Asshole Monday: Kid's birthday parties

Everyone wins when kids get to paint stuff

Hey everybody! My apologies if this blog is incoherent or just completely retarded (I know this word has been deemed inappropriate language but I have to disagree. I would never call a mentally handicapped person retarded, that would be mean. But I am retarded sometimes and I can call myself whatever I want) but I am typing it up from an iPad.

Oh, no no. Wait. Don't get me wrong. This isn't mine. I don't own an iPad. This is my sisters and she is wonderful and she is letting me use it while my phone just keeps on deciding not to work (please, first generation iPhone, don't crap out on me. I'll die) so I can do important things like check Facebook, email people and write a blog about using an iPad. You are all welcome.

Today (written Sunday) was Garrett's sixth birthday party. It was the first pool party that we have had at this house and I have to say it was... I have no idea. I wasn't there for it.

Look, people. We all know how much I love him and Whitman and they really are wonderful kids the majority of the time and I honestly like all kids (well the good ones) but there is something about kid's birthday parties that I cannot stand. I don't know if it is the loud noises. The frenzied grabbing of presents. Children running around in circles. Crying. Screaming. Convulsing. Fits of laughter. Jealous rage. Crazy sugar freak outs. The constant need for juice. Inflatable things. Things deflating. It's just all too much so I usually bail.

Look how happy and calm.

His birthday party today was at my actual house so bailing completely wasn't really a valid option for me. So I did what every good nanny does; I helped out with whatever I could help with and then I drank in my room. Duh. It was hot as hell outside and there is just no way that a dozen or so screaming kids is going to make that any better for anyone. Maybe having all those kids in one place at one time all going crazy is what I dread the most? I dunno. I just really can’t stand kids birthday parties and if the day comes when I have to throw one, I am not exactly sure how I will survive it. Maybe it’s different when it’s your kids?

There was an episode of The Office (when it was good) where Oscar describes something that he doesn’t really want to go to but he goes anyway and he likens it to a kid’s birthday party “There really isn’t anything for you to do there, but the kids are having a really good time so you’re kind of there.” Yes. Exactly.  You are kind of there, standing awkwardly, waiting for the kids to stop having fun so you can go.

I had to take Garrett to a birthday party last weekend. A party for one of Garrett’s school friends. A kid’s birthday party where I knew no one. To say I was dreading taking him is an understatement. But I had an idea. If I can take him, drop him off and then come back and get him, that would be ideal. I am not his mother. I don’t have to make friends with anyone. I am not there to plan play dates or swap recipes or whatever the fuck it is that mothers in the ‘ville do at these things. I just had a kid, that isn’t mine, that wanted to go to the party so leaving early sounded like the best option…but it didn’t to Garrett.

Before we got there, he was adamant that I stay. I guess he needed that sense of security that someone else he knows is there? I don’t know. I also think he thought I wasn’t going to come back for him which is preposterous (but maybe not unwarranted???). To say that I was dreading taking him is an understatement. I had terrible visions in my head of chit chatting with people and small talk and fake smiles. But he really wanted to go so of course I would do whatever he wanted. I got him to the party (fashionably 10 minutes late) and I walked him to the backyard where all the other kids were. I stood there making my presence known so Garrett would know that I wasn’t going to leave him and then something pretty amazing happened: He told me I could leave.

Garrett came over after playing for less than two minutes and he said “You can go now, Stacey. I will be fine. Just come pick me up in a few hours.” At this point I was equal parts proud, relieved and excited. I reached out to give him a hug for being so brave and he gave me this look that said “Please don’t hug me in front of my friends,” so I said “I won’t hug you now” and I gave him a little pat on the back. He said “Thank you” under his breath and ran off to play. I should have been overwhelmed with love and adoration for this kid that is growing up so fast but really I was just happy that I got to leave. If I had been forced to make awkward small talk with Collierville parents, things would have gotten hairy.

“But, Stacey,” you are asking yourself (no), “Is there any kid’s birthday party that you don’t hate?” Yes, yes there is. There is one exception to my kid's birthday party avoidance rule: when I get to make stuff.

For the past two years, Whitman has chosen to have his birthday parties at a pottery painting place and I was all about it. If I get to paint, color, sculpt, trace whatever, I am down. If I can make a fucking teddy bear, where do I sign up? Yes I know that the painting is for the kids but I don't have any of those. Don't invite me to a kid’s birthday party if I can't count for one of those kids. Sorry but those are the rules. If I ever get one of those kid things, I will let them do all the cool stuff (and I will sulk quietly to myself) but for now, I am painting a unicorn, dammit and there is not a thing you can do to stop it.

No, seriously. I painted a unicorn. You can kind of see it here.

Cute? Yes. Smart? Ehhh...

Before I begin, there is this:

Does anyone out there know who you can most definitely fool with the "Ewww! That smells horrible, come smell it..." routine ??? A four-year-old. Shocking. I know. We just played a quick game that was fun for the both of us and also pretty ridiculous for two smart individuals such as ourselves. It alll started with me taking out the trash...

There has been this funk smell wafting through our household since this morning and it is pretty grody. I determined it was most definitely our garbage can so I took the garbage out. Whitman could smell it from where he was standing and he looked curious as to what was smelling so badly so I said "Ewww. This smells awful, come smell it..."

He was, of course, happy to oblige. He came over and put his whole face in the garbage can and took a whiff and he concurred, it smelled pretty rank. To see his "this smells terrrible" face is pretty funny so I just took him around the house and told him to smell stuff and to tell me what everything smelled like. According to him everything smelled bad. We killed a good 30 minutes just smelling things. Anyone who says that small children are hard to please is the dumbest person imaginable. Moving on...

I know that I have said before that at times parents think what their kids do or say is way, way funnier to them than it is to anyone else. And that is all well and good. However, I really hate to break it to some parents that their kids aren't that funny. In fact, I am sure some of them may be a little bit boring. Hate if you must (haters gonna hate), but come on. Even the parents of boring kids know their kids are a little boring. Quit lying to yourself, it helps no one.

Garrett and Whitman just so happen to be really cool and funny and amusing to everyone on Earth. It's true. I've seen it. And I am an excellent judge of character and entertainment. And that is how we got to this:

In truth, the idea for this video was must grander and funnier than it turned out being, but it's a super cute kid doing stupid noises. What is not to like? Come on, now! I fear we will not be the next YouTube sensation but someday Whitterbug is going to be grateful to see how weird he used to be as a kid and he is going to thank me for this. I just know it.

Please ignore my very, very country-bumpkin-ass accent. It is terrible and I am not the most fond of it:

Again, I am sure it is lame to anyone that isn't related to this kid is going to be bored to tears, but it's the little, really stupid things like this that make me gush with parental (not a parent) pride. I am easy to please, what can I say, really?

Oh, and hooray for Friday night blog posting. To anyone that thought I had a life, you were so very wrong. Egg. All over your face.

We Like to Express Ourselves Around Here

Everything you are about to read happened in an eight-hour time span. You are about to read about Garrett and Whitman's Day of Terror. Please do not let this one day deter you from thinking these are the sweetest, coolest two boys alive, I assure you that they are but sometimes they have these moments that instill the sense of baffling fear an awe-inspiring pride. I call these moments: Hilarious. That's all.

It is impossible to keep an eye on small children constantly, especially when these two children happen to be brothers that are 18 months apart in age. When they were babies, they never got into anything. Even when they learned to walk or crawl, they only played with things they were allowed to play with. We have never had any crayon drawings on the walls or broken lamps or shattered glass or anything else that toddlers tend to fuck with that they have no business being around. They always kept to their own stuff. And I honestly don't mind giving them their privacy. They are very young but that doesn't mean they don't deserve some times to themselves, right? So I like to give them their space and if they need me, they will let me know. But I always check on them. We do a "Marco Polo" kind of thing every ten minutes or so just to make sure everything is kosher. A surefire way to know when these two are up to no good is to listen. If you hear nothing, you had better go check. Immediately.

We are a fan of gummy vitamins. We like gummy bears and if you put vitamins in a gummy bear why would you not eat it? That just seems silly. The label on the vitamins very specifically says “Keep out of reach of children” for obvious reasons. It’s a jar of gummy bears, duh. I gave Whitman his two allotted gummy vitamins for the day and put the jar back.

I left them to their action figures and playing "Star Wars Clone Wars" which is basically just the both of them beating the shit out of each other with plastic light sabers (if you call them "swords" around here, you get an ass-chewing). They were fine and I could hear them fighting and trying to decide who would be "Obi Wan" and who would be "Alligator" (Whitman calls Darth Vader "Alligator", cutest thing ever). And then I heard nothing for a second. I went downstairs to check on them and Whitman had a nearly empty jar of gummy vitamins in his hand. I asked who ate them, they both know they only get two, and Garrett confessed. He ate about 60 gummy vitamins when the dosage for adults and children is two a day.

If anyone was wondering what happens to a small child when they ingest way too many gummy vitamins, the answer is: nothing. I wouldn’t recommend it because I was fearful for his health for a second there but he lived through it without a stomach ache or whatever.

I checked on them a few more times and about the fourth check-in of the day I went into their room and saw this:

I thought this was some sort of misguided crafty project that Christy did with the boys Sunday morning, it was not.

While I was sleeping Sunday Morning (I got up around 10:45, which is earlier than I would have liked) and while Christy and Ron were outside painting, the boys were going through the kitchen drawers, collecting sharp kabob skewers, stealing two oranges and one apple out of the fridge, cutting that apple in half with something (I am guessing a knife, we have yet to find said knife), skewering the oranges and half an apple and hanging them around their room. No adult had any hand in any of this and they did it without anyone knowing.

I thought Christy, admiring their creativity, hung up their fruit art as a source of pride for her children, no no. They got it up there on their own…somehow. Christy even asked them what the purpose was of this nice display of produce and creative toddler fuckery and Garrett replied “It looked like it needed something there.” Something meaning: stabby fruit art.

I was one part horrified they could have seriously injured themselves from not only cutting the apple in half but stabbing the fruit repeatedly and with a certain amount of force with admittedly sharp skewers. And I was also one part proud of them for choosing to express themselves so oddly. Where did they even get the idea?

I swear I would never let them watch The Blair Witch Project. That was the first thing that came to my mind, but they haven't seen it and I wouldn't let them until they were at least 10.

After taking the pictures Garrett asked me if I was going to take it down and I replied that I wasn't and he said "Thank you, Stacey!" and he did a little dance since he got to keep his bit of artistic expression. So funny. So sweet. He was very proud of...whatever it was that he did...

So proud that he and Whtiman wanted to put something else together for me. So I had to go my room and wait to be called upon. Garrett had the bathroom. Basically he just set all of his action figures and Bakugan dumbassery on the bathroom sink and he told me, "Hey, if you brush your teeth can you try not to knock these over and if you do can you put them back?

Whitman his his room and he just piled his action figures on a table and showed them to me. He's simple but classic.

And, of course, he is showing me his toys and picking his nose. Hey Whit! When you are old enough to read this you will see that I had pictures of you picking your nose for the entire world to see. Sorry (I am not, you know better than that).

I finally corraled them both into my room to play Angry Birds on my phone. They both sat there quietly for a while until Garrett got up to pee. It took him a  while but he gets side-tracked from time to time. He wasn’t gone for five minutes, I mean that. He obviously had this idea in his head and he waited to go execute it while I was occupied. Kid's a genius. He comes back from the bathroom with a water bottle in his hand that he had all day. He holds the bottle up to Whitman's nose and tells him to smell it. I immediately put my hand up to shield Whitman from whatever was going to come out of that bottle which would have been piss. Yes. Garrett went and pissed in a water bottle and brought it back to Whitman. He thought it was hysterical. I was trying my hardest to stifle my own laughter but I held it together. I stayed strong!

Later on they were in the guest room/ office and Garrett now knows how to open up iTunes and play Big Time Rush on a continuous loop. He was in plain sight listening to the music and jamming out when Whitman was quiet and no where to be seen. He was hiding in the closet doing this:

Ron has one of those stamp thingys that stamps your return address on your mail because he’s fancy. I have absolutely no clue what this type of stamp is called but it’s one of those that if you push down and it flips around and stamps whatever for you.  Whitman found  it and covered himself with it. Because why wouldn't he? However, this might, sort of, be my fault.

Whitman and I like to look at tattoos together. I read a lot of tattoo blogs and I like to look at them in general and Whitman joins me most of the time. He will sit in my lap and we will look at pretty tattoos while he tells me what he would like for me to get (mostly Power Rangers and Storm Troopers) and he comments on which ones he finds "awesome." He sees my tattoos and he still can't quite grasp that they are never, ever coming off. He loves temporary tattoos and he also likes to draw on himself and call it a tattoo, so when a child finds a rubber stamp that looks not unlike a tattoo, of course he is going to cover himself in it, right?  It makes sense to me!

Needless to say, Whitman went to school with his address on his face today. It wasn't coming off easily.

But look at how much fun he had with it? I had little chance of keeping the hysterical laughter to myself any longer so I pretty much died at this point. 

At this point during the day I was both exhausted and vigilant. Under no circumstances were they to get another one over on me. Not a chance. So I watched them like a hawk and, of course since a half-assed adult was in the room, they were perfect angels. Of course I can't exactly say that if they hadn't come to me first and presented each of their ideas to me beforehand I wouldn't have worked something out with them in compromise. If Garrett could logically have told me that he was going to piss in a water bottle and that it was a good idea for some reason, I would  have heard him out at least. I mean, come on, I am reasonable...