It’s Saturday. That means families everywhere should be together doing fun things. Going to pumpkin patches, taking bike rides and eating picnics, walking through tall fields of wheat with the mom’s hair blowing in the wind like a super model…OK so maybe I’m a little bit of a perfectionist in my expectations. The good news is that I don’t necessarily expect that I will have this great hair because for my entire life it’s been thin and fine and there’s nothing I can do about it.
This particular Saturday sees my family doing none of those things. It sees the Executive at a college tailgate and football game and me with my three children stuck to the house because Edith has a birthday party from 12:45 until 2:45…smack-dab in the middle of my day. This means we can go nowhere- no open gyms for them to run off energy, no pumpkin patches to waste a large chunk of the day…nothing. We are stuck at home. Awesome.
My entire goal for the morning is to take a shower. I’m not sure at what point this became a luxury but honestly it’s the only ten minutes of Me Time I get every other day…or every three days. See what I mean? I needed a shower on this Saturday morning. If I’m being completely truthful about the showering situation it’s really not entirely Me Time. Usually Agnes is wandering around ready to be my ‘Towel Assistant’ and asking when I’ll be done. Then there’s the Executive who comes in all stealth-like as if he’s attending a peep show- which he is since our shower door is glass. He’s usually asking me if he can help which is not so much an offer for assistance for me as it is a direct attempt for personal gain. So really now that we look at all these factors, the Me Time shower is really not Me Time at all.
Margo is playing on the computer, Edith is making a birthday card for the inconvenient birthday party girl and Agnes is somewhere doing something…quietly. I tell my children that I am showering and for the next twenty minutes (I like to be liberal in the amount of time I tell them because now that two of them can read the clock they will be in the bathroom EXACTLY the amount of minutes I tell them I need and then the tattling, questions, and general bombarding of information will begin- this allows me time to lotion up and perhaps even get a stitch of clothing on) and I escape like a convict from jail. As a nice side note I stepped on the scale and had lost a pound- no worries, in the three days it takes me to get shower time again I’m sure I’ll have found that rogue pound and maybe even one or two of his friends. I get in the shower and take a deep breath. I am free for twenty minutes.
Eventually I emerge from the shower and no one is attempting to tell on anyone else. I think that perhaps I had better start with make-up because I can forego the lotion in the event of an ‘emergency’ but the make-up is a must. I start to get moisturizer out and spread it on my face when I hear a loud gasp come from the kitchen. I hope this does not require my attention and grab for some blush. Before I know it Margo is standing in the door. Unlike Edith who pounds across the house like a water buffalo in combat boots Margo is a quieter walker. She could perhaps be the cheetah that hunts the less sneaky water buffalo.
“Mom, Edith wrote ‘Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat, if you don’t, I don’t care, I’ll pull down your underwear’ on Kate’s card,” she reports very matter-of-factly.
“Please tell me you are lying,” I sigh knowing that she’s not because she almost never lies.
“I’m not, mom,” she replies with a tone of indignation and a head bobble that says she’s fully aware of how much trouble she’s getting her sister into.
I am still in my towels, one on my body and one on my head. Because our house is made almost entirely of glass, it precludes us from throwing stones- and walking across the house in bath towels. I throw on my robe and yell across the house, as I’ve told Edith a millions times not to do, “Please tell me what Margo just told me is not true.”
Because Edith is Edith she doesn’t even try to hide it which, as a parent I am thankful for her lack of ability to lie on the small things- she can lie like the best of them when it’s major though. “Yes, it is true!”
I walk into the kitchen and there it is, inside the card where she was supposed to be writing a nice note to the birthday girl.
“Why in the world did you write this?”
“Well,” she says as if it’s perfectly acceptable, “I wanted to write something Halloweenish.”
I nod my head. Halloweenish it is and the picture she’s drawn to go with it is really quite nice. I can tell she took her time- some of the spelling is even correct, which for a first grader is pretty good, but she did her best to sound it out and she let me shower in peace so I have to give her that. I look at the card in disbelief and then I look closer at the card. Above the lovely Halloweenish sentiment is an erased line.
“Dear Kate, thack yu for inv…” and it stops. I will translate for any non-first grade speakers out there, “Dear Kate, Thank you for inv(iting)” and then presumably it was going to say “to your birthday party.”
“Edith, Why didn’t you continue writing what you started up there?”
“I couldn’t spell all the words I wanted to,” she says as if she’s written the “Naughty Trick or Treat Song” with perfect spelling.
Because I’m an excellent mom I don’t point out all the words she hosed up in the “Naughty Trick or Treat Song” but I do tell her that she must make a new card for the birthday girl.
And then for the first time in many years I take a picture of the thing that annoys me, yet cracks me up and I think, “I need to blog that.”
Suburbian Siren, who feels that mojo comin’ on…
