Picket Fence Post

For the past few years I’ve addressed the issue of holiday stress – particularly when you gather multiple generations together for a high-pressure holiday dinner — by creating Dysfunctional Family Bingo cards. I take awkward-but-realistic scenarios that might occur during (before or after) your family’s Thanksgiving dinner and place each one into a box on a BINGO card and pray that no one checks off enough boxes to actually win.

In some twisted way, writing up all of these scenarios amuses me and serves as a reminder that EVERYONE experiences a bit of familial dysfunction during holiday dinners so we may as well just find the humor in them. (For the full history of Dysfunctional Family Bingo, go here.)

What kinds of scenarios am I talking about? For the past couple years, I’ve used a few of my own holiday dinner experiences (though there’s no way I’m ‘fessing up which ones are autobiographical) as well as some which my friends have shared with me in order to fill out each box on the Bingo card. Here are a few from my 2008 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card:

– Some older children at the gathering taught your impressionable young child how to spit, the glory of purple nurples and new vocabulary words like the “F” word.

– Your mother suggests that you join her in starting a diet in the new year, noting that your pants are getting “a bit snug” and asks you if you’ve ever heard of the term “muffin top.”

– It gets heated when several members of the family cannot agree on the best, fastest route to take from this location to the mall.

– A male relative drags you outside and points out everything that’s wrong with your house, from the roof and gutters, to the window screens and the chimney.

– Maxi pads, whose box you had tucked away in a bathroom cabinet, were taken out by a young nephew who decided to remove the paper strips on the back and stick them all over the bathroom wall in a random pattern.

This year, I’m going to ask you, my smart and witty Picket Fence Post readers, to please contribute YOUR OWN oddball/dysfunctional family holiday dinner scenarios which could happen (or have happened) during the celebration of Thanksgiving. I’ll use reader suggestions along with my own to create my 2009 Dysfunctional Family Bingo card. Please e-mail me your contribution (everybody’s got at least one amusing scenario) — to meredithobrien@hotmail.com — no later than noon on Monday, November 23.

 The best four contributions (as determined by me) will earn their creators an autographed and personalized copy of my collection of humor/parenting columns, Suburban Mom: Notes from the Asylum, where the motto is, “Parenting is best done with a hearty sense of humor.”  Looking forward to reading your e-mails!

Image credit: AP.

The Picket Fence Post Family Christmas/Hanukkah Card Photos: Recent photo session with the three Picket Fence Post children was a disaster. Said session was punctuated by tears, parental threats, puffy eyes (still red from previous bouts of crying which delayed the taking of photos until children’s eyes were less red), forced awkward smiles (called to mind the web site Awkward Family Photos), an energetic (and slightly vicious) pediatric pillow fight and the labeling of yours truly as, and I quote, “the worst person in the world.” (No, the kid who said that does not watch Keith Olbermann’s declarations of who the “Worst Person in the World” is for each particular weekday. However the mere fact that I asked the children to put on nice clothing and brush their hair is clearly grounds for human rights violations. I should start planning for my trial at the Hague.) I’m contemplating actually using some of the odder, weirder shots and chronicling the photographic debacle for a bit of holiday humor, greetings for those with a sense of humor.

Mentos/Diet Coke: This summer I bought a six-pack of 16.9 ounce Diet Coke bottles and a six-pack of Mentos packets with the intent of reenacting the Diet Coke/Mentos explosion — the one you’ve likely seen on the internet – in our backyard. Long story short, I just — FINALLY — got the chance to do it this afternoon after weeks upon weeks of The Youngest Boy whining, “When are doin’ the Diet Coke-Mentos thing?”. What a bust. Maybe we did it wrong because it didn’t look anything like we thought it should. Maybe we should’ve used a two-liter bottle instead of those small ones. Completely anti-climatic.

Soccer’s Over. Hello Basketball: The final soccer games of the season for The Girl and The Eldest Boy were rained out on Saturday. (The Girl’s game was re-scheduled for Sunday, but we were at my niece and nephew’s combined birthday party. The Eldest Boy’s game has yet to be re-scheduled.) And just as I was starting to enjoy the fact that I didn’t have to race around delivering them to various fields for practices and trying to remember who had the game where and whose practice ended when, we’ve started receiving e-mails to alert us to the fact that basketball season starts in two weeks. (The Spouse is The Girl’s head coach and is assisting The Eldest Boy’s team so things’ll be insane around here in short order. Not many family meals together during the week I expect.) Meanwhile, The Youngest Boy just started a once weekly hockey scrimmage thing on Sunday mornings before church. (That doesn’t include his Saturday morning hockey skills sessions.) How is it that I was naively thinking about getting a break?

Going on Month Four of Working at the Kitchen Table: The Picket Fence Post family puppy Max, now 6 months old, is still not completely housebroken yet. Whenever he sets his paws on a carpet, he acts as though it’s the grass outside and he pees. So that means he spends his days in our kitchen on its hard wood floors (on which *knock wood* he hasn’t had an accident in a very long time). But since he’s a puppy who’s still teething, Max needs to be monitored or else he’ll gnaw on the furniture and get into stuff. (That’s when he’s not in his crate whining about the fact that I had the nerve to leave the room.) Guess who’s been doing the monitoring? That’s right. I’ve been working on my laptop at the kitchen table or the kitchen counter for almost four months so that I can allow Max to run around when the Picket Fence Post kids are in school. (Once they get home and heap their stuff atop mine, the kitchen looks like a Superfund site.) We recently had our backyard fenced in and that’s taken some of the pressure off because I can let Max out to romp around (and tire out) like the little maniac he is, but the world starts feeling mighty small when you spend most of your days confined to one room. Kind of feels like I’ve been grounded. Then again, maybe I deserve to be grounded, what with being the worst person in the world and all.

This morning, I officially became the mom from A Christmas Story, the mom who “accidentally” broke the leg lamp her clueless husband won in some inane contest. But this isn’t about a leg lamp.

Seeing that it was like the Arctic outside this morning, I advised my three offspring to dress warmly, to don hats, mittens, scarves and season appropriate clothing.

But that, apparently, was just silly talk.

The Girl, who’s angry that I insisted that she wear her pink mittens (new ones I ordered haven’t arrived yet), fought me bitterly over the fact that she couldn’t POSSIBLY wear pink mittens. I told her to blame it on me, her nutty, unhip mother if any kids said anything to her, a pre-teen Sporty Spice. However, as I watched her walk to the bus stop — about 10 paces ahead of her twin brother – I saw her remove her mittens, just like I used to do when I was her age and got on the school bus, triumphantly yanking off the winter hat that my mother had made me wear.

Then, an hour later, I had to see The Youngest Boy off to school. (This is where the Christmas Story scene with Randy in the snowsuit where he couldn’t put his arms down comes in.) He was willing to wear his Bruins hat and his mittens. All good. But then I went to help him put the white, fleece scarf around his exposed neck, the scarf he said he liked and wanted when I bought it for him in September.

And all hell broke loose.

He said I was choking him as I tied it around his neck. I was being mean, he said, when I said it was pointless to wrap the scarf around the outside collar of his jacket and not on his naked neck flesh.

He ran away from me and said he hated me, all the way to the bus stop, where he gave me his back the entire time.

Guess it’s karmic payback.

The Picket Fence Post family survived two Thanksgiving dinners this past weekend and managed to fill two squares on the Dysfunctional Family Bingo card . . . though I’m not sayin’ which two because my loving family members read this blog.

*waving, ‘hi’ to family*

The day after Thanksgiving I (at my parents’ house where the kids watched about 47 hours of TV), we attended a Christmas parade featuring giant balloons (Cat-in-the-Hat, Strawberry Shortcake, etc.) and a few street cleaners which were, no lie, part of the procession. The kids’ favorite part, I suspect, was gathering the pieces of candy which were hurled in their general direction by parade participants. Given that two out of the three kids didn’t really eat much at Thanksgiving dinner — unlike their parents who stuffed themselves –they must’ve been hungry.

As soon as the parade concluded, we went inside the mall along the parade route and got in line to visit Santa. Panic ensued when the skeptical Eldest Boy told me, “I’m not going to see him. He’s not the real Santa. I’m going to write [the real] Santa a letter.” And the kid refused to get in line.

I was concerned that his move would taint the experience of his siblings and prompt a crisis of Christmas faith, but The Girl and The Youngest Boy were distracted by the fact that they didn’t know exactly what they want for Christmas (making Christmas shopping vexing!) and didn’t know what to say to the big guy in red. (The Spouse and I suggested that they tell him they’ll send him a letter with a specific request later.)

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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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