Family that plays together .. stays together!

Being a parent is never all that easy. We have to make the hard decisions and sometimes we have to yikes say the word “NO” to them. Turns out that this is entirely okay for them to hear and believe it or not its our JOB to teach them the difference between right and wrong. So many times I see people trying to be their children’s “friend” instead of their parents.... Newsflash folks .. if you want your kids to respect you then you best be stepping up to the plate and guiding them because if you don’t that pot smoking, free loading, juvenal delinquent, certainly will have no issues teaching your kids what they think is right. One of the ways I try to stay connected with my kids .. and yes hang on to your hats ... I play games with them. Board games, made up games, run in the yard and act stupid games and yep I even grab a controller and hop onto the X-box 360 with them. I do not think the video game system is a way to escape from your kids I think it is an awesome way to interact with them. On family game nights we all take turns with the controllers (we kind of have too there are five of us and only four controllers). I might not be the best player but who would of thunk that I would be sitting on the couch yelling at my kids to kill that guy or to throw a grenade but hey I like Halo Reach just like any other crazy gamer ... I am just not very good at it but I cut myself a break. I figure it is not my fault I am from the era that invented the Atari. We were blissfully and deliriously happy with our joystick and single button darn it. Heck I can even remember being proud of playing pong for hours .. sigh now I have to hit the LB button while pulling the trigger button and do not forget to click the directional pad all at the same time. Which, by the way, is precisely why I happen to end up dead quite a few times. I admit it, me, a thirty nine year old woman happens to love shooting someone, blowing them up, or better hit using a melee attack to whip them out. It melts away the stress of the day.

The really funny part is my dear sweet son, in his quest to be politically correct, actually said to me “its okay mom, you are a good distraction” in his response to my comment that I really do suck at the game. Hmmmm me thinks he happens to like watching his mother explode a time or two.

So here it is a Friday night, I had to come home early from work (sinus infection - yuck) but I need to prop myself up on this silly couch because the flood need their butt kicked and my son needs a “distraction”. The joys of parenthood!

Typical Day or Is it??

Before I had children I stupidly thought that being a mom could not possibly be all that hard. Wow, was I clueless. Do not get me wrong I love it. I love those moments when I am sitting there and for no reason at all I get the “I love you”, or when you are sitting there on the couch and you suddenly think “wow I am thirsty” and you realize you get to say “go get me a drink” to one of your three kids and they practically fight to be the one to get it. (Do not worry I am not delusional I am positive that the day where I get the sigh, moan, followed by the “do I have too” is not all that far away).

This morning started like any other day. I get to ever so gently wake them from their slumber with a soft kiss and a hair tussle ... okay really I flip the light on, watch them squirm by the sudden intrusion of bright annoying light, bark orders regarding having exactly ten minutes to be up, dressed, and downstairs or else. I actually love when one of them tries the good old “or else what”? comment because truthfully, i love to come up with what ends up sounding like new forms of legal torture. There is the .. or else I will print up those pictures of you I got when you were picking your nose and take them to your school and decorate the halls with it .. or there is the I will wait until your friends are around and ask you if you wet the bed again last night or did you stay dry? (of course none of it is true but you know the fact that as a parent I have information, some true, and some not so true, that could potentially kill their social life for the next 15 years certainly does get them motivated to keep me happy.

Once their precious and beautiful faces are all smiling and down in the kitchen, it is lunch packing time. Our recreation room doubles as an extended pantry and well Sam’s Club has turned into our weakness. It turns out you can buy chips, crackers, pudding, applesauce, and anything else you could ever need to pack a lunch with in JUMBO size. Some morning you would think we were asking for them to perform an incredible task ... I mean really we are asking them to yikes, pick what you want for lunch, AND put it in a lunch sack... the nerve, the horror, the hard work we are forcing onto them. Don’t worry I checked the child labor laws and so far we are okay, you can indeed have your children pack their lunch without violating any laws.

If we survive the lunch packing we still have to have breakfast eating, teeth brushing, hair brushing (okay the boys luck out on this one, we keep their hair short), and here comes another nasty word, chores. Now the chores are simple, feel and water the animals. I know terrible and demanding but they have to date survived the horror of helping out.

Michael, the oldest, walks to school in the mornings and the two youngest usually go with me to the office for about twenty minutes before I drive them to school and drop them off. My grandfather would be freaked out that there was no walking to school up hill both ways, through horrific weather conditions, and no shoes. These of course are different times and now that would be a form of child abuse punishable by jail time I am sure.

Today, I got to skip the office first thing and sit in on a table top exercise (and for those people not in the know .. NO that is not a gym or exercise routine that takes place on top of a table). It is alway fun to have multiple agencies hanging out discussing the what if’s of some random act of either terrorism or tragic accident. To me it is a great networking meeting so you can learn the key players before something would possibly happen.

The rest of the day went by in a flurry of phone calls involving everything from mold, air quality, sewage, and my favorite a complaint involving neighbors. Finally my favorite time of the weekday came around .. yep you guessed it .. quitting time. Then it is off to school to pick up my angle little girl who never ever gets in trouble (okay well maybe she does sometimes but so far it usually just involves talking, umm talking back, not listening or something else that does not involve anyone getting hurt). As I recall when I was growing up when the school called about my brother there was usually punches being thrown. So you know I can work with the talking .. .because if you couldn’t tell her mom likes to talk as well.

With the husband working over tonight I do believe the evening will be centered primarily on homework, dinner, homework, and if there is any time left maybe I might do a little homework.

Oh which reminds me guess I better stop talking on here and get that done .. nope I have no idea where she gets that talking bug from.

Death of Real Friendships

Exactly at what point did friendship boil down to abbreviated messages sent through text messages, instant messaging or random comments left on a wall? With all the social networking sites available today you would think that peoples inner circle of friends would grow expediently to such amazing numbers that you would struggle with keeping all their names straight.

Sadly the truth of the matter is that sites such as Facebook, Myspace, yahoo messenger, and heck now even Twitter, is are more like anti-social sites geared towards even less contact with one another. Oh sure, you post the lasted pictures from your day, home, family or whatever thing you choose to snap a photo of with your cell phone, but when is the last time you met one of your friends for tea (or coffee as the case may be) and hand them pictures you just got back from your drugstore? What is it that drives people to make a profile and search through pictures of people they have not seen in twenty years? Is it a true yearning for old friends? Are you reaching out to get their phone number so that you can meet and catch up over lunch? Or is it some misguided curiosity to see who is doing what (or who is fatter, skinner)? Why is it that we spend hours flipping though their pages to see what they are doing now?

Suddenly you have over a hundred (or more) Facebook friends does that mean you life is suddenly richer because of it? Does that mean that you can post to all these folks who are listed as “friends” and ask for help moving into your new home, or see if anyone can “float” you a loan? No not likely. How many people do you accept because you don’t want to hurt their feelings though you are relatively sure you never spoke to them one time while you were school and relatively certain that you will most likely never have a real conversation with them. So how exactly does that make these social networking sites “social”?

I believe I actually long for the days where we had to use the phone to connect with out friends and not wait for them to update their status page to find out what they are up to. No, we did a crazy thing and call our friends and find out how they were. Now we all have cell phones to stay “connected” ... connected to what I am not always clear on. If with these incredible conversational pieces in our grasp you would think we were checking on our “friends”, calling and making plans. Instead we don’t actually talk on them, no we text short quick sentences using funny little shortcuts. We do not say later we say L8R, we don’t actually laugh with our friends we LOL with our friends.

I no longer want a status update dinging as it comes through my phone, I want an honest to goodness old fashion phone call or a letter, heck I am not picky, send me an e-mail directly to me and not the hundred plus added people that you probably have not seen in a million years, but a real communication meant for me and me alone.

I say that applications like Facebook are killing friendships. Husbands and wife’s are not immune as they take their relationship to the social networking sites, leaving each other messages on their walls? Really? I think I would prefer to talk with them during dinner or a movie, even pulling myself out of the computer and looking at them when I talk to them. I do not want to leave someone a message to see what up?, I want to hear their voice and share the fun of really laughter and tears.

So I say to that if you want to know me than don’t try to add me randomly, pick up the phone, send a letter, postcard or an e-mail. No longer will I resort to being the sum of my latest status message. I am a person, flawed and crazy. I am not the same person I was in high school so do not try to dig out an old yearbook and see if I have “improved” or “aged horribly”, send me a note and share your favorite memory with me. Let us break free from the horrible rut that “social” networking sites have lead us to. Shake the repressive shackles that the internet has encouraged onto our friendships and let us crawl out from behind the keyboard and learn to laugh again, not simple LOL or LMAO, or even any other abbreviation. Let us go back to the days where it was TGIF so that we could spend the weekend with friends and family for real.

With that note I think it is time to gather the addresses of my real friends so that I can participate in living and reaching out to real people.

Signing Off,

God Bless and Good night

Jennifer

A Day in the Life of Me

I believe in the minds of my children they are convinced that so some level that I revel in the joy of getting them out of bed for school. Of course that is far from the truth, I do not believe anyone can enjoy repeating themselves at least three times for the simplest tasks. Because even though the requests seem simple ... you know, get dressed, pack your lunch, and heaven forbid the evil “brush your teeth”, they all seem to be difficult for two 7 year olds and a 10 year old to process. Hey but you know I have to get up for work, they have to get up for school.

The next part of my day was pleasant really, the husband made me a travel mug of tea (my true morning joy), the weather was perfect and I had a site to be on. Not a tough job for a beautiful morning, the soil scientist had to do all the work I just get to stand there and throw out my opinion occasionally. Now I would love to say the experience was all good but of course the grass was wet, my boots were soaked through to my socks and well it turns out the ground was rolling every which way and the horizon was a difficult read. Again, I was still smiling after all the sun was perfect but then I ran into some huge spider, don’t worry I pulled it off, did not act the least bit concerned (even though in the inside I was screaming like a little girl!). I discovered (largely due to the fact that the soil scientist knew it’s name) that it is something we have here in Indiana called the Garden Spider. Go ahead google away .. it looks like it may be able to devour one of the children on a good day!. Luckily it stand devoted to wrapping up a grasshopper and well I choose to walk way around it.

Well that was my morning anyways ... and now that it is closing on the day I have to wonder how in the world did scientist come up with a number of spiders they believe we eat in our sleep in a year? I mean seriously even if they figured it out in some sick twisted way, why in the world torture us with that kind of information?? I am already an insomniac as it is .. do they really need to throw in the whole “gee why you are sleeping bugs are climbing down your throat” image? I just do not need stress like that because now I am picturing this rather tremendously huge spider (and yes each time I tell the story I plan on making the spider just a tiny bit bigger - it’s my story and I can do that) the size of saucer climbing down my throat. Yep that should help me sleep. Maybe I should forget about the sleepy time tea and switch to wine.....

The Gossip

The media has been buzzing about the issue of “bullying” for the past several weeks as national attention has been brought to students who, in a sense, have been bullied to death.. All too often I think people do not step back and think about the consequences that words can have on our fellow man. It is bad enough that name calling, derogatory comments, sly remarks, and cruel taunts are part of our schools, but the truth of the matter is that even as adults people are sometimes immature idiots when it comes to using these tactics to make someone’s life a living hell.

When I was growing up I heard my fair share of cruel things being said and can certainly say without a doubt I was bullied in school. I still can recall everything that was said about me back then, nothing was off limits. My teeth were not straight enough, my hair was too frizzy, I was too skinny, did not have the right clothes, I am sure I can keep going, but I am sure you get the idea. I hated school and used to wish that the neat little black holes that existed in cartoons could be real so you could just fling one down on the ground and disappear. What I am trying to say, is yeah I do understand why bullied kids sometimes kill themselves.

The sad thing is those days I was convinced that once I was an adult I would never have to endure such cruelty again. WRONG. It actually turns out that adults are sometimes not much better. Instead of blatant taunts and locker bumps, you have people who like to start rumors and make up stories in order to hurt their fellow man (or woman).

Recently I went to a training and was fortunate enough to be able to go with my wonderful family. It was held in a gorgeous state park and I though being fall it would be a great semi vacation. Only what I did not remember is that the group that was there has a few of these ladies that due to lack of excitement in their own lives, must attempt to talk about other people’s life’s. We all know the personality type, the one that seems to be interested in everyone else’s business only so that they can attempt to talk about them later. They love to start sentences with “now you didn’t hear this from me” or the “what I heard is”. Worse yet some of this gossipers spat out stuff that they completely fabricate cause it makes a rather good story. Which brings me to my lovely training, there is one particular lady (who for the sake of not ever sinking to her level I will not mention her name) manages to spread some kind of venom filled lies about me nearly every time I come across her sight. Now, I can speculate as to why she does this but I am honestly not sure but my favorite thought is perhaps she does it because on some level she is jealous that I have a good happy life, at least I like to think that is why. Anyways, at a particular moment in the training I saw the schedule was getting ready to be a bit off of anything I needed to hear about, so instead I slipped out the door and went to join my family for a rather long beautiful lunch. Now that seems rather innocent enough ahhhhh but the opportunity for the gossip was too much. Her brain went into overdrive and her mouth even faster. It would later be related through the training room that I was there to “hook up”. HOOK UP? hmmmm I am 39 years old and there with my family so yes in one sense I was there to hook up. Of course the hook up’ ees are darn adorable so I can see how that could be a point of contingency for the story. At first I was rather upset after hearing that somehow despite being there with my family I was being painted as, well as my grandmother would of said it, a hussy. I was hurt and angry as I dragged myself back to my room later to meet up with the family and relay the information to my husband. He of course brought the smile back out as he attempted to assure me that gossips are normally jealous and trying to bring you to their level. Might not be true but heck I like to think maybe that was the case.

The crazy point to all of this is that even as an adult people still try to attack one another and bully them. Why is it that society still allows this kind of behavior. How many people need to leap from a bridge, or tie a noose around their neck in despair before we take responsibility for our role in this. No I am not talking about tolerance, I am talking about just being plain mean to one another. Do we need to point out that someone is large, or skinny, or that their teeth are crocked, or yellow? I am quite certain if there is a flaw they already are self conscious about it. I often wonder what kind of world we would live in if we were all blind ... besides the numerous car accidents.