BC (beloved child the elder) – Page 10

Category: BC (beloved child the elder)

i ran

Posted on July 10, 2008 by wrekehavoc

today’s lesson in parenthood: you’ll never know the fun you’ll have discussing middle eastern issues with a nine year old.

BC and i were driving to camp this morning. i didn’t have my mp3 player hooked up in the car, so we were at the mercy of the radio. i couldn’t bear to hear the mattress discounters commercial one more time, so i put on NPR. you never know what you’ll get on NPR, one of the reasons i like it so much. and lately, BC is interested in the stories she hears, so i turn it on every now and again.

of course, today, the big news is that iran continues to test more missiles. what’s iran? BC asked after hearing the scary tale.

once again, i was thrilled to be the parent who gets the good questions, not like BS, who gets questions like: daddy, why can’t i have candy in the morning? and: daddy, is it dessert night? nope, i have already (poorly) tackled evangelicals and abortion, homosexuality, and menstruation. why not middle eastern politics? it’s definitely a different tack than the other conversation we seem to be having this week: whether or not BC is chubby or too heavy, as the other little girls have a harder time picking her up at cheerleading.

of course, you know what i told her about that: those girls need to start lifting weights! (as if.) i also seriously told her about how its difficult when you’re a curvy and muscular tween girl. a lot of other girls haven’t started developing yet, and you feel bulky and cumbersome. i still remember thinking how huge i was in comparison to the other girls when i was her age. it was, essentially, muscular me versus the twig girls.

i worked myself into some borderline eating disorder moments because of it, and i’ll be damned if girlfriend goes down that path, too.

but back to iran, the topic most mothers and daughters are chatting about these days. well, i started out in a ::cough cough:: reaganesque tone, iran is a country in the middle east. for awhile, they were led by a US-backed ruler called a shah; i suspect he wasn’t nice to all of the people. then, some religious people kicked the shah out of the country. they took american hostages out of the US enbassy there. i still remember as a girl watching the news. as the announcer would tell you how many days the hostages were in captivity.

the president at that time, jimmy carter, tried to rescue them, but the attempt was a disaster. the day that ronald reagan became president, they released the hostages, which was great for them and obnoxious for president carter. i guess the people who took the hostages might have thought that reagan would have done something scarier to get the hostages out, so they released them.

anyway, there are a lot of very religious people there now who don’t like people who don’t follow their ways. (yes, i was very, very close to my separation of church-state speech here, but i hadn’t had coffee yet. i spared the child.) so right now, people are concerned about iran having missiles like these because if they have them, they can hit a lot more targets.

like us? she asked.

well, not us, i continued, but israel. they don’t recognize israel and don’t like israel, so people are afraid they might send those things toward israel. israel is surrounded by a lot of other countries that don’t like it, so israel would probably act pretty tough in return if iran sent missiles over.

well, that would start World War III, girlfriend said.

sometimes, i marvel at her ability to grasp things. yes, it could, i replied. but there are a lot of people who don’t want that to happen, and so people are keeping an eye on the situation.

where do they test them? she continued.

i don’t really know, honey, i replied. maybe the desert, maybe the ocean. i don’t know.

does it cause big waves in the ocean? does it hurt the fish?

there are so many questions you wish you could answer as a parent. and then of course, there are questions you have that are also sadly unanswerable.

with apologies to sting, i hope the iranians love their children, too.

one, two, tell me who are you? THE BEARS!

Posted on July 8, 2008 by wrekehavoc

girlfriend is attending cheerleader camp at a tony private school. i balked for a few years, sending her to the YMCA until i was completely fed up with the lack of supervision, the lack of a program, and the lack of working transportation. (when she and her fellow campers were stuck on the fairfax county parkway one of the many days that the Y’s bus broke down, i pretty much had had it.) i have come to the conclusion that the private school’s camp isn’t that much more expensive than the Y (they feed them lunch and snacks! they actually do what they say they will do! (i.e., counselors actually teaching them cheers! supervises them! keeps them from killing each other!)), and considering it is a bit of a higher quality program, i am okay with that. (note that girlfriend is not attending camp all summer, which helps in balancing costs around here.)

the best part, of course, is that BC’s best friend in the whole entire universe is also attending with her. she will also attend girl scout sleepaway camp with her later this month. this is incredibly cool, as these girls live in separate towns and don’t actually see each other much each year.

so yesterday, i dropped my girl off, sunscreen and all, to cheering camp. i should point out that i was one of the girls who threw items at the cheerleaders. i sneered in their general direction. in short, i was not a cheering fan, in spite of the fact that my dad was on the pep squad when he was a young man about town. [insert vision of will ferrell here.]

when i picked her up at day’s end, she was a little annoyed. all of the girls, save for her buddy, knew each other already. some attended the private school during the school year. and they were… wait for it…stuck up.

no? cheerleaders at a private school…stuck up? no way.

[snerk]

i gave her the talk. you all know the one: don’t worry about any of the other girls. do what you went there to do: learn to cheer. have fun doing that. if the girls continue to be jerks, ignore them unless they’re hurting you (in which case, involve the counselors.) etc. the same self-talk i did when those men weren’t too happy about my presence in the weight room. she was still a little nervous about going today.

fast forward to pickup time today. how was your day, i asked, nervous about the answer.

mama, she said: i was a FLYER!

come again?

for those of us who spent little time with those popular, pert ladies in our high schools, a flyer is the person who gets thrown in the air.

i was a little scared because if someone dropped me, well, that would have hurt. but they didn’t! and there was one girl who is so big, the counselors couldn’t hardly throw her, but not me!

i guess that means today was a better day, huh?

it don't come easy

Posted on June 28, 2008 by wrekehavoc

today, i share the tale of the Easy Bake Oven. it will be a tale much like another famous tale, though it involves no curtains. mercifully.

it’s starts with a little girl. let’s call her BC, shall we, as we always do around here. when BC was about three years old, she went to a chanukah party at her uncle BTD’s house. there were many children there, as her uncle has five kids, and her uncle’s wife’s family has a lot of children and cousins. at this party, everyone had presents to exchange; everyone, except the uncle, who had presents for all of the other children but no present for his beloved (and at the time only) niece, BC. probably a little oversight on the busy present shopper’s part.

in any event, bless BTD’s heart: this is conjecture, of course, but it appeared that after BC’s beloved uncle scrambled upstairs, and then downstairs, he presented BC with a gift he had plucked from an upstairs closet from thin air: a brand-new Easy Bake Oven. BC loved this oven; only, too bad for her. EBOs are for children age eight and up. no matter how mature madame was at this age, she was not ready for an EBO. carefully, her grandmother whisked the present away to toys r us, where she exchanged it for something a little safer for a spunky three year old.

fast forward to our hero, the now-eight-year-old BC. that same grandmother, remembering how much her granddaughter wanted that EBO, got it for her for chanukah. her other uncle, the lovable, right-wing nutball larry, supplied a whole bunch of EBO mixes to keep her own personal glycemic index at about 1000. happy days are here again, right?

not quite.

for our hero, who had not yet fully developed her ability to read fine print, took the giant long cattle prod pushing tool and shoved it into the oven, lodging it permanently inside the oven, even before she had any chance at baking anything. oh woe, she cried. her mom, desperate to dislodge the long plastic thingy, called up hasbro for guidance. unfortunately for all, hasbro and our friends at the cpsc had just announced a recall of the EBO. apparently, other things were getting entrapped in the ovens. (things called fingers.) dutifully, BC’s mom and dad packed it up and returned it, as they had been instructed. the mixes lingered, but the oven was gone with the wind postal service.

months went by, months when hasbro said they might rebuild it; or then again, maybe not. eventually, they issued a $25 gift certificate for any item on hasbro.com. considering the shipping, it wasn’t the best offer in the world. (BC’s mom promptly lost the offer, so in truth, she’s just rationalizing because she felt so guilty.) in time, BC’s evil mom, fearing that the mixes were going to be nastier than nasty, chucked them as well.

fast forward once again to this very date, a date which shall be remembered for so many things. for one thing, BC’s brother jools celebrated a whole week of dry nights; he was to be gifted, as promised, with a shark slip and slide. (after weeks of obsessing about this item, he decided to choose two other items instead as his reward.) for another, BC achieved straight As on her report card. and, remembering that a child had been denied her EBO for so many years, BC’s parents caved bought her her very own EBO.

hurray!

but woe to BC: her mixes are gone. BC’s mother, being cheap industrious, located DIY EBO recipes on the internet, as she knew the three included mixes would last about two minutes. and after BC’s dad returned from the store with a lightbulb (the secret to those crispy crusts delicate cakes heated plastic oven walls), we set forth on our baking adventure.

#1: yellow cake (one packet) with chocolate frosting (one packet), baked especially for the man who bought the lightbulb.

#2 and #3: chocolate peanut butter fudge, one serving shared by wreke and jools, this serving was affectionately dubbed gloop for it’s consistency. imagine the fine taste of confectioners sugar with a slight brownish tinge. the second attempt, eaten by BC after a stint in the fridge, fared a little better.

BC had a great time, though her mother, wreke, was left with the realization that the same woman who would not buy wreke an EBO was willing to do so for her grandchild. no, instead, wreke realized that her own mother, aka the grandmother, was willing instead to let wreke use the real oven instead.

in retrospect, it was probably safer.

what's the frequency, kenneth

Posted on June 24, 2008 by wrekehavoc

this week, one of BC’s best pals is hanging out with us. because their names rhyme we decided they’d go by codenames. don’t ask how we got there, but BC’s pal is now going by moose and BC is going by the moniker of squirrel. (somewhere, jay ward is laughing. i know i am.) the plan is that every morning, we do something (or nothing), then every afternoon, the girls go over to the ice skating rink for skating camp. BC’s pal is one of the nicest kids around; they have been friends since they were about five or so, and having her around is a pleasure.

yesterday, things didn’t go completely to plan, though. jools had to stay home, as i needed to take him to the pediatrician’s to get his friday TB test checked. (happily, he is TB-free.) so i had two young ladies of around nine and one little newly-minted five year old. jools only wanted to play with the girls, and the girls preferred playing without his presence. there was much whining and gnashing of teeth. i took them to one of our great sprinkler parks, hoping that there would be something for everyone. and there was, for a time, until jools was too chilly and moose needed a knee repair after getting a bit of a scrape.

re-enter the whining. i don’t think i have ever seen jools so whiny. it was frustrating. hours and hours of never-ending whining. they took my scooter! they won’t let me in BC’s room! they don’t want me around! as the youngest child in my family, i knew all-too-well the joys of this scenario, as i experienced in many times over. i talked to him about it, too. but as he was over-the-top in his mood, i was beginning to wonder whether he was actually not well.

we dropped the girls off at camp. i encountered an obnoxious parking deck checkout woman who looked at her nails while my free 15 minutes in the parking deck turned into 16 minutes and a $1 fee. we hit the doctor’s office — no TB, remember? and then, we went for a swim, just mr. whiny-pants and me. and d’ya know something? the dude was happy. he was swimming to me, diving after his spiderman dive stick, and playing with his little girlfriend, jo-jo. in fact, when he gave his dive stick to jo-jo to borrow and some young cad of about their age came by and took it from her, you had to see mr. man inflate himself and yank it back. i thought they were going to come to blows, so i ambled over, only to watch jools get out of the pool and put the dive stick back into my beach bag. he then returned and just continued to swim with jo, who was not bothered by the loss of the stick (and who then got whacked in the head by a volleyball gone wrong. poor kid.)

all in all, a most pleasant afternoon.

we picked up the girls. moose is a more skilled skater than is squirrel, and apparently, the powers that be at the rink noticed this and wanted to place her in a different camp. no, moose told them, my father signed me up for this camp and this is where i want to be. what a loyal, sweet girl! i dropped off moose, and the fighting continued.

ah, sibling rivalry. is there no one it can’t unhinge?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fxfDRYGtjw&hl=en

guilty pleasure monday: to sir with love (lulu)

Posted on June 23, 2008 by wrekehavoc

as the school year closes (at least around here — most of the rest of the nation has been out of school probably for six months by this point, but not OUR schools, which stay open practically until the next millenium), i am inspired to revisit an old chestnut from the teacher-who-tames-the-unruly-and-impossible-class genre. it’s another one of my 4:30 movie favorites, to sir with love, starring brilliant actor sidney poitier and a host of other mostly-english actors you’ve probably never heard of.

in typical hollywood fashion, the movie completely bowdlerizes the novel, down to the fact that when the girls burn something in poitier’s classroom, no one ever tells what’s causing that smell. (it’s a sanitary napkin. used. yech.) not to mention the fact that london’s east end in the mid-1960s was a very rough place, thanks to kray-zee guys like these. (i, of course, follow the east end of london closely, the current bowdlerized version anyhow, via eastenders. so i should know. of course.)

but i rabbit on digress. and this is about guilty pleasure songs, not films. apparently, the american idol folks had lulu on in the not-too-distant past, reviving this old chestnut. i’m sorry i missed it but am glad i can still see it, for while i avoid AI like the plague, i do like seeing old singers trotting out their hits. and it is a lovely song, much better than the crap lulu ended up singing for eurovision a few years after.

too bad for her, though: she can no longer feel parts of her lovely face. no more botox for you, lulu!

so is there a point to all of this? let’s see:

1) the east end of london is not a groovy disneyland;

2) you ought not set fire to your kotex under any circumstances;

3) love your teachers and sing to them often;

and

4) botox — or buttocks, as BC mistakenly calls it — is probably not a good option.

pictures of you

Posted on June 19, 2008 by wrekehavoc

props to onthecurb for stealing this groovy idea. and i’m stealing her verbage, in case kids want to try this at home:

The concept:

a. Type your answer to each of the questions below into Flickr Search.
b. Using only the first page, pick an image.
c. Copy and paste each of the URLs for the images into fd’s Flickr Toys: mosaic maker.

The Questions:

1. What is your first name?
2. What is your favorite food? right now?
3. What high school did you attend?
4. What is your favorite color?
5. Who is your celebrity crush?
6. Favorite drink?
7. Dream vacation?
8. Favorite dessert?
9. What you want to be when you grow up?
10. What do you love most in life?
11. One Word to describe you.
12. Your flickr name.

1. Sheryl Crow -Vancouver, 2. Peanut Butter Cup Heart, 3. Toms River High School North Marching Mariners, 4. eccentric beauty, 5. you really don’t have a blog?, 6. Fishin’ Remuz, 7. Arched people, 8. Spicy Mini Chocolate Lava Cakes, 9. We are fuckin Rock Stars, 10. wildwood crest – windblown, 11. colorful world12. Not available13. Not available14. Not available15. Not available16. Not available

twisting by the pool

Posted on June 8, 2008 by wrekehavoc

we belong to our community pool. it’s hard to believe, in fact, how much it costs to be a member of said pool, and yet, we do it. there are not many options where we live; we can’t actually put one into our backyard (besides the overwhelming expense, our back yard is a bit of a luge run), and it’s close to the house. yes, we are lemmings.

anyway, in years past, we have not known anyone at our pool, save for another family from our synagogue. i have actually tried making friends, but apparently, there is a huge sign on my forehead that says: avoid! avoid! she has a strange sense of humor, and her hair is bad! but this year, as BC goes to school with a lot of the kids from our neighborhood, i figure we will meet plenty of the people who swim.

today, we went to the pool. luckily, our new neighbors were there. wow. who knew that the pool experience is so much more fun when people actually talk to you! BC played with our neighbor’s two kids, while jools hung mostly with BS and i. and lo, and behold: the dude, whose feet touch the 3 foot bottom on tiptoe, actually hit some milestones, all in one day.

swim without waterwings: check.

swim with head underwater from mom to dad: check.

jump in pool and recover himself enough to swim to appointed adult: check.

so very proud i am. truly.

it would have been a completely perfect day had the boys BC knew from school not come around and started calling jools stupid! these are third grade boys going off on a five year old. i wasn’t there — BS witnessed it. and while BC was outraged for her brother (yes, the same brother she thinks has psychological problems and, in her professional opinion, needs speech therapy), BS told her to ignore the boys. why should she care what they think?

clearly, i need to let BS know that this is not the way bombastic me would have handled this. see, i take no prisoners and wear my mom badge proudly. and i have no problem with taking a boy by the hand and marching him to his mother, asking her whether she approves of her son taking on another child nearly 5 years younger than him, unprovoked, and calling him denegrating names.

and you wonder why other people avoid me at the pool.

with a little luck

Posted on May 23, 2008 by wrekehavoc

every morning, i drive BC to school a little before nine. we hear my favorite DJ, weasel, who was a mainstay at the old, much lamented and missed 99.1 WHFS and who now hangs mornings at The Globe. most mornings, he asks a trivia question, and i never call even though i know the answer. and BC says: aw mom, why didn’t you try?

this morning is the first SOL (standards of learning, though some fool definitely made for one unfortunate acronym) for BC, and she’s nervous. she ate a good breakfast, and we packed some solid snacks for her. but she was still nervous. as the good mom i am, i always deal with my feelings by making a joke out of them.

so we’re driving to school, and i’m telling her: BC, honey, whether or not you pass the SOLs does not determine whether you pass the third grade. you would have to go and do something crazy, like burn down the school at this point to not pass third grade. and that would be a stupid, stupid thing to do.

BC grinned. mama, that’s the craziest idea i ever heard!

exactly. then we heard weasel about to announce the question of the day. i generally do not dial and drive, but i figured, aw, what the hell. i’ll dial and pull over. it will make the kid laugh.

the question: sheryl crow sings my favorite mistake and now claims it is about some philandering ex-boyfriend of hers. we know who it is really about, though, right? call me and tell me who it is and you’ll get a pair of tickets to her show.

duh. if anyone was paying attention a few months ago to my clapton/harrison binge, they’ll know that if i wondered whether it was true before, i know it’s true now. while clapton never out-and-out admits it, based on his past track record and doing the math, it is not hard to figure out. weasel mentioned that he could not understand how the two of them tour together after breaking up.

anyway, to make madame smile, i called. and… i WON. yes, jaxx, yes BS, yes everyone out there who thinks i’m the luckiest girl alive, i won two tickets to next week’s show. unfortunately, it is a wednesday night, the last night of religious school and a night before another SOL. can’t get a sitter. can’t take the girl.

(anyone wanna go with me? i have no earthly idea how to get to the venue, of course. so you’d be driving 😉

but the grin on BC’s face as she walked out of the car was priceless. and that is exactly how i wanted to send the chick off to school. mama’s a doofus, but her aim is true.

ah, the things we do for love.

speaking of love, here are the former alleged lovebirds.

i know why the caged bird sings, weasel: it’s good business to tour with a legend.

writing

Posted on May 20, 2008 by wrekehavoc

as a writer, i am always sucked in tempted thrilled to find opportunities to challenge myself online, especially between the hours of 10 pm and 4 am (barring those nights when people under the age of 10 decide not to sleep due to illness or just plain cos.) for example, there was a time i wrote abstracts because describing articles in 100 words was more fun than delousing my daughter’s hair. (sadly, that opportunity — the abstract writing website — has gone belly-up, at least for now. the lice, mercifully, are still in louse heaven, living on a giant head.)

but now, i’ve discovered smith magazine, a place where you can be challenged to write about anything… in just six words. considering just how verbose i can be (note entire blog output since 2002) about a whole lot of nothing, well, this screamed try me!

so i did.

recently, i tried my hand at the MOMoirs section. you may have guessed that i have a little experience in the MOM department, having been one for nearly 10 years. and of course, i possess all the answers on being a MOM. for example:

Q: mommy, why can’t i see whether jools will eat this [fill in the blank with anything disgusting, inedible, or poisonous]? wouldn’t it be fun?

A: because mommy doesn’t want to make you personally pump jools’ stomach. you don’t know how to do it, as you have not watched that episode of Trauma: Life in the ER yet.

so when i noticed there was actually a contest on this, well, of course i was going to give it a go.

lucky me. i am a winner.

i had to summon all my powers to think of how i could describe this crazy roller-coaster ride called parenthood in six words. all the joy. all the heartache. all the leftovers. it was not easy to convey that in six measly, economic words. but, it suddenly came to me, as if summoned by a dream:

Can I pee in private, please?

anyway, i would love it if you folks would try your hand at this fun exercise in the comments section. i shouldn’t be the one having all the fun.

fragile

Posted on May 15, 2008August 1, 2013 by wrekehavoc

the thing about modern medicine is that we, modern citizens in the modern world, assume it cures and completes everything. you take a pill; a malady ceases. you inhale a puffer of medicine; you breathe again. it’s simple and it seems to work most of the time.

yet BC continues to struggle with her coughs. the child is on symbacort, nasonex, amoxicillin (20 days, thanks very much), prevacid, and zantac. (she’s also supposed to be on zyrtec, but it doesn’t seem to do anything for her, so we’ve taken that one out of the lineup.) the cough has improved a bit, but her stomach aches, in spite of the yogurt i attempt to put down her gullet to counteract the antibiotic destruction of good bacteria. she isn’t sleeping well. and she’s a bit miserable at night. in fact, last night, she wailed: i wish i wasn’t on all this medicine. i was happier when i was coughing all the time!

there are those times when you wonder whether you’re doing the right thing.

it doesn’t help that i’m only finally coming out of a tough IVIG experience. understand, i ADORE/ LOVE/ WORSHIP the nurses who take great care of me. but accidents happen. i go through three bottles of Gammagard, and i sit for about 4-5 hours because it needs to drip slowly or else i get ill. unfortunately for me, the second bottle dripped so quickly, it finished it in record time. the clue, of course, was that for me, finishing two bottles in two hours is unheard-of. i stood up to let the nurse know i was ready for bottle #3.

and it all started when i sat down. my body felt fluttery and weak. my head started to ache. my stomach felt nauseous. (note that i do not barf. i am only nauseous when i am seriously ill or when i’m pregnant. i knew it wasn’t the latter.) in short, i was having a reaction to the IVIG.

see, i’m allergic to IVIG. i need it every four weeks, so i get it, but not without premedication. when i had it for the first time in the hospital two years ago, the nurse ignored my brother-the-doctor’s suggestion that she premedicate me with benadryl prior to giving me IVIG since i have such a history of allergies to so many things. it’s not written on your chart, she muttered without interest. let’s give it a try without.

within 20 minutes, my entire body was shaking violently. it was after midnight (why do they always try things in the dead of night when no one is around?), and i struggled to actually push the help button. when the nurse finally arrived, she looked at me deadpan as i was shaking uncontrollably and having what i can only guess what some sort of a seizure and said, gee, i guess you do need some benadryl.

(there are times when i wonder whether i would have been prosecuted for kicking her once my body settled down.)

once the benadryl was added to my IV, it was as if i achieved nirvana in 30 seconds. peace reigneth. probably the first time in my life i understood why some people inject themselves with drugs. there’s no wait. instant karma.

[kids: i am not endorsing injecting yourselves with anything. do not try that at home or anywhere else.]

i always have a reaction to IVIG. at first, even premedicated, i ran a temperature, had terrible chills, and was exhausted. i’ve moved on to the place where i usually just come home and go to bed and wake up fine. but for some reason, the headache i developed from the latest reaction, along with the exhaustion, followed me for days. i can’t imagine it was the IVIG the entire time; i suspect it triggered something that just went from there.

but we never went camping. i had an awful mother’s day. and i didn’t really start feeling well until yesterday.

i guess i better remember that neither my kid nor i is invincible.