Question master

Back when I was in college, we used to play a drinking game called Circle of Death. I seriously have absolutely no idea how we played it or how it was played, I couldn't recreate that game if you paid me to, but I do know that there were two very important roles that had to be played: thumb master and question master. Thumb master was in charge of randomly putting his/her thumb on the table and then when the non-thumb masters saw this, they had to quietly put their thumb on the table and the last one to put their thumb on the table had to take a drink. Question master had to ask a question (and I might be getting my drinking games confused here, but I think it was an 'I never' sort of question), and then if you hadn't done whatever the question master had never done then you drank. Or maybe it was if you had done what they had never done. I just don't understand why my memory of a drinking game I played in college would be so fuzzy? It makes no sense! And mom and dad if you are reading this, this is all just to add drama and street cred to my blog and 'I never' participated in binge drinking in college.

(We also used to play this game that truly makes my stomach turn now, I of course can't remember the specifics but I think there was a quarter, and a pitcher of beer that everyone drank out of. Just even thinking about drinking anything that a coin has been in now makes me want to scrub my tongue with bleach. Man I'm glad I wasn't an old lady in college.)

I really had a lot of fun in college.

God I miss college.

Anyway, back to reality, where I fantasize about binge drinking but then immediately start worrying about the amount of calories that would be (I REALLY should have cared more about this in college by the way- why wasn't My Fitness Pal around in the early 00's?), my life is ruled by two question masters. There is this sign at the Magic House that says how many times a typical four-year-old asks a question (again, a fuzzy memory as I am most often drunk at the Magic House), but I do remember that it is a shit load. And I remember seeing this when the kids were little and thinking 'Oh, but all the things they will be learning, and I'll get to explain, it will be so fun!' but no one tells you the truth about the hideous constant-question phase. The truth is, most of the questions are so ridiculously stupid and do not need to be asked under any circumstance, that for a split second you will be 100% sure that your kid must have sprouted some wonderful, sarcastic sense of humor and not just be a complete dumbass. Not that I'm calling my kids a dumbass in any way, I'm talking about your kids. Although there are some times (every day all day) where I seriously have to ask myself if H and P have had some kind of traumatic brain injury in the last 24 hours that I was not aware of.

Here is a very small sample (.001%) of the questions I have gotten from my children in the last 48 hours: (Very rarely do I respond with more than an eye roll or a silent prayer for strength/a bus to hit my car, but only the front part of the car so the children are not injured and I'm only forced into a coma for a good 30 day nap or so, but if I did respond, it is in bold):

While carrying a feverish, crying Harry across the parking lot to the doctor's office: Can we go to the playground after this?

Opening the door of the office and physically walking into the doctor's office: Is this the playground?

While carrying a feverish, crying Harry OUT of the doctor's office and back to the car: Are we going to the playground now?

At the stop sign at the end of my street on our way to the YMCA: Is this our home?

At the stoplight that faces my QT where we went on opening day for milkshakes (this question has been asked and answered every day since that fateful day): Is that the gas station we went to and got milkshakes?

In the parking garage of the Galleria, after I said 'We are going to park in the parking garage because it is so hot today': Is this the parking garage?

Walking through the mall: Is this the mall?

Sitting at a stoplight after pulling out of the mall parking lot: Are we home now?

Driving to Aldi to buy groceries including stuff for a smoothie that Penny has been begging for: Are you making my smoothie now? 

Carrying two grocery bags with smoothie ingredients, a watermelon and the mail in my arms: Did you make my smoothie yet?

Taking a gallon of milk out of the bag and putting it in the refrigerator: Is that my smoothie?

Putting dinner on Harry's plate: What are you doing?  Putting dinner on your plate. Can I have a snack?

Blowing my nose: What are you doing?

Going pee: What are you doing?

Putting peanut butter on a piece of bread: What are you doing?

Slamming tequila shots: What are you doing?

And on, and on, and on, and on. It's a whole new Circle of Death. Except now it is not the death of treasured college memories, but the death of my sanity. I am seriously going to be full-on insane by the time they leave this stage. You've all been warned.

Twosday funnies

The kids have been going to day camp at the Magic House AND Vacation Bible School at their school all week, so it has basically been the best week ever. Because I am a much better mom when I am separated from my children for two to three hour blocks of time. It's really strange.

After day camp Penny came home and said her belly hurt, which I took as an avoidance tactic for eating dinner, but lo and behold when I went to get her from the living room, she was asleep on the couch. Which has never happened before. My kids were never the kids who adorably fell asleep while eating, or watching TV, or playing; they only know how to sleep in their bed. So when I saw that I knew something was up, and when I picked her up to carry her to her bedroom and she was a ball of fire, I really knew something was up. Now Penny (and brace yourself for a HUGE surprise) is a giant pain in the ass when she is sick. She acts like you are sticking a razor blade under her arm when you're trying to take her temperature and she refuses to take medicine that she will beg for when she's not sick and she see's Harry taking some. So tonight I used the proven parenting technique of giving choices: Do you want the red cup or the blue cup? Do you want your pink shoes or your purple shoes? All that jazz that makes the kids feel like they're in control so they actually do something without bitching and moaning to much. I asked her: Do you want me to take your temperature under your armpit, or shove the thermometer up your butt? Do you want to take your medicine in the cup or in a shot? And voila! She let me take her temperature under her arm and she drank the damn medicine. This is a major parenting win for me and I'm documenting it here so that I don't forget what to do the next time she is sick. (She made a miraculous full-on recovery by 6:30 and spent the evening watching Doc McStuffins on the couch with dad, jumping around (she learned to jump and kick her own butt at the same time), and eating a third of a strawberry milkshake from QT for dinner.) I'm hoping this means it was one of those rare, ninety-minute viruses and we'll be good tomorrow. Because that Magic House day camp was not cheap.

Harry went to VBS by himself, which was like asking him to go to war or something, but he had a great time like I knew he would and saw all his friends from school. So I was giving him the usual 'What'd ya do? What'd ya learn?' as we drove home and imagine my surprise when he mentions satan. SATAN. The Baptists are teaching four-year-olds about satan. According to my mom I should have seen this coming, "God knows they like to talk about satan," but I was taken aback. But then, THEN, with perfect comedic timing that was completely unintentional, Harrison says "You know that guy satan? (beat, beat, beat) He's a real snake." Lord how I wish satan would have brought a drumset up from the bowels of hell so I could do a rimshot. I would have bowed down to him and started sending my kids to Devil Preschool in honor of his awesomeness. It was priceless! I don't know what the hell they were teaching him there, Adam and Eve, satan makes you sin, WHATEVER, I don't care. Any psychological damage or sleepless nights that he may have because of the Baptists need to teach babies about satan is alright by me. All for that awesome, awesome line. Sometimes my kids can be pretty damn funny.

No pain, no gain

If I had to have a mantra, it would be 'Thou shalt not do things that thou knowest shalt make life harder on thineself.' Or something like that. Basically, don't make things harder than they need to be. Some may call it laziness....

Well, I'm failing my mantra miserably this summer because I have enrolled the kids in swim lessons not once, but twice. And my kids (Penny) HATE the water. Hate it. Hate it more than she hates any food that is not a PBJ or a dinosaur chicken nugget. So of course I feel that it is important to somehow magically turn this hate into a passionate love for the water, preferably through swim lessons.

Now Penny doesn't come by this hate spontaneously- she gets it genetically. Somewhere on the 8th chromosome of the X whateverthingy, is an extreme fear of the water. It all started with my great, great, great, great, great grandmother who drowned at Plymouth Rock. My mom never learned to swim and doesn't want to and I have very vivid memories of pure terror during my own swim lessons. I took swim (I feel like it should be swimming) lessons for an embarrassingly long time- we're talking high school. It was bad. I was being taught by other high schoolers. At my own high school. Which may explain why I never shot up to the popular status that we all now know I so deeply deserved. But I did learn to dive, which has been oh-so useful in my day-in, day-out life, I find myself in situations where I need to dive about zero times every twenty-five years.

But enough about my amazing skills, back to the kids. The last two summers we took private lessons in my friend's pool. This is the part where it gets really confusing so stay with me. It was my friend Heather's pool and my other friend Heather was the lifeguard/teacher. So two Heather's. Heather the lifeguard was an excellent teacher and the other Heather's kids made great progress. Because they don't have the genetic disorder of crippling water fear like my kids do. My kids spent most of the lesson clinging to me as if their little lives depended on it and when they had to be separated to actually LEARN something, they screamed and cried. It was a great time for everyone!

So this summer I decided to get out of the private pool, and go somewhere where I could drop my kids off and 'leave' (hide in the bathroom or anywhere out of sight), figuring I was a big part of the problem. I'm just so amazing that my kids fall to pieces when they're away from me, I really need to work on being less awesome. The first try was at Maryland Heights Aquaport and was pretty much a bust. The original evening class I signed them up for had 14 kids in it, so I switched to the morning class which had one kid in it. Even though they were 2/3rds of the class, they still didn't do much. Harry did 'swim' around with a kickboard, and scooped his hands....that's about it. Penny wandered around aimlessly and got in a little more than ankle deep. (It was a zero-entry pool). But I wasn't going to force the issue with the lifeguard/teacher, she was very sweet but I doubt she gets paid enough to listen to a four-year-old scream and cry in her ear for a half hour.

And now we are currently taking lessons at the Y. I got a bonus at work and decided to use it to very generously buy my family a YMCA membership (remember how awesome I am?) so that the kids could once again take swim lessons for cheap and Jamie and I could work out our way back to our pre-marriage bodies. Like a huge dork I grilled the aquatics director before I joined, and she GUARANTEED me that if I made them stick with it, they would learn to swim. She also told me that they had no problem letting kids cry the entire lesson, because eventually, there will be some lesson where they don't cry the entire time, and that is what we will call success. Who knew the YMCA were such heartless bastards? I LOVE THEM!

Last week was our first lesson and Penny cried the entire time. The. entire. time. I went to work out, and apparently someone came to look for me but couldn't find me on the front row of the treadmills (?), but they were only coming to tell me that she was still crying in case I grew a heart and would have came to her rescue or something an attachment parent would have done. But they misunderestimated me, because I would have just said okaythanksforlettingmeknow and continued reading my magazine and watching The View working out REALLY, REALLY hard.

This week was our second lesson, and while it started off with both kids crying at the top of their lungs and having to be forcefully removed from my body just like last week, it had a different ending. When I went to pick them up, Penny was 'SWIMMING' with the aquatics director with a floatie and a noodle, but she wasn't crying!!!!!! And Harrison was 'swimming' with just a floatie thing and some teenager teacher. (They have yet to actually go to their class which is taught by Grandma Betty, who is as the name implies, an actual grandma. I am very worried about getting a bill for two weeks worth of private lessons.) So I start celebrating like a lunatic, and they each get their three gummy worms that I bribe them with, and everyone is happy. Oh so happy, we are like that Pharrell song. Penny starts spouting off all sorts of made-up shit like how she went under (her hair was completely dry past the tips), and how she jumped off the side, and how she LOVES swim lessons. I just want to put that on the record here. We have three more weeks of this session, then the pool closes for a couple weeks for some deep cleaning, and then we'll start again. Swimming by Christmas sounds like a realistic goal. Because really, is there a better time to know how to swim then in the winter?

I may have timed it badly but I'm going to stay optimistic. Stay tuned, I see this as the first in a 25 part series called 'Things that I never thought I would spend so much time thinking about, talking about, blogging about OR What has my life become?'

Happenings

- We went camping this weekend and it wasn't a total disaster. I figured out that the key to successfully camping with kids is having basement-low expectations and then when it doesn't go terribly, you'll think it's a raging success and start planning the next trip while you're still on the first trip. Either that or the cave in the park produces some kind of mind-altering gas that makes you feel euphoric. I think the best part for me was when Jamie was doing something with the kids and I ate greater than eight but less than eighteen burnt marshmallows in a row because I didn't have his judgey face judging me and one of the other husbands told me 'Marshmallows are fat-free' but I know he was really saying 'It's totally normal to eat half a bag of marshmallows in the five-minute period where your husband is distracted with the kids.' And there was day-drinking, which you could put me in a cave in Afghanistan with some Strawberita's in the middle of the day and I'd be content. And I guess the kids had fun or something, between the day drinking and the marshmallow-binging, I was too busy to really worry about them.

- Jamie took the kids to swim lessons last night while I was at book club and the kids acted like shit like they do during swim lessons, and I was secretly (openly) gleeful that he got to experience it. He actually threatened and then took away all reading books and stories before bed this week because of how horrible they are during swim lessons. If I've read it in one parenting book I've read it in ten- if you're going to start taking things away as a punishment, the first thing to go should be books. Us VanDernoot's don't really need no book learnin' anyways.

- There are only three more days of swim lessons. I've come to the conclusion that Penny will never learn to swim and I am a-ok with that. I'm going to move her to North Dakota or some other land-locked state and then I'll be worry-free. Do they have boarding schools in North Dakota?

- Today we watched a Doc McStuffins and the big pressing issue that Doc had to fix was that Curly Q didn't like her hair. How is this a medical problem exactly?

- Jamie found out today that he is getting a bonus for traveling so much and he is giving it to me to do what I want with it. Is it a sign of old age that my first thought was that we could put it towards remodeling our bathroom? And my second thought was to use it to fly to Colorado, where I've already been twice this year. But my third thought was about how many Coke Zero refills I could get at the NEW QT BY MY HOUSE, and the answer is more than 1500.

- The new QT by my house opened on Thursday and it is glorious. The kids ask every day if we can go there. It is the new most-desired destination by Caucasian four-year-olds who reside in the 63114 postal code. Anyone want to meet us there for a playdate?

- We are remodeling our bathroom, finally decided on a contractor, put money down and all that serious stuff. Jamie told me last night that I was project manager. He is probably going to regret saying that, but I'm PUMPED! My first decision as project manager is to replace our tub with one of those jazzy tubs with the door and a seat. Look how happy this lady is!!!

Visual approximation of me after our bathroom is finished. Except my robe has strawberries on it.

- I have a no-bra policy when I am home and we don't have guests over, and this carries over to both my front yard and my back yard. Because my neighbors dare venture outside when I too happen to be outside, I am 99% positive that three out of four direct neighbors have at least seen my aereola, if not my entire breastal area this summer. (My congresswoman and the little boy down the street have also been exposed when they knocked on my door and caught me unawares).  This was not a problem in the winter. My neighbors across the street have taken to sitting in their driveway in the evening, and tonight I couldn't throw the mop water out without fear of completely flashing them so Jamie had to do it. Summer is really cramping my style.