Angie Kinghorn

You know you’re a mom (of multiples) when…

You know you’re a mom when you start to sound like your own mom.  You know you’re a mother of multiples when you start to sound like your own mom and you don’t care.
Yesterday, for example, I arrived for preschool pickup to find the hallways of the school smelling strongly of bleach and a haz-mat team running around in full spacesuits.  A sign on their usual classroom door told us that the children were in another room.  After I collected their bags and coats, I found the room and lined up with the other mothers waiting at the half-door to collect their children.  When it was my turn, I asked about the change of locale.
“Well,” the teacher said, “Somebody had an accident in the old classroom, so we had to evacuate.  Just so you know, it might be,” her voice lowered to a stage whisper, “contagious.  We like to alert all the parents in these types of situations.”
An accident.  Okaaaay.  Toxic waste spill?  Influx of malaria carrying mosquitoes?  Swine flue?  Asian bird flu?  Whooping cough?  
All around me, mothers with infants in strollers were coaxing their three year olds into their coats, periodically shrieking, “No!  Don’t touch the baby!  You’re contaminated!”  
I looked at the teacher.  “What kind of accident?”
“One of the kids…got…sick.”  She moved her hands as she spoke, vaguely circling her stomach area and then lifting them skywards.
“So he vomited.”
“Yes.  Like I said, there was an accident, so we evacuated the classroom immediately.”  
I was perplexed.  Vomiting kind of comes with the territory when you’re talking about preschoolers.  “Did this child throw up on the other kids?”
“No.  Just, you know,” she dropped into her stage whisper again, “all over the floor and stuff.”
“Well, were the kids stomping in the puddles or finger painting with the vomit?”
“Of course not!”  She looked scandalized.  “We evacuated immediately.”
Seriously.  Evacuated?  What was this, Chernobyl?
“Ok, great, sounds good,” I said, herding my kids off to the playground.
My mind was whirling, attempting to do math (a dubious prospect at best).  Remnants of high school biology led me to conclude that if this kid was throwing up today, he was well and truly contagious yesterday, and that all our kids had been thoroughly exposed.  It’s not like this was thrilling news, but it hardly seemed like the apocalypse.  If we were gonna get sick, we were gonna get sick.  There’s not much we could do about it after the fact. 
We went out to the playground for our daily after-school play time, a non-official playgroup of sorts, and I took up my usual position with the other mommies, watching our kids slide, climb, throw sand, and generally get filthy.  
Our preschool is usually a laid-back kind of place.  Many of the mothers attended when they were children.  There’s no crazy emphasis on academics; they like to let children learn through play.  Listening to the mothers on the playground yesterday left me feeling like I was in the twilight zone.
“My God, I can’t wait to get them home and throw them in the tub.”
“Oh, I just hope she doesn’t touch the baby!  I cannot deal with a sick baby.”
“I just want to scrub him down with Purell.”
“Who was it that threw up again?  Why was he in school?”
Watching the twins climb the massive playset to the slides, shrieking, I put their bags down at my feet.  “This is so weird.  Remember when we were in elementary school?  You know, when a kid threw up in school, they’d just move us all to the other side of the classroom until the janitor could get to the class, and then he’d sprinkle some powdered stuff on the mess, sweep it up, and then everything just kind of went on.”
Crickets. 
Then, a chorus of, “Oh,  yeah, I remember that!”  
“Yes, that stuff that was like kitty litter!” 
“It’s amazing any of us lived!”  
And then the crowd dispersed, each to her own minivan.  Where, I suspect, many children were scrubbed down with Purell or whisked home for de-contamination.  I wish I could say that I whipped out my own Clorox wipes, but quite frankly, my dear readers, I didn’t give a damn.
Instead, I took the kids to the grocery store, and during our first stop in the produce section, I turned around to bag some grapes, and when I turned back, my daughter was chowing down on the ice in the apple cider display.
I’m so getting my Good Mommy card revoked.

 

My husband left me last night

My husband left me last night.
I don’t know what happened.  We haven’t been fighting.  None of the signs were there.  No strange phone calls or texts, no hot babes at work that might have turned his eye.  Sure, he’s been stressed out about work, but that doesn’t make a person just up and leave, does it?  
There was no warning.  No indication he was anything less than happy.  
Until he walked out and crushed my entire world.  He came home from work, still in his suit, and when the twins ran to him as usual, screaming, “Daddy!” he took their hands and led them out to the car.  He loaded them in their car seats as I watched, asking repeatedly what he was doing and where they were going.  For a minute I thought we were going out for pizza, but that’s usually a Friday night thing, and so that couldn’t possibly be it, and then he turned around and his face was stone overwritten with thunderclouds.  He marched back into the house, his eyes passing over me like I was nothing more than a kitchen chair.
I watched in disbelief as he picked up the dog.  He yelled something over his shoulder about the pineapple on the kitchen counter and then he left.  Just like that.  He left.  My legs rooted to the floor and I wanted to wail, but I couldn’t move.  I screamed inside, so loudly that I clamped my hands over my ears.  
The screams tore through my whole body, and there was much gnashing of teeth.  I clamped the pillow to my head to make it stop, please just make it stop…and then I realized it was all a dream.
“Honey?”  The hubster peered down at me, trying to see around the pillow still clutched around my head.  “What’s wrong?  Do you have a migraine?  Do you want me to get your Imitrex?”
I sat up.  My clothes were drenched and my body had pummeled itself into one big heap of aching muscles.
“You left me!”
“What?  I’m right here.”
“You…you fucking left me!”
By this point he was back in the bathroom, razor in hand.  I swept my legs from the tangled sheets and followed.
“How could you do that to me?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about you leaving me.  Walking out of the house and not coming back.”
The hubster had the nerve to laugh.  “Honey, it was a bad dream.  I would never leave you.  You know that.”
“Well, you did!  You left me!  You took the kids!  You took my dog.”  I looked in the mirror.  Hello, hell.  My eyes were bloodshot and puffy, and as I spat my nightguard out, I noticed my cheeks were actually swollen from the aforementioned gnashing of teeth.  My head was shot through with the icepicks that herald a migraine.  The bastard.  
“You’re being ridiculous.  I didn’t leave you.  You had a bad dream.”
“Oh, you most certainly did leave me.  And when I begged, no, pleaded to know why, all you would tell me was some stupid nonsense about how I hadn’t bothered to cut up the pineapple yet.”
“Ok, that sounds awful, but honey, I didn’t do that.  My dream self did that.  I would never do that.”
“Oh, that’s right you wouldn’t.  Because you know what I would do?  I would call your mother.”
That stopped him in his tracks.
“My mother?”
“Yes.  I would call your mother, and then you’d hear about what a rat bastard you are for leaving your wife.  And taking the kids.  You even took the dog!”
“Ok, calm down.”
“I can’t calm down, I’m in hell!  You left me and you won’t even say you’re sorry!”
The hubster put down his razor and gathered me up.  He said, firmly, “I.  Would never.  Leave you.  And I’m sorry my dream self did.  He can be an ass.”  Then he hugged me to his slightly damp from the shower chest, and even though I could feel him shaking with suppressed laughter, I felt better.
“Yeah,” I said, wiping tears from my swollen cheeks.  “Ok, I forgive you.  But don’t even think about doing that again.  Hey–stop smirking!  I saw that!  Hell, my whole day is shot.  I have a migraine.”
“Why don’t you take an Imitrex and then we’ll go down and have some coffee?”
And so we did.
And I couldn’t help but notice when I came downstairs, that the kids were chowing down on pineapple.  Pineapple that my dear hubster cut up, just so I wouldn’t look at it and get mad at his dream self again.
I love this man. 

Get Fuzzy
*Get Fuzzy by Darby Conley

This post was written for Mama Kat’s Writer’s Workshop.  Prompt: “And then I realized it was all a dream…”

When Mama said, “Eat your veggies,” she didn’t mean these.

Every summer, my husband plants a garden.  Not just a plant or two, but a decent sized patch of land.  He amends the soil until it’s black (no mean feat when you live in the land of red clay) and full of things like mushroom compost and manure.  He forms neat rows of soil for the tomatoes, okra, and peppers, and hills for the cucumbers and our one disastrous experience with pumpkins.
This year the kids are three, and we thought they would enjoy helping with the garden.  He told them they could plant something, and being the little “Max and Ruby” addicts they are, they demanded carrots.  So the hubster bought a packet of carrot seeds.  
Here’s the thing, though.  Neither of us knows a damn thing about how to grow carrots.  Not sure where we went wrong, but here’s the first horror that have come out of our garden:

When the hubster came inside carrying the first one by its long, skinny root, I screamed and thought it was a mouse.  The kids played with it for several days, making it squeak and run across the floor.  Several carrots later, our son picks the most deformed versions  and chases his sister around the living room with them.
Needless to say, we have not attempted to eat the mutant carrots.  Of course the kids wanted to know why, and the hubster had the perfect answer.
“Why can’t we eat these carrots, Daddy?”
“Because they may be carrying the genetic code of Satan.”

People, you just can’t argue with that.  Even if you’re three.

A Friday flip-off to the asshats who don’t comprehend the rules of the road

The word of the week is asshat.  Ahem. 
If that offends your delicate sensibilities, you may want to stop reading now.
Definition (as provided by the Nerd Mafia Dons):


Asshat: noun, (slang): asshole.  From the slang expression, “having one’s head up one’s ass,” thus wearing the ass as a hat.  The term is extended to people who are clueless or bumbling, who don’t understand what’s going on.
Urban Dictionary’s helpful addition:  A person, of either gender, whose behavior displays such ignorance/obnoxiousness that you would like to make them wear their own ass as a hat.
Originally I was not pleased with this word of the week, because every time I read “asshat,” my mind wants to pronounce the “sh.”  Similar problem with the word “sweetheart.”  I want to pronounce “th.”  Anyway, asshat has turned out to be a most appropriate word.  Lately I’ve just about worn out the horn on the minivan, and I’m trying valiantly not to cuss in front of my kids, so I have a lot of pent-up road rage.  And so, I am carpeing the diem to rant at the asshats of the road.
Dear Asshats,
Yes, you.  You there driving ten miles under the speed limit when I’ve got to get my kids to preschool.  And you!  Yes, you Mommy midgets making fun of my Swagger Wagon while craning to see over the steering wheel of your Suburban and juggling your Starbucks and cell phone.  I’m talking to you!
Months of pent-up road rage have led me to the sad point of your collective flipping off.  Wait, am I talking to you?  How do you know if you’re an asshat?
Start by checking  your head.  If your ass is on top of it, then, well, you’re an asshat.  Even if your head is ass-less, if any of the following apply, I hereby find you guilty of asshattery:
  • You’re reading this at a stoplight.
  • You’re reading this while operating a moving vehicle. 
  • You park the wrong way in angled parking spots.
  • You expect other cars to make room for you as you leave the angled parking spot going the wrong way down a one-way row.  An especially big flip off to you if you honk at ME as if I’m a dumbass while trying to get your car out of a place it never should have been in the first place.
  • You park your giant SUV next to my Swagger Wagon and ding my sliding doors.
  • You’re the person who scraped my rear bumper a few weeks ago and left nothing but a small dent and white paint behind.
  • You don’t use turn signals, because guessing is so much fun!  
  • You clearly have the right-of-way at a four way stop but insist on sitting there and waving everyone else through.  That’s not chivalrous; it’s stupid and irritating and creates confusion and potential accidents for everyone involved.  When it’s your turn, GO, asshat!
  • You park in the handicapped spot while dropping your kids off at preschool so you can make it to your spin class on time.
  • You make everyone behind you wait while you back your car into a parking spot.  (Exception if you’re James Bond and might really need to peel the hell out of Dodge.)
If any of the above qualifies you as an asshat, flip off!
Feel free to comment and share your own Friday flip-offs. 
Love to all (asshats excluded).


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