Category Archives: working mom

Why did the Chicken Cross the Road? (The 5 year old version) and Wanting a Friend in the Tub

Posted on March 16, 2011 | Leave a comment

Continuing my trips this week down memory lane, I came across the following incidents memorialized in e-mails.  These incidents were really funny and just the kind of adventure that pops up for a working mom when she least expects it!

Kayla, age 5

  • Why Did the Chicken Cross the Road?

One day, driving home from work and school when Kayla was 5 (she rode with me for about an hour each way that year to go to a pre-school near where I worked), she and I had the following conversation:

Kayla:   Why did the chicken cross the road?

 Mom ( promptly):            To get to the other side.

Kayla:  No, to go play in the mud.  

Kayla:   Why did the pig cross the road?

Mom:    To go play in the mud?

Kayla:   No, because his mother was calling him.

Kayla:   Why did the turkey cross the road?

Mom:    I don’t know.

Kayla:   Yes, you do.

Mom:    To get to the other side?

Kayla (proud to have gotten another one over on Mom): No, to go play with his friends.

Kayla:   Why did the horse cross the road?

Mom (firmly):     I don’t know.  

Kayla:   To go eat. 

Mom:    That’s nice.

Kayla:   Why did the chicken cross the road?

Mom:    To go play in the mud.

Kayla:   No, to go get dressed……

And so it went! 

  • A Friend in the Bathtub

Woof, around age 13

About a month before that,  due to a mishap in the kitchen one evening, I had to mop the floor, so I popped Kayla into the bathtub to take her bath while I did it.  Kayla was just at the age where she could take a bath without me being in the bathroom with her, but I would leave the door open to be sure I could hear noise from the bathroom. 

I heard her calling Woof (our oldest dog then; our only other dog at that time was Tyra) over and over, but didn’t think anything about it until after a while Kayla called for me to come in – “Mom, you have to see this!”  (Never a good sign!).  Upon entering the bathroom, I discovered a tub containing one (very unhappy) 13 year old dog and one (ecstatic) five year old daughter, who explained to me that she wanted Woof in the tub with her because she “wanted a friend with her while she took her bath.”  I removed the dog from the tub, dried the dog, removed the child from the tub but did not dry her, cleaned the tub, re-ran the water, popped the child back in the tub (with strict instructions that the dog was NOT to be pulled back in again), cleaned up the copious amounts of water on the floor from the dog and child removal (hey, at least I had the mop out already, right:?), and went back into the den (making sure both dogs were with me – this wasn’t a problem, as Woof was walking very near to me, close to a nervous breakdown) and laughed silently until Mark got home and I could tell him.

Have a great day everyone!

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Wake-Up Call, Lunch Money and Funny Bone

Posted on March 11, 2011 | 2 comments

Hi Everyone!

The Best Alarm Clock in the World!

  • Wake-up Call

I confess that I hoped to be writing this much later than I am, since, as a working mom, I had a rare opportunity to sleep in on a weekday, but Mandy had other ideas.  Mark got up at his regular time, and then after about fifteen minutes, Mandy jumped up on the bed and stood there quietly behind me for about 30 seconds.  (It is even odds as to whether this was her own idea or whether Tyra was egging her on.)  When I didn’t pay any attention, then she took her nose, and touched it gently and sweetly to my ear.   I continued to ignore her, so after another pause, she deliberately stepped on my side with her front paws, took another step so that I was between her front and back paws, finished walking over me with her back paws and jumped off the bed and circled around to the other side.  I still continued to ignore her, so she repeated the walk-over.  However, this time instead of circling around to the other side of the bed, she escalated by turning back to where she could reach my face from the floor , waited another few seconds and when I still didn’t get up, she started licking my face furiously, at which time I really had no choice but to start laughing and get up.  If I had rolled over to ignore her yet again, her next step would have been to jump up on the bed and walk on my hair.  That hurts!

  • Lunch Money

Kayla was worried this morning – she might miss second breakfast.  Let me explain.  The school sends home each Thursday the amount of lunch money remaining in her account.  This Thursday, she did not have a balance, but we owed the school 10 cents.  If you owe the school or have a zero balance, you cannot have breakfast until money is posted back in your account.  Although I am sending a check with her today, it won’t be placed into her account until right before lunch, so breakfast at school will not be available.  She explained all this to Mark, who came out to check if I had lunch money to send with her.  As Mark said to me, “She told me she gets first breakfast (at home), second breakfast at school, lunch at school, snack at school, snack at Learning Lodge and she says you’re usually good for a snack right when the two of you get home, but she is worried she about missing second breakfast in case they have cheese grits!”  I gave her a dollar just in case the school was serving cheese grits and sent her away smiling.  Mark was buying her breakfast at McDonald’s, so she was getting extra food for first breakfast, too.  It reminds of the time when, a young and inexperienced couple with no children, we took our nephew, who was about Kayla’s age at the time, to the Kennedy Space Center, and he told his mother after the trip, “It was fun, but they only fed me three times a day!”

  • Funny Bone

I was walking by our kitchen desk area and hit my funny bone hard on the chair in the kitchen.  It was not, as anyone who has had this experience knows, funny at all.  It was one of those self-censoring moments – right when I hit, I started by saying “Gawww….” and remembered to shift streams to finish with “lly gee whilikers!” 

Have a great weekend everyone!

Nancy

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Dance Picture Day, No-No and Bad Dog Strike Again and The Light Bulb Conspiracy Continues

Posted on March 10, 2011 | 2 comments

Picture, if you will, a rectangular room with echoing acoustics and a hard cement floor, populated by around a dozen mothers who have established squatters’ rights at various positions along the wall, each surrounded by a plethora of paraphenalia, including hair materials, anywhere from three to five costumes, make-up and shoes, along with at least 15 3rd and 4th grade girls, who make enough noise for at least thirty, and one brave dance teacher trying to shepherd the 15 girls through group and individual pictures in each of the three to five costumes.  That picture will give you a pretty good idea of the annual event at Kayla’s dance studio known as picture day, which happened yesterday.  The noisiest picture is the one taken of the girls in their tap costume.  At that point, the 15 girls talking at a decibel of 30 girls geometrically expands to a noise volume somewhere around 90 girls, since the sound of their talking increases to cover the noise of the tap shoes.  The picture above is one I took of Kayla in her tap dance costume.  

Here is Kayla in her ballerina costume.  I think it is really pretty.  This was the second or third photo for the girls, and while I can’t show you the expressions on the mom’s faces, while the girls still are having a good time, most of us are starting to reflect on the uncomfortable aspects of the hard cement floor, although we are having a good time visiting with the other mothers and learning that our children are not unique in the foibles and follies they display to us every day.

The last costume for Kayla was her gymnastics costume, so she decided to do a back bend for me.  I am really impressed; I have never been that flexible.  Since it was the last picture for the day, all of the mothers still remaining were cheering the gymnastics picture taking process on, and most of us were calculating how we were going to drive straight home without doing any errands so that we wouldn’t have to wait for our child to change before we left.  Every time the photo room door would open and a girl scurry out, our hopes would rise that they were done, only to be dashed as each girl explained something to her particular mother and scurried back into the photo room.  Kayla came out three times because she wanted to update me on her progress and I came within an inch of telling her the last time that under no circumstances was she to come out of the photo room again until they were completely done.  I didn’t though, because she truly was just trying to help.

Once the gymnastics photos were done, it didn’t take long for most of us to clear out of there.  

Kayla’s dance teacher constantly amazes me with how calm she can remain in the midst of the necessary chaos, and still steer everyone to where they need to be and answer about fifty questions being shot at her in every direction.  She goes through this every day this week, with dancers ranging from age three up to age 17 or 18! 

  • No-No and Bad Dog Strike Again

After a couple of quiet days, No-No and Bad Dog reemerged yesterday to remove from my bedroom one Merrell and one sneaker and a handkerchief.  I am guessing that No-No (Darwin) scored the shoes because they were not in a dilapidated state but instead just plopped down in the middle of the den floor in the hopes that I would notice.  I am certain that Mandy scored the handkerchief because I caught her red-handed with the handkerchief in her mouth and a mournful expression on her face when she realized that she had been caught.  The mournful expression was not because she was sorry for anything she had done, but because she knew that the handkerchief was about to be taken from her.

 This morning, the intrepid duo managed to score a cheap ring from a McDonald’s Happy Meal.  I removed it from Bad Dog as she was chewing it.  No-No was staring at it and Mandy, simply waiting his turn.  A second ago, while I was writing this, my Merrell just got dropped in the den again by No-No, who is puzzled as to why this troubles me!

  • The Light Bulb Conspiracy Continues

As I told you in an earlier post, we have light bulbs that tend to go out in clusters, and, being tired of that, we put in light bulbs that are supposed to last two years in each of the flood lights in the den.  The other light bulbs in the house have now escalated their attack.  In two days, we have had four bulbs blow in various parts of the house.  The first was the end light over the breakfast bar.  Mark went ahead and replaced it that night, even though I asked him if he wanted to wait until we saw which other lights chose to go out.  The next morning, the middle light on the breakfast bar, a flood light in the bedroom and a bulb over my vanity all went out within ten minutes of each other.  I guess the bulbs feel like they have to make up for the ground they have lost in the den!

Have a good day everyone!

Nancy

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Three Hour Naps, Three Jello Snacks and Three Things I Didn’t Need to Know

Posted on March 7, 2011 | 3 comments

Good morning everyone!  I hope each of you had a good weekend.  We did.

This picture has nothing to do with anything else I am writing about today; I just like it.  It is from a trip to Gatlinburg in 2008.

  • Three Hour Naps

Even though we had a lot we wanted to get done this weekend, we still found time for naps on Saturday and Sunday.  Usually I end up taking about an hour and a half to two hours, and then I’m up, but for the first time in a while I took three hour naps both days.  Mark slept even longer.  Even Kayla (reportedly – with Kayla doing the reporting) slept two hours on Sunday.  At least we should be caught up on our rest!  Kayla used the time when we were napping and she wasn’t to paint pictures with watercolors for Mark and I.  Since I have the prerogatives of a proud parent, here is a photograph of her pictures:

For anyone in need of interpretative guidance, the top picture on the left is of the woods, with a stream running through it, the top center picture is of a golf green,  and the top right picture is a picture of the house, with our red brick as best as she could render with the water colors at her disposal, and the rose bushes in front.  If you look closely, there is a door and a door bell, but I am not sure my photograph is good enough for you to see that.  The bottom row is pretty self explanatory!  On top of painting these pictures, she managed to keep both No-No and Bad Dog quiet in her bedroom under their alter-egos of Mandy and Darwin (although one of the two if not both reverted to form since something  plastic and bright pink was rended to shreds; however, it doesn’t seem to have been anything important).

Kayla and Darwin This Morning

Kayla and Darwin This Morning

  • Three Jello Snacks

When we come home from school every day, Kayla and I have the same discussion – whether or not she is going to “get some snack.”    Most of the time it depends on how long it will take to fix supper and when the three of us will be able to sit down and eat it together.  If it looks like we are going to be eating a little later, I will let her have something. 

On Friday, Kayla asked if she could have a little cup of orange jello.  I told her yes, and didn’t think anything more about it.  To both Mark’s and my surprise at supper, she didn’t want to eat much.  We do not force her to clear her plate, but a certain threshold of food consumption is required before she can have dessert.   That threshold had not been reached, but she decided to stop eating anyhow.  I was a little concerned about this, since she normally eats very well, but right before she left the table, she looked at me with a mischievous grin and announced that she had had three orange jello cups.  She must have been operating on the principle that it is better to beg pardon then ask permission, but she wasn’t really begging for pardon either!

  • Three Things I Didn’t Need to Know

Over the course of my adult life, I have compiled a list of things that I learned that I didn’t really need to know.  These include tidbits of information like “if you leave the oven on at 350 degrees overnight, you  will NOT burn the house down,” a dog can eat a tube of neosporin ointment and not get sick,” and “Indian Hawthorn may be poisonous, but Darwin and Mandy chew on it all the time and are all right.”  I added three things to that list this weekend.

1)    Blue eyeshadow will rinse easily out of a tub.  And lest you accuse her unnecessarily, it was not Kayla’s fault that the blue eyeshadow ended up in the tub, but mine.  I got trigger happy in putting up my makeup containers, and picked up the big case in which I carry all my blush and eyeshadow to put it up without realizing that it wasn’t latched.  Voila, the blue eyeshadow in the bathtub.  Several other items slipped out also.  I leave it to your imagination as to whether I said at the moment everything spilled, “Verily, verily, I hath spilt my make-up case” or something stronger!

2)   If you leave a wooden clothespin on the vent of the toaster oven for two days, it will not ignite. 

  3) And the last thing I learned this weekend needs little explanation – If you are looking for your glasses while you are wearing them, it takes a while to find them!   

No one took me up on explaining “lie” v. “lay” on Friday.  If anyone can explain a quick way to tell the difference, along the lines of “your prinicipal is your pal”, please leave a comment.  An explanation as to whether the “.” comes before and after the parentheses would be welcome, too.  Otherwise, I will have to look the answers up myself! Have a great Monday everyone!

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Posted in dogs, Out of the mouths of babes...., Pets, working mom

Cleaning, Petting the Dogs, The Longest Walk Revisited, Braces and Grammar

Posted on March 4, 2011 | Leave a comment

Isn’t it great to know that we have made it to another Friday?  Although we have nothing spectacular planned for this weekend, it’s nice –

excuse me while I go retrieve a handkerchief from Bad Dog, who just saw me looking at her and has decided to lie on the handkerchief and pretend that it’s not really there –

 to know that a chance to sleep in and have some additional family time is right around the corner! 

  • Cleaning

Our first activity of the weekend, however, will occur tonight when Miss Kayla gets to clean her bedroom and bathroom once we arrive home.  I don’t think she’s too happy with that itinerary, but it is necessary! 

  • Petting the Dogs

I got the chance last night to sit down with each of the dogs and pet them for a couple of minutes.  Darwin started it, really; I was going over to him to get him to stand up and go out for the last time before we went to bed, and he looked up at me from his dog bed, which is on one side of our fireplace in the den and his tail started wagging furiously.  Darwin’s dog bed is about two sizes too small for him – we have tried buying bigger beds, but he refuses to have anything to do with them – and it constantly amazes us that he can even fit in there!  So, when he started wagging his tail, rather than make him get up right away, I sat down by him and loved on him for a minute.  While I was doing that, Mandy looked up from the dog bed she was using on the other side of the fireplace with kind of a grumpy “Are you really going to wake me up now?” look, so I went over to her to pet her, too.  Petting Mandy is always a sweet experience; for all her foibles in the chewing and counter departments, she is a very loving dog and has the softest hair I have ever felt on a dog.  In my opinion, it is as soft as an angora cat’s hair would be, but less fluffy and infinitely less likely to send me into a sneezing fit!   Having petted the other two dogs, it just wouldn’t do, of course, to leave Tyra out, so I went over to her (she was on the couch, guarding “her man”, ie., Mark, from all comers except me) and stroked her for a while, too.  I got several tail thumps from her for that one.  It just was a sweet moment. 

  • The Longest Walk, Revisited

I was getting ready for bed last night, when my eyes fell upon the pair of shoes I had worn yesterday sitting by my bureau.  I thought about what I wrote yesterday, and decided it couldn’t be too hard to take them to the closet, so I went ahead and picked them up and carried them through the closet door – at which time I pitched them on the floor two inches from the shoe rack where they still remain, along with most of my other shoes.  Oh well, Rome wasn’t built in a day and two inches beats a whole room as a distance to conquer!

  • Kayla’s Braces

I was on the phone with my mom last night, and had just finished telling her that Kayla’s braces weren’t hurting her anymore, when screams started to erupt from her bathroom – the kind of screams that let you know that something is wrong.  I raced in there, got off the phone with my mom, and then got to play the “Stop screaming long enough to tell me what’s wrong” game – any mother will tell you that if you’re not frazzled when you first hear the screams, you will be by the time you finish playing twenty questions in between the screams.  I usually don’t make it to question 9 before my eyes start flashing and smoke starts coming out of my ears, because it is so frustrating to need to help and not be given any information about how to do so.  It turned out that a wire in the back of her mouth had poked into a very tender place in her cheek and stuck there.  It wasn’t in very deep, and we got it pulled out fairly quickly but there was quite some excitement for a minute or two!  After Mark got home, he insisted that Kayla put some wax on that wire, and put on the Canker-X medicine the doctor gave her, and that helped, too. 

  • Grammar

I have tried to use English correctly in these posts, but”lie” and “lay” defeat me – I have a 50/50 shot at it, but usually get it wrong.  So, if anyone knows, did Mandy “lay” on the handkerchief, or did she “lie” on the handkerchief, and is there a good way to remember the difference? 

Have a great weekend everyone and I will talk to you on Monday!

Nancy

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Earth Fare, The Longest Walk, General Von Bissing and the Birds

Posted on March 3, 2011 | 2 comments

Yesterday’s dog paw prints having faded into a nice light glaze all over our dark wooden floor, it is time to move on to other topics of conversation, although, for the record, No-no and Bad Dog kept up quite a trail of things for me to rescue yesterday, also!

  • Earth Fare

This weekend, Mark and I had the chance to go into an Earth Fare supermarket for the first time.  Earth Fare labels itself as “the Healthy Supermarket.”  The label “organic” is pretty much standard throughout the store.  It had a large selection of teas – I got a tin of berry green tea for Christmas, so I have been trying some different teas from time to time – I can brew one cup of tea, add 1 teaspoon of real suger and have a small treat for the cost of 1/3 point on the Weightwatchers system.  Its produce section, which was all organic fruits and vegetables, looked really good too.  We bought a few of them, some dry roasted cashews (the store sold them in bulk containers and you scooped out what you wanted), a fresh-baked loaf of sour dough bread and some wheat crackers.  The finishing touch, though, was the discovery at the check-out counter that the store sells what I consider to be the very best apple juice in the world – Martinelli’s Gold Medal 100% apple juice.  Kayla agrees with me.  Mark and I bought 16 bottles on Sunday; we are now down to only 4.  If you ever come across this apple juice, you really need to try it! 

  • The Longest Walk

I walked into Kayla’s bedroom the other day, to note the pairs of shoes scattered throughout the floor rather than sitting in the closet, and started to wonder irritably why it seemed so hard for her to walk the two feet from where the shoes were to the closet to put them in there – until I walked into my bedroom and noticed the three pairs of shoes I had sitting on the floor in our bedroom by my bureau drawer rather than in my closet.  The longest walk for both of us appears to be the path from the bedroom to the closet door.  I really should do better, since No-no and Bad Dog have been known to snatch shoes to chew when no handkerchiefs, socks or other items of clothing are available.   Other long walks for me appear to be the walk from the kitchen counter to the trash can with the empty diet coke can, and the walk from wherever the clothes were folded to the place where they are supposed to reside normally. 

Have you ever lost the TV remote and spent thirty minutes looking for it rather than walk the three feet over to the TV to turn it on?  I did that the other day.  I used to think it was just an amusing peculiarity of human nature but during this latest TV remote search I realized it has now become a necessity.  About 15 minutes into the search I walked over to the TV to turn it on manually, only to discover that, while I could turn it on and off manually, I was completely unable to do anything else without the remote.  There wasn’t even a channel switch!  That added a new urgency to the search for the remote, which was ultimately discovered underneath a couch cushion. 

  • General Baron Von Bissing and the Birds

General Baron Von Bissing was the German (well, really Prussian) military governor of occupied Belgium during World War I.  As such, he was responsible for ordering the executions of dozens if not hundreds of individuals, and the deportation of thousands of Belgians to Germany to work in forced labor situations.  (I am researching his life as best I can, in my copious free time, in connection with a book I would like to write.)  I was looking through the newspaper archives of the New York Times last night (they go back to 1851, and articles from 1851 to 1922 are in the public domain, ie., they are free) and came across a one paragraph article about a peculiar order of the general’s.  In the middle of the occupation, General Von Bissing issued an order stating that the “artifical blinding” of song birds was forbidden in Belgium as a “cruelty” that would not be tolerated.  Now, it’s not that I disagree with the sentiment, but for that practice to bother a military governor who acted as he did with respect to people just seems odd.  I also wondered why anyone would want to deliberately make a song bird blind and why that was a big enough problem in the middle of the war to require an edict of its very own. 

Well, that’s enough for now.  I need to complete a “discission” (Kayla tried to say “discussion” and managed to blend the words “discussion” and “decision” instead) with Kayla about the necessity to get her hair and teeth brushed quickly at this point.

Have a great day everyone!  

Have a great day everyone!

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