Picket Fence Post

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 is a draft of the brief ”amusing anecdote” I was working on for our family Christmas/Hanukkah cards . . . the one that The Spouse said could be misinterpreted by some as too mean-spirited and anti-holiday-ish, therefore it got the ax. (For the full saga of the Redacted Christmas cards, go here.)

Her hairstyle — a high ponytail pinned atop her head resembled a Palin-do, before anyone knew what a Palin-do was – had been dubbed too “embarrassing” to wear outside of the house on a family walk.

“What’s up with that?” her husband asked, gesturing toward her brown spikes of hair jutting toward the sky.

“Mom!” shouted her exasperated-sounding 10-year-old son, “you CAN’T go out with your hair like THAT!”

“Yeah,” the 10-year-old girl chimed in.

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because it’s embarrassing,” the boy said.

Embarrassing. That’s what she’d become. An embarrassment.

As her family prepared to take a walk down the street to the park, she decided she’d show them embarrassment. Out of the hall closet came a pair of Groucho Marx glasses, the ones with the crazy nose and fluffily exaggerated eyebrows and mustache that the kids wore for last year’s Christmas card photos. The look of horror on the family members’ faces when she appeared in the driveway with her hair down but wearing the glasses was well worth the irritating accumulation of condensation inside the bulbous plastic nose and the annoying synthetic hairs poking into her eyes and mouth.

“Mooom! You’re NOT wearing that, are you?” the girl asked, visually scouring the street hoping there were no witnesses to this spectacle which could potentially destroy her budding social life with tales of the nut-job mom with a mustache.

“Wearing what?” she asked, coyly smirking as she crossed the street and strolled down the sidewalk, wearing the glasses all the way down the street until she’d sufficiently embarrassed those who had mocked her and, much to her relief, before any passersby spotted her.

Although I’m not a person who would typically be described as being ”crafty” (as in crafts, not sneaky), I used to love making our annual Christmas and Hanukkah cards. Ever since our twins were toddlers, The Spouse and I have been making different Christmas cards (in the shapes of ornaments, sometimes with decorative fabric ribbons, or vellum overlays) and including a short, funny story to serve as an antidote to the traditional family holiday letter where folks recount the previous 12 months’ events. Our Christmas card stories usually got laughs at our, or our kids’, expense.

But over the past two years, this Christmas card business has become a source of contention in my house. Why? Because I’m no longer allowed to write about anything that’s truly comedic because the kids say it embarrasses them. It’s one thing to write about our lives in this space where I don’t mention the kids’ names or post their photos. But it’s quite another thing, they maintain, to write a funny anecdote about them, attach their photos, and send them out to all of our family members, friends and neighbors, including kids with whom they attend school.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to come up with a topic that would: a) Be funny and b) Be acceptable to the Picket Fence Post family.

The story about The Spouse trying to prove he’s not middle-aged when he hopped up on the kids’ Rip Stick . . . and then fell flat on his back in the driveway, prompting the kids to fetch me so I could help him up? To make it funny, we were worried that it might come across as too mean. People who don’t get my sense of humor might pick up the phone and inquire about why I was being cruel to my husband and suggest it was un-Christmasy, maybe offer up a phone number for a couples therapist.

The story about The Youngest Boy plunging into mourning after we sold our tan mini-van (called “The Funny Van” since we got it seven years ago), complete with sobbing and angrily lashing out against our new family vehicle? The Youngest Boy got very upset at the prospect of me writing something like that. Then he told us, AGAIN, how much he missed the mini-van and was still angry we got rid of it.

The series of Q&A’s I did with the three kids where I asked them a variety of questions about their current likes and dislikes, with plans to excerpt the best parts on a card insert? The Spouse said it wasn’t funny enough. Nor was it cutesy enough. It was just kind of blah, he said.

The anecdote about The Spouse and the children telling me I couldn’t take a walk down the street to the park with them unless I fixed my hair (because it was “embarrassing” piled up on top of my head and “sticking out”) which prompted me to don Groucho Marx glasses as I strolled down the street? The Spouse thought it was too cutting toward me in the same way the Rip-Stick story was too cutting about him.

With the deadline for the Christmas and Hanukkah cards bearing down, I suggested that I create something I dubbed, “The Redacted Christmas card.” I’d write some sentences and use a thick Sharpie marker to draw lines through the nonsense, filler text as if I were a government censor. It would go something like this:

“It was at THAT moment, when The Youngest Boy was banned from eating chicken. The rest of the nonsense text would go on for a few lines and be unreadable as it would be covered by a thick, black line. But then, The Eldest Boy, chimed in, establishing why he’s been nicknamed, The Instigator. The quick brown fox jumped . . . now how does the rest of that cliched sentence go, the one my father used to type when he would try out new typewriters? But you had to hand it to The Girl, who, in November, decided to ditch her feminine name and replace it with ‘Nick.’”

I thought a censored Christmas card would be kind of funny (thought it was really just my passive aggressive response to being censored), but The Spouse disagreed, saying, “Maybe five of your friends would think it was funny. Everyone else would be confused.” He said he could envision relatives calling us and asking for an unmarked copy of the story.

Seeing as I found it creatively impossible to concoct an amusing card under such conditions, I opted for no story at all.

But I’m not planning on letting my efforts go to waste. I’m going to post the kids’ Q&A’s here, as well as some of the rejected holiday cards stories, ones that were deemed inappropriate for the family Christmas card. There shall be no redacting here.