Tag: kids

children, gratitude, grief, happiness, loss of parent, mommyhood, motherhood, parenting

Slam Dunk

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Hoosiers
Image via Wikipedia

The goal in writing this blog is to give some much needed observatory distance from the chaos that is my every day life.  It helps if I take a moment to reflect on the day’s events and allows me to be a more accepting person/Mom.  I have grown leaps and bounds in acceptance but there are still times when I find myself holding my breath and wishing that my boys were a tad bit calmer than they actually are.

It just ain’t so.

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I had high expectations for our family movie night viewing of ‘Hoosiers‘.  While I am at heart a true girlie girl, I appreciate good sports and I adore a good sports movie.  This particular movie is very special to me.  I vividly remember going with my Mom to see it and we bonded tremendously over the nail-biting basketball sequences and rooting for the underdog.  I truly felt like my mother’s daughter after this experience.  She, the lover of all things basketball, realized that maybe I wasn’t only all about lip-gloss and hairspray.

I prepared myself that the boys would lose interest in about the first five minutes of the movie.  Despite this mental preparation I couldn’t help but ‘wish’ that they would sit quietly for its duration and maybe even love it a little, too.

Thankfully, it exceeded my expectations.  Granted, T.Puzzle fell asleep because the movie had a late start, but Full Speed was riveted.

T.Puzzle can't run with the big dogs and falls asleep before Hoosier's sectionals. No worries, we own the movie little guy.

Maybe there’s more to each of us than we realize.

If we learn to let go of what we think people should be, they might just surprise us and be exactly who we need.

And learning this is the slam-dunk of motherhood.

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kids, mommyhood

Watch Your Step

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We are headed to dinner. Full Speed decides he wants to wear an Ohio State pull-over hoodie. No big deal, he just needs to remove his glasses before I help him tug it over his head and arms. He of course carefully places his glasses on the floor right next to where he and T.Puzzle are standing. I quickly admonish him and tell him to hurry up and put his glasses somewhere that they won’t get stepped on. He scrambles to them, scoops them up and races over to the stairs. He then proceeds to gently place them on the lowest step.

Not exactly what I meant.

bad day, kids

A First

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Full Speed had another bad report from school. Make that a rotten report. Not only did he not listen when his teacher told him not to throw mulch on the playground; he launched a handful that hit a classmate in the face causing a cut on their eyeball (thankfully it turned out to be minor).

There are many firsts in a young life. The first time a baby smiles is pretty awesome. First steps and first words are pretty spectacular, too. Then there are the smaller milestones, like using a sippy cup, getting rid of a pacifier or being big enough to wear hand-me-down spider-man pjs that one of your favorite cousins gave you.

Firsts are sometimes the things that will keep an overwhelmed mother going. They carry enough sparkle to help you shine through the tedium and get you through your worst days.

However, if the first involves your child being the only classmate to receive a red mark (bad) on the day a brand-new behavior charting system is implemented at school, you kind of want to curl up in a corner and hope that no one can see you. I think I did for a moment close my eyes and hope that like a child, if I couldn’t see the world, the world couldn’t see me. What I wouldn’t have given for some invisibility spray.

To compound an already strained situation, the boys were awful at Tae Kwon Do. Little T.Puzzle ended up disgraced and unceremoniously placed in time-out AND Full Speed lost his belt when his poor behavior report was read at the conclusion of class.

I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry or simply shut my eyes again.

Thank goodness tomorrow is another day. Maybe my boys will be perfectly well-behaved. There’s always a first, right?

kids, mommyhood

Really Bad

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In our house there is much discussion as to what constitutes a bad word. Both boys have had their share of saying naughty words at the worst possible times. I will spare you the details.

This is how Full Speed kind of understands it. “A bad word is okay if you use it to name a thing but if you use it to call someone a name, then it is bad.” For example, if you sneeze and you get snot on your arm and are simply identifying the grossness all over yourself as snot, that’s fine. However, if you see your little brother, smack him on top of his head and call him a ‘snot,’ then you are in trouble. I know this seems like an odd rule but it works in a few instances like with bottom or poop. Believe me, we’ve run the of gamut this rules’ possibilities.

This all came into play on our ride home from school today. Little T.Puzzle is singing and being generally silly. Full Speed says, “You’re weird, T.Puzzle.”

I intervene. “Please don’t refer to your brother as weird. It isn’t nice.”

“Mom, I was just saying it as a thing; I wasn’t actually calling him weird.”

The only word that came to my mind was bad. Really bad. No matter if you named it a thing, a person or a highly confounding situation brought on by my five year old.

health, kids, mommyhood

Another Day, Another Vitamin

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I may not do a lot of things consistently when it comes to the boys nutrition, but I am religious about giving them a daily multi-vitamin. Since I have been frequenting my local Walgreens due to my family’s varying degrees of illness, I remembered to pick up a fresh supply of children’s vitamins. There wasn’t much of a selection so I grabbed the largest one I could find that happened to be Flintstones Gummy vitamins. I had grown up consuming the hard, candy-like chewable variety of Flintstones and I had a fleeting wave of nostalgia overcome me. The next day I didn’t think twice as I passed around the Flintstones. I grabbed a couple and popped them in my mouth. I was quite surprised to realize they were like rubber cement. I could barely gnash and gnarl my way through them. I look up and see little T.Puzzle has one in his mouth and is fighting his way through it. His face is red, his fists are clenched and he is grunting like a crazy ape.

“These are hard to chew,” I manage to sputter out.

“No they’re not,” states Full Speed.  “All you have to do is swallow them whole.”

My heart drops to my shoes. My mind immediately races to the thought that these vitamins are a serious choking hazard. I thought the whole idea of a multi-vitamin was to preserve and protect my children’s health not endanger it.

Needless to say when I was at Target today I stocked up on loads and loads of SOFT, chewy vitamins. No worries dear readers, T.Puzzle and Full Speed will live to see another day.