Orthodontics is No Laughing Matter

I've been banned from going to the Orthodontist.  Seriously.  No pun intended.

This most solemn of dental decrees was pronounced by Chloe as she and I were walking out of the office from her last visit to the orthodontist.

Her edict came in a conversation that went like this...

"Mom, you can't come in to my appointments anymore.  You need to stay in the car and wait for me there."

"Why's that?" I say.

"Because you make everybody laugh.  And your loud voice can be heard all the way in the back too.  The ladies that work on me end up laughing so much that I'm afraid their hand is shaking so hard that they're gonna poke me with something sharp when they're inside my mouth." Chloe rambles.


[I'm laughing.] 

"This is serious mom!"  she says with a stern voice.  "It's really scary, if I get poked it'll be all your fault.  You can't come in anymore."

Then she adds, "...or you just need to talk quieter...but we both know that'll never happen." 


"Yep," I agree out loud.  "That'll probably never happen.  I'll try to stay outside."


[but you know that'll never happen either.  The poor girl is gonna get poked...and badly.  It's inevitable.]

Undeterred

Sadly, winter is officially here.  The means one thing around the Skillman house:  A nice cozy fire.

Chloe was just begging for someone to start one but no one wanted to brave the drizzle and cold and go get wood from behind the barn.  It's quite a jaunt.

Usually the kids drive the riding lawnmower down to the barn and fill up the mower's trailer with wood.  But Chloe doesn't weigh enough to push the seat down far enough to override the seat sensor which is supposed to keep young drivers from operating these sort of gas-powered blade-wheeling contraptions.  But the geniuses who invented the seat sensor forgot that kids know how to add.  One plus one is not a hard equation.  It didn't take long for Chloe and Connor to multiply their weight by simply riding the mower together.  Their combined weight easily allows them to bypass all safety features.

That said, on this particularly blustery and chilly day, there was no way Connor was going outside.  That left Chloe with only one option:

the Wheelbarrow.

So what's a girl to do when it's the "perfect day for a fire" and no one heeds the call?  She does it all herself.

This wheelbarrow full of wood weighs twice as much as she does.  How she managed to push it down the long path to the barn, fill it up, and push it back without losing it all is impressive.

This girl is  Undeterred.
 ...and of course, shortly thereafter, she got her cozy fire. 

That's some real tenacity.  Let's hope she never gets it in her head to do something like get tattooed and join a biker club!  We could all be in trouble. I'm afraid there's no stopping this very determined girl.  Until then, we'll bask in the heat of her cozy fire.
 

Picky! Picky!

Chloe.

She's our little fastidious child.  She may come in a small little body but she's surely the most persistent of our progeny.

She decided her dad had a few premature grey eyebrow hairs and that just wouldn't do.  And so, like any emboldened and meticulous child would do, she took matters into her own hands and rid her father of them.

This is the frightening little scene that I walked downstairs and saw:

Thank goodness for my iphone camera! I keep it on silent just for this purpose.  Silent Mode = Stealth picture snapping.

She enlisted the help of her cousin Madi to hold the light on her
dad's face so that she could get down to the very important and ultra serious business of "feral-free facescaping".

As for Mark, he's either one brave dad, one desperate grey ridden man, or simply a whipped father.  Most likely a combination of all three.

And poor poor Chloe.  Should I tell her that her dad's about to turn the big 5-0 this December and that it's only gonna get worse?  Very soon this old man is gonna start needing more than just tweezers.

Grandma Can Do Hair!

Let's face it, hairdos have never been my strong suit.  Never.
My poor daughter Cheyenne grew up sadly lacking the latest fashionable hairdo trends.  I was awful with a curling iron, even worse with a hair straightener, and don't even mention the "f-word"...
french braids.  I've been doing this mom thing for twenty years now and I just recently discovered there's an actual difference between a ponytail and a pigtail.  Where was the memo on that? I thought they were interchangeable terms.  Then there's the subject of bows and ribbon.  And all I can really say on that is: absolutely not gonna happen.  This house has had a strict no-bow policy for two decades.

While Cheyenne always went off to school with a homeless hairdo, Chloe did a little troubleshooting and always sports great looking hair.  But quite honestly, it has absolutely nothing to do with me.  Nothing at all.  She figured out at an early age that if she wanted nice fashionable hair she'd better figure it out herself...

...or outsource her do's.  She borrows other peoples mothers who have amazing hair skills or she seeks out friends and family.  Here's Chloe her cousin Sheralyn Shumway and our friend Amanda Petersen trying Amanda's famous "Manny Bun":

But now that I'm (gulp) a grandmother, I thought I'd better try a little harder to develop a few basic mom-ish skills that I've so wretchedly lacked with my own kids.  And since my first grand baby is a girl, what better skill to try and tackle than the hairdo?!

And with a little gel and I think I've got something...

Not bad eh?  I'd even be willing to compromise on my "no-bow" policy.  It might add that special delicate touch to the Mohawk giving it that "My-Grandma-did-my-hair-but-really-I'm-a-girl-and-this-is-the-only-hairdo-she's-good-at-so-far" look.

This most successful hairdo really boosted my confidence.  I may start working on my other motherly shortcomings like scrap-booking with my kids.

Then again, let's not get ahead of ourselves.   

Caution: Baby

Cheyenne and Kendra were here visiting recently and when that happens Aunty Chloe gets all excited and hogs all the baby holding time she can as if Kendra were her own personal American Girl Doll.  Chloe will hold her non-stop and only put her down to sleep. 

The other day I walked into my bedroom and found this:

Apparently when Chloe put her down for a nap on my bed, she was so worried that because Mark and I are now decrepit grandparents,  that our declining vision would obscure the fact that our granddaughter was asleep on our bed.  So she solved the problem by making us this nice sign.  A sign in large print no less.

Cautious Chloe--and a little life saved by a pink marker!

Cart Cardio

Went to Target the other day to pick up just a couple of things--certainly not enough to merit using a shopping cart. A handled basket would have worked. But it seems Chloe had other plans.

Chloe, who had convinced Mitchell's friend Nick to come along with us, decided she wanted to ride in a cart. And not just any cart, mind you. Chloe wanted to take the HUGE ride in cart for a spin around the store. So she talked Nick into pushing her around in one while they followed me in the store. Nick, being a good adopted big brother to both Connor and Chloe, caved into her request and strolled her around.

You know the summer doldrums have finally hit when your kids look for entertainment by doing random weird things. Well that's what happened with these two. One thing led to another and soon the two of them convinced me to push them around the store.

 

I think I've discovered the perfect workout for mothers. All you need is a a bored little girl, an extra large teenager (also suffering from boredom), and a ride-in Target shopping cart. Your calves will be sore the next day but they're sure to get all nice and toned! It was excellent cardio AND it amused some bored kids.

 

Little Miss Sunshine--Almost

Chloe's 11th Birthday brought a freakish summer deluge of rain-two inches of it to be exact. Not a good thing when all she wanted for her birthday was a brand new bike. And when she got her wish, the poor girl was left sitting on the thing under the eaves of the house longing to take it out for a spin. But Chloe's never been one to be impeded by anything. She might be small but she's a tenacious little bugger.

After about an hour she couldn't stand it anymore and decided hell or high water,  she was gonna ride her bike no matter what.  And so she did.  She rode down the driveway in no particular hurry, getting totally soaked but ever so determined to have her day in the sun regardless of whether the sun actually showed up for it or not. She took her sweet time and then returned home with a converse skunk streak on the backside of her new birthday clothes.

The next big rainy day birthday hurdle was her party plans. She had decided she wanted a campout in the backyard with a few of her friends complete with tents, flashlights, and smores--and again, despite the weather, Chloe was completely undeterred. When there was no sign of the downpour letting up she simply insisted the garage be cleared of cars and left us with instructions to pitch the tent in there. (She also left us with a directive to plug in extension cords, a TV, DVD player, and a fan. Chloe displays true Skillman style--we like to camp but we certainly don't rough it when we do.)

Nothing seemed to deter her birthday splendor.

...That was until Little Miss Sunshine didn't get enough beauty sleep.

One thing that has been consistently Chloe is that from day one she has always gone to bed early and gets up waaay waaay too early--just like her dad. But her friends at her slumber party had other plans. Imagine that?! A gaggle of girls NOT wanting to go to sleep at a slumber party??  This was the only glitch in Chloe's plans that she could not outflank.

Very early the next morning, Chloe was the only one to arise and head in for breakfast. She deserted the tent and it's slumbering contents and came in the house and made a most serious proclamation like she was channeling the fervor of Martin Luther nailing his ninety-five theses to the church door:

"Mom, I will NEVER do that again. Nobody wanted to go to sleep. I have tried and tried but no matter what I do, I am just NOT the sleepover type."

Apparently our birthday girl has a limitation on how many tragedies she can overturn.

A Problem with Primates

Ahhhh, the end of the school year is here and Chloe is enjoying her last few days of elementary school. Next year she'll be in middle school with Connor, but for now, she's enjoying the fanfare the comes with the glorious long-awaited end-of-the-year grade school wind down: School Parties.

Today she and her head of three precariously perched ponytails bounded off to school for "Crazy Hair Day" and she's got all sorts of plans for tomorrow's "Backwards Day" but it was last Friday that really got me shaking my head. Friday was "Pajama Day", basically a day the kids all get outta bed and just head strait off to school. But everyone knows that there is one all-important tag along item on Pajama Day: the stuffed animal. Each year the kids show up in PJ's and slippers and clean out their backpacks to make room to bring along their favorite stuffed animal.

The first year Chloe got to do this she shrewdly asked her teacher what exactly qualifies under the term "stuffed animal" to which the teacher, falling into Chloe's baited trap answered, "whatever stuffed animal you like to carry around with you."

Bad answer.

This girl might be one of the smallest kids in the class but she is very capable and extremely willing to  carry around the mother of all stuffed animals. One that, for most of Chloe's life, was bigger than she was. Her preposterous penchant, yes indeed, was that little ol' Chloe loves her giant sliverback Gorilla.

Yes, alarming I know.

And especially nefarious since the one and only fear that I have had since childhood is an irrational fear of gorillas. In life's classic list of scary things, it is the Gorilla that has the dubious distinction as being my Achilles heal. The Boogieman, spiders and snakes, dark alleys, jumping from airplanes, you name it, I am not afraid. But show me a Gorilla and I will scream like a girl.

In a bizzare twist of fate that happened to me around the tender age of two, I have a distinct memory of being assaulted by, of all things, a Gorilla. Years later I would discover it was indeed not a real Gorilla at all but a prankster neighbor who happened to work for a Hollywood Studio in their Costume Department. And through some sort of not-so-funny ruse, this neighbor and my father concocted a plan whereby "costume boy", who'd taken a full-fledged gorilla suit home from work, would swing by our house on his way to a Halloween party and scare the living daylights out of my mother by ringing the bell and then going all-out berserk once she opened the door for what she thought would be just a gaggle of harmless little trick-or-treaters. Unfortunately when that fateful ring happened, it was more trick than treat: I was the one who answered the door.

Flash forward to the wretched scene where you find my two year old body curled up into the fetal position and screaming bloody murder and you have discovered the origin of my life long irrational fear of Gorillas.

This is a picture of me just one year later...

Yes, my parents, knowing my profound displeasure for hairy beasts, thought it'd be a real hoot to take my photo next to the Gorilla statue at the San Diego Zoo. As you can tell by the matching expressions on both my face and the Gorilla's, neither of us thought the idea was all that funny. That was the last day I ever had anything to do with Gorillas or monkeys. To this very day I've never even watched the Wizard of Oz in it's entirety. Once the flying monkeys come out, I get the heebeejeebees and flee the room. I've sworn off ALL hairy beasts-which includes a stern warning to my husband to never let his back get hairy!

Admittedly, if you're going to have an irrational fear of anything, Gorillas would be a good choice. I rarely run into them-which is to say NEVER. I am very careful at the zoo staying far far away from any anthropoid areas and that seems to be the only place that poses a primate problem.

That was until Chloe came along.

This dangable girl, for reasons unexplainable, zeroed in on the whole of the primates and decided that her favorite thing in the whole wide world was monkeys and gorillas. Over the years she has amassed a whole collection of them in stuffed animal form.

But the one she loves the most is a giant four-foot tall silverback gorilla. She's had it since she was little and spent most of her napping and book reading hours engulfed in it's arms. Tender, yet hairy isn't it?

And ever since she tricked her very first elementary school teacher into letting her bring it to Pajama Day, she has lugged the hairy beast to PJ Day every single year since. This year was no exception. When I drove to school to pick her up she wasn't all that hard to spot in the mass of school children waiting on the curb. I drove past all the kids with the cute little bears and bunnies and doggies and headed strait for the kid overshadowed by her beady-eyed thug.

As I got home I was thrilled at the notion that there would be no more stuffed animal-toting PJ parties for Chloe at the Middle School next year. And I grinned an evil smirk knowing the Gorillas Days would soon be numbered. Chloe would soon be distracted by other things and grow too old for hairy beasts and I would soon be rid of the thing.

Then I discovered Chloe has other plans. Devious ones. She has decided to woo another generation into her monkey madness. I came into the living room yesterday and saw this horrible scene:

She had swaddled her little niece Kendra into its arms!

 Then she propped a baby bottle 

into the beast's hairy hand and let King Kong feed her!

 Then, to my horror,

my own grandchild tenderly fell asleep in its arms!

Seriously folks, I HATE GORILLAS. Can't a girl just have her little irrational fear without provocation?

Thanks for Being a Nerd with Me

Chloe and her friend Keelin found some old 3-D glasses stuffed in one of our junk drawers and decided to pop the lens' out and wear them around for the entire day. Everywhere they went they wore their "nerd" glasses. I carted them around the whole day as if I was running a school for visually impaired children--these girls were very serious about declaring the entire day a nerdy one. We got a lot of goofy looks around town but these girls were undeterred.

After Keelin went home, we found this note she left for Chloe:

Just like a nerd, very polite.

BOY Did He Miss Out

Connor and Chloe like to go to Home Depot once a month for the Kids Building Workshop they put on so they can build whatever project-of-the-month they've got for the kids to make.  Like clockwork, the first Saturday of every month Chloe dons her little orange apron, forces Connor into wearing his, and then she reminds me it's hammer time.

But this month Connor opted not to go since all the projects lately have been decidedly way too girly.  Last month, because of Valentine's Day, he had to make--horror of horrors--a heart-shaped shelf.  So this time he decided not surrender his man card anymore by refusing to let his little sister talk him into going.

So Chloe and I headed to the Home Depot, minus Connor.  We decided to go and pick up her cousins since there was more room in the car without a stinky brother brave enough to come and swing a hammer with us.  We arrived to discover that this month's project was the mother of testosterone driven projects:

NASCARS!

Chloe with her cousins Madi and Janelle

somewhere amidst the toxins of the fertilizer isle, 

assembling their Nascars.

BOY did Connor miss out!

Connor was bummed when we got home.  He said next time he won't miss the workshop since things are looking up.  What I didn't tell him was that I already asked what next month's project would be...

... it's Easter Baskets!!!!

Shhhhhh! Don't tell him though.  I'm waiting to see the look on his face when he shows up and realizes he has to glue and nail together another stupid girl project.  [fade to evil laughing.]

Send Her to the Principals Office!

Chloe brings home piles of papers from school all the time and I usually heap them all in a big basket intending to look at them and see how her school is going.  The stack was getting pretty high, as was my guilt for not looking at them in such a long time which meant I was scandalously not keeping up on how she's doing in class.  I decided to flip through the papers and empty the basket out and it's a good thing I did.  Look what I found...

That's not the alarming part either.  The real scuttlebutt is what the teacher wrote after reading her paper and seeing that Chloe really wanted a little sister!

This sort of thing should have gotten her teacher sent to the Principals office!  Bad teacher!  Very bad teacher!  Remind me never to let Chloe have a genie in a bottle!

Love Notes

The two younger kids have been writing more love notes. They've got quite a History of Love Notes and you'd think by now they'd run out of creative ways to jot down an affectionate "I love you mom" but there seems to be no shortage of these little twilight tokens waiting for me on my pillow each night.

Chloe continues to pen more and more, shall I say, quite unique declarations of love.  She has apparently abandoned the hum-drum savoir-faire of a classic Shakespearian love expression and developed her own unconventional style.

Of late, Chloe's notes fall under six very unique love categories:

Bizarre:

(This one was written around Halloween, and now I wonder if we may have watched a few too many thriller movies with the kids.)

Random Bizarre Lists:

...and Koala Bears?

Subtle Complaints:

Subtle Requests:

Not so subtle Complant AND Request:

Luckily this complaint was aimed at the school for planning a field trip the day after school got back in from winter break.  

Apparently Miss Chloe would have scheduled it at a better time.

Funny:

And now it's clear that Chloe's loyalties for the Beavers

ended when they lost the playoffs.

And from time to time

Good Old-Fashioned True Love:

Connor, in stark contrast, sticks to the tried and true declarations, the kind that make you feel warm and fuzzy instead of confused and perplexed (but highly amused)--like Chloe's notes tend to do.

(one of Connor's favorite baseball pitchers)

The U.K.?  

That's real love right there, don't you think?

Awkward OR agreeable, you gotta love a love note.