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SAHD Training--Memorial Day Shenanigans
- May 26, 2009 at 12:07 PM
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My husband got a big taste of The Life Of A SAHM yesterday between Our Blue Daughter, our son Nigel's Little Friend Dalton's visit and the eight neighbor kids that crashed the place because the pool is warm enough to do more than dip a toe, scream and head for Hot Bath Country.
Our daughter MaryJane learned that painting one's regular body parts with blue nail polish before Mommy Wakes Up has a number of not-so-nice consequences, especially when those body parts are already decorated with Kitten Scratches and Mommy has a BIG bottle of acetone and a roll of paper towels. Not wanting her to become even more of a statistic I did not douse her in flammable liquid, but painstakingly dabbed a great deal of blue chud off of her over the course of several hours. She bawled and carried on because her scratches were sizzling. I did not feel really sorry for her, to tell you the truth. And I really needn't have bothered with the dabbing as it turned out. If ever your child becomes auto-covered in nail polish, let her soak her bones in a swimming pool for four hours and the stuff just peels off in sparkly blue shards. Once I woke up enough to really LOOK, I disovered blue nail polish on the carpet, the kitchen floor, the table, the television buttons and the kitten. Needless to say, all nail polish in or near the house has been relegated to the landfill.
Dalton, in whose company Nigel already spent Friday and Saturday nights over at Dalton's house, came over to go swimming and spend the day. I'd almost forgotten what a huge pain that kid can be. Momnesia, the thing that powers most abortive play dates. He wasn't exactly naughty, but he was weird enough to raise the eyebrows of anyone Not Dalton. Between yarking tea all over the kitchen while trying to chug-a-lug the whole bottle, nuding up in front of eight neighbor kids and blithely dripping ketchup all over The Ugly Chair while glued to Phineas and Ferb, my husband was ready to headdesk both himself and Dalton. Dalton recently quashed not just one bully, but any and every bullying attempt that would ever be leveled at him by anyone who was present and anyone who can listen to a whispered rumor by stabbing a freshly-sharpened No. 2 pencil into the back of the hand of the aformentioned bully, who called him "a fag weenie". This information made it across not one, not two but three school districts and all the way up to the high school, so when Dalton skinned off his swim trunks and skedaddled naked across the yard screaming "I'm a space shuttle!" in full view of four 11-year-old neighbor boys and four 14-year-old neighbor boys, all they did was whisper amongst themselves "Isn't that the kid who stabbed someone with a pencil?". Little Nigel verified and clarified that information by telling them all about the "fag weenie" incident. A seven-year-old has never held eight older kids in the palm of his hand with sheer force of storytelling in such a fashion in the whole of Little Boy History.
All those kids swam for four or five hours and then asked me for towels and sustenance. I asked them if they saw a sign reading "Country Club" over the door and that because I just happened to have the right number of hot dogs, buns, potato chips, sparkling lemonade and popsicles, I'd feed them THIS ONE TIME, but in future they needed to bring towels and either a cooler full of junk food or cold hard cash if they wanted a buffet. My husband was stunned that these kids' parents were not with them. "I could be a child molester! They've never even met me!" Well, they've met me and in this neck of the woods, if you've got all your teeth and don't look like you're on meth, you're qualified to watch their kids. Besides, the kids were in a pack of eight, four sets of Big and Little Brother combos. "But what about phone numbers? Do you even know all their names? What happens if somebody gets hurt?" I informed him that all of them have names sort of like Kolby, Jordan and Christopher, that I knew where at least two families lived and one could hit their front doors with a rock from here, that I'd met one each of those two sets of parents and that I'd already told all those kids that if someone cracks a skull I'm dragging the lifeless body off the property and pretending I've never heard of the lot of them.
The kids did their begging before my husband peeled himself off the lawn chair and by the time he made it back up to the house with the dog and the kitten in tow, there were eleven children stuffing themselves with hot dogs, swigging sparkling lemonade out of cans and arguing about Whose Cooties Are On Which Can, burping, farting and bickering over the XBox360 controllers. MaryJane, the Odd Girl Out, hawked the bowl of poato chips off the main table when nobody was looking and wedged herself under a table in the corner and packed 'em in with her blue-tinted hands and occasionally fed one to the dog, who crammed himself under there as well because he knows where his bread is buttered. Once my husband confronted the living room, which after only nine minutes looked and smelled like Guam, he staggered down the front porch steps to where I was coolly tugging on a cigarette out by the truck. "How can you put up with this? This is insanity! All these kids live around here, right? In all these brand-new huge houses? How come they want to come to this crackerbox and play? How can you feed them; they're like kittens, once you feed them they'll never leave!" About that time Dalton's mother called to find out how much trouble he'd managed to get into. "Oh not much," my husband told her "we did just now manage to get all of his clothing back on though." You could practically hear Dalton's mother smack her own forehead over the phone. She knows that her kid is a tad weird; she's just grateful that MY kid is about as normal as a seven-year-old ever gets and that I'm willing to put up with Dalton for eight hours at a stretch. Once the hot dogs ran out, all the neighbor kids faded away to their respective Big Huge Houses and my husband grimly re-directed Dalton towards packing up his things and heading for the car, which took both of us and 15 minutes of Searching For The Odd Items Dalton Had Collected over here. One rock, four shred of old pillowcase the lawnmover got ahold of, 12 bottlecaps, five corks and a length of chrome-plated chain later, Dalton was headed home and our kids began asking for cocoa, a movie and Bedtime Stories.
Welcome To My Life, Dad.
Comments:
I almost peed myself when I read that.
Liz, I love you. You're so frickin' normal and happy and good of a person. Sigh. You know I'm in a weird mood this morning.
It's good to know that part of the world hasn't changed too much in 42 years.
Where do you live? I thought our place was bad? When Randy was a teen our place was the gathering site because there was always a vat of chili or spaghetti or other high carb filler of hollow legs. I'm so glad we did not have a swimming pool!
When Randy left home my grocery bill went down $200 a month!! Since at the time my Husband was active duty military he was away much more than he was here- magically none of the hordes seemed to materialize until he was once again gone!
LOL! I love your writing Liz. But I must say I'm with your husband, RUN AWAY! ;)
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that is so funny at least this time he knows how much you put up with welcome to our world dad
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