Dear Kids,
For the past eight and a half years, I have shared my home with you. I have shared money, food , energy and my impressively large store of knowledge and advice. I have shared time with you I previously reserved just for sleeping. I’ve shared my dinners and every dessert I’ve ever eaten in your presence. For nine months, I shared my actual breath and blood with you.
So I don’t feel at all bad when I tell you to leave my new Nook alone.
Today is my birthday. The kids have been celebrating for the last few days by selecting random objects from around the house, handing them to me with a flourish and yelling, “Happy Birthday, Mom!” I want to applaud the sentiment but really it just means they’re getting out more stuff for me to put away. And I’m still trying to understand the thought process behind giving someone a plastic tomato for her birthday.
I decided we’d go out for Birthday Bagels this morning and since I’m the only one around here at that hour who can drive — I took them out for my birthday (note to kids: if you are reading this in ten years, I hope you have stepped up and are now treating me. Moochers.) It took them exactly twelve minutes to go from watching cartoons in their underwear to dressed, brushed (teeth and hair), shod and in the car. For the last nine months I have been complaining about getting the kids out the door on time for school. They have no problem getting up. They get up at 6:30. Every. Single. Morning. But somehow in the ninety minutes between getting up and leaving, the wheels fall spectacularly off the bus and then run us over so that by the time we go I am pleading, threatening and employing every manner of trickery to get them to the car. What I was lacking, it seems, was the proper motivator. Bagels. If we’d spent the last year heading every morning to a Giant Bagel Emporium, this story would be a lot different.
I should have known food was the answer. It usually is.
The following list is not all-inclusive and will most certainly be added to as summer continues:
1.) If you are climbing the tree in the backyard and I can look you in the eye from the second floor window, you are too high.
2.) Never again fill your cup from the ice dispenser with so much ice that it backs up, causing the next person who gets a drink to be bombarded with 50 cups of ice.
3.) If your baby sister is sleeping, do not stick your face in front of her and yell, “Are you sleeping? Are you?!?!”
4.) Before going in any body of water, check with me. Shopping mall fountains, certain creeks, sewers and puddles are not for swimming. Do not repeat last week’s indiscretion of climbing into the decorative pond at the house of someone kind enough to invite us over for a barbeque. It’s rude.
5.) Anything you take apart because “I just wanted to see how it works” must be pre-approved by me or have a total cost of less than $10 and belong to you in the first place.
6.) No bleeding on my stuff. If you need a band-aid, stay outside and I’ll come to you.
School’s out. I saw a kid this afternoon who ran out of his class waving his arms and shrieking like a victim in a Godzilla movie and another kid who was chanting, “First grade!! First grade!! First grade!!” like he was ringside at a WWE tourney. My kids, while slightly more restrained, are still ecstatic.
I am maudlin…but not for reasons you might assume (and which would make actual sense.) I am mopey because it hit me today that in ten years, Timothy will be graduating from high school. Next fall, Caleb goes to preschool and I have only one kid left at home with me. Alexis starts first grade and will be gone all day. And all this is making me maudlin.
To put all things in perspective, I do actually want for Timothy to graduate in ten years. I want for all my kids to grow up and do well and move out and have their own families to depress them with how fast children grow up. Especially since Chris says my first choice — to have them stay here and live in momma’s basement ’til they’re forty — is unacceptable.
