Tell It To COACHIE

So, we’re moving again, which means preparing for the move, which in my OCD profile means that I must lay hands on absolutely everything that we own. On the one hand, we moved less than 2 years ago and we had a big de-crappifying yard sale, so we’re not totally swimming in excess junk. On the other hand, we moved less than 2 years ago, and apparently my brain needs a lot longer than that to recover between moves. I am so mentally exhausted from doing stuff like this:

Dear teachers, dentists, firefighters, doctors, librarians, nutritionists, police dogs, etc.,
Please just give my kids candy. My mother keeps them in pencils.
love, Shannon

The guest/toy room is always the worst. At first I was glad there were 2 closets in there, because I could close them and hide the mess. Unfortunately, 22 months of closing them and hiding the mess eventually has to end. After 3 days, I’ve come up with this:

And this:

I did not match up Barbie’s shoes. I am making progress!?

The food is up high to protect it from bears. Actually the food is up high to protect it from kiddies, so that I don’t end up with sad little toys like this:

I can’t find 2 plastic cookies or the other half of this velcro broccoli. I don’t know which is sadder, the fact that I know what plastic food is missing or the amount of energy I have expended trying to find it.

Of course if the kiddies can’t reach the food, they are more than willing to occupy their time pulling out other random things like this:

Yes, we must get a good look at Mommy’s college classmates before we can possibly get ready for school. I have come to the conclusion that as I lay my hands on everything we own, I leave behind a magical sparkly aura that induces my kiddies to come along behind me and then attempt to lay their hands on everything we own.

Case in point: the other day my neighbor called and asked me to let her dog out. I jotted down the location of their spare key on a post-it on the desk. The next day I sat down at the desk and noticed my note, which said “deer head in shed” and had 3 marker swirls at the bottom. I thought it would make a funny little post, about how I’m leaving cryptic little notes to myself and how every scrap of paper in the house has marker swirls on it because I’m testing every marker I find before clearing it for the move.

This morning I went to take a picture of the note, and it is gone. So is the pack of post-its. Why could they possibly need my “deer head in shed” post-it? I think maybe I’ll e-mail Alberto Gonzales to see if it is legal to keep your children handcuffed while at home.

The other major problem these days? Let’s see if you can guess. What do these items have in common?

They are all things that the ants who invaded our house over spring break did not infiltrate. All other cereal, crackers, candy, etc. - in the trash.

Of course, I always try to have as little food as possible in the house when moving day arrives, so I must admit that the ants are being more helpful than the children. We’ve had the exterminator out here twice, but still the ants reappear.

Now I must return to the sorting before the little varmints return. Any of them.

Why do people live here?

When I heard the first boom, I assumed it was artillery on one of the training ranges. The second boom I heard was a little louder and stranger than I’m used to, so I went to the window to investigate.

Fortunately, it didn’t break the window.

That’s really the only nice thing I have to say about the whole situation.

I couldn’t reach any part of it to pull it down, so I had to call the HP home from work, and together we managed to get it back on the ground. The HP started unscrewing the legs and told me he had everything under control, so I went inside to get ready for my snack time date at Marty’s school.

A few minutes later, I heard him call “Shannon,” which may well be my name, but it is not anything he ever calls me. I found some shoes and went back outside where the HP stood in his grass-stained ACUs. The wind had gotten under the trampoline again, had thrown the HP into the neighbors’ yard, and had reattached the trampoline to the side of the house. We finally got the stupid thing down again, the HP got the stupid legs off of it, and now it sits on the stupid side of the stupid house, weighted down with big stupid rocks. I’d take a picture of it, but that means going outside again, and I don’t see that happening.

The trampoline is likely a total loss.

Haven’t these people ever heard of spring?

So what did you do this evening?

Hmm?

Oh, that sounds like fun.

In fact, it sounds a lot more fun than my evening which was spent shut into an interior hallway with four pillows, three weepy children, and the sounds of armagedon crashing on the roof. This was the first time I’ve ever actually thought that a tornado might come right at us. According to the radar, we were in dire straits.

I suppose the worst part was having the kiddies ask whether they were going to die. Marty had his fingers up to the first knuckle in his ears, Aislinn was lying under a pillow with her arms wrapped around my legs. Then from her spot on my lap Lauren began to whisper prayers to God, Jesus, and Mother Nature (just to cover her bases). After an interminable while things got quieter outside.

The kiddie-style tornado freakout has grown since our last series of sirens in January. Today’s weather emergency was definitely worse and, given the amplification effect of the first one, will likely turn them into garment-rending, tongue-speaking maniacs the next time it goes off.

The trouble started during dinner, so after we came out of the hallway, the food was cold and gross. Rather than warm it up I told them, “Forget the dinner, let’s have candy,” but even that did not get much of a reaction. They did enjoy going out into the sunshine (it came out about 5 minutes later) to inspect the hail and compare war stories with the neighbors:

The front yard.

The walkway.

The scooter that was not put away.

Unfortunately, I had to put down my camera and pick up Marty, so I did not get any pictures of the neighbors’ damaged cars (hooray for our carport) or the neighbor’s damaged self (one has a huge welt on his back where the hail hit when he ran out to move his wife’s car). I do have one closeup of the hail:

“Was that thunder?”

And now I’m off to stake out a spot in what I am sure will be an extremely crowded bed tonight.

Marty’s carseat is on the passenger side of the car (minivan *retch*). On a typical day, I will open the door on the passenger side, Marty will climb in, and then he will immediately work his way over to Lauren’s carseat on the driver side of the car. I close the passenger door, walk around the car, open the driver side door, buckle him up and we go about our business.

Why yes, this little extra maneuvering is a bit annoying, because things would move a lot more quickly if he would just sit in his seat and let me buckle him on my first try, but that’s not how he rolls, and really, I live in Missouri, where the %$^& do I need to rush off to?

I am boring you with this description as a way to build my defense when I describe a little car-loading incident that happened in the Hampton Inn parking lot on Wednesday in St. Louis:

I had opened the passenger door, one or both of the girls had gotten in, my dad was walking towards the front of the passenger side and Marty was trailing along behind him, presumably planning to hop into the car and then find his way to the place where we’d be least likely able to reach his seatbelt. I grabbed the driver side door to open it for my mom, flung it back with a good amount of force, and sent it sliding backwards about as fast as it could travel. At that exact moment, inexplicably, Marty came trotting around the driver’s side of the car.

The door had left my hands, there was nothing I could do but watch as the door smacked him on the forehead, almost right between the eyes. As you might imagine, there was a considerable amount of crying and guilt involved, but fortunately it was not a gushing head wound, just a sort of cut that was split open and red, but not actively bleeding.

As we sat at dinner and I went through interminable cycles of “I can’t believe I did that but why did he come around the car and I know there is nothing to be done now but I can’t believe I did that but why did he come around the car, etc. etc.,” I noticed that his hair was occasionally getting stuck in the cut in the forehead. I’m not going to lie to you, it was gross, so after his bath I put a band aid over it, so that he wouldn’t bleed on the pillows or wake up with bloody hair matted to his forehead.

Programmatic Lessons Learned: Never put a band aid on Marty’s forehead.

Here are a few facts about the band aid:

1. It is still tenaciously attached to Marty’s forehead.

2. When I attempted to prepare it for removal (by rubbing soap into the adhesive parts) he screamed so uncontrollably that almost everyone in the house had to come and see if I was actively sawing off one of his appendages. (He is not a screamer. He’s not even much of a complainer - he recovered from the actual car door blow in under two minutes. I guess that’s why everyone was so sure I was the problem.)

3. I am now not allowed to touch his head, brush his hair, or even gaze at his forehead.

4. He is determined to wear this nasty band aid on his forehead until he gets a place of his own.

My dad suggested that we have my mom rip it off his head just as they leave for the airport tomorrow. If any of my children had ever forgotten anything that had ever happened to them, I might have activated this plan. Unfortunately, I think I will just have to sneak into his room each night with a little teeny drop of soap and rub it in as gently as I can until the stinking thing finally falls off.

He and his blood-curdling screams may have me on this one.

Although I sat down here last night before I went to bed to complain one more time about the weather, I was actually already resigned to the snow day. I decided I would not be the voice of reason even as the HP searched the networks for the most preposterous predicted snow amounts. I didn’t force the kiddies into the bathtub, I didn’t demand that the homework be finished, I didn’t hurry them off to bed within seconds of their normal bedtime. I decided all that could wait until today. Snow days are fun, sledding is fun, snowmen are fun, and so therefore, I will be fun.

Yesterday morning in the rain, I went to the commissary to stock up on all the things we needed for boredom baking and enough apples and milk to last the kiddies a few days. I told myself that at least it would be snow, not ice, and hopefully (knock wood) the last one of the winter, so I should just accept it. Although I did hope that it would be the amount of snow that could be cleared in one day, still I looked at the sky and said, “Let me have it.”

When we went to bed, the predicted snowfall for our neighborhood was 6 inches, right on the edge of the 8 inch band, “So really,” our awesome weatherman said, “Conditions could lead to up 10 to 12 inches in this area.” I woke up at 3 am and peeked out the bathroom window, where I saw - no snow. I had seen on the weather channel website that the steady snow was not to begin until 2 am, so I figured it just hadn’t started yet, that the front was stalled out and waiting until rush hour to slam into us. I woke up at 6:30 am and peeked out my bedroom window, where I saw - no snow. And I mean, NO snow. Not a dusting on the cars, not a thin layer on the street, NO snow, except the little bit that had fallen on the grass and trees yesterday afternoon.

I checked the local access station, and school was not canceled. School was not even delayed. School was beginning on time (although the field trip was canceled) and my slightly grubby somewhat groggy children with the unfinished homework were expected there. I got up and rushed though all the homework helping that I had planned to leisurely accomplish today, found all of the books that needed to be packed in the book bags that we’d tossed aside the night before, combed through the bed head and sent them off to school.

Later, I checked the local weather to see what the explanation for the lack of snow was. While the weathermen admitted that they “could not have predicted” this snowless band, they did not add that they “could not explain it” either.”One guy likened it to “lake effect snow” except without the lake. Okay, dude. All around us the 6 to 10 inches of snow had fallen (hence the cancelled field trip), but in a 40 mile wide strip through the center of the state (and right over our heads), no snow had fallen.

I guess there is no explaining what happened. However, it may be that the combined power of the wishes and prayers from all the parents (except the HP that is) in a 40 mile wide strip through the center of the state acted like a giant snowblower, blasting the snow to either side and clearing the way for business as usual.

I don’t need an explanation. I’ll take it.