Walls

ME (totally exasperated after a day of, well, parenting): "Zj, you'd argue with a wall, wouldn't you?"

Zj (using his best OMG do I have to explain EVERYTHING to you voice): "Well NO Mama, because walls can't talk."

"You can bring the Doritos."

See, the thing is, I sort of fancy myself to be a rednecky Martha Stewart.

Ya know, minus all the tax evasion and jail time.

I make crafts that look like this:

I cook - FROM SCRATCH - meals that look like this:

Recipe coming soon.  I promise.

I decorate for holidays like this:

Just in case you missed it last time.

I make - and can - my own applesauce, jams, jellies, and other cool things.  

I also do a lot of other cool domestic-y things like sew and coupon and quilt and whatever.  I just don't have any photos of those things handy.

Anyway, when Z started school this year, my creative craziness kicked into high gear.  I would be the Queen of the Kindergarten Room Mothers!  I would WIN at holiday parties!  I would be AWESOME!!!

I may be just a TOUCH on the competitive side.

Once, long ago, RJ signed us up to bring corn to his holiday party at work. 

I was distraught.  "BUT YOU CAN'T WIN WITH CORN!" I wailed.

"Win what?" RJ asked me, clearly not understanding my passionate response to the corn situation.

"LIFE!" I screamed.  "YOU CAN'T WIN AT LIFE WITH CORN!!!"

Ahem.

Anyway, I waited and waited until it was time for the first party of the year - the Halloween party. I pinned a ton of cute stuff to Pinterest in preparation, then I waited.  And waited some more.  Impatient?  Who, me?

FINALLY, I got a note from the teacher asking for volunteers for the "Fall Party."  Call it whatever you want, it's Halloween.  In the note, she mentioned that in years past, there had been an abundance of sweets like cupcakes, candy and cookies, and she asked for some other options.  Ok, I can work with that.  I quickly checked my board for non-sweet options, and decided that I would go with either this:

 which I found on this cool blog

or this:

from the PBS site.

The note I sent back was wonderful in it's simplicity.  

"Dear Teacher, I would be happy to bring something for the party.  I could bring fruit or pretzels or whatever you need.  If I don't hear back from you I'll bring one of those things."

Oh, wouldn't everyone be surprised at how wonderful my simple little "fruit or pretzels" turned out?  Clearly,  I WOULD win at Kindergarten Halloween Party.  

The next day, I got another note from the teacher.  It read, in it's entirety:

"Someone is bringing pretzels.  Can you bring the Doritos? Circle yes or no."

Doritos?  DORITOS!?!?!?!?

If you can't win with corn, it's abundantly clear that you can't even place or show with Doritos.

So now what?

I ran to my computer, intent on Googling things like "homemade Doritos" and "Doritos Halloween crafts" but before I got there, I turned around, swallowed my pride, circled "yes" on the note, and died a little inside.

Then I went out and bought two giant family-sized bags of Doritos.

The party is tomorrow, and I'm sure zj and all the other kids will have a great time.  I'll take my Doritos, and the kids will eat them and not care one bit that they are not carved into the shape of bats or coffins or whatever.

But I swear, by all that is holy, if there is even ONE undecorated or unadorned cupcake or cookie in that room, the Doritos will hit the fan.

 

"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility."

The title of this blog post is a quote from Peter Parker's (aka Spiderman's) Uncle Ben.  If you don't know what any of that means, you just might want to move along now...


This is how it started.

RJ came home from his weekly visit to the local comic book shop all a-glow.

RJ:  "Guess what I just bought?"

Me: Oh, shit. "Uh, what, honey?"

RJ: "Well, this guy who works there had a bunch of comic book figures for sale and he was really short on cash and he gave me a great deal."

Me: "How many did you buy?"

RJ: Looking dumbfounded that I would have to ask. "Well, I bought them all, of course."

Use your imagination and insert some words here: passive-aggressive drivel from me about "finding a place for them SOMEWHERE" and super-cajoling "But they're really cool!  And a good INVESTMENT!" from RJ, until a compromise was reached.  I would sell them all on eBay, return the initial blue-gazallion dollar investment to RJ, and  pocket the profits as my own, to buy vodka, wine and cute shoes with.


Easy-peasy, no?

Uh, no.

Because when I saw the boxes and boxes of things that looked like this:

It's kinda possible that my head blew completely off and I seriously considered tossing the entire lot in the trash, "investment" be damned and I was unsure where to begin.

See, in case you were unaware of this, in order to sell things to comic book geeks online, you must be able to correctly identify them.  And not only must you be able to identify them, you must know what if they're a variant,  or possibly a limited edition or what series they were part of.  Oh. Dear. Lord.  I could get as far as naming some of the figures.  I knew Ironman, and Wolverine, and even some more obscure ones like Apocalypse and Blob.

But this guy (and a million more like him)?

Not a flippin' clue.

Zj just happened to wander by as I was Googling "red and purple guy with spikes" - don't ever do that, by the way - and muttering under my breath about investments-my-ass, and yelled "Mama!  Where did you get that cool Onslaught figure?"

Ding! Ding! Ding!

Suddenly all the hours I basically ignored zj and let him watch YouTube videos of comics book figures while I was busy playing on Twitter were going to pay off!

He grabbed it from me and started to talk about things like the details of the spine, and the "rotation and articulation of the torso," whatever the hell THAT meant.

So I put his little ass to work.

Several hours later - hey, I feed and clothe the kid, it seemed like a small price to pay on his part - we had correctly identified many of the figures, and my eBay store was exploding with what could only be described as a Geek-gasm of epic proportions.

And when it was all said and done, I saw that it was going to be a breeze to recoup the initial "investment" with plenty of wine-fund money left over for me.

I paid zj for his time in random figures.

And I don't think he minded one bit.

All the news that's fit to talk about.

Occasionally, ok, ONCE when I couldn't think of anything interesting to blog about, I Googled "blog post ideas" and decided I would write about the least worst one.

I chose "write a blog post about current news happenings."

Since no one actively criticized and/or stopped following me after that, I decided to do it again.

Hey, there's only so much original content left in the world, people.

Last time, I got my news stories from CNN.

This time, my news sources were a bit more... diverse.

Here we go.

Maine to legalize switchblades for one armed people.  Well, it's about time, Maine.

Norwegian boy saves sister from Moose attack using World of Warcraft skills.  There is nothing I could say about that to make it any better.

Sony CEO says Nintendo devices are "babysitting tools."  Two words:  Hell.  Yeah.

5 reasons to see Thor this weekend.  Really, I'm only interested in number one.  And I don't even really like blondes that much.  Mmmmmm... Vikings.....

Man lives off beer only for Lent.  Best. Sacrifice. Ever.  I'm totally going to a) become Catholic and b) do this next year for Lent.  Or maybe just for the hell of it.

Is bacon cologne proof that America's love affair with with the breakfast favorite has gone too far?  Well, yeah.  Personally, I love bacon flavored... er, scented men.  Nom, nom, nom, nom, nom, nom...

How to get drunk in the healthiest way possible.  With illustrations!  In case you're too drunk to read.

And there you have it, folks.

News, mj style.

You can thank me later.

He's at an impressionable age right now...

My kid, he's just like me.

He's smart, stubborn and has an unnatural attraction to shiny things and superheroes.

My kid, he's nothing like me.

He's a drama queen - currently he's in his room fake crying as loudly as he can, door open and standing in said doorway for maximum effect - he loves to be around people, and he's never met a crab leg he didn't like.

In the 5 plus years I've been his Mama, it's been amazing to watch him develop.

I'd like to say I've guided him, but really I feel like more of a spectator to the entire ordeal, standing on the sidelines, watching but unable to enact any real change with my praise, encouragement  or counseling.  He does his own thing.  He is his own kid.  That's not to say he doesn't pick up things from others.  Ya know, because he lives in the world, and I'm powerless to stop it.

A while back, he went somewhere with RJ, and came home calling everybody "Bro" and drinking sweet tea exclusively, which had previously not been consumed at 154 Hidden Court.  I am of the personal opinion that sweet tea is of the devil and is designed to make you thirstier.  After that same trip, he began to regularly request fish sticks dipped in applesauce.  Blech.

And that was the beginning of the end, so to speak.  Since then, he has picked up things from people other than myself at an alarming rate.

Last week, I had Willie blaring on my iPod, and he walked up, listened for a minute, then said "Mama, do you have anything with a little more Boomp-Boomp in it?"

I've been working with him to drop the phrase "Oh My Gosh" in favor of something more kindergarten appropriate, like "Goodness gracious."  Occasionally when I'm feeling crazy, I'll encourage him to say "Goodness gracious great balls of fire."  He ran up to me the other day yelling "Goodness gracious my balls are on fire!"  Uh... that's close?  I guess?  Good effort?

He has also started using the phrase "punked" a lot.  I'm not entirely sure he knows what it means.  I'm not entirely sure I know what it means.  Usually, it's used in the following sentence "Mama!  Cj punked me!"   I'm certainly sure cj doesn't know what punked means, and if he did, I'm pretty sure he wouldn't do it to zj.  Moving on...

When things are going his way, he likes to announce that he's on the "Happy Train."  I'm pretty sure that's a reference to drug use, but whatever.  At least I can decipher the meaning.

When I handed his his lunch the other day, he looked down it and said with an impressive amount of disdain, "That's not what I ordered."

He recently came running up to me crying that he had fallen down and "hurt his spleen."  Never mind that he was holding onto his arm at the time...

He also likes to occasionally announce, for no apparent reason, that he "has a little mean inside him," and if he is uninterested in doing what I need to him to do at any given moment, he will say "Nah, I'm out."

He has recently moved cool to a whole new level.  His Bieber-hair must be JUST SO, he's working on his whole "click-wink" that he uses when he is trying to be especially impressive, and he likes to yell "Who's the Man?  I'm the Man!" when he does something particularly good, like win at a video game.

When he was three and still somewhat interested in making Mama happy, he would tell me he wanted to be a doctor when he grew up.  I asked him recently and he said "I'm gonna have a comic book store."  I said "I thought you wanted to be a doctor."  His response?  "Nah, too hard."

Yeah, my days of having any influence on him at all are definitely numbered.

When he starts school in the fall, I'm afraid he's going to be in for a big shock.

Probably, it won't be quite as big as his teacher's though.

This one catches on quickly...

Me: "How does a chicken go?"

cj:   "Bock, Bock!"

Me: "How does a cow go?"

cj:   "MOOOOOOOO!!!"

Me: "How does a puppy dog go?"

cj:   "Woof! Woof!"

Me: "How does a kitty cat go?"

cj:   "Meow!"
Me: "How does a monkey go?"
cj:    "Oooh  oooh,  aaah aaah."
Me:  "How does a Mama go?"
cj:    "NO! NO! NO!"

Well, at least it's accurate.

Sarcasm: apparently, it's hereditary.

"Too bad I don't have a tomato to throw at your head."

"Mama, let's pretend you are on fire."

"Where's a Japanese restaurant when you need one?"

"For dinner I want those, you know, chicken arms."

"Hypothetically speaking, you are not the ONLY boss of me, you know."