The (immediate) future of this blog...

Well, I know I have not written here for a while now. Truth be told, I never expected to be so overwhelmed this summer. Between one kidlet still attending school four days a week, the house being on the market, preparing for our latest Open House, and various tasks and errands that have been demanding my attention, I feel as if I lost my head somewhere. (If you find it, will you please let me know? That's the sort of thing one misses.)

I'm hoping that once school starts up again in September, I will once more be able to sit down and blog. If the house goes under contract between now and then, that might be next to impossible. We shall see. I hope you forgive me for hoping that happens. We really, really want to be able to move into a new school district before Horse hits middle school in a year.

As of today, I'm officially giving myself the rest of the summer off from writing in here. For the few people who check this site religiously, I wanted to thank you for your interest in my random blathering and invite you to check back here in September. If something major occurs between now and then, I shall do my best to sit down and write, but I am making no promises.

I hope all of you have a very enjoyable summer.

--Murphy

Here a thwack, there a thwack...

I have a problem. Specifically, I have a problem with a three-year-old in my son's class at school thinking it is absolutely fine to haul off and thwack my kidlets every time he sees them. From what my son tells me occurs during the school day, this other little boy also throws toys, knocks down whatever people are building with blocks, and generally frustrates the heck out of my son.

I understand that children who are going to school in the extended school year program that my son attends have special needs. My son was once the three-year-old in a similar situation, except he would not randomly thwack people. Yes, he would push people away if they got too close to him, but he was generally quite shy when it came to being in a classroom setting for the first time. Two years later, Pig Jr. is one of the big boys in the class having to put up with three-year-olds and their socially immature behaviors.

At pickup time today, Lion, the three-year-old in question, followed Pig Jr. out of the door, walked over to where Rooster and I were waiting, and thwacked Rooster.

     Me (to Rooster): "You can tell Lion to not hit you."
     Lion's Mom (to Lion): "You need to apologize."
     Lion: [dead silence]
     Rooster: [mumbling and a bit unnerved] "Don't hit me."
     Lion's Mom (to Lion): "Hey, say you're sorry."
     Lion: [dead silence combined with a smirk]
     Me (to Rooster): "You did a good job using your words instead of hitting him back."
     Lion's Mom (to me): "He hits everybody. He hits his siblings. He hits us. He hits his cousins. He just hits."
     Rooster: [still mumbling, but looking up at Lion's Mom] "I accept your apology."

We walked away from Lion and his mother at that point. Lion did not apologize at all, and I honestly cannot blame my kidlets for looking a bit miffed at the self-satisfied grin on that little boy's face after he thwacked Rooster.

As we walked to our car, Pig Jr. pointed out that Lion had knocked over a bunch of his toys at school today, too. Pig Jr. told me he let the teacher know right away, and I praised my son for his response. (Pig Jr. will sometimes shut down emotionally when someone does something upsetting to him. No one can get a verbal response out of him at those times, so him speaking up to let the teacher know what happened was a huge deal for my little man.) We talked about how younger kidlets sometimes do things that older kidlets know is unacceptable, and that Lion will eventually learn how to behave in a classroom.

Sadly, I am not sure I believe Lion will ever stop hitting other people, at least not when his mother is involved. Today was the first day she even spoke up to try and get him to apologize. Normally, she just lets Lion thwack whoever he wants without any type of consequences or even a verbal warning.

I remembered a situation that happened with Horse, back when she was around two years old. She bit me. Immediately, she had to deal with the consequences. I got her attention, told her she hurt me, and put her into a time-out. Before she was allowed out, she had to tell me she was sorry and that she would not bite me again. (She was quite vocally advanced and fully capable of doing what was required. Also, we had previously talked about how biting is a no-no when a friend of hers bit her, so I knew she was aware she had misbehaved. Things would have played out differently if she did not know biting was not allowed.) That was the last time she ever bit me. A day or two later, she bit her father. He told her not to do that, and said she would get in trouble if she did it again. She bit him again. He warned her again. She bit him once more and received another warning. Eventually, I got frustrated overhearing him warning her, and pulled him aside to tell him to stop the warnings and deal strictly with consequences. She already knew biting was bad. He did as I suggested (okay, fine...demanded), and she stopped biting him. With Horse, it really was that simple.

I wonder how long it is going to take Lion's mother to realize she is being manipulated by a three-year-old who likes to thwack people and get away with it. When a child has the mental capability (it is very different if someone doesn't) to know something is wrong and should not be done, they need to have age-appropriate consequences for their misbehavior. When the adult in charge does not follow through with consequences, he or she fails that child. When Lion's mother just shrugs and says hitting people is just something Lion does, she is setting her son up to continually do as he wants instead of what he should do. Ultimately, he's not my kidlet, and there is not too much I can do to correct the situation other than to teach my kidlets how to react to him.

I am proud to say that in the weeks my offspring have already had to deal with that little boy, none of my kidlets has ever hit him back. They know there would be consequences for them if they did.

Kidlets Driving

My offspring can drive better than I can. It's true. The fact that they are five, seven, and ten just adds insult to injury. Now before anyone goes to report me for endangering my kidlets' lives, let me just state for the record that we are talking about playing Mario Kart on the Wii.

The fact that I have been driving for longer than they have been alive is irrelevant. My abilities behind the wheel of an actual car count for nothing. The truth of the matter is that my kidlets can kick my behind from here to kingdom come when it comes to steering cartoon vehicles on our television. Every time they attempt to race me onscreen, the conversation goes somewhat like this:

     Horse: "Okay, Mom. You're the race on the bottom." [points to a part of the television screen]
     Me: "Okay. I think I can follow that."
     Pig Jr.: "I'm in charge!" [picks the hardest race possible]
     Me: "Hey, I just fell off a cliff!"
     Horse: "Yeah, Pig Jr. picked a hard race."
     Pig Jr.: "This is fun!"
     Horse: "Mom, you can hit the plus sign to use that item you just picked up."
     Pig Jr.: "Hey, why is the game paused?"
     Me: "I hit the plus. That's what Horse told me to do."
     Horse: "No, that's the plus over there. [points] You hit something else."
     Me: "No, I hit the plus sign. You just pointed at the directional arrows. That's not the same."
     Pig Jr.: "I'm in first place!"
     Horse: "Yeah, Pig Jr.'s way ahead of you."
     Me: "Hey, what the heck just happened right there?!?"
     Horse: "Oh, yeah, Mom. You're supposed to avoid those shy guys."
     Me: "What's a shy guy?"
     Horse: "The guy who just bumped into you and knocked you off course."
     Me: "Doesn't seem very shy to me. Oops. Found another cliff."
     Pig Jr.: "I won!"
     Me: "I think I'm in last place."

I really don't understand why it is so difficult for me to mentally transfer from driving on a road to steering on a game. Granted, I am not likely to have other vehicles trying to play bumper cars with me while I'm driving down the street. A ghost is not likely to pop up and spray ink at me, thus blocking my visibility in real life. And most cliffs that I have ever seen have guard rails to prevent my plummeting over the edge when I accidentally hit a power up and go faster than expected. Then again, I don't think I've ever hit a power up in real life either.

Come to think of it, it makes perfect sense why I stink at Mario Kart. I expect other drivers to follow laws, stay in their lanes, and play nice. I do my best to stay in my own lane, drive the speed limit, and stop for yellow or red lights. This is the sort of game where erratic and illegal driving skills are actually a plus.

I guess I should be grateful I cannot compete amongst insane drivers. The fact that those animated drivers are being controlled by my offspring scares the ever-lovin' daylights out of me. I nominate their father to be the one to teach them how to drive behind the wheel of an actual, real-life vehicle. If they drive anything like they do onscreen, that's going to be the most petrifying thing we will ever experience.

Eating Machine

I have inadvertently created a monster. Specifically, I have turned a ten-year-old into an eating machine.

Let me back up a bit here. Last week, Horse's stomach was "burning" about an hour after eating breakfast. She said she felt hungry, too, and a bit like her legs were shaky. A snack or two later, and she felt perfectly fine once more. I just figured she hadn't eaten enough breakfast.Yesterday, Horse had a similar experience, but it was much more severe. She was doubled over in pain from her burning stomach, pale as a ghost, too hot (to herself, not to the touch), queasy, and could not even walk from the bathroom floor (where she was lying down) back into her bedroom. Heck, even sitting up hurt her too much. She tried sipping a bit of water, but was afraid it wouldn't stay down. Half an hour-ish later, the burning suddenly stopped, she was able to finally sit up and then walk into her room, and eventually eat. By "eat," I mean she chowed down on three separate, full snacks. She was still a bit shaky until all three of the snacks went the way of the dodo bird.

Needless to say, I was on the phone with the doctor's office while snack number one was still being devoured. This did not seem like a stomach bug, acid reflux, or anything I could think of. Horse had been sitting quietly reading right before it happened, so it wasn't as if she was exhausted from running amok. She had lunch, which consisted of a bologna and cheese sandwich (on bread with six grams of fiber between the two slices), fruit, and a full glass of milk somewhere from half an hour to an hour before it hit, so it wasn't as if she should have been hungry or dehydrated. So what the heck was it?

Well, the nurse on the other end of the phone line was not sure either. She suggested it might be a low blood sugar thing, since that could give all of the symptoms Horse had. A conversation with a relative later brought to my attention that hypoglycemia (which is basically low blood sugar attacks) ran in the family. Huh. I never knew that. Suddenly, Horse's frequent commentary about how hungry she is takes on a whole other meaning. (Please note that her weight has always been fine, so the doctor had told me she was eating the right amount. Had she lost weight or not gained weight appropriately, I would have instantly fed her either larger portions or more frequent snacks. Given that she already eats more than I do and the doctor thought her weight and height gains are fine, I had not done so before now.)

The end result of those two conversations is that if Horse has another one of those bouts, which she claims she has every three or four weeks and just never told me about before now, we need to take her immediately to the doctor's office so they can check her out, look into her blood sugars, and see if there is anything else that is going on without our knowledge. (Strep, for example, can cause stomach upset without having a sore throat.) Heck, it might even just be a growth spurt where she needs a larger caloric intake and is not consuming enough. That could make her stomach cranky, too.

In the meantime, I told Horse she has free rein (interesting play-on-words there, with the astrological sign I use for my daughter) to have a snack if she feels hungry and it's been an hour since she last ate.

My ten-year-old has pretty much eaten us out of house and home today. In addition to breakfast and lunch, she had two snacks this morning, not including the extra breakfast she consumed, and is already on her third post-lunch snack. Dinner will, in theory, be in another hour, so I'm curious whether she will clean her plate there, too. There have been no complaints of a burning stomach, queasiness, shakiness, or any other similarity to yesterday. Here's hoping the near-constant snacking will take care of whatever ails her.

I have definitely created an eating machine.

Pets in cars...

Okay, so it's been a little while since I've been up on my soapbox. I guess I missed it, because I've decided to jump back up on it for a rant today.

Right now, according to the last news reports I have seen, our country (USA, for those who don't know me in real life) is in the middle of a heat wave. It's brutal outside. When plastic items left outside in the sun start looking like they belong in a Salvador Dali painting (specifically, The Persistence of Memory, for those with an intense desire to google something), you know it's nasty.

A friend of mine had posted on our social media outlet of choice about how she heard barking while in the parking lot of a store. There was a dog left in a truck with the windows cracked about two inches to keep the poor thing cool. I am beyond proud of my friend for calling 9-1-1, waiting around for police to show up, and then retrieving water for the severely overheated dog once the responding officer got the dog out of the vehicle. By her count, it was around fifteen minutes between when she noticed the dog and when the police arrived. In that time, the dog was no longer barking or running around the vehicle. I suspect that poor dog would have been dead by the time the owners returned from their shopping trip if not for my friend's intervention.

Please, pet owners, use some common sense. On a nice, cool spring or fall day, a car can still get up to over a hundred degrees inside, depending on where it is parked, how far down the windows are, and whether the sun is beating down on it. Remember that greenhouse effect that people have been discussing since at least the '80s? A car is the perfect example of what can happen when sunlight enters through the windows and bounces back and forth inside the car without being able to escape. Even in the winter when it's cold out, a car can still be much warmer inside than it is outside. So what on earth would possess someone who supposedly cares about their pet to leave that pet unattended in a car on a hot summer day?

When I walk to school to pick up my kidlets, I see plenty of other parents at the school waiting in their cars. On beautiful spring or autumn days, they might have the windows all the way down and their cars silent while they wait. On warmer days, almost every single one of them has the windows all the way up, the car running, and the air conditioning cranking. If it would be too hot for a person to sit inside a car with the window down two inches, what absolute moron would think it is okay to leave a beloved animal in the same situation? Has no one else heard how it is possible to bake cookies on the dashboard of a car (well, technically on a cookie sheet on the dash) on a hot, sunny day? If cookies can bake, so can Fluffy's brain!

Please, pet owners. Leave your pets at home when you run to the store. Even if you don't have air conditioning at home, you can still pull all the shades down and keep the house much cooler than the inside of a car. Besides, your pet can access his or her drinking water at home. (Remember, too, to change your pet's drinking water often, especially when it is hot outside. You don't want Spot to get sick from drinking water that has who-knows-what growing in it after being left out for a day or more.)

And to anyone who sees an animal or, God forbid, a child, left unattended in a turned-off, parked car this summer, call 9-1-1. (If it is a child, I strongly suggest doing whatever it takes to get that child out of the car as soon as possible, especially if said child is unresponsive. I'd ask whoever is on the other end of the 9-1-1 call what to do while waiting if it is an animal. Even kidlets that bite are less likely to cause as much damage as a pet that does.) No one should have to die because someone locked them in a car on a ninety-degree day with only two inches of window to provide them with slightly cooler air.

God bless you for doing the right thing, my friend...

Who's Brave?

In celebration of all five of us being home from school and work today, Pig and I decided to take the kidlets to go see the movie Brave. Quite conveniently, said movie is playing at the movie theater just down the street from us. Huzzah for ease in movie-going!

Brave was the first movie we have attempted to see as a family in quite some time. Actually, I think the last one we tried to see all together in a theater was Toy Story 3. Rooster started sobbing about two minutes into the movie, and I took her home while the rest of the family stayed and finished the movie. I still haven't seen Toy Story 3 all the way through, despite us having it on DVD by this point in time. Oh, well. Maybe one of these years...

Anyway, the kidlets were thrilled to be going out to see a movie. Horse was ecstatic that she and Pig would be eating a pizza lunch there. (The rest of us, due to our dairy allergies and/or lactose intolerance, depending on the family member, ate lunch at home first.) I asked Pig if he could buy some water for the younger two kidlets, too. Properly supplied with food and/or drink, we awaited the start of the movie with great glee.

Shortly into the previews, Rooster proved that she still has not mastered the fine art of keeping her mouth shut during a movie. She talked. A lot. Even with me threatening to take her home immediately if she could not respect the rest of us enough to let us listen to what was going on onscreen. (I think she knew it was an empty threat. Harrumph.) I don't know what Pig said to her to get her quiet, but she finally settled down by the time the movie actually started.

Around the same time Rooster became absorbed in the screen was around the same time Pig Jr. discovered the fine art of how to drive Mommy crazy in a darkened room. It's quite simple, really. First, you get on and off of your seat a zillion times, making sure to properly put the seat up when standing up and pushing it down noisily when sitting. Then, you need to stomp in place several times in order to make your cool, new, light-up sneakers demonstrate their amazing capabilities. Eventually, you need to tell Mommy you need to sit on her lap, so as to better try and push the seats on both sides of her up and down with your feet. Finally, you need to stick your fingers into your plastic cup, play with the ice cubes, and then complain about being cold.

Truth be told, I was shocked that my son would play with ice cubes at all. He hates anything cold or wet, and ice cubes in a cup of water certainly fall into both categories! I'm assuming my surprise overrode my natural maternal instinct to scold him into sitting still and just watching the dang movie already.

Then came some scary parts. Brave has a number of not-human characters, specifically bears. Angry bears are scary things to kidlets. Heck, I wouldn't have wanted to run into one in real life either. So around the same time I had Pig Jr. on my lap getting scared by bears, I had to lean over, thwack Pig to get his attention (there were two seats in-between us and he did not hear my angry whisper), and tell him to hold Rooster, who was freaked out in the seat next to him. The irony of our kidlets being petrified during a movie called "Brave" was not lost on me.

All in all, I think our whole family mostly enjoyed the movie. My daughters were perplexed that I would like a movie simply because it's not a "girl meets boy, falls in love, and they are married by sunset" type of movie. Kudos to the filmmakers for finally realizing that a girl doesn't need a boy to be complete. That was truly a "Brave" move on their part.

When ages three and up doesn't actually mean that...

I should preface today's blog entry with the information that I am coming down off of a horrific migraine. It hit yesterday afternoon, with no aura beforehand, so I was totally unprepared. Normally, my vision starts doing funny things (that's the aura part) before I become sensitive to light, get nauseous, and then finally get hit with the mother of all headaches. The good news is that if I take Advil when I get the aura, I never develop the full-blown migraine headache. The bad news is that when I skip over the aura part, I'm too queasy to even consider taking Advil to try and lessen the pain.

Migraines do make me cranky, so I should, in theory, know better than to try and interact with the outside world while one is beating on a thousand invisible drums around my head. Note the words, "in theory," since I clearly do not know how to stay put and not inflict myself on others.

To make a long story even longer, I had to take the kidlets to the library to return a movie we had borrowed. It was due back today, and I did not want to forget to return it while struggling to function mid-migraine. While we were there, I picked up a schedule of the activities that are set up for kidlets during the next two months. I should have just left the schedule there and crawled back home to my darkened house and a hot pad for my head.

At home, I sat down to try and figure out what activities would work for any, if not all three, of my kidlets. I was surprised to see "The Goonies Movie" written on one of the dates. I was even more surprised to see "Ages 3+" written underneath that. Now, I love The Goonies. God only knows how many times I have watched that delightful '80s flick. However, it is a PG movie, there is a fair amount of swearing, and the level of violence (or implied violence) is definitely not advisable for young kidlets.

To err on the side of caution before calling the library, since I honestly thought they had perhaps meant to write "Ages 13+," I double-checked with commonsensemedia.org. (I love that website, by the way. It tells parents, or whoever uses it, about movies and other media, and gives a recommended age range so you have a general idea whether or not something will work for your family.) Sure enough, http://www.commonsensemedia.org/movie-reviews/the-goonies had it rated as good for ages ten and up. That matched up with what I already knew about The Goonies, so I went ahead and gave the library a call.

Imagine my chagrin when I spoke with someone who informed me, rather tersely in my opinion, that their age rating was simply because a child needed to be able to sit through a movie all by themselves in order to watch it, and that it was up to the parents to do their own dang research (okay, I'm paraphrasing that part) to see if it is okay for their offspring. I think you could have scraped my chin up off the floor.

Correct me if I am wrong, but if I see "Ages 3+," I am expecting the selection to be appropriate for children ages three and up. I do not expect to see a PG movie, which means parental guidance is required, and one that I know personally freaked me out the first time I saw it as a tween. To say I am disappointed that someone on the library staff would say a movie like that is fine for any child old enough to sit by themselves is absurd.

I promptly threw this summer's library schedule into our recycling bin. Darned if I am going to take my offspring to anything that they have set up for a particular age group. I don't trust their age ranges any farther than I could throw the library building. To say I am disappointed is an understatement. At least the Advil started working. To bad they don't have a pill for common sense.