Things I never thought I’d hear my son say: “Help me take off this dress, Mama. I have to pee!”
It’s his sister’s old Christmas dress — purple taffeta skirt, velvet top with sparkles. Extremely charming on a four-year-old Wacky Boy.
“The fingers of your thoughts are molding your face ceaselessly.” — Charles Reznikoff, poet (1894-1976)
Is this why my face is so haggard? Right now, I’m not thinking, “Yay! I’m taking the kids to swimming lessons!” Honestly, Internet, I’m thinking, “Fuck. They’ll have a fit, scream and kick and hit” (a rhyme, just for you) “and by the time they’re in the pool IN SOMEONE ELSE’S CARE I’ll be exhausted and ready to cry. And they’ll be happy and smiley and ‘Gloop/gloop! went the little green frog one day/gloop/gloop! went the little green frog/Gloop/gloop! went the little green frog one day/and they all went gloop/gloop/glop/BUT WE ALL KNOW FROGS GO WHOOP-LA-DI-DA-DI-DA WHOOP-LA-DI-DA-DI-DA WHOOP-LA-DI-DA-DI-DA/we all know frogs go/WHOOP-LA-DI-DA-DI-DA/they don’t go gloop/gloop/glop.”
Uh, yeah.
They are vampires they drink my blood at night, I know it. More later.
If you are, you’re not reading this, probably. You’re probably having mimosas for breakfast, then going for a swim. Or maybe you’re having bloody marys in the mountains, then hiking. I am here in my urban neighborhood, wondering why we’re not on vacation. Oh, money, right. There was this, this and oh, yeah, now this.
We found out last summer we have a family of fairies living in our garden. The mom is Summer, dad is River; Forest is the brother and Dawn is the sister.
Fairies are not a lot of work, it turns out. They’re pretty resourceful and mostly take care of themselves. However, they do like it when we leave them raspberries, blueberries, honeysuckle, notes and clothes. (Little wisps of clothing we make out of Barbie doll clothes, lace and nylon scraps.) Sometimes they go on vacation for awhile — to the mountains, or the ocean — and we don’t hear from them. They’re whimsical that way. In the fall they split and go someplace warm. Cabo San Lucas, or maybe Fiji, who knows. Then they popped up again, once school was out. They have a castle and a dragon we bought at the pet store, in the aquarium section, a birdhouse that we leave notes in (the lid lifts off) and two sunflowers. They only come out at night. They like to swim in the river and play at the park. They love our yard.
My friend Annie, someone I knew from college, was raised by awesome hippie parents who let her think she was a fairy until she was four years old. Then she figured out she wasn’t and turned into a girl. It gave her a good outlook on life, starting out as a fairy — she was pretty cheerful and kind of floated along. Like a fairy.
Here is a list of FAQ about fairies (Wacky Girl will handle this part):
The thing about blogs is you have to blog, my Wacky Cousin tells me. Huh. The thing about blogs is that however everyone else is doing is how I start doing. The readers, the other bloggers, the Internet in general. I am impressionable like that. So we’ve all been in something of a funk lately. What with summeritis, jobs changing (I’m starting school to get my real estate license), my Wacky Cousin being beautiful with her big baby belly (I start FEELING PREGNANT just being around her. See? Impressionable.), school getting out, BlogHer ’06 (I’m not going and am sulking), being in a “bad-ish place”, getting our pictures taken with Andrew Shue, sigh, “screwing up the world one baby at a time”, etc.
Ya’ll realize, I hope, that if you’re looking at my blog and something really weird is there, under comments, that it is not our crowd — it’s the…
OK. I cannot use any of the words that these folks use to track me down. So read between the lines:
They’re sp@!mers. I f&!king despise them. I spend a large part of my day deleting na&*y comments left by s@amm#!$ on my blog and Hockey God’s. In fact, I deleted about 20 comments today alone on the two blogs, including half a dozen on Hockey God’s, left from the time we got home from Wacky Girl’s dentist appointment (at 6 p.m.) and now (8:30 p.m., same day).
Oddly, he gets about three times more junk mail than I do. Just like our snail mail.
Re: dentist. WG needs braces. She is six. “Six year olds don’t get braces!” you’re no doubt thinking, “They don’t, like, even have all their permanent teeth yet. WTF Wacky Mommy?” They get “appliances” now, then braces later. I have been told this is expensive. Please don’t tell me how expensive. I’m enjoying denial. Her teeth are way crookedy. Good word, no? Crookedy. Makes it seem almost comical, instead of “F&*@!ng h&*l we have to re-fi the house for this?” Her bite and jaw will get “even worse and she will need surgery,” according to the two dentists and two orthodontists we have seen.
“You might be looking at surgery, on down the road, anyway,” they say.
“It’s too soon to tell the extent of this,” they say. Although they all agree that the poor kid’s mouth is a mess.
“You can make payments,” they all say.
Good, good, that’s a comfort.
So the junk mail? Please ignore. Thanks and have a splendiferous night.
Wacky Girl is and always has been a spelling fiend. Even more so after watching Akeelah and the Bee. Which I have seen referred to recently not by name, but as “a Starbucks-produced film.” Which it was, but whatever, hello, say the name of the picture, would you? It’s a great film, and it was awesome to be able to take my six-year-old to a film that we both enjoyed, that was inspirational without being sappy, and that starred people who weren’t white.
Good God, was that so much to ask of Hollywood? Hollywood, what the hell is your problem? You know I dislike Tom Cruise, Hollywood.
Thank you. And now, a few spelling words… starting with…
“C-R-O-Q-U-I-G-N-O-L-E: Croquignole. (Fr.) A hair waving thingy.” (Sorry, that’s what I wrote down.)
Wacky Girl and I went to see Akeelah and the Bee and it made us so happy. Go see it. Except I’m thinking, my kids are really not going to want to go to the movies with me once they hit those teen years, cuz I am big sucker crybaby at the movies. (They probably wouldn’t want to anyway, but they especially won’t cuz who wants to sit with sobbing mom?) Sad, happy, romantic, overwrought, Civil War epics, cartoons, doesn’t matter. Is she going to win? WHAT IF SHE DOESN’T WIN??? WHAT IF THE OTHER KID WINS THE SPELLING BEE? etc.
WHAT IF E.T. DIES?
WHAT IF AT THE END OF “AN OFFICER AND A GENTLEMAN” HE DUMPS HER? No, it’s okay, there he is, carrying her out of the factory, everyone’s cheering, whew that was close.
Sucker crybaby, I told you.
We had to play Scrabble after dinner; guess who won?
Dear Wacky Mommy:
I know it’s not Friday advice time yet, however I have a question: What would your advice be for calming a middle school student when their school has been closed twice in a week (TWICE!) due to “threats.” Lots of the parents are becoming frustrated at the situation, but I don’t want “parent emotions” taking over what the real issue is, and that is dealing with the kids’ emotions. I’m compiling all the advice I can get. Thanks!
Oh, we hope they find the punks who are doing this and get them the help they need.
Signed,
Zipdodah
A Short Story By Wacky Boy
Once upon a time, there was three sheep driving along in a car. Then… I forgot all the story.
Wacky Girl, to the rescue…
When all of a sudden the funny wheel rolled along…
WB: No! That’s wrong!
Then one of the wheels rolled off and then the sheep fell onto the wheel and the wheel rolled all over with the sheep on it.
THE END
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