My face betrays me when it turns purple!

Have no fear reader dear, the war wages on.  The tech-NO battle is not won. This week on the reality show that is not aired on television (my life) we had a few tech (hell) -no moments. I took my daughters shopping on Saturday. “Number 14.5” is barely speaking to me these days unless she wants a ride somewhere or needs some money for something. She needed new undergarments (she takes after her mother) and needed to go up a cup size, but she wasn’t speaking to me or making eye contact. Which really annoys me and I try hard not to show it, but I think my face betrays me when it turns purple, those veins start bulging in my neck and forehead, and I start frothing at the mouth.  This happened only after she sat in the back row of the suburban with only 3 of us in the vehicle and I tried to talk to her with her iPod on and earbuds in for a half an hour. When someone refuses to make eye contact it’s really difficult to get their attention through the rear view mirror. She did not want to hear me or see me and it was making me crazy, but I bit my tongue until I checked on her in the dressing room and she instantly turned mopey. I ask her how things fit and discovered that she is trying on “push-up” bras, now that would be fine if she were a member of the Itty Bitty Titty Committee, but we are here to move up into the ‘C cup’ range and I’m thinking, ‘uh, no way are you pushing them up any higher!’ So I tell her (in my most compassionate maternal tone), then I bring her some normal support wear, suddenly she is done shopping she doesn’t want to try on another thing. I have ruined it for her, and as we walk out of the dressing room she is texting someone. I imagine that I am being maligned via text to everyone and anyone who cares for wanting her to look less like a stripper and more like a virginal ninth grader. So I say, ‘give me that damn phone!’

I just wanted to delude myself into believing that my daughters and I could enjoy some time together, but I realized that we are never alone if they have their iPods or phones with them. Now because I have taken one phone I must take two. This is one of these moments when you hate parenting because you know that you are now about to suffer more than they are. I took the phone from daughter “Number 12.5” (almost a teen) and then my head begins to throb and my right ear starts bleeding because she’s sitting in the passenger’s seat and won’t shut-up now that I have her phone. Done shopping and back in the car I still try to maintain the ruse and I ask them if they want to go out for lunch.  Number 14.5 is ‘NOT hungry and doesn’t care,’ and Number 12.5 just wants her phone back…. Is it too early to start drinking that’s all I can think about is calming my nerves with alcohol. I shouldn’t admit that; I should say I thought of meditation or yoga to calm myself, but that would be a lie and not funny in a sad way at all!

I love, love, love my children more than life itself… (that saying makes me wonder, but I’ll save it for another time).

Just let the wolves raise them, it’ll be cheaper.

So I haven’t written in a while. Sorry. We took to the road and my grandmother passed away which changed me somehow. Although I couldn’t tell you how exactly. I think she took a piece of me with her, unfortunately not my heart, but my brain. Well, maybe she took both!?

Writing about the’ tech-free’ thing kinda bores me, although with all these kids its necessary, unless I decide suddenly that I’m not interested in raising healthy, well-adjusted, socialized individuals I guess I’ll keep at it. My youngest is having a birthday soon and in addition to the Wii, the PS2, the xbox360, the PSP, the iPod touch (3rd gen), a laptop and her cell phone she now wants a PS3…So I asked her, “Can you try to think of a gift that doesn’t force you to sit on your ass for hours at a time just using up all the good oxygen in the house?”  Okay, to be honest, I didn’t say it exactly like that but I wanted to. Seriously, someone needs re-market the Hula-hoop, or the jump rope or something! (I know adults everywhere are doing it, but I mean get kids to like it again. Why doesn’t Donald Trump make that a challenge on “The Apprentice?” – Is that show still on?) Not to be the kind of parent who ‘walked to school up hill both ways in the snow,’  but shit we used our effin hands as toys… remember that? ‘Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack?’ 

Call me crazy but I don’t want to spend $300 just so I can be Super-Mom while you sit there endlessly with that blue glow reflecting off your face. I find it annoying to cook for you, do your laundry, and clean up after you while you sit on your ass all day moving only your thumbs; and to think that I thought ESPN was a horrible invention when I first got married! I seriously wonder what the difference would be between the unsocialized child raised by wolves and the unsocialized child who is a ‘gamer’ 18 hours a day. I mean they’d spend the same amount of time interacting with other human beings, they’d learn to communicate through a series of grunts, and let’s face it, their table manners would be; yes I’ll say it, NON-EXISTENT! Too bad Jane Goodall isn’t still around this might be right up her alley.

So let me weigh the options again, the end results being the same: I spend hundreds of dollars on another game console or I let the wolves raise you for free? Someone please pass me the ‘Easy Button.’

Follow the ‘yellow brick road’ to where again?

What do you do when you know you aren’t in ‘Kansas’ anymore and you have no idea how to get to ‘Oz’?

Today has been an interesting day; have you ever noticed how ‘polite’ people use the word ‘interesting’ to replace a more negatively sounding word?! My day started out by over-sleeping, I woke up exactly 1 hour too late…. damn time change! Yesterday we were fine, but not this morning…. so of course this puts everyone slightly on edge when your mother wakes you in that ‘OMG-we’ve-already-missed-the-bus-and-are-going-to-be-tardy tone’! Of course my son is ready in 5 minutes, I doubt he brushed his teeth, but he say’s, “I’ll be waiting in the car” -very efficient.  Meanwhile my youngest had 2 bowls of cereal in the amount of time it took my 13 year old daughter (who had to shower and put on make-up) to get ready in a hurry!

Are you still with me? Okay good, because my son was waiting in the car for 20 minutes and honking the horn the entire time, as if I had forgotten that we had someplace to be, meanwhile I made him (and his twin sister) an English Muffin with butter and strawberry jam, so they would have something in their stomach to start the day, because moms are just like that! So we get in the car and I hand the twins their muffins and my daughter says, “mom did you write that note to my English teacher”?

PLEASE NOTE: Last night this same daughter left a note on my laptop; the note was written to her English teacher, and it said something like: ‘Dear Mrs So’n So, Please excuse my daughter for submitting her online assignment 1 hour and 15 minutes late bla bla bla….’ Right beside the note was a blank piece of paper and a pen, with which I was expected to write this note to her teacher. Now I will say, that in the past I have written a note when I knew for a fact that my daughter had been working diligently on a project and something unfortunate happened, but that was not the case this time. This time, she spent her entire Saturday watching episode after episode of “Grey’s Anatomy” on Netflix, and on Sunday I put in plenty of personal time on the Atom model project, but I had not heard one single thing about this English assignment so I am assuming that she forgot about it. Now let’s return to this morning in the car on the way to school…

I respond to the question, “No M, I did not write a note to your teacher.” Indignantly, she spats that she will now be getting a lower grade because of me! To which I respond (calmly I might add), ‘how this is a lesson in organization, and time-management, and that if I had seen her working diligently on the project as her letter to her teacher indicated, then I might have written the letter, but this was not the case. If she knew that she had an English deadline and an Atom Project, then she should have worked on one on Saturday and one on Sunday. A deadline is a deadline, and she won’t be learning anything if I write a note to her teacher, because ultimately she is accountable. If she watched TV all day Saturday and knew about the assignment, then she is irresponsible (which I know is not the case, she is normally extremely conscientious), but if she forgot about the assignment, then she needs to use her agenda to become more organized and manage her time better’…. meanwhile I can feel (what I call) “death glare” penetrating the back of my skull, so I turn around and I say, “I’m sorry honey, but I wouldn’t be doing you any favors by writing the note, so please understand and to eat your muffin so you have something in your belly.”

“I hate English Muffins”, she spats.

“Oh since when? I think I saw you eat one covered in Hollandaise Sauce and Eggs Bene on Saturday”

“I hate them plain”, she says.

To which I reply (still calmly, I might add), “perfect honey, because this one has butter and strawberry jam on it, just take a bite please.”

So I happen to glance into the backseat, as she pinches a crumb off the edge of the muffin and angrily shoves it in her mouth…… skreeeeeeeeeeetch …… into the ‘suicide lane’ we come to a dead-stop… I am no longer calm, in case you were wondering. I say, “it will be a mistake for you to behave this way.” And suddenly out of no where, like a polite southern child she says, “Yes ma’am” and takes a bite, so I wait for traffic to pass and I pull back on to the road … Since I am all Yankee,  I set a very poor example of “polite southern ways”, but in a pinch a “yes ma’am” will come out of one of my children and will put them on the path to recovery instantaneously.  All three of my kids have had issues with homework in the past week, so as I continue to drive I drone on with my lecture about homework, which even I don’t remember because I am so tired of hearing myself talk… I pull into the school and try to salvage the morning, with ‘I love you(s)’ and ‘have a good day’ darlings….

So what I NEED TO KNOW IS: Since I can’t get back to ‘Kansas’ (the days before puberty) how do I find the ‘yellow brick road’ and stay on this path to ‘Oz’ (a time when we will be from the same planet again). You are probably wondering by now if I sprinkled LSD on my fiber bran cereal this morning, and the answer of course is no, but again I ask you; why kids don’t come with manuals? EVERYTHING ELSE DOES! To simplify this for you (for me, really) I will say that there are times, between the lessons of ‘Tech Free Sunday’ and using a late homework assignment as a lesson in personal accountability/responsibility, that I feel lost. Times when I imagine what Velma must feel like when she loses her glasses on ScoobyDoo, as I fumble around blindly trying to raise intelligent, productive human beings, by limiting their tech time and not writing notes to their teachers? I might be the cause of a new type of Bulimia: “Techno-Bulimia” for all I know, where my kids binge for 6 days of the week because I made them purge on Sunday, and then because I didn’t write this one note my daughter doesn’t get into Harvard and hates me for the rest of her life. Am I being overly dramatic  or is parenting really the most difficult thing I will ever do? This post feels like my lecture in the car this morning; I think I just rambled on for hours, about nothing, but who knows, maybe you got something out of it, let’s hope so! 🙂

“I’ll get you, my pretty, and your little dog, too!”

~ The Wicked Witch of the West

 

 

 

 

Is your cell phone REALLY ruining your relationships or is it you?

Okay so as an ‘official blogger’, which I have ALWAYS (since blogging began) thought sounded disgustingly similar to a booger, and I do believe there are some fairly obvious similarities between a gooey glob of well; you know (Merriam-Webster says : piece of dried mucus) and  to the contents of a person’s personal weblog (abbr: blog), of course these similarities do not apply to ALL bloggers, but in the case of this particular post of mine there may be no dispute.

I am torn and I need help; (observe my role as the victim here) my best employee and right hand (and left hand)  left the office at noon for the day (because she had a headache after having an MRI that morning), and my daughter called me at 3:40 to tell me that she needed a ride home from “Science Olympiad” at 4 pm…(not on the Google calendar). So in an extremely professional font I typed a sign that said to call my cell phone in an emergency which I scotch-taped to my office door, (because I have now left the office vacant an hour and a half before closing time) Oh yes, I did!

Meanwhile my daughter is running the risk of never being picked up because she keeps texting me to ask where I am, while I’m driving like a maniac to pick her up on such short notice. Then I get home with my youngest and my other daughter asks where her brother is? So as I am about to call in the National Guard to find him when my ‘famous’ aunt and uncle stopped over to discuss with me a few legal issues, and as I am always touting here on this tech-freeing blog (which another blogger so aptly pointed out was an amusing oxymoron) the value of the human relationship. I had forgotten that my aunt and uncle were coming over for drinks to discuss their estate (as it was not on the Google calendar), and the entire time I kept answering my cell phone incase it was my missing son while my aunt was telling me about my legal responsibilities as their trustee. Meanwhile I have lost a child during the course of this day and am seriously questioning their decision in choosing me for this job.  Then in walks my son who had math tutoring after school and forgot to tell me (not on the Google calendar).

In the stress of my missing son I was worried about offending my aunt and uncle, Maya Angelou says it perfectly:

I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.

I read this article this morning (because it popped up on my home page at the office) about attention sappers and that perhaps it isn’t ADHD at all but technology overload or stress or 2 other reasons, I almost laughed hysterically at this article… and it’s simplistically under AND over-stated OBVIOUSNESS… someone push the friggen “easy button” PLEASE!

Then I see this article  “Technology overload” can ruin relationships written in 2008 about gadgets ruining relationships. It likened technology use to alcoholism and how some people can have one drink while others must consume the entire bottle…. Why do I feel annoyed again by the ridiculously simplistic nature of both of these articles?

I am not a scientist, and I am not a statistician so I will not give you scientific evidence based on statistical results, but can I say  this as a blogger aka booger? …. BS.!!! ( I am trying to keep this blog PG) …. People ruin relationships, not gadgets. People ignore each other or feel overwhelmed by all they have going on in their lives because they over commit themselves or have too many kids (or whatever).  Ultimately people have to take responsibility for their own actions and  make the conscious decision to put down the phone and talk to the person in front of them. Sometimes, I will admit, it’s difficult when you think you have a child missing (being tutored), and your aunt (who only checks her email once a week) finds it rude when you answer a phone call while she is discussing you being the trustee of her estate… So I admit there are always exceptions, but ultimately it’s your choice. Do you spend your life staring at your cell phone or do you go out and take a walk, look at the moon, read a book,  have a conversation with a friend, relative, neighbor, train for a 5k or start a Tech-Free Sunday (for example)?

The notion of looking on at life has always been hateful to me. What am I if I am not a participant? In order to be, I must participate.~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Do you remember when….???

We walked two miles to school up hill both ways in the ice and snow bla bla bla…

As soon as a kid hears that they tune right out. I have come to realize that they have absolutely zero interest in what is was like to have to wait your turn to use the telephone, or the bathroom for that matter. (I grew up in a home with 6 kids, one bathroom and one telephone attached to the kitchen wall) I was having a conversation recently with my kids when I said something along the lines of the the fact that we only had 3 television channels to choose from, and my son angrily interjected that he didn’t care how many channels we had, because he has hundreds and Netflix too, so what was my point? I honestly can’t remember at the moment. What I do remember is that IF I said the words, “I’m bored” within earshot of my mother I would have been washing cloth diapers out in the toilet (by hand)… (I was obviously the oldest of the 6 kids, lucky me!) I learned at an early age to find something to do, and if not then look like you were doing something and above all don’t complain… it only leads to more chores. I had a rock collection; only rocks with white rings around them which I kept in a box under my bed, but I spent many hours in search of these beauties: I still have a thing for pebbles, I have a particular fondness for cairns and I can’t say why, and I love the smooth perfection of a North Carolina beach pebble as well. (Random -sorry)

Not only did I pride myself on my pebble/rock collection, but I had a fort…my was a fort was built from pallets, and shingles and other junk, I loved this place more than any place on earth, the front door was tied to a 2×4 with a sock. (Oddly enough the door was not large enough for an adult to fit through.) Sadly, only a few people might remember it (on the back of the barn), Jenny T, and Peggy K who might actually be able to get me a digital picture of it so I can share it with you… Peggy can you please????

My point in sharing all this isn’t to shame my children into being more creative, but to expose them to a different way of life. I was petrified to say that I was bored or complain about ANYTHING when I was growing up… we had a large family and always had a large garden, my mother would send me to pick green beans, which is back breaking work no matter how tall or short you may be. Once (when I was bored) she sent me to look for an Indian Arrow Head in the freshly tilled corn field adjacent to our house, and imagine her shock when I actually came home with one! (The Lenape Indians were from my neck of the woods)…. So I suppose boredom or the over-use of the term by adolescents is not a new thing, but technology makes me wish for my children that they only had three TV channels, no laptops, iPods, or cell phones… Am I old-fashioned or just old?

What are your thoughts?

I have lost my mind! Just be quiet and go watch a movie or something!

I hate Tech-Free Sunday’s – There I said it!

It can be the most excruciating experience of my week and sometimes I think the kids drive me to a new level of insanity on purpose just so I will call the whole thing off! Tonight we made tacos for dinner (just to tone down the clean up factor)  then played Pictionary and one of my daughters (I will not say which one) talked, chattered, prattled, babbled, any word that you can think of where someone makes noise incessantly, well that was what she did. During the entire game new husband kept looking at me anxiously and asking if I needed a cocktail… I kept saying, no, although I really wanted to say yes, but I had to remind myself that my family-time should not require me to consume more alcohol……so why does it feel like it does? After our game my son (who unbeknownst to me  had just farted) and then proceeded to give me a hug, which required that I linger there hug-length time in his anal stench, meanwhile I say, ‘what is that smell?’ and he starts giggling. To which I reply ‘ughghghghg blech’. Then he said, “mom you aren’t excited”, and I admitted to him that I hate TFS, and he said, “then mom why are we doing it? We are finally getting used to it”, and my reply, “because it’s good for us, like eating our vegetables (cauliflower or brussel sprouts – not my favs).” I keep trying to remind myself about the part in the book, Eat, Pray, Love where she hates a particular mantra/prayer and then discovers that she must discover why she struggles with this prayer before she can get beyond it…I have not reached that level of enlightenment yet, obviously…

I know that on a some deep level it is good for us and maybe today I’m just cranky, I have had the flu all week, (which is why you haven’t heard from me) so maybe I am still not quite myself, but it feels like more than that… I took them all to “The Fuzzy Peach” http://www.thefuzzypeachnc.com/where you buy yogurt by the pound in a very ‘mod’ setting…. why do I feel like such a curmudgeon when I say that $20, for frozen yogurt is a bit much…and while I’m on my rant let me also mention that I ran into the grocery store to grab a  few things for dinner; my bill came to $50.28, so I gave the prepubescent clerk 3 twenty dollar bills (that’s $60), a nickel and a quarter (30 cents)…. Guess what I got back in change????? $9. 97….. WTF…..  Yes, I gave you a nickel and a quarter so you could give me 57 more coins, ( I know this is not PC, but you …. retard!) (New Husband tells me I should not say ‘retard’, but I ask you what else do you call it? – I WOULD NEVER use that term for someone who was actually mentally or physically challenged/impaired/handicapped (pick your term), but this kid wasn’t, he was just an idiot and I called him a retard -in my head!) I didn’t even bother; I stood there for a moment paralyzed and confused as though I had made the mistake and maybe just gave him a quarter, but then realized that he was probably still hearing voices in his headset (which he was obviously no longer wearing)  from his most recent game of Modern Warfare. And in his defense it could have just been an honest mistake, but after that game of Pictionary I am not feeling generous, sorry kid…get some math skills or go stock green beans or something that doesn’t require basic math skills!

As cranky as I sound, it really was a good day, the girls rode their bicycles for the first time in decades ( no exaggeration) without me telling them to do it, and my oldest daughter even complained that I didn’t spend enough time with her on “family day”…. who’d a thunk it? They are embracing it and I am lacking simple appreciation of that precious fact. Tomorrow morning I will start my day with day one of couch to 5K with my son, so hopefully I will have  a more positive attitude when I report to you tomorrow.

Good Night and thanks for tuning in to TFS#6 and I will try to be less itchy tomorrow, I promise!

Then a funny thing happened; I killed moose with my car.

Then a funny thing happened; I killed moose with my car..