Coco-nuts

My youngest child has very odd taste in food. He thinks it’s a treat to go to the health food store and pick something out. He comes home with all sorts of oddities: star fruit, melons, a giant cabbage one time, and tonight … a coconut.

Somehow, even though my husband took him to the store, it became MY job to figure out how to open up the coconut. Read a wiki, got the coconut milk out, and then took it out to the driveway to smash it open with a hammer. Success! But then, all the meat of the coconut was still attached to the shell.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just jimmy it out with a knife. A sharp knife. Great idea, right?

My husband walked by my operation and I asked him what he thought the odds were that I was going to injure myself. He just chuckled, which I knew meant 100%. I agreed. It was a matter of time.

I think it was less than 30 seconds later that the knife slipped out of my hand and I stabbed myself in the other hand. In the palm. I cried out in pain. “What’s the matter?” my husband called from the other room. “Stabbed myself,” I answered.

At first I didn’t see blood, but then I SAW  BLOOD AND LOTS OF IT. For a tiny little puncture, that fucker bled like crazy. But I totally deserved it. That was a dumbass move and I paid the price. Pro tip: don’t jimmy out coconut meat with a sharp knife. I don’t have another answer for you at present. I have to stop hemorrhaging blood so I can figure it out.

---

One day later …

Still about half of the coconut meat needed to come out, so thought I was going to be smart and just smash it into bits so I wouldn’t sustain any more injuries. I took a huge piece of coconut to the driveway and threw it to the ground with gusto.

The shell back bounced up toward me so I went to stop it from hitting my face and/or vital organs with my OTHER hand. The shell was all jaggedy so when I put my hand out to stop it, I got rewarded with more lacerations.

Conclusion: coconuts are dangerous, and should be outlawed.

Another small step (backward) for parent-kind

There are plenty of model parents in this world. I see their Instagram posts, their Pinterest boards, their just general fucking smugness about how they have this all figured out. Meanwhile I’m over here like, how many days ago did they take showers?

So in order to understand what I’m about to share with you, you need to be familiar with this video. I don’t quite get the humor, but if you are a fifth grader, this is like the most hilarious thing to quote.

My friends, I’ve always said that when opportunity knocks, you answer. And opportunity knocked for me a few days ago.

I had ordered some raw almonds online from Trader Joe’s because there’s not one close to me, I like their almonds, and I JUST DID, OK? I got it through Amazon Prime, so, free shipping. Bonus for me. I checked the mail after I got home. I had my box from Amazon, which I opened when I got inside the house. Both my kids were sitting on the couch, using their electronic apparati, when I walked into the room.

“Hey guys, guess what came in the mail today?” I said, barely even able to say this with a straight face.

“What?” they both asked, probably hoping it was a video game for them or something.

Triumphantly holding up the bag of almonds, I replied, “DEEZ NUTS! GOTTEM!” and then I cracked myself up laughing. The six year old laughed, and the 10 year old basically just gave me a SMH face.

I call that a win. I don’t know what you call it. Immature, probably.

 

The Ribbon Eaters: Who Are They?

These aren’t the bunnies my kids have, but you can tell that it has a REAL FUCKING RIBBON around its neck. Right??????

I got home early from work today. All alone in the house.

Just me, the animals …

And a shit ton of Easter candy.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking? These kids will never even notice anything’s gone.

As I’m inspecting the stash, I notice something strange about the giant chocolate bunny my kids have eaten the ears off of. First, the front of its box states that it is

 

Hollow
MILK CHOCOLATE

Flavored

Which, what does that even mean? Chocolate flavored WHAT????? Gross. I don’t even want to know.

But that’s not the weirdest thing about it. The bunny has a green ribbon tied around its neck, made of satin or whatever the hell they make ribbons out of. Like, it’s a legit ribbon. Any dummy could see that.

However, the warning on the side panel of the box states, “DECORATIVE RIBBON IS NOT EDIBLE.”

Do you realize what this means? They had to put that warning on there because at some point, some dumbass ATTEMPTED TO EAT THE RIBBON. I know. I can’t believe it, either. So what happened was, either this person is so clueless on the way the world works, they thought it was food, choked and sued the company that makes the milk chocolate flavored bunnies. OR … this person was so SMART that they realized there was NO warning NOT to eat the ribbon, so they tried eating it, feigned choking, the lawsuit followed, and BAM, the rest of us are being treated like Grade A morons.

Either way, my mind is kind of blown. That I live in the same world, breathe the same air, as The Ribbon Eaters. I just … I … I can’t.

Just when I think I understand humanity, something like this comes along and shows me that I know nothing.

#ParentingFails

Most days I am an ok parent. I’d give myself like a B minus. I’m not knocking it out of the park, but I’m not Child Services material either.

My kids are growing up way too fast. With YouTube and Instagram and basically anything they can find on an iPad, they know stuff that I didn’t know until I was a little bit older. My 10 year old was looking up songs he liked and watching the videos on YouTube. I wasn’t comfortable with some of the things he was seeing – mainly gratuitous instances of the Twerk. So I thought, ok, he just wants to listen to the song … I’ll turn him on to Spotify. I installed the app on his iPad, helped him set up a playlist of his faves, and that problem was solved. Well, except for the occasional f-bomb and questionable lyric in some of the songs he chose.

Then the 6 year old wanted Spotify on HIS iPad. I let him access my account rather than set one up for him. I helped him pick songs and created a special playlist just for his stuff. He was satisfied, and I went into the kitchen to do something domestic, while the boys remained in the adjacent living room.

Maybe 30 seconds later, the following song BLASTS from the living room, off my 6 year old’s iPad:

“THIS SUMMER’S GONNA HURT LIKE A MOTHA FUCKA”

“FUCKA”

#ParentingFail

And by the way, I’m STILL mad at Maroon 5 for even producing that piece of garbage. You’re better than that, Adam Levine. And … other band members also in Maroon 5…

Watch Me

I try to stay hip to the music they’re listening to. So I thought it would be hilarious one evening when I retrieved a container of Cool Whip from the fridge if I put on a little performance.

My boys were watching TV or, more likely, something inappropriate on their iPads, when I leapt into the living room holding said container of whipped dessert topping. I thrust the container out with my left hand. “Now watch me WHIP,” I said. “Now watch me Nae Nae!” And did the requisite Nae Nae move.

They both gave me a blank, horrified stare and definitely didn’t appreciate the mom humor.

#ParentingFail

This just makes sense

Finally, trying to keep these kids clean is a chore. Especially when evening sports activities suck up some of our at-home time. This week we had a tournament that was a half-hour drive away. We basically had time to get home around 6, everyone change clothes, and run back out the door.

They didn’t get a chance to shower Wednesday night because of this. Then during the day Thursday we found out we were playing again that evening. They go to my in-laws after school so I called in a favor and asked if they could shower over there before the game. The only problem was they didn’t have a change of clothes so they would have to put their dirty clothes back on. I figured they could change when we got home … but when we got home that evening, we were in such a rush,  I forgot.

Therefore, they had on dirty underwear on Friday. It was basically going on three days old at that point. So I told my 10 year old to put on a clean pair. His response? “I’m about to fart, so …”

To which I said: “Well fart in the dirty ones and then put the clean ones on!”

I thought that was solid advice. #ParentingWin

Application to be a youth basketball referee

After witnessing what had to have been the worst ref in the entire history of youth sports officiate my son’s 5th grade game today, I have to wonder what the job application looks like for someone to become a ref. Side note: if I am ever arrested, it is definitely going to be for assaulting a ref at one of my kids’ games.

I happened to get my hands on the job application and I thought I’d share it with you, so you can see the screening process is quite thorough.

JOB APPLICATION FOR REFEREE FOR YOUTH SPORTS

1. State your name
2. Did you just say “your name” out loud? a) I said my actual name b) no c)yes
3. Do you currently have a pulse? a) yes b) no c) how do I check?
4. Do you wear glasses/contacts? a) yes b) no c) I am legally blind
5. What is your level of education? a) high school grad/GED b) college c) raised in a barn
6. What color is a basketball?
7. Identify the basketball in the following photos:

8. Do you know how to blow a whistle?

 

 

Seriously, that is it! That’s all you need to do to apply to be a ref for youth basketball. Makes sense now, huh?

People Whose Christmas Decorations are Still Up

It shouldn’t surprise you by now that I hate Christmas. OK, not entirely true, but I despise enough of the things about Christmas that I qualify for Grinch status.

One of the things I hate about Christmas is the fact that people put their decorations up in like mid-August these days and don’t take them down until the ides of March. In my house, if I catch wind that the boys want to put the tree up, and the calendar doesn’t read “December,” all hell breaks loose. Even the first week of December is a touchy subject for me. If there’s snow on the ground and you happen to catch me in the right mood, I *might* go for it. Then again, I might not.

December 11, 12, thereabouts, begins to be an acceptable timeframe to put up the tree. It’s a huge hassle for me to have to move furniture and have my living room be all cluttered and claustrophobic-like, so that is the impetus behind why I delay it for as long as humanly possible.

On the flip side, my tree is down by New Year’s Eve. If it were up to me, it would be taken down on December 26, but I realize my kids like to savor the holiday and admire their gifts under the tree.

If my husband isn’t lazy in a particular year and puts up outdoor lights, he better have them down by this timeframe, as well. They sure as hell aren’t getting turned on once the calendar flips to the new year.

So it boggles my mind, no, REALLY it does, when I am driving around on a day like today, January 11th, and people are still at it with the lights. We’re a good three weeks out now. I’ve worked a full week in the new year and it sure doesn’t feel like Christmas anymore. Therefore, everyone should also be done with it! Can someone explain to me why people still have their lights up? Is it laziness? Some other light-decorating holiday in January I’m not aware of? Honestly. I get so irritated when I’m driving at night and the street is all lit up like I’m in the goddamn Vegas Strip. If I’m feeling especially passive aggressive, I will YELL AT THE HOUSE. That’s right, I yell at a building. “Take down your lights! It’s not even Christmas anymore!” I yell in my most irritated tone. Give it everything I’ve got. It makes me feel better but doesn’t do a lick of good because they’re still up the next time I drive by.

Anyone else feel particularly ticked off by this or am I just in a special category of grump all by myself?

Bathroom break

I rarely see my kids use the bathroom. They could absorb the pee back into their bodies for all I know.

EXCEPT.

Except when I’m in the shower. We have a one bathroom house (which I hope to remedy soon), and so when the bathroom is occupied, and you gotta go, you either wait, or you knock.

They knock.

(At least they knock.)

I swear, it’s like the shower just causes their bladders to fill on command. It doesn’t matter what time of day it is. I could shower at 8 a.m. or 8 p.m., mid day or the middle of the night, and at least one of them would come in to take a whiz in that small window of time. I don’t even take long showers. Probably shorter than average! Maybe 10 minutes, max.

Is this a mom phenomenon? It’s like the only time I really have to myself while everyone is awake, and they don’t even give me that. #momproblems

Picture Day

As the sole woman in my household, I’m often outnumbered when it comes to decisions. Watch the game or Scandal? The game. (Fine, I’ll watch Scandal by myself, the way I LIKE IT.) What’s for dinner? Pizza or Chinese takeout? OK, call Papa John.

But the one realm where I assert total authority – what I say, goes – is school picture day. This is MY THING. I do the ordering and the dressing and everyone can just shut the hell up, smile nice for the camera, and go on with their lives.

So picture day is today. But let me back up and tell you what happened this weekend before I tell you what happened today. Saturday morning, I’m cleaning up dishes from breakfast, and my husband is at the kitchen table, which also doubles for the place where kids’ papers go to die. There’s a pile on the table, and if the paper is more than five deep, it may as well be in a black hole, because it’s never seeing the light of day again.

Anyway, both the kids’ picture forms are at the top of the pile, and my husband, thinking he is being helpful, says, “I’m just going to fill these out now so we’re not doing it Thursday morning at the last minute.” Thoughtful, right? It shows some insight and forethought that is usually absent in the male mind. I was ok with this plan, as long as he ordered the picture packages I wanted. He fills out the kids’ names, their teachers’ names, etc., and then he looks at all the packages. “I’m just going to get the cheapest one,” he says because we’ve established that he is a cheap bastard, and then when I turned white as a sheet, he told me he was joking and just said it to get a rise out of me. Very funny. But then, a few minutes later, he said, “I’m just going to order magnets, because everybody likes those, right?”

I waited for the punchline.

There wasn’t one.

“So, you mean, like, INSTEAD of getting photos, just … getting … the magnets?” I was struggling to understand this. And to breathe.

“Yeah,” he said.

I paused here, giving him ample opportunity to back down. When he didn’t, I said, “You know what? I will fill out the forms.”

He got kind of pissed and threw the pen down on the table in disgust. I don’t see why he was mad – he knows I’m anal, and honestly, ordering school pictures is total chick territory. He had no business venturing into lady land in the first place.

So I got the picture forms under control, wrote the checks, got that shit squared away. I also planned the outfits for the boys and made sure they were clean. That’s right, I #nailedit on preparation.

Cue this morning. Older child puts on his designated outfit without question or complaint. This is shocking because his everyday attire usually consists of an Under Armour t-shirt/hoodie and athletic shorts/pants with some kind of outrageously-colored socks (this is a whole other post – boys’ socks). Anyway, he’s good to go. The younger one, however, is NOT HAVING IT with the shirt OR the shorts I set out for him. He wants “the shirt I wore to Papa’s house.” Papa is his great-grandfather, and we haven’t been to his house in almost a year. I can’t remember what shirt he wore yesterday, let alone which one he wore to Papa’s. He starts tearing shirts out of his dresser drawer and I am trying to not go completely psychotic over the chaos.

He didn’t find whatever shirt it was … chances are, he outgrew it because it was so long ago. He did, however, find a plaid button-down long-sleeve shirt, which he wore in our holiday photos, but whatever. Not going to argue with him at this point because I’m now late for work. He wore that, plus some long pants on this 80-degree day, as opposed to the nice kelly green polo and khaki shorts I had planned for him. His loss.

B&E

My son, the future criminal.

We have neighbors around the corner with a boy his age. Now that he’s 6, he pretty much thinks he can do whatever the F he wants, when he wants. This, of course, runs counter to my plans for him as a parent. We don’t exactly see eye-to-eye on many things, namely, bedtime, tooth brushing time, dinner time, wake up time, go to school time, etc.

So I’ve been letting him go over to see if his friend is home. The mom over there knows to shoot me a text and let me know he’s there, and I do the same – although her kid is terrified of my dog, so he never comes over unannounced. We have to batten down the hatches before he will even step on to our property line. Because my dog is a super terrifying licking machine who loves people. Anyway, the other day my son asks to go check if they’re home. I told him it was fine, but to come right back or have his friend’s mom text me.

Ten minutes go by with no text, and no sign of my son, and to be honest, I wasn’t super worried about it. But then he comes back into the house and announces that  they weren’t home.

“Then where were you these past ten minutes?” I asked.

“The door was unlocked so I went in their house to see if they were there,” he told me, LIKE IT’S TOTALLY NORMAL TO BREAK INTO SOMEONE’S HOUSE WHEN THEY AREN’T THERE.

And apparently he walked around their house, looked in all the rooms, to see where they were.

Explaining that it was not socially acceptable to do this seemed to go in one ear and out the other. I fully expect to have to bail him out of jail at some point in his life for this kind of behavior.

Just like animals, animals, like animals, mals.

School starts on Wednesday. Can I get an amen??? No, really. They are starting a week earlier than they did last year, and about a month ago, I was all, “what? That’s so stupid!” But now I am like, I NEED TO KISS THE PERSON ON THE LIPS WHO IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THIS. Call it cabin fever, call it summertime blues, call it my kids are total assholes, but their behavior has been off the charts all week. I literally cannot wait for them to go back to school. Even though I work and I’m not with them during the day, I feel like the return to their school routine will somehow iron out the kinks in their brains that are making them act like complete douchebags.

Cases in point:

I came home from work one night this week, pulled into our one-car garage, and said hello to my six-year-old, who was riding his bike. I went inside and had a two minute conversation with my husband only to realize that we had both assumed, via a misscommunication over text, that the other of us was going to pick up cat food on our way home. I regrouped for maybe five minutes and went back outside. The six year old was acting like the cat that swallowed the canary, but I just thought “ain’t nobody got time fo’ that” and continued to my car.

When I got in, I realized that there was this white sploogy stuff all over my windshield which DEFINITELY wasn’t there five minutes ago when I had come home. I may have uttered an f-bomb before getting back out and asking my six year old if he knew anything about it. The acting job was commendable, but I could tell that he definitely did know what had happened, and just was not telling me. I told him to go turn the hose on, because I was going to need to spray down the car before going to get the cat food.

Once I backed the car out, I noticed that the white substance was also all over my hood and dripping down the front of the car. And, there was a white puddle on the floor of the garage. But nothing obvious to tell me what the source of the spillage was. I noticed it had an odor to it, something unpleasant, but nothing I could identify as, for instance, paint or weed killer or anything like that.

Through some serious Scooby Doo mystery work, my husband and I were able to finally deduce that the six year old got it in his head to spray deer repellant in our garden. Why, you might ask? We are still trying to figure that one out. So, he did that, which is weird in and of itself, and then tried to put the bottle of Deer-B-Gon on the shelf in the garage, which happens to be above my car. He must not have closed the top all the way, and he must not have gotten it on the shelf all the way, and thus, coyote urine and other fine blends of things deer don’t like was dumped all over my (black? did I mention my car is black?) vehicle. Then he must have picked up the bottle, capped it and put it back like nothing happened.

EXHIBIT B:

Last night, we went out to eat. There are very few restaurants we can go to that all four of us like, and that don’t have a huge wait on Saturday nights. Basically your hole in the wall local spots are our only choices. We went to an Italian place that 3/4 of us were ok with going to. (The older child was just not into going out at all last night. Major attitude from the get-go.) We got seated right away, and the hostess brought us some water while we waited for our server.

We waited. And waited some more.

While we waited, my six year old dumped a few sugar packets into his water and stirred it around with his fork. As we perused the menu, I didn’t notice that he grabbed 3 or 4 more packets and dumped those in there, too. By the time we did, it was too late. So, whatever, I let it go. But then, for some reason, he decided to drop the paper packets themselves into his glass. WHY????????? We took it from him, and then he refused to order a drink when the server finally came to take our drink order. Then he was mad when she came back and didn’t have anything for him.

We had the slowest service I have ever had in this restaurant. We saw tables around us get seated, order, get their food, pay and leave while we had still only had an appetizer. And the kids were just relentless. Fighting, pushing their chairs back into the people at the table behind us, going to the bathroom umpteenthousand times. I am a type two diabetic and my blood sugar was low when we walked in. So, waiting for the food felt like the life was just slowly draining out of me. And the lower my blood sugar, the worse my kids were acting. I told my husband that this was what hell on earth felt like. It felt like we were there for four hours. I think it was closer to two.

EXHIBIT C:

All the damn fighting. My boys wrestle and play rough, and as an only child and a female, this is strange territory for me. I don’t know when it crosses the line into really hurting each other, and all the screaming just sets me on edge. They’ve been doing it more and more, and the more I tell them to stop, the more they do it. And then someone always ends up getting hurt – usually the little one. I can’t stand it.

So I am glad school starts this week. I have their school supplies organized and packed in their backpacks, ready to roll for Wednesday morning. Please, teachers, knock some sense back into these boys!