There’s an old Chinese proverb that says, “If thine enemy wrongs thee, buy each of his children a drum.” Apparently, I greatly wronged a writer friend of mine, for this week she gave my 4.5-year-old triplets a drum set. And now, in a very loud domino effect, I am poised to greatly wrong my neighbors. And everyone within a three-block radius.
You think I exaggerate about how loud three little boys can bang the drums? Read More…
I consider it a good day with my 4-year-old triplets when I only get hit with a hammer twice. That was the case yesterday, when the boys built wooden buses at Lowe’s home improvement store.
I discovered the free kids workshop completely by chance. A few days ago I dashed into Lowe’s to get some paint samples. A sign on the door said, “Build your own bus!” Well that certainly got my attention. I am the mother of three future bus drivers, after all. Read More…
I stink. No, I’m not referring to my writing, or to my editing, or to my behavior or personality. I mean me, my body—I stink. I completely, absolutely, totally reek of coffee. The ironic thing is, I hate coffee. I can’t stand the taste of it, and the smell is only mildly tolerable to me on its best days. Nevertheless, I am awash in the Eau de Coffee Bean. Read More…
My husband’s bachelor party was at a Padres baseball game. In the middle of the game, he caught a home run ball hit by the Pittburgh Pirate’s Midre Cummings. We considered it a portentous omen: surely this marriage was destined for greatness.
Flash forward fourteen years, to our wedding anniversary. Instead of the two of us holding hands over a romantic candlelit dinner, my husband was with one of our four-year-old triplet sons at a Padres game. It was the little boy’s first game ever, and Daddy was over the moon at the chance to share his love of the Pads and baseball in general with his progeny. Two days before, he was sharing the same experience with one of our other sons. And the day before that, the third boy had his grand baseball adventure. The Daddy/Son Padres Extravaganza ritual has been the same for each boy, at the insistence of the boys themselves. And, no surprise to me, it required Mommy to act bizarrely in public: Read More…
Being a lifelong tomboy, I know nothing about eyeliner, lipstick, or mascara. I do, however, know a lot about blush. The natural kind, that is, the kind you get when your three-year-old announces to your mother that the cushion on the car seat’s 5-point latch is there to “pwotect my p-nis.”* The kind you get when your sons sing the latest song Daddy’s taught them—“Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh, what a relief it is”—to your mother-in-law as she helps them in the bathroom. The kind you get when your friend is visiting and one boy suddenly hollers, “Tootie! I did a tootie!”, setting off a chorus of mimicking cries from his celebrating brothers. That’s the kind of blush I mean. Read More…
My boys were going on 17 days without a bus ride—this, after a year of multiple daily bus rides in Lowestoft, England—and they were feeling it. Big time. Every time we drove by a San Diego city bus, they strained in their car seats to take in its beauty for as long as humanly possible. Their eyes absolutely begged for another bus ride . . . and so did their mouths. “Mommy, when will we get to ride one of those buses? We haven’t been on a bus in forever.” Because to 4.5-year-olds, 17 days might as well be forever.
So, we rode a bus. Read More…
I’m driving the wrong car. I should be in a sparkly blue hot rod. Lowered. With tinted windows and Dayglo green underlit carriage. Can you picture it? Me in a rockin’ lowrider with music blaring. Hey, it wouldn’t be any less ridiculous than my reality: Me rockin’ out in the driver seat of a silver Honda Odyssey minivan, my windows vibrating from the music pounding inside.
When the boys are in the van, I stop at “12” on the volume indicator. Out of curiosity, I just checked the level I set it when I’m alone. 28. 28 what, I couldn’t tell you. But seeing that, I worried a tad. I don’t want to be deaf by age forty. So I turned it down to 26. Within two stoplights, though, it was back to 28, and in two more, it was at 30. Ah, just right… Read More…
It was bound to happen. At some point, on some day, over some thing, my sons would let fly with their first four-letter word. The thing is, I didn’t expect that four-letter world to be ‘head.’
‘Head’ is now illegal in my house. I declared it so after trying uselessly to ban the words my three four-year-olds were building with it: pudahead, tootiehead, boodateendeehead… I know, the names aren’t offensive and could even be funny, if you didn’t have to live with them the way I have the past few weeks. Read More…
I never used to worry that my three four-year-old sons would be eaten by cows. Apparently, I was living in denial, for those cows in the marshes up the road from us were just biding their time….
On the night before we started our journey back to San Diego from Lowestoft, England, my husband went out to the Dolly’s Dumplings Cache in Carlton Marshes Read More…