Daring Young Mom

Love Songs For Jerks

Posted on February 15, 2013 by The Daring One

Yesterday, I tried to get romantic. It’s Valentine’s week and I was feeling lovish so I got out my Nashville soundtrack CD, cued it up to what is currently my favorite love song and left it in Dan’s car so he’d hear it when he headed to work in the morning.

I worried that he’d get in the car, think, This is not Jazz. Why is this not jazz? and turn it off, so I told him to listen to the song I’d cued up because it contained a special message.

When I said I love this love song, what I meanter say (channeling Hagrid here) was that every time I listen to it, I cry and I want to tell Dan to quit his stupid day job, come home and hold me. HOLD ME!

So I waited to hear back from him. Did he love the song, even though it had lyrics and a discernible melody? Did he feel the same as I, perhaps even wiping away a phantom tear of romantic ecstasy?

His responding text said, “Um… I hope you pressed the button one too many times. It was about how you can see through my lying cheating ways… :-)”

Now, I like to mess with Dan. It brings me pleasure. He plays along. I call it flirting. RE: he is my boyfriend.

There was the time I put pigs’ feet in a prominent place in our kitchen cupboard and waited to see how long it would take him to notice them.

Then there was the time I went out to his car every night for weeks and tuned his radio to the Mexican Mariachi band station at a deafening volume so that he’d enjoy turning on his car for his commute in the morning.

But this time I was sincere, and very romantical… But I did press the button one too many times. What I wanted him to hear was this:

What he got was this:

Not quite as Valentinesy. I’ll make it up to him soon. I’m making him the best, weirdest belated Valentine’s day present ever. I will keep you posted.

Posted in he's so fine he blows my mind, save me from myself | 2 Comments

Worst Haircut in the World

Posted on February 3, 2013 by The Daring One

Magoo’s hair had sprouted into this huge, massive muffin puff that could look cute and current, if every hair were arranged just so. BUT. If one hair were arranged not so? Bam. Street urchin.

So tonight I decided to de-urchinize him. I’d never done a real boys’ haircut with shears myself, or even a Pinocchio’s haircut. But still I pulled out the scissors. I was super nervous and he could smell my fear. The scent of my fear became the seed of his terror and he began to tremble exceedingly.

He did not want me touching his luscious locks, not even coming near them. And eeehhheeeheeee. Stop! The water spritzer tickled. And the scissors hurt his hair as I cut. Actual pain. Apparently, he is a mutant with living hair.

“Don’t worry,” I said, “I won’t give you a mullet.” Although I wasn’t sure what I would give him. I was just cutting things and spritzing and cutting more things and combing like a hair stylist might do if she were in my kitchen of a Sunday evening.

“What’s a mullet?”

“It’s the worst haircut in the entire world.”

Without missing a beat, he grimaced and said, “You mean like Dad’s?”

“Please blog that,” was all Dan said as he left the room.

Posted in he's so fine he blows my mind, kid stuff | 10 Comments

Tuppence Per Each Bag

Posted on January 28, 2013 by The Daring One

I’ve been trying to eat well lately. In theory I’ve been trying to eat well all my life, minus college. In practice I’ve been getting progressively better for the past 5-10 years. I’ve very recently turned to a hard-core, stop-eating-anything-that-doesn’t-taste-like-a-literal-nutrient way of eating.

I’m struggling with perplexing health problems and if you have perplexing health problems, eventually you turn to examining your diet and when you examine your diet, you find that if it tastes good, there are at least ten people who live on the internet who will tell you that what you’re eating is causing your specific problem.

I don’t listen to those ten people because they obviously hate brownies.

However, last week my naturopath told me that I should consider severely limiting my grains. Also, my “random thoughts that come into my head right after I finish praying” told me I should severely limit my sugar intake.

Blech.

So I’m trying to eat like a good girl, I am. Lean meats and vegetables, baby!

But there are days when Doritos must be imbibed. So, I was having one of those days but I was trying to have it Drops-of-Awesomely, focusing on the fact that I only bought the supersized personal-sized 50% more bag, instead of the supersized FAMILY-sized 50% more bag. I planned to enjoy every morsel.

Then Wanda walked in. She had many questions, questions about what I was eating, about why she was not also eating it, about, please please, could she please eat it.

So I shared.

Begrudgingly.

If I was going to unlimit my grains, I wanted to unlimit them all the way down.

But she had cuteness on her side and I really shouldn’t have been eating that much grain, much less that much grain coated in nuclear cheese dust. I should be feeding it to my sweet, growing child person.

She started plowing through the chips faster than I would have thought possible. She’d grab one, say, “Thanks,” and leave the room. Two seconds later she’d be back for more. With increasing dog-protecting-his-bone-ish-ness, I handed them to her. Grrrr….

We made short work of the bag and I continued my quest to eat things that are green and crunchy and capable of making me feel smug and self-satisfied when I notice them hanging around like a lump in my stomach and later coming out in Dr. Oz approved luscious deposits.

But, as I went outside later to pick up my kids from the bus, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a mother lode of Doritos all over the porch and front walk.

“Look!” Wanda grinned, “I’m feeding ALL the birdies!”

It was obvious from the sheer number of slimy glowing orange chips that the birdies had absolutely zero interest, or they assumed that something the color of a construction cone was inedible, from previous painful personal experience.

So I smiled and congratulated her on her good deed-ery, sighing at all the lost cheesy goodness. And when she wasn’t looking, I threw them over the fence into the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. I don’t know what goes on back there but we have found animal bones. And broken clay pots circa AD 1985.

Now all that’s left to do is put on all my Newsies-colored dresses and skirts in multiple layers, tease my hair like a crazy rock star homeless person and start singing on my front porch steps. “Feed the microscopic organisms in the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. Tuppence per each bag.”

You know you’d pay money to see that. Way more fun than giving your coin to those mean old guys at the bank, right?

Posted in aspirations, food, kid stuff, poser in granolaville, save me from myself | 10 Comments

Sunburnt

Posted on January 22, 2013 by The Daring One

After six years working with the teenage girls at church, I’ve moved on to a new job. It’s… a “little” different. The class of three-year-olds in the Mormon church are called Sunbeams and I’ve written about the experience of teaching them over at the Time Out For Women blog.

“Sunbeams are warm and lovely, vibrant and life-giving. But if you get too close, they will incinerate you.”
[read more at TOFW.com]

Posted in faith, fun, fun, fun, save me from myself | 7 Comments

Just Love Em, Dad Gum It

Posted on January 20, 2013 by The Daring One

The weirdest thing happened at dinner tonight. My little angel babies of light were *gasp-snork* fighting with one another. And it wasn’t a good fight or a noble fight. They were not fighting to protect the honor of a fallen comrade or to maintain their basic human freedoms.

They were fighting about whether or not Magoo had seen me and Dan kiss. He maintains to this day that he NEVER sees us kiss. We’ll kiss in one room and he’ll yell from the next room, “I didn’t see that!” It’s sort of a joke in our family. Well today Dan and I were on the make-out war path. He’d kiss me mid-sentence, whenever he thought Magoo could not possibly miss seeing it.

Magoo would calmly close his eyes and say, “Didn’t see that.”

Well, by golly, Laylee was pretty sure he had seen one of them and she would not stand for the lies, those dangnable, dangnable lies. If a person has seen two other people snog at the dinner table, he’d better darn well man up about it.

She would not let it go.

“I didn’t SEE IT!” he protested.

“Yes you did,” she persnicked.

“Did not.”

They would not stop. Dan told them to stop. Then he commanded them to stop. But they just kept nitting and picking at each other. Tears were shed and the war waged on.

Dan encouraged them to use kind words. “We just need to build each other up. I know you love each other. Why say things that are hurtful? Will this fight matter in ten years?”

“Well he did see it,” Laylee said in that really annoying voice of a Disney star, who’s bound to get busted for shoplifting or a DUI because she’s so mad to be 18 and still playing a 13-year-old snot face on TV.

AAAAAHHHH.

Then the thought came to my mind, the best way to behavior modify is to set a good example. You’re supposed to love them into wanting to be kind.

But that takes too long.

Maybe if I love them really really hard.

So I grabbed Magoo and asked Dan to grab Laylee and I said, “You guys are obviously sad because you don’t feel loved enough. We’re just gonna love you until you can be kind to each other. We’re gonna love you like widdle babies, yes we are, goochy-goo-googly goo.”

We scooped them up into our arms, 7 and 9 year old infants, giggling and struggling to get free.

“Do you feel loved enough to be kind? I just want to love my widdle Magooly-face until he feels the love in his heart just spilling over into the way he talks to his sister. Do you feel loved enough?”

At this point we were rocking them back and forth and everyone was laughing.

“Yes, I feel loved, I feel loved. Put me down!”

So we did. And the cycle was broken. The fighting stopped. Stellar parenting? Not necessarily. But it got the job done. Love heals all, even raucaus, what-the-heck-are-you-doing-Mom love.

Posted in kid stuff, parenting, scaring the neighbors, What Thompsons Do | 5 Comments

Stop! Person Who Made a Poor Choice and Stole Something!

Posted on January 16, 2013 by The Daring One

I would title this post, Stop! Thief!, but that would mean labeling one of my children and from what I’ve read in these here parenting manuals, there is no such thing as a “bad child,” just a child who makes poor choices. Although, if you read Dickens, there is such a thing as a “poor child” and according Robert Kiyosaki, there is also such thing as a “poor dad.” But that’s neither here nor there. The sweet little fruit of my loins shoplifted this afternoon, bless her heart.

Wanda is not highly diabolical. In fact, she’s not even the most diabolical three-year-old I know. She is an addict, always looking for her next sugar fix. And her head often resembles a muffin. One might say she was muffin-headed. But she pulled a pretty smooth con today.

So, we were at the grocery store today, buying the supplies for the OhMyGoshICan’tTellYouHowMuchILoveThem meals from my meal planning service and Wanda was a big help. She helped me throw the giant butternut squash on top of the other produce. She helped me develop stronger resolve to eat healthy by asking me to buy every single processed food in the entire store. She helped me load items onto the conveyer belt. And then she helped herself to a baby bottle pop.

I’m not sure where she hid it or why I bought her a coat with pockets, but I didn’t notice the thievery until we’d driven home and I went to unload her from her seat. She was grinning from ear to ear and her entire body, car seat and inside the car seat buckle mechanism were covered with pink toxic sugar dust. She was SO proud.

I didn’t know quite how to explain to a barely three-year-old pumpkin face about the wrongs of stealing. But I did know we needed a memorable lesson, so I gave her a simple definition and my best “I’m disappointed but I still love you but oh NOOOO this was not a good choice” talk.

We drove back to the store. She gave a muffled apology to the Customer Service manager who, coincidentally, was also her church nursery teacher last year. Then I made her empty out the dollar and twenty-five cents from her allowance envelope and give all of it in payment for the pilfered merchandise.

She was slightly stricken but handled it all pretty well, frequently burying her face in my sleeve.

Then our friend handed her the candy she’d just purchased and I DUN DUN DUN… took it away.

That’s when the emotionally fueled detenatory convulsion occurred. I carried her from the grocery store, sobbing and yelling, garnering pitying looks from strangers. I’m not sure if they pitied me or Wanda. Maybe both.

It’s so hard to be a three-year-old felon. Even if you don’t have to wear hand cuffs. Even if your mug shot looks like this.