. . . or you might look over one day and realize that your 6th
grader has practiced her leg shaving skills on your 7 year-old.
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| "I don't smile for pictures" is what this child says to me! |
The summer has flown by, I’m now the parent of a 6th
grader and I’m in complete denial of what I call the “trickle down” effect of
having older children in the house. For
everything from chores to bedtime to learning about body hair, the younger
children learn it all at the same time the oldest one does! And good, bad or ugly, I need to buckle up
because there are a few things I’ve learned over my summer vacation with three
pre-teens (oh yes, I said it, even the 7 year-old Id is going on 16 and momma’s
in for a loooooooooong decade)! Gone are
the days when my biggest concern was a rock stuck up someone’s nose or a crayon
stuck in an ear.
Of course, I meant to write many times over the summer,
but every time I tried to sit down before midnight, someone was coloring
someone’s hair, shaving someone’s legs, destroying someone else’s bedroom and
generally about to commit some form of Hara Kari!
Here are what I call my Summer 2013 Greatest Hits:
1)
When one fine summer day, your eleven year-old
angel child who adores her daddy is screaming at him at the top of her lungs
because he asked her to get dressed before watching endless cartoons, LOCK YOUR
DOORS BECAUSE SHE’S COMING FOR YOU NEXT.
No clue what kind of PMS monster possessed that child, but it came in with a vengeance. It quickly left the next day, but it made mommy
realize that she was in no way ready to handle what may be coming in a couple
years. My recommendation . . . go to the
nearest bookstore and let American Girl handle it!
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| This is a fantastic book that you can get through Amazon here. |
2)
No child under the age of 10 will EVER write you
a note home from camp. She will simply
come home with wadded up note cards and will show you all the fun things she can do with the most expensive stickers on the planet (i.e. her Forever stamps)! SH******T!
3)
On the flip side, you may have a child who sends four letters home and P.S.’ you do death. I wish I
could now find the cards so I could show you a picture, but, of course, mommy put them in a "safe place" so
she wouldn’t lose them and now can’t find them - every single card from the
Ego (9 year-old middle child) had one sentence about how much she missed us,
followed by “P.S. I need more hairspray” or “P.S. I need more stamps” or “P.S.
I need more cards”.
Had I not been on a fabulous vacation with
Husband from Heaven (and hence, didn’t receive mail that was sent home), this
is what I would have written back:
“Mommy and Daddy are having a fantastic
vacation eating all the ice cream we want and not having to give you any. P.S.
Chase down your sister and take her letter writing sh*t; clearly she doesn’t
need it!”
Oh wait, did I just write that where Nana could see it and add it to her custody file?!
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| OK, apparently mommy was the only one enjoying all that ice cream, and it wasn't until looking at the photos that she realized she pretty much hit up every ice cream place from coast to coast! |
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| Had to throw in these two from Magnolia Plantation outside Charleston! OMG, gorgeous! |
5)
LARGE Box of Baking Soda + EXTRA LARGE bottle of
vinegar + 15 children = An asphalt driveway in need of repair!
Following a particularly messy Camp Runamuk
this summer (lets just say that the vinegar and baking soda couldn't hold a candle to the finger paints and exploding mentos soda bottles), while I was cleaning up those messes I thought it would be "no big
deal" to leave the kids with these items so they could “experiment”. Let’s just say that mommy had to take a
firehose to the driveway and tables and she’s lucky daddy didn’t pop in for a
surprise lunchtime visit!!
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| ALL of those boxes and bottles were FULL when they started!!! |
6)
DO NOT take children with you to an appointment
for “threading” your chin hairs (oh yes, I admitted it, I have those annoying
goat hairs and I’ve tried everything from waxing to shaving to plucking and
thought this would be the panacea)! If
you decide to take your children to this exercise in torture, you may find
yourself explaining why you are crying so much that your contacts popped
out!! Uh huh, it hurt so bad and I cried
so much my f*#&ing contacts came out of my eyes! I have a tattoo and I have pushed 3 babies
out of a place not meant for a head to come out of and I have never experienced
pain like that!!!! No wonder they only
charge you $8 and tell you it will last 8 minutes. They're softening the blow and hoping it's so cheap you'll come back. Who needs water boarding when you can just
“thread” people?!!! NEVER AGAIN. From
now on I’m using Husband from Heaven’s razor and I’m not ashamed to admit it. (shhhhh,
don’t tell him. He will hide it from me!)
7) Speaking of messes, when you tie dye, make sure that you put on gloves that can appreciate your sailor mouth! On my girl scout honor, I did not do this intentionally - when we were tie dying sweatshirts with the Ego's girl scout troop, I removed my glove and found THIS
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| So now, if anyone ever annoys me, I just hold up my phone!!!! |
8)
Taylor Swift might be one hell of a b!tch to
contend with if you date and break up with her, but I gotta say, she’s one of
the most amazing performers I’ve ever seen in Concert. Any person who, in the middle of a concert,
can inspire my 11 year-old to apologize for her previous bad behavior, has my
fan loyalty FOREVER!!! (We had a small
wrestling incident while we were in line to buy shirts. Note to self, when attending a concert with
children, DO NOT arrive more than 15 minutes before the main act goes on –
otherwise, as your children are getting restless and tired of waiting, all those around you will take pity on you as they watch your
children pummel each other in a public display of their best WWF skills).
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| Seriously, best concert I've ever attended!! She was spectacular! |
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| And here's one for the "worst auntie ever" file . . . We dressed up my two year-old niece like the girls (complete with red hairspray and sparkle nail polish), and then we told her she couldn't go to the concert! I suck!!! |
9)
When you go to the beach with the children, be
sure to put YOUR undergarments in a bag separate from your children’s beach
toys and towels. For if you do not, you
may find that as your “baby” is trying to find a towel, she will come across
your thong underwear, proceed to take it out of the bag and show it to the
ENTIRE F*&%ING BEACH. And in
response to this display, one of your child’s friend’s might say “Oh my gosh, I
thought that was one half of a bra!!!”
Needless to say, the Id had her birthday party postponed by two weeks
for that little display (this of course was after her mommy walked away and
laughed her @$$ off with her friends).
As I sit here on this first day of school and breathe a collective (with all the other parents around the country) and bittersweet sigh of relief that summer is over I realize that with every summer that passes, so too does the youth of my children and my own youth as well.
Here are two things that helped me survive my summer:
1) Name Bubbles – an incredible company that bent over backwards to get name labels to me in time for summer camp. On some of their clothes, toys and sleeping bags, my kids still have the ones we used 2 years ago. These things last!! Of course, I'd use them for their school stuff now, but I put them in the same place as the Ego's summer camp letters and now can't f*&#ing find them!!!!
2) A library card for e-books – how else can a mommy read her naughty books and keep from Husband from Heaven just how many she’s read over the summer?! Seriously, you can check out e-books from the library and they even have the naughty ones like 50 Shades of Grey (they, of course, don’t have ALL the other naughty series' that I’ve read over the summer, but those I’ll cover in another post so you have the names)! And for those of you wondering how I find the time to read, calculate just how many 45 minute chunks of time you spend waiting for a child to finish a music class or sports practice. Adds up to A LOT of reading time!!! J
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