BC (beloved child the elder) – Page 24

Category: BC (beloved child the elder)

freedom to marry week: invisible grooms

Posted on February 17, 2007 by wrekehavoc

this week has been pretty crazed. i had to figure out how i was going to be chaperoning several three year olds at disney on ice downtown while simultaneously delivering my daughter to her school, which opened two hours late on thursday and friday. i also had to figure out how i was going to be at school for the 100th day of school celebration and plan a mardi gras party for a few little girls on saturday (today). and today, for anyone who cares, is the one year anniversary of my start in the hospital.

so i’m a bit preoccupied.

but i’ve resolved that this is the year i will have FUN. (dammit.) and that is why we had several of BC’s pals from her old school over. we made masks, we made tiaras, we listened to professor longhair and buckwheat zydeco. there are beads and feathers and glitter all over my table.

i love it.

but i think the funniest part of the day was watching the three little girls have a wedding. (i am not making this up.) two of them wrapped themselves up in flowery sheet gowns; and BC was going to be the officiant. one wanted to be the groom, but the other said she’d prefer to marry an invisible groom. i looked for the wedding march on rhapsody. it was a moment.

i enjoyed listening to these eight year olds wax on over why you must marry before you have a baby — clearly we parents have been working overtime on that one. but i realize that none of us have talked much about who can marry or who cannot. i guess i never thought about that much. in the back of my mind, i am hoping that by the time BC and jools are old enough, this will be a non-issue.

carnival cruise – review from a family perspective

Posted on February 1, 2007 by wrekehavoc

we just returned from our very first cruise, a cruise on the Carnival Ship Inspiration. since folks are always interested in information about family-friendly vacation options, i thought i’d share my .02 in case anyone was interested. eventually, i will do a full review. we (DH, 8 year old BC, 3.5 year old hellboy, and i) went on this cruise not knowing what to expect. we booked it last minute, as it seemed like a really reasonably-priced way to have some fun and visit two ports.

carnival touts its “camp carnival” program as the answer to the cruising parents’ prayers — you get a break while the kids are having fun. camp is available to kids 2 to teen. people we met on the cruise were surprised — their travel agent told them that their 21 month old could participate, but the folks on the cruise told them that he could not, so they had a special friend with them throughout the cruise and no break. it seemed like there was some naptime geared to the under-2 set at lunch time for an hour (this would have been completely useless for my kids had they been at that age at that time — when they were babies, they napped in the a.m. and in the p.m. but not over lunchtime), but other than that, the only thing available to parents with kids under 2 would be paying for babysitting from 10 pm until 3 am. i can’t speak much to the under-two situation, but if you were considering a cruise with carnival, you would be wise to make sure that your expectations are in line with what they offer. oh, and know that anyone not potty-trained may not swim in the pool. any pool. period.

we were surprised to find that camp occurs in spurts. most days, it starts around 9 through noon. then, they close for lunch and reopen at 2 (except on days when they have family events at 1:00 — more on that later.) until about 5pm. they close again at 5 and then sometimes reopen for dinner, sometimes not in the 5:45 range until 10pm. after 10, you must pay for a babysitter — $6/hour for first child, $4/hour for second — which is available until 3 a.m. some of the activities are fun — the older kids built, painted, and exploded a volcano. the younger kids basically played with toys, colored a bit, and listened to stories. but they tout this as an “award-winning program”. who gave the award — sony? my eight year old was surprised that two hours in the day — one in the a.m., one in the p.m. — was dedicated to playing with playstation2 and gameboys. “mama,” she said, “why don’t they ever take us to the pool? we shouldn’t be playing with gameboys on vacation!” this sort of programming smacks of laziness, so much so that if an eight-year-old can figure it out, then i wonder why the children’s programmers cannot. in short, you’d do better at a program at a club med, activity-wise, where they take the kids swimming, do sports and circus activities, painting, and a show. while the kids had fun when they were there, it was due more to being around other kids their own ages rather than due to the programming. (oh — and that 1:00 family program? it’s “build your own bear — carnival cruise bear. for $19.99, of course. like you need to shell out more money and pay for more crap to schlep through customs.)

timing is an issue for people with young children. if you have children that stay up late and wake up late, bully for you. for the rest of us, staying up really late means you’ll pay in a big way the next morning. the allure of partying until 3 a.m. is lost on sleepy parents of young children, methinks. unfortunately, most of the nightlife (shows, events, tournaments) starts at 9:30/10:00, so carnival essentially nickels-and-dimes you for childcare if you actually want to participate in any of the things you came on the boat for in the first place. conversely, if you are like us, you never get to see any of the shows because if you stay up really late, you’ll pay for it the next day when your three year old bounces out of bed very early. in short, cruise ship schedules are not exactly young-family-friendly. the people who dreamed up the schedule on this ship either are childless or live with mary poppins, who cheerfully provides childcare 24/7 and lets the parents sleep in at will.

the dining room was the best part of the trip. i cannot say enough wonderful things about the dining room staff, who remembered that my kids liked chocolate milk at dinner and brought it out each night. they were pleasant beyond compare and downright wonderful mostly. if your kid is a finicky eater, there is pizza and chicken nuggets galore. the food is average (hello — indian food requires actual spices, people), even decent in spots, and i still miss the warm melted chocolate cake. which i ordered. every night. and it shows.

the pools on the ship were quite small (it is a ship, after all), though my eight year old enjoyed the water slide. (i think you have to be 48 inches tall for that.) the kiddie pool, near a little play area, is very small. on our first day, it was filled with things like splenda bags, cigarette butts, and other yuck. my kids adored this tiny pool, though (only 18 inches deep) because when the ship rocked, it turned into a crazy wave pool (unintentionally). eventually, the pool was cleaned out so i didn’t have to wonder what sort of nasty filth my kids were swimming in.

other cruise lines are undoubtedly different from carnival. but the carnival clientele is not dominated by urban parents: it’s predominantly middle america, people from the heartland who smoke aplenty (and they did, which even irritated my kids), drink aplenty (and those drinks with the umbrellas ain’t cheap), and apparently who think it’s cool to get t-shirts from the harley davidson store in grand cayman even though harleys are american. (note: pet peeve alert — the smoking area rules were not enforced at all. if you do not like being around cigarette smoke, you really need to be aware of this.) they were shocked that my kids ate from the sushi bar (and OHMIGAWD what a brave move for carnival to put one on board, open from 5-8 many evenings but very smoky due to its position near a bar) and even more shocked the night they offered indian food.

anyway, that’s pretty much the family angle. i will also point out that the cruise price is just the beginning. everything costs extra. sodas. (my daughter asked for lemonade with dinner, and apparently, that wasn’t considered a juice. $2 + tip, please.) as you can probably glean, i am probably not a cruiser, as i don’t like feeling like i am being nickled-and-dimed for everything. club med sandpiper was a much better value, imho (and no, i don’t work there — i’ve just been there several times) and does a much better job with the kids program. IMHO, carnival should take note.

oh, my nose!

Posted on December 21, 2006 by wrekehavoc

with no apologies to marcia brady whatsoever.

yesterday, as hellboy was waking up from his nap, i came over to tell him that BS had put up a tree for christmas and that we were going to go and visit santa’s helper at the mall. we celebrate chanukah in this house, but we also help BS celebrate christmas, too, in a very secular way. (we’re probably more religious than he is.) he was so excited that he accidentally head-butted me in the nose. in short, i think my nose is broken. it hurt so damn bad that i was convulsed in tears for a solid two minutes. “go get daddy!” i told him. he bent over and kissed my head, which of course made me cry more because he was so sweet. “it was an accident – i know you didn’t mean it. go get daddy!”

eventually, he toddled off. i heard muffled voices, then i heard BC walk over and shout, “mommy’s crying, daddy!” yep. i’m sure in about 10 minutes time, jools would have worked his way over to “mama is hurt,” but no matter. BS, in an effort to keep order, told the kids to sit on the couch and watch TV. he assessed my nose in about 5 seconds, went away, and threw a bag of peas over, then promptly left to watch the kids or something.

so there i sat, holding a bag of frozen peas on my nose. not very dignified, huh. i eventually came out of there, blew some of the blood out of my nose (yes, i get prettier as this goes on), and looked at my husband for some sympathy. of course, at this point, he was knee-deep in christmas lights, which only means one thing: stay the hell away from BS. i tell him every year to just get a new set and avoid frustration — it is worth the $20 not to have him bark at all of us because the light in the very middle is out and taking all the other lights out with it. but no. so i sat with my kids, who were very sweet. jools was sad that he had hurt me, and so i of course went into “i’m really ok” mode. (a day later and my nose still hurts.)

so if anyone wonders why the hell i don’t care for christmas, you can put this down as one more reason. christmas is freaking hazardous to your health 😉

toys in the attic

Posted on December 21, 2006 by wrekehavoc

that would be wishful thinking at this point. plenty of toys are scattered in the family room, in the sun room, in the kids’ own rooms. i feel like there’s no room for any of my stuff anymore unless it is something acceptable to people under age 8.

currently, hellboy, who gave us more fun than we ever could have wanted last night by hitting 105.2F, is scattering paper butterflies all over the place from his new elefun. of course, he don’t need no stinkin’ trunk to scatter them. he just took the trunk off and is currently littering the world with red, green, and yellow faux thingies. he’s pretending it’s a leaf blower, which, while not something the game makers intended, might make for an interesting idea next fall.

that assumes, of course, that it survives until next fall. if it’s anything like the easy bake oven that BC got for chanukah, it’s got a life of about, er, 1 hour. see, BC decided to shove the plastic spatula-type thing into it, only it had the pan in it simultaneously. and now, it’s stuck beyond hope. one call to the nice folks at hasbro, though, who tried to walk me through fixing it while jools kept blowing me with the elefun (remove all heads from gutter, please), resulted in the nice folks at hasbro shipping out a replacement part, i.e., the entire oven and spatula. gratis. of course, it is backordered, so she probably won’t see this until her 14th birthday, by which time i hope i will trust her with the real, honest-to-G-d oven.

ah, burger meister meister burger, we hardly knew ye.

i'm a homosapien, too. yeah.

Posted on December 13, 2006 by wrekehavoc

so missus is practising her dance routine she’s choreographed herself for Brownies tomorrow. she can’t decide whether she’ll dance to “mickey” or “kids in america,” both of which are fortunately on a rhino compilation CD i have in my happy possession. we’re having a lot of fun, especially since we started dancing to “i love a man in a uniform.” but she just changed the CD over to “homosapien.”

mama, she asked, what’s a homosapien? now, i can answer this question in a scientific way with perfect validity. why, it could start up a conversation about science, about evolution, about all things lofty and good. but i don’t think that is at all what pete shelley had in mind.

but that’s ok. only a few songs above it is something even better. i dodged a super-duper sized bullet when she asked “mama, what’s a sex dwarf?”

“uhm, that song sucks, honey,” i replied. “let’s listen to kids in america again, k?”

yep. if you’re still counting, i am one step closer to bad parent hell.

slurpees gone wild

Posted on November 29, 2006 by wrekehavoc

for those of you who can manage to scroll back all the way to nov. 21st (you can DO it!), you might recall that i promised mr. jools a slurpee should he keep his pants dry and clean all day. ok, so he had a slight mishap on thanksgiving day; otherwise, he has been a superchamp. so today, after school, we piled into the car, and the three of us had a slurpee party. nevermind we all had coke (ok, i had diet pepsi, which i secretly loathe but which was the only thing edible that fit in with my new food regime) slurpees, and as newly-caffeinated citizens, we will all be up until 3am tonight.

we brought aforementioned slurpees home in time to watch the humungus leaf sucker truck (as it is known in these parts) eat up the leaves in the street. jools at first was afraid the giant hose would suck him up, too. BC, meanwhile, wanted to get as close as possible to the hose to see inside it, making me very nervous. (it’s always feast or famine, huh.) and we sat and watched them as they slowly moved down our sleep. after our leaves were sucked up, we had the good fortune of seeing the men take the truck apart, as the truck broke down — someone put a plastic bag in the pile, which felled the giant machine.

in these parts, that makes for good theater. sadly, we had to break up the fun because it was time to pick up DH at the metro. but we had us some good fun, we did.

struggling

Posted on November 20, 2006 by wrekehavoc

the day started out ok. jools had blood in his ear, so we dropped BC off at school, then he and i went to safeway to shop until it was time to go to the doctor’s. we lovelovelove our pediatrician, so much so that BC was jealous because she wanted to see dr. j. anyway, dr. j didn’t see any infection in his ear and figured that perhaps jools had somehow scratched it up inside. so off we went, stickers in hand, ready to go to the big thanksgiving shindig at jools’ school.

at lunch, my face swelled up again. BS, in a moment of sheer kindness, left work and came to jools’ school to take my place with jools at his feast while i went home to put my head on the heating pad. when i returned to pick everyone up, jools had once again pooped in his pants and was in a different pair of pants. he always tells me he is too busy to go to the potty. at home, he pooped in his pants again. later, he peed. he asked to wear a pullup. reluctantly, i agreed.

i finally told him that he is acting like a baby, and babies don’t eat candy (which he asks for constantly since halloween happened), so until he keeps his pants dry and clean every day, he can’t have candy. something in my gut tells me this is really a bad idea, but i don’t know what else to do. he *knows* that he’s doing this; he’s been able to do this before. i told him that we can’t go fun places either, like the zoo, until he keeps his pants dry. but i don’t think he cares. and everyone else in the family ends up being penalized because of this. BS is about to go spare. BC is pissed off, too. and we can’t plan any vacation if he’s going to be pooping all over.

i’m really struggling with this.

pre-pre-teen angst

Posted on November 14, 2006 by wrekehavoc

its official. i have finally found someone even more neurotic than i am.

my daughter.

can’t blame my little chick, though; she has reason to be, to be sure. she is talking to me tonight about what if’s. there’s a boy who she has to sit with at school each day who has a serious problem — every time she speaks (and not necessarily to him, mind you), he imagines she has said something bad and malevolent. the first time this happened, he thought she was saying a slur on his ethnicity. and he slapped her.

he a c t u a l l y slapped her.

and the substitute teacher in charge told him not to slap her but also maligned my daughter for saying something not-so-nice about his ethnicity.

i went to the principal on this one.

they questioned everyone involved. and although they are pretty sure she didn’t say anything bad about his ethnicity, no one actually completely gives her a clean slate. which pisses me off. my beloved child is many, many things. but she does not have a bigoted bone in her body, something i would like to continue for as long as possible.

so meanwhile, back to this boy. they were playing a math game today at her table. and she had the temerity to be excited about something, and, mocking her mom, exclaimed, “yee ha!” this boy thought she said the word “fat” which he believes to be a bad word. “mama,” she asked, “i didn’t say it, but is fat a bad word?”

“no dear. though it isn’t nice to call someone fat.”

“well, i didn’t. but he thinks i said it and now he wants to go to the teacher.”

man. i have had enough of this boy. i think i will have to go in and have the teacher change someone’s seat. it always pisses me off, though, that the person who is causing the trouble is never the one who gets his seat changed. my daughter loves everyone else at her table–she has become friendly with everyone, and they work together well, which is important considering this is spanish immersion and they all have to work together — the native english speakers and the native spanish speakers. so why should she have to change tables?

the holidays are upon us

Posted on November 6, 2006 by wrekehavoc

in this house, we celebrate chanukah. and christmas (in a secular way.) and, in a stroke of brilliance that i refuse to take credit for, it’s also BC’s birthday.

we refer to december as the BIG BIRTHDAY BONANZA MONTH!

now, it’s hard enough as a parent to figure out a birthday present. but to have to figure out birthday presents, chanukah (one for each night, mind you) AND CHRISTMAS is a moment i dread each year. and of course, starting in october, grandparents and others start asking for hints. and i have very little clue. i place catalogs in front of my kids – etoys, land of nod, SHOOT, harry and david if it would only yield some answers.

but of course, both of my kids have shown how acquisitive they are. “i want this, and this, and this, and this, and this…” ad nauseum. i remember when i first became a mom how i wanted to raise people who cared about others and loved the earth and all those good, crunchy qualities i cherish. and they do, of course, possess many of those qualities. but they also want polly pockets, and race cars, and a baby doll high chair, and… well, you get the picture.

it makes me feel like i have somehow failed as a mom.

on the bright side, i guess i have ideas now for gifts. i’d better make room in my house for all the crap that will descend starting in early december.

******

of course, the only thing i want, no one can give me.

at the playground

Posted on November 5, 2006 by wrekehavoc

we took a jaunt to a new playground this evening, BC, jools, BS, and BC’s pal, Alison. the kids all started to create a restaurant with some sandy mud and various sticks and acorns. so jools comes toddling over with a bucket first, filled with sand, and announces, “do you want some hamburgers and creme brulee?”

BS and i didn’t know he had ever heard of creme brulee. the fanciest we get is vanilla pudding.

a few minutes later, Alison comes over to collect some more sand near us. another mom is neaby with her little one, who is looking on wistfully, waiting to join in the restaurant biz. “what are you making?” i ask Al.

“Julian says he wants us to bring him a six-pack next.” jools learned this term from the adventures of zak and cody, where the heroes ask for a six-pack of soda. but it’s too long to explain that.

the other mother looks at us. we shrug. we wait for her to pick up her cell and call the authorities. fortunately, she just takes her son and walks over to the kids.

for anyone concerned, my kids seldom drink soda. and that’s about the hardest stuff they’ll get around here.