Stick (People) it to Ya!

Yeah,I'm one of those Moms. I have a stick person family on the back of my mini-van...along with stickers from my kids' schools and places we have visited. I even have a purse with the name of my son's school on it.

And you know what? I love my stickers and magnets. Plain is boring. I don't eat vanilla ice cream because it's too plain. I may be many, many things, but boring is not something I strive to be. It's bad enough that I am driving a silver mini van (of which there are approximately 647 MILLION exact same ones on the road). Even before I had the stick people, I had unique stickers on my vehicles (the most memorable being "White Trash Goddess" -- oh, how I miss that sticker). Now, I do not have our names below our stick figures. I think that's just asking for trouble. I never had the kids' names embroidered on their backpacks, and other than sports jerseys, they didn't have their names on clothing.

I think the notion that by having the stickers, it makes my family a target of predators, is a load of hooey. Even if I had not one sticker on my MINI-VAN, the sheer fact that I am driving a MINI-VAN probably indicates I have children. And honestly. how many times am I alone in the van? Most time, we look like one of those clown cars at the circus...chock full of kids.

This is not to say I don't take the safety of my children seriously. I am realistic, though. I have my kids' pictures on my Facebook Page (with the privacy settings at the highest level). My kids' pictures have been in the paper, on the schools' websites, and on their own Facebook pages (along with all of THEIR friends' pages)...I think my stick people family is the least of my worries.

Besides, I think the stick person version of me is totally cute.

On the side

I am a notoriously picky eater. The list of foods I won't eat is miles longer than the list of foods I will eat. I am funny about tastes, smells and textures. My mother used to tell me that "once it was cooked, I'd never be able to taste (fill in the blank)." I always tasted it.

Family legend has it that when I was a baby/toddler, I would eat anything...pheasant, goose, rabbit, muskrat (I really hope they are kidding about that one). I say, if they actually fed me that, it's no wonder I am so picky now.

Going to a restaurant with me used to be like the scenes in "When Harry Met Sally." My best friend loved to watch me order a Cobb Salad and totally deconstruct it. Jason says I don't really eat salads....just bowls of lettuce with carrots tossed in. I do try new things when I go out to restaurants, and I really, really, REALLY try not to be overly obnoxious when I order something (after all, I do not care to have my entree served with a side of spit).

In spite of my food idiosyncrasies, I tried to make sure I didn't pass them on to my children. Yeah. That didn't work so well. If I was the queen of "on the side," JP was the Emperor of "plain." I mean, plaaaaaaaaaaain. Dry white toast (a la Elwood Blues), pancakes and waffles with no butter or syrup, pasta with no butter or sauce, hamburgers were patty & bun (god help us if we went through the drive thru and they messed the order up), cereal with no milk...and on and on. The child would hoover broccoli, but he wouldn't eat a peanut butter & jelly sandwich.

Packing the child a lunch for school was quite the show. He survived, though, and now, he eats all sorts of stuff (most of which I still won't eat). The first time I went to Subway with him and he ordered something other than a meatball sub, I about fell over. I listened to him ask for lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers,and on and on, and I swear, I turned to him and asked,"who's going to eat THAT?!?!" He ate it.

Cameron & Russell will eat bait, I mean, sushi, like it's going out of style. They all love seafood. You would think growing up in Annapolis that I would, too. Nope. Dirty little secret #625: I hate crabs. I will pick them for hours on end, but I will not eat them. I don't like crab cakes, crab imperial, or crab anything except hot crab dip and cream of crab soup. And fish....ugh. This drives Jason nuts, but I will only eat canned tuna, not fresh. Why, I don't know. I have tried fresh tuna, and I just can't eat it. I do love shrimp and lobster, though. :-)

I went to Norway several years back with my best friend, Tami, and I made a concerted effort to eat things I normally wouldn't eat. I ate reindeer, escargot and scallops (not all mixed together -- are you nuts?). I survived them all. Would I go out of my way to order them again? Probably not, but I can say I have tried them. Once.

I made chocolate muffins last week, and I put zucchini in them. Guess what? You couldn't even taste it.

It was.....soap poisoning!

Since it is 100* here today, naturally my mind drifted towards thoughts of snow...which led to thoughts of Christmas...which led to thoughts of one of my favorite movies ever, "A Christmas Story." There is a scene in the movie where Ralphie's father (aka "The Old Man") was fixing the furnace. In the movie, Ralphie narrates it as, "my father wove a tapestry of obscenities that as far as we know is still hanging in space over Lake Michigan." In yet another of my favorite scenes, Ralphie gets to help the Old Man change a flat tire. Ralphie is holding the hubcap filled with the lug nuts, and he drops them. In the snow. At night. He reacts by saying, "Oh, fuuuuuuuuuuuuuudge," only, well, he says the real word. He gets his mouth washed out with soap, and there is another great moment where he compares the tastes of all the soaps he has "tasted."

I grew up in a house where "shut up" was a bad word. I was the oldest of three kids. Like Ralphie, I tasted my share of soap. Of course, as a child I vowed I would never do anything as barbaric as wash my children's mouth out with soap. Jason grew up surrounded by lots of "colorful" language. Once free from the threat of blindness from soap poisoning, my vocabulary became peppered with expletives, too.

Now, no one wants their precious angel to have a vocabulary that would make a sailor blush. So, I found myself, in the bathroom, with a bar of soap in my hand saying, "if I EVER hear you say that again, I am washing your mouth out with soap." All four of my children have had their mouths washed out at various points in their lives.

Four years ago, when Cameron was in 5th grade, "crap" was suddenly the cool word to say. Evidently, it was taken off the "bad word" list, and no one had the decency to tell me. Kids in school were saying it, some teachers were saying it, and no-one was batting an eye. Then it was "pissed off" (and all the variations) that became en vogue. I told my kids that just because everyone else was saying it, that didn't mean I wanted to hear it. A gaggle of 12 year boys saying, "oh, crap" every other word truly grated on my nerves (and lordy, that "Oh, snap!" phase just about sent me to the loony bin. They are lucky I didn't wash their mouths out for that, or else they would all have been stricken with soap poisoning blindness).

I know my boys swear. I know they listen to music with swear words. They know I swear...that is no secret. But still, it's a bit disconcerting to actually hear the words coming from my boys' mouths. When JP would plug his iPod in to the car speakers, he used to skip certain songs. Or if he "forgot," he'd at least give a quick,"oops, sorry," while changing the song.

The day of his graduation from DeMatha, on the way home, JP played a string of hand-selected songs that were hilarious...and borderline obscene. Jason almost wrecked the car he was laughing so hard. I was torn between laughing at JP's audacity and being appalled that he was comfortable enough testing his newly found freedoms. So, it's no surprise that I lectured him while laughing so hard I had tears in my eyes. Proud mommy moment, for sure.

In another 20-40 years when my children make me a grandmother, I fully expect to get a phone call saying, "Mom, I don't know WHERE they heard such a word, but I had to wash their mouths out with soap." Let's just hope they didn't hear it from me.

**Side note** as I was typing this, my three year old daycare buddy said to the other kids,"What the Hell?!?". Seriously. I'm telling you I can't make this stuff up.

One of the Longest Weeks Evah

I am a gadget girl. I love them. For the longest time, my cell phone was just your regular, boring, run of the mill phone. Then I lost it. So, in replacing it, I figured I'd better get something that would stick out a little more. I got a hot pink Razor phone. Loved it. Lost that one (we actually think it was stolen out of my car, but still, another phone gone). I replaced it with another hot pink Razor, which I used until it the number keys started malfunctioning. You would think I would give up and not have a cell phone. I might have, but then I saw the iPhone. Now, being me, I had toyed with the idea of a Blackberry, but they just didn't speak to me like the iPhone did.

Oh, how I coveted that phone. I wanted one so badly I could hardly stand it. At the time, I had a fully functional phone, so it was no dice. Then, as I said, my current phone started dying. By this time, the iPhone was up to the 3Gs version. I got it. I loved it. I don't know I managed to function pre- iPhone. It became a part of me. Wherever I went, the phone went. I even took the phone onto the beach (encased in a heavy duty ziploc bag). The phone has been to the pool, on the boat, in the rain with no incident. Then I went to play mini-golf.

I had the phone in my pocket, and I crossed a bridge to the next hole. I didn't even hear the splash. My phone landed face down in 2 inches of water. I almost started crying when I saw it lying there, submerged, like a little rock. I took the cover off and sat it out in the sun (it was 95+ degrees that day) while I finished up the round of golf (which, by the way, I won..AND I won a free game. Normally such things would send me home singing, but alas, the glory of my golf luck paled in comparison to the thought of being iPhone-less).When I got home, I put it in a bag of rice and prayed heavily to the God of Gadgets.

And I waited. Have I mentioned how much I like waiting? Yeah. All I wanted to do was try and see if it would work. Every time I would pass my rice buried phone on the counter, my heart sank a little more. I held off pushing any buttons or moving it until Thursday. I plugged it into the charger, held my breath and...Nothing. Zip. Zilch. Nada. Well, fluffernutter. I went to the computer and scrolled down on the website I had googled about how to fix your wet iPhone. I wasn't about to try the putting it in the oven thing. I just knew I would be the one in 60 zillion that had the phone explode and burn down the house. I wasn't going to try and pry the phone apart in hopes that I could realllllly dry it out. The more I read about the extreme lengths some people went to to get their phones working (someone left it in rice for TWO MONTHS!), the more my heart sank. I was bracing myself for the idea that my phone was dead. I kept reading, and I got to a post about blowing the phone out with an air compressor. Now that, I could do. Once I had sprayed it down, I plugged it into the computer and....SHAZAM!

It was back. The screen was a bright beacon of loveliness. So far, so good. I called it, and it rung. I took pictures, and they turned out. I sent a text and got a reply. It's been a full week since I resuscitated my phone ,and it seems to be pretty much back to normal. All is well in my gadget world....although I have to admit, a teeny, tiny part of me almost wishes it had died so that I could get the iPhone 4. A gadget girl's coveting never ends.