Mission Impossible

I have had to wait a while before I wrote this post...my head felt like it was going to blow off from the stress of getting two boys off to the sitter who are currently playing the game..let's drive mom around the bend once and for all!!!  I feel like I'm trapped inside of a Gordian knot....They are entering the phase that parenting experts call contrariness...you know,

 "I want this, not that, now I changed my mind, what? You're still trying to reason with me?  Take THAT peon, I just changed my mind again, but inside of my head this time, and I didn't tell you, HA!  What, you want me to spoonfeed you here.... don't give me the crying face, why are you crying too?  If you can't take the heat, get out of the toyroom...."

So this morning I'm trying to rush around and get the boys something to eat so I can go and get ready for work.  I pour them some cereal, with CHOCOLATE MILK AND WHITE MILK ALL MIXED TOGETHER!!  Fine, I can do that,  you're being a bit of a putz but nothing I can't handle.  So I go to hand the bowl to Zac and his face gets all crumply and the morning tears start springing forth.....  he wails..., are you ready for this....."  NO!!! I want the chocolate milk on the TOP and the white milk on the BOTTOM!

What's that now.....?

You want me to bend the laws of Newtonian Physics?  Make up new rules of how matter comes together in the universe so you can properly enjoy your breakfast?  I mean, is that such an unreasonable thing to ask...  Wait, I'll check with God.

HE SAYS NO!

Sorry Buddy, God says you are being a poopface and I don't have to play this game with you.  You may commence the screaming now.

Now we turn to the brother.  It takes a Herculean effort and 20 full minutes to go from standing in the porch to getting in the car.  Something that I can usually accomplish in, oh, say about 17 seconds on my own.  Enter the second half of the Mission Impossible Team.  Tom Cruise has nothing on these cutie pies, believe me.

I go to strap Marcus into his car seat, he has a juice box in one hand and a granola bar in the other and he cries, "I cannnnn'tttt doooooo iiiiitttt,    Hellllppp......" Whaa, whaa, whaa......"

I take him under the arms and hoist him into his car seat....and try to buckle him in, then he starts,  "NO! I WANT TO DO IT MYSELF!!!!"

Oh, do you mean you want to do the thing yourself that you just whined about not being able to do yourself?

 I just need to clarify here....

This is after a giant tantrum because I had to put the plastic bird back into the house because the full 5 minutes I gave him to do it was clearly not enough time to place an object on a horizontal surface to his liking.

So now I'm trying to wrestle him into his car seat, despite the cirque du soleil full body contortions he is pulling.  My blood pressure is rising and by blood sugar is dropping, not a good combination.... I finally get him in an slam car door to drown out the screaming.  I scream out a few choice words beginning with the letter F, the neighbors are probably wondering by now if I have a very driveway specific form of Tourette's.....

So I finally start to drive them to the sitters, and Marcus notices that the zipper on his boot is down about 1/8 of an inch...  He starts screaming..."MYYYYY BOOOOOOOT!!  You have to ZIP IT UPPPPPPPP!"  I listen to this until I get to the sitters and get out of the car in the driveway to calm him down.   I offer to zip up his boot, but no go people.

"GOOO  BACK HOOOMMME, I WANT TO ZIP IT UP AT HHHOOOOMMMMMEEE!!!

So, what you need then,  is for me to find the time to drive back home, to the point where the zipper issue originated to rectify the situation.  Well let me check my blackberry to see if it fits with my schedule....

COMPUTER SAYS NO!


I throw them into the sitter's house and run for it, swearing all way to my car.  Turns out my Tourette's is not just specific to my driveway.....

Rules are there for a reason...

Ok so I'm going to write a little about myself here today, the blog is  usually about my blood sucking energy vampires darling children and the general decline in mental function that I experience when trying to play the role of zookeeper responsible parent.

But...there is more to me than just my relationship to the ankle biting set...I have other stuff in my life too.    I belong to a community Theatre group with my BFF's Dawn and CO.  Being shameless attention whores and general exhibitionists, this is a good fit for us, and gives me an outlet for some real drama, not just the cascades of screamy thoughts that rises to crashing crecendos of catastrophe inside of my head.  A little alliteration anyone??

So anyway, Our group has just finished a production of a play. It was a blast.  The thing is, I have this co-star that plays opposite of me, my love interest in the play.  The guy is a bit of a narcissist and for some reason had been bragging all week about how good of a dancer he was.

So after the show we hit a club to do some dancing and shooting pool and the like.  We hit the floor where the guy proceeds to break the cardinal rules of guy dancing:

1.  DO NOT back your butt up against the girl with your arms in the air in the "raise the roof" position. This is never attractive, it is a typical girl move, typically done by too drunk 20 somethings in  a desperate bid for male attention, not attractive in any case.  Do not offer your wildly contorting body to me in some sort of a "behold, you may now lay hands on me" offering.  I'll take the head of a chicken, thankyou.

2.  DO NOT raise your hands past chest level, at any point during the dancing.  Possible exceptions: A. Punjabi wedding B. Rock concert fist pumping C.Songs like  "Jump Around"D by House of Pain or other old school early nineties hip hop..hip hip HORRAY...OOHHHH ...AAAYYY...OHHHH... You get the picture.

3. DO NOT lead with your shoulders.  Men, move your hips in small movements, do not make big lunging movements with your jangley legs, having just had the path cleared with your shaking shoulders.

4. DO NOT dance with Jangly legs....big steps, legs wide apart.  Think, white boys at a barn dance.

5. DO NOT do the side-clap while wildly bobbing your head.  I mean the "I really want to be a spanish Matator, Ole!" side clapping hands up high by the side of the head, or like your a rich guy at a long table in a Carol Burnett skit, summoning the butler to take away the butter.

6.  DO NOT try to garner more attention than the girl that you are dancing with.  Men, you are there to be accessories to us on the dancefloor.  Keep your movements small and your eyes on us, don't look around the room to see who may be watching you.

7.  Most of all, if you are trying to impress someone with your dancing, DO NOT come up to them casually afterward and say, "So, how's my dancing?"

You might just get the attention you were looking for as the crowd watches me vomit all over your shoes.

Girls, Girls, Girls....

I think when ZZ top expressed this sentiment, it may have been a little different than the one that I scream to myself inside of my head.

My oldest is Mackenzie (Kenzie for short).  She is a beautiful, brilliant and verbal child with precocious tendencies.  When she was a baby she slept for 12 hour stretches at night, didn't cry much and preferred not to be carried around.  When she was a toddler, she never threw tantrums and would calm from a fit of crying when I simply said, "Can you calm down?".  People used to credit me with her good behavior and I had a sneaky suspicion that I had nothing to do with it...that it was just the way she was.

I used to watch my good friend with her boys, who were a little more high maintenance at the time and think, "That looks hard, Kenzie doesn't do any of that..."  Turns out I was a Smug Mother of a Girl.....

Smug mothers of girls can be identified by the slightly confused look of sympathy given to mothers of toddler boys, like "Why are they doing that?, don't they know just to ask them to calm down and they'll stop biting/whining/screaming/jumping off the bedroom dressers...."   My poor friend Dawn bore this unconscious attitude from me with grace, only saying "I can't wait until you experience parenting boys..." as her only indication that she knew what I was in for, and that it would be a whole different ball game.  Then BLAMMO, my twin boys were born and they haven't slept through the night or stopped screaming yet and they're three!

So now Kenzie is 6.  I heard when she was younger and  I only had the one that girls were easier when they were babies but harder when they were older. "Surely not.. I thought, Kenzie is a reasonalble human being and will continue to be so."

Then reality bitch-slapped me at age 4.  There was a new sheriff in town, and her name was ATTITUDE, she was flanked closely by her twin deputies, Passive Aggression and Demandingness.  Now when I wake her up in the morning, the first words out of her mouth are "Am I getting my allowance today..I really need Skwinkies, I'm the ONLY one at school who doesn't have them." and MOM, this and MOM that, peppered liberally with eye rolls and sighs.

So now the boys are at their worst/hardest age and the girl is as her worst/hardest age.

The smugness has gotten SO smacked off my face, thanks for the foreshadowing Dawn!

The Devil is Throwing Snowballs

It has happend.  I know, hold on to your hats, it's BIG NEWS.  Are you ready for this???

I had a lovely weekend.

I know...... it's a lot to take in at once. Pace yourself with the absorbtion of this material...

Usually I detest the weekends, long stretches of parenting alone, pulling out my hair at the screaming, the fighting, whining, oh and did I mention the SCREAMING?  In twin boy STEREO?  With a side of six-year old girl indignant, guilt inducing attention seeking.

But, this weekend, I had a very relaxing overnight in the city.  I attended a roast/dinner in honour of a great guy who had a great accomplishment, then I went back to my friends house, drank tea and watched "What not to wear" and slept.  Oh, bliss!!!!  Got up at 11:00 am the next morning and went for brunch, a bit of shopping and coffee.  On the way home, I get a text, "drive carefully, don't hurry,  all under control here"  Talk about foreplay!!!!!!

Sounds delightful huh?  Wait there's more.  When I got home, Chris (my husband) had the kids OUT!.  As in out of the house, as in did not bowl me over, and try to crawl inside my skin and take up residence like a pack of parasitic worms.  (albeit, cute parasitic worms....see how generous I can be?)  They stayed out for two whole hours!  Then we had a peaceful supper which they all ate ( a miracle in and of itself...).

After that we watched Toy Story 3 as a family and get this, for the first time in their lives the boys paid attention to the movie for a whole 90 minutes.  The little faces, transfixed; and lit by the flickering light of the TV screen....oh, I just choke up thinking about it.  The silence!  

The next day I was busy out of the house with the girl, gymnastics, ballet and then 3 whole hours of play rehearsal just for me!

They must be reading the blog and feeling guilty!

PEWKs....

So you may have ascertained from the flavor of some of my posts that life can be a bit stressful, that I do not find the job of parenting to be as easy as it looks in the TV commercials for Skippy Peanut butter.  My childhood was a bit... how should I say, dysfunctional and I always vowed that I would have a better relationship with my kids than I had with my mother.   

Having said that, it would be a whole separate world in the blogosphere to write about my mommy issues.  Suffice to say they are still there but have mellowed to the extent that I am driven crazy by them, not deeply emotionally affected by them.  My mother is and always has been a loving and kind person, just a little obsessed with control..and not allowing us to have our own feelings...

ANYWAY...

So before I became a parent I was a PEWK....Parenting Expert WITHOUT Kids.  PEWK's can be identified by the frequent use of words like, "Always" and "Never" in conjunction with their parenting plans.  Like,  "my kids will ALWAYS talk to me, I will ALWAYS  listen to them, they will NEVER eat junk, watch tv, throw tantrums"...etc.  The word JUST is also thrown into the mix, especially when criticizing the observed behaviors of other parents WITH kids.  " Just put him in time out..." "Just talk to him in a reasonable manner and he'll listen"  "Just walk away and cool down instead of yelling".    Sound familiar to your pre-kid self?

So here's the thing that surprised me the most about kids.  I used to think, "they don't have to watch TV or eat junk food, if I never give it to them they'll never know the difference right?"  Laugh at me now, I deserve it, I mock myself on an almost daily basis.  The thing they don't tell you in the Skippy peanut butter commercials is how UNHAPPY kids are most of the time!  The whining, the attention seeking,  the needing every scrap of your attention all of the time until you are a walking shell of your former self (ok bit dramatic there, but I mean really,  check the name of this blog...)  Neither the Skippy commercials, nor the Cosby Show (my only reference to a "normal family") never made reference to the fact that you are in an almost constant state of scanning your environment to find anything, ANYTHING that will make it stop for just a few minutes, that will allow you to go to the bathroom, call the cable company, make a grocery list,  to BREATHE !  And guess what works for a couple of minutes?  Tv, junk food and that damn toy at the checkout that you swore you'd never buy.  It's survival,  PEWKS!

Oh, dear PEWK, just wait until you have kids, until they reach inside of you with their Skippy Peanut Butter covered fingers and yank every smug, self-satisfied preconception out into the light, where they'll stomp all over it and watch you crumple to the ground......begging for them to "JUST  GO AND WATCH SPONGEBOB, ALREADY!"