I Lie Because I Must

            I wouldn’t say that I have picky eaters; I have children that love to be contrary to whatever is going on. We were having chicken for dinner one evening, as we had had many, many, many times, but on this particular night Adam decided that he didn’t like chicken and was not going to eat it. How it came to me I’ll never know but without missing a beat I told him that I knew he didn’t like chicken so he was having meat instead. He ate it and told me how good his meat was. It was about a year later, after serving him “‘meat” rather than chicken that whole time, that I sat him down and told him the truth. He looked at me strangely and we stared each other down for a little while when he finally commented to me that “nope” he had not been eating chicken because he doesn’t like it. We went back and forth for a while when he finally decided that I was telling the truth and he liked chicken disguised as meat. He knew he was beaten in this round but undoubtedly he will be ready for the next.

Myrtle Beach at Twilight

            Recently we took a trip to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. We drove and had a great time doing it. The kids are usually good when we travel but probably only because they each have a DS and they play games all the way to and fro. Alex and I had been to the ocean before, not together. He went on vacation with my parents a few years ago to visit my brother and his family in Vermont and I had been to the ocean when I vacationed with my parents twenty-whatever years ago. The point is that the twins, not to mention my husband, had never been to the ocean and were very excited to go. My husband handled his excitement better than the seven year-olds did. When we got to our hotel in Myrtle Beach we all got out of the van and stretched. It was about 7:00 in the evening so I assumed we would go to the beach the next day considering that it was fairly dark. That was until I looked around and my little boys were gone. I could hear them laughing and squealing so while my husband checked us in my oldest son and I followed the sounds of excited whooping. That was when Alex came upon a sandal. He picked it up and we continued to walk along, finding another sandal here and another there until we had all four of them. Two little boys, four feet, four shoes. I gathered that they were running to the water and decided to skip the preliminaries and just strip on their way. Thankfully they did leave their clothes on but as we began to find shoes I was unsure that they would. We found the boys, knee deep in water and running along the sand, laughing and marveling at the place we had just arrived at. After catching up with them and telling them that they cannot take off on us again, no matter how excited they were, we let them run and splash and be kids.

            It wasn’t long until they noticed there were about one hundred seagulls gathered along the strip of beach we were enjoying. My charming little boys are always trying to devise a way to catch a bird…or a squirrel…or a chipmunk…or a cat. It really doesn’t matter what kind of animal it is, they want to catch it and be friends. This did not work with the seagulls (and has never ever worked, period). They tried walking very quietly, they tried sneaking, they tried it all but eventually decided that they would just run after the gulls and watch them fly away from them. In the end, that was more fun than catching one.

Dead President, Dead Ringer

    Cashiers. Do they see me coming and think to themselves “Bet I can really piss her off."? There have been so many that have just pushed their luck and their ability to keep me on my side of the counter. I was going through the check out one day and there was a middle-eastern man checking. I thought that this would go well. I was unprepared. He looked up at me and said "My but you look just like John F. Kennedy. Have you been told that before?" Good Lord. Moron. I’m white, that’s all the similarities that I share with the good President. I looked at him and said “Are you kidding me? JFK? No, never in my life until this unfortunate moment.”

Beauty Tips From the Beauty Impaired

            I color my hair. It is normally a very dark brown and on me, that looks drab and I hate it. So I opt for a blonder version. I have had it colored in salons and never once did I like it so I cut out the being pissed off and just buy a box of color and do it myself. Perfect every time. I was buying said accessory one dark day when my cashier picked it up and looked at it and then at me. I was ready for a stupid comment but not the one I got. She smiled at me, proudly showing me the one tooth that she still had in her mouth,  shook out her hair that had at one point been blonde but was now sporting a good four inches of regrowth and proceeded to give me beauty advice. I was stunned that this is what she had the nerve to say to me. I am not an ugly girl but I don’t run around saying “Look at me, I’m stunning,” but she was proceeding to tell me how I can be lovely? She obviously had never owned a mirror, or a tooth brush, or a hair brush for that matter but was telling me that I needed to take that hair color and rather than work it through all of my hair that I needed to put all of the color in my hands and run my fingers through my hair, streaking it like she had done for her mother and herself. I had so many derogatory things that I wanted to say to this delusional woman but I am not in the business of hurting people, even stupid ones, but I did tell her I would be doing no such thing and that when it comes to beauty that I’ve got it covered.

Naked Misunderstandings

            Shortly after my first husband and I divorced he got a girlfriend. She was nice and loved my son so she and I were on good terms. Her dad’s birthday fell near Halloween so they always would throw a themed party for him. Alex was two years-old and I trusted him with the girlfriend to go to this party with a bunch of people I didn’t know. I approved of her over-protectiveness. He seemed to have fun from what he told me when he got home. He was troubled by the naked man that was there though. My heart sank and I thought that I would vomit when he said that. I had a horrible fear that something happened to him. So I kept my anxiety under control and asked him questions about what he had said. Who was naked? Why was it that Alex had seen this naked man? Had someone hurt him? As it turns out, the naked man was a door-sized decoration of a skeleton. Naked because he had no skin. Talk about relief.

Decorating the Baby

     Christmas is a blast around here. We celebrate the birth of our Risen Lord of course but we also have a great time with the children and gifts and such. When the twins were little, their first Christmas as a matter of fact, we wanted to be able tell them apart in pictures later on and let’s face it, fat, bald babies can all look the same. They had matching holiday pajammies so that made it a little more difficult to tell who was who but Alex had a fabulous idea. In our Christmas pictures we can tell the boys apart because Drew has a red bow off one of Alex’s gifts stuck to his head. Brilliance in its simplicity.

Stealing Christmas

            My brother-in-law had a fondness for pranks. One Christmas he came up with a great one. He wrapped packages in a variety of sizes and "accidentally" dropped them here and there throughout the day in front of his father’s house, where we were celebrating the holiday. He also had a camcorder set up in one of the windows to catch what was bound to happen. Did I fail to mention there was nothing but paper (to give them a little weight) in these "gifts" that he wrapped? By the end of the day he had a great deal of footage of people walking by and, some discreetly, some at break-neck speeds, snagging these "gifts" off the front walk and undoubtedly hustling home to see what they had scored. I remember wishing that he had put a note in these "gifts" so when they were opened the recipient would know that it was a joke. There was only one sweet little old lady who came to the door to give him the gift that had been misplaced, everyone else took the spirit of Christmas and ran.