people in a busy shopping center.

Good going Lil’ Sophie’s daddy. Did they teach you those skills in business school?

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Hodge Podge


2007
11.09

Posted in aquarium, family, kids, parenting, running | No Comments »

Did anyone realize that it’s already November 9th? I sure as hell didn’t. Seems like just yesterday I was encouraging my offspring to maim each other with roman candles and then BAM! All the sudden it’s winter.

Ok, it’s not really winter. Not around here anyway. Raise your hand if you’re from Michigan and that last sentence made you want to kick my ass.

Moving right along, let us all bow our heads in remembrance of the Berlin Wall. That monstrosity fell eighteen years ago and I was lucky enough to finagle a piece of it during a trip to Europe that now hangs in my office. You have no idea how many starving socialists I flashed at Checkpoint Charlie for that damned bit of concrete.

Today I was running errands, one of which involved going to Capitol Aquarium. While we were there my daughter started pointing at the tanks which were fully stocked with the latest shipment of saltwater fish. Since I’m always game to blow $50 on the next critter to buy the farm in my big tank I indulged her curiosity and we browsed the selection.

So mesmerized was I with the sea anemones and corals that I completely ignored the sucking sounds coming from knee level until I felt a cold, wet hand go up my shorts. As I turned around I was horrified to see my daughter stick her hand into a ground-level tank, pull out her saturated sleeve and suck the brine right out of it. For the record, the fish were probably more traumatized than my daughter.

Oh, and the controversy surrounding this woman reminds me of an incident that occurred during my second pregnancy. I was two weeks away from my due date and working out on a stairmaster at the gym when a guy next to me said “If you were my wife I’d be damned if I let you go to the gym while pregnant.”

To which I felt obligated to reply, “And if you were my husband I’d be damned if I gave you a blowjob until you got rid of that attitude.”

Asshole.

To all the people I owe e-mails, I’m sorry. It’s been hell around here the past few days and I promise to answer. It might be January, but dude, I swear I will answer.

Denise, you rock. You’re a damned talented artist and wonderful human being and I adore you. Especially since you have yet to let my husband know what a dork I was in high school and college. You’re not going to tell him are you? Because I totally think I have him snowed.

Jenn, I just love you. Love, love, love you. In that totally platonic I’m-already-married-but-if-I-weren’t-I’d-seriously-consider-switching-to-chicks kind of way.

Kevin, you’re thoughts on our faith and life blow me away. You are probably the most cerebral person I’ve encountered in matters regarding all things God and music and life and you make me happy to be Catholic.

Blondie, good luck with your move. I’ve been thinking about you a lot lately and hoping that you are able to sharpen your ninja-like wallpaper removal skills before taking up residence in Omaha.