The UnGuest-ly Guest Room

Whenever I visit my sister, my niece Cailey voluntarily gives up her cozy room so that I will have a nice place to sleep.  It is a kind gesture really, as the poor girl ends up sleeping on the couch.

I must admit though, she's made it awfully difficult for me to get a good nights rest in there.  It's not her bed; that's very comfortable.  It's not her cleanliness; her room's always in ship-shape.  The real problem is her decor.  Generally her room looks like your average cute teenage girls room BUT there is always a one misguided accoutrement each time I come to stay.  With every visit I'm always horrified to find one unsightly blemish decorating her room--one that seems to keep me up at night.

On one of my first visits, or should I say sleepless nights,  I found a    "Vote for Hilary Clinton" sign looming in her window.  How could I sleep with that in her bedroom?  One of us was gonna have to go.  About 5 minutes passed before I stuffed it between her mattress and box spring so I would not have to look at it.  Upon my departure, I refused to tell her where it was hidden so she spent a fair amount of time trying to recover it.  And when she did, I also discovered my niece had an imp-ish sense of humor as I found the sign folded up in a large envelope inside my mailbox upon my return home.  A very misguided but CLEVER little girl.

This last visit was the mother of all offenses.  I had to sleep with a huge laminated poster of Edward the Twilight vampire staring back at me.  It was all too much.  So I fixed the problem with a little paper, tape, and scissors...

And after that, I slept like a baby.

Sock Scandal

A big scandal has broken out.  There has begun, in the dark corners of PTA meetings, hushed whispers behind my back amongst the mothers who know my youngest son Connor.  Apparently they've been discussing my derelict duties as a mis-fit mother in a certain unforgivable area.  In the polls of public opinion, this unforgivable flaw has brought my approval ratings to an all-time low.  And worse, my son has become a charity case!

But I must clear the air.  Quite literally too.  Because my son's shoes stink.  Which is due to the fact that his feet stink.  Which, according to the scandal of all scandals, is because, allegedly, the poor kid doesn't own any socks.

What kind of mother sends her kids out into the cold cruel world with no socks?
Yep, you guessed it...I do!

The whole thing stinks.  I'm officially confessing that my son  Connor is a Sock Bandit!  He's been swindling mothers everywhere into feeling sorry for him in an evil ploy to come home wearing clean, fresh borrowed socks.  He's even got mothers who volunteer to let him keep the socks, as if by no other means will the poor downtrodden kid get a pair of socks.  And once, the dastardly dude even came home with a brand new package of socks!  A textbook case of sock swindling if you ask me.

The real truth is that the C-man can't keep his socks on.  He absolutely refuses to.  Which means he takes them off and can never find a pair to wear because he can't remember where he took them off and left them.

No matter where he goes, he almost always goes sock-less (though he never fails to return from someones house with a new pair on).  Even at church, all dressed up in a suit and tie, looking all dapper and distinguished, he's still hiding a stinky little secret.  Underneath it all (feel free to peek if you go to my church!) he's got stinky bare feet sweating inside his nice polished shoes!

See this bin of clean socks...

...not a single stinkin' match to be found in it!  NOT ONE.  The darn thing is overflowing with unmatchable socks.  Which is IMPOSSIBLE, since I only buy the same kind of socks for everyone in the house.  How is it that there are perhaps 30 or so possible brands of socks out there in the universe and yet I have a basket full of 80 socks that are completely incompatible?

The pile grows and grows as if they're asexual entities that multiply by themselves.  Bet my biology teacher never knew that about the sock species.

Summer, my blissful friend, has helped to uncover the truth.  While I was out weeding the other day, I discovered where the other half live...

Let's make a game of it, shall we?  Something like "Where's Waldo?" only we'll call this game:

"Where's the Sock-o?"

A little closer in and you can see this cache of socks 

by the trampoline is the mother-lode...

These pesky little vermin are like an infestation that has overtaken my yard--my six acre yard to be exact!  And there's no pest control to call to rid me of these demons.  Though perhaps this is why there are never any deer eating our shrubs.  Stinky Socks must scare them away!

And now I've uncovered the real truth-- that the kid totally mismanages his socks--that leaves me with not only a bad reputation amongst the other mothers, but worse, a basket full of socks I refer to as "Sock Hell".  A place where all the socks unfortunate enough to make it into the laundry cycle get unfairly banished to a bin where they will never see the light of day again or feel the warmth inside Connor's very stinky shoes, all because they got unfairly separated from their comrade.

And while we're on the subject of purgatory, I have a fear one day that if I end up being sentenced, after this mortal life is over, to serve my time in perdition for all my misdeeds, I'm sure the devil will have me matching an endless bin of unmatchable socks while being forced to watch re-runs of the Golden Girls and Touched by an Angel.  Because I certainly can't think of anything worse.

All I can say is that I'm just glad it's flip-flop weather right now.

Mancake

Mitchell and Connor got that mid-afternoon snack attack.  Apparently they got tired of the usual chips, cereal, and ramen that they usually forage for, so they decided a round of pancakes might be a nice change.  The smell of pancakes began to waft through the house and when I passed through the kitchen this is what I found...

Chloe's had her girl cousins over for a solid week and I think the poor boys have been suffering from an overload of estrogen that's been swirling about the house.

It appears that the boys have had enough of the girly stuff going on around here and have decided to boldly make some sort of food statement by making "Mancakes".

Out Smarted

Mitchell's about to be a senior this year.  This means it's time to start taking college entrance exams.  Time to get serious.  Put on your game face.  Get down to business.  [Mostly the business of upping his GPA, since he spent the first two years of high school not turning any of his paperwork in.]

Since we've already been down this road with Cheyenne, we decided this time around we'd give the ACT test an entirely different approach.  When Chey took the test, she prepared for months by studying prep books and taking practice tests online.  She finally got a score of 26-but she got that only after epic study sessions and then taking the test TWICE.

Mitchell, on the other hand, isn't really keen on epic study sessions.  He'll focus on something then abandon the pursuit altogether in favor of building some strange monstrosity out of thrown out computer parts.  So we decided that the best approach for Mitchell's ACT test taking journey would be a "Scared Strait" approach.  Like those camps for wayward youth where they take them off to prison for a day and seize them with fear and trepidation-all in the name of setting them strait. 

We decided to underplay the whole test taking adventure which was about to loom in his future.  Since the test can be taken several times, we planned to send the poor boy in cold turkey and let him have a go...unstudied.  We figured this would shock him into the reality that he'd better hunker down and get to some serious studying before he took another crack at it.  And, after getting the results, he'd know exactly where his problem areas were.  We knew this sort of surprise attack, taking a test so brutal,  it would motivate him to spend the approaching winter months hunkered down studying like a madman.

Chey was in our our little scheme.  She called him up one day and casually suggested he take the test and then helped sign him up for an upcoming test in a distant town.  She/we didn't really fill him in on much else except the time and date and the casual comment that it would be a good idea to bring a #2 pencil with him on the day.

The night before the test, Mitch, completely unaware of the magnitude of what was about to happen, calmly borrowed a calculator from his cousin, grabbed a single #2 pencil, and programmed the navigator so he could find the town and place where the exam was to be held.

The next morning we gave the poor kid a pat on the back and wished him luck.  And without much ado we sent him,  like some sort of lab rat, into our crazy experiment.

Late in the afternoon, when Mitchell arrived back home from the test, his first comment was, "No one told me that was gonna be a four hour test!"

"Oh really?  That long?" we replied trying to appear innocent and unknowing.  [Perhaps we underplayed it a little too much.]

Then Mitchell adds, "It would have been nice to know how long that test was gonna take so that I would have known to bring more pencils with me."  Apparently we'd been so casual about the test that he assumed the test would be about 30-40 minutes long.  He said things got a little tense when he realized his single pencil may not last the duration of the "endless test".

For a small moment, we started rethinking our approach.  Perhaps we'd really scared to poor kid so bad he'd be struck with a serious case of nerves for his second time around and we'd botched the whole thing.   We tried to reassure ourselves that the plan was working.  We were determined to help him take the test seriously the next time around and what better way then to help him know exactly what he needed to study.

Two weeks later his results arrived in the mail.  We had mentally prepared our little "It's-gonna-take-a-lot-of-effort-and-study-if-you-want-to-get-a-good-score-the-next-time-around" speeches and had them ready to go when he opened the envelope.

When he opened his test results our knowing smirks turned to awe.  The kid outsmarted all of us by scoring a 27.  This put him in the 89th percentile.  

So much for Operation: Scared Strait.  Looks like we've been outsmarted by a teenage boy.  That probably puts us in the 15th percentile.  There's no #2 pencil that can fix that.

When You Work For Your Dad

Now that summer is here, Connor has decided to hang out with his good friend Severin a few days a week.  The big catch is that Sev has a summer job.  He's been hired by his dad to work down at the family shop so he can earn a little money for scout camp.  Sev's Eleven, so as you can imagine, the sort of work he's doing is probably everything the real workers don't want to do...sweeping, weeding, cleaning out the gutters-grunge work.

On the days Connor spends the night he gets up and goes to work with Sev.  And while Sev gets paid, Connor's working for free on a "help-your-friend-with-their-chores-so-you-can-go-and-play-sooner kind of deal.

Sev's keeps an official time card to keep track of his work hours and when Connor goes down to help he can't resist tracking his time too:

The thing gave me a good laugh.

At first they started out working nice even hours.  On June 16th they both put in a solid two hours of work.  But then the next day they only put in 1 1/2 hours.  Did they get more efficient? Or just plain sick of working already?

Then, I think they realized actually counting up hours was doing MATH and realized that math should not be apart of any 11-year old's summer vacation.  So they switched to the method of simply listing the time they clocked in and out without trying to figure up the figures.  They'd just as soon leave that for dad...he's not on summer vacation.

Next I wondered what started happening on June 17th because they began to clock out at uneven hours.  They both showed up to work at 11:30-a nice even number.  Then they suddenly quit working at 2:13pm.  2:13pm?  I figured Sev's mom must have called them in for lunch or something.

But my favorite entry of all are Sev's last two entries when he clocked in at 8:55am one morning and 9:03am the next.  That's the serious perks that come from being employed by your dad.  You can show up at 9:03 and nobody's gonna fire you.  And even better than showing up at three minutes past any hour, he can leave at 11:52 just because he feels like it.  Perhaps he got hungry, thristy, or just because it got too hot outside and he decided he'd rather go home and swim in your pool than keep weed whacking.

That's my kinda job.

I only hope Sev's dad majored in math since he will need to rely on these skills to figure out what to pay his son.  He's gotta figure out what to pay a kid who worked 2 hours and 57 minutes on one day and 1 hour and 40 minutes the next.

Autograph Hound

About a month ago I had asked a friend, whose son pitches for an east coast team, if his team would be coming out anytime soon to play against any west coast rivals.  Sure enough, he was scheduled to play the S.F. Giants right after school got out.

Once I told Connor, who happens to be a Giant Giants fan, he was convinced it was destiny that we get tickets and head to San Francisco and watch the game.

Not only did he and his friend Severin decide they wanted to go to the game,  they decided to make a scheme of all 11-year old schemes...see if they could get our hometown hero to sign a bunch baseballs.

I wasn't about to tell them there were two major problems with their idea.

First, I'm not really a fan of stalking stars.  I'm just not the kinda gal that would ask anyone famous for their autograph.  No matter who it is.  But I've discovered that when it involves my son's love affair for autographed baseballs, I end up becoming the thing I loath the most: An Autograph Hound.

The second problem with their plan, as anyone who's a fan of baseball knows, is that this isn't always an easy operation to carry out.  Most of the time you can't get close to the players unless they come to you-which they hardly ever do.  And when they're on the field, they've got their game faces on-so scream as you might, they tune everything out.

But Connor and his buddy Sev were undeterred.  Mostly due to the fact that Connor had obtained signed balls with an accompanied high-five from not one but TWO of his most favorite players the last time we took him to a game.  Though I have assured him ever since, that it was an extreme fluke, a total stroke of luck, but he still doesn't believe me.

The morning of the game, we loaded "The Beast" full of boys and headed south with only a weak plan of attack: 7 brand new baseballs, a lame idea, and a Sharpie.

Along the way we made a classic stop for lunch:

I'm not really sure what this pose is about.  Perhaps they were trying to see what In-N-Outs arrow was pointing at...

Then it was back on the road and off to San Francisco for apparently a few more weird poses.

San Francisco's not the place where "The Beast" fits in.  Our quick jaunt down Lombard Street  seemed to seize fear into the hearts of  tourists who fled for their lives to the safety of the meager sidewalks that edged the famous street.

Then this parking structure seemed to confirm our car's epic large-ness.  As you can sorta-see from the picture of our beastly Ford Excursion trying to squeeze itself under a parking structure (the top of our car had three inches of headroom to spare):

During our tour of San Francisco, Severin proudly spots something close to home...fenders.  Here Sev, Connor, and Mark proudly pose with the bright red fenders his father made for the trolley buses in San Francisco:

Then, its off to the serious business of becoming (gulp)...an autograph hound :

First, you must stand out from the crowd and make yourself visible.  This means making it perfectly clear you're a huge baseball fan:

Next, scope out the field for your player:

Unfortunately, our player happens to be in the center of this pic.  Very far away.  But the boys are undeterred.

Then when our victim moves to left field so the boys follow their prey:

Connor and Sev have posted themselves right in front of the crowd and luckily stick out wearing their bold orange and black uniforms.  But the lady glaring from the field doesn't look like she is gonna be much help in their pursuit of a signed ball.

Sometimes luck just doesn't go your way.

Unless you have mother has an uncanny knack for loudness.  This under appreciated talent of mine finally got to shine.

When I arrived down where the boys were at they'd been screaming our player's name without so much as getting a sideways glance.  Sev's dad Brett said that no matter what they tried they just couldn't get his attention.  Here's four of the boys wondering what to do next.

A sinister smirk spreads across my face.

For years I have searched for a talent that I can call my own.  I can't play a musical instrument or sing in tune.  I'll never be a champion at sports or brain bowls.  I've just always lacked a definitive talent.  So a few years back I got tired of being undertalented and decided to make up my own classifications in what should/could be considered a talent.  I certainly wasn't gonna be an achiever of any sort in the traditional talent categories.   It was then that I came to appreciate some of my awkward skills that have been largely under-cherished and decided that I am an undisputed holler champion and even a grand champion when it comes to clapping.  I can clap so loud I can start standing ovations at any event I attend-my favorite pastime is starting a round of awkwardly mis-placed ovations.

And here, suddenly, my talent found the place to shine.  Under the bright lights of a crowded baseball game.  All I had to do was wait for our hometown boy to come within my voice's unfortunate but legendary range of fire.

Then, the final step in getting a player's autograph is to use the secret weapon:  You gotta yell something only the player knows...

...and sure enough, I yelled two simple words (the exact words are a trade secret-wouldn't want you to out autograph hound me at the next game) and then we suddenly had ourselves a player!

And a bunch of signed balls.

A big thanks to J. for coming over and giving our kids the ultimate highlight to any baseball game.  He was kind enough to come over and say hi,  give us a hearty round of high-fives, and even come back after warming up and sign more balls.  He didn't even mind that the boys were wearing the wrong logos on their orange and black uniforms!

At this point, now that Connor and Severin were basking in their fait accompli, with Connor knowing another signed ball will be protected in a little plastic case and sit on a dusty shelf somewhere in his room, I can only hope my son will one day repay my reckless support of his childhood dreams by bringing me boxes of chocolate when I'm aged and withering away in an old folks home.

Till then, I have to settle for being a loud mouth who can clap real loud.  Not a pretty picture but the only talent I've got.