Tag: sons

Period. #atozchallenge

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Recently, I found a chocolate bunny that was left over from the Easter holiday. I stuck it in a sandwich bag, and I broke it into pieces. (Had I done the reverse—broken it up and then put it in a sandwich bag, I might have lost some of the smaller pieces…). I had been eating little bits from the bag each night.

After a few days of this nibbling, I went into the pantry closet to have my nightly ration. I looked where I thought I had left the bag, but I couldn’t find it. I searched one bin, then another. No bag of bunny bits. Bummer.

I must be going crazy.

The following night, I thought I should look again. Perhaps I had missed it the day before.  Again, I searched the logical places, and again, I came up empty. Where could I have put that bag? I strained my memory trying to recreate my actions in returning the bag to the pantry.

“I know I had a chocolate Easter bunny in here,” I said to no one in particular. “I just can’t seem to find it.” I sighed. Loudly.

“Wait. That was yours?” C asked from where he sat in the living room.

I turned and looked through the doorway, studying him sitting on the couch, suddenly alert. “Did you eat it?” I asked accusingly.

“Nope. When W got home from school the other day, he found it in the pantry, and he asked if it was mine. I said no, so he assumed it was his. He ate it.”

“He ate my chocolate bunny?”

“Yeah, I’m pretty sure,” he said, sounding not quite certain. “You’ll have to ask him.”

“Ugh! I have been going crazy looking for that bunny!” I made the statement as dramatically as I could.

“Mom,” C retorted. “You are going crazy. Period.”

NO! #atozchallenge

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Recently, I have come to the strange realization that cat treats and human treats are contained in similar bags. Sometimes, when I pull out a bag of chocolate covered somethings, the cats will suddenly appear in the kitchen, believing that they might get a small tidbit to keep their poor selves from starving to death.

This evening, I took a bag of chocolate covered blueberries out of the pantry and put them on the kitchen table. As frequently happens, I was distracted by the need to complete a task, and I went upstairs. As I was coming down the stairs, I thought I heard the bag rustle, as if someone was eating my treats! This must be the sound the cats hear before they come running.

C was in the kitchen, eating a snack and getting ready for bed. I studied him for a moment, narrowing my eyes. “Are you eating my blueberries?”

He nodded. “Yep,” he stated proudly.

“Um… no,” I stated matter-of-factly. “Those are my treats.” I moved the bag just out of his arm’s reach. His arm stretched, he leaned, and he pulled them back toward him.

“They’re my treats, too,” he informed me.

“Nope,” I tried again. “I paid for them. That makes them my treats.” I offered what I thought to be an irrefutable argument.

“But I am eating them,” he informed me, his own logic trumping mine.

I sat down and pulled the bag closer. “Go on,” I joked. “Isn’t it bedtime?”

“Just a couple more,” he teased.

“No!” I waved him away, stifling a giggle. “These are mine!” I clutched them to my chest like a treasure. He disappeared upstairs. No doubt, the minute I am not looking, he will eat them.

The letters N and O. Perfect together, but not always what we want to hear.

Knives #atozchallenge

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“Hey Mom, I booby-trapped the sink!” C exclaimed as he shut the dishwasher and dried his hands. It had been his night to do the dishes.

I looked toward the sink, and saw he had placed several knives in the position in which (I will admit) I too frequently leave them. They were on the edge of the sink, half on the counter and half “in” the sink. The blades were in mid-air, pointing into the sink. I laughed.

C had commented on this habit of mine when he first started to work in the kitchen more often. “What is this, Mom?” he pointed to the knife of the moment, hovering over the  sink. I had used it to make a sandwich, and I wasn’t done with it. I still had more to do before I was ready to clean up the kitchen.

“Are you trying to kill someone? Look at this!” He pretended to slip, moving his hand too close to the knife. “I could cut off my finger just trying to wash my hands!” He was totally teasing, but logically, he was making a good point. Balancing a knife in that position, over a frequently used sink was probably not the best idea. Point taken.

But I still leave my knives on the edge of the sink. In the time it takes me to break the habit, the kids will have moved out.

Just so you know… #atozchallenge

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The students in C’s culinary program were preparing for some event or other last week. C came home one day to report that he had fried 168 chickens that day. He was in charge of frying while other students had their own tasks to complete. Actually, he didn’t say 168 chickens; he said 7 times 24 chickens. Interesting number.

Meanwhile, the thought that he had spent so much time with the fryolator slipped right out of my mind. Until, that is, he came home on Friday with his culinary uniform in a bag to be washed for the following week.

“Put that downstairs in the laundry room. It probably doesn’t smell too good,” I told him when he came into the house. When I was a teen, I did my time in a fast-food kitchen, and the smells of hot oil and friend foods came wafting back to me on the breezes of my memory.

C stared at me for a moment as he formed his thoughts into the words he needed to express his dismay. “Um… just so you know,” he started. “When I got in the car after school, my girlfriend said I smelled good. She said I smelled like a carnival!”

“Oh, fried dough!” I exclaimed, and the smells in my memory morphed into the smells of sweet dough mixed with fried onions and summer grass.

“Yeah, a carnival,” he said pointedly. “Just so you know.”

Danger & Discovery #atozchallenge

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I am navigating the line that separates danger and discovery. Walking this line used to be a piece of cake—it was solid, and there was a clear delineation from one side to the other. But over the years, the line has flexed and grown treacherous, making my footing uncertain.

When my children were younger, it was easy to create opportunities for them to discover the world in ways that involved little risk. They would play in the sink with soapsuds, “experiment” with science kits that were designed specifically for kids their ages, or don their puddle boots and wade along the shoreline of our pond with a net and a bucket catching frogs and fish and turtles.

Now that the children have become teens, the line I walk is thin and often barely visible. Their discoveries involve delving into some project that has an uncertain outcome. Take, for example, the electronic interests of my younger son.

He has, in our basement, an area in which he satisfies his technology-driven need to create. He has electronic components culled from the drawers at the back of his favorite Radio Shack stores, before his they all closed. He has an array of lights and breadboards and switches and transistors and miles of wire.

For his most recent project, he created a speaker, wired and assembled and tested by his fourteen-year-old self. But then he needed a transformer and an amplifier, so he built those, as well.

And then he took his creation, and he plugged it into a wall outlet carrying 120 heart-stopping jolts of electric current. That part I made him do in my presence at the kitchen table. And I readily admit, I took a step away from the table, just in case. There was a deep sigh of relief from this mom when the entire contraption did exactly what it was supposed to do.

Yesterday, he began to assemble a box for his speaker. He used power tools to cut the ¾” MDF while I made dinner, pretending not to hear the whine of the saw emanating from the basement. Pretending there was no danger involved in my son’s latest exploits.

Today, when I arrived home from work, he proudly demonstrated his new speaker—assembled and working and sounding pretty darn good, I must say. There is no doubt in my mind that the “discovery” aspect was an integral part of the process: he built, he learned, and now, he will move on to the next project.

Bigger and better discoveries lie ahead for him. And the line I walk—between danger and discovery—becomes ever more treacherous.

D

Sweatshirt?

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Spring has come early to these parts, but that doesn’t mean spring is here to stay; it comes and goes. In fact, the weather is so volatile lately that we might experience the entire range of four seasons within a span of days. Or hours. Last week, it seemed as though spring had settled in, but this week’s raw temperatures have mixed with precipitation that reminds me the calendar still says March. But last week’s weather spoiled us. And the more inexperienced among us have shed our thick outer layers in favor of the freedom of a sweatshirt.

Then again, the teens among us shed their jackets with abandon long ago, and only wear such heavy garments when it is cold. Really cold. While I am more comfortable when I am bundled up, my young friends (the male ones, in particular) tend to believe a sweatshirt is enough unless the mercury dips into the single digits (and in these parts, we still measure in Fahrenheit).

Last night, we stepped outside the house on the way to a Scout meeting. My youngest was in a sweatshirt, the sight of which was making me shiver. “It’s 37 degrees,” I informed him. “You should be wearing a jacket.” This information was imparted merely for the purpose of informing him. I had no thought that he would actually care, much less do anything to rectify the situation.

“That’s funny,” he retorted. “That’s the same argument I was going to use about not needing a jacket.” Ah, to be young and numb to the cold.

I picked him up at the meeting two hours later. The temperature had dipped closer to freezing, and it was raining. As we stepped out of the building, his tough exterior crumbled for half a second, and his weakness slipped through. His immediate reaction was the statement, “It is very cold out here!”

I bit my tongue to stifle the I-told-you-so that was tumbling at warp speed toward the front of my mouth, and when I looked at him, he was already back-pedaling. “Wait, that’s not what I meant….”

“I know,” I said, swallowing hard to keep my mother-words down. “It’s not cold out here. You meant to say, Oh look, it’s raining!”

“Yep. That’s exactly what I meant!” he snickered.

We walked the rest of the way to the car in silence. Sometimes the obvious is better left unsaid.

Shared adventure

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I sent my children out on a mission. Armed with my camera, and all the colors of the fall season for inspiration, they went for a walk around the neighborhood so my daughter could take pictures for my son’s yearbook photo.

This plan is one that has was hatched over the summer, when I decided to save some money by not hiring a professional photographer to take C’s senior pictures. We discussed it in August, but C wanted to wait until the trees turned and the colors were bright. And he kept putting it off, claiming that his sister was never ready. J, meanwhile, claimed that C just had to say the word. It was not a promising start to the project, and I found myself second-guessing my decision.

As often happens, we procrastinated down to the wire. The pictures were due this week, and we had to factor activity schedules with days of “picture perfect” weather. And so it was Wednesday, leaving us very little time for a retake, should it be necessary.

After school, texts flew as plans came together, friends were contacted, and last minute details were taken care of. I let the kids figure out the logistics, the process, the timing. I gave them their mission, and I stepped out of the picture.

When I entered the house later that day, three kids were in the living room, laughing and chatting as they viewed the pictures on the computer. Click, click, giggle. Click, click, “Oh! Flag that!” Click, “Stop! Go back!” They flip through the photos, one by one. All of them. All 248 of them.

248 photos! (In my day, that would have been 10+ rolls of film; countless hours in the darkroom….) My daughter had catalogued the entire excursion in a photographic essay, of sorts, documenting the journey from our front door to the top of the street, and back again. Buried in among all of these photographs were the three choice moments when they stopped to focus on the mission I gave them—the sit-and-pose pictures. In total, we had seven photos in the running for the yearbook. But we had countless others that had captured a moment, a journey, a memory.

I sent my children out on a mission, but they came back armed with memories of an adventure. Sometimes, I am amazed at what happens when I remove myself from the picture. Mission (more than) accomplished!

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(all images provided by the creative eye of J)