You will not, you will never

Day three of track-out, check.  For those of you who aren't familiar with year-round schools, it means you get to have three to four week breaks, once a season, all year long.  It's good for moms like me whose chests tighten up at the thought of someone giving me little people I passed through my loins and telling me I have to take care of them for three months straight.


It's also supposed to be good for retention and overcrowding and all that, but mostly it's for people like me who can only handle their children in three week doses.  I'm sure the retention and overcrowding elements were thought of afterward as a way to pitch it to the public when a bunch of moms who were opening up their second bottle of wine came up with the idea of year-round schooling in the first place.

I kid, I kid, I joke.  I love my kids.  I love them lots.  I don't want to home school them, but I love them.  I also know one day they are going to get on the internet and find this blog so just wanna say LOVE YOU LOTS, KIDS.  And don't close the browser I have open like you always do.  And stop eating crackers over the keyboard.  And get off the computer and do your homework.

So, if you'll accompany me to the DeLorean, Natalie and Daniel had their field day in absolutely perfect weather.  And by perfect, I mean that I could be outside without sweating, because sweating is the ultimate worst.  I hate to sweat.  Unless it's my eyelids sweating over some really spicy nachos.

Field Day is different than when I was a kid.  When I was in school, we didn't participate in every single activity.  We signed up for random events and got ribbons.  The only athletic thing I've ever won in my life was a 1st place ribbon for the 50-yard dash in grades 3-5.  Because my long legs can haul some serious ass before I have an asthma attack.  60 yards?  I'm down, I'm not breathing.

What I never had to do was put a wet rag on my head and run around a cone.

I don't get it.

What I do get is pulling a tire around a cone.  That is what we used to do as kids when the tire swing fell down in the middle of a lane that was merging to the left due to construction.

Eve got bored with all the cones and decided to play on the see-saw.  She said she was on there with her friend, Bob, who also wears sparkly shoes.  Bob has been known to leave sparkly shoes all over our house, in addition to messing up Eve's room and eating the last Girl Scout cookies in the house.  Bob is a giant B.  I can't type out any more bad words because I think I used up my allotment earlier in this post.

My enjoyment of the day was only enhanced when I heard Kidz Bop 20 blasting over the speakers.  Kidz Bop 20 is the best of the Kidz Bops; Kidz Bop 21 is such a huge disappointment, I don't even want to go into it.

The next day, we went to a Girl Scout Expo at the mall where Daniel managed to try three each of every single cookie available.  That is all I have to say about that.  He is awesome.  I want to be Daniel when I grow up.  Now that is really all I have to say about that.

And here is a picture of Eve and Dan after I told them that we caught mice #10-13 in the garage all in one night on the same trap.

No, seriously, that's what they are excited about.  They know how those traps will nickel and dime you to death.  At least those deaths occurred on the traps which stink like terrible meets horrible so we could bag one of those up and get them out of our garage.

And in other news, we participated in the Wake County Public School Choice Selection Round One, which, if you don't live in Wake County, I couldn't possibly explain to you what this means.  In fact, if you do live in Wake County, you may still not know what the hell is going on.  I don't think I do.  I know the school we want to send our children to, which is the closest school to our house, has negative fourteen open seats in the second grade and my kid is number four on the waiting list.  So I guess the "less than 5" was accurate when the county told me how many seats were open.  How about less than negative thirteen?

Hmmph.  Or is it hmph?  I think I have as great a chance of finding out that answer as I do the correct way to pronounce nonpareils, which will be 99% faster than I figure out why Wake County wants me to take my kids across town instead of letting them go to the school that is closest to our home.  Why don't they want my kids as numbers -15 and -16?

Natalie gave me an invitation to come to her classroom to visit their wax museum.  I had no idea what a first grade wax museum would entail, but I went with a slight hope in the back of my mind that there would be a life-sized Michael Jackson with a wick poking out of his head.  (No Pepsi jokes intended.)

Instead, I found that I could not find my child in the midst of painted paper plates for at least forty-five seconds.  And that's a long time when there are many small people staring at you through painted plates on popsicle sticks, not allowed to talk until you put a coin in the jar in front of them.

I think I'll go over to this little Chinstrap penguin.

There she is.  The only thing missing was a hole cut out for the mouth so we could understand what the little person was saying.

Fortunately, there was a book the teacher had put together that had all the reports of the little people typed up neatly for those of us who haven't had our ears cleaned in a while.

(And yes, I really do have to go to the ENT to get my ears cleaned every other year.)

Page four of the penguin report:

I love the sass in this page.  They have stiff tails to steer even though they are birds you will never ever see them flying in sky you will not you will never.  Yep.  Three snaps in a z-formation.

I had to take Daniel to the eye doctor to see if the patching we have been doing since August 2010 has corrected the amblyopia.  And Google, amblyopia is a real word so stop it with the red squiggly line when I'm trying to tyype a post.  Okay, tyype isn't a word.  I see that now.  Thanks, red squiggly line.

What got me kind of concerned was the fact that Dan couldn't see as much as he could the last visit three months before.  The only thing that was really different was the yellow glasses.  The glasses that Eve ordered online for Dan as a Christmas present.  The glasses that, with upgrades and shipping, were less than $24.  The glasses that were definitely not the ones we spent $250 on at the eye doctor that keep falling apart.

Then the powers that be looked at the bright yellow frames and asked if they were the same glasses that he wore at his last visit.  No.  These are his spare glasses.  That he wears everyday because his other glasses fall apart.  So they took the glasses away to the special machine where they figure out the prescription and the pupillary distance.  And thank goodness it came back with the same measurements because I would have felt like a total a-hole for cheaping out on his glasses and messing up his vision.

Did you know that your eye glasses prescription doesn't include the distance between your pupils?  Because apparently the distance between Dan's pupils is proprietary information and as his mother, I am not allowed to have it unless I want to spend another few hundred dollars on another pair of overpriced piece of crap glasses.  At least, this is what I've been told when I've asked for his pupillary distance as I've tried to order cheap glasses online.  And you can't order cheap glasses online unless you have the prescription and the distance between your kid's pupils.  And the reason I can't have this?  Because they don't have to give it to you, by law.  They are just really concerned that if I order from someone who isn't charging an arm and a kidney (yuck, yuck, Wilms joke, y'all!) that I will end up with bad glasses that will, for lack of better terms, eff up my child's vision.

Well, know what?  If you won't give it to me, I'll just sneak up behind you when you put his expensive glasses into that magic machine that reads all the measurements and write it down on the back of this Taco Bell receipt I've had in the back of my jeans that I haven't washed in the past two weeks.  So there.

Then Dan repeated the eye test and his vision is the same.  He just got bored reading random letters of the alphabet.  Do not pass go.  Do not collect $200.  Do continue to wear your eye patch for three hours a week.

In other, other news, Daniel got a Marvel Super Hero St. Baldrick's shirt in the mail that he had been geeking out about a few weeks earlier.  It hides ketchup well, but milk stains show up kinda good on the black collar.



Dan deserves to be recognized as the super hero he is.  He's incredibly awesome.  Gets it from his mom's side.

His kryptonite is pollen.  There's not enough Zyrtec in the world for these bad boys hanging out in your backyard:

No, Eve.  Not pretty yellow flowers.  Those are evil.  They make Mommy rub her eyes until her contacts fall out and eyeliner is smudged from eyebrow to eyebrow to create the unsexiest of looks, the unibrow, which is only flattering if you have just the one eye.

So don't go outside until you've taken your allergy medicine, kids, or else you'll be sorry.  Much like the time I told you you shouldn't have a second Fiber One bar.

Eve: You better take that medicine or else you'll be sorry!
Nat: You're not the mommy, Evie!
Eve: Yes, I am.
Nat: Then tell me: how do you make taco salad??!?


Because only mommies know the secret recipe to taco salad.  But seriously, taco salads are really just nachos with extra lettuce.  So, of course we eat them a lot around here.

When I can't take much more arguing over who the greatest mommy of all time is (I am) or who made the mess in the playroom (not me), I jump on a last-minute invite to the beach and look for signs that 2012 really is the end of it all.

Dead birds abound on the beach.  Pretty sure that's a sign.  Pouring one out for my dead homey.

And being driven home from the beach by someone who is clearly about to fall asleep because maybe said friend can't keep up with my mad white girl party skillz and we find out we've started driving in the wrong direction on the interstate and are most certainly heading back toward the beach.  Which I wouldn't mind because it was a seriously pretty day and I could stand to check out some more dead birds and maybe play a little more beach bocce.  Because bocce in my backyard usually involves small children throwing heavy balls at your temple.

But I got back and decided since the kids are tracked out, and this is definitely the end of times, we should go out to the museum and see what we will soon become.  You know, like dinosaur* bones.  There will be an exhibit for whatever inhabits our earth two million years from now of the bones of a tall mommy with poor posture who is tripping over bags of mulch with a hiking pole in her left hand and a beer in her right, and three small skeletons clutching to her ankles as they rush to tell her who put who on the booger list before the sun set and never came up again.  Because it is 2012 and that's what's going to happen.

So anyway, Eve kept talking to this snake, which gave me the heebie jeebies.  I was convinced she was going to speak Parseltongue and let the thing out.  I hate snakes, even if they eat mice.

After my share of snake exhibits (2), we went to Snoopy's.  I like sharing onion rings with Daniel because I feel like I'm dieting; I eat the soft onion and he eats the battered ring.  And that leaves me with less guilt as I attack the girls' french fries.  Which is exactly what I needed to fuel up for a carb nap at the dollar movie theater.

WHICH I CANNOT BELIEVE IS $2 NOW.  Seriously.  I remember the good ol' days when the dollar movie was $1.50.  Luckily I had enough quarters in my pocket to secure admission to...Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked.  Yes.  I really did pay to see this movie with my kids.  And I really did fall asleep in the middle of it, but in my defense, I had all those fried carbs in my belly and a nice warm Eve on my lap.  And the movie wasn't nearly as obnoxious as I thought it would be.  It was only a little terrible.  But maybe it would have been worse if I had been awake during that middle part.

When we got home, I made the kids go clean their rooms because, well, I didn't want to do it.  I had just taken them to the museum and to the hot dogs and to the Chipmunks, dammit.  They can clean their own rooms.  And when Eve decided she wanted to take scissors and just cut anything and everything she had in her room, I told her I would go back in time and not let her go to the movies.  And this worked.  And it works every time.  And this is my gift to moms of four-year-olds everywhere.  You're welcome.

That evening, Mom of the Year figured she would go do some exercise to work off those onion rings and french fries and hot dogs that Mom of the Year deemed a healthy lunch to her children.  I severely underestimated my neighbor's description of the ballet fit class that included phrases like "really hard" and "it will hurt."  All I know is that my legs were shaking and I kept staring at the clock wondering if the hour had passed and ohmygosh it has not!  And as we were at the barre doing things that I haven't asked my body to do in fifteen years, I seriously thought that I would rather be giving birth than holding my leg up in the air with a ball in between my legs for one more second.  And after giving birth I would happily go on an Ultimate Hike.  And then I would deliver the placenta in the middle of the woods.  And I would do all of this before ever doing Ballet Fit again.

And I sweat.  And you know how I feel about sweating.

So then I went to the grocery store and used the shopping cart as a walker.  I was out of it from the pummeling my body took.  I went to the produce section and loaded up on fresh fruits and veggies.  I was the zombie mom drenched in sweat who needed grapes and pinched every grape on display to make sure I found a bag that had nothing but firm grapes.  And I did this for five minutes.  Because my brains oozed out my armpits.

And after that, I went to the dairy aisle and got some skim milk and some low-fat cottage cheese.  And my legs were still shaking.  And then I got all confused and the next thing I knew, I had Fruity Pebbles, ramen, and jelly beans in my cart all up on top of my grapes.

And this is why it's unhealthy to exercise.


*When asked how dinosaurs had babies, I had no answer but pictured two giant dinosaurs and some Al Green in the background.  That's some massive mating right there.