Mid-CenturyModernMoms

Where school seems to go on forever

Unlike most of the rest of the country, my kids are still in school. I know... it seems to last forever and yet it's never long enough! We've got one more week before they're out for the summer. This is the week of final exams. They go in at weird times, and leave at weird times. I have no clue when they should be where. I figure that it's their responsibility to get to their final exams on their own.  Once the exams are over, they're both going to be home all summer long. Yup, all summer long. Gulp!

I'm of mixed emotions. I have to admit, I love tossing the alarm clock and knowing that I won't have to see 6:30 am again until September.  Sleep is very important to teenagers and for a couple of months they'll get enough to keep them on a fairly even keel. I hope.

I also love having them around much of the time. Despite what you might have heard, I like my kids and I enjoy their personalities and their wit. Most of the time. I like doing things together with them, I like when their friends come over and I can eavesdrop on conversations and find out what the heck is going on in their lives. I like when they come up with bizarre ways to entertain themselves.

However, they eat like starving grizzly bears, they are the messiest human beings on earth, and they tend to argue. A lot. It's never nice and peaceful for very long around here. My son tends to entertain his friends here more than he ever goes anywhere else. There will be 2 or 3 day marathons of video games, shouting, eating the shelves bare, and taking over my house. I think it's better that they are here than if they were unsupervised someplace else. But OMG, the noise, the mess!

My daughter leaves school and the second she is off the property, every single thing she has learned all year empties out of her head. I've never seen anything like it. It's as if she does this brain dump in the parking lot. As summer progresses she gets dumber and dumber. By the end of summer I'm ready to scream in frustration. I must say "THINK" about 3 million times a day. She totally loses the ability to think, read, or write come summer.

Additionally, the school still have no clue of what they are going to do with her next year. It's her junior year. They want her to transfer to the other high school so they can wash their hands of her and not spend a penny on her special education needs. She has refused the transfer. I have refused the transfer. The school has no alternative. She is not registered anywhere for next year. Legally, the school has to follow her last signed IEP, which says she's enrolled in their school. So far they're refusing to do that. Which is against the law. To make matters worse? The social worker who has been working with her, and who we both like, just lost her job due to budget cuts. Today was her last day. So my kid doesn't have anyone to represent her best interests. She gave me the name of some other person whom I've never met and is male, who will be taking over for the social worker. I'm so unhappy about this.

Thus this will be, for me, the summer of lawyers and lawsuits. So looking forward to this. Not. But it has to be done. She has to be in school. We've been homeschooling and it's not the best option for my ultra-social kid. If we have to, we'll continue to do so, but I'm going to make the school let her do math and science there. I can't teach either math or science at home.

Summer is also the time when I become a professional chauffer for my kids. "Mom, take me here." "Mom, I need it NOW". This will be the last summer, because they'll finally turn 16 at the end of August and then the fun really begins.

Driving lessons.

Oh lord, kill me  now.

So maybe I shouldn't be so anxious for school to be over after all. I can't even imagine what kind of hell it will be once they learn to drive.

I really miss sippy cups

My son, for all his faults, is a great kid. Smart, funny, fairly cooperative, and very loving. However, the child is not graceful. Oh, that would be putting it mildly. This is a kid that not only trips on anything in his way, he trips on absolutely nothing. He's the kid that walks into furniture, and occasionally walls. Clumsy would be his middle name.

He don't seem to have an idea of his physical space, I think. He's growing so fast that he doesn't realize how big he is. Big plus clumsy equals disaster.

He is a spiller. I used to say, "Never a meal without a spill." but he seemed to outgrow spilling all day every day. Even when he used sippy cups, he spilled, but then the spills weren't so catastrophic.

They do not seem to make sippy cups for clumsy teens. More's the pity, I say.

Today it was a big class of Kosher for Passover Coke. This is a very valuable commodity because it's made with real cane sugar and not corn syrup. It tastes really good, and I hate Coke. Hate it. So spilling and entire glass on the coffee table and over the side onto the oriental rug, well, not a good thing. He got really upset because he had to clean it up and he lost a whole glass of the special Coke. A double whammy. And of course, Coke is really sticky so just wiping it up isn't enough. Poor kid.

He's blotting and wiping and mopping and he looks up at me and says, "I really need a sippy cup."

I  agreed. He does. But they just don't make them. That's a shame, isn't it?

At Least I Wasn't Buying Preparation H...

Well, today I learned yet another reason why getting old stinks. (And I’m not just talking about the fact that you start to appreciate the comfort and holding power of a pair of underpants that reach up to your armpits.)

If you’ve lived long enough in one area — as I have — and your children have worked their way up the school system, Kindergarten through high school, you’re bound to have a couple of unpleasant youth-related experiences. Our first occurred a couple of years ago, when my husband and I were at a local restaurant having a nice dinner. We even looked forward to imbibing, just a little.

Imagine our horror, then, when the waitress arrived to take our orders — including martinis — and we realized that she was the little girl across the street who used to beg us to let her babysit our boys but she was too little. Only now she wasn’t so little. She was suddenly very big, wearing lots of makeup, and asking us what kind of vodka we wanted in our martinis.

Well. My husband and I were a little taken aback. And though we recovered — and gave her our order, which she had to have someone else bring out because, thank GOD! She was still too young to carry alcohol herself — we felt vaguely criminal while sipping our martinis. And we wondered what she would tell her parents — who, after all, were our neighbors — when she got home. “OMG! You won’t believe what lushes the Hausers are! And do you have any idea how much food they ate?? They each ordered dessert!”

That was bad, but it wasn’t horrible. Because the girl in question wasn't in the same grade as either of our sons, so it was just horrible in a "well, now the neighbors know we like to kick back a martini or two" kind of way.   

But then there's what happened on Saturday.  That was horrible.

I was at the grocery store, unloading an entire week’s worth of groceries, including alcohol, assorted embarrassing items you usually keep hidden away in your medicine cabinet, and guilty snack foods I only eat when I think nobody else is around. 

All of a sudden I heard a cheery, "Oh, hello, Mrs. Hauser!  How are you?"  And I looked up, only to find that the cashier in my check out lane was a girl who is in my son's high school class.  A girl whom I’ve known since first grade, chaperoned on many field trips, watched from the sidelines as my husband coached in soccer, and from whom I've bought far too many Girl Scout cookies over the years. 

And as I watched the contents of my grocery cart roll down the conveyor belt toward this girl who’s known me as an upstanding member of the PTA for her entire life, I had a dilemma.

Did I want her to think that my son — the one with whom she goes to high school, and who has, thus far, displayed a remarkable clumsiness when it comes to conversing with the opposite sex — has a condition that requires deodorizing foot powder? No.

But did I want her to think that the extra strengh powder in question was mine?  NO.

Did I really want her to know that I needed two bottles of wine to get me through the week?  No.

But did I want to snatch the bottles and dump them in the cart of the unsuspecting stranger behind me, thus going without?  NO!

Did I really want her to know that I have, on occasion, a need to use Jolene lip bleach? No.

Did I want her to assume my husband was the one who needed it, instead?  Well....Why not?  He wasn't with me; might as well throw him under the bus.

But really, I had no choice.  All I could do was blush and stammer as I paid for all my embarrassing necessities.  Thank goodness she didn’t then add, “And would you like your wine in paper, or in plastic?”

This is just not something you think about, when your kids and their friends are all tiny and cute and playing together; you just do not look at them, holding hands on the playground, and think to yourself, “Wow. I can’t wait until I can start asking them what the drink special is tonight!”

I don’t know what to do now. I guess I’ll have to start buying groceries — and ordering martinis — in the next town or two over. Darn these kids and their pesky habit of growing up.

They’re really putting a cramp on my life.

Of Belly Buttons, Locusts and Peanut M&Ms

By Jenny Gardiner

It's taken me a while to figure this out. Well perhaps more like it's taken me a while to pinpoint the comparison. But finally it dawned on me what teens are like: locusts.

Okay, I don't mean that literally. But the thing is, once kids get old enough to be utterly self-sufficient while not concerned necessarily with being responsible, they're capable of such indirect destruction, they can be compared to a plague of locusts. Or at least a swarm.

This morning I woke to a clean kitchen. Helped youngest get ready and off to school, came back, cleaning as I went along. Next went to spinning class, returning home early enough to corral shift #2 (the older two) off to school.

But what greeted me when I returned to the house? My clean kitchen was ravaged. In one short hour, it went from crumb-and-dish-free to riddled with all of the above and then some. But where a swarm of locusts would sweep in and strip bare all that is before them, my kids instead left a trail of evidence. Starting with the remnants from yesterday's backpacks: dirty soccer gear, boxers, sweatshirts, socks, uneaten lunch box contents (left to fester in the sink). Homework papers and discarded tests left on bar stools and on the steps, phone chargers, ponytail holders, hairbrushes, flipflops, sneakers, everywhere. You name it.

And then there was the trail of breakfast and lunch detritus randomly left out for the house elves to put back: the butter (crumb-laden), crusted cereal bowls, knives (for both butter and peanut butter and jelly). Empty Tostidos and pretzel bags. One of those damned Propel packets, empty of its contents, corner snipped and on the floor. Cinnamon Toast Crunch box with 2 lonely nuggets remaining in the bottom. Cups, juice, milk, smoothie ingredients hardening in the blender. The list goes on and on. Crumbs by the toaster. Crumbs by the stove. Tea bags left to dribble on the counter, right near the speckles of honey and the scattered granules of sugar.

I pointed out this locust comparison to the older two who laughed and acknowledged their culpability. They walked out the door, late as usual to school (despite not having to be there till 9:40 a.m.), leaving mom to be the one following the elephants in the circus. My son did kindly point out that they are actually more like 'reverse-locusts,' what with their leaving so much behind, rather than barren stalks and no evidence of the presence of any life besides that. Such is the glamorous life of a writing mom.

It's been a teen sort of week here. Middle child turned 16, declaring a few weeks ago her intent to have her belly-button pierced for her Sweet 16. Mind you, I saw Lisa Ling suffer through a navel-piercing when she tried out for The View years ago on TV. I witnessed her ashen face, her intent to win a coveted slot on the show overcoming her common sense at the time. My #2 hates needles. Absolutely hates them--to the point of passing out on them. Thus we gave her our blessings to go ahead and pierce away, figuring  A) there are far worse methods of self-mutilation. And B) what are the chances she'll really go through with it?

Did I mention she hates needles?

In the meantime, while I weather the storms of teen behavior, I'm facing my own anxieties head-on. While my next book is on submission and awaiting reactions from editors, I am taking the bull by the horns and doing what any lilly-livered wuss with food-as-comfort issues would do: stress-eating peanut M&Ms. Green ones, if that matters at all.