With Friends Like These

Conversation between TGIM and Mack in the DWM family car, after Mack explains that oh my freaking gosh she has only reminded him like a bajillion times that she needs new contacts because the one pair she has left totes hurts her eyes, most likely because she accidentally always falls asleep wearing them but whatever oh my GOSH.

TGIM: Okay, okay, I’ll order some online today and we’ll get them in a week or so.

MACK: OMG! A week?! (Chandler Bing style) Oh my gosh!

TGIM: Calm down! Ain’t no thang.

CAT: Ain’t no thang, ain’t no thang… Bing bong and chickadees! Hee. “New Girl” is fuuuunny, guys.

TGIM: Just wear your glasses until they get here.

CAT: “I’m the only one who hasn’t seen it!” Seriously. Schmidt is HI-larious!

MACK: Fine. But whenever I wear my glasses to school, all my friends congratulate me for getting my nerd on.

CAT: Pee-pee and bubbles!

MACK: MOM.

CAT: Glasses. Nerd. I’m listening.

HANNAH: They’re all like “Rocking the nerd look, huh, Hannah?!”

TGIM: Heh.

MACK: Yah. That’s on you.

Happy Christmas to All, and to All a Good Night.

It’s Genetics. Do You SEE?!

(Here’s the what:  I just found this lost post. Yep. From, like, a year and a half ago. So WAY late to the party! Still, I’d forgotten this whole conversation, so I thought I’d better post it! You know, for posterity’s sake? So… okay. That’s that.)

After attending a friend’s Bar Mitzvah, Tanner came home chock full of wild stories of crazy chair dances and professional DJs and AWESOMELY delicious food and, oh yeah, how much freaking MONEY his friend scored when he turned thirteen. Because money is a BIG DEAL. I mean, think! That is a WHOLE LOT of Pokemon! Am I right? Huh? Am I right?

Tanner’s sisters were (to put it mildly) super impressed, all “Nuh-uh! NUH-UH!” and “No FAIR!” And Alli? I can only imagine she’s been giving the matter of Bar Mitzvah’s tons of thought, as evidenced by a recent conversation.

Alli had been sitting in my room with me as I read, an unusual, pensive moodiness about her. Suddenly, she broke the silence. “You know, if Tanner were Jewish,” she said conversationally, “he’d be totally rich right now.”

Tanner overheard. “I know, right?” he replied.

Alli shrugged a little “Well That’s That” kind of shrug and lapsed back into her broody silence.

I looked at my youngest daughter with my “Really? That’s That?” kind of look, but she didn’t notice. She was lost in her thoughts, her brows deeply furrowed behind her glasses. And those thoughts? Those she was lost in? Were some seriously mercenary thoughts, it turns out.

“We need our own coming of age ceremony!” she burst out a few moments later.

Tanner perked up at that. Because, hello? Money? And professional DJs?! And chair dancing?! And MONEY?!

Noticing Tanner’s interest, Alli began to expatiate on her totally BRILLIANT idea. “We could call it a… a… a Har Litzfah!” she said, her eyes dreamy and distant, “And we would… um… tell jokes instead of reading scriptures! And people would give us MONEY for being FUNNY! Because HAR Litzvah?! Like har har har?!” She clapped her hands, reveling in her brilliance.

And I was all, “Ooooh! Pun SNAP!” and there was a giving and receiving of high-fives all around.

In other news, that inappropriate-yet-impossible-to-resist punning thing? Totally genetic.

(Har Litzfah. Good Lord.)

Suppertime Non Sequiturs

ALLI: (out of the blue) I wonder who was the first person to ever do the pee-pee dance?

CAT: Okay… Because that’s a completely normal thing to wonder.

ALLI: (shrugs) My mind is a mystery.

We Don’t Need No (Sex) Education…

Alli, my fifth grader (I KNOW, right?!), has been enduring Family Life Education (FLE) class at school all week long. I say “endure” because she has been dreading FLE ever since Hannah went through it last year when she was a fifth grader. FLE is described as “a K-12 program designed to provide students with age appropriate knowledge, attitudes, and skills to make healthy, responsible, respectful, and life-enhancing decisions related to human growth and development, human sexuality, relationships, and emotional and social health.” So, really, FLE is just the school district’s sobriquet for, wait for it… wait… yes, SEX ED. And Hannah told Alli there would be PICTURES! Graphic PICTURES! And words like PENIS and VAGINA! And long conversations about S-E-X! And PICTURES! Mother of all that is sweet, the PICTURES!

So, Alli? Not on board with the whole FLE thing.

The first afternoon she walked into the house with Hannah and TGIM and silently handed me a colorful packet that contained a few sample feminine hygiene products and brochures with titles like “A Girl’s Guide to HAPPY Periods” and “Talking With Your Daughter About Puberty” and “It’s a HAPPY Thing!”

“I’m supposed to ask you about your experience, you know, goingthroughpubertyandstuff,” she explained with a strained, almost shell-shocked expression on her face as she handed me an FLE checklist I needed to sign.

My first thought, naturally, was… it’s a HAPPY thing? Okay, I dare the author of that pamphlet to say that to a woman during a few key days every month! I’m only saying. Honestly.

TGIM, who was sitting across the room, asked, “Hey, did I ever tell you guys how Papa Neal taught me about sex?”

“YES!” we all yelled.

Undeterred, TGIM continued, “He said to me, ‘Son, have you seen the bulls with the cows out in the field?’ I said, ‘Yes, Dad,’ and he patted me on the back and said–”

“‘Good talk, son’!” we yelled in unison.

“Oh,” TGIM said, eyes wide with feigned innocence, “have I told that story before?”

Hannah, ignoring her father, asked, “So, did they make you yell ‘vagina’?” She rolled her eyes. “They made us yell ‘vagina’.”

“Yes,” Alli said and shuddered dramatically. “And penis, too. It was disturbing.”

I did my best to assure her that using those words should not be disturbing, that they are just words to describe parts of the body, like “mouth” or “knee” or “elbow,” but I must admit that the vision of a room full of fifth graders yelling “vagina” and “penis” over and over again was a bit disturbing. You know, just a scoche.

As the week went by, a pattern emerged. Alli would approach me after school and, with a deer-in-the-headlights expression, hand me yet another parent-child FLE conversation checklist to sign. I would gamely buzz through the questions, Alli would stare glassily ahead, I’d sign the checklist, and with a gusty sigh of relief Alli would shove it into her backpack and run off to play.

Friday afternoon Alli came home and told me that they had discussed making babies in FLE, which, first of all, gross, and second of all, GROSS. “I mean, the pictures, Momma? WAY too detailed. I get it! I did NOT need to see that!”

Hannah patted her on the back. “I know, right?” she agreed with sisterly camaraderie.

That night there were no more checklists. Yes! Happy day, FLE was behind us! We had made it through FLE relatively unscathed! Yay, us! So there we were, sitting on the bed in my room, just playing… a game, NOT Pokemon or anything, just a normal, age-appropriate, not-Pokemon game. The companionable silence of a mother and daughter sitting and playing said game which was not Poke– Okay! It was Pokemon! Soul Silver! FINE! Shut up!– was interrupted by a sudden revelation from Alli.

“Hey, Momma?”

I paused my game. “Hmm?” I looked over at her and I was immediately intrigued by her serious expression.

“You know what I’m going to do when I grow up?”

Oooh! Life choice! Fun! “What?” I asked, curious if she was still dead set on being an actress and/or astronaut.

“ADOPT.”

Next Page »