Sad day for Dad

This morning while we were lazing around in bed, Matthew called Kaes in to "talk and snuggle and visit" with him.

Kaes's response: "Jonathon can do that job."

attitude

Prologue:

Tuesday morning Duncan was a bit crabby while I was taking him to school. I was trying to tease him out of it, which sometimes works, but not Tuesday. I finally asked him if he was having an attitude with me and he said, "Everybody has an attitude."

Tuesday afternoon:

A kid was pestering Duncan and his friend during recess. The kid was kicking them, and Duncan was trying to push him away with his elbow. Finally the kid left and the playground teacher came over to Duncan.

Playground teacher: I saw you kicking that boy.

Duncan: No you didn't.

PT: Yes, I did. You were kicking him.

D: Fine. Believe what you want to believe, but I wasn't kicking him.

PT: Are you having an attitude?

D: Yes.

PT: Do you want me to write you up?

D: Write me up if you want to, but I wasn't kicking him. He was kicking us.

PT: I'm going to go talk to the boy.

D: Go ahead.

At this point the playground teacher left. She did not write him up AND she did not go talk to the other boy.

When relating this story at home, yes, Duncan was mad that the playground teacher did not believe him. But you know what made him REALLY mad? The playground teacher didn't write him up, neither did she go talk to the other kid. She was useless, across the board. THAT is what he was the most upset about.

Sound familiar? If you have ever met my brother Aaron, then yes, it does, which is just thrilling for me. I love Aaron very much, but I already raised him once and I'm pretty sure I don't want to go through it again. He's all about attitude...

Footnote:

A couple weeks ago Duncan argued with an old lady who told him he couldn't play on her apartment complex's playground because he didn't live there. He told her people come on his yard all the time (which they don't) and it doesn't bother him (which it would if they did). I told him he can't argue with old ladies. He didn't believe me.

Questions you don't wanna ask

Last night Duncan was supposed to be in his room doing homework and Kaes was supposed to be in her room not bothering him. Kaes came downstairs with Duncan's water bottle. I talked to her for a minute, because I'm her mom and I do things like that sometimes.

Then Duncan yelled out, "Forty-two seconds!"

Kaes gave me a wild, panicked look, said, "I gotta go," and ran upstairs, clutching his filled water bottle in her arms.

What was that? Blackmail? Indentured servitude? Slavery?

These are all questions I'm not asking.

You reap what you sow

Today is garbage day, so last night the boys were supposed to go through the house and dump all the garbage. Technically, Duncan is supposed to do it all himself, but somehow dumping all the trash and putting in new liners is just too much for him, so I told him he could ask his brother for help and if Jonathon said yes, then he would be in luck. I was trying to get the kids in bed and went into my room for something. My trash can was lying on its side, there were some pieces of trash scattered on the floor around it, and the 'liner' was on the floor on the other side of my bed. Definitely not lining my trash can. I made a growly noise and went into the boys' room, where I saw that their trash hadn't even been dumped at all.

"Duncan!" I yelled. "You son of a-"

And I stopped, because it is wrong for parents to say such things about their children. I STOPPED! I did not complete the sentence.

Then Jonathon, who was the only other person in the room, said, "Well, he's your-"

And he stopped. He did not finish the sentence, but seriously, we all know where he was going.

He had the decency to blush at that point, which is a big deal because blushing could be considered a 'reaction' and Jonathon doesn't do those very often.

So what am I supposed to do? Not talk like that? I DIDN'T! I swallowed that last word like a chameleon taking down a fly. It did not escape. Apparently, however, the fact that flies have ever buzzed around my head is enough for my kids to know what they sound like when they hear them coming.

You have got to be kidding me

Duncan has decided he wants a lizard. What he really wants is a dragon, but since those are hard to come by, he's willing to settle for a lizard. So today we went to the pet store and looked at four-legged reptiles. It was most exciting and a little disturbing. We got to watch a gecko actually shed its skin. It walked around the inside of its fake stone cave scraping its head against the wall until the skin pealed away. And once its head and front legs were free, it reached back and started eating the dead skin. Can I just say at this point that I like my pets not to eat their own skin? That's like bringing home a masochistic zombie and naming it Spot.

So, in an effort to distract my son from lizards, I pointed out that birds can actually be trained and they pay attention to you and they're pretty and they don't eat their feathers. Duncan readily switched over to wanting a bird instead, and even wanted to bring one home RIGHT NOW. I told him that bringing home a bird without Dad knowing about it would be bad. He pointed out that Dad would know about it when he got home, but I had to explain that you really can't just surprise Dad with things like that. He's already not very enthusiastic about us getting another duck and starting up with chickens come spring. Which brought up the point that Duncan is going to be getting a duck in a couple months, so we really shouldn't get another bird now.

At this point I diverted his attention to a fish. We have had fish many times before and it hasn't traditionally gone well. Any fish brought into our house will wind up dead, and generally not in an "everything dies eventually" kind of way. Duncan even said that when the fish does die he would be sad. With all the tenderness of a loving mother I told him that it's just a fish and you can't really get that upset over it. I knew he would get upset anyway, but it wasn't anything I would have to deal with for a couple months at least. I had every intention of trying REALLY HARD to keep the fish alive this time.

So we got a really pretty silvery beta. Duncan named him Firefly before we even walked out of the store. I thought it was a pretty cool name for a pretty cool fish. We came home and I washed out the bowl that had held our last beta and currently was holding nothing but dust. I filled it with water and put the stress drops in it, then added the fish. A very pretty fish right on top of the piano.

Jump ahead six hours. We're trying to sit down and have a late, Friday night dinner. Duncan is taking forever because he says he can't find the fish in the bowl. That's ridiculous, we say, of course it's in the bowl. Come and eat. An hour later and dinner is over and it's time for bed, but again Duncan's hanging out at the piano and now he has Jonathon with him. We can't find the fish, they say. Go to bed, we say. So they go to bed. Jonathon comes down to get something and says, very quietly, "Will you look for the fish? I really can't see it in there." So I look, and guess what? I can't see it either. I get a flashlight and look behind the piano and there's little Firefly. Already snuffed. There's a fish-sized spot in the dust on the piano right outside the bowl. It didn't even make it six hours in my care. But I don't care about the damn fish. I've got Duncan upstairs convinced that it's just a trick of the light and the curve of the glass that's keeping him from enjoying his new fish.

I got in the car and raced to the pet store to get another silvery beta. Unfortunately, the pet store was already closed and there was no way Duncan wasn't going to figure things out in the morning, so I had to come home and tell him what happened. There were tears on Duncan's part. Everyone else was laughing at me. Less than six hours. I broke my own record.

fresh air

Yesterday was a beautiful day for not being inside. It was in the mid fifties and felt positively spring-like. Kaes came home from school, and, after emptying her Valentines on the table, went to play in the backyard in the pink dress she had worn especially for Valentine's Day. She shoveled frozen, crusty snow from one bit of grass to another, and rode a stick around the yard like a hobby horse, with her dress hitched up to her waist. There was something involving buckets that I never quite figured out, but she was hauling something from somewhere and dumping it elsewhere. She was all alone while she did this, no friends or brothers to help her have fun. She is by far the most social person in the family, making friends while standing in line in the store and bringing toys to the park in case she meets a friend (old or new). And yet, when I send her brothers out to play, even if I send them out together, they stand around and look at each other, then at me through the window, and tell me 'there's nothing to do' and 'no one to play with.' But Kaes has an innate ability to play, which often manifests itself as 'constantly doing something' or 'getting into things.'

After an hour of re-discovering the backyard ("Mom, did you know there is grass growing on the side of the house?") she came in, took off her muddy shoes and announced, "I'm gonna get some non-fresh air."

That's my girl.

just so you know

Thread that is sucked into the vacuum and wraps around the beater bar jobby can melt. Into a plastic-like substance. Inside where the bearings of the beater bar jobby are located. Thereby freezing up the beater bar jobby and causing your house to smell like burned rubber.

Word of advice: Don't suck up thread with the vacuum. By the spoolful. Because when the beater bar jobby has to be replaced, it's possible that you will be paying for it out of the money you were supposed to get for vacuuming. Jonathon.

I'm just saying...

Saying goodbye to Jerry

My life has not exactly been traditional, even by non-traditional standards. My parents got married when I was five, just a few months before I turned six. My dad adopted me. I was even sealed to him in the temple. Four brothers and a sister soon followed, and that was my family. But it wasn't all hunky-dory, and by the time I was fourteen (and my youngest brother was still an infant) my dad was no longer living at home. When I was fifteen, my parents got divorced, and I admit I didn't really like spending time with him anymore (Their divorce was actually a relief). In short, he scared the liver out of me. The details aren't the issue at the moment, but unfortunately they do put me in a rather unpleasant, but not nearly uncommon enough, boat with too many other people. When I was nineteen and away at college, I got a card from my dad. He signed it, "Your Stepdad." It was the first time I ever remember him being referred to as my stepdad, and I was devastated. I cried and cried. It was the Monday after Thanksgiving, and it was the first time I had missed a class all year. When I was twenty-one, I told him I didn't want anything to do with him anymore.

When I was twenty-two, my grandma told my my biological father's first name was Frank. It wasn't too long before this that I had found out he had curly hair. I have curly hair, I'm the only one in my family who does. However, my mom's dad had curly hair too, so I had always told everyone I got it from him. My aunt and cousin have curly hair like mine, and another aunt has really wavy hair, though it's not exactly curly. My mom's hair is straight, along with all my siblings. I had always told myself that the curls had skipped them the way they had skipped my mom, but down deep inside I had wondered if my curly hair really came from my dad. Finding out that it did, then finding out his first name, was more than I had ever known about him, and actually more than I really wanted to know. I am certain my mom would have told me about him if I asked, but I never did, and I never wanted to. Before she got married, my family was me and her. After she got married, I had a dad. Why would I be thinking about another one? Even after everything went to hell, it never occurred to me what 'my' other dad might be like. I was in the same boat with my brothers and sister. We had a dad, and he was a jerk. End of story.

Then I got married. And then I got pregnant. All of a sudden I found myself a little bit stressed. My husband had lost an older and a younger brother to heart defects. We knew to tell the doctor about that. But what was I bringing to the mix? My mom's side of things I knew about (hips), but there was this whole other part of me that was an unknown, a mystery. And though I knew there are people having babies all the time without knowing their full medical history and everything turns out just fine, I couldn't help worrying. So my mom asked my husband to look for my biological father. In a matter of a few short weeks, I went from knowing his name was Frank and he had curly hair, to actually talking to him on the phone. And less than a month after my son was born, two months before I turned twenty-nine, I met my biological father for the first time.

Frank is from Oregon (obviously--how else would he have met my mom?) but had moved to Texas before I was born. He had gotten married and had a son, but had been divorced fifteen/twenty years when I met him. Long enough to have become a bachelor again. As far as I can tell he has been to Oregon at least once a year since he left it, but he has a strong Texan accent. And attitude. (Though he told me once that when he first moved out to Texas people there called him a Yankee because Oregon is north. He shut them up by replying that where he's from, Yankees are from the east, and Texas is east. I'm not certain how he survived that little encounter, but I don't anyone could accuse him of being a Yankee now.)

The first several years of our relationship were difficult for me. Frank is a good man, a kind man, and a generous man. And he is a man from a different place and time than anything I could easily relate to. He is several years older than my mother and grew up on a dairy farm. Many dairy farms, in fact. He is possibly the hardest worker I have ever met (including my stepdad, which is saying something). He was raised in a no-nonsense time by no-nonsense people and has a bit of a no-nonsense attitude about things. He's not LDS, or very religious at all. He's a wood carver and comes from a long line of artists and poets. There were many things about me that he could relate to, which should have been a good thing, I suppose. But every time he found another thing about me that was like him, he would claim it, as though all of my talents and interests had been inherited through that one sperm. I felt like he was taking away pieces of me with each new discovery, as though I hadn't chosen or developed any of these things on my own. Or that my mother had been a major influence in my life, and since she was somebody he had liked enough to have a relationship with, it was possible she shared these things with him and had passed them along to me. In any case, his annual visits were a source of stress for me, even though it was apparent that he loved me and was so very happy to have a relationship with me now (to this day not a visit goes by that he doesn't cry at least once over all the years he lost with me).

Eleven years ago, on my thirty-third birthday, when my second son was four months old, he married Jerry. She is as short as he is tall, a little plump, older than Frank, and an absolute sweetheart. She's a widow with two grown sons, a gazillion grandkids and a goodly amount of great-grandkids. I adore her. Their courtship was extremely short (they had seen each other at dances before, but Frank asked her out for the first time in September and they got married in November). Frank told me that he married her because there was something about her that reminded him of my mom. Knowing both my mom and Jerry, I can say that they are really not similar. Their personalities are nothing alike. But the thing that they have in common, and the thing I think Frank was drawn to, was that they are both LDS. I couldn't believe it when he told me Jerry was Mormon. Of course, she started coming out with him on his annual trips to Oregon, stopping to see us either on the way out or the way back (or sometimes both). We fell in love with her. She loved Frank, there was no question of that, and she knew about me and that whole situation and it didn't seem to phase her. I think she also realized that I was having a hard time keeping up with his exuberance. She didn't condemn me for it, but encouraged me to be close to him without pushing and she acted as a buffer along the way. She came to church with us while my dad stayed home and mowed our lawn and I didn't really know how to introduce her. I wanted to just say, "This is Jerry, and I love her." One time in Relief Society she introduced herself as my stepmother before I could say anything else. I remember sitting there thinking, "Those of you who don't know me think you know what this means. You think my parents got divorced (which they did, but not from each other) and my dad remarried and I have issues because she's the 'other woman' or she's trying to take the place of my mom, or any of a dozen other cliches. But you're all wrong, because really, I only even met my dad a few years ago and this woman right here is bridging gaps I don't even think he knows about because she's LDS and she's a mom and she's not a confirmed old bachelor." And she's loving and kind, but she's got spunk, too, and it wasn't too long after the two of them got married that I started calling Frank Dad and I was able to tell him that I love him (something I don't say unless I mean it). I'm certain that would have happened even without Jerry, but having her around sure made the process easier, faster, and more fun.

They came and visited us last spring. They've been trying to get out to see us more often, but both of them are getting older and they have to plan their trips between doctors' appointments, so lately it's just been once a year. Jerry had been having stomach pains and had to be careful what she ate so it wouldn't hurt too much. They left Utah and went on to Oregon, but her stomach bothered her the whole time. She saw the doctor when she got back to Texas, but it wasn't until July that she was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer. She did chemo for a while, but just a couple of weeks ago she decided to quit. My dad called me this morning. Jerry passed away last night.

I am going to miss the twinkle in her eye when we bring up the prospect of a bowl of ice cream after the kids go to bed. I'm going to miss seeing her sit at the table, shelling pecans with Kaes. I'm going to miss the flash of jealousy at the mere mention of my dad carving a heart for any other woman but her (though she conceded that he could carve one for me and Kaes if he wanted to). I'm going to miss her trying to teach me how to crochet. I'm going to miss her pulling out her sketch pad and watching her draw (we have a Jerry Turner original framed and hanging on the wall in the family room). I'm going to miss her soft, southern drawl, and the crooked smile with the tears when it's time to say good-bye.

My stepmother died yesterday, and my family isn't going to be complete without her.

Growing up is hard to do

Kaes has been going to second grade for a total of six days. She likes her teacher well enough, but she was still less than excited to go to school this morning. I asked her what was wrong.

Kaes: It doesn't feel like school.

Me: What does it feel like?

Kaes: Learning.

engaging children

I tried to play a game of Qwirkle with Kaes (seven), Elisse (six), and Dono (four). The object is to make lines of tiles that either match in color or shape, but not both. Colors and shapes are a pre school/early elementary skill. All three have mastered those concepts (though Dono called one of the shapes 'slash' which seemed appropriate enough). The game said it was for ages six and up and I figured I would have to help Dono a bit, but like I said, it's shapes and colors. How hard can it be?

More than half an hour later, there were still tiles in the bag to be drawn, but the game was over. I basically had four turns each round while the kids made shapes out of their tiles, and stacks, and sat on them, and (thank you Kaes) held them up to their eyes like possessed dominoes (a red circle and a red square). I added up our scores (that I had essentially worked on all by myself). I didn't even win.

Now the kids are watching a movie. Enough of exercising their brains and interacting with them. My brain hurts, and if I hear their angelic little voices sing about monkeys one my time, I'll explode. Or maybe they will. In any case, it's healthier for everyone if they turn into vegetables in front of the TV. I'm going to go clean the garage.