Monthly Archives: April 2009

Chicken Pox Fun

April 28, 2009

On the CDC website it says: “Chickenpox vaccine is the best way to prevent chickenpox. Vaccination not only protects vaccinated persons, it also reduces the risk for exposure in the community for persons unable to be vaccinated because of illness or other conditions, including those who may be at greater risk for severe disease. While no vaccine is 100% effective in preventing disease, the chickenpox vaccine is very effective: about 8 to 9 of every 10 people who are vaccinated are completely protected from chickenpox. In addition, the vaccine almost always prevents against severe disease. If a vaccinated person does get chickenpox, it is usually a very mild case lasting only a few days and involving fewer skin lesions (usually less than 50), mild or no fever, and few other symptoms.”

I have discovered that this is complete BS! If I ever had any doubts about the chicken pox vaccine before, they were all well founded. I have met so many people over the last few years who’s kids got chicken pox (some even multiple times) after getting vaccinated. I was really starting to worry about my 11-year-old, because the older you are when you get chicken pox, the worse it can be, so I was actually relieved when he broke out with the itchy rash over the weekend. Two of my sisters who’s kids, most of whom had been vaccinated, also broke out right about the same time . . . and I can guarantee that there were way more than 50 lesions on each kid — even the bottoms of feet had chicken pox! I just talked to a lady the other day who’s fourteen-year-old son recently got the chicken pox, (after having the vaccination) and it put him in the hospital.

I have decided that the chicken pox vaccine is really just a tool for procrastination that really only provides a false sense of security and (maybe) buys you a little time, but that little bit of convenience bought is just going to come back and bite you in the butt a lot harder later. Those 8 or 9 people talked about on the CDC website are just delayed and will most likely get it sooner or later. I think that we were very lucky that my son’s case was not more severe, considering his age . . . Interestingly enough, of my two children who didn’t have the vaccine one broke out very lightly, and the other not at all . . . at least not yet. But for now, I am keeping them all away from other kids as a precautionary measure.

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Kid Quotes

April 26, 2009
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Kid Quotes

Zee (age 5):I’m allergic to pink.

Zee (age 6): All right, I’ll use the pink cup . . . (sighing heavily) I’ll just have to itch a little bit.

Zee (age 6) to his sister who was singing loudly: Stop it! Your blocking my earsight!

Bee-isms (age 3): Cow Puppy = Toy Stuffed Cow, Puppy Cat = Toy Stuffed Dog

Alex (Age 14) After handing Zee an overflowing cup of water: Hurry, sip the top off! But do it slowly!

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Crossing Napoleon’s Yard

April 26, 2009

Here is a story that I posted on the writing bolg that I have been participating in. You can find this and other fun stories at the Utah Children’s Writers blog here: http://utahchildrenswriters.blogspot.com/

Crossing Napoleon’s Yard

Their eyes met, his brown-flecked eyeballs unblinking. He was much smaller than she was, but she also knew that without a weapon she was no match for him. Dena had been in this position before—only this time was different . . . this time, as she desperately scanned the area for a stick; anything to fight him off; she couldn’t see even a decent sized twig within her reach. Her palms began to sweat. Without turning her back, she ever so carefully, slowly, took a step backwards, and then another. He did not move, but looked steadily on, his small head cocked to the side.

A wave of anger briefly swept over her. How could her sisters have forgotten the plan? She backed up more quickly now, ready to turn and bolt the first chance she got. His small body seemed to expand as he prepared to attack. Quickly she turned; taking one gigantic leap, when suddenly, she tripped, hitting the ground with full force.

Egg collecting was never easy. It was the responsibility of the girls to collect the eggs once in the morning, and again in the evening. Now, this doesn’t seem to be such a big deal, but then again, you have never met Napoleon.

Napoleon was a small rooster with beautiful iridescent blue and green tail plumage streaming out behind his jet-black body. His eyes were yellow with brown flecks, and he had a blood red comb at the crest of his head that seemed to drip down under his chin to his waddle—he had looked majestic when father had first brought him home. Now he just looked frightening. Even though he was small, he was also swift, powerful, and fearsome—a true enemy to any egg collector who crossed his territory, which in his mind, was any part of the farm.

Things had not gone as she and her sisters had planned, of course. Not only had the stick been missing, but today Dena had to get the eggs alone.

She raised herself up with her hands, screaming with rage and spitting dirt and blood. She could hear Napoleon’s quick little footsteps getting closer and closer.

“Why couldn’t they just leave the stupid stick by the door?” she screamed, pulling herself to her feet. She Staggered a little, and then saw for the first time what she had tripped over—a three-foot piece of pvc pipe. Grabbing it and turning in one movement, Dena could feel short bursts as Napoleon’s wings beat the air. He was attacking! Without thinking, she swung the piece of pipe with all her might at the blur of feathers and talons.

Crack! In horror, she watched wide-eyed as Napoleon flew, spinning through the air, landing with a thud next to Mother’s zucchini patch. He hopped right back up and began to run towards her again, his little feet stirring up dust. A flood of relief passed through her as once again she turned to run. At least he wasn’t hurt.

She had only taken two steps when she realized that she could no longer hear Napoleon running. The sound of his footfalls had been replaced by strange flopping noise. Stopping, she slowly turned to see Napoleon thrashing wildly on the ground.

That very evening, mother served ‘mean roster soup’ and everyone, even Daddy, said it was the best they had ever had.

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More Funny Kid Quotes

April 22, 2009
This entry is part 3 of 5 in the series Kid Quotes

Mom to Jake, who has been babbling into a handheld mirror: Jake, who are you talking to? Are you talking to yourself?
Jake (2 years old): No! I’m talking to him! (holds the mirror up so I can see)

Jake (2 years old): Ow!
Mom: What’s wrong?
Jake: A bump got me!

Jake (2 years old): (as I am tickling his leg) No! I’m not made for tickling! I’m made for wuving! (after thinking for a minute) I’m made for kissing too.

Mom: Jake, eat your dinner.
Jake (2 years old): I can’t stuff my food in my mouth! Mom, (blink, blink) can I eat my (chocolate) bunny?

Jake (2 years old): Please give me my car . . . don’t break it—it’s beauful.

Mom: What kind of dog would you like to have?
Jake (3 years old): W’ fee’ fee’.
Mom: Fifi?
Jake (getting frustrated): No! W’fee’ fee’!
Mom (confused): Fifi?
Jake (exasperated): No! I want a dog with legs! I want a brown dog with legs and four feet!!

Jake (3 years old): Crawly cat. Crawly cat means Mr. O’Malley in Spanish.

Jake (3 years old): Monte’s name is spelled S, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 8, 9.

Zee (3 months) I want to get down! (after wiggling and squirming on mom’s lap for a few minutes)

Zee (6 months): (as I was busy cleaning in the kitchen, Zee had been crawling by my feet crying, then he finally got tired of waiting, grabbed me around the leg, looked up at me, and said: “I want mommy to feed the baby!”

Zee (2 years old): Mom, how come my ‘hi’ doesn’t work? (After yelling hi to people as we were driving down the road in the van with the windows up.)

Alex: what color is it
Zee (3 years old): Navy Peach
Alex: what does that look like?
Zee: like yellow with no eyes!

Posted in: Toddlers, Family Life, Kid Quotes, Parenting – No Comments

A Great Exercise for Writing Dialogue

April 19, 2009
This entry is part 1 of 5 in the series Kid Quotes

Writing down funny things that people say and writing them just how they were said is a good writing exercise. When I taught school, I would have the kids eavesdrop and write down conversations in a notebook and then we would change the context a little, or change the words slightly to create dialogue for a story that they were working on. I like writing down quotes by my kids, and collecting them from other people I know. They make great fodder for stories 🙂 Here are a few funny quotes by kids I know:

Alex (age 4): Mom, do you like it when people do things for you? I do, but there’s some stuff people have to do themselves – like sitting on the toilet or blowing your nose. But I wish someone could go to the bathroom for me, cause I hate going poop!

Alexisms: easy as cake, lickety slip

Alex (age 4): easy as a piece of cake.
Mom: don’t you mean easy as pie?
Alex: no, I do it in the cake kind of way.

Alex (age 4): Mooooom! Jake pinched me as hard as I dropped a rock on my toe!

Zee (age 3): Dang it!
Mom: What?
Zeeh: My Pixar! Bee just freezed it with her freezing power!

Mom: I really wish you wouldn’t have done that!
Niece (age 3): Mom, I’m not yours fairy!

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Poor Harriet! Poor Zee!

April 19, 2009

My son has learned a sad thing that no 6-year-old should ever have to know. Chickens do not need baths, and they cannot swim. And that the life of a pet is a delicate thing.

When my 11-yr-old went to take care of our hens Harriet and Gertie this morning, Only Gertie was anywhere to be found. As I was hunting for Harriet in the yard, Zee came and said that he had given her a bath, and then he burst into tears and ran around the house and hid in the bush. Apparently, he had put the chickens into a five gallon bucket filled with water for a bath, and Gertie was standing on top of Harriet to avoid drowning. Good for Gertie, very unfortunate for Harriet.

When she stopped kicking and then closed her eyes, my poor little boy realized that something was wrong and he pulled her out of the bucket, but by then it was too late. He buried her in the back yard with grass, and didn’t tell me because he was afraid of getting into trouble, so by the time I found out, he had been carrying the weight of her death on his shoulders for a whole day.

I pulled my son out of the bushes and took him in the house where I held him and he sobbed in my lap for half an hour, and I realized that this was the reason that I had needed to have the experience of accidentally killing a pet as a child.

When I was about 6, our cat had kittens, and when the kittens were about 6 weeks old, I had taken my favorite outside to play with me. My sister wanted to play with the kitten too, but I was selfish and would not share. When my mother called me into the house, I hid the kitten from my sister in a camping cooler, and then went into the house to do my chores. And I completely forgot that the kitten was out in the cooler.  When I remembered the next morning, I ran to let her out, but she had already suffocated.

To this day I still feel guilt over the death of my poor kitty, and I imagine that it will be the same for my son, poor thing!

Posted in: Pets, Family Life – No Comments

The Many Hats of a Writer

April 17, 2009
This entry is part 2 of 5 in the series Raising a Writer

I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago for the Utah Children’s Writers Blog:

I just got home from a ladies social where the theme for the night was vintage fashion and the girls put on a fashion show. There were vintage era dresses and hats from the late 1800’s to present day. I have never seen so many outlandish hats and froofy dresses in one room all at one time!

It made me think about all of the many hats we wear . . . just today I have been a business woman doing outreach for my agency at a charity breakfast, an office assistant, a mom cooking vegetable beef stew and checking homework, a friend, a fashion consultant for my 14 year old daughter, a napkin for my 3 year old, and now I am attempting to put on my writer’s hat, while at the same time serving as a bean bag chair for a child who will not go to bed.

With life sometimes spinning out of my control, I often feel at a loss when trying to fit in time for writing, and yet on those days that I barely have time to think, it is in the quiet moments after the kids have gone to bed (and sometimes after I have finally gotten comfortable) that the ideas start coming in like waves. It can be really irritating. Of course I never have a pen and paper handy, so while I lay there all comfy in my blankets with my pillow just so, staring at the ceiling and knowing that if I go to sleep the idea will be gone in the morning . . .

With my eclectic web of life experiences, it seems like there are always a wide variety of crazy stories bouncing around my head, from pirates on a picnic (inspired by my 5 year old) and tales from the little farm I lived on as a child to the more serious stuff of family dysfunction and teen angst, divorce, and moving to the city.

Even now as I sit here typing, Brie has pulled off one of my shoes and socks, and is asking for a glass of milk. As I get up to accommodate her, I notice that she now smells strongly of perfume and is wearing gray-blue eyeshadow on her eyebrows and lips — how long was she gone? My foot is cold and she is finally falling asleep in my lap . . .

Posted in: Family Life, Toddlers, Writing – 1 Comment

When Mom’s Away, The Kids Will Play!

April 17, 2009

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Musings on Mothering

April 16, 2009

How many children do you have to have before you are actually qualified to give parenting advice? Even Dr. Ferber changed his stance on the ever popular Ferber method for getting kids to go to sleep after having a child of his own. Too many people who write books on parenting are giving advice from the perspective of only having a degree in child psychology, and maybe only have one kid. I go to my mother for advice—she’s the only one I know who’s really qualified since she has raised 12 kids. My younger sister is a close second. She has nine. I have four kids, and my right to give advice on parenting is very limited.

I hate it when parents of only one child (usually a mild, even tempered, obedient child who has never run away from them in the supermarket) look at a frazzled mother and say something stupid like, “I wish she would learn to control her kids!” or “don’t you think you should have used birth control?”

In order to even be able to start handing out advice, you have to have had a child who has done something horrible, like sneak out of their room after pretending to be asleep at nap time, and then quietly going into the kitchen and getting into the refrigerator so that they could get your eggs out and hide them around the house, breaking a few in the process, or like gleefully throwing cottage cheese onto the carpet because they wanted to pretend they were throwing candy in a parade, or getting out your maxi pads and sticking them all over the bathroom wall and calling them butterflies. Or my personal favorite, squirting chocolate syrup out on the white carpet, pouring milk over it, and then dancing in it. (Why did it take me so long to figure out how to lock the fridge? And why for goodness sake did I ever agree to rent a house with white carpet!)

I remember once, being infuriated with my sister because her 2-year-old little girl had pretended that my stacks of clean folded laundry were cakes and she had ‘frosted’ them with a large bottle of baby lotion that had been sitting out, and all my sister had done was take the lotion away and sternly say “no, no, sweetie!” At the time, of course, my first child was only a few months old, and had never done anything remotely obnoxious. If it had happened now, at least we would have both gotten a good chuckle over it.

And what can you really do about it? Take it away, and say “no, no!” while you try your best to look angry. There are a few areas, however, where I do feel qualified to give some advice. For example, never just nod and say “yes, uh huh, ok,” when your toddler is talking to you in words you don’t understand. For all you know, you have just given them permission to use your scissors to play barber. And if you have put your child down for a nap, make sure that he is really asleep before you go take a shower, or worse yet, fall asleep yourself, or you may find him missing when you wake up. Which brings me to the next thing—if you do fall asleep, first make sure you deadbolt the door and lock the top latch which you have smartly installed way up high at the top of the door, and then hide away, or better yet lock up anything with a long handle, like, say a broom, for instance, or you may find him being returned to you by a strange blue haired old lady who was nice enough to go door to door looking for you rather than calling the police. . . if you’re lucky.

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How to Tell if You Are the Mother of a Toddler

April 16, 2009

You know you’re the mom of a toddler when nothing embarrasses you anymore. I know this is true because when my second son was 3 years old he once interviewed every stranger in the fast food restaurant we were eating at, asking everyone if they had penises, even the women. (Thank God there were only 3 other families there.) I was really starting to get annoyed at this strange fascination of his, because no matter how often I patiently explained to him that “no, I don’t have a penis, only boys have those,” he didn’t believe me, so it was actually a huge relief when he came barging into the bathroom one day and whipped open the shower curtain with a strange look of triumph on his face. He looked at me as if he just knew he had finally caught me red handed. As I frantically grabbed for the shower curtain, he shouted “Ha! Mom, you do have a . . .” a puzzled look crossed his face. “A big hairy thing?” Then he smiled and said “and you have bosoms too!” Then he closed the shower curtain and left. That was the end of it, and I am really, really, really glad.

Some other things that could tip you off that you are the parent of a toddler are:

1. When your child is missing, the closet in the entryway of your home is a perfectly logical place to look.
2. You have had to look in the middle of every clothing rack in Wal-Mart at least once.
3. You often look like your shirt sleeve has been used for a napkin. (Oh wait! It really has!)
4. White is not something you wear unless you have a babysitter.
5. It’s a relief to only have to give your child one bath in a day.
6. You lock the doors of your house with a latch that has been installed at the top of the door before taking a shower or using the toilet so your child doesn’t escape, and even then you are ready to run out of the shower naked at the slightest sound of chair legs scraping across the floor . . . (the news story of a toddler who escaped with the car keys and crashed the car into the garage while his poor mother was showering comes to mind)
7. Oh wait! Ha, what was I thinking? As soon as I get in the shower, I have instant company. And supervised toilet time . . . (“eeew mommy, you stink!” “Thanks sweetie!”)
8. Nap time is the only quiet part of your day. (Please! Pray that the toddler will take a nap!)
9. Anything nice you may have is either hidden away, or on a really high shelf that can’t be reached by climbing. (Ha! don’t you know there isn’t such a place? Must be why I don’t really have any nice things . . . )
10. If your child even eats one or two bites of his dinner, sometimes that is good enough.
11. You find yourself babbling to complete strangers at the play area in the mall, because you crave adult conversation.
12. Your house has at least one wall with crayon scribbling if you’re lucky. Otherwise, it’s permanent marker and it’s on every wall in the house. This will invariably happen right after you have painted. Thank goodness for magic erasers!
13. Your house is always a wreck, even right after you have spent the whole day cleaning up.
14. You keep baby wipes in your car and/or in your purse.
15. Milk and applesauce is a good lunch.
16. You often find yourself spelling out words such as C A N D Y, or P A R K in conversations.
17. Barney, Vegi Tales, and the Boobahs are necessary evils.
18. You have had at least one conversation as if Elmo were a real person.
19. You have either gone to the store with an odd assortment of barrettes in your hair at least once because your little girl was ‘fixing your hair’ and would have cried if you took them out, or you have pretended to be a dinosaur and that pancake syrup is blood to get your son to eat (or some other equally gory thing).

Posted in: Family Life, Toddlers – No Comments
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