It’s been a hell of a week here in the US. The kids are paying attention and asking a lot of questions that have no good answers. Usually when I shut off the TV in exasperation, it’s been blaring Disney sitcoms or the latest teen drama for hours; this week it’s been the news. I watch my kids questioning, feeling compassion for the victims, putting together their own conclusions, and realizing that the world is a scary place. . .which some of them knew, some suspected, and one had no idea at all.
Why would somebody even want to blow people up?
Is this because of North Korea?
Does this mean we’re at war now?
Why does everybody hate us?
Did the same people attack that factory in Texas?
Elvis tried to poison the president?
And as we checked in with our friends in Boston and breathed a sigh of relief when we touched base, it was a short-lived relief and I was filled with conflicted guilt because I was happy that I didn’t have to go through the same first-hand pain as someone else, not yet. It reminded me of this post I read several months ago on Larry Hehn’s blog: Someone Whom You Don’t Know.
Politics, terrorism, and disasters are not only outside the scope of my blog, they’re barely within the scope of my parenting. I struggle for words both there, and here. But we do our best to give them answers, or at least ask them other questions.
We make it a point to tell each other when we hear a good story about someone helping someone else out. We make it a point to try and make each other laugh.
That’s truly the extent of what I can say about this week in the US. So now I’m gonna talk about Narwhals.
I just recently- like last year- learned that Narwhals are actual animals, not mythical creatures.
And I learned about it off of someone else’s blog.
My kids, however, knew. Whereas I first heard about Narwhals in the Archie McPhee catalogue (hence my confusion as to their legitimacy), my kids were taught about Narwhals in school.
That’s your tax dollars at work right there. Or at least mine.
#5 knows the Narwhal
Last week while I was reading some Harry Potter to #5, he kept interrupting me to show me the Narwhal sculpture he was making out of Silly Putty. Over and over. And over.
Here’s a link to the Narwhal song. I had never heard past the first verse until I saw this. It’s kind of hilarious (repeats after 35 seconds, so it’s also a quick view).
Speaking of dramatic sea life, do you know about the Mantis Shrimp? Click this link. Don’t let the “shrimp” fool you. It’s completely badass and terrifying. At the end of the piece are a couple of videos: one of the Mantis Shrimp breaking glass to get to a crab and one of it kicking the crap out of a different crab (think: Heavyweight Championship on Pay-Per-View).
Somewhere out there right this minute, a realtor is advising a homeowner to paint the inside of their house in a neutral palette before they put it on the market. Conceptually, it’s a good idea. Neutral is. . . neutral. Non-offensive. Unnoticeable. Calm, even.
I have nothing against neutral as a genre.
But I enter my plea with all realtors, homeowners, and interior decorators to please not ever allow anyone to paint ALL of the walls, baseboards and ceilings the same dirty shade of off-white.
“Swiss Mocha” my ass.
Tinting white paint with a spot of brown and covering all available surfaces in it is exactly the same as rubbing your walls, baseboards, and ceilings with sponges dipped in mud puddles.
Although, this isn’t anything you notice at first. Not until you get all the boxes unpacked anyway, which takes about a year if you’re really lucky.
Then you start painting the kids’ bedrooms. One per extended school break, because kids are naturally good painters and will totally bust their butts for fifty bucks. And with each gallon of paint you shake and stir, you start to dream of other colors in other rooms. Soon, every room in the house that you, personally, never spend any time in is painted. Excellent colors. Colors that fit the personalities of the people who do spend time in those rooms. Colors you would be proud to show off if said rooms weren’t otherwise so offensive.
And you start to notice Swiss Mocha.
How it makes your 1970’s suburban split-level look its age and style; how no number of pictures on the walls can prevent it from sucking your soul out little by little. How it never looks clean, no matter what you do to it (although, in Swiss Mocha’s defense, most of what you do to it is resent it and deem it unworthy of washing one more freaking time).
This was my state of mind regarding the Swiss Mocha on my walls when CC left for Denver for six weeks at the start of last summer break, leaving me in charge of a household of five kids and two puggles. It was the first of many extended trips he had scheduled for the year.
The morning he left I woke up in a blind panic, drenched in sweat, from a dream in which I was standing at the edge of a cliff with one foot in the air. I had just started to lose my balance and the adrenaline jolt woke me up. I knew that the only way we were going to make it through him being gone was to stay busy. But how? How was I going to keep five kids with no itineraries occupied all summer without myself going crazy?
Then #2 and #3 spent a Saturday helping the youth group paint a lady’s apartment and they talked about how much they enjoyed it. Now, I’m a terrible painter. I’m impatient. I can’t paint a straight line nor can I tape one. I don’t enjoy it. Yet, at dinner that night it was out of my mouth before I could talk myself out of it.
Me: We should paint the house while your dad’s gone. You know, as a surprise.
Them: That’s crazy.
Me: Isn’t it though?
Them: Okay. Let’s do it!
We made friends with Bryan, the guy at the paint store. I brought all the kids in and we let him in on our surprise project for CC. He was fantastic.
As you can tell from these pictures, there is no greater joy in a child’s life than painting. Especially painting one’s own house during summer vacation. For free.
#2, crying out of pure joy#3 can scarcely contain her excitement#5 is so happy to help!
The puggles helped, too.
Ear paint.Butt paint.
CC and I had been fighting about colors since we bought the house. He was a neutral advocate. I wanted statement walls. The longer I looked at Swiss Mocha, the greater I wanted those statements to be. The golds I chose for the main areas were tame for me, but would be a stretch for him.
When it was time to move on to the hallway, I had an idea. I was thinking: ice cream; I was thinking: sunset; I wanted something amazing in this dark hallway with no natural light; something joyful that would be the first thing we saw when we walked out of our rooms in the morning. The plan was to extend that color out to the first wall you see when you walk in the front door.
The day I went in for the paint, Bryan wasn’t there. There was another guy. Another guy who was not in on the plan, not part of the surprise, who didn’t offer me encouragement or help me make decisions. A guy who, when he looked at the close-but-not-quite-right colors I had hoped for guidance with, had an opinion.
Guy: I don’t even know why orange exists as a color.
All my confidence fell away. Maybe I should go with beige. What if CC totally hated it? What if my surprise for him just ended up being a huge waste of time and money and started a big fight? But then I had another thought.
Me: Umm, do you know when Bryan works again?
I went back the next day and Bryan helped me with the orange that CC would never have signed off on in a million years. As the kids were putting it up on the walls they kept commenting.
Navel.
#2: Oh my god.
#3: Wow!
#2: Dad’s going to divorce you.
#3: Yeah, he probably won’t like it.
#4: Oh my God. Dad’s going to divorce you.
#5: I love orange! Dad’s so going to divorce you.
#1: Holy Crap! What did you to to the wall? Dad’s going to divorce you.
But I loved it. I would literally clap my hands and jump with glee every time I looked at my orange wall.
It took the bulk of the time that he was gone to do this project. We all worked really hard. I got some form of dinner on the table every day, wherever the table happened to be that day. We had the Summer Olympics on TV the whole time we were painting. We painted at 2am watching the replays of the female Chinese weight lifters. We taped the trim at 7am when #5 got up. Every kid got to paint a door in the downstairs hallway any way they wanted to, and #1 put a mural on one wall.
We banded together and we stayed as busy as possible, which lessened our awareness of the very noticeable absence in our midst. We all knew that over-noticing that absence would be our downfall.
He was blown away when he got home– mostly grateful that he didn’t have to do any of the painting.
He liked the orange wall. He said, “It looks a lot less crazy on the wall than it did in your head.”
Welcome home. To Crazy Town.
And that, Guy Who Is Not Bryan, is why orange exists as a color.
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Have you ever planned a surprise for someone you weren’t sure they would like? What’s the boldest thing you’ve ever put on your walls?
Kids are funny about holiday traditions. They’ll cling mightily to some while not remembering others; actively resist certain new ideas but welcome others without question.
Easter is where all holiday traditions have broken down in this family. We’ve done something different every year, to new levels of failure every time. I posted about a couple of them here and here.
Last year after so many Easter ideas that didn’t fly, I gave up trying to find something that would work. I dumped some chocolate in a pile on the table and slept in while CC took the kids to church. The older kids hid eggs for the younger kids, and I felt guilty for a whole year. I believe they considered that the best Easter ever. . .
But you never know what kids will latch onto. They’re always watching you, even when you think they aren’t paying attention. Turns out I did start a tradition: The five-dollar egg, and the dog poop egg.
#5 started asking about this year’s egg hunt shortly after Christmas.
The other kids would chime in that they just weren’t into egg hunts, didn’t want to color eggs, had no interest in doing anything like that- they were way too old for that stuff. They stopped short, however, of giving up their Easter baskets.
Spurred by last year’s guilt I decided that I would do an egg hunt this year, by God, because #5 kept asking about it. True to their word, his sisters all bailed on coloring eggs. All except for #4, who was forced into it by the babysitter after #5 had waited for her all day to do the eggs.
Sometimes it sucks being the youngest. I remember that.
The astute among you will notice that I am not the colorer of eggs. If you dig through the archives, you will also discover I don’t carve pumpkins, either.
But something. . . dare we say miraculous? . . happened on Easter Sunday. Three of the girls decided to join in the egg hunt. Probably it was the promise of the $5 egg. Now, I may have hidden that egg in a place where it was more likely to be discovered by a ten-year-old boy than a teenage girl. Maybe. I may or may not have given him a word of encouragement/direction before the egg hunt began. I did not, however, tell him where it was.
Regardless, #5 did find the $5 egg (which was an egg with five bucks rubber-banded to it because I didn’t get plastic eggs this year).
#3 found the dog poop egg- which was a poop-colored egg hidden near a pile of dog poop (not in it). The best part is that she didn’t notice the poop when she found the egg, and was more than a little grossed out when I pointed it out to her. Win-win.
Peep Dioramas were next on the agenda, the prize up for grabs being a bag of Robin’s Eggs and some Silly Putty. The only rules were that Peeps had to be involved, and so did their Easter baskets. I guess I was envisioning small Peep scenes contained within the Easter baskets. But the term “diorama” became. . .expanded. And suddenly three teenage girls and one ten-year-old boy were madly scrambling for anything remotely resembling blocks, dolls, or action figures.
All with showtunes blasting on Pandora.
My living room was epic.
And twisted. Most of the Peeps died. Including one that was puggle-napped.
#5’s scene involved a roller coaster, military vehicles, and towers. I called it Peep Inferno, even though nothing was technically on fire. Yet.
It included a botched helicopter rescue:
GRAB THE ROPE! THE ROPE!MY ROPE BROKE! OH NOOO!
I seriously debated whether or not to include #4’s for fear of my door being broken down by DYFS. Then I figured, what the hell. If it’s the Peep diorama that sends DYFS over the edge, they haven’t been paying attention.
I dubbed this Rock Show of Doom because she claimed it all started at a concert:
When Mosh pits go bad
And yes, I am intentionally avoiding close-ups of all of the creepily posed dolls. Please don’t scrutinize it.
While it was never clear who started off performing in the concert, it was very clear who the victor was:
Last Peep standing.
#3’s started off as a volcano sacrifice (with tomato and Craisin lava). . .
Who to save?
But the availability of extra Army dudes changed it up a little and she opted for a “make your own story line” motif.
And who won?
#2.
With her Peep depiction of Les Misérables:
Cosette. . .*cough*. . mais non. . .
I have thrown Peeps, stuck Peeps to the wall to have Peep races (last Peep standing wins), tried to blow up Peeps in the microwave, eaten Peeps (not recommended), and cleaned up dog-vomited semi-digested Peeps (also not recommended). Hands down, the Peeps “dioramas” were the best Peep experience I’ve ever had. Maybe this tradition will stick (like a Peep, to the bottom of your shoe…)
JM Randolph, accidentalstepmom 