The Love Bugs

Aislinn: Mommy, I have to write a story for Student Treasures and it's really hard.

Mommy: What is Student Treasures?

Aislinn: I don't know.

Mommy (figuring it must be a class anthology): What's hard about it?

Aislinn: It's going to be really long, and we need to use lots of adjectives and I've only written three chapters so far.

Mommy: Well what is it about?

Aislinn: It's about a lady bug named Maria. In Chapter One she graduates from college. In Chapter Two she has two kids and in Chapter Three she goes out with hot guys.

Mommy (oh, God, please tell me this hasn't been seen by the teacher): She needs to date the hot guys and get married before she has kids. Can you switch the chapters, or change Chapter Two to be the last chapter?

Aislinn: I don't feel like erasing it.

Mommy (I will remain calm, but oh, God, please tell me we can change this before it goes to publication): You have to. People need to get married before they have kids...

After some persistent convincing on my part and a lively debate on who has kids but isn't married (actually, she couldn't think of anyone), Aislinn finally agreed to rework the plot. Today after school she reported that she was rewriting the whole thing rather than erasing Chapter Two, so hopefully the crisis has been averted for now.

I can't imagine where this view of the world came up. Oh, wait, yes I can. The Disney Channel and it's nonstop lineup of single parents. Walt must be rolling in his grave.

Fries with That?

Today Marty was digging around in our bucket of plastic food, trying to find an egg to put in his chocolate stew. I guess he got tired of looking, because suddenly he said “Pizza! You always need pizza for the chocolate stew.” A few minutes later he told me that he needed to mix it with the loud mixer so I should go play somewhere else.

When we lived in Kentucky, a little girl in the neighborhood would come over to play restaurant, and drive 3-year-old Aislinn completely crazy. Aislinn would sit at her little table and order chicken and french fries, just as she had in every restaurant she’d ever visited, and the other girl (who was about 8) would say she didn’t have any french fries because we didn’t have any plastic french fries. She would only serve the food that we had a plastic representative for, nothing imaginary. I would always suggest that she pretend that the carrots were french fries, but she never went for that suggestion. Finally, I suggested that they stop playing restaurant before Aislinn was driven to drink the Bud Light she was always ordering (we had unlabelled silver cans that the 8-year old allowed to be beer).

My kiddies may be at the odd end of the spectrum, but every once in a while it’s nice to see that their imaginations are still intact.

Every Which Way But Out

I can still vividly remember the sensation of my top front tooth coming out. I won't attempt to explain it here, since as we have repeatedly told Aislinn, everyone's front teeth come out. Her front teeth have been very loose and wiggly for over a month, and yet she refuses to work at getting them out, and runs from the room whenever we ask for a shot at them.

Unfortunately, her short stint as a shark has convinced her that the best way to get teeth out is to sit in a dentist chair, shot up with Novocaine and watching Shrek while the dentist wriggles them out. She has decided that she is going to try to hold onto her front teeth until April when she is scheduled to go back to the dentist. We have several issues with that plan, one of which is that professional loose tooth wriggling rings in at about $20 at tooth, and we really don't want to find ourselves shelling out $400 over the course of her baby teeth for services that nature is willing to provide for free.

Another problem is that her teeth are not just loose, they are shifting and moving all over the place. She is starting to look a bit like the hillbilly she might have become had we stayed in Kentucky. Instead of the exquisitely cute girl you see in the banner above, she is beginning to look a bit like this:


One of her little friends recently lost her two front teeth during some game where her sister accidentally kicked her in the face. I'm thinking of having them over for a round of whatever that was to get this show on the road. I suppose it is some consolation that she'll be at the dentist and the teeth will be out one way or another before her next big photo opportunity in May (First Communion), but I think that $40 would do more for her in her college fund than the dentist's till.

How Not to Increase Your TV Time

Tearful Marty, placing hand on my knee: Mommy, I don't want to die.

Mommy: What?

Marty: I don't want to die. Aislinn said if I knock over that lamp the house will explode.

Mommy: The house will not explode. You shouldn't be playing with the lamp, but the house will not explode if you knock it over. Aislinn?

Aislinn: ... (smirk and shrug)

Mommy: Aislinn, don't tell your brother that. The house will not explode if he knocks over the lamp.

Aislinn: Well that's what I saw happen on TV.

Is this true SpongeBob? Hannah Montana? Who is blowing up houses with toppling lamps? We are about to beat a hasty retreat to Noggin and PBS if this sort of behavior continues.

The Twenty-First Amendment

The other day when I arrived to pick up Marty, his teachers were laughing and debating whether to tell me something he had said. I figured it might be related to the detailed yet somehow skewed specifics of potty-training that he often spouts. Instead, she said (in a whisper), "Today Marty asked me if I drink W. I. N. E."

I was momentarily puzzled, because I didn't realize that Marty knew how to spell wine. But then I realized she was whispering and spelling it to save me some sort of embarrassment. When I started to laugh, I guess she felt she could continue the story,"I said 'no' and he said 'Well my daddy does.'" There was some furtive glancing between the teachers which made me think that he also said "My mommy does too. All the time. From the really big glass."

It reminded me of one time when we were in a rest stop in Kentucky around 10:00 am. We were attempting to drive from Louisville to Lexington, a trip that does not require a rest stop, but the HP had to stop to take a call from work, and since we were stopped, 2-year-old Aislinn figured she'd better go to the bathroom. As we were walking back out through the mostly empty echoing lobby I told her that we were going to go get Daddy a drink. She declared, "Yeah, we're going to go get Daddy a beer! Daddy loves beer!" One nearby little old lady who had started to smile and give me the "isn't she cute" nod was suddenly stricken with a look of horrified surprise. Another older couple laughed a little and said "That's quite a word for a little girl to know." I smiled and left, not embarrassed but happy that we now had something funny to talk about on our seemingly endless 90-minute trip.

I appreciate that Marty's teachers were trying to be discreet when discussing our drinking habits, but it was just another example about how life among the teetotalers is starting to get tiresome. Just because our kids are familiar with wine and beer (the words not the tastes) doesn't mean they are living in some sort of gin house. Sometimes I would like to step out the front door and shout "Alcohol consumption couldn't be more legal. They tried to get rid of it and it didn't work. So Bottoms Up you self-righteous @#$$%s!!" And then I would bend down and take the beer away from the baby.