A play date.

This is the last full week of summer vacation.  Monday morning arrived with overcast skies and a lot of rain.  The kids insisted on a “stay-home day” which quickly turned into a “whining and fighting day.”  It appears that others were having the same problem.  Just after lunch, the Middle Kid’s friend from across the street called and invited him to play.

Our neighbors with the cat are home now.  (One side note – they were grateful for my slug traps.)  They have a daughter that is two years older than our youngest and the girls like to play together.  She was very happy to come to play at our house this afternoon.  But their play dates provide an interesting language challenge.

Our neighbors speak German at home but their daughter goes to school in French.  I speak to the mom in English, but she doesn't know French.  When her little girl comes here to play, I can speak to her daughter in French, and she can tell me what she needs (in French).  My daughter bosses her around quite successfully in English.  I don’t think she speaks much at all when they are actually playing.  Although, one day, her mom asked me if our Little One speaks Dutch.

Huh?

No, I assured her that while Dutch has trickled in here and there sometimes with the boys, the Little One would have no reason to have learned it yet.  She explained that her daughter told her ours spoke Dutch.

Today, I figured out why her daughter thinks that ours speaks Dutch.  The girls were playing together at our house and at one point, mine was jibber-jabbering away in complete nonsense.  When I asked her what language she was speaking, she said French.  

Her teacher is going to have a lot of fun next week.

The Annual School Supply Scavenger Hunt

I don’t know why I keep thinking that the search for school supplies will get easier every year.  It just doesn’t.  This year, I have three lists, with varying degrees of complicity. 

The Little One’s list is pretty easy.  Things like markers, crayons (which are actually colored pencils), glue sticks, pillow and blanket for nap time, and a box for her nuk when it’s not nap time. 

The Middle Kid’s list had the potential to be difficult, but it has only been two years since I bought all of the same stuff for the big kid.  The more strange the item on the list, the more likely I was to remember it.  Like three little boxes, or a deck of playing cards, or a pair of dice. 

The 3^rd Grader’s list was the toughest.  This year, I learned what “highlighter” and “protractor” are in French.  “Equerre” and “surligneur” respectively.  I'm more than a little bit scared for the homework he's going to need help with.

One problem with all of the lists is that they can be very specific.  For example, they all need pads of paper, and colored paper.  But they all need a different size, and sometimes the teachers specify which weight.  They each need several presentation folders.  (These are plastic folders, with clear plastic pages to insert artwork, etc.)  But each kid needs folders with different numbers of pages, and I’m convinced that sometimes they teachers specify folders with page counts that don’t exist.  Like one kid needed a folder with 50 pages.  But in all the stores I went to, I could only find 40 pages or 60 pages.  Recently, (I think maybe last year) I let go of my type-A need to be exact, which was liberating. This year, if I needed a folder that required 50 pages and I couldn’t find it, I just bought the 60 page one.  It made things much easier.

Another problem is that words don’t translate exactly.  (Something about “French-French” and “Belgian-French”).  So while they are sometimes helpful, my online translator tools and pocket dictionary don’t always cut it. 

I have developed a strategy, though.  And it seems to work year after year, especially in the smaller, specialty paper stores.  I head to the school supply aisle.  I get as much as I can by myself.  Then, I wait until an unsuspecting employee ventures within a two-asile vicinity.  I pick the most obscure things on the list, explain I don’t speak French very well and have them show me what they are.  This year, I started with the protractor and highlighter.  My employee was very patient and helpful this year, and she walked me through about five or six other things.  There were even a few things that she couldn’t figure out, which oddly made me feel a lot better.  After she went on her way, I sorted myself out and realized I only had a few things left.  Next I asked an unsuspecting mom, that took care of another one or two and the rest I’ll figure out later. 

So while the lists don’t get any easier, I suppose my comfort level -- and therefore attitude -- has improved.  Mostly, I’ve just learned to let go of having to do the whole thing perfectly, which has helped the stress level immensely.  

The War On Slugs

I hate slugs.  They are just disgusting little creatures.  I’m sure they serve some sort of purpose, but for the life of me, I can’t figure out what.  Last year, I ran through the grass late at night in the backyard.  Barefoot.  I stepped on a slug.  That did nothing to promote them in my eyes.

The last few weeks, we have been looking after our German neighbors’ cat.  The cat, we call it tripod (it only has three legs) is a really sweet outdoor cat.  To make it easier on us, they made a little outdoor shelter for the cat on their patio bench, gave it a huge tank of self-filling dry food and all we have to do is check in every couple of days to make sure it has enough and maybe give her a few treats.  It’s prefect, really, as when I watch this cat for their smaller trips, the cat prefers to stay out for days at a time anyway.  And I know from experience that cats who get mad about their people traveling like to pee all over carpets.  So it’s a pretty good set-up for everyone.

Except that I realized the cat wasn’t eating.  I thought maybe she was mad about her people being gone.  Every couple of days I gave her a can of wet food to appease her and make sure she wasn’t starving.  However, one early morning visit the other day revealed the real reason the cat didn’t want to eat. 

The slugs had slimed her food.  Yuck, yuck and yuck.  It was a damp morning, and to my horror, I looked down and her food was covered with giant, slimy slugs.  She looked at me and meowed.  Ok then.

Right then and there, we declared war on the slugs.  I grabbed the food tank to scrap them off her bench.  I shuddered and did that little creepy-shiver dance thing you do when something is really gross.  The slugs landed in a pile on the ground, as did about a cup-and-a-half of her food.  It was the slimed part anyway.  I laid new towels down on her bench to cover all of the slim trails.  I filled her dish with fresh food.  I left the big pile of food on the ground to serve as a decoy.  Slugs are by nature lazy, right?  They won’t climb up her bench if there is a pile of food on the ground.

And then.  I remembered reading somewhere a long time ago that snails like the taste of beer.  If you put some in a shallow dish, they climb into it, get drunk and can’t get out.  Maybe slugs like beer too?  After all, aren't they kind of the same as slugs, just with a shell?  I went home and got a beer and some shallow plastic take-away dishes.  I came back an hour later and guess what?  There was a slug taking a drink of beer.  I found a stick and “helped” him to get a better taste. 

A couple of hours later, the five-year-old and I went back to check out the slug situation.  There was a whole bunch of them helping themselves to the pile of cat food.  I grabbed two (really long) sticks and chopstick-style, we helped them all taste the yummy beer.  Tonight when we checked, there was only one slug.  It turns out, he likes beer too.

The only part of this I’m pondering, is how am I going to explain the dishes on the patio filled with dead beer-slugs to our neighbors?  They return in a couple of days.  I sure as heck am not going to touch the beer-slug dishes.  Unless it’s to put more slugs in the beer.  Or maybe more beer into the slugs.

Current Tally in the War on Slugs: 

Me:  13  (Slugs)

Slugs:  None. 

Kitty: 2  (mice, but I’m not touching those either.) 

My neighbors are going to find a whole carnage-death scene on their patio when they return.  But I suppose as long as their cat is alive and not starving to death, maybe they won't care?  And their carpets won't have cat pee all over them...so maybe that's something too.  

  

The Longest Line

 So in my previous post I mentioned a long line for a ride that Number 3 insisted on.  We had just come back into the Park after taking a break for dinner, and we were trying to pick rides that we had never gone on.  After a few minutes in line, we realized that this particular ride was probably a mistake.  The line was long.  The line was slow.  Only a few people could go on the ride at a time.  It was sort of excruciating.  But a few pivotal things happened.

The first, was mentioned previously.  The Little One picked it, and insisted, and we obliged.  The second, was that we saw another kid with Alopecia.  Looking over early on in the long wait, I happened to see a little boy, a few years older than our Middle Kid with a bald head, marked by a few small patches of shaved hair.  It made me catch my breath. 

About one year ago, we made a trip to Disney after our five-year old’s first hospital stay and his head looked exactly the same.  We immediately made contact and started talking to the mother.  Through a combination of french and english, she explained that the doctors didn’t know what it was, but that they thought it was a reaction to a shock – she was a recent cancer survivor. (A common trigger for Alopecia is shock and stress.)  We pulled the Middle Kid’s hat off of his head and explained that he had the same thing and one year before looked exactly like her son.  She had never heard the name of it before.  Our two boys did the “exploding nucks” anytime they saw each other in line after that.

And finally, about half-way through the line, I realized there were a couple of kids trying to sneak past us in the line.  I refused to let them past.  To my complete shock, at the next turn in the line (that went by the exterior wall), I saw their mother join them.  She was kind of hard to miss, seeing as how she was wearing a hot-pink blazer that should have stayed in the 80’s.  They had settled into the line too far behind us to really care, other than tisk-tisk at each other about how ballsy that is. 

And then. About ten minutes later, I noticed that her three children were perched conveniently along the wall that would deposit them neatly in front of us, about a dozen or so people ahead from where we were standing.  She placed her hands under the armpits of the first kid.  The oldest kid slid sneakily onto the ground, securely in his new place.  I grabbed John.  I didn’t wait for him to do anything. 

In my rustic French, I started screaming.  Madame!  Madame!  Stop, there is a line!  Stop, Stop!  Or something like that.  I don’t really remember.  It couldn’t have been much more than that, my French isn’t that good.  All I remember was John laughing and saying, “Ok honey, that’s enough.”  The woman nonchalantly shrugged.  She shook her head at the kid still on the wall and pulled the other ones back over to their original spot, where they’d already cheated an unearned place.

All around me, people were nodding in agreement, saying it wasn’t fair.  Later, Avery told me that he heard all kinds of people saying (in French) that they were glad I said something.  On one hand, I was surprised that I was the only one to speak up.  On the other, I was proud of myself for seizing the moment.  I'm not usually very confrontational.  It didn’t hurt that we had just come from dinner (which was accompanied by a shared bottle of wine.)  

I won’t even get into the sick feeling I have about what kinds of lessons that lady is teaching her kids about cheating.  I’m just glad that my own kids got to see me stand up to something wrong and maybe even be a little bit of a hero, however small.

A 48-Hour Family Vacation

Preface:  It’s summer.  I have three kids.  I just can’t find a moment of peace to myself, ever.  Let alone find any time to write anything. But anyone that has followed this blog for awhile, knows that if I don’t blog, I explode.  Therefore, if there is a break in the blog, never fail, I will make up for it eventually, as you can see for yourself.

Our first month of summer break was Minnesota.  After that, it’s recovery and usually this part of the summer we get to have a visitor or two.  (Morrisons, we miss you!!)  Then it’s back-to-school prep and birthday party planning.  John’s travel starts up again.  This year, we decided that it was very important for us to dedicate some time to have a family vacation, where it was just us.  Our own little family vacation – even if it was only for 48 hours.  We had just enough time to sneak something in after the cousins departed and before Daddy had to go to Spain.  

And you’ll never guess where we went.  Yep.  We snuck away to Disneyland.  Again.  But seriously.  When will we ever live 3 hours from Disney ever again?  Not when our kids are the perfect age to enjoy it, that’s for sure.  Maybe grandkids.  And have I ever mentioned that it’s on the way to stop in the Champagne Region of France?  We cleared a space in our wine cellar (i.e. basement), packed the car and took off.  Since we were traveling on a Sunday, John even called ahead to a cellar to book an appointment.  There was no coincidence whatsoever that the name of the cellar was “Lemaire.”  None at all.

We were at Disney with plenty of time to swim before dinner.  Our day at the park dawned bright and beautiful.  Our expert park-going skills got us through our top three rides in the first 45 minutes of the Main Gate’s opening.  (Yes, we fully admit to our type-A personality traits.)  But after that, we really did relax.  Throughout the day, it became clear that it was one of our very first, family vacation memories. 

Yes of course we’ve had family vacations before this.  But we were dragging this little baby along.  Someone had to stay with her because she couldn’t go on any rides.  Someone had to make sure she had her special food, or her nap, or her whatever.  But not this time.  This time she was one of us, with her own little opinion and her own appreciation of being considered one of the crew.  She expressed this opinion clearly whenever necessary.  Like the time we considered getting out of the god-awful long line.  She screeched and declared “ME GO ON AIRPLANE RIDE NOW.”  Ok then.  We’ll wait it out.  Waiting in line together actually became a treasured part of the whole experience.  Who would’ve thought?

Her favorite ride of the day:  Pirates of the Caribbean.  Having been on it earlier in the day, it was decided that this was going to be the last ride of the day.  We raced across the park near closing time to make sure this happened.  We just made it through before they closed the ride to anyone else.  (See, sometimes being type-A has its advantages.)  It was just as big of a hit at 10 o’clock at night (even if I did worry just a little about nightmares.) To our surprise and delight, when we pulled up to get off, the attendant asked who wanted to go one more time?  (We were the last boat.)  Our family, Little One included, was all for it. 

It was a really great day.  

Potty Training, Take 3.

It’s official.  The potty training has begun on Number 3.  If I have anything to say about the matter, this is the last time I am going to go through the potty training thing.  The first kid was a tough one.  So tough, in fact, that when, on the weekend of the second kid’s second birthday and he asked me if he could sit on the potty, I flat out said “No.”  I continued to say “No” for several days.  I told him he was “too little” and explained that I didn’t even have any pull-ups in the house.  Little did I know that this was the absolute, perfect strategy for Number 2.  After a week of him asking, I finally relented and put him in these itty-bitty underpants.  He never had a single accident, and I got to completely skip the pull-up in between thing.

And while I know I got off easy with Number 2, it is safe to say that after 8 years, I am really, really tired of poop.

The Little One starts school next month.  A big motivator to get going on the potty training, for sure.  I could hardly start anything like that with us traveling for a month, so after the jet lag wore off, it was clearly time.

I tried a new strategy this time.  One morning, we woke up and I just put her in big girl princess underpants.  Every twenty minutes that whole first day I asked her if she had to go potty.  I went through every single princess in the package.  She peed on the couch a couple of times.  (Which was perfect timing as we had been meaning to get a new couch anyway.)  I did a lot of laundry those first few days, but it seems to have worked.  She announces to the world that she needs to go and she runs to the potty.  She refuses to use a seat of any sort, all the way declaring “Me a big girl.  Me do it.  Me do it.”  And she does.  Ok then. 

But there’s one catch.  While she’s good at the pee-pee part, she absolutely flat out refuses to do the other on the potty.  I’ve coaxed.  I’ve explained.  I’ve even made up stupid songs to sing, but to no avail.  So after a few days of dramatic accidents (made dramatic almost entirely by me, because as I said, I’m sick of poop) we reached a compromise. Now she tells me when she needs to go, we put on a diaper for that part and we go on about our day. 

But I hope this is temporary.  I’m really, really sick of poop.