“I’m mad at Miss Teacher. She always makes me come in from the rain last.”
I look at my young son. He turns five in a month. F-I-V-E. He is timeless like my sister, always thousands of years younger than reality. He has ideas now. He has opinions. He is wrong a lot.
I’m sure you’ve read this story. Like a lot of the trends in the world I tend to be one of the last to catch up. So when I saw the picture of the black lab sleeping on a sofa with a heart felt story attached, I read it.
It’s not unusual to hear a “mommy blogger” talk about the inevitable morning from hell. In fact, I’m pretty sure both of you reading this could tell me you’ve experience this exact same morning. The difference? It happened to me. And this is how things shook down:
The 4 year old is in a particular nasty phase. It’s the morph between preschooler and “real boy” that mimics pre-pubecense with pee accidents. It’s a confusing time for everyone involved. This particular morning, the Boy couldn’t get a grip. He woke with a nasty case of being four. He sat, emphatically, at the table and stated: “I will not eat this cereal.” Now, in case there are any four year old’s reading this post let me explain a small known fact among all parents. The minute you state you WILL NOT EAT THIS CEREAL means you absolutely WILL NOT GET ANYTHING ELSE. Eat or don’t eat, we don’t really care. But that cereal? It’s all your gettin’.
In tradition with all Mommy Bloggers (Capital “M” and “B”) I’d like to present to you a montage of TEH CUTEZ.
I know I know, I hear it. Sorry.
As a little girl sitting in a pew at St Mary’s Catholic Church, I was pretty sure the Priest was talking directly to me about 90% of the time. (The other 10% I figured he was talking about those girls at school who really needed to go to confession for breaking commandment number 5: Honor your father and mother because surely that could never be me.) Even if it was a sermon about giving money back to the church or not overdoing the strong drink, or treating work as a sanctuary, I still took these to heart at 8 years of age. God was telling me something. He had to be. Didn’t I just have too much Tang yesterday?
My young son, mentioned previously, reminded me last night of another story I keep forgetting to tell you.
He reminded me, as I lay him down in his twin bed, tucked him in, sang him a song, and promised to come back after reading to his sister, about this time I did not come back to check on him. In fact, he reminded me, I left him alone in the house for a very long time; a very long time while I was at the bus top. Did I remember that? he asked. Yes, I replied, I did.
You know those days where you forget to eat for about six hours and by the time you realize it you swear your pants are already a size bigger and you must surely look anorexic or vitally ill or, say, like Angelina Jolie but without all those kids or Brad Pitt? And then when you’re in the REWE supermarket you catch a glance of yourself from the side in the fridge isle and realize you could probably stand to go another ten days plus six more hours without eating but damn those sausages look tasty.
Yea, that.
I wrote this super cheesy post back in 2003 about how I thought I had the “Dog Spirit.” You know the one where a pregnant 28 year old fanes poetic about her free spirit that is about to be leashed to years of diapers and saying, “Do Not Take Off Your Clothes In Public.” (I assume this includes the teenage and college years.)
It’s not a new theme in my life: Traveling. It’s not something that just sort of showed up one day in my head where I said, “HEY! Let’s go somewhere!” No, the more I analyze (and by god I analyze) my desire, nay, need to get off the continent as frequently as possible, I realize it started early in my childhood, right down to how poorly I do travel and how often I crave it.
Some kids collect stamps. I don’t know who these kids are but I think they’re all about 102 nowadays. When I was a kid, way back in the early eighties, I collected cabbage patch kids.
So I’m talking tomorrow night at the inaugural meeting for the EE Seattle Meet Up. And, if you follow me on twitter, you’ll realize I’ve been doing nothing but coding-OMG-coding-HEADBANG for weeks now.This is also why you see a distinct lack of conversation about the latest Bachelorette (TEAM JEFF) or why all the freakin’ adorable stories of my children remain largely untold. Not to worry, I promise to bring up a variety of daily babble soon enough.
In the mean time, I have a confession: I’m speaking on the “Best (some # here) Tips for a Friendly Back-End in ExpressionEngine” and I’m not sure I’m qualified to give BEST TIPS. I mean, sure, after 8 years of working with EE I have some good tips. I have some experiences that I can share that I’ve learnt from. But BEST TIPS?