Pinterish: Kinda Sorta Making Something You Saw on the Web (from the Momplex Blog archive)

May 20, 2014February 27, 2023 Jenny3 Comments

I once tried to fix the sole of a saddle shoe using nothing but Superglue. Just eight years old, I figured how hard could it be? I ended up conjoining two of my fingers and gluing the shoe to the kitchen floor. With a great deal of tugging on my part, the shoe eventually did lift from the floor but so also did the white tile—a couple of quarter-sized pieces at least. My mom arrived home just in time to see me crying hysterically while trying to cover up the bald spots. Out, out, damn spots! I was using white watercolor and a tiny watercolor brush.

Fast forward 30 years, and I am still not a quality do-it-yourselfer. I wish I were, but I don’t have the patience. This is an actual board I keep on Pinterest:

See that teepee to the right? See that bleeping teepee? Well, I don’t know who the hell I think I am, but I tried to make that thing today. I can’t explain why, but something came over me in bed this morning when realized I had a whole day with my 5-year-old to myself. (Normally my mom has him for a few hours on Mondays.) It was windy outside, and I thought, “We should have a kite.” My next thought was, “I could totally make a kite.” But once I got onto Pinterest, my ambition somehow morphed from cutting out a paper-bag square to building a mother-loving TEEPEE.

The crafter who designed this project had me convinced that she made it out of random fabric remnants already somewhere in her house, and that she just had to buy six 1x2x8 planks, tie them together with some jute, and glue-gun a bunch of fabric pieces to the frame. She didn’t spend even $10 on the whole thing! Someone else on Pinterest actually had the gall to refer to this nightmare as a “fun DIY gift idea!”

Let me tell you, I worked my ass off making this ridiculous teepee today. Do you know what happens when a dwelling is designed by a crafter rather than an engineer? It looks great on Pinterest but has the stability of a drunk snow crab. Also, I don’t know how the hell this crafty person defines collapsible and easy to store, but I think she was smoking something. Well, actually the teepee was extremely collapsible until I went rogue with her design, yelled GODDAMNIT in front of my kids, and tied the thing my own way.

While I was trying to put together this hot mess of a teepee, the only way the kids could really help was by cutting some strips of fabric. Once that was done, I was on my own. It took me three freaking hours and so many hot-glue gun burns to my fingertips and wrists to make this unholy mess:

It looks fine. I realize that. But if I had seen a picture of MY teepee on Pinterest this morning, coupled with an honest description, I never would have done it. I’d have made a paper-bag kite. “This overwrought reading nook will cost you only $60, too many hours, and much of the respect your kids had for you before you started it!”

I yelled a lot today, for example when my 5-year-old randomly peed his pants for the first time in probably two years while honoring my request that he find something to do other than beg to reload my hot-glue gun. He did find something to do, in the upstairs bathroom:

Not sure what you’re looking at? I’ll zoom in:

Still not sure? Me neither. Whatever it was, he couldn’t bring himself to leave it for long enough to sit on the toilet RIGHT NEXT TO IT when he needed to pee. And was he ever pissed off when he later discovered I’d drained that sink. He said I’d killed his “little glue man.” What? I don’t even know what. All I could think to say was, “OH. MY. GOD. DID YOU USE MY LAST HOT GLUE STICK!?” I said this as if he’d eaten the last tin of smoked fish on an Arctic expedition, leaving me no other option for my next meal but human flesh.

The sad part is that I was just trying to do something fun with the kids today and had it backfire in the worst way. Instead of making memories, I made a scene. Instead of making dinner or making time to read or making my son put on actual pants instead of his pajama pants with the hole in the crotch, or just anything normal like that, I made a mess. My son and I actually had Home Depot hot dogs for lunch because I was more concerned with building this teepee than making something to eat. Which wouldn’t have seemed stupid at all if this teepee had been as awesome as advertised–not just to look at but to make. As it was, I worked on it all the way until my husband walked in the door from work, late, at which point I said, “Go look in the basement, then in the bathroom. Don’t ask me questions until after bedtime. I haven’t showered. The kids are having frozen pizza. We’re ordering Thai.”

When he came up from seeing the teepee, he couldn’t resist asking just one question, with the slightest hint of annoyance in his tone:

“Is that thing collapsible?”

No, honey. No, it isn’t. But I sure as hell am.

motherhood

I Am Not a Search Engine…But I Let My Kids Think I Am (from the Momplex Blog archives)

May 30, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny4 Comments

Butterflies pee blood. That’s what my kids learned today from the Grow-a-Butterfly Kit I bought for them. Actually, since I’m the one who shouted this information while witnessing blood spraying from a newly emerged butterfly’s lady parts (they’re all girls in my mind), it’s probably more accurate to say they learned it from me.

My children learn most of their erroneous facts about science, nature, history, and the cosmos from me. Turns out I shine only with the basics, like answering whether apples grow on trees or underground like potatoes. Though I absolutely have tried, I cannot explain why we don’t have watermelons growing all over our yard after we’ve spat so many melon seeds there over the years. It’s also proven difficult for me to explain how a photo travels from my smartphone to my computer, and the reasons I never wet the bed. This is because (1) I am not a walking encyclopedia and (2) never seem to realize how full of shit I am until I’m knee deep in what’s come out of my own mouth.

If you have a young child, I hope you’re in the same boat. Because it’s not just misery that loves company; it’s ignorance and ineptitude, too. I don’t want to be the only mom who’s a walking, weekly confirmation of her children’s suspicion that, yes, we really do forget most of what we learn. But, come on, how the hell am I supposed to remember what a scalene triangle is? And why? Oh, wait. I know why: Because some evening, my third-grade daughter is going to flop down next to me at the kitchen table with a geometry worksheet, and ask me to remind her. That’s when I will excuse myself to use the bathroom, sneak a peak at our American Heritage dictionary, and come out acting like I totally knew.

So help me, if you’re able to explain on demand to a child how wind is made, why conifers don’t go bald in the winter, or how worms survive after being chopped with a garden spade, I hate you. It only means you’ve got a better memory than most and/or spend too much time on the Internet. And it’s making the rest of us look bad.

As it turns out, butterflies don’t actually pee blood. Some online almanac tells me it’s meconium. (That’s newborn caca, to the layperson.) Sometime later today, probably while putting the kids to bed, I will issue the retraction of my misinformation from this morning. I will swallow my pride and be honest, confessing I had to look it up on the Internet, slowly but surely handing over my authority to Google, slowly but surely revealing I’m not as brilliant as they used to think I was. That’s okay: My preschooler, who witnessed the caterpillars quadrupling their size, saw them climb to the ceiling of their tent, watched them sealing up as chrysalises, and finally saw them emerge a week later as butterflies — he told me today that it wasn’t that interesting watching them come out, that he’d rather have seen them going in.

I may not know everything, but for now, I’ve still got the kids beat.

dads · discipline · husbands · intentional happiness · marriage

Forts (from the Momplex Blog archives)

January 25, 2013February 27, 2023 Jenny16 Comments

“Mom, can you help me build a fort?”

Ugh. At least once every week, one of the kids asks me this question. Whether I say yes or no, what I’m usually thinking is Here we go making my living room look like a Mumbai slum again. They usually ask after I’ve just cleaned, because as any parent can attest, there’s nothing like a clean house to spark little kids’ imagination. And by “imagination,” I mean the metaphorical taking of a toy-dump.

IMG_20130125_101552_353 — “Sure, honey, take a nap,” hubby said.

IMG_20130120_162135_754 — Same room, when I woke up an hour later. “Mom, we made a tea house!”

My husband is the fort god. He creates kick-ass multiplexes of blankets and pillows and cushions and chairs and heavy anchors that may or may not result in concussions if pulled down. The kids spend hours playing in these forts, dragging in collections of books and stuffed animals. They always have to eat in the forts, so they sneak in snack-cups full of perishables, such as applesauce or pretty much anything that can roll away. (Our holidays wouldn’t be the same if we didn’t find a petrified baby carrot while rearranging furniture for our Christmas tree each year.)

IMG_20130119_195139_083 — Dining room table, moved into corner and re-imagined as a roof, walls of blankets. See the child engrossed in a book inside the belly of this fabric condo?

I do not build awesome forts. I suck at them on purpose. I suck because I want them to be easy for lazy American children to clean up:

Honestly, last week my 9-year-old said the worst part of her day was having to go up and down the stairs not once but TWICE while getting ready for bed. She made sure I read the exhaustion all over her face, and my response—indignant laughter—totally puzzled her. For a kid who often makes our living room look like scenes from Slumdog Millionaire, she shouldn’t need me to point out the first-world luxury of having a house let alone one that requires a staircase.

My husband’s and my differing philosophies about forts are telling about the dynamic in our house. He’s helpful and patient and laid-back with the kids. He lets them climb all over his back like spider monkeys despite his herniated disk, and can be easily badgered into playing a loud game of chase in the house, a game in which he howls like a hyena and takes two steps at a time to seize his deliriously willing victims. Me? I’m the one always spoiling movie night by forbidding popcorn in the living room; the one who burns up over Jackson Pollack toothpaste scenes on the bathroom counter; the one who doesn’t tolerate so much as a smidge of backtalk or an ounce of sass. In other words, I’m the bad guy.

Before you give me an amen, before you dwell now on the times your husband indulged in being happy-fun parent while you toiled over dinner dishes and shouted at the kids to put on their jammies, just let me finish. I’m actually not complaining. Sure I’ve done my share of that, but in my heart, I’ve grown to feel yin-yang parenting is actually quite good for the kids. As long as Mom and Dad are a solid front on the big stuff, the yin-yang approach means the kids always have discipline and structure but also have a soft place to land. Besides, what comes with being the “bad guy” is that I’m also the one the kids tend to run to when they’ve had a bad day and need security. I’m honestly the goofier, wilder one in my marriage, but in our parenting life, even though I’m easily up for a fart-off or booger jokes, I think I just might be their rock. And it’s me who’s cast myself in this more serious role, because I’m wired to play it, not because my husband made me.

This isn’t about an imbalance in our responsibilities. My husband hasn’t shirked anything. I’m not picking up parental slack. It’s not a competition, and I’m not jockeying for first in a game of who’s-the-favorite. We’re being the parents we’re wired to be, and fortunately it creates balance. My kids just get different needs fulfilled by their two different parents’ very different natures. Yeah, they need to slum it with daddy, but they need their mean old mom, too.