Name Calling

     Adam had a serious talk with me When he was five years-old. He doesn’t like it that I call him dumb. “Wait” I said, “I have never called you dumb.” He tells me that I call him dumb all the time. I ask him why he thinks such a terrible thing. After he explains it to me I understand, I have called him dumb every day of his precious little life. Adam translates to Add-dumb. Ok, time to explain the pronunciation and the meaning of the name and whatever else I can use to try to get this very serious, very literal child to see that his mother has never called him dumb. Besides, his dad picked the name, not my fault.

Hiding the Pizza

            One night a week I go to my friend Rachel’s house and we have a girl’s night full of laughter and just good times. On these nights I still expect my children to eat dinner and I leave my husband in charge of this. Frozen pizza is as far as his culinary skills reach so I have a few tucked into the freezer for such occasions. I took my son Adam to the store with me on one of my shopping trips. He was maybe four years-old at the time. He is helpful and reminds me of things that I am forgetting or that have simply escaped my attention, things such as candy, doughnuts and cookies which I don’t usually buy anyway because I have absolutely no control of myself around such amazing treats. It might appear that I am a really good mom by keeping such crap away from my children, which I am, but the truth is that I am a weak, weak woman. On this particular trip I put a couple of frozen pizzas in our cart then asked Adam if he knew why his dad made frozen pizza for them on the nights I am gone. He looked at me for a second as if contemplating answering me, as if he knew the answer but didn’t want to tell me. This confused me for sure. Finally, after a little thought he tells me what I can only assume he thought was a huge secret. “Dad makes them when you’re gone so you can’t have any” is the answer my son finally gives me. It seems that he is tattling on my husband for not sharing with me. I tell him that since I am the one who does the shopping that I obviously know that said pizzas are in our home and that since I don’t have any in the duration of the week that I probably am good with the fact that Adam and the rest of the men in the house eat pizza without me and that I am not upset about this. He just shakes his little head as if conveying to me that I am a little confused about the motives of my husband and the missing pizza. I appreciate his truthfulness in this matter.

Vocabulary Concerns

            When Alex was about two years old he and I were home alone one evening and I was making a fire in the fireplace. He was sitting in front of the hearth with his little legs kicked out in front of him just tapping his feet when he, for reasons unbeknownst to me, says “goddamn it.” Wow…utter shock on my part. I take him to the stairs and sit him down to tell him the importance of good words and bad words and words we just don’t say. He sat there for a little while, which is my habit when my kids are in trouble, then he got up and joined me in the living room again. After just a little while he comes to me and apologizes by saying “Mom, I’m sorry I said shit.” Wow again, not only did he cuss, again, but with a new word. Back to the stairs while I sat on the couch shaking my head. Consequently, I have not heard him swear again, in nine years.

He Who Lives By the Fork...

            We read a children’s devotional every night before bed. Sometimes there is a little confusion and we have to discuss it. I love these times because what my children come up with is so original and off-the-wall that I have to really try to come up with answers. Cain and Able came up. Children of Adam and Eve. Cain killed Able out of jealousy. I thought that the parallels between the two brothers fighting and my twin sons fighting would spark some interest. Nope, that wasn’t it. “What day of the week was Able killed on?” I said that I didn’t know because the Bible doesn’t tell us. “Why doesn’t God want us to know what day of the week?” I said that it wasn’t that God didn’t want us to know but that it wasn’t an important thing to be worried about. My Adam was sure that it was a Tuesday; Drew thought surely it must’ve been a Saturday.  Then we got into hair color of the brothers. I thought that I could nail this one but I was wrong. I assumed middle-eastern would most likely have dark hair while Adam decided red and Drew thought it must be blonde. There was speculation as to how Abel was killed. Drew thought that it must’ve been with a big rock and Adam was fairly certain that Cain had thrown a fork at Able. I said that I was not sure what had happened exactly but I thought that I could safely rule out the fork scenario. We had gotten way off the subject so I said goodnight and shut off the light before I got in further over my head.

Blind Precision

            Drew was running one day and kind of throwing himself at me. I was sitting on the floor with my back to the couch when this started. He was not yet two and a little clumsy as all two year-olds are. He would run to another room then run to me and just fling himself at me as  he picked up speed. We did this for some time and it was so much fun…until the blood started to flow. Mine, not his. He was something of a biter but this didn’t occur to me to be a problem as he was moving at break-neck speeds and who can bite while flying through the house. Drew can, that’s who and with great precision as my doctors appointment will attest. I had a small mole on the left front just below my collar bone. You notice I wrote “had.” I was wearing a t-shirt and a sweatshirt on this particular day, the day of the event. As little Drew was running at me and I was catching him I received the most ridiculous injury of my life, and that is saying something considering some of the stupid things I’ve done or had happen to me. As I caught him on what became the last catch of that day he bit me, right through my t-shirt, through my sweatshirt and somehow managed to rip that mole from my skin. I let out a scream and ended up knocking him backward. He was scared and crying and I felt terrible that I knocked him down but before I could pick him up something occurred to me; my mole. I stuck my hand down my shirt and came back with blood all over my fingers. I still didn’t think that he could really have bitten me with that much precision so I took my shirts off and sure enough, it was gone, rather, most of it was gone. The rest of it I did find in my bra thank goodness. I called my doctors office and naturally couldn’t get in until Monday, this happened on a Friday and I didn’t feel like a trip to the emergency room so I waiting until Monday was what I’d do. I explained the nature of my injury to the nurse on the phone and said I’d see her Monday.  On Monday when I saw my doctor she walked into the exam room reading her chart and said to me “Ok, tell me the story because this says that your son ran and jumped on you and bit off part of a mole on your collar bone.” I pulled down the collar of my shirt and showed her my injury and she just shook her head.  I told her that the information on her clipboard was correct and that it took the child a fraction of a second to do it and that it was all an accident, and done blindly since I was clothed in layers that day. She’s been my doctor for years and we are great friends. She laughed while she proceeded to take the rest of my jagged little mole off so that I could heal up and forget this episode. I should’ve had that mole removed years and years ago as I always hated it. I guess I owe Drew a debt of gratitude.

Nail Polish Isn't for Everyone

     I like to paint my toenails. I’m a girl and it makes feet pretty. When Drew was around one year-old he sat down by me as I was painting my toenails and stuck his little feet right up to me so that I could paint his as well. I sighed and tried to explain that it’s for girls, not boys. That, of course, didn’t matter. So I did the only thing a mom in my position could do, I painted his big toenails only. It was a compromise. My husband was less than thrilled and tried to talk to the little boy about it but Drew was so enamored with the shiny lilac color on his toes that nothing that my husband said penetrated his thinking. This went on for years. I’d sneak into the bathroom to paint them and then act as though nothing was up. Drew would notice the shininess and instantly sit for me to paint them. After about a year of this Adam decided it was the thing to do as well so I painted his big toenails, too. They wore shoes everywhere and it wasn’t as if everyone saw it or knew. That is until I had their pictures taken for their third birthdays and they were barefooted. If you know what you’re looking for you can see that they both have shiny lilac big toes. At least it wasn’t red nail polish.

Candy is the Devil

            I have a love/love relationship with candy. I love it and it loves to go to my ass and stay there. I try to avoid candy for this reason but I am weak and can only say no so many times.

            Halloween is hard for me, as is Christmas and Easter and birthdays and any other time of the year when candy is on the guest list. The only candy that I can say with all certainty that I hate is Peeps. You know, those marshmallow shapes covered in sugar…they make me sick but only because, years ago, my then sister-in-law and I ate a record 92,000 Peeps, in the car, as we drove to her father’s house from a grocery store so that we would not have to share them with our families when we got back to his house. Okay, so maybe it wasn’t 92,000 and sure, we had it coming for cramming them all so we wouldn’t have to share but I have never been able to look a Peep in the face since then. As a joke one year my friend Frank got me a special surprise for my birthday, which happens to fall in the spring when Peeps are in bloom.. A bag of Peeps. I felt my lunch rumble a little. Thankfully it didn’t escape.

            Halloween candy presents another problem. I have three kids and they trick-or-treat. There are bags of candy in this house the day after Halloween and it is too much for me. If it isn’t hidden I will eat it. All. I will eat all of my children’s hard earned Halloween candy. I have done it before and I will do it again if I am not stopped. This happened as recently as last Halloween. My husband came home from work and asked what happened to all of the candy for he thought that he would indulge in a tiny candy bar or two. Foolish man.  I told him that I was weak and that he needed to help me. He took the pitiful amount of remaining candy to his truck and locked it in, then hiding the keys. I felt the monkey crawl off my back at that point.

            My children didn’t get upset with me, they understood and I did promise to make it up to them and buy them more candy on the condition that they hid it from me. They did, they are good boys.

I stopped buying Halloween candy years ago because the candy never made it to Halloween night. Ever. And now I take my children out into the night to beg for candy to support my habit. Such is the lot of the candy addict.