To all the parents who stayed up late wrapping presents, I salute you!
Continue reading From Santa, With Love
From Santa, With Love
Continue reading From Santa, With Love
Category Archives: Parenting Heart Palpitations
Continue reading From Santa, With Love
Passive Aggressive Cookies for Open Door Policies.
I am baking cookies. The smell of freshly ground cardamom is overpowering at first, but then melds with the warmth and smells of baking in the oven.
I am an American and I do not possess a good sense of what a 3 mm thickness looks like, nor do I have a ruler, so I have to open and shut the oven door repeatedly trying to figure how long it will be before my already brown cookies are ‘browned’ at the edges. I guess wrong with the first batch, so after figuring out they need at least 15 minutes, I pop that batch in again until I fear burning the pistachios.
“Pistachios?” You might ask.
“Yes,” I say, “Because of my son.”
“Oh, he likes them then?” You presume.
“No. He doesn’t. These cookies are for me. He doesn’t get any!”
I stand in my kitchen guarding both the baking cookies and my son from accessing my bedroom.
I currently have a most reluctant and unexpected open door policy.
I’m am very good at holding onto my mad. This happened yesterday and in response, I took all of his stuffies until the door is fixed. I made him write sentences based on how much the guy estimated it would cost to fix the door jam. (Hint it took about 8 pages of tiny print to write them all.) And today he’s cleaned and vacuumed most of the house and swept half the garage.
He doesn’t get any trips or treats until the door is fixed. Subsequently, I get to listen to a litany of requests to “Fix door.”
He’s even insisting on an exact time of repair.
“10 a.m. tomorrow, fix door.” He is standing next to me as I type this.
This is the parenting paradox. Anything you do to “punish” a child’s misbehavior rebounds on you. He can’t go on trips to Burger King–so I can’t go there either. He isn’t allowed to get the highly desired items from my room, so I have to guard him at all times.
It’s going to be a very annoying end to our summer.
At least I have cookies!
Graduated Expectations
May 24th is the anniversary of my husband’s death, but this year I am in such a manic-panic over getting my son ready to graduate school, I barely remember until afterward. When the hullabaloo dies down, I am emotionally wrung out. I am a moldy, gray dishrag of a human being. But, I am also very relieved it hasn’t gone worse than expected. It did go about as bad as I thought it might, but no worse. And in my son’s world, that is a good outcome.
Continue reading Graduated Expectations
Dental Damns…
We are past the first hurtle. My son has survived having his wisdom teeth extracted and now has to just get through the next five days on a restricted diet of soft foods. Currently he is having ice cream for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
It may have been exhausting, but at least the hardest part is over. Now to survive the days with the benefits of top-notch pain killers. (Norco is the way to go. Sadly, only the kid is receiving them.) But, I am reaping the benefits of a narcotically stunned teenager filled to the gills with bowls of Super Scoop ice cream with a chocolate sauce chaser.
The even better news is that the two family members who have been teetering on the brink of existence in separate hospitals have now recovered enough to be discharged. Huzzah! Let everyone rejoice the homecomings!
And to anyone who was hoping the title of this piece was somehow a salacious intro to a naughty confession, my apologies. I’m sorry to disappoint your prurient desires.
Doing a Thing…
In case anyone wonders, I am doing a THING.
I can neither describe it nor defend it, but I’m definitely doing it because I plunked down a $25 no-refund application fee and I will spend an insane amount of money before I admit I am ill-qualified to do the THING.
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Continue reading Doing a Thing…
Hell’s Home Kitchen – Napalm Edition
I recently read a few other bloggers’ trials and tribulations in the kitchen–HERE and again HERE and this made me reflect on some of my worst disasters.
Please enjoy my retrospective and recollections of thymes past.
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Continue reading Hell’s Home Kitchen – Napalm EditionWhen the Pumpkin Hits the Fan…
<<<STRESS>>>
Everybody has it. It’s the energy that fuels life. If you don’t have enough stress, you probably would have been eaten by something furry back in prehistoric times to keep you from reproducing your laid-back DNA. Stress kept you on your toes back then.
Nowadays, however, it tends to be a corrosive that eats away at your central nervous system unless you learn to deal with it in someway. Today was a test of my emergency stress management responses. You may have handled things differently–probably averting the same crises with ease. But, I defy you to read the following and not at least have a little sympathy for a mom who just wanted to read a book.
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Continue reading When the Pumpkin Hits the Fan…….And then this happened
Last night I tried to write a blog post. I was struggling to put into words how I feel about the situation in Minneapolis. The anger that permeates all the news regarding race in our country. The helplessness to change anything.
And then I went upstairs to check on my son and was reminded of WHY you never leave him alone for any reason…
This happened because I told him I was going to cut his hair the next day.
I often wonder whether my son is actually listening to me.
Now I know.
He is listening with a vengeance.
And a plan.
Below is a link on Facebook to my reaction to his styling techniques.
If you are struggling to get through depression or the continuing of Covid-19 isolation, or you could just use a laugh, it is my gift to you.
Also, you won’t be feeling so bad about your own hairstyles now, will you?
https://www.facebook.com/Kirizar/videos/10157361845595868/
I.E.D.s in the Family Tree
I used to scream bloody murder when I was a child. I would shriek so loud, so long, that eventually I would go hoarse. I even developed nodes–tightened knots on my vocal chords. When I finally figured out screaming wasn’t helping me I stopped. This allowed my vocal chords to relax and I discovered I had a deeper register. (As a result, I sing somewhere between contralto and tenor with a hiccup in my falsetto.)
What I couldn’t have told you, even if you had asked, was why. Why did I devolve into a nightmare child shuddering in hysterics? I couldn’t tell you then, but I might be able to tell you now.
But first, a little back story…
Continue reading I.E.D.s in the Family Tree
Hiding from the Moon on a Very Dark Night
In case anyone needs to hear this, you are going to make mistakes as a parent. Some of them will be colossal. Just try not to let that be your standard operating procedure. Learn from my mistakes…
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TheDustSeason 