Boba Fett's Head

"Hey J, I found Boba Fett's head in the dirty clothes hamper!"

The Black Permanent Magic Marker Gasp!

I was lecturing one three-and-half-year-old about the necessity of leaving the Christmas wreath hanging on the door (where it belongs) when I noticed streaks of black marker on the other three-and-a-half-year-old's face. Purely out of reflex I scanned the rest of his body. Only when my eyes landed on the cap in his hand did my brain catch up to what was seeing. Oh no.

Fifteen minutes earlier I had dared to let him color with a permanent black magic marker at the table. I told him he was not to leave the table with that marker. He didn't listen. So there I was following the trail of my parental failures; the tell-tale marks on his face, the cap in the hand, the inky culprit on the third step from the top, scribbles on the hallway wall... Oh, I suck suck suck at this! How could I let this happen?! How dare I try to clean the kitchen?! How dare I forget that he had that marker?! How dare I let him use it in the first place?! How dare I trust them...

"BOYS!!!!!!!!"

"1, 2, 3 eyes on me!"

"I want to know which of you participated in this!" (pointing at the offensive, black swirls on the wall).

At the bottom of things five minutes later the child with black streaks on his face tells me "I'm weally, weally, weally sowy".

"But honey, you KNOW this is wrong because we talked about this when you did it with the red crayon!" (oh yes, this was not the first time - did I mention I suck suck suck at this?)

"Mom, I'm weally weally weally sowy but that's why I wanted Halloween decorations on the door."

"You colored on the door?!?" (running up the stairs thinking I probably shouldn't even look).

And approximately twenty-five minutes after I allowed him to color with permanent black magic marker on paper at the table, I stumbled into his room. Closing the door behind me, knowing full well what I might see on the other side, I couldn't stop the gasp that escaped my body.

Time out for him. Time out for me. New coloring rules and policies. Television on. Wine uncorked. I love my boys, I love my boys, I love my boys... Give me strength, give me patience, give me grace...

Fast

(A Loose Interpretation of a Serious Conversation Between Two Three Year Olds and One Five Year Old Regarding the Relative Speed of Mostly Living Things)

1. Establishing Speed

I’m super fast!
Are you faster than a car?
No, I’m faster than a kid!
Well, I’m faster than lighting!
We’re fast!

2. Onto Hoppers, Swimmers and Mammals

Kangaroos and rabbits and frogs hop.
And kangaroos win.
Yeah, kangaroos swim!
No, kangaroos are mammals; they don’t swim.
Yeah, they’re mammals!
You don’t even know what a mammal is.

(Thoughtful silence)

I said kangaroos win not swim.

3. Swimming Begets Speed; Long Necks Do Not

Stingrays are fast but not giraffes.
Giraffes are really really tall and they walk.
But turtles are fast; they swim.

4. Five Year Old Voice of Wisdom and Reason

Guys, lets say gazelles are the fastest.
I-mean-zebras-I-mean-cheetahs!

(Enter diplomacy)

But we can just pretend they’re all fast.

5. Voice of a Three Year Old Aspiring Superhero

Spiderman is fast.

(Pause)

(Seeking five year old approval)

Spiders can win.

(Five-year-old-“I-know- better”-patient-silence)

6. The Other Three Year Old’s Final Word on the Subject

Yeah.

(Quiet contentment from the back two rows of the minivan)

How Do You Spell Book?

S: Blue, how do you spell book?

C: B-O-O-K

S: B-O-Y-K. No, that's not really straight.

J: Yes it is really straight!

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up?

C: I want to be an author and illustrator, but when I'm eighteen I want to drive a city bus.

J: I gonna be a superhero! I'm gonna be Spiderman!!!

S: (raises him arms in a circle above his head) I'm gonna be a O!

One Step at a Time & Go Fish!

C playing with a one-legged army man, making him hop along the ground:

"One step at a time"

"Get it?"

S playing Go Fish with mommy against C:

Mom: S, C wants to know if we have a 5. Do we have a 5?
S: Nope.
Mom: So what do you say to C?
S: October!

The World According to Ding Dong

This morning S was lying in bed with his hands under his head singing the ABCs Super Why-style (if you have a 3 yr-old you know what that means). He told me "mom, I'm singing the Super Why song with my elbow."

Huh?

Okay, cool.

And that's pretty much the kind of thing S does and says, and that's pretty much how we respond.

Angel Boy

Yesterday, after a brisk walk up a hill, C was holding onto his chest with both hands. I asked him if he was okay. His answer:

"I'm feeling god in my heart when it beats."

We are not a religious family; we don't go to church. C did go to a neighborhood preschool sponsored by a Lutheran Church and, as such, the class did receive bible stories each Monday. As we are not atheists either we figured the lessons couldn't hurt. Monday bible stories was one of his favorite times at school. I have always talked with C about "god"/the universe/spirituality on my level and from my perspective because I don't have any other way to talk about "it". He has always understood: I think he understood before he was even here with us. His Gramma S calls him Angel Boy. For certain, he is an angel walking the earth.

A List of Things Gone Missing:

fancy, spring-loaded fabric scissors
rubber cement
duct tape

reading glasses
postage stamps
my phone
the Batman cape

his wedding ring
some other things
I’m sure I shouldn’t forget

a binky
(that goes by the name of Pluggy)
Bug-Boy's butterfly net

the hidden gift
the hiding spot
(no longer under the bed)

my sanity
some memories
my head
my head
my head…

A House Full of Boys

Part 4

What I’ve Learned About Boys (So Far)

Boys like to touch, handle and manipulate things. They pick them up, take them apart, and turn them upside down and inside out. Discovering a new thing with buttons or mechanical parts is often a cause for celebration. When the twins were around a year old they became fascinated with the thermostat on the living room wall. No matter what we did to keep them from reaching it they managed to find their way back, climbing whatever they needed to in order to push those buttons. They once changed the setting to Celsius by pushing the unknown, but precise sequence and combination of buttons. (We lived with that setting for months until my husband accidentally reset it to Fahrenheit one day by alternately pushing random buttons and swearing under his breath). Another of their favorite activities involved plucking the keys off the computer keyboard. I have a friend whose three-year-old boy loves to play with the coffee grinder. In a boy’s world of play nothing is off limits; coffee grinder, computer, thermostat, toilet, toilet paper, microwave, laundry hamper, dirty clothes in the laundry hamper, clean clothes in drawers, clean clothes in laundry baskets, laundry baskets, electrical outlets, cords and plugs, refrigerator doors (for opening, closing, emptying and climbing), any and all furniture, pet food, bird food, bird feeder, grilling charcoal (new and used), holes in the ground, tools for digging holes in the ground, anything with any kind of button, their own streams of urine, kitchen utensils that mom thought were out of reach… Sometimes this kind of play can look and even feel destructive or disrespectful to the responsible adult. However, I’m certain the intention is anything but one of destruction and disrespect. There is a purpose in this play to sate curiosity and the drive to explore and discover. It helps me to think of it as deconstruction rather than destruction. When my own adult desires for order, neatness and containment begin to surface I look at the deconstruction all around me and feel gratitude for the spirit and joy that created them.

So, boys are messy. They play messy. They throw things, make huge piles of things, and knock them down or jump on or hide in them. They wrestle, run into things and smash things into each other. They eat messy. They squish, mash and pick apart their food. They put food in their cups and the contents of their cups on their plates. Their arts and crafts are messy. Paint, markers, glue and stickers are for paper as well as any exposed skin or object nearby. It’s not that they are messy people, per se. This messiness results from their tendency toward a very physical and kinesthetic approach to interacting with the world around them. Watch a young boy try to sit at the table for a meal for fifteen minutes. They start on their bottom, then they are up on their knees, then they are standing on the their chair, then sitting on their bottom but backwards, then standing next to their chair, then half sitting half standing… I imagine it’s pretty difficult to avoid making a mess when eating a meal in that manner!

Boys are daring. They generally don’t look before they leap. One of my cousin’s three boys is recovering from injuries acquired during an incident in which he thought he could fly. The other day I watched one of the boys at my five-year-old’s preschool clear four steps in an intentional flying leap to the concrete floor below. He proudly landed on his feet and promptly climbed back up for an attempt in which he clearly intended to surpass his previous accomplishment (there was an intervention before that attempt got off the ground). Though we have avoided any serious injuries in our house thus far, I’ve witnessed this daring spirit in my own boys’ play. They often approach their activities and projects with little thought, let alone concern, of the potential for negative outcomes or consequences. They just joyfully forge ahead and wait to see what happens. Sometimes they get hurt; sometimes mom gets mad. Other times nothing significant or special happens so they do it again; this time testing the limits and pushing a little further.

Boys are hunters. They seem hard wired to focus on a specific task and to do so with intensity and great dedication until it is complete. Last summer my boys played a game that involved walking back and forth between sandbox and kiddie pool and filling each with the contents of the other using a variety of tools. They usually did this for about twenty to thirty minutes and without speaking a single word to each other. They would travel the twenty yards between the two destinations, back and forth, passing each in total silence and with an energy conveying that they were all completely aware of and tuned into the goal. And even though I couldn’t tell you what they accomplished (because nothing was visibly apparent to me when the activity ended other than two huge piles of wet sand), at some point the work was done. I don’t know how they knew it, but they did, and they just stopped and moved on to the next thing as silently and knowingly as they had just been playing. And what they moved onto next wasn’t always silent. No! Hunter-type play can have a very quiet quality. On the other hand, some of their play is incredibly loud! Another of my boys’ favorite activities involves throwing lots and lots of toys and other things down the stairs or behind the couch or down the laundry chute at my parents’ house. This is usually, for a reason not known to me, a very loud job.

Part 5

Boy Energy & the Male Brain

Boys are not all of these things all of the time. Neither are girls not these things, or the complete opposite all the time. For example, each of my sons can be less messy and rather neat; less daring and more cautious. It’s important to me to embrace and support each of my children as individuals with entirely unique perspectives, journeys and “ways of being” in the world. To be sure, generalizations can threaten our ability to see people as individuals, and even influence a person’s expression of their genuine “self” outside of often resulting stereotypes. The intention is to convey that my experiences have shown a certain current of underlying tendencies to be so strong and so hard wired in my boys that they are hard to ignore. As a parent committed to understanding my children as individuals I was in danger of ignoring what they had in common with each other and boys everywhere. There is much knowledge to be gained by also seeing them as part of a group with specific predispositions, and it was an eye opening and revealing day when I acknowledged this truth.

Part 6

Comin Soon...

A House Full of Boys

Part 1

Boys and Boogers

When I was four-years-old one of my best friends was a boy named Jerry whose family lived in the same apartment building as mine. Our families moved away from each other when we were five and he and his family came to visit us in our new home some time shortly after. They stayed overnight and Jerry slept in our room with my sister and me. I don’t remember him having a cold or allergies, but for some reason I swear he picked his nose and wiped it on our wall until he decided to go to sleep. In grade school I had two other unforgettable incidents with boys and their boogers. There was who Dustin blew his nose and, apparently amazed by what came out, just had to show it to me. To this day that booger has the dubious honor of having been the biggest and roundest I have ever seen. Then there was Eddie who simply picked his nose, showed it to me, popped it in his mouth and carried on with his work. I was shocked, disgusted and amazed all wrapped up in one little girl-who-would-never package.

A few days ago I found myself saying to one of my three-year-old twin boys “honey, if you have a booger please give it to mama instead of putting it on the wall”. Asking my son to give me his booger tops a list of similarly odd comments such as: “let’s take the grass, sand and worms back outside where they came from”, and my personal favorite, “guys, it’s dangerous to run up and down the stairs with bags on your heads”.

Part 2

The Boy Train

Life with three sons, ages 5, 3 and 3, is an adventure full of surprises for a girl like me. I grew up with one sister. Her first two of three girls were born before my first son, and I became quite close with them. When I found out I was pregnant with our first child it never crossed my mind that it could be a boy. It’s not that I preferred a girl over a boy, or that I even consciously thought about life with one gender over the other. Simply put, I was surrounded by girl energy; I’m a girl, my sister is a girl, my nieces are girls, so of course I would have a girl. Imagine my surprise when we found out we were having a boy! I stared in wonder (often and for long periods of time) at the sonogram picture that showed his boy parts. Curious and excited, I started connecting with his boy energy long before he was born.

Shortly after our firstborn’s first birthday I discovered I was pregnant again, this time with twins. Certainly the odds were that at least one of them would be a girl. Honestly, I really wasn’t sure how I felt about that prospect. Some sort of uber-practicality came over me and I decided, rightly or wrongly, that life with three children separated by a mere two years would be easier if they were all the same gender. We didn’t have any girl clothes or toys, and had already started raising one boy. We were on the Boy Train headed to Boy Town. It just seemed easier somehow to avoid adding another train, with another destination and a completely different set of tracks.

Part 3

Two More Boys, a Booger Wall and the Smell of Dirty Socks

The day we found out we were having two more boys my perinatologist (and mother of three grown boys) smiled knowingly and said “in ten years your house will smell like dirty socks”. My mom (who didn’t raise any boys herself, but was raised with three brothers and no sisters) said “oh, Shannon, you’re going to have a Booger Wall”. Her reference to the now infamous booger habits of my childhood friend was a loving quip-turned-eerily-accurate-prediction. Neither my perinatologist nor my mom intended for me to take what they said at face value. Their comments intended to convey the truly different experience on which I was about to embark. The smell of dirty socks and Booger Walls were symbolic windows into the world I was entering as a woman raising not one, not two, but a handful of boys.

Part 4

What I Know About Boys (So Far)

Coming Soon…

The Tin Can Top

“The modern can opener, with a cutting wheel that rolls around the rim, was invented by William Lyman of the United States in 1870. The only change from the original patent was the introduction of a serrated rotation wheel by the Star Can Company of San Francisco in 1925. The basic principle continues to be used on the modern can openers, and it was the basis of the first electric can opener, introduced in December 1931. Pull-open cans, patented by Ermal Fraze of Ohio, debuted in 1966.” (http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/canopener.htm).

If you are like me you own a basic, non-electric can opener. Also like me, when opening a tin can you may leave the newly-sharp top hanging by a thread, thus avoiding the challenge of finding an effective, and hopefully safe, manner of fishing it out of the food in the can (i.e. your fingers, a knife, a fork, your teeth, a crochet hook…). If this rings true, then you, like me, soon find yourself coaxing the sharp, jagged, circular top away from its almost equally sharp and jagged, cylindrical counterpart.

On the other hand, you may be a bit fancier in the kitchen. You may have an electric can opener; a nifty invention that takes the entire top off and holds onto it with a little magnet. Not only does this allow you to avoid the challenge of choosing an effective, and hopefully safe, manner of fishing it out of the food in the can, but neither do you find yourself having to coax the two menacing parts away from each other.

Pretty soon I’m going to be fancy in the kitchen with a nifty electric can opener. I’ve heard that if you open a tin can the old-fashioned way (not like a cowboy, whose tin can opening techniques are unknown to me but must certainly involve spurs and a revolver - but rather with a non-electric, manual can opener with a cutting wheel that rolls around the rim…) and if you make subsequent, dangerous decisions regarding the removal of the tin can top from its counterpart, bad and painful things could happen to you. I’ve heard that the sharp, jagged, nasty little tin can top can slice your very flesh open. Maybe even your left thumb. It’s true. It could hurt and bleed too. There’s also a good chance that you could this during dinner preparations for a family of five, which includes three hungry boys of preschool age. Then you won’t have any dinner to offer them. What you will have to offer is what I can only assume would be a rather frightening sight of a bleeding parent, jumping up and down saying “Ow, ow, ow, this really hurts” and the other parent looking at the gaping wound saying “yep, we better go get stitches”. Then you may have to find care for your kids so your spouse can drive you to Urgent Care because, after all, driving yourself would likely prove to be a bit of a challenge. At Urgent Care you may be in store for an overdue Tetanus shot, as well as some Novocain shots that hurt much more than the ones you get in your mouth before a filling and even hurt more than the Tetanus shot, and lastly, a few stitches.

I’m not saying at all that any of this happened to me. I’m just saying I’ve heard some things and have been thinking about it lately. I'm going to buy an electric can opener.

For The Girls

Warning - Don’t read any further if you are terribly fond of Walmart or if you think you could be offended by a frank discussion of women’s undergarments. Otherwise, please, read on (and enjoy)!

As the daughter of a lifelong advocate for fair wages, humane working conditions and support for local industry and industry jobs, I strongly dislike Wal-Mart. As a reasonably endowed woman who likes to keep The Girls up where they belong, while still feeling pretty under her blouse, I cherish a great bra.

I bought a bra at Walmart (gasp!). I liked it so much that I bought another (GASP!). And then, another. Oh, the guilt! You might wonder how this happened, and so, the story begins.

In the eighties, during adolescence, my girlfriends and I started the exciting foray into the world of makeup, stylish clothes and magical hair products; blue eye shadow, blue eyeliner, leg warmers, mousse and lots and lots of hairspray. Back then I wore whatever bra my mom bought for me; after all, she knew more about such things and at the time I didn’t care about anything anyone couldn’t see. (And frankly, in retrospect, at that age, regardless of size, the amount and manner of support was insignificant in light of the newness of the parts).

Come the nineties, I was a young woman with more confidence and the novelty of my “girl-ness” and its trappings faded. I became more strategic about my appearance; my small face looked better in shorter hair, my blue eyes “popped” with brown eye makeup and clothes that fit well were of greater value to me than those that were in style. This was a decade of fun experimentation with bras. I had my own money and I bought my own bras. People saw my bras. How exciting! I was among the mass of twenty-something women with a small, pink, plastic card in my wallet with a manageable, albeit unnecessary balance.

Cut to the new millennium and I really know things about myself now. Comfort is key, but not at the expense of looking nice. I’m not a slob, but neither am I polished head to toe. Case in point, I have nice eyes and skin but terrible hair, so I’ll go to the grocery store without makeup, but not without trying to make my hair behave first. My teeth are discolored from the umpteen cups of coffee and glasses of red wine I’ve consumed over the years, but I don’t whiten them. Whitening hurts too much and I shudder at the notion of giving up the staining culprits. As a stay at home mom my clothes are much along the lines of Yoga-wear; comfortable enough to take care of three little boys, but fitted and colorful enough to be flattering and interesting. On date nights I wear low cut, but warm tops with fitted jeans that hide my twins tummy, heeled boots, smoky eye makeup and perfume. Underneath I wear a very pretty, yet highly functional bra.

The quest for the very pretty, yet highly functional bra began sometime in my late twenties or early thirties. I settled for some pretty bras that didn’t fit quite right. From the outside, where the mirrors and the rest of the human world existed, The Girls didn’t look so great and I gave up the small, pink, plastic card. I then settled for some practical bras that were just plain ugly. But, wow, the girls hadn’t looked so good in years! Then I had three babies. There was breastfeeding and pumping and endless hours and days in t-shirts, pajamas or nothing (“going commando”, so to speak). For The Girls a whole new level of need opened up. I searched, I fought, I settled, I bought – until one day I stopped at Walmart to get a snack for the kids. I checked out the bras as I had become accustomed to doing. I felt a pull toward a display and walked right up to a lovely black, green and white striped bra. It had full coverage! It had wide straps! It had three hook and eye closures where most pretty bras only had one or two! They had my size! It was $10.00! I bought it, took it home, put it on and it was glorious. The heavens opened up, angels sang and I was happy.

I don’t plan to shop much at Walmart – the occasional clothing item for the boys, maybe some winter boots, but most definitely without guilt, I will buy bras. I have reconciled my upbringing on picket lines with my desire (my need) for the perfect bra. Any woman whose story of the last twenty-five-ish years sounds similar to mine will understand; I’m doing this for The Girls.