Christmas Rap

T'was the Friday before Christmas and all through the house, the presents were wrapped but none by my spouse. A secret location is where the presents lay hidden...but my oldest found out one...you gotta be kiddin! The stockings are still hung not one of them missing, except for the trinkets and candy inside causing a lot of moaning and hissing. Mom is exhausted having shopped for weeks on end...She's wrapped so many presents her back is in a permanent bend! Mom can finally relax at the computer with a cup of hot coffee, even regarding the disaster of a kitchen with joyous glee.


And so goes the holiday poem but with a twist...my fingers flying on the keyboard paining my wrist. This has been a nice Holiday season...but I'll be glad when it's over for good reason. We can clean out old toys, freecycle the rest...I'm sure to a bunch of thankless freeloaders at best. I look forward to starting the year anew....because this last one went by so fast it nearly flew.

I love to watch the kids' faces light up with joy...when they've unwrapped their present revealing a much sought after toy. It's one of the many reasons I enjoy being a Mom....their unconditional love provides me with such peace and calm. Grandparents sent gifts of affection across the miles....it hurts they won't be here in person but their gifts still bring plenty of smiles.

It won't be long before all the kids have grown and moved away...but I'll have memories of all their Christmases that will never stray. I hope we'll always stay close and we all keep in touch....even if they move far away just a phone call will do my heart much. My wish is to be blessed with lots of grandchildren to spoil....giving them gifts, affection and sugar with none of the child-rearing toil. But I'm getting way ahead of myself as I usually do...I can't help but ponder future family Yule.


Before I wander off to get more java and refresh my mind I'd like to pass along some Holiday Joy in kind.


May all your Holidays be merry and bright.....MERRY CHRISTMAS to all and to all a good night.

MERRY CHRISTMAS AND HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Independence Days gone by

So here we are again, on the cusp of a great holiday. Independence Day isn't my favorite however, I save that one for Halloween, but it can be a lot of fun. I always try to make it memorable for my kids so they will have great stories to tell their families one day. But not all of them have been great. I have no idea why I remember July 4th, 1976 so well. That one particular 4th is always in my mind because to me it was the lamest. It seemed the whole country was in a frenzy over the bicentennial and to me that was pretty neat and I wanted to watch fireworks, go to cookouts and hang out with friends and family. We did zilch, nada, nil. My biggest disappointment was my brother kept telling me that entire summer he had a HUGE bag of fireworks he was saving for that July 4th...well being almost 11 I believed him, after all, he was my big brother why would he lie? Because he was 13 at the time and and plain evil and mean to his little sister. I was so excited about shooting fireworks and I bugged him every day up until July 4th about the fireworks and he assured me he had them and they were in a 'safe' place. Well, come July 4th, 1976 and I ask my brother about the fireworks and he just laughed and said he never had any and it was a big joke. UGH! What a jerk! I was so upset and angry I stood there and cried. I just remember going outside and sitting on the grass by myself feeling heartbroken. I watched other kids light fireworks that night and just sat there thinking what a horrible time I was having...my brother lied, I was missing my mom, it was the country's largest Independence Day and I sat by myself feeling like crap. I swore to myself that if I ever had kids I'd make that day fun for them. I lived in a cozy suburb of Washington, D.C. and to me it was always a priviledge to live there. I felt like it was an important place. The older I got the more freedom I earned to go to downtown D.C. and participate in the July 4th festivities there. I remember when former Sec. to the Interior James Watt (a real winner) cancelled the Beach Boys concert in favor of *gag* Wayne Newton. It wasn't a bad concert per se but Wayne Newton? The lounge lizard belongs in Vegas not the hub of the nation's capital. I have been to the concerts of the National Symphony as they belted out Tchaikovsky's 1812 overture to the fireworks on the capital steps. They were conducted by none other than the late Leonard Bernstein. I felt it was an honor to be there and watch this spectacular symphony and fireworks show. D.C. certainly does it big on July 4th, and I really miss those concerts. I miss everything about that place. The saying is definitely true you don't know what you got til it's gone. I miss being able to hop on the metro and going anywhere I wanted to in D.C. and suburban Maryland. The museums, the sites, the smells, the diversity of the people....I'll cherish those memories forever. I wish we lived in a more populated (and normal) area for the kids but I think I'm giving them good memories. I try to make their birthdays and holidays memorable because they don't have grandparents in their lives and we're pretty much on our own in the midwest. Family is very important to me and I enjoy the times we're able to get away from podunk and back to civilization. Last year for July 4th we took the kids to St. Louis and it was quite a spectacular celebration. The kids loved the airshow and especially the concert under the Arch by the Black Eyed Peas...but the fireworks right after the concert were nothing short of breathtaking. That's the magic I'm talking about...making memories for my children...so they can say they were somewhere exciting and fun and with their family enjoying it together. It may not have been D.C. but it was refreshing to be in a large city, surrounded by a diverse population, all enjoying one thing together...our country's biggest birthday bash. We hope to repeat the magic for the kids tomorrow. There won't be any airshow and the concert slated is Hootie and the Blowfish. Oh well. As long as it isn't Wayne Newton I think we'll have a great time. Have a happy and safe 4th of July.

To some people perfection comes natural. For me it takes cursing profusely, pounding inanimate objects and yelling in tongues until I get the desired result. My husband thinks I'm a complete nutcase but I think he's mistaken my skewed perfectionism as OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. Maybe I should change that to OCPD, obsessive compulsive PERFECTION disorder. I want things to run right...especially this crazy contraption known as a computer. I'm sure Hewlett Packard is a fine company but this PC we bought that bears their logo is a complete lemon. We purchased this overpriced fancy box 2 years ago. It has all the bells and whistles and we can record TV and yadda yadda yadda. It worked just fine for the first few months then out of the blue it just went black with a tiny white cursor blinking in the corner. What every PC owner dreads...a complete system recovery, wiping out everything not factory installed. Had I known I would have to repeat this procedure about 100 more times I'd have taken this cursed thing back to Best Buy and told them to shove it where the sun don't shine. HP customer support was very little to no help and boy once that warranty expires those buggers want your money before they will even lift a finger to help you. To this day we've done about a dozen system recoveries, 150,000 system restores, replaced the hard drive, the CD-Rom tray is forever frozen and won't open. The DVD drive plays only half our movies and won't open some games because of a little tiny thing called copyright protection. Which takes me to today. I love playing Rollercoaster Tycoon 3...it's a neat game. As much as rollercoasters scare the bejeezus out of me I love watching them in virtual reality. I like building rides and managing my park...now the game itself has an expansion pack so you can make a water park.... WELL....this little expansion pack will NOT open in the DVD drive, the CD drive is shot to Hades so forget it. I got extensive instructions on how to go around the protection in the CD itself but after 4 hours of cursing, sweating, yelling, head spinning and totally scaring the crap out of everyone in my house....it still won't work. I really hate failure. I know it's not my fault the damn game won't work but I see it as defeat. I am not the most patient person in the world (gotta love those Scotch-Irish genes) but I work on something until it runs. Until today that is. PC game 1, frustrated mom zero. The only thing to do now is purchase an external CD drive (oh boy more of hubby's money to spend!) and load it that way. But that means going back to Best Buy and dealing with a bunch of geeks in khaki pants and blue shirts. Or I could go to Walmart to a bunch of toothless trolls with zero personality and find it a few bucks cheaper. I was still seething over my defeat by such a goofy game that I spent 2 hours crashing cars on Burnout Revenge on Playstation 2. This is the safest form of venting for someone who doesn't smoke or drink. I sometimes load up Star Wars Battlefront II just so I can shoot the crap out of stormtroopers or rebels. Hey it's cheaper than real therapy, a bottle of scotch and a tub full of calgon.....one of these days I'll learn to walk away from this darn computer and practice my mantra of control, alt, delete, control, alt, delete....control, alt, delete....

I can't be old I listen to 50 Cent!

Anyone with 5 kids will end up cranky. It's inevitable. Face it....kids will make any normal person turn into a head-spinning, pea soup hurling exorcism challenge. But when did I become old? Not just in age but in mind? Let's walk through it together Grasshopper: Today was any typical summer day...the kids playing, fighting, playing, fighting some more and me having to ward off neighbor kids with a cross and holy water. 8 hours of listening to all this noise and chaos I was a wee bit ticked off when my husband walked casually in the house from work. One look from me and I could almost see his invisible tail tuck between his legs. Maybe it was the vapors that he was overcome by...I couldn't tell. Anyway I was in major bitch mode and he was at the top of my list. Not for any apparent reason....other than the fact I made the choice to stay home while he worked...I followed HIS career for 17 freaking years....I gave birth to 5 enormous babies with even bigger heads....my body still thinking and looking pregnant 3 years after I popped out the last one. Ok you get the idea...I was just majorly pissed off. Brilliant husband gets the idea of going fishing at one of the local parks with a pond. Oh joy. He proceeds to dig up part of the flower bed (boy he really is earning that top spot on my shit list) to find a handful of squiggly smelly things that make my 3 year old daughter squeal with delight. Of course I had to finish cooking dinner and got the kids fed, cleaned up the kitchen while he threw fishing gear in the back of the van and we were off to the land of mosquito bite city. We pull in to a nice quiet spot and I hear the vibrations of a really bad car stereo in the distance...and another, and another. Three carloads of teenage punks go whizzing past the van to the parking lot adjacent to the playground. Lovely...I yelled "slow down" to one of the morons with blond frizzy hair as they flew by listening to various rap recordings. I stopped in my tracks and said "Did I just say that?" When did I become my own grandmother???? My husband and two older sons are fiddling around with worms and fishing gear and my 3 other kids are bored so I walked them to the playground area...right where the cluster of punks lay in wait, ready to pounce on a defenseless old lady and her three cherubs....ready to turn us into some sort of Satan worshipping machines of ...I'm sorry, where was I? I just knew they were up to no good. I could sense drug deals and murderous plots going on in their minds. Ok in reality it was just a bunch of teenagers that have nothing to do in a boring town so they all met up with their friends to hang out and have fun while blasting Hank Williams Jr. (country makes me want to puke, but I digress) I couldn't believe the things I was thinking about these kids. Ok they were smoking which makes me cringe to see 14, 15, 16 yr olds lighting up and puffing away....but I did the same so who am I to judge? Heck I was deflowered at the ripe old age of 14 listening to The Knack's "My Sharona" while smoking a blunt. Yet here I stand, a 40 year old mother of 5 ready to try and convict these kids of the only thing they are guilty of...being young. They never said anything to us, heck I'm not even sure they even saw us walk by. They didn't care, they had friends and music and not a care in the world. I felt bad thinking they were selling dope or loading handguns or signing a blood pact into a gang. My kids played for a while until it started to get dark and the streetlights came on. With my 3 in tow we walked right by the teenagers again only this time I was less paranoid. I was happy to hear Nelly's "Grillz" on one of their car stereos and thought it was odd I know every word of that song yet that song is marketed toward people half my age. Irony is a strange malady and I was thinking about when I hung out with my friends, when we listened to the Grease soundtrack, argued who was cuter - Luke Skywalker or Han Solo, who shot J.R., who finally got the Atari 2600 and the Pong game. Times have changed, but teenagers haven't. Their world is even more precarious with the invasion of pop culture at every turn and the peer pressures they have may be greater but as a whole they will perservere. Every generation has done so before them. I am happy about being my age now. I treasure memories with my friends from long ago and figured that the parents of those teenagers I wrongly maligned...were the exact type of people I hung out with in the late 70's. My boys never did catch anything except a bunch of moss and the fish got a few free meals of earthworm, but I did put in 50 Cent's CD and sang along with "In da Club" all the way home. 40 isn't so bad after all, yo. Peace out.

Is it the Omen yet?

So here it is, 6-6-06...as I sit here sipping my coffee waiting for armageddon to occur...my offspring are having a normal morning of cereal, video games, squabbles over meaningless toys. You know if the world is really supposed to end wouldn't it start out abnormal??? Come to think of it the world was REALLY supposed to end on January 13th, 2006...according to my kids' Nintendo 64 game Battletank. You know you have way too much time on your hands if you remember something like that from a video game. Ah, the joys of having 5 glorious children! My tranquil morning was disturbed like always at 9:03. I cringed as I heard the two tones from our doorbell because I knew it was the neighbor kids from behind us. Ok, I'm not a mean hearted person...I DO love my children, but MY children...is it wrong to say that the syndrome of OPK (other people's kids) really bums me out? Well it does, and they do. They are loud, bossy, dare I say it 'daycare-raised' heathen that never seem to leave us alone and stalk us constantly until we give in to the dark side of....wait, lost my train of thought. If you are a SAHM with kids in a nice subdivision then you too have OPK. I think it's an epidemic with us stay at home parents. It seems like every other week there is a new kid to add to the problem of OPK. If you want to send your kids over to play, that's fine, but on a daily basis is really annoying and most of the time I have no clue who the parents are or where they are. A sad commentary to today's socially inept parents who seem to avoid contact with other adults *gasp* God forbid a conversation between two adults occur! Not that I actually WANT to be friends with the parents of these spawn. But it would be nice to hang out with someone cool like me *ahem* and have a nice cup of coffee and complain about our husbands, barking dogs, bratty kids, bills, laundry. You know, a normal conversation describing the nuclear type explosion that occurred in your teenager's room and you're too afraid to go upstairs and survey the damage. Now THAT'S living! Give me that, the Golden Girls reruns on Lifetime TV and I'm sound as a pound. But for now I'm a prisoner in my 4 bedroom suburban home, listening to my 3 yr old dance and sing like a crazy Mary from American Idol, hearing my two older sons laugh as they cause each other to crash on a Playstation 2 game. I glance outside to watch my 8 and 6 year olds play with the neighbor spawn and wonder if it is a bad idea to casually lock the front door and get another cup of coffee....guess it isn't the end of the world after all!