Picket Fence Post

Scene: My kitchen where I’m making dinner. The 8-year-old boy suddenly appears, having just left the basement playroom where the kids were hanging out and listening to a top 40/pop radio station which I suspect has some sort of mind control over them as they’re obsessed with it and want to listen to it all the time.

Kid: Mom, what’s a disco stick?

Me: A what?

Kid: A disco stick. We were listening to a song on the radio . . .

Me: By Lady Gaga?

Kid: Yeah. And she says, “I wanna take a ride on your disco stick.”

Me: (*head imploding, trying to think up something misleading, quickly*)

Kid: Do you know what it is? A disco stick?

Me: (*thinking that lying is the way to go*) I have no idea. That Lady Gaga’s crazy, isn’t she?

****

We were all watching the Winter Olympics as a family last night and, after witnessing a few brutal wipe-outs during the women’s downhill racing event — in particular, the crash where an athlete’s body, while careening out of control down the mountain, went up a mogul and then, after flying through the air, slammed into the ground — my 11-year-old daughter ran out of the room in tears wondering why on earth anyone would willingly participate in such a sport, especially in light of the luger’s death last week. She had trouble falling asleep because she kept replaying the crash footage in her head over and over. I had to try to take her mind off of the crashes as she fell asleep . . . but not by providing the definition of “disco stick.”

However their experience watching the Olympics hasn’t been all bad. Yesterday afternoon, I’m lucky we didn’t have a wipe-out situation of our own. After-the-fact, the Picket Fence Post children informed me that they had attempted to reenact an Olympic snow boarding event. They’d donned their bike helmets, climbed atop a small snow-covered hill in our yard, then stood on the rickety wooden sled as they slid down. (I got conflicting reports on how fast their descent was.) When I responded loudly with, “You did WHAT?” they tried to distract and impress me with the news that, before they “snowboarded,” they’d taken some tall dry weeds from the woods and pretended they were the Olympic flame and ”lit” a pretend Olympic cauldron. I have no idea what was the stand-in for the cauldron. Thank God that’s as far as they went with the flame reenactment.

****

Other than attempting to impersonate Shaun White, the kids have also used their vacation time to – and I’m not kidding here — reorganize their playroom. No, I didn’t bribe them to do this. It was wholly their idea.

Normally, I’m fond of likening the room in the basement — with the half-peeled jungle/animal border, the crayon scrawled on the walls next to the holes caused by a wooden wagon and various balls being smashed into them — to a bad neighborhood, the kind of neighborhood you realize is kinda sketchy only after you’ve taken a wrong turn in an unfamiliar city.

However, the kids did an admirable job of neatening it up. They set up ”sofas” (pillows from the various sofas in the house, blankets they pilfered from bedrooms), a music listening area (so they can listen to that station that’s teaching them about “disco sticks”) and a makeshift library where they created a bookcase from cardboard boxes and duct tape and filled them with paperback books, a hardcover copy of the 2009 Guinness World Records and an assortment of sports trading cards. They created and posted on the wall a list of nine ”rules” for the room that visitors have to agree to abide by, along with an oath that visitors must sign. Among the rules were:

1) When coming downstairs, never touch the bottom step.

2) Do not ever stand on furniture.

5) Owner of drum set must be watching you if you play the drums.

No word on whether playroom visitors are required to sing along with Lady Gaga tunes, however you DO have to have a high tolerance for KISS 108.

Image credit: Getty via Gawker.