Picket Fence Post

. . . in it, my mother arrived at my house, unannounced, on a weekend day. With great flourish, she presented The Spouse and I with a baby she said she “picked up” for us. (My mother’s a super-shopper. Plus she’s been agitating for us to have a fourth kid. *Insert chuckle here* )

When The Spouse and I looked at her, dumb-founded, the baby, which my mother had named Charlie, started growing freakishly fast (like in that recent episode of Fringe) and not only became mobile, but became verbal, all within the span of an hour. The dream continued with The Spouse and I running off to the store to buy baby-proofing stuff, gates, diapers, etc. because we were unprepared for having a baby in the house.

I related the dream to The Spouse, while our offspring were in the room, and we got a big chuckle out of it. However when we started making joke about Charlie, The Youngest Boy — who gets insanely jealous when we hold our toddler nephew – started screaming, “Charlie’s a fake! There is no Charlie!”

When I unwisely pushed the issue a little bit more, saying that I thought I heard Charlie running around in the other room, The Youngest Boy went nuts, “No! There’s no Charlie!”

Apparently the dream cut a little too close to home for the kid.

Years ago, I wrote a column that somewhat embarrassed The Spouse. It asked one, central question: How do sleep deprived parents of young children enjoy “private time” together? (And those moments at midnight, when you’re both exhausted and about to fall asleep, didn’t count. The key word here is “enjoy.”)

After taking an informal survey of my friends at the time, I learned that many of them had invested in solid bedroom door locks and took advantage of the fact that their kids would be transfixed by the TV, so they kept a variety of videos and DVDs that their kids liked on hand, hoping that the glow of the TV would maintain their children’s interest and keep them away from Mommy and Daddy’s bedroom for a little while, say, 10 minutes. In addition to those suggestions, friends also offered horror stories of getting caught in the act by their children, every parents’ nightmare scenario.

I’ve never really seen that horrifically awkward moment depicted well on TV. Until this past Sunday night, when Desperate Housewives – in the midst of a major creative comeback – had a storyline about Gabby and Carlos Solis being observed by their daughter Juanita, whom they initially told that they’d been wrestling. It was priceless. And funny.

The other parental intrusion scene I’ve seen recently happened on Mad Men – during an episode called “Three Sundays” — when two grade school-aged offspring barged in on their parents, Don and Betty Draper. When asked what they were doing, their father shouted, “Sleeping!”

The link to the Desperate Housewives’ video is here, but DO NOT WATCH it with kids around or when they’re within earshot. Trust me on this.

Item #1: Beware of the Mice

If you live in the MetroWest area outside of Boston and pulled one of those plastic Little Tikes Cozy Coupes from someone’s trash thinking it was your lucky day, boy were you wrong. The thing’s filled with mice.

My sister-in-law called me today and related the story of how, when my nephews were playing with their Cozy Coupe outside this week, one of them spotted a mouse sticking its head out of the hole where the steering wheel had been. (The steering wheel was busted soon after the boys got the car.) Horrified, my sister-in-law wheeled it away with the intent of dealing with it later until she realized there wasn’t just one mouse living INSIDE the plastic car, but a whole bunch of them.

She put the car out on its side on the street next to her trashcans this morning, but before the trash haulers arrived, she noticed the Cozy Coupe was gone. She then started feeling guilty that some unsuspecting parent had grabbed the car and might’ve put it inside his or her house not realizing that it’s filled with mice. They’re in for a big surprise.

Item #2: Old Christine Gets Guilted

Speaking of guilt . . . the latest episode of The New Adventures of Old Christine really hit home for me this week as it dealt with maternal guilt, specifically, Julia Louis Dreyfus’ character Christine feeling badly because she was working so much and missing things for her kid, including forgetting to submit the application for her 12-year-old to join a lizard club. She felt so badly that she missed the deadline — as well as a party she’d promise to attend — that she agreed to go on a date with the creepy head of the club in order to secure her son’s admission to the group. Only it didn’t go as planned. (Link to the video here.)

This week I missed several deadlines for my own kids. Papers requiring my signature and homework that I was supposed to initial and correct have been flooding my house like a never-ending onslaught of junk mail. For example, I forgot to sign The Youngest Son’s reading list one night (didn’t write down what he read) and we got the list back marked with a red question mark. Last night, I didn’t have the chance to listen to The Girl read me a passage aloud three times and then grade her reading skills. This morning I had to quickly write a note telling her teacher why the homework wasn’t done.

So when the lizard guy told Christine, “A good mother doesn’t miss deadlines,” I felt that one. Right in the gut.

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The heinously evil mother sat her newly-minted 7-year-old down to write thank you notes to the people who had given him birthday presents. She’d purchased some cheery Snoopy note cards. She wrote out six different, short scripts on scrap paper for the child to copy onto each card. While the child was writing out the cards, the mother was addressing and stamping the envelopes, six in all.

“I HATE your stupid writing!” the child burst out while writing the first card. “I can’t read it.” (*slams a fist onto the kitchen table*)

“What can’t you read?” the mother asked. “I’ll tell you what it says.”

Frustration was building as the child continued to mutter and fist-pound but not identify what he couldn’t read. “This is just like cursive writing,” he said of the printed scripts. “I HATE your writing. Don’t ever write anything again!”

“Tell me what you need me to read,” the mother calmly repeated, looking over the scripts and recognizing that, indeed, when she had written the word “for” the “r” kind of resembled a “v” but thought everything else was fairly easy to make out.

But the child didn’t want the mother to help; the child wanted to complain.

“What? ANOTHER ONE?” he shouted as he was handed his fourth blank Snoopy card and accompanying script. “I HATE this.”

The mother began to get annoyed. “You’re lucky that you have the cards all written out and you just have to copy them and not figure out what you were going to write for each one,” she said, noting that the child’s writing was starting to deteriorate into scrawl. “Make sure to write nicely so people can read it. This is the least you can do for people who gave you a present.”

The criticism provoked the child even more, as he grew more and more agitated. “Why do I have to write what YOU say? They’re my letters.”

“Fine,” she replied, “write what you want.”

The kid wrote the next letter. It said: “Thank you for the chek.” (The original script said, “Thank you for thinking of me on my birthday and for the check.”)

The mother laughed. “That’s kind of short,” she remarked, getting a sinister kick out of this tedious, hard labor to which she was subjecting her youngest child.

“What?” he replied as she handed him another card. “MORE? (*pause for sniveling*) I’m going to throw up.”

The mother laughed again at the thought: Vomit-inducing thank note writing. “That would be a first,” she thought to herself.

When the child finally finished – slamming each thank card on the table with his sweaty hands – the mother put the notes in their respective envelopes and handed them back. “You can seal all of these and put them in the mailbox,” she said.

“Noooo!”

The mother, thoroughly amused, walked out of the room chuckling.

Image credit: Easy Free Printables.

We’re still trying to shake off that vacation feel and jump back into our regular, everyday life . . . but we’re not doing so well. The reason: The Boys’ first season of Pop Warner football started last night with equipment pickup. They just had their first practices (which lasted approximately 47 hours and run for 49 consecutive days, while $98,000 worth of new equipment put a huge crimp in my credit card and The Spouse and I look forward to months of making the 20-minute each way trips to drop them off and pick them up from their bazillion practices. So I’m gearing up for a long, grumpy season of hauling boys and their smelly equipment around . . . but I digress. I promised Cape tales in this blog entry. Here are the highlights:

Lucky Number Seven

We celebrated the 7th birthday of The Youngest Boy during our summer holiday by playing a rousing round of mini-golf (thank God no one won a free second round on the 18th hole) at one of the Cape’s 118 mini-golf establishments. The one we went to has a farm theme . . . because when you think Cape, you automatically think farm. The birthday boy not only miraculously got two holes-in-ones (miraculous given that he viciously pounded the golf ball on numerous occasions sending the white sphere of death sailing through the air), but we also allowed him and his siblings to waste much of our hard-earned cash in the arcade afterwards. Who knew that the most fun was to be had NOT in playing the games, but in cashing in tickets ”earned” by playing the games to get a prize worth 17 cents? (For the record, all the kids selected from the prize area some form of plastic weaponry and plastic rings guaranteed to cut off their circulation.) After mini-golf, plastic guns and birthday pizza, the birthday kid also got to go to the beach and later enjoyed a chocolate Hulk birthday cake. Plus presents.

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