What About College?

IMG_0557Anyone who has seen the Hungtington Learning Center commercial on TV — “Face it! I’m not getting into college!” – has had the pleasure of hearing a dramatic scene taken from the pages of my own life.

Let me clarify: I am lucky in that I haven’t had anyone failing out of school. The kids have taken rigorous course loads, held down after school jobs and gotten involved in things like “Model U.N.” and played the saxophone.

But I am starting the third round of the college search process and while I just assumed things would get easier with each consecutive child—that there would be some type of buy-in at the very least – I find I’m running into the same bullshit now that I did a few years ago when my oldest was a junior in high school.

At issue is the broad assumption held by my children that going to college is a figment of their mother’s imagination. They act as if the four-year academic experience practiced by gazillions of people in the United States is some crazy scheme I cooked up, akin to the notion that beets are delicious and NPR is interesting.

They act like where they’re going to spend the next four years is my problem. They have failed to understand that that ship has long since sailed. I’ve already proved to be a fair-to-mediocre student more interested in a certain boy than things like homework and studying and ended up in a big, state school filled with a lot of people from New Jersey just like me.

And I’ll admit: It’s not easy preventing my own dreams and regrets from getting caught up in the process. There’s tons of things I wish I had done differently when I was their age – starting with turning off the TV in my bedroom – and see their futures as a chance to make better choices. A do-over.

But if I can put all that other stuff aside, what I hope my children come away with is expanded horizons. I want them to understand that while this little upper-middle-class-suburban-microcosm that they’ve grown up in is very nice, there is a whole world out there filled with all kinds of different people and different experiences. I want them to be open to the idea that the possibilities are endless.

Because it took me a long time to understand that the ideas I was operating under were way too small.

I am most surprised that my third child has proved to be as resistant to discussing college as her older siblings. It was no shock that those two quickly dismissed any conversations that began with, “So, do you see yourself at a big school or a small school?” or “What part of the country would you prefer?”

They seemed to view every question I posed as a personal affront.

My oldest son and I took a couple of trips to look at schools, driving together across highways bisecting Pennsylvania and along the Northeast coast, and we probably shared about 10 minutes of conversation for all those hours we sat side-by-side.

That might even be an overestimate.

He’d sit next to me in the passenger seat, or if it was a really long haul he’d stretch out in the back of our SUV, wearing headphones from which blared some very intense-sounding rap music, drowning out not only any attempts at conversation, but the audio book I had downloaded for the trip.

There’s nothing like trying to imagine what it’s like to be shipwrecked in the Pacific or get a handle on characters’ crazy Swedish names with Lil Wayne and Eminem shouting vulgar and angry words in the background. It’s disconcerting.

But I am shocked that Kid #3 isn’t embracing my attempts at helping her find the right school. I actually thought that when her turn came to look at schools, we’d have a lot of fun going on tours together and talking about what we liked best here vs. there while lying on our beds at a Hampton Inn in some college town.

Those are the getaways I should have taken with her three years ago, when she still liked me.

I tried again to start a conversation about college at dinnertime the other night. She bristled as I wondered aloud if a certain state school might be worth looking at, and hissed, “I don’t know,” and I really felt like she was seconds away from barking, “Face it! I’m not getting into college!”

When I in turn got all snippy and informed her that the time had come, like it or not, to start talking about college, she agreed but then told me, “You just go about it in the wrong way.”

WTF?

And I get it: She’s probably feeling like she’s under a lot of pressure (first round of SATs this weekend!) and in a little bit of denial.

Growing up is scary and talking about it makes it all seem so stinking real.

The Huntington commercial came on early this morning, while my daughter and I bustled around the kitchen with the TV tuned to the local ABC news that comes on before “Good Morning America,” and the familiar, “What about college?” line seemed to hang in the air.

We both looked up from what we were doing and made eye contact and laughed.

“I am so writing about this,” I told her.

And if that’s the only satisfaction I can derive from this whole stage of my children’s lives – aside from the joy of paying for it – I’ll take it.

 

 

525,600 Something

tumblr_m5b3djsvv01qknpp3o2_250If I were the mathematical sort, I would try to calculate just how many hours there were between fall and spring semesters at the university that my two oldest children attend.

But as I have a hard enough time counting how many times I’ve squatted on a ball or lifted a weight over my head when I work out, I am going to bypass all addition and assume it’s been around 525,600 (which is a standard measurement of something according to the song from “Rent”).

How does one fill all of those hours between final exams and buying new text books, especially when one’s been forbidden to get stoned in one’s own basement?

Hmmm … well, there’s always exercise and then eating things like mashed potatoes in the afternoon or barbeque potato chips at midnight to balance any healthy benefits of that time spent at the gym.

Then there’s the new PS4 console in the basement that the 11 year old got for Christmas, which the older brother has probably logged more hours playing FIFA and NBA games on for hours at a stretch than the gift recipient.

And thank God for “Criminal Minds,” which seems to be like one never-ending episode playing at all hours in my family room and – while I’ve never seen an entire episode myself – I’ve gathered always seems to involve the removal of some poor victim’s eyeball or eyelid and earnest detectives trying to find the bastard who did it.

We’re starting the fourth and final week that the kids are home for break and it’s gotten so boring around here that my 21-year-old son actually volunteered to pick his younger siblings up after school one day last week. He’s also done some grocery shopping for the family and taken his little brother to the barber shop for haircuts.

Not for nothing, but I’ve likened this kid to the big brother on the ABC show “The Middle,” which is a thinly-veiled representation of my life, minus the very tall husband, and frankly I’d like to sue someone for infringing on my hard-won material.

Axl Heck is the classic teenaged oldest brother: He thinks his parents are “lame,” his younger sister a “dork,” and is always walking around in his boxer shorts, a habit I abhor.

Middle1001(I am sorry but at a certain point, even though I spent years toweling you off after baths and wiping your bottom, I do not want to see you in your underwear. We call that having “healthy boundaries.”)

Coincidentally, the TV in my kitchen was turned to an episode of “The Middle” while I was making dinner the other night and one of the plot lines of the show was how bored Axl was between high school sports seasons.

He’s seen in various poses in his boxers complaining to his mother about his plight while draped over the couch or lying on the kitchen floor with his bare legs propped up on the refrigerator.

“Why don’t you try vacuuming?” his mother suggests and before you know it, Axl is not only vacuuming the rugs, he’s working with the attachments and taking the job more seriously than school and certainly his family.

In a later scene the mom is lying on the couch eating popcorn and taunting her vacuum wizard with how she can toss a piece in the air and catch it in her mouth or even eat the popcorn off her shoulder.

“Nailed it!” she cries after gobbling some off her shirt and spilling the rest onto the couch, making her son crazy with the mess.

Oh, how the tables had turned.

It reminded me of how annoyed my older son was when he went to pick his little brother up from school last week during the polar vortex and found himself sitting in the parking lot for about 20 minutes along with all the moms in town in their SUVs only to learn that his brother had wrangled himself a play date and didn’t need the ride.

“BLERGING BLERGY BLERG,” he shouted at me when I called his cell to tell him the news.

He was clearly agitated but I told him to hang out and wait for our neighbor, who still needed the ride, only to learn five minutes later that he was invited to the same play date.

“BLERGIN BLERGIN BLERGER,” my son choked out upon learning the most recent development in the 5th grade social scene. He had clearly lost his marbles at having wasted all those valuable minutes in the parking lot approximately 1/8 of a mile from our house that could have been spent playing Assassain’s Creed or looking in the refrigerator.

He cursed his brother, the little neighbor and me for conspiring to ruin his life and stormed into the house to yell some more before retreating to the basement and the comfort of PlayStation.

Welcome to my world, I thought merrily as I returned to stalking people on Facebook.

I really can’t wait until he has teenagers.

And may they all be girls. Like, four of them, who think he is the most annoying person in the world.

It’s going to be fun. I’ll make the popcorn.

 

 

 

Waiting for the New Year to Begin

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My mom bought these bastards, that literally come in a giant tin bucket, online from Hahns Old Fashioned Cake Company in Farmindale, NY. www.crumbcake.net

I’m finding it very difficult to embrace the New Year and all the new things I resolved to do and not to do when it still seems like 2013 around here. Actually, you could tell me it’s still 2011 and I wouldn’t really be all that surprised.

The problem might have a little bit to do with the giant bucket of crumbs that have been sitting on my kitchen counter since Christmas (wherein some evil genius decided to completely eliminate the pesky cake portion of coffee cake and package only the sugary topping) that I just can’t bear to toss in the trash.

It’s hard to resist all their little voices, calling out to me as I make my coffee each morning. I hate to be rude.

But the real problem is that I am surrounded, day in and day out, by people who are still on vacation. My college kids don’t go back for two more weeks and now that the holidays are over, they don’t really have much to do but watch Netflix and play video games.

And make paninis.

Just when things started to get back to normal and the younger two kids returned to school on Jan. 2, a Nor’easter slammed New Jersey and deposited those two back on the couch with the older ones the following day.

So I still feel like I’m in a quasi-holiday, snow day, everyday-is-Saturday state of mind.

I did manage to squeeze a little bit of writing in between using my vacation days this past week to load up – once again – on a bizarre amount of dairy products from Costco, take a quick trip to Delaware to see my dad and play untold hours of Walking Dead Monopoly.

Here’s what I had to say:

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babies pix-1Blast From the Past

As noted on this blog ad nauseum, I pretty much killed 2013.

By now, we all know how I launched a blog, went to a blogging conference, traveled to Greece alone and kind of, sort of, tried to date (okay, not the greatest victory there). (READ MORE … )

 

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photo 2How Not to Hate Your Teens

If you’re like me, you are finding that it’s not always so easy to like all the people who you’re living with. Much less love them.

At least once a day, I find myself in a combative situation or heated conversation with someone I gave birth to.

I even made that observation aloud to one of them this week, in the midst of one such episode, “This is not how people usually talk to me.” (READ MORE … )

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And while I did not actually write this post this week, I did reference it on Facebook and folks seemed to like it. Maybe you will too …

DSC00672This is How I Miss Him

In the almost four years since my ex-​​husband moved out, there have been a few times that I really wished the guy was still around.

Like when it snows. Say what you will, but that man could shovel like a motherfucker. He’d be outside for hours, first clearing the driveway and front walk as the snow was falling and then again later, after the storm had passed. He’d clear a path in the back for the dog to get to a spot to do his business and when he ran out of stuff to shovel here, he’d start in at the neighbors’ next door. He never asked for help and we all stayed warm and cozy inside while he labored in the snow. (READ MORE … )

 

 

 

 

How Not to Hate Your Teens

photo(72)If you’re like me, you are finding that it’s not always so easy to like all the people who you’re living with. Much less love them.

At least once a day, I find myself in a combative situation or heated conversation with someone I gave birth to.

I even made that observation aloud to one of them this week, in the midst of one such episode, “This is not how people usually talk to me.”

But he just grunted and kept at it.

Not long ago, I posted a friendly link in the Facebook inboxes of my two older kids about a college coed who had fallen asleep (read: passed out) on a front stoop after a night out in freezing cold temperatures and was now facing amputation of one of her limbs due to hypothermia.

I saw it as a cautionary tale that I wanted to share with them so as to avoid future amputations and the need for any prosthesis. God knows their tuition bills are enough to finance.

I had also recently shared a link with my 21-year-old son to an article reporting that smoking too much cannabis can cause man boobs, which he thought was funny.

Apparently, he did not think the frozen girl was funny or valuable in any way because he called me soon after freaking out about it.

“Don’t send me that shit,” the conversation began and quickly ended with me screaming “Fuck you!” into the phone and hanging up.

I promise you: This was never a part of my grand master parenting plan, nor was the moment after I hung up the phone when I had to walk back into the kitchen to find my two younger children – 16 and 11 – sitting on stools and staring at me.

Not exactly the model of conflict resolution I wanted them to see.

Needless to say, the matter was discussed in-depth with my therapist when we next met and she helped me see that while I thought I was using the poor girl’s possible amputation as a teachable moment for my kids, my son viewed it as a message from me that he would be dumb enough to do something like that in the first place.

He was insulted.

And who knows, maybe the day of that terrible conversation I was getting my period, or ovulating or whatever it is nowadays that makes my hormones go a little crazy, which added fuel to the emotional fire.

But historically, he and I are good at pushing each other’s buttons and quickly making the other one crazy. We tend to jump right out of the frying pan and roll around in the fire.

And it’s not just him. I get into tussles with everyone around here. I like to joke that my little guy’s been strapping on his teenager training wheels lately because sometimes there’s that tone in his voice when he has to answer one of my many, apparently, annoying questions, and he’s given some sassy responses lately, too.

Et tu, my sweet young boy?

And while my therapist recommended things like having follow-up conversations with all the kids about the amputation blow up, meditating and making a jar that I put money in every time I act like an asshole (or something like that), I think I have struck upon the perfect antidote to potentially hostile situations with my kids.

Last week I picked up a box full of home movies I had converted to DVDs at Costco and was reminded – at least for a few hours – of how fucking sweet my children were. Are. Is.

Sure, we’ve got boxes of old pictures and photo albums filled with shots from Christmases of long ago. But to actually see the kids in action and hear their little voices – so young and innocent – and watch how we all interacted was wonderful and terrible all at once.

Like, how did we get from there to here?

In retrospect, some of the scenes are classic signs of personalities to come: my older daughter shy and hesitant in the hospital room meeting her new little sister but super-excited for the candy in her Christmas stocking; the little sister – at 4 – decked out in a kooky lingerie-inspired outfit and belting out some made-up song on her Barbie karaoke machine, pausing only to scream at her older brother to stop “annoying” her.

Total diva.

But to me, one of the most compelling moments of those recordings was watching my oldest son open his Christmas presents, circa 2001. He was in third grade and had just turned 9 and apparently Santa really thought he wanted a lot of books that year. But instead of disgust, he happily opened his deluxe Narnia Chronicles set and lifted the heavy Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire tome over his head in victory.

He was that sweet. And I knew just how to make him happy.

Sometimes I tell myself stories about my kids. “He’s always been this way,” or “She’s always been like that.”

And sometimes it’s the truth and other times, it couldn’t be further from it.

But I know that since I watched my son lift that Harry Potter book over his head, I’ve been looking at him a little different over this long break home between semesters. I’m seeing him not in a new light, but the way I used to see him.

The two of us went out to dinner last night and had a great time. The conversation was easy — we talked about everything from Breaking Bad to LeBron James — and there was never any point that I felt like I had to say something annoying, like “Put your napkin on your lap,” or “Use your knife.”

He already knew what to do.

photo 2And I’m reminded that even though he’s a lot taller and hairier than he used to be, inside — and sometimes maybe it’s so deep down in there you’d need an excavation crew to find it — he’s still that same sweet boy I knew all those years ago.

And I’m glad I found him again.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Sometimes, Elves are Okay

photo(86)I went to my annual cookie exchange the other night and as we sat around the hostess’s kitchen island eating the salad she prepared to balance out the fondue and Trader Joe’s wontons we’d been feasting on earlier, someone pointed to the elf perched high atop the cabinets.

“That’s Steve,” out hostess said brightly and picked up her iPad. “Wait, you’ve got to see this.”

She had taken a picture of the note her 10-year-old son had written to Steve earlier in the season and as she read the note aloud — that wondered whether elves had specific tasks up in the North Pole and wished Steve a happy Christmas with his friends and family — her eyes filled with tears.

“He’s really the one that deserves all the presents,” she said at the end, wiping her tears away.

And the pureness of his letter — it’s innocence and sweetness — made me misty too.

So, my gift to all of you this Christmas is this little sparkle of a note that reminded me that sometimes kids really do want more than PS4s or Skylanders.

Sometimes the very best things don’t come from Amazon or Zappos.

It’s hiding right there in their hearts.

Ho, ho, ho.

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100 Down: Celebrating a Year of Blogging

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My trusty notebook is filled with lots of crazy quotes my kids say and ideas for future blog posts. In other words, it’s a gold mine of content.

For many years while my children were going through our local elementary school, the highlight of the long winter months would be the celebration of the 100th day of school.

To commemorate that special day, inevitably the kids would need to bring in 100 of an item to be counted or added or divided or something math-related. Over time, I got pretty good at hot gluing things like pennies and buttons onto old baseball caps or poster board without burning my fingers or dripping globs of the sticky stuff onto the kitchen table.

So when I noticed last week that I was nearing the 100th post on my blog, I really wanted to break out the gun and start gluing stuff to celebrate.

When the blog was just something I talked about (rather than did anything about), I worried that I would run out of things to write about. But luckily, kids and ex-husbands make for excellent blog fodder. They’re an endless source of content.

And while I still struggle with how much is too much information to share with the general public, here I am at Post #100 with a notebook full of ideas for future posts and life constantly providing other items of interest to blog about.

So instead of gluing things together – and really, we probably have enough boxes full of things our kids have stuck together – I thought I’d reshare the top 10 most viewed posts of 2013, as this also coincides with the almost one-year anniversary of the blog’s launch.

I have to say, it’s really exciting to have created something from scratch and watched it grow. A blog is like a child you have total control over. I can tell it what to say, not to talk with its mouth full and to go to bed at bedtime and, damn, the blog always does what I say.

But most importantly, blogging about my life has given me great comfort learning that I am not alone. We all are trying our best — balancing the good with the bad — and want to know that our voice has been heard.

I love hearing from all of you and am thankful for your support. Thank you for listening to me.

Looking forward to the next 100.

4065e460375c6ba54b4882434096429610. The College Good-Bye

There’s a picture pinned to the bulletin board in my kitchen, half hidden by silly greeting cards and bumper stickers that I fancy, which is our iconic family back-to-school photo. In it, my oldest two children stand on the front step of our old house, a basket of late-summer impatiens drooping behind them, on the occasion of the eldest’s first day of preschool, just shy of his fourth birthday. (READ MORE … )

9. This is How I Miss Him

In the almost four years since my ex-​​husband moved out, there have been a few times that I really wished the guy was still around. Like when it snows. Say what you will, but that man could shovel like a motherfucker. (READ MORE … )

374973_10201077380878194_436086746_n8. Divorce 101

I’ve always been ahead of the curve when it comes to major life events.

I was in a huge rush to get married and had the ring on my finger by the time I was 23 and two years later, I was pregnant with my first child. I am familiar with being the one to provide all the firsts as the oldest sibling in my family and oldest grandchild on both sides of my family. But I also stood alone in my close circle of girlfriends in thinking that getting hitched and knocked up so young were especially good ideas, so became the first among us to sail into those unchartered – and as it turned out – stormy waters. (READ MORE … )

7. Young Amy: A Cautionary Tale

Over the course of the, like, bazillion hours my college girlfriends and I sat around talking during a girls’ weekend earlier this month, the topic of how much you should let your children know about your past antics came up. (READ MORE … )

enhanced-buzz-9179-1375125450-06. Mismatch.com

I went on a date last night with an amazing guy.

Really, we were totally on the same page and I thoroughly enjoyed his company. I liked chatting with him and watching how he talked with his hands. And he was really cute, too, with beautiful blue eyes. (READ MORE … )

 

5. On Being Catholic: The Mystery of Faith

My 10-​​year-​​old son had a play date after school the other day and when the friend’s mom came to pick him up, she asked if we were in a rush to get my guy to CCD.

“A lot of kids seem to go on Tuesdays,” she said.

“Um, we’re taking a break from being Catholic right now,” I told her, and she laughed at my joke, but I still feel really guilty about the whole thing.

It must be the Catholic in me. (READ MORE … )

photo(57)4. Old School (Or That Time I Drank Jungle Juice)

I drank something called jungle juice this weekend and as I lifted the Solo cup brimming with the icy yellow liquid to my mouth, I realized that I needed to retract a statement I made recently – that you couldn’t go home again – because dudes, sometimes it’s like you never left.

Let me explain. (READ MORE … )

3. November is the Cruelest Month for Moms

Anyone who agrees with T.S. Eliot’s assessment that “April is the cruelest month” has obviously never spent time trying to be a mom in New Jersey during November.

This week alone, my fifth grader has three days off. Three days. I didn’t even know about one of them until this weekend. (READ MORE … )

IMG_76582. The Girls

Between us, we have 19 kids, 9 weddings, 3 ex-​​husbands, 2 boyfriends, over 25 years of memories and a lot of opinions.

Since we met as students at the University of Delaware in the mid-​​80s, our gang of 8 friends has come a long way from our days of sitting around dorm rooms and sorority dens in oversized Forenza sweaters and big Jersey hairdos, telling each other what to do. (READ MORE … )

1. Cheez-​​Its: A Love Story

It wasn’t until my ex-​​husband moved out more than four years ago that my late night nibbling began.

Until then, we’d finish dinner and maybe I’d have a bowl of ice cream with the kids (I was younger then and could get away with those kinds of things) and we would have eating wrapped up by 6:30 most nights. (READ MORE … )

 

 

 

Why My Son Says, ‘Everything is Ruined’

702599_10151283017657173_124342937_nThe Elf didn’t start out as a thorn in my side.

At first, he actually helped keep my then-preschooler – and the youngest of my four children – in line.

If my son put up a fuss about going to bed at the appointed hour or carried on in Target about not getting a toy he totally wanted (“PLLLLLLLEASE, MOM.”), I’d have to pull the old Elf card out of my back pocket.

“I’d hate for Alex the Elf to have to tell Santa about this,” I’d say with a smile, looking at him lying on the floor of the toy aisle, and then usually, the tantrum would cease as quickly as it began.

Problem solved.

I am well past negotiating with children. Just do what I say, please. And don’t make me count to 3 (don’t ask but for some reason, when I start counting, my kids start listening).

I liked that I could bring Alex the Elf in as the bad cop around here when we had a situation.  Life is so much better when you don’t always have to be the heavy.

Don’t want to eat your vegetables? I’m really sorry to hear that, but I think the Elf hiding over there on top of the kitchen light is going to have to report that infraction.

Trying to pull one over on your mom by just wetting  your hair a bit in the sink instead of taking a shower with actual soap and shampoo? Dude, I know, cleanliness can be so annoying and eats into valuable YouTube time. But Santa only brings presents to clean little boys and Alex is sitting in the pantry, keeping track.

But as the years passed, the onus of keeping up the charade of the Elf became like a part-time job for someone who has a hard enough time remembering when it’s time to start cooking dinner or move the laundry along.

I am easily distracted and have terrible short-term memory skills.

By last year, my son would come bounding out of bed during the month of December and immediately start rooting around the house, looking for the Elf. More likely than not, the dude was still in the same spot it had been in the day before. Eventually, my 15-year-old had to intervene and started hiding the Elf each night after her little brother went to bed.

She got kind of into it, as many people seem to do and document with some regularity on Facebook. Alex the Elf would be perched atop the cow milk pitcher in our cabinet surrounded by stacks of plates and bowls or sitting on top of our oven hood.

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Apparently, Alex sometimes needed some disciplining of his own, as evidenced by this scene:

702445_10151301542047173_610540196_nAnd then came the inevitable: one day this summer my son opened a drawer of the pine hutch that sits in our family room, a piece of furniture generally of no interest to someone his age. The bottom holds all my china, silver and serving platters we pull out for Thanksgiving. The drawers are filled with placemats and assorted candlesticks. None of these are of interest to a 10-year-old boy.

But for some reason, he pulled a drawer open one day in June and found, to his dismay, the folded up body of Alex within.

“I knew it!” my son shouted, glaring at me with contempt.

As if I had come up with the evil Elf charade and wasn’t just a cog in an elaborate wheel of make-believe.

Truth be told, Alex was still hanging around the house Christmas morning last year and I grabbed him and stuffed him in the drawer before my little guy noticed the Elf was still in New Jersey and not back home in the North Pole chilling until his return to our house the following December.

I asked my son recently why he was so upset by the discovery of Alex in the drawer.

“It just ruined everything,” he told me.

“Did you want to believe?” I asked him gently, seeing his eyes fill with tears.

“I really did,” he said. “But now all I can do is pretend.

“It’s the best I can do, Mom,” he added.

Welcome to the club.

 

 

 

 

Amy’s Week in Review: Dec. 2-8

1The holidays are off and running around here.

Last week, I was able to cross a bunch of big holiday to-do items off my list, like ordering Christmas cards, figuring out what I was going to bake for the annual cookie exchange (chocolate pretzel cookies) and spending so much money on Cyber Monday that Wells Fargo’s fraud division shut down my VISA card until they could confirm it was me making all those purchases and not some half-drunk identity thief in Caracas.

But now that the kids go to their dad’s more regularly every-other-weekend, it kind of puts a pause on the holiday spirit. It’s just no fun decorating the house or doing any other Christmas-y activity without them around to complain about it.

Instead, I spent most of Saturday organizing the crawl space in our basement that was a hodgepodge of Rubbermaid containers and black garbage bags full of all the Christmas paraphenalia I’ve collected over the last 20-odd years. Usually, there’s some order to all the luggage, ski helmets and old sports gear that the holiday stuff shares the cramped space with, but after my older children so kindly disassembled and stashed our holiday decorations last year (unprompted!), the storage area was a little haphazard, to say the least.

Beggars can’t be choosers. I’d rather deal with a disorganized crawl space than taking down the Christmas tree any day of the week.

I hauled out the giant boxes filled with Pottery Barn mercury glass trees, the red velvet skirt that goes under our tree each year and the banners my oldest child made in nursery school some 15 years ago that used his tiny hand print to make angels and reindeer and  reminds me of Christmases long ago.

All the boxes and bags are now lined up at the bottom of the basement stairs, waiting for next weekend when the kids will be home and we can stuff all the holiday joy and kvetching into one weekend.

After all the physical labor, I went and got a sparkly manicure and pedicure and all was right with the world.

If you’ve already ordered your cards and trimmed your tree and lit all of the bushes in front of your house and are looking for something to do this Sunday, perhaps you’d like to spend some time catching up on what I haven’t been doing. You’ll feel good about yourself.

Swear.

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timthumbLet the Holidays Begin! Sigh.

Over the course of this past weekend, I had to yell at not one but two of my neighbors – both grown men – for causing me undue stress and anxiety.

There they were, with the Thanksgiving dinner a not-so-distant-memory, wrapping lights around anything not moving in front of their houses. There were wreaths and swags and twinkling shrubbery while over at my ranch there’s just a lone pumpkin leftover from Halloween sitting on the front step.

Fuck. (READ MORE … )

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IMG_0047Holiday Cards 101: How to Market Your Family

It started the day after Thanksgiving this year, the annual marketing campaign going on in homes across the country that gives new meaning to the term Black Friday.

Inside my mailbox on that day, along with 20 pounds of Pottery Barn catalogs and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, sat the first holiday card of the season.

Ho ho ho. (READ MORE … )

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DSC02004Offensive Driving

You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

You’d think that my arms wouldn’t fly up to shield my head reflexively as we hurtled past parked cars or stop signs, preparing for imminent impact.

By now you’d think that I’d gotten used to how angry they become when I shout things from the passenger seat like, “Move away from the curb!” or “Slow down for the turn ahead!”

It hurts their feelings. (READ MORE … )

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And finally, I know you’re all racking your brains, trying to come up with the perfect gift for me. Let me help you out.

The greatest thing you could give me is the gift of sharing my blog posts on Facebook with all of your friends. I’d like to become the Clairol Herbal Essence of bloggers, so if you could tell two friends about a post you like, and maybe they end up telling two friends, we can get the whole “and so on” thing going.

Plus, it’s free and doesn’t need to be wrapped, which is almost like a gift right back to you.

 

Offensive Driving

DSC02004

You’d think I’d be used to it by now.

You’d think that by now my arms wouldn’t fly up to shield my head reflexively as we hurtle past parked cars and stop signs, preparing for imminent impact.

By now you’d think that I’d gotten used to how angry they become when I shout things from the passenger seat like, “Move away from the curb!” or “Slow down for the turn ahead!”

It hurts their feelings.

Listen, I’m just trying to get through this in one piece and hurt feelings are the least of my concern.

I am in the midst of surviving my third child learning how to drive and I don’t know if my heart, or my pocketbook, will be able to handle doing this a fourth and final time when my youngest gets ready to take the wheel in a few years.

I’ve already spent hundreds of dollars on a professional driving teacher who took my daughter out for the mandatory practice hours required to get her driver’s permit before she turned 16.  Now we just need to make it her to her 17th birthday which, if her last turn at the wheel is any indication, is not looking so good.

The kids and I had been trying to squeeze in a date to see “Catching Fire” over Thanksgiving break before my oldest daughter headed back to college, and we decided the only time we could fit it in was that Saturday night.

As we piled into the car for the 7:00 show, I decided that the driver-in-training needed some nighttime experience and insisted that she take the wheel.

Damn you, hindsight.

So, in New Jersey at the end of November, the streets are lined with large piles of leaves. For all you know, there could be a large crate of glass bottles, boxes full of nails or at the very least a super-sharp set of kitchen knives lurking under all that foliage.

Which it seems there was, because after my daughter plowed her way through four or five large piles of leaves – as she instinctively shied away from the middle of the road and hugged the curb – we heard a thumping beneath the car.

“Do you hear that sound?” yelled my older daughter from the back seat.

I quickly turned down the deafening music from my daughter’s iPhone filling the car with Daft Punk and heard the unmistakable cuh-cunk of a flat tire.

Okay, this is where I kind of lose my cool and get a bit hysterical. Fearing the dreaded bent tire rim, I started screaming for her to pull over. What I was trying to say was, “Take the next right,” but what was coming out instead was “Pull over. Wait! No! There’s a … stop! No. Go! Turn! Up Ahead!” so that the driver didn’t know what the fuck I wanted her to do and became equally, if not more, hysterical.

Katniss was off the table for the evening as we waited in the dark for the AAA tow truck to arrive to swap out the damaged tire for a spare. By the time we headed home, the bad driver already had a Plan B in place for her night and needed a ride to the high school football game.

This time I drove.

When I brought the car into the mechanic a few days later to see if the tire could be saved, I learned the gash was so big, I would need to purchase a whole new tire instead.

Here’s that equation: New Tire + SUV = Mucho Dinero.

It was just another in a long line of expenses my children have racked up since they started to drive.

We’ve had numerous parking lot fender-benders, so many in fact that I started to wonder what the fuck was wrong with my kids. Did we need to, like, wrap our car in rubber or something for the good of other drivers? The kids were like pinballs, knocking and banging our car off everything in sight.

In the last four years, I’ve had the police arrive at my door to inform me a car registered in my name had been involved in a hit-and-run in the parking lot of a local pizza joint.

I’ve had to hunt down a very nice older woman and fellow member of our beach club on a hot day in August to inform her that her shiny BMW SUV had been sideswiped by one of my children.

And one time an angry Cadillac owner called to tell me one of my kids had backed into his car while trying to pull out of a parallel parking spot. Please let the record reflect that my car comes equipped with a rear view camera that beeps if you get too close to the object behind it.

My insurance company probably has an employee lunchroom at its headquarters somewhere in the Midwest named in honor of my children and their driving gaffes.

I thought the answer to the first round of bad driving was a lack of experience and figured I’d remedy that this time by making the 16-year-old drive all the time.

But now I’m not so sure.

The good news is by the time my fourth child needs to learn how to drive, he’ll probably employ the same method he used to learn to tie his shoes and ride a bike: He’ll teach himself.

It cuts down on shouting and then everyone is happy.

 

Holiday Cards 101: How to Market Your Family

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Christmas card 2002. Caption read, “Look what Santa left under our tree.”

It started the day after Thanksgiving this year, the annual marketing campaign going on in homes across the country that gives new meaning to the term Black Friday.

Inside my mailbox on that day, along with 20 pounds of Pottery Barn catalogs and Bed Bath & Beyond coupons, sat the first holiday card of the season.

Ho ho ho.

I think the special delivery vexed me for two reasons. First, it was a reminder that I needed to get my act together to accomplish a great many things in the ensuing weeks (weeks!) before Christmas, which included dealing with all the Christmas tchotchkes crammed into about a dozen boxes in my basement and the stupid Elf on a Shelf.

Secondly, that card signaled that I needed to plan how I would be marketing my own family this holiday season because that, let’s be honest, is what it’s all about.

Branding.

I want you, along with my college roommate and cousin in Connecticut, to see just how attractive, smart, accomplished and well-traveled we are, via a 5 X 7 card.

It’s like the paper-version of Facebook.

But don’t get me wrong: I drank the Christmas card Kool-Aid years ago and have spent a lot of time, money and patience creating the annual aren’t-we-something campaign. I am the ultimate Mad Mom.

Parents nowadays have no idea what it was like producing a card back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and before digital cameras were de rigeur. When I, and every mom within a 10-mile radius, had to bring my roll of film (actual film) to the CVS to be developed and wait a few days in hopes that at least one of the 24 shots would be a winner. I prayed for that one frame where all eyes would be open, looking straight at the camera and not rolled up in small heads in disgust.

Then I had to get 100 copies made of that one tolerable photo and then stuff said photos into cards, that needed to be signed and maybe a bow needed to be tied, and then stuffed into envelopes, licked and addressed, stamped and mailed.

I’m not saying you young moms have it easy, but seriously, you have it so freaking easy.

Nowadays, you just scroll through a photo gallery and upload a variety of images to an adorable card that’s personalized and ready to be mailed when the shipment arrives on your doorstep. It’s fucking magic.

I thought I could make a clean break from sending cards out when my husband moved out in December 2008. It was such a terrible time and I figured I’d have to be some kind of marketing genius to generate a card that said, “Look how happy we are.”

So I just kind of knocked it off my mental check-list of holiday tasks for that year until one of the kids asked about it.

“I’m thinking we’re not gonna send one this year,” I told my oldest daughter.

“Wait, what? You’re not doing a card?” she asked. “It’s our tradition.”

The other kids sitting in the kitchen nodded in agreement and I realized that the stupid card had become about more than how others see our family. It had become about how we see ourselves, too.

And sending out a card that year signaled to the kids that life would still go on, even after their dad moved out. There would still be cards, wrapping paper and Christmas for them.

Just like everyone else.

I decided to bang my cards out earlier than usual this year and take advantage of all the Cyber Monday sales this week. I checked a couple of sites for the best deals and instructed the older kids to send me photos of themselves to use since we didn’t have any great shots of all of us together this year.

I struggled, as I have these last few years, with how to personalize the card since the kids and I have different last names. Hyphenating the two seemed weird and just using the kids’ name, the one I had used for 20 years, didn’t seem right either.

So I finally settled on sending love to all our friends and family this Christmas from “4 Walsacks and a Byrnes.” Awkward, perhaps, but it just felt more right than the other options. I included all of our names and then finished it off with “& The Cat,” because she might look and act like a raccoon, but that critter is a strange part of our family now, too.

I think the end-result, while far from perfect, says, “We’re doing okay.”

I walked across the street to steal a glass of wine from my girlfriend and celebrate knocking such a big item off my holiday to-do list, and bragged to her about my accomplishment.

“Oh, do you want to see mine?” she asked, turning around to pull a festive card covered with great pictures from her family’s trip last summer to the Grand Canyon out of a little brown box.

“You already fucking HAVE your cards?” I said, and we both started to laugh. “I am totally writing about this.”

And now I have.

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