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I was dropping Vaughn off today (as a birthday gift to my husband) at my parents', and before my eagerly awaited departure, we decided to have a water balloon fight. Like a well-oiled machine (okay squeaky, excessively rusty machine), we coordinated our efforts in filling the balloons--Vaughn on balloon holding duty, my mom on operating spigot duty, and I on tying water logged balloon duty. As one balloon got a little over voluptuous, Vaughn exclaims in his typical hyperbolic fashion, "OH MY GOD!"

Okay...This is 5 inches away from my mother's face--my mother, who will not watch a rated PG movie because of its "excessively filthy language," oh-my-God falling undeniably within the confines of the "excessively filthy language" definition.

I'm sitting there, right next to my mom, my son blissfully oblivious to the, shall we say, awkward moment this has created, racking my brain for the proper response. You know, something like, "Those wicked public schools. Curse their evil influence," only weakly managing, "Vaughn, don't talk like that," in my most convincing disapproving tone, trying to avoid any tinge of culpability from my inflection, hoping we can just pretend this little utterance never emitted from my son's lips. However, I glance at my mom out of the corner of my eye, and see her starting to nod her head knowingly. Uh-oh...I see this is not finished.

"Mmmm-hmmm...I think I know where he gets that from..."

Again, uh-oh. My mind flits back to just a few days ago and the blue streak I let fly while on the phone with my mom after discovering Dave had locked me in the van, without keys, windows rolled up, in over 80 degree weather, with the alarm setting on. Upon opening the door in order to gasp a breath of air under the temperature of 130, the horn starts bleating incessantly--"THIEF, THIEF"--in a very populated parking lot. (I did mention I was on the phone with my mom, right?) I believe my words were something on the order of "G*****n it! S**t! J***s C****t," etc., etc., only too late coming to the realization of what I'd just done. I'm hoping my mother thinks it's a prayer of some sort, counting on the combination of the horn honking and her ever increasing deafness over the phone to blur out the actual content of my exclamation, mumbling a quick apology, and abruptly terminating the conversation.

Back to present time:

"You do?" I say, innocently, "Where?"

"Mmmm-hmmmm" still nodding head with sagelike wisdom. Oh boy, here it comes....

"American's Funniest Videos. They say that all the time on there," shaking head disapprovingly. "You know how he picks things up."

Yes, yes. I know. Too true. Yep. It could either be AFV or...his mother, who has a mouth that would make a sailor blush. I'd say it's a toss up as to which is more influential.

Damn AFV...I mean, darn them!

The Tree Frog Terminator

My son is a tree frog assassin, and that is putting it mildly. More like a tree frog torturer and then assassin. His body count thus far has reached one. Well, the jury is really still out on that. There is no concrete physical evidence…yet. (The Tree Frog Terminator is clever that way.) The body has yet to turn up over a month later after the frog’s mysterious escape from the cleverly constructed plastic nut container with a slot in the top twice mini-Kermit’s body size. I expect any day now to find a petrified tree frog discreetly tucked away unsuspectingly in some shoe or sandal in the house, or worse, in some cup in the cupboard.

This first and latest victim only wetted the Tree Assassin’s appetite, as he, I have now discovered, captured two more captives a few days ago and has been holding them in over 90 degree weather out on the porch. As I have said before, after the Woodland Shark and other various tall tales, I have become even more skeptical and suspicious of the veracity of Vaughn’s various tidbits and trivia, so when he came home from visiting one of our friend’s and stated he had brought home tree frogs (our friend lives in the suburbs, and to my knowledge, does not have a pond or lake or other body of water, besides his above-ground swimming pool, anywhere on his property), so I thought it was pretty safe to humor Vaughn with a few “Uh-huh”s and “That’s nice, Dear”s, throwing in a complimentary, “As long as you keep them outside.” Now, being the slacker mom that I am, I only vaguely registered the fact that this last comment made him unusually gleeful, and I briefly thought it odd that the permission to keep fictional amphibians outside would fill a 7-year-old boy with such joy. However, in my defense, there were two facts that I thought were pretty self-evident, thereby making the likelihood that Vaughn was in possession of real live tree frogs pretty impossible:

1. After the escape and subsequent, we can assume, tragic loss of Kermit the First, and the literal hours and hours of emotional fallout that ensued after Kermit the First’s disappearance, I thought, logically, “Why would Vaughn think to repeat such an occurrence so soon after having undergone such gut wrenching grief?” I mean truly it was quite the dramatic spectacle—gnashing of teeth, rending of clothing and tearing of hair. I stopped him before he got to the point of wearing sackcloth and ash.
2. His father was with him, and having experienced this emotional catastrophizing of the loss of Kermit the First, would again, logically, have enough sense to halt even an inkling of repeating that scene. (I believe I’ve mentioned in the past how I thought this whole parenting gig would be a lot easier if there were just one of us? This would be one of those instances. For the record, Kermit the First was brought home on Daddy’s watch as well.)

And so this leads us to today…I’m picking him up at his day camp class, and there is another little boy there begging his mommy to allow him to see the tree frogs Vaughn has brought to class. Now mind you, this is another one of those over 90 degree days, and the mother (in all her granola-nuttiness) turns and looks at me with nothing short of an “are-you-out-of-your-ever-loving-mind?” looks, followed by another well known mother-to-mother look: “What kind of mother are you?” A look, sadly, that is only all too familiar to me. I look back at her with what I have come to think of as my “Woodland-Shark-Attack-gullible-parent” look, shaking my head sadly that my son has duped yet another sucker. But…her son is emphatic and Vaughn is starting to make me nervous because he’s giving me the sheepish “Heh-heh-um-I-didn’t-really-mean-it” looks. It is at this point all the conversations and babblings over the past few days come rushing back to me in one of those frenetic rewinds you have in your head when you’re about to have a terrible epiphany. Vaughn is over at his backpack at this point, continuing to give me the sheepish looks, with the other little boy crouched down, his mother in tow, eagerly awaiting the tree frog unveiling. It is at this point I decide I had better intercept, the epiphany exploding full force in my brain as I look at the scene before me: Vaughn opening up a little plastic container, empty, with the exception of two little, unmoving, very real tree frogs. I give Vaughn my “Boy-you-are-in-trouble-now” looks and then glance back at the other boy’s mother in an effort to do damage control. She is now looking at me as if I were Hitler’s mother, which, well…I can only hope this stops with tree frogs. I cut my losses, scoot Vaughn out of there as quickly as possible, launching into a lengthy lecture on animal cruelty and the humane treatment of living beings, especially amphibious living beings in over 90 degree weather with no water. I then get on the phone and give his father a good tongue lashing, to which he responds, “I thought you knew about them? He said you told him to keep them outside.” “Yes…well…It’s still all your fault! How was I supposed to know they were real?!”

Anyway, I dreaded the inevitable release of these poor tortured Kermies (or rather burial), tallying in my head that this would make the body count rise to three and wondering if this qualified as torturing small animals in the Serial Killing For Dummies handbook. Nevertheless, I wanted Vaughn to be a witness to the results of his irresponsible behavior (praying he wouldn’t start laughing maniacally as the little pale green bodies plopped out one by one into the cold, cold…well, hot ground). Much to my surprise, tree frogs are evidently remarkably resilient. It was sort of like Insta-Frog. We added a little water, and *boing* *boing* they sprung to the top of the container, seemingly the none worse for wear, miraculously resurrected from their dehydrated state, and teaching Vaughn a valuable lesson (a la Crab Dog): Capture tree frogs, house them in sweltering heat with little to no water and no food for days on end, and they will thrive, enabling you to say to your mommy, “See? I’m a good animal keeper.”

It's the Little Things

This is what my life has come to: I actually got excited when I read in Women's World that sidewalk chalk (which we have an overabundance of) put in a plastic bag with a small slit in it, placed at the bottom of a laundry hamper will prevent the buildup of mildew and odors.

I believe my exact reaction was bouncing up and down ecstatically, exclaiming, "THAT IS FABULOUS!" To be fair, this was just after the foreplay of finding out you can remove the gunk off your iron by setting the heat to high, turning the steam off, and rolling the iron over a paper grocery bag with table salt sprinkled on it.

Well...I was on my second cup of coffee.

Just goes to show you can never totally escape mommification.

Mommification

A state of static existence that occurs after becoming a mommy—mommified. This term popped into my brain a while ago, and the more I think about the term, the more I warm up to it. A state of existence in which you are neither dead nor alive, but wrapped up in the sometimes suffocating bindings of a mommy. Sometimes these bindings are physical, sometimes mental, sometimes a combination. An example of a physical manifestation would be the extra postnatal pounds we carry around as a souvenir following the birth of each child. The mental would be the idea that now that we are post-delivery of an 8 pound human being, we have morphed into asexual beings that can no longer wear a bikini.

Now, I am not vilifying motherhood here; far be it from me to go down the disastrous road of my Baby Boomer foremothers. However, I think we still have a long way to go in striking a balance between being a mommy (and defining exactly what that is, and if there is even one definition that fits all) and who we were as individuals pre-mommification. Perhaps mommification is an inevitable state of being. I have rid myself of some of the physical bindings, but having self-christened myself a slacker mom, feel I have a long way to go in escaping the mental ones. Then again, no one said being mommified was either a good thing or a bad thing or perhaps it’s both. After all, yes, we are covered in uniformly tightly wrapped linen bindings making us indistinguishable from one another, but underneath those bindings is a tautly bound hot Egyptian princess…so what if she’s petrified?