Category: friends

advice · friends · motherhood

Bitty Buddha 101: How (and Why) to Make a Mean Person Your Friend (from the Momplex Blog archive)

Jenny1 Comment

I can’t count how many times someone’s called my first-grader a little Buddha. He’s an insightful little fart, often boiling down life’s tough stuff into the simplest terms from the backseat of my Hyundai. And he’s always unusually happy, even when his nose is bleeding like a scene from the Colosseum. One could argue that all first-graders have a happy nature, but that’s simply not true. I know, because my sixth-grader came out of the womb with her cup already half empty. (Boy, did THAT hurt. Rimshot!)

As a result of the constant flow of weird and wonderful things that come out of my son’s mouth, something awful happened: I became One of Those Annoying Moms Who Quotes Verbatim Conversations with Her Child on Facebook, like this one:

“Mom, I love you more than you love me.”
“Impossible. I love you times infinity.”
“Well, I love you times googol.”
Then, after much back and forth about I LOVE YOU googolplex, googolplex plus one, infinity plus infinity, he says, “Just kidding. I actually only love you about 10 percent.”

And this one:

“Mom, I think sometimes it’s better to be a kid than a grownup, because if you’re a kid and you punch someone, you just get in trouble. If you’re a grownup…JAIL.” 

And this picture:

Dodge Ram

With this caption:

“I think that guy really wants you to honk at him. It says, ‘Big Horn’ right there on the back, Mom.”

Look, I’m not saying he’s a total wizard, but he’s kind of growing on you, right?And sometimes he does make some amazing observations, about which I post things like this:

Playing a silly game of “what’s your favorite…” at bedtime, I asked my son, “What’s your favorite booger?” He said, “The not-bloody ones.” And when I laughed, he said, very seriously, “I’m not kidding. They’re gross. The blood tastes so bad on the booger!”

Indeed.

I could go on, but I won’t, because starting today, I’m just going to put the virtual microphone right under his chain. Today, Bitty Buddha wisdom, as dispensed to me from the back of my Hyundai and repeated to me for transcription when we got home–because he thought “we should probably put that on Google, to help people.”

I agree. Without further adieu…

HOW AND WHY TO MAKE A MEAN PERSON YOUR FRIEND

Hello, everybody. This is how you make a mean person into your friend. The reason you want to make them into your friend is because it’s hard to make friends with people who are mean. It’s really hard, because you think they’re so mean. That’s what most people think, so then the mean person doesn’t get friends, and they become sad. Try to make friends with them, so you don’t get hurt. But be careful, so you don’t get hit. These are the instructions:

First, you need to make friends with them.

Then, you need to help them become good, because friends normally obey each other and like to have fun, so he might obey you and be nice and be a good person.

Also, this is all how it started. Because I had a bloody nose at school, because another boy slapped me in the nose on accident. We were playing cops and robbers. He gets in a LOT of mischief almost every day. After the nosebleed, since I didn’t want to lose him as a friend—because it’s hard to make friends with people that are naughty—I had to make him better. I plan to stay friends with him so I can try to do that.

Put that in your pipe and smoke it.

friends · humor · motherhood · preschoolers · sons · speed-posts

The Shame of Hand-Me-Downs (from the Momplex Blog archives)

Jenny8 Comments

My son has almost no clothes of his own. By that, I mean he wears almost exclusively hand-me-downs. I can’t even begin to fathom how much cash this has saved me. Land’s End snowsuits, firetruck galoshes, and warm cable-knit sweaters are nothing to scoff at. I’m grateful.

BUT.

This year my son started preschool, and among his classmates is the younger sibling to the kid who used to own my kiddo’s threads. And several times a week we are greeted in the preschool cloakroom with one of these lines:

“Hey, I know that shirt! That’s one of Sam’s!”
“Oh! Our favorite pants! Sam loved those!”
“Hey! There’s another one of Sam’s sweater!”

And so on.

For some reason, it’s starting to get embarassing to me. Like none of his clothes are ours. Like we never buy him anything new. Like we’re riding someone else’s wave. I find myself wanting to shush her, to say, “Do you have to announce that every day?” Which makes me feel like a real jerk. Because it is just that: real jerky. Maybe it’s just the repetitiveness? Like Ned from Groundhog Day who greets Phil every deja vu morning with the same thrilled Hey! Phil!? Phil!? Hey, Phil Connors! I thought that was you! Hey, hey, now don’t you tell me you don’t remember me, because I sure as heckfire remember you!” Look where THAT got him:

Sweet relief, look how good Phil feels after that release!

Oh, my god. Am I seriously suggesting that I punch a dear friend in the face because she’s happy to see her kid’s old clothes again? Do you know what this is all about? Well, I might. You see, I’m a little sister, the one who got all the hand-me-downs in my family. Even if I loved them, weren’t they somehow always not quite mine? Weren’t they always a little worn and pilled already? Didn’t my sister used to get to dictate which ones could be released to me? Like, did I EVER get that #$!@ng awesome Tweety Bird t-shirt she had in the first grade? No. I got her stupid jeans.

This is starting to look to me like a classic case of PTHMDS, Post-Tramautic Hand-Me-Down Syndrome. You know what? I had better get the heckfire over it, because Land’s End snowsuits, firetruck galoshes, and warm cable-knit sweaters are nothing to scoff at. And like I tell my 4-year-old son, we don’t punch our friends.