Brace yourself.

George (who is 7) takes tumbling. Which is the perfect extracurricular activity for him since he’s been cartwheeling his way through this house for the better part of 8 months.

He’s one of only 2 boys in a sea of girls in there, but he holds his own pretty well. I mean, as long as Ross shows up.

Tonight as they were stretching, they went into the splits. The gymnastics coach commented that the girls should all be embarrassed since George (who has rubber bands for limbs) can get all the way into a split, and most of the girls cannot.

So on the way home, David informed George that when they got here, George should tell Grace that he had mastered his splits.

(Grace shares George’s enthusiasm for all things gymnastics but she’s 5′ 3″ and counting, and having her doing cartwheels throughout this house is flat-out dangerous, so she just lives vicariously through him.)

To this suggestion, George responded, “I can’t do it again tonight. I’ll break my nuts.”

“George, you can’t say that,” informed David.

“What do you mean?” asked George.

“Well, you can’t say ‘nuts’ in that context. It’s not really appropriate. Just so you know.”

“Well, I just mean my penis!” clarified George.

“Um, okay, but…” stated David.

“And plus, this is confusing,” continued George. “I mean, if I can’t say ‘nuts,’ what if I’m at a baseball game and I want to buy some nuts because I’m hungry and I like nuts. Can I not order nuts?”

“George,” said David, feeling a bit manipulated, “Of course you can order nuts at a baseball game. Those are two different uses of the word ‘nuts.’ Like, take the word ‘dam.’ If I say, ‘I want to drive over and look at the dam,’ that’s fine, but I can’t say, ‘Damn, this traffic is terrible!”

“OH, I GET IT!” exclaimed George. “I’ll go home, show Grace how I do the splits, and then say, ‘I just broke my damn nuts!”

We have a long way to go here folks.

Most Advent calendars have a cute little window you can open each day. When I was growing up, opening this window revealed a picture. It was super exciting.

But nowadays, all the kids know that an Advent calendar isn’t cool unless each window reveals a piece of chocolate. Or an iPad2.

Two of my kids can’t have chocolate, and even if they could, dividing it between all 5 of them would be asinine (not that I’m above asinine. I’m not), I had to come up with an alternative. Which I did. 3 years ago.

I strung 24 envelopes, each for one day in December, from the mantle. We alternated who got to open one each day, and each announced a surprise activity. The kids would learn that we were going to get our Christmas tree that day, or fill boxes for Operation Christmas Child, or clean the leaves out of our neighbor’s front yard, or play a new game hidden somewhere in the house that they had to find by solving a series of riddles.

It was awesome.

And by awesome, I mean completely and utterly exhausting.

To proactively take responsibility for my 3% of the problem, I did make one critical error of note: in my haste to come up with 24 cool things to do, I forgot to do two things: 1) write them down for my personal reference and 2) consider the day of the week on which each activity fell.

The Wednesday that I woke up having slept for about 7 minutes the night before, and the kids opened the envelope to reveal that we were going bowling that night? Yeah. I almost killed myself.

Or the day the card said, “Look under the thing you constantly clog with toothpaste to find a new game,” and I was like, “OH MY GOD I DIDN’T PUT THE GAME UNDER THE SINK. ALSO, I FORGOT TO BUY THE GAME!” Yeah. That didn’t go well either.

So this year, after I was, in effect, told that Christmas isn’t Christmas without Mom’s Advent Calendar of Giving and Receiving, I reluctantly went to JoAnn’s and bought this:

Because I know that the kids will peek, I put only the current and next day’s cards in their respective pockets. This approach also allows me to strategically decide what makes sense to do on a given day, and prevents the aforementioned bowling debacle.

Tonight’s card says, “Go buy Mom a new car.”

leather calendar agenda

On today’s agenda: Help George’s class with a paper mache project; get hair cut and colored in preparation for my trip to Las Vegas.

Not on today’s agenda: Sudden elementary/middle school closure due to electrical failure.

Seriously?

I was exiting the highway on route to drop off the 3 oldest kids when my cell phone made a strange noise. Having never heard it before, I wondered aloud, “What does that mean?”

Skipping nary a beat, Grace responded, “Text message.” She’s 11. And she doesn’t text.

I checked the text message (at a red light, everyone keep your pants on), which most matter-of-factly informed me that my day was being uprooted. In fact, in the future, I’d suggest that such texts begin: Dear Parent, We great apologize but your day is about to be suddenly uprooted.

Yes, of course I immediately said, “You cannot be serious.”

Grace, Jack and Henry began cheering uproariously while I tried to stomach the notion that I was going to have to take the 3 of them (plus a 2-year-old) with me to paper mache the solar system with George’s class, and then to attempt to erase 5-7 years from my real age via the magic of The Guru at the hair salon.

As it turned out, the paper mache project went relatively well as far as these things go. Henry put on his you-have-got-to-be-kidding-me face and guarded Nina, who tormented Snowball the Bunny for an hour. Jack manned Table 2 of Paper Mache Mania while Grace manned Table 1. They both now want to paper mache everything in site. Ain’t gonna happen.

At 10:00, we headed to the hair salon. And don’t think I missed the look of sheer terror on the faces of…well…everyone as we entered.

But get this: I got my hair cut, colored and highlighted AND Grace got hers cut–with the must-have-it-now slanted side bang–while Henry and Jack sat patiently in the waiting area. Clearly, Henry is ill.

On the way home, however, it began raining. “What’s wrong with that?” you might ask. Nothing. We live in Arizona. People totally flip and do crazy happy dances in parking lots when it rains. Young children run for cover sure that Armageddon has begun.

But my right windshield wiper is broken and “someone” was supposed to fix it last night (but did not).

The poor little wiper just haphazardly flapped in the breeze each time it attempted to work its magic. And then, to add insult to wiper injury, Grace states, “Ohmigod, this is mortifying,” as she sinks down into her seat and covers her eyes with her right hand so that none of her friends will see her riding as a passenger in a car with a broken windshield wiper.

Which, of course, none of them will. Because they are all in school.

Photo courtesy of biewoef

 

 

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