Even though my boys are getting older, I still like to surprise them from time to time with encouraging notes in their lunch bags.
A little motivation goes a long way, ya know? 😀
One of my recent creations. If this isn’t motivating, I don’t know what is.
Verbatim from a December 2014 entry in The Journal of Quirky Girl, the following incident of pre-holiday mayhem earned a special place in the Funnier in Retrospect category.
This morning was like something out of a deranged comedy.
It started off with my son declaring it “A Horrible Day” after accidentally spilling his cup of apple juice all over himself and pretty much everything else in the kitchen during breakfast.
And then it got better.
When we piled into the car to go to school, my child was still alternately sulking/ranting over what a bad day it was.
Distracted, I backed out of the garage too quickly.
The passenger mirror smashed into a million pieces after colliding with the side of the garage, knocking the garage door off its track.
The shattered mirror dangled lifelessly by a wire.
Thoroughly distraught, we hopped into the truck. The car would have to be dealt with later.
As we backed out of the driveway, the truck’s massive tires took out the candy cane Xmas lights I had spent hours putting up the day before. Flattened and crushed like roadkill.
Ho ho ho, into the trash they go.
“It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year” was playing on the radio.
And so the day had begun…
The title pretty much sums it up.
~Comically Quirky is finally on Twitter! Follow me: @comicallyquirky . Thanks!!!~
My boys both brought home their much-anticipated school pictures last week. Somehow, these are by far their worst ones yet.
I’ve seen characters in horror movies with more pleasant facial expressions.
Hell, even Chucky the Killer Doll looks more sociable than these two.
What gives?
It’s like the photographers don’t bother waiting for a kid to be fully in position before snapping the picture.
And what are these photographers using for prompts?
“Suck on this lemon for 30 seconds, then smile!”
“Just heard your teacher say something about a pop quiz today…?”
“Whoa, did you just see that bat zoom by?”
Not only do school pictures get more expensive every year, there are also noticeably fewer pictures in the packages. Which, quite frankly, when they look that dismal, may not be such a bad thing.
But still, it’s the principal of the matter. There used to be enough pictures to wallpaper an entire bathroom . Now, what you get barely covers one of the small floor tiles.
And of course, you must commit to buying these things sight unseen. What kind of nonsense is that? It’s insane!
Speaking of insanity…
The photo packages range from $19 for the I Don’t Really Love My Child That Much package, which gets you a single 5×7 and four wallet sized photos, to the self-proclaimed Best Value! package, with a total of 19 photos, a cd with exactly one image on it, and three key tags, all for just $69!
If you really love throwing money away, there are all kinds of frivolous add-ons. Did you know you can add a sheet of 20 stickers for only $9!
Right…
Ultimately, I went with a more middle of the road package that clearly demonstrates I love my child a reasonable enough amount.
If you really think about it, the poor kids are totally set up for disaster on Picture Day.
Against all logic, it takes place at the very end of the day at least 99.9% of the time. After P.E., lunch, recess, and that 20 minute fire drill on the windiest day of the entire year.
This ingenious set up guarantees bloody toothed grins after face planting on the playground, black eyes from taking a hit to the face during dodgeball, hair sticking up in seventeen directions, pants split down the crotch after a morning bus stop dare gone wrong…
And, of course, there’s always the trademark red Kool-Aid stained mouth that makes it looks like the little vampire guzzled a vat of blood for lunch.
Oh well. Not all is lost.
The timing is actually fairly good, seeing as how my kids sort of resemble spooky ghouls and goblins in those photos. Maybe I can use them for Halloween decorations…
Say Boo!
A school picture is worth thousands of words.
Got school-aged kids? Then you know all too well the one word that strikes fear into the hearts of kids and parents alike.
Here’s a hint: It’s scarier than a candy-hoarding corpse on Halloween.
Homework.
There. I said it.
And now I’m breaking into a cold sweat, even though there’s not a single unfinished assignment anywhere in sight.
I didn’t particularly like homework as a child. But I find it even less tolerable now.
Science? And so the suffering begins.
Math? Oh, the misery.
Writing? Woe is me.
A five page research paper on cows? Just kill me now.
You need to do research for a project on “Susan B. Something”? For the love of God, it’s women’s suffrage, not women’s coverage!
Oh yeah. Been there, done that. Way more times than I’d care to count. I already did my time.
But apparently, not everyone feels the same way.
I stumbled upon an interesting topic of discussion on the radio last Friday as I was driving my boys to school.
I was intrigued. But it made me wonder…
Anyone here guilty of doing their child’s homework for them?
I’m not talking about merely helping.
I’m talking practically yanking the assignments out of their hands and hunkering down with a generous shot of your liquor of choice while plowing through seven pages of multiplication and two-step word problems involving Gertrude and her friend Jasper’s adventures stealing corn from Psycho Samuel’s cornfield.
Jasper? What century is this assignment from?
But back to the homework. And the radio show.
A woman had called the radio station with an immense concern. Her son’s teacher wanted to meet with her.
Not too unusual. It’s a boy, after all. Boys are notoriously rowdy and full of mischief.
Well, it turns out she’d been doing her son’s homework for him. Not helping. Doing it.
Doing all of it.
And the problem with this would be…?
The kid was failing 4th grade. He had no clue how to do any of the work, thanks to her.
What a shocker!
While not uncommon for parents to help their kids out with homework, help is the imperative word here. Applying new concepts by doing the work themselves is the key to success, after all.
Although…
There are definitely times when it would be wonderful if you could just cook dinner uninterrupted, without having yet another paper shoved under your nose with more questions that you have no clue how to answer.
Oh, but what’s the fun of cooking without the threat of burning down the house because you’re too distracted trying to figure out what the hell happened to Pluto?
What about the nine planets we all learned about in school? Now there are only eight?!?
Size clearly matters, even in space. Who knew?
But this all seems so trivial when you consider the house wouldn’t be on fire right now if only you had done the damn assignment yourself in the first place.
What I want to know is how anyone ever managed to get by before Google. There are numerous assignments that require knowledge I personally no longer possess.
(I’m struggling to remember what I had been doing 15 minutes ago.)
Remember that show Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader?
I was evidently not smarter than a 5th grader when that show premiered in 2007. I can almost guarantee I’m even less likely to be now.
Besides, my kids spend seven hours a day at school, for crying out loud! Shouldn’t they be the experts on all things academic? Shouldn’t they be teaching me?
At any rate, this is where Google comes in. Google has answers that I clearly do not have.
So I often (shamelessly) tell my boys, “Let me think about that one and get back to you.” Then I make my escape and get down to business.
I’m sorry, hang on a second…
You need to build The Liberty Bell?
Out of what? By tomorrow?
We don’t have an ounce of modeling clay to work with…but we do have five packages of spaghetti.
A situation of this caliber is best handled by an expert.
Where exactly can I find that homework-monopolizing mom?
Never mind. She’s booked until June, just trying to keep up with her own kid’s homework.
Oh well.
As the saying goes: When life hands you homework, make paper airplanes.
Even Garfield hates homework.
“Life is a journey, not a destination.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Emerson really whacked the nail on the head with that one, didn’t he? The mere experience of relocating to No Man’s Land is indeed a journey. A journey that conjures up images of the treacherous voyage to Hell!
An unexpected job transfer has my family packing up and moving to a place with cows and cornfields, without the knowledge of where exactly we would live or even where the boys would go to school. We did manage to book a hotel for one week, so that’s a promising start.
Traveling as a family is notoriously dangerous territory, especially at the airport. We’re all hauling hefty carry-on bags, while I’m also loaded down with a large purse that could easily fit a small whale, and the zipper is about to bust right off the jam-packed suitcase.
When it’s time to check in the baggage, it’s discovered our suitcase is 15 pounds over the 50 pound weight limit. Paying $75 in overage fees? Not going to happen.
After 20 minutes of chaotic rearranging, the 9 year old now totes around a 45 pound carry-on of coloring books, shoes, bras, superhero action figures, underwear, crayons, and other random goodness.
Our sulking preteen child, hauling a backpack crammed with his nine pairs of Converse shoes and six electronic devices, sets of the metal detector.
A TSA agent glances at him, gives him a once-over with the wand, and sends him on through.
Guess which bag gets flagged in the x-ray scanner for search? That’s right, the 9 year old’s backpack with Batman and all the underwear.
“Is this your bag, sweetie?” the TSA agent asks. Seven different times. You know, because there’s the possibility it’s actually daddy’s bag, loaded with cocaine and explosives.
After confirmation that bag does in fact belong to the child in question, a search ensues.
Out comes underwear of every size, shape, and color.
Out come Batman, Hulk, and Captain America.
Out comes a dog-eared comic book with what appears to be teeth marks at the top left corner.
A shoe flies out, along with a handful of sea shells.
As the bewildered TSA agent continues rummaging through the bag, the child grabs his Hulk and Captain America action figures and engages them in a disturbingly intense battle, complete with self-generated sound effects. Hopefully from the mouth and not from his other end.
Then he turns to the TSA agent and asks, “My daddy said we can’t say the word ‘bomb’ at the airport. Why can’t we say the word ‘bomb?’ Is it like a nuke?”
The TSA agent is now frantically searching the backpack, puzzled by the odd looking Minecraft toys- tiny swords and a small plastic box labeled TNT.
She pulls out her walkie talkie and quietly asks for “assistance.”
The child is sent back through the metal detector, and he asks one last time, “So, why can’t I say the word ‘bomb?’ Have you ever seen a real nuke?”
After my husband’s brief detainment by the TSA, we are permitted to board the plane.
With the security fiasco behind us, one might think the rest of the trip ought to be smooth.
The three hour flight is mostly uneventful, until we are close to our destination.
“Good evening, passengers. A severe storm is preventing us from landing at this time, so we’ll be circling briefly until conditions improve,” the flight captain announces.
And so we circle. And circle. And circle.
A full hour passes before the captain’s voice booms through the aircraft again, notifying us that the plane is running out of fuel.
There’s none of that “fasten your seat belts and prepare for landing” nonsense as the plane plunges from 30,000 feet onto the runway in record time. Of course, we land at an airport that’s not even our intended destination.
Maybe we should have hung out at the airport with the TSA, discussing bombs and having our bags searched just a tad more thoroughly.
The Death Tube eventually makes its final descent into No Man’s Land and we all hustle off the plane like a pack of feral beasts.
The entire family is hungry, tired, and disgruntled enough to use nukes on each other.
But hey, there’s only a 10 minute ride to the rental car depot and another 30 minute ride to the hotel. We can do this!
I should know better by now.
As we drag our beaten and overloaded suitcases outside, the shuttle pulls up. Between the confused look on the young gum-chomping driver’s face and her abrupt curb-hopping stop, my gut tells me we probably should have waited for the next shuttle.
U-turn after U-turn, we are clearly going in circles. The driver stops on the side of the road and stares blankly out the window. It could easily be her first day on the job, or perhaps her goal is to ensure the boys hate us for the rest of our lives for dragging them out to live in the middle of nowhere.
A passenger marches up to the front of the bus.
“Why don’t you just follow the signs that say, “Rental cars, this way?’ ”he snarls.
A lightbulb seems to go off in the brilliant girl’s head, and within five minutes, we arrive at the rental car depot.
We are off in a nondescript rental car shortly after, rocketing down the freeway with a GPS that doesn’t seem entirely convinced itself which way we need to go. It’s tempting to enable the off-road option so we can plow straight through yards, cornfields, and lakes to get to the hotel faster.
Perhaps we should have.
We find ourselves at a complete standstill on a backed up and construction-heavy freeway. I glance out the window and notice a 1,000 foot drop into oblivion on one side of the road, and a concrete barrier on the other.
A sudden sensation of crunching metal jolts me from my drifting thoughts. It takes a minute to realize we had been rear-ended, and the same jerk who hit us is now trying to push our rental car out of his way so he can keep going.
The kids are screaming, my husband is screaming…or was that just me?
The police finally show up, after passing us twice on an adjacent freeway and then getting stuck in traffic, but at least we are back on the road again.
We arrive at the hotel after midnight, only to discover that we’ve been deemed a no-show and the staff had rebooked our room. There’s only one room left, with a double bed and a pullout sofa.
We enter the room and flip the light switch.
Holy crap! Had this room recently been the scene of a horror movie or satanic sacrifice? I’m far too exhausted to determine whether it’s actually Heinz ketchup or blood splattered all over the wall.
Well, this will have to be dealt with. Tomorrow. Or rather, later today.
The boys are already asleep on the lumpy double bed, so my husband and I wander downstairs to the restaurant.
Who am I kidding? We’re practically galloping to the hotel bar.
A few lackluster drinks later, we head back to the room. At least the boys are managing to get some rest.
No Man’s Land, it’s me, Quirky Girl. It sure doesn’t seem like you want me here any more than I want to be here. You’d best bring me a better day tomorrow, or be prepared to face the wrath of my 9 year old and his imaginary nukes.
comically quirky 