The Agony of “The Corner”

I see nothing wrong with a good, old fashion spanking.  However, spankings don’t seem to work on all children.  Take mine, for example.  AJ is a mini-adult, and he will be the first to remind you of this.  Spankings are completely and totally ineffective on him.  In fact, they veer toward the counterproductive.  Spankings make him angry and apt to spank you right back. 

Enter “the corner.” 

I was a “spanked kid.”  I won’t say they worked on me, come to think of it, they just made me realize the sheer importance of ingenuity…figuring out new and clever ways to not get caught.  I also don’t think I’m neurotic or angsty due to those spankin’s, either.  I don’t think that spankings have long-lasting ill effects (as long as they were just some butt-whacks, mind you).  When we made a major offense, such as the telling of a lie, we even got The Belt. 

AJ gets The Corner. 

Who would have thought that a child could wail like a fire engine at the mention of The Corner.  We simply found the dullest corner in the house.  Nothing interesting to look at.  No possible way of entertaining himself.  And when he’s naughty, The Corner is where he gets to stand.  I must say The Corner is a hundred times more effective than a spanking, in AJ’s case.

But I’m afraid the neighbors will hear his screams and think we’re doing something worse!  It’s just The Corner, I promise. 

He’s really a good kid.  And we have The Corner on our side when he’s not. 

 

Heck On Wheels

My son just loves his new Big Wheel. 

 

Little Friends

AJ made a little friend at the park on Sunday.  The park is awesome…huge, landscaped, complete with lake and creek and wonderful bridges and things to climb on.  The sun finally came out after a long, long, extra long winter here in Montana and suddenly the park was packed with families.  AJ was a little intimidated by all the new kids, but in a short time he was venturing onto the slides.  He didn’t latch on to any kids, instead playing with ‘Mac’ his imaginary friend. 

Soon a mommy sat next to me and we both had babies with us.  Babies are a great way for moms to start talking to each other.  There are endless questions such as “How old?” and “Is he/she sleeping?”  Her baby and my baby were born only three days apart, as it turns out.  And then she said she had a 3 1/2 year old running around on the rocks.  How convenient!  So did I!  So we introduced the kiddos and they spent the next two hours throwing grass into the creek, racing around the playground, building houses for ants, and making the very last pile of snow in the park into snowballs.  I was very happy to see AJ having so much fun with another little kid finally.  Bonus:  I got the mom’s phone number so we can meet at the park again. 

 

I Blame Homer Simpson

Parents get freaked out when they think their children are in trouble.  I figured that once I reached adulthood, this silly worry would go away.  However, it just gets worse, according to one of my mothers-in-law (I have two…).  Apparently the older your child is, the more there is to worry about.  I guess I can understand.  Parents spend their thriving years raising kids, keeping them safe, feeding them, spending every last stinking dime on their stupid sports uniforms and yearbooks.  Children are a huge investment of time and money, not to mention all that love and DNA crap.  So when it comes to worrying about their children, can you blame them?

Back to me foolishly thinking that it would stop when I no longer qualified for that 18-24 target age group…

I had a house in Northern Virginia when I was working in DC.  Here is what my life consisted of when I lived in DC:

• Wake up (4:30 AM)
• Leave for work (4:50 AM)
• Leave work for home (4:30 PM)
• Arrive home (5:30 if light traffic)
• Simpsons/King of the Hill reruns (5:30 - 6:30)
• Dinner, read, bathe (6:30-8:00)
• Bed (8:00 PM)

One day, a day just like any other day, I came home.  I was in a great mood because traffic was smooth and I got home before dark.  All the neighbors were coming home too.  I was going to make myself a nice dinner and get some reading in before going to sleep and waking up and doing the whole commute thing again.  I took my cell phone out of my purse, plopped it on the coffee table and turned on the Simpsons.  It was the one where Homer attempts to assemble a barbeque in the backyard.  Things go crappily, and Homer begins beating the life out of that poor, unsuspecting grill.  Homer screams like a madman, and the grill is reduced to a pile of nuts and bolts. 

I listened to Homer scream as I changed out of my work clothes.  The doorbell rang.  No one ever rang my doorbell.  I looked out the bedroom window.  The street was blocked off by a fire truck!  Red lights bounced off the thick trees and the neighbors smart yellow siding!  What the hell?!  An ambulance pulled up.  I ran downstairs.  What in the world?

Two police officers were standing on my porch.  “Can I help you?” I asked.  The officer looked concerned. 

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“…Yeah,” I said.  “What’s going on?”

“Are you in the house alone, ma’am?”

“Yes,” I said.  What did I do?

“Do you mind if we come in and take a look around?” said the second officer.  “We want to make sure no one is forcing you to say that you are alone.”

“Come on in,” I said.  “What’s this about?”

“We received a call that someone had broken in and was beating you,” the officer explained. 

“What?!??!?”

The police came in and looked around the house.  My phone rang.  I answered in.  My mother was on the other end of the line, barely breathing.  She was yelling really loud, like she always does on the phone, like it’s still 1910 and we’re yelling into cans.  “Are you okay?  Oh my God, are you okay?”

Curiouser and curiouser.  “I’m fine, mom.  What’s wrong?”  

“Are the police there?” she asked. 

“Yeah,” I said.  “How did you know?”   I had not yet made the connection.

“Why did you call me?” she asked. 

“I didn’t call you,” I said.

“You called me and you were screaming!  Someone was attacking you.”

“…”

“You called me,” said my mom.  “Are you okay?’

I’ll leave the rest of the very confused conversation out to make a long story shorter.  Apparently when I had tossed my cell phone on the coffee table, it dialed the last person I had called (Mom).  She answered the phone and heard Homer Simpson beating up that effing barbecue.  She was sure it sounded like me, and that I was getting attacked, and that somehow I managed to get the telephone to call her.  I mean, who else would you call if you were getting attacked and murdered? 

The cops didn’t really laugh much when I figured out what had happened.  I guess it’s not funny when a Simpsons rerun is responsible for what was probably several thousand dollars worth of emergency response.  I mean two officers, a fire truck and an ambulance.  Impressively, it only took fourteen minutes for them to arrive at my house…a 911 call in Butte, Montana calling about a potentially dire situation in a busy, populated part of Virginia during rush hour.

So I can look back on it all and chuckle a bit now.  I was furious at the time.  All my new neighbors gazing at my house in curiousity…as the 911 crews swarmed in, ready to get the perp.  I was flabbergasted that my mom would think I would be so retarded to call her…a ten digit dial 2500 miles away…instead of a three digit 911 call to a police department that actually had funding.  I understand a bit better today.  If you think your kids are in trouble, it’s hard to think clearly.  It’s hard to think at all. 

Well I haven’t heard my mom panic like that, that barely breathing thing, again.  That is, until yesterday.  My brother pulled quite the stunt this weekend, which I will get to in the next post. 

 

 

Does our toddler watch too much tv?

Jesse asked AJ what color his dinosaur was, waiting for the standard “orange…orange is my favorite color.”

This time, AJ said:

“Orange, brought to you by EPSN Sports Center.”  (ESPN)

 

The Paranoia of Mothers

There you go, walking along enjoying your life, not worried about anything except for whether or not you will get off work early enough to go to the happy hour.  One day you wake up and there are other people living in your house, namely a husband and children, and you wonder how it all happened.  Or at least I do.  And you don’t worry too much about the husband, even when he is a photographer who wanders among the high cliffs of lightning bolts and the cougars of death, but you do worry about the wee ones.  All the time.  Especially if you work and have to entrust their little lives to others for a good part of the day.  Moms (except for crack moms and meth moms, probably) all belong to the Major Leagues of Paranoia, to some degree.   

Not all mothers are paranoid about injuries, or about germ infestation in their kitchens, or about kidnappers.  And some moms are only paranoid about one of these things, while some are paranoid about all of them and more.  I have certain paranoias when it comes to my children.  Germs are not one of them.  My son often eats off our (disgusting) floor after he drops food on it.  Things like macaroni and cheese.  He also never gets sick.  Immune system strengthening at its best.

They say that people spend most of their lives worried about the wrong things; plane crashes, house fires, wayward asteroids. 

My own mother spent most of my childhood worried about:

Balloons

Every single freaking time my brother and I were around balloons, a strict warning would come from Mom.  She was eagle eyed around balloons.  For you see, at any moment, the balloon could pop, go whizzing around the room, hit us in the back of the throat, at which point we would choke to death on pastel-colored latex. 

Smoke detectors

Sleepovers at other houses always followed a long period of questioning and/or phone calls to the other house.  “Do they have smoke detectors?  Is it a trailer house?  Trailer houses burn down faster.  Do they have a back door in case you need to escape?”  The next day when I returned home, follow up questioning took place.  “So did they have smoke detectors?  Do you think they change the batteries in them?”

Of course they had a back door, Mom.  They didn’t live in a cave. 

Toasters and coffee pots

Had. To. Be. Unplugged.  At all times.  Otherwise they were certain to burst into flames, because it was in the newspaper once, and it happened to a real family somewhere in Tennessee once.  It was sure to happen to us.  And at that time, we better hope that our smoke detectors had batteries in them.

But here is what Mom should have been paranoid about:

Babysitters

I had some doozy babysitters.  The one that comes to mind as a shining example of babysitting horror is the one who locked my brother in a closet all the time, gave us “snakebites” (or “Indian burns”, depending on what your neighborhood kids called them), brought her boyfriend and his friends over to the house and threatened us with interesting methods of death if we ever told on her. 

And of course there was Gramma Gigi.

Toothpaste

As children, we ate massive quantities of toothpaste.  This habit started at summer camp, 1985.  There was no candy to be found, so one of the older kids at summer camp suggested we eat our toothpaste.  It was a delightfully minty flavor.  As an adult, I bothered to read the warning label.  It’s really bad to eat toothpaste.  Besides getting fluoride poisoning, your teeth can turn brown and soft.  Gross!  Plus I bet had I not eaten all that toothpaste, I would have ended up smarter than I am today.  If I ever have to get a brain scan, the doctor will be looking at pictures of the inside of my head and say “I see the problem…a class four toothpaste deposit on the right frontal lobe.”

Weird Al

Not Yankovic, of polka fame.  Weird Al was a guy who lived three blocks away from our house.  All the neighborhood kids were obsessed with Weird Al.  No one knew what Weird Al looked like, but we all knew what he sounded like.  When we kids wandered the neighborhood for hours, our paths went by the broken, weedy sidewalk that went by Weird Al’s weird house.  It was brown, with a caving roof.  Plywood was hammered randomly to the side of the house and spray painted with messages: Keep Out.  No Dogs.  Good Morning.  When we walked by, a deep voice would come from the screened in porch.  Weird Al would call out “Hey kids.  <weird laugh here> Come on over.  You can come over.”   We could make out Weird Al’s large shadow.  Later on in junior high, we’d prank call Weird Al during sleepovers.  We kept Weird Al on the phone for hours. 

Looking back, he was probably just a lonely old dude with a sorry house.  However, there is a strong possibility that if any of us were stupid enough to go meet Weird Al, our bones would have been discovered centuries later in a slab of cement that used to be his basement.

Now here is what I am paranoid about:

Magnets

I am always imagining my son eating magnets, for some reason.  This is because I watched the news story from last year about the Magnetix toys that some kid ate, and they stuck together in his intestines, and his intestines ruptured and poisoned him.  I am always looking at the floor for wayward magnets.  You never know what a hidden magnet might roll out of; remote controls, toy dinosaurs, pillows. 

I should not worry about this at all because I taught my son at a very early age to bring me little things that he finds on the floor.  Over his three years he has delivered heavy duty staples, nails, tacks, and esophagus-shaped plastic items to me, no problem.  If he found a magnet, I am sure he would use it to hang his artwork on the refrigerator.  Still, I am worried.

Poisonous plants

I watch my son outside to ensure he doesn’t eat the mushrooms that pop up after a good rain.  I watch to make sure he doesn’t taste the pine cones…pine cones are a gateway plant.  I know you can eat dandelions, but I don’t want him to do this because today it’s dandelions, tomorrow it’s a poinsettia. 

Rattlesnakes

I don’t even have rattlesnakes around my house.  There is no logic when it comes to paranoia.

And of course I am paranoid about:

Toothpaste

We lock it up.

 

Snow Cave 2008

Today was annual Snow Cave Day in our yard.  AJ was happy to contribute to the igloo.

 

Not as big as last year’s cave was, but this one has a bench inside.

 

Saturday Morning Cartoons

I remember Saturday morning cartoons being a lot better “back in the day” than they are lately.  I mean, today’s options for the kiddos really stink.  Am I just viewing the past through rose-colored glasses?  We tend to do that, when remembering the past.  We only remember sitting in front of the toasty-warm fireplace, watching the road-runner float safely above the canyon, drinking the chocolaty milk from the cereal bowl.  We forget that we had to shut the cartoon off prematurely, and then get stuffed into a snow-covered vehicle, filled with cigarette smoke (windows rolled up) to drive to the grocery store to help look for the sale hot dogs.  But that is not the point.  The point is, the cartoon was really good. 

I’m mostly upset that my son doesn’t seem to have Bugs Bunny as an option.  Can anyone point me to it on DVD? 

Let’s compare yesterday’s options to today’s, just to see if I am imagining things.

Yesterday:  Bugs Bunny

Summary:  A clever bunny uses his mind to outwit, outplay and outlast the futile hunting attempts of Elmer Fudd; a happy-go-lucky desert bird continues to evade a hungry coyote with clear and questionable political ties to the Acme company.

Today: Yu-Gi-Oh

Summary:  Weird, angular humanoids battle each other with magic cards.

Winner:  Bugs Bunny.  The other one sounds lame, unless your diet consists of Cheetos and Pepsi…then I can see how a mushy brain may get sucked into its repetitiveness.

Yesterday:  Sesame Street

Summary:  A cast of likeable, mammalian characters face life’s lessons in a quaint, tree-filled neighborhood, while learning numbers, letters, and how to tie one’s shoes.

Today:  Teletubbies

Summary:  Four furry, jellybean shaped robots with televisions for abdomens chant unintelligible sounds while dancing on a hill under a garish, baby-faced sun.

Clear winner:  Sesame Street.  Thankfully it’s still on PBS.  It seems to have gone downhill since the introduction of Elmo and Mr. Noodle (how I hate Mr. Noodle) but it’s still seems to be a good choice, considering the alternatives.

Even with Mr. Noodle, I think it only takes these two examples to see that Saturday morning cartoons, and kids’ television in general, is less plot-driven and educational today than it used to be.  Today it appears that to be a successful children’s program, you don’t even need real words, you just need flashy, seizure-inducing images and a decent timeslot. 

It’s really just best to shut the box off and go play in the trees instead.