Just a matter of geography

So, we're into Doctor Who now. We're Whovians.

Which is awesome, because it means we've reached a point where the entire family can agree on what to watch (so long, Disney channel sitcoms!). 

But we may be getting a little too obsessed....some members of the family more than others. It's pretty much all we talk about at the table, and the kids are constantly drawing Doctor Who pictures, and one of us may have been a little too excited to find, when she googled David Tennant, that he was born in 1971, because that means he's only one year older than me, which means that if we ever did meet and fall in love (inevitable), there wouldn't be an awkward age-gap.

This is similar to my early-90's certainty that if John Cusack just MET me, everything else would fall into place.

I just need to make sure that Amy Adams pops by on the same day, so DH gets his wish, too.

You may not recognize me

I joined a gym.

And I've actually gone to it. Like, 3 times.

So if you pass me on the street and don't recognize me, I'll understand. Pretty major transformations goin' on over here.

Speaking of major transformations, you know that cartoon where the elderly woman is walking down the street, but her shadow is her as a young ballerina? I pretty much lived that moment when I caught sight of myself during Sh'Bam class. I almost didn't recognize the old lady shimmying away in the mirror, and then I realized she was wearing the same clothes as me.

Sh'Bam, by the way, is one of the most delightfully ridiculous workouts I've ever done. (I keep calling it Sha-Boom, but that would something else. Very slowly doing jazz squares to old doo-wop songs, I would guess.)

But back to Sh'Bam. Remember how excited I was when Just Dance had that song on it that made me feel like a Solid Gold dancer? Now I get to do moves like that IN PUBLIC. Seriously, there's actually a move where you kind of do a tiger-growly-swiping at the air move. One step away from the Solid Gold dancer patented crawl-seductively-towards-the-camera move. I may start wearing a head band and leg warmers to class, just to get the full effect.

Also, there was a part when we were doing the MC Hammer dance (seriously, I couldn't make this stuff up) and I looked in the mirror and wondered who was dancing so close behind me. Then I realized that it was just my butt, taking up way more real estate than it ever did before.

Still, I walk out laughing, which is more than I can say for any of the people working on the machines. Unless they're watching me Sh'Bamming away through the windows, in which case we're all getting a good chuckle.

This is a test.

This is a test of the emergency parenting system.

Child comes out of the bathroom and says, "Something weird is going on. My underpants are all pink."

Mom and Dad exchange a significant look as Mom leaps off of the couch towards the child.

Dad beats a hasty retreat upstairs.

Mom realizes she is completely unprepared and has no idea what the next words out of her mouth should be.

Mom: "What do you mean, your underpants are all pink?"

Child shows Mom.  Her underwear is pink. As in, they went through the laundry with something red, and the underwear is now pink.

This was only a test.

If this were truly a parenting emergency, bottles of wine would have lowered from the ceiling, and Carol Brady would have been immediately dispatched to your home. 

Don't you hate it...

...when your kids teach you stuff you should already know?

We came home from swimming lessons on Saturday morning to find DH in a bit of a lather about the state of the house.

(We've kind of let the housekeeping slide over the last few weeks. And the 15 years before that.)

So DH had made a list of chores for everyone to do.

Seriously, he had written it all down on a piece of paper.

So, we finished eating, then scattered to every corner of the house to get to work.

As I cleared off the kitchen table, I picked up the list. 

S had edited it - or, as she wrote at the bottom of it, the list had been "S"-ified.

She had drawn hearts all over it, and at the end of the list of chores, she had written:

"Everybody relax.

Have fun."

Happy Mother's Day to all of you out there who, like me, have to keep relearning the same lessons over and over again. Thank goodness 9-year-olds are good teachers.

Choose your words carefully

It's not so much miscommunication, as it is people's minds skipping ahead a few grooves in the conversation.

• I'm getting my gall bladder out. I explained to the girls that it is being done 'by a robot' as the doctor will be in one corner of the room, and he will remotely control the scope going in through my belly button. (Crazy!)

But a few minutes into the conversation, one of the girls looked at me worriedly and said, "So, how does the robot get out of there after?"

• I got a summons for jury duty. I know!

After doing what I thought was a pretty good job of explaining it to them (including "and then you decide if someone is going to have to go to jail"), one of the girls looked at me worriedly and asked, "But, could you end up going to jail?" 

• We were talking about a dog that got hit by a car in our neighbourhood. 

DH: "I remember the woman was sitting there on the side of the road, with the dog's head in her lap, just crying..."

Pause as we all think of how sad that must've been.

K: "Wait a minute. The dog's HEAD in her lap?"

Me: "No, no...it was still attached to the dog."

And this last one was more about wanting the conversation to skip ahead a few grooves, so it would just end.

The subject of puberty came up during dinner the other night. After a lot of moaning and gagging and eye rolling, K and S beat a hasty retreat as soon as they could.

E, bless her heart, stuck around.

But after a few minutes, Pop launched into "Isn't it amazing, though, that you will be able to create a life inside your own body?"

She nodded half-heartedly, looked down into her folded arms, and did a long, slow, exhale.

It was truly a deep, cleansing breath. Like she was just steeling herself for the rest of the conversation.

But then we were laughing too hard at her reaction to continue.

And I said, "Pardon?"

Conversation over breakfast.

DH: "Are you going to eat your waffles?"

Child: "I will not eat my butthole."

DH: "What?"

Child: "I will not eat my butthole."

DH: "I said are you going to eat your waffles."

Child: "Oh."

DH: "Are your ears plugged?"

Child: "Yeah."



The thing is, there was no real reaction to DH saying such a thing. It was a very calm and measured response.

DH, later: "It's not like it's out of the realm of possibility that I would say something like that...but in that context? On a school day over breakfast? It's not like--get up, get up! Eat, eat! Clear your plates! Are you going to eat your butthole? Pack your lunch!"

No appreciation for the classics

DH heard Meghan Follows being interviewed on the CBC the other day, and we're highly suggestible, so we ended up watching Anne of Green Gables.

The movie was wrapping up, the girls had already looked at me to check if I was crying when Matthew died (and to laugh at me) (no, not all the girls, I have blessed/cursed S with the inability to sit through almost any show without tearing up about something), Anne had announced that she wasn't going off to school, and she was walking dreamily through another field.

Sorry, I guess that last paragraph should've had a big spoiler alert before it, but really, the book has been around for 100+ years and the movie was broadcast 30 years ago, surely to goodness you all know by now that Matthew dies...

Anyhow, so Anne was walking through the field, Gilbert was approaching on horseback, the music was swelling...and DH and K started giggling. So I gave them the stink-eye. And they giggled again. So I said, "Guys, it's the last, like, two minutes of the movie, can you just NOT?" And they giggled AGAIN.

Movie ended, I was in full happy ending afterglow, and DH explained to the other two (who, of course, just kept saying, "What are you laughing at? What are you laughing at?" for the rest of the movie) that when Gilbert was approaching on horseback, he had leaned over to K and said, "Imagine how different this scene would play out if Gilbert was riding a giraffe?"

Which led to a full five minutes of:

"Imagine if he was riding a monkey?"

"Imagine if he was riding a pig?"

"Imagine if he was riding an ostrich, holding on for dear life?"

And finally, "Imagine if he was riding a unicorn Pegasus? And then the Pegasus was pooping rainbows?"

Missed Opportunity

I was at a stop light the other day, and a girl pulled up next to me with her windows down and her crappy thumpy music BLARING.

You know the kind, where your windows are all the way up, but you still can't hear your music because of the THUMPA THUMPA.

The light turned green, and suddenly my dear 101.3 (the heartbeat of South Western Ontario) played Tie a Yellow Ribbon!  And I really, really, really wished it had come on 15 seconds earlier, so I could've rolled down my windows and cranked it, and then given my traffic neighbour this face:

Serge Thomann/WireImage

To show her that I was also rockin' out. In the loser cruiser. To Tony Orlando and Dawn.

Parental Guidance

I've been out at rehearsals lately, so the girls have been spending some quality time watching TV with DH. So luckily I missed these two conversations.

1) DH got hooked on a show called Naked and Afraid. There was a marathon on, or something. If you're not familiar with it - this is a show where strangers are dropped in some remote location - naked - and they have to survive for some ridiculously long period of time. Also, DH couldn't recall if there is money on the line. People would do this for kicks?? Anyhow, the important thing to note here is that everyone is naked, but their private bits are blurred out.

So, they were watching an episode with a guy who, in DH's words "must've had a gigantic package" because S finally had to ask, "Pop, why do they keep blurring out that guy's butt?"


2) DH and E were watching a show on Discovery last night, and a commercial came on. They watched in silence, and at the end she said, "Pop, I don't understand - why is that boy getting a car, and what's Cialis?"

Cross that one off the list

Thanks to another mom's status update on Facebook, I found out the girls were learning about where babies come from.

(They certainly weren't offering up this information on their own.)

When I asked them what they'd learned at school that day, they casually mentioned that they'd started learning about it, but there was more to come.

Oh, did I mention that one of them was sick that day? So I practically shoved her out the door the next day, not wanting her to miss any of this, because God knows I was in no rush to have this conversation...

So days go by, and nothing is mentioned.

Finally the other day we were driving somewhere and I asked what they learned at school that day.

Silence.

"Did you learn about where babies come from, and that's why you don't want to talk about it?"

"Yes."

Later on, they started to tell me more about it.

"And then someone asked if you can choose to have a baby, or how you end up having a baby."

"And?"

"And then the teacher TOLD us! And we giggled. Because he even used the word!!"

"What word? Penis?"

"No!"

"Sex?"

"YES!"

Pause.

"So....we know, Mommy."

Pause. Meaningful look straight at me.

"We know....."

How the other half lives

I went to a work event the other day, and one of the presenters was a person I recognized from high school.

I knew he had gone to an Ivy League school after high school (with a scholarship, I think)...when I read his bio, it turns out that yes, he got his undergraduate degree from Harvard, and then he got his Ph.D. from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.

I was telling all of this to DH last night over dinner, and we were marvelling at how intelligent and focussed one would have to be to achieve such things.

At which point S said, "May I please change the subject now?"

Me: "Sure, what would you like to talk about?"

S: "M was telling us about this video of gymnasts at the Olympics where someone has dubbed it to make it look like they're all farting..."

DH: "Oh, man, we've gotta see that!"

I'm 97% sure that the same conversation was not happening at the Rhodes Scholar's dinner table last night.

Free labour!

I had two goals yesterday: get groceries and clean the bathroom.

(Spoiler alert: I accomplished neither.)

The second goal was especially important because, when I tried to remember the last time I thoroughly cleaned the bathtub, the best answer I could come up with was "before Christmas."

But when I realized it probably wasn't going to happen, I did my best impression of a multi-tasker and put the kids to work. Before each of them went in for a shower, I sprayed the cleaner on the tub, threw a washcloth on top, and told them to skate around while they were in there and get cleanin'.

Also, fun fact about me: if I get out of the shower and put my hair in a Turbie Twist,

and then get distracted by cleaning the damn tub, and my hair ends up drying completely in the Turbie Twist, when I eventually take off the Turbie Twist, I look like this guy:

That was lovely. Loud, but lovely.

I just came home from rehearsal and everyone is asleep.

I got ready for bed downstairs, then came up to my bedroom to find K sleeping in my spot. She and DH were snoring away, and she was sleeping so soundly I didn't want to disturb her, so I climbed into her bed.

As I lay there listening to E and S snoring, I was so filled with love. Lying in that cozy room, lit by the two bedside lights we've been using since we brought the girls home from the hospital, I thought about how lucky I am to be in a house with so much life and love in it. I listened to the rhythm of their wheezy, whistling breaths, and I thought about the fact that moments like this are fleeting, and the girls will be out of the house before I know it, and I'll look back on tonight and wish I could relive it one more time. I looked at their angelic little faces, surrounded by so many stuffed animals they were almost completely camouflaged in the cuteness.

And then I thought, "This snoring is driving me nuts, I've got to go downstairs and get some sleep."

I'm such a hypocrite

The girls were talking about a boy in their class who was being rude and grumpy and swearing at school the other day.

Me: Well, maybe he hears that kind of stuff at home, so....

E: Well so do we!! We just don't repeat it!!

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Speaking of swearing, I've mentioned before that they gave me a heart attack one day when they said someone at school had used the C word.  (Turned out the kid had said, 'Crap.')

Yesterday they reported that someone used the F word!

Me: Really? The F word??

E: Yes, you know. The F - R word....

I couldn't actually determine if it was "frig" or "freakin'", because she wouldn't repeat it.

I guess this means that they think everything I say is a swear word, so they just don't repeat anything?

Not even "fudge knuckle" or "mother of pearl"? I feel like I'm making up these substitutes for nothing, now.

Not my kid...but still funny

On their way to Mass at school the other day, one of the girls in Kindergarten leaned over to one of my girls and told her:

"It's not really Jesus at Mass every time. It's just a guy dressed up."

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Also, back on the subject of dreams:

Last night I dreamed that I was hunting for alligators by sticking my legs in muddy water and feeling around to see where the alligators were.

Then an alligator was biting my toes and I had to remain calm until it let go.

Then I woke up, and my toe was hurting.

I explained all this to DH, and he immediately said:

"That's weird, last night I dreamed I was eating chicken wings, and I woke up with your toe in my mouth."

Funny guy, that DH. Funny, funny guy.

Yes...*that's* what we were wondering

What are we eating that's giving us weird dreams? (Besides the haggis last night?)

E came in sleep walking the other night, and stood by my bed, holding up a stuffed animal, saying, "It's okay - I've got the rooster!"

DH had a dream that our friends, the Bad Influence Neighbours (B.I.N.s) were mad at him for breaking one of their priceless cement laundry tubs.

And then he had another dream that sounded awful. You could tell he was still upset by it when he was telling us about it the next morning.

They were all climbing a mountain (I wasn't there - even in dreams he must know I'd sit that one out) and E fell. He was describing in great detail how he saw her start to fall, and he couldn't get to her, and she went off the ledge...

And then K interjected:

"Wait a minute. Was I wearing a hat?"

So our brains do weird things while we're sleeping. K's does weird things while she's awake.

It's getting weird

So, I'm getting a bit obsessed with the number count on my FitBit pedometer.

Like, I'm walking around as I'm typing this right now.

But I realized things were getting weird this morning, when my fixation on the step count collided with my complete lack of self-control...

...and I went into the lunch room and jogged on the spot while eating a doughnut.

(Yes, I think a tale of obsession, indulgence and weirdness is a fitting way to herald my return, don't you?)