The Lost Olympic Sport

Yes, I'm talking about kickball, folks.

Maybe not in Winter, but if we get on the bandwagon now, we might make it for the next Summer Olympics. It's the perfect sport - really, you don't need any real determinable skills to play (check out the photo of me playing) which means that any aged person can play. It's cheap - a playground ball and some plastic cones. You don't need expensive equipment like skiing or snowboarding. You don't need fancy outfits like iceskating (although THAT would be fun - sequins!) You don't need a real strategy (again, the fact that I do indeed get picked to be on a team. Besides the fact that I'm married to a team captain and he'd better pick me or it's the couch for the next month.)

We have a standing date each month with some other (crazy) families to kick each other's kickball booties on the local field. Then we hoof it back to the old homestead to nurse our wounds with a few beers or Caprisuns, depending on the age of the participant. A nice way to spend a couple hours on a Sunday afternoon.


In all honesty, we aren't a civil bunch. We'll take out your child just as soon as give you a welt from the playground ball. Don't say you weren't warned,...



And, really? There is no escape. You play ball before you are allowed egress from 'Kickball Thunderdome' I don't care how cute or young you are. Kick it!




Yeah, I missed the ball. But I tried. I get points for trying.

Talking to Dumb People

So, we were having a light dinner conversation. The big J, who is dabbling with doing something in the medical field because he doesn't want to waste that human anatomy elective credit he naively signed up for in 7th grade - since it has ingrained itself on his memory as he drags a bag of flour mascarading as a baby around school and co-parents with a fellow jock and is totally harrassed by everyone. Ha! I say. Bag of flour? Let those little whipper snapppers spend an hour at my house and you have a perfect ad for birth control, or perhaps celibacy. J has sworn off girls before he even found them interesting because he knows that sex might result in his little sister Fifi. 'Nuf said.



Anyhoo, we were somehow talking about school and he was asking why in the world you even need to study certain subjects. "You don't need to know history if you're a doctor," he said.



I'll be honest. I'm a lone wolf in my household, near and far. My dad was an enginerd. My husband is one, his dad and sister are too. Then you throw in a couple of math and computer science geeks, and I basically have to talk to myself during most family get togethers.



I majored in geography, for gawd's sakes. That statement alone was enough to make even the most drunk fraternity boy run for the hills because they thought I was going for my MRS degree as opposed to my BA degree, which is a bunch of BS, obviously. Besides the fact that I am indeed married. With five children. And drive a suburban. But that's beside the point...



So, trying to make a salient point, I pipe up this bit of wisdom that was passed to me during my introduction to the UDub - people take electives classes so they can engage other people in conversation. These classes are dubbed 'cocktail electives.' But then I had to define a cocktail party and why people stand around just talking, and my point was going nowhere, so hubby came to my rescue with this shining nugget: "You have to study that stuff so you know how to talk to dumb people."



To which my 10 year old (no longer my favorite child) said, "Ohhhh, so that's how you two met,..."



Very funny. Ihope you know who buys the ice cream in this household, young man.

Muddlin' Winter Olympics 2010

Well, not everyone can make it to the Winter Olympics. We had ours just a little south of Whistler,..

So fast, you had to hold on to your hat,...

Hanging on for dear life,...

And the winner: Catchin' air with your grandkids:

That Grandma has amazing form:

A '10' for keepin' those legs straight and catchin' air! Way to go, Grandma!!

They may say 5 and under, but don't let that fool you. This is a tough run. Some of us needed a binky pull before hitting the slope.

'

Gotta keep the glasses on straight during the runs,...

The anxious fans,...

The big contender: Mt. Rainier. So what the volcano is 'sleeping' We were just fine with the rabble rousing snow.

Happy Valentine's Day

So, it's Valentines for all creatures, mothers included, right??? So, I'm going to sit here at the kitchen island, drink some red wine and eat See's candy, while others toil.

I told my kids "Alright, the girls can have dessert, but the boys don't get squat until they clean their rooms."

To which my 13 year old asked: "What kind of dessert is squat?"

Parellel Universes

Do you ever wonder what your pets do when you're gone? Well, I'll tell you what mine did,...

While I was at the urgent care clinic after a week of feeling worse and worse every day,.. getting the edict from the physician's assistant that I do in fact have walking pnemonia,..while my overworked hubby bounced two girls in the waiting room as the nurse gave me a breathing treatment and a shot of antibiotics in the bum.

(I normally have low blood pressure and low body temperature, and then today with the mucus situation, I have low oxygen levels, which prompted her to ask, "Do you ever feel light headed or dizzy?" To which I responded, "Why, yes, but I thought that was just part of my personality.")

While I was gone, my dogs, the Fuskey and the #&)#%(* German Shepherd were partying lilke it was 1999. Here's how it went down, I think: the Fusky, with her carbohydrates-from-Trader Joe's fetish decided to finish off my freshly made pumpkin bread. Then, with all that fiber (how much fiber is there in half a loaf of TJ's pumpkin bread? Quite a lot by the looks of it,.) she proceeded to poop upstairs.

Then, since she didn't share with Miles, the #&$)(#*$(*N German Shepherd, he got mad and took it out on the B's new Hello Kitty backpack, recently purchased to transport her new tap shoes in. Thankfully he stopped chewing when he hit the metal taps; the shoes are unscathed. Because I needed something with a nice clunking sound with which to smack them with when I got home.

Yeah, yeah, .. they behave when they're ran around the neighborhood for several miles each day. Which I haven't done because I've been busy coughing up a lung.

I wouldn't have even gone to the doctor, but you know how these things work - I've been planning a girl's weekend with my sorority sisters up in Portland for two months now. The last time I took off sans child? Five years ago. Do I ever get sick? Not really.

So, of course, I would have something totally crappy happen to me right before jumping on a plane to go up to the raining northwest from Cali. Ya know, if it had been a kidney or stomach thing, I might have been able to ignore it, but the fear of my head exploding on the airplane from too much sinus pressure? That made me go to the doctor.

Which I don't like because I find it humorous that it seems like all the people who go into professions where they constantly have to deal with people? They don't really like people. So, after the stupid physician's assistant (yeah, I don't even rate for a real doc, I suppose) scolded me, "You've been feeling this way for two weeks and only NOW you come to the doctor?" I scolded back (I have five kids, DON'T USE THAT TONE OF VOICE WITH ME.) : "If you'd read my admission form correctly, you'd see that I just started feeling bad on Sunday night, and most of the time, if someone comes in with a cough and a stuffy nose, before a week, you just say it's a virus and send us home anyway." Ha. Take that and a bunch of spittle spewed your way, thank you very much.

So, she got back at me with the shot in the bum.

Then, we went to Von's to get some more drugs, so I treated the girls to hot cha cha. Which Fifi promptly spilled, but I didn't know until I'd turned the aisle to see the trail of slippery chocolate behind me, much like Gretel. Then, while I was trying to figure out, do I 'fess up or just go down the next aisle like nothing happened, Fifi disappeared into the card section. Only a few mangled Valentine's Day cards later, I had them by the scruff of their necks back home, to be met by white fluff all over my living room floor.

I do need a vacation.

Conversation 2.0

Why not? With all the Gov 2.0 and Web 2.0 stuff I see at work,.. and now it's oozing over into my personal life with some sort of Mom 2.0 event,...

I've already talked about how I use my phone now to converse with my teenager more than ever before. And I'm not talking via voice - we discuss the meaning of the universe via text messaging. Or whether or not he can have an airsoft war with his friends,.. you know, whatever's more important,..

I've found an even BETTER application for my awesome iPhone - virtual shopping! Yes! With the advent of being able to photomessage people, I no longer have to take my surly 13 year old boy who hates to shop actually with me. As long as I have the kid's measurements and what I think is a whiff of his fashion sense, I can tally ho alone. Music to my ears. I simply take a picture of said article of clothing and sms the kid. Of course, being the teenager he is, I have to:

Call his phone.

No answer.

Send a text message.

No response.

Call the house phone.

8 year old is probably airsoft gunned to answer the phone so the other two don't have to move from their chairs.

"Hello?" says tentative little voice.

"Hey dude! Can I speak to Big J?"

Silence.

For quite a while.

"Who is this?"

"For God's sake's K, it's your mother. You've lived with me for 8 years, don't you recognize my voice?"

"Oh."

"Can I speak to Big J?"

"Just a sec."

Eternity passes,.. and God takes another Sunday breather,.. and big J gets on the phone.

"Uh."

"Can you go look at your text messages? I just sent you a picture of some shorts and I need to know if you like them or not."

"K." (He's on an alphabet diet ya'll. He has to spend his letters wisely.)

A few moments later - okay, in my terms? About a shirt and a cute little cardigan later,.. he sends back an answer to my sms - which was a picture of GNARLY surfer shorts and '????'.

'No.'

Gah! "Why not?"

"I don't like them."

Welll, duh, big J, why don't you like them? So I can be like some sort of artficial intelligence creature and maybe learn from my mistakes.

"BTW, U take crappy pictures."

Gee thanks. I'm trying to clothe you and you find fault with my sense of artistry. "Trying not to get arrested,.."

So we sms back and forth for a while and I finally find shorts he likes.

But he was refering to picture #243 and not picture #244 like I thought, so they were the wrong ones anyway and then when I forced him to at least try them on for size he had a middle aged muffin top and the boy is a solid quarterback for his football team, so that was a little weird.

I never said I had the system figured out, just that I was excited about it.

It's funny the Big J is at such a loss for words when you really want it because I can remember another monumentous moment with him when he wasn't. It was the turn of the century (wow - I sound all horse drawn carriagey) and instead of referring to that time in our lives as Y2K like every one else, we referred to it lovingly as 'Why2K?"

Because there wasn't anything that kid didn't want to know. I had to read the kid street signs as we were zooming down the highway. I had to explain everything to the point that when he asked me how an elevator worked I told him it was magic.

Now, 13 years later, history repeats itself with my new 2 year old - Fifi. But she asks 'What's that?' and points to whatever - as we are jogging or driving or whatever. The point is, I don't know what she's pointing at because, like the light from the Sun, by the time it reaches me it's already 3 second old You know what I mean? We've already passed whatever object held her fancy and I have no idea what she's talking about. Just getting ready for those teenage years again, I guess.

The B? She's a wealth of interesting questions. Yesterday she asked me "Why do we have heads?" In my infinite wisdom I told her we had to have a place to put our brains -so - voila! Heads!" (she won't grow up to be a doctor on my account,..)

Then when I announced we were meeting daddy for a lunch date, she looked at me very seriously and asked, "So, why are you coming?"

Gee, I don't know, B, I guess since you aren't tall enough to reach the gas pedals I thought I'd drive you.

Then she told me "I LOVE Lady Gaga!"

And this was all on Monday.

Game Night: Not Rated E for Everyone

Where was I,.. oh yeah, "what I did for Christmas vacation."

So, one of the things that Grandma loves to do (and so do we, but we live with the little monsters, so we know how things will end up) is play games. Not mind games or anything scarey - we're talking Memory, Pictionary, you get the drift. This time around we tried CatchPhrase and Scrabble.

First, I was totally impressed with the eight year old. This is the kid who has been in special programs since he was two years old because his mind works a bit differently than the rest of us. He was great with guessing what words you are trying to yell clues about before the buzzer goes off. GREAT.

I also found out that he knows exactly what he's doing. Yes, when I yelled my clue that "this is how Kyle usually wears his shirts," he instantly said, "inside out!"

So, when the kid gets married with his shirt on backward, pants unzipped (sans underwear, mind you), one sock on and one sock off and shoes on the wrong foot - he will have done it on purpose.

Then, we naively switched to Scrabble. Which went well, until the boys realized you could make all sorts of bathroom words,. .if you had the right bowels. I mean vowels. (snicker).

Later that night, the big J was wrestling with a few last letters and we came up with 'eta' - which I'm sure is some sort of greek word (I was in a sorority, it sounds familiar,..give me another beer and I might remember,...). Hubby came back from whatever errand he was running and exclaimed - 'you mean ATE?' Oh yeah,.. that too. I guess that seals the deal. Kyle isn't the only one whose mind works in mysterious ways.