The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly

The Good:

Maggie now has three awards from her teacher for "doing a great job at clean up time." She's taking her OCD public and reaping the rewards. Huzzah!

The Bad:

Yesterday, she asked me all conversationally-like, "Bathrooms are the appropriate place for fawting, isn't that right?"

Me: Fawting? What do you mean by that? Farting?

Maggie: No, fawting. It's a word that means tooting. That's for bathrooms, right?

Me: FAWTING? I think you mean farting. It's pronounced faRRRRRting. And yes, I guess a polite person does that in the bathroom, if they can.

Maggie: No, it's pronounced fawting. All the kids in my class say fawting.

I just want to make it clear that I'm MUCH more upset that my kid is cultivating a Boston accent from her kindergarten classmates than that she starts conversations with me about flatulence.

The Ugly:

Kate decided to throw a huge tantrum this morning about the clothes I picked out for her after she was already dressed and we were practically walking out the door to take Maggie to school. With no time left for shenanigans like this, I told her she could change into anything she wanted after we got home. We both totally forgot about it until approximately 15 minutes before we needed to leave to go pick Maggie up from school, when Kate remembered and started having a total nervous breakdown. She ran upstairs, stripped down to her underpants and one sock, and then like a chihuahua having a panic attack, peed all over the floor and rug in front of her dresser. WTF. After a frantic bath and clean up job, she picked out a new outfit that calmed the frankenstorm in her 3-year old brain, and we rushed out the door to school.

The real kicker of this story is that the outfit I dressed her in consisted of a solid purple shirt and a pair of polka dot pants; the outfit Kate preferred consisted of a purple polka dot shirt and a pair of solid purple pants.

I just really don't see how their teenage years could possibly be any worse than this preschool age. Parents of teenagers must just forget about the days when you had to listen to their crap AND clean it up after them as well.

"Can't You Even Tell a Good Tree From a Poor Tree?"

We put up our tree this week. Don't get too excited, it's just a tiny, fake, pre-lit tree that's small enough for me to carry up the stairs to the attic all by myself. We're going to be in Oklahoma for Christmas this year (which is so exciting!), so as much as it pains me to have a half-assed Christmas tree (which is so pitiful!), it's the only sensible thing to do.

The funny thing is that the girls don't even realize that this is an embarrassment of a Christmas tree. They are STOKED about this tree. They are full of glee over this little bottle-brush of green plastic that is barely taller than they are. They are so thrilled by it that we mostly just let them decorate it themselves.

Joy

Rapture

Kate is pretending to be a sleeping cat under the tree.

You can just barely see Kate "sleeping" underneath.

They have spent the last few days applying and then rearranging the ornaments. They sit and bask in it's feeble glow, admiring their handiwork. Every morning they come downstairs and demand that we plug in the lights so they can worship it for a few minutes before breakfast.

Lots of ornaments here...

...lots of ornaments here...

...no ornaments at all here.

But someone has left their balled-up, dirty socks here.

Morning Adoration

As Linus says, "I never thought it was such a bad little tree. It's not bad at all really. Maybe it just needs a little love."

'Tis the Season

I have been informed that I really ought to send out Christmas cards this year.

It is apparently my duty as a mother and an American. Something like that, or people just can't get enough photos of my children, or probably - most likely - other people just really want me to suffer through the same ordeals they put themselves through. People want me to send out Christmas cards just like they are always trying to get me to run a half marathon or take a Zumba class with them.

I'm on to you, sadists. I'm not falling for your cruel tricks.

I don't need the paper cuts and broken nails and migraines that come with having to address, stamp, and snail mail cards to everyone I know. Especially not during the holiday season, which is already so busy that I don't have enough time to drink coffee in my pajamas while staring at a book I'm not really reading - which is how I usually prefer to spend my time.

My sister-in-law, Amy, even designed this card for me so that all I have to do is order it:

It's perfect, and I do love it. My girls look so precious, and it is the kind of card I would send... But she didn't offer to hunt down everyone's real addresses, buy the stamps, and drive to the post office for me, so I don't think she was really serious.

In past years, I have considered sending out Halloween cards, because:
1) Who does that? No one would expect it.
2) I'd have more time to waste on it around the end of October.
3) Halloween is funnier than Christmas.

I've never actually gotten around to sending out these Halloween cards though, because:
1) I never get the girls' costumes done that far in advance, and then Halloween is over. Who wants a Halloween card in mid-November?
2) Again, there's all that address hunting, envelope licking, post office visiting.
3) I really just don't care enough to execute the grand plans my imagination comes up with.

But people seem to actually expect me to put forth some effort towards social conventions and holiday spirit, yada yada. (It's like you people don't even know me.) And then there's the fact that we did take some family photos this past weekend, and Mike's brother actually got some decent shots of the four of us.


This photo was not one of them.

When I texted one to my mom, she said, "Wonderful! That could be your Christmas card pic!" Assuming I was sending Christmas cards. If she could have nudged me with her elbow through the iPhone, she would've.

This is the actual photo I texted to her. We are pretty cute.

So since we all acknowledge that I don't have your actual physical address - or stamps - here's the closest thing to a card you're likely to get from me.

 

 

Wishing you all the loveliest of Decembers. Peace be with you. Love, Amanda.

**Edited to add: I stole all these photos from my brother-in-law, Jeff. And I stole all these holiday card templates from tinyprints. Please go there and buy all your holiday cards from them or else they'll probably sue me for copyright infringement or something. I should go order like 100 copies of one of these cards, even though I won't mail them out, just to assuage my guilt. I could pass them out like business cards at cocktail parties. That would be amusing.

Scenes From a Thanksgiving Weekend

All of these lovely pictures were taken by my brother-in-law. Thanks, Jeff!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from all of us!

PS - And if you know who this child actually belongs to, please let me know so that I can return her. Dresses?!? She's obviously not related to me. Maybe she gets this girly thing from Mike.

PSS - This morning while I was making the mac & cheese to take to Thanksgiving, she begged me for some cheese... "I'm thirsty for cheese, Mom." She carried her cheese away to go eat it while watching cartoons in the living room. A little later she came back "thirsty" for more cheese, but she did not get another piece because MIKE FOUND THE ORIGINAL PIECE IN THE RADIATOR. No cheese for you!

Notes From the Nightstand: Operating Instructions

I have read so much about Anne Lamott and her writing, in particular about Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year, which is considered to be a classic in the mom-memoir genre that has since spawned a million mom-blogs (this book was written back in 1989). She's a writer's writer who is able to strike a perfect balance between humor, poignancy, politics, religion, and her personal and public lives with just the right amount of self-deprecation and honesty that never feels like embarrassing overshare.

When she found out she was pregnant with her only child, she was 35 years old, unmarried, and only a few years sober after battling an alcohol and cocaine addiction. While this may seem like the kind of uphill battle that most people will not have to overcome while parenting their newborn, everyone does face their own particular collection of challenges in that first year, and anyone who has (or will) go through it will feel a sense of camaraderie with Lamott. I ended up reading the passages about her son's colic aloud to Mike (oh, I know how much he loves it when I do that!), and we both nodded enthusiastically in agreement with her black humor about that long, dark night of the soul.  If you're looking for the straight dirt on having a baby, this is it. It's a quick read, it's funny, it's heartbreaking, and it's true.

Lamott also writes fiction in addition to non-fiction about her faith, her addiction and recovery, and writing. I'm currently reading Bird by Bird: Some Instructions for Writing and Life. She also has written a memoir about the birth of her first grandson, Some Assembly Required: A Journal of My Son's First Son, which I definitely have on my to-read list.

Tu(n)esday

Andrew Bird has a new album out called Hands of Glory, and it's folkier than his previous ones, which I love. This particular song, the first single, is pretty classic Andrew Bird rather than anything super-Americana, but here's a clip from Letterman where he does a cover of Townes Van Zandt's "If I Needed You," which is also on the album: