Little m Long a

From the bench I watched as the kids played, excited to be in a new park.  The thrill of unexplored slides, swings and ladders fueling their excitement.  I watched as they played, proud for their confidence.

I watched from the bench and I saw Zella take the little girl’s hand and, smiling, walk with her toward the slide.  The innocence of a child so willing and so accepting.  I could feel myself smiling, too.

And almost as quickly I could feel the smile fade.  I began to notice that the little girl, probably five, maybe six, was no longer helping Zella, but dragging her.  She spoke harshly without consideration.  Zella’s face had in a moment turned from happiness to one of fear and apprehension.

Calmly, I walked to where the girls stood on the steps leading up the slide and I called Zella to me.  And then I leaned just a bit closer to the little girl.  Closer so that I could speak emphatically without raising my voice.

“Tell you what, kid.  I think it best that you find someone else to play with while you are here at the park.  Do no talk to my daughter.  And certainly do not touch her, again.”

The little girl did not say a word but looked at Zella and then back at me in a manner that almost asked, “Or what?”

So I leaned in just a bit closer and almost whispered.

“You think I’m kidding?  If I see you touch my daughter one more time, I will rip your tiny little arms off and bash your fucking skull.  Do not touch my kid!”

The girl said nothing, but turned and ran toward her mother on the other side of the playground.  I smiled at the woman and waved as I mouthed the words, “Your daughter is a bully.”

Clueless, she waved back.

I returned to my bench and resumed a conversation I was having with another mom.

“That little girl is not very nice,” she said when I sat back down.  “I’ve been watching her.”

“Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to have any more trouble with her.”

He also hangs around for lunch, dinner and snacks in between. Oh, and the goldfinches have returned.  I’m working on a better shot.  Until then, this is what I’ve got.

A little something to get your week kick started.  It’s cheaper than therapy.

When was the last time you tried a kazoo?

So we loaded up the family truckster yesterday and started driving north.  No road trip this time.  Rather, a quest.  Each spring, my wife makes a few planters and fills them with all sorts of flowery and grassy items.  She lovingly selects a variety of perennials and blooming flowers and painstakingly places them into their summer home–a huge–and I do mean huge–pot.

Once her task is completed, she instructs me on where each planter is to be placed. My charge then is to keep the damn things alive for the duration of the summer and god forbid that any should perish!

Anyway, she had heard tale of a greenhouse north of us where the plants were more than adequate and the prices were more than fair.  A quest it was, then.

Turns out, it really was a nice greenhouse.  If you could call it that.  It was more of a landscaping adventure land.  There was an island with gentle waterfalls and streams.  Covered bridges, a butterfly house (well, not until September) and catfish the size of Zella.  The kids had quite a good time running around while Maura and her sister selected plants.

Eventually, we made our way to the storefront (in search of a restroom).  One of the kind ladies inside offered each of the kids a freezer pop to which they of course said yes.

I noticed the sign above the freezer indicating the prices for the various ice creams and Popsicles and offered to pay the woman.  She smiled and politely declined.

I thanked her at length and commented to the kids how nice it was for her to give us the Popsicles.  They all agreed and said as much through full mouths dripping with frozen sugary goodness.

We made our way back outside and as we walked toward the building where we thought we might find Maura an older gentleman and his wife remarked at how much the kids seemed to be enjoying those good looking Popsicles.

And Zane replied, “Yeah.  They’re free!  There giving them away right in there.”  And he pointed back to the storefront.

It all happened so fast that I didn’t have a chance to stop him.  The man’s face lit up and I watched as he scurried into the building.  I thought nothing more of it.

Later, when it came time for us to make our purchases I returned to the storefront with our list.  I was a bit confused by the stink eye I was receiving from the formerly kind woman until I noticed the new sign above the freezer.

We are currently out of freezer pops.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

Come to think of it, I did notice quite a few people enjoying those Popsicles while we were there.

Holy Crap!!  (Initial reaction.)  I wanted to say that out loud but I was surrounded by the five little monkeys I so affectionately refer to as my offspring.  I probably settled for the less offensive WOW!!  But my eyes and mouth agape surely screamed the former.

Why we had waited this long I’m not certain.  Well, I’m sure there were reasons:  convenience, membership dues, convenience.  Wait, I said that already.  I’m still a bit woozy from the entire experience.

This past week our family took the plunge and added another exclusive club membership to our resume.  There are no fancy guest chef nights here, though.  No four-man scramble tournaments or flick and float movie nights.  No rules about pool clothes not being allowed inside of the clubhouse. (Though I’m fairly certain there are rules about the wearing of proper clothing.)

No, this is a club of a different sort.  The wholesale shopping club.  That’s right, we broke down and got a Costco membership.  Have you heard of this place?  It’s a warehouse—literally, it’s a warehouse.  With a fancy sign out front.  Items are stacked in boxes and palates, plastic wrapped from the floor to the ceiling.

Memory foam pillows just above the cases of canned peaches.  The outdoor inflatable castle next to packages of white tube socks (64 count).  It is crazy!!

Everything is quantity and the quantity is massive.

“We should have been shopping here for years,” I told my wife.  We stocked up.  On just about everything.  Toilet paper, paper towels, cereal, ziplock bags.  We were like two little kids in a candy store with daddy’s American Express Gold Card.

“Look!  Windex in a five liter jug!!  They’ve got chips–in a 6 pound bag!!  Look over here, Sham Wow!  Cases of Sham Wow!!!  Sugar!! They’ve got sugar in 25 pound bags right next to the 50 pound bags of flour!!!”

All in all the trip was a resounding success.  And with the money we saved–we’ll be adding a room on the back of the house.

So we can have a place to store all of this crap!

Oh, and one other thing.  Anyone know how store a gallon jug of mayonnaise once it’s been opened?

The really sad thing about the Windsor Ruins is that no one really knows what the mansion looked like.  All drawings and renderings of the structure were lost in the fire in 1890, a fire started by a careless cigar or cigarette left smoldering.

Of all of the places we visited on our trip to Louisiana, I may have liked this one the most.  Surreal does not begin to describe the feelings that rushed over me as we turned the final curve on the bumpy gravel road, literally in the middle of nowhere Mississippi, to gaze upon the 23 columns standing in the little clearing.

Twenty three columns.

So what did you do in school today, Zia?

We started numbers.  Today was Zero (0).  Then we’ll do 1, then we’ll do 2, then we’ll do 3….. It’s a review.

(For the record, Zia’s pre-K class has been working on the letters of the alphabet all year long.  A different letter each week.  Last week they completed the alphabet and have now moved on to numbers for the remaining two weeks of the school year.)

Zia, that’s great.  But you already know your numbers, don’t you?

Yes, Dad.  (In a totally frustrated tone that only a just turned five year old little girl can make.)  That’s why its called a review!

Sometimes, they are just words.  They should have meaning.  Depth.  Instead they are hastily formed without emotion, little more than making sure the spelling is correct.

My head was full this morning of thoughts and ideas.  Words to express how truly grateful I am.  How fortunate I am.  Emotions muddled.

Words like–my greatest joy–mute when I tried to speak them.  Others like–my true, my purpose, everything, beautiful, happy were left swimming in my head.

These words and more I wanted to shower upon you this morning,  This day that is yours.  This Mother’s Day.

And now it’s too late.  For nothing that I could say or pen will ever compare, let alone compete, with the outpouring of genuine emotion that came from our dear son, Zane.

“Dear Mom,

Thank you for working so we don’t have to live in the street.”

How am I supposed to compete with that!

So I’m standing there in the middle of the living room, on hold.  Barry Manilow is intermittently interrupted with various pitches from the club restaurant about guest chef night.  Later this month Chef Fred will honor the south with an authentic Cajun dinner.  Andouille sausage is mentioned as is gumbo.  My interest is peaked.

“Dinner is to include fried clams and etouffe, fried catfish and jambalaya.”  When the club receptionist returns to the line I have all but forgotten the purpose of my call.

“Can, I help you?”

“Uhm…what’s the deal with the guest chef night?”

Thankfully, I have all-to-eager memory joggers and I am quickly brought back to task.

“Dad, what did they say?”

“Oh, right.  So when does the pool open?”

“May 23rd.”

“Great.  We’ll see you then.”

The kids have been asking for weeks when we would be getting back to the country club.  Weeks, I say!

We have a membership at the local country club–a social membership.  It entitles us to full use of the club dinning room, lounge, and pool.  Basically, it’s everything you could want in a country club membership except for the golf, which works out really nice for me.  (That’s sarcasm.)

Actually, I’d love to play golf but I just don’t have the time.  Last year, I played a grand total of 16 holes.  Not even one full round.  I played in the rain.  It was about 40 degrees.  I was miserable!

I have no intentions of playing this year.  I’ve decided that on the off chance I actually do get 4 free hours the last thing I need is to spend it getting totally frustrated and pissed off.  It’s just not worth it.  If I want frustration and anger I can just stay home.

No, our club membership is strictly for the pool.  And it’s worth every penny.

“So what did they say?”

“May 23.  Three weeks.”

And the room collectively cheered.

I couldn’t help but smile as I looked upon my children, my children who had just moments earlier begged me to turn the heat back on(It’s May.  May for Christ’s sake!  There’s no way in hell I’m going to turn the heat back on.), my children huddled together in the living room playing with puzzles and reading books still wearing their sweaters and winter coats yet cheering because the pool at the country club would soon be open.

Now that’s irony!

We are winding down on another year of piano lessons.  The big project for this month was the Guild Auditions where Zoë had to play before a judge eight selections from memory, transpose one of the pieces, play the scales and cadences associated with each of her memorized pieces and recognize by ear some major and minor chords as well as a few intervals.

Completely nerve wracking does not begin to capture how strung out I have been over this.  Getting Zoë to practice this year has been drudgery.  It’s like bathing cats.  She’s got too many other things she’d rather do.  Focusing on piano lessons unfortunately is not on her list.

I honestly felt she had not practiced well enough for the audition.  I was torn, though, between holding her to the piano and thereby making her loathe it or giving her some leeway and keeping the whole experience enjoyable.  Letting her practice in her own way on her own terms.  We tried to strike a balance.

I thought as the time drew nearer for the audition she would get nervous or buckle down and, now don’t get me wrong, she did practice more, but there was still very little sense of urgency or intensity.  When I picked her up from school today I told her that she had just two hours before the audition.

Her eyes widened and she took a deep breath.  She paused.  I was prepared for the encouraging speech.  You know, let her know everything would be fine that she was ready and would do a great job.  She looked at me, eyes still wide and said, “Do you think I should wear a pretty dress?”

It’s not that she doesn’t care.  She just doesn’t get worried or upset about it.  She’s too busy having fun.  I wish I could be as laid back.

She actually did a fantastic job.  She had one little mistake on Fur Elise–she just skipped three lines.  No pause or stutter.  Just left them out.  The judge made the comment that it was an interesting interpretation of the piece but that she should take another look at the music.

I couldn’t help but laugh because she learned the entire piece by ear and memory.  She never once looked at the music.  Wouldn’t know what she was looking at if she did.

As we left I turned to Zoë and said, “Boy, am I glad that’s over!”

“Why?”

“I’m just glad it’s over.  It’s so much hard work and pressure.”

“Yeah……but not for you!” she replied and then skipped off to the van.

Maybe she takes it more seriously than I give her credit for.  But I’ll be damned if it shows.

The behavior chart is a daily exercise.  The squares of the calendar weekdays are filled, always green. A monochromic reminder that the boy is for all practical purposes–good.  These are things I know.

The sheer repetitiveness of the drill makes it easy for me to gloss over, to ignore it’s presence in the reams of paper that are couriered to and from the schoolhouse.  But like a trained monkey, I initial each square, occasionally offer a few words of praise and place the paper back in the folder.

I can’t imagine having to address behavioral issues with Zane at school.  Sometimes, though, I secretly long for variety, a different hue in the seas of green.

Careful what you wish for.  I’ve heard that before, but where?

Oh yes, it’s in my byline.

Yesterday’s behavior chart was alive with color.  Greens, yellows and reds.  Red is the really bad one.  Shocked (though smiling on the inside), I asked for an explanation.

In return I got a sullen face and silence.  He knew but wasn’t saying.  I asked again.

Nothing.

I seem to recall accusatory words like, “you know” and “your silence is the same as lying.”  There were other words, words with consequential meanings attached.  Words like “you had better” and “time to think.”

I don’t care about what he did at school or what happened.  I really don’t. I know if it was really egregious, I would have received a note from his teacher.  There was none.  It’s all benign stuff and typically classroom unruliness, the exercise is designed for the kids to gauge their own behavior on a daily basis and own up to it.  They fill out the chart.

What bothers me is his unwillingness to stand up and tell me what he did.  To do the right thing.  He said he can’t remember.

He’ll have plenty of quiet time to clear his head when he gets home.

Where have these kids gotten off to now?  Any guesses?  Click the picture to find out.

I hit a bird with my van the other day.  It wasn’t the first time and certainly won’t be the last but for crying out loud.  It’s a van! Certainly the damn thing could see me coming.  Or hear me.

The radio is always somewhere near “could you please turn that down” and “could you please turn that up” except my kids aren’t that well mannered.  They seldom say please unless prompted.

They also seldom listen to what’s playing on the radio.  They have either busied themselves with calling out requests for the next song, after first determining if the “iPot” is in the car, or they have lost themselves in a game of make-believe and fantasy and are presently arguing over each’s respective roles in the game.

The intensity can be numbing.  White noise except it’s not.  It’s life noise.  Unless I tune out the majority of activity that is actually going on around me at any given time of the day, I would go insane from the over stimulation.  I filter.  A lot.

I respond when asked and step in when necessary but have noticed myself leaving them to their own as of late.  Not in the “Hey, kid.  You’re on your own” sort of way but in the way that says “you are old enough now and possess enough grasp of the language to work this out civilly between yourselves.”

They don’t want my intervention.  It’s hardly compromise.  I can hear them. “You better stop, Dad’s coming.”  They know.

I know.

Watching my kids grow up sometimes hurts.  Watching them have fun doing it though makes it all worth it.

We capped off Zia’s Day of Fun just as we did last year, at the Easton Fountains.  It never gets old!

It’s happened before–and probably will again. I’ve been blanked in the past but tonight was quite the opposite.  My head just too full to organize a rational or coherent thought.  So I turned to the most rational, coherent person I know and asked for help.  “I need a guest post.”  Begrudgingly, she acquiesced in a fantastic way. Thanks, Maura.  I owe you big.  I give you—Zoë’s Mom and her very first blog post.

This started about 2 years ago.  We were planning my son’s 5th birthday party and my husband and I had no idea for THE BIRTHDAY GIFT.  I had been becoming progressively more soured on the vast amount of gifts that I had been seeing kids get for their birthdays.  By the time  some school friends, Aunts and Uncle and Grandparents threw in their presents, it was hard to distinguish one from another.  By the time the child got around to your gift,  they were in major gift fatigue mode.  So I suggested the idea to my husband – what if we got Zane no gifts at all?   What if the gift was a day with his parents, all by himself?

You have to understand that I come from a family of ten.  The first five births were all fourteen months apart and I was one of a set of twins (yes, Catholic).  We had working parents and we were raised mainly by my grandparents.  In those days, my grandma would go to the grocery once a week on a Wednesday and take one (or two) of us with her.  Those days were absolute highlights of my youth.  Don’t get me wrong, I loved growing up in a large family, but occasionally it was nice to be singled out and be treated like an only child.  My grandma would get the lucky kid a piece of candy at the check out counter and maybe lunch at Friendly’s afterward.  During that day, you  had the chance to be seen just for yourself, to be heard without shouting. These days would come along once every 3 or 4 months and we fought for them tooth and nail.  My grandma just wanted help getting her 3 to 4 carts of groceries but she gave us in return an afternoon of feeling singularly loved.

I was a little hesitant to suggest this to my husband.  But I must of caught him in just the right mood because he said yes immediately. Then we launched the idea to Zane and he, quite to my surprise, couldnot have been more enthusiastic.   Since then we have not bought a single present for our children’s birthdays.  They get a day of fun and in that day they may get an outfit and a stop at Build a Bear,  maybe a book at the Barnes and Noble.  But the focus of the day is on spending time over the course of day one on one with us.  And we get a chance to show how singularly loved each of our children are.

Today was Zia’s Day of Fun (the evolved name for the event).   She turned 5 on April 28th.  If ever there was a child who could break your heart just by smiling, it would be Zia.  I have found in the planning of these days that less is more.  It is better to be able to walk around an art museum or through a city park than to go to a place with lots of noise and games for kids (an amateur mistake on our first outing).  The highlight of the day comes when you actually get to hold a conversation with your child about flowers or art or your memories of growing up.

Today we started out at the Columbus Zoo because they just had a baby elephant born there one month ago.  As soon as we got in the 30 minute line to wait to file quickly by this newest zoo arrival, I thought to myself, “We have got to get out of here as soon as possible”.  Too many people, too much chaos, not enough quiet to get a chance to talk to my daughter.  We saw the elephant and a few other zoo sights but then we took off to this lovely city park on a beautiful sunny spring day.

And it was there, over the course of the next hour and a half that Ed and I had a chance to talk to Zia, watch her chase butterflies, see her run up and down the walking paths of the gardens, and revel in the beauty that is my third child.  And it is for these moments that the idea came to be.  Zia got a chance to shine today for her parents and a chance to see in our smiles and laughter the deep love we have for her.  It is always on these days that I take a moment to tell my child about the moment they were born.  (That tradition actually started with my mother, who, despite giving birth 9 times, remembers the day we were born very precisely).   So I told Zia today about the perfect spring day she was born on.  The first time that year that there was a day that showed summer would again come to Ohio.

On that beautiful day, I gave birth to a beautiful baby girl who has come to personify for me Spring and its promise of joy and beauty.  It was a day very much like today.  And so it continues, the joy of being Zia’s mommy.