Posts Tagged ‘Fort Worth Mom Blog’

The other night we took a night off from camping at the mall and Vince and Brand (aged 12 and 14) went into Barnes and Nobel. I was glad to see they still had some interest in print media, since their obsession with something they call a PSP, which seems to be a later-day Game Boy which also plays movies, has been nearly all encompassing. When they came out with a Mad Lib book, I wasn’t too disappointed – Mad Libs keeps kids busy and teach them grammar – actually, kids who do Mad Libs are the only ones I’ve ever seen who can tell an adjective from an adverb.

They started right away, doing their own Mad Libs by themselves in the back of the car. “Let me hear one of those,” I asked.

“No, no,” they assured me. “These are not mom approved.” Then we went ahead and we all did one together.

The next morning, I saw the Mad Lib book. I know what I was going to do. I opened it up the first page and read the non-mom-approved Mad Lib. It was as I expected. Mad Libs are funniest, when you’re 12 and 14, with four letter words in them, especially modified into adjectives. I closed the Mad Lib book. I remembered some stuff I’d written when I was their age, which I discovered when I was in college and destroyed; afraid it would fall into enemy – or anyone’s – hands. These Mad Libs were no different. I put the book of Mad Libs back down where it had been. No need to take this up with them. It was just a phase – for once in my life I believed this old parenting axiom and wasn’t worried.

Up the next morning, and the kids are fighting over the mini-boxes of cereal. They never get sugared cereal at home except on holidays and on camping trips. It’s not enough that they are angry at me about how many boxes they can have per day, one, but they get mad if someone else eats “their” box of cereal. Now Vincent, who can’t get up as early as the others, his body just won’t move before 9 a.m. on a non-school day, comes out and starts yelling and throwing things because someone ate the last mini-box of Golden Grahams.

This has been happening a lot around here. It’s almost so bad that I feel like threatening them with not buying mini-cereal anymore, except that I try not to make threats I don’t intend to carry out and the tradition of the mini-cereal on the camping trip is sacrosanct, going back to my own childhood. Maybe someday General Mills (which, we learned from reading the box, uses whole grain in every cereal product) and Kellogg’s will find out that mini-cereal’s profit margin is not enough to justify their manufacture. But so far, so good. Every year I go to the grocery store to get them and wonder and worry if they are still being manufactured until I find some.

Brand comes into the car to complain about the one-box per day rule. “Sorry Brand,” I tell him. “You can have some instant oatmeal. Besides, I’m about to go to the store and get sweet rolls and we’re going to have bacon and eggs too, so you don’t need to eat so much.” This calms him down and he goes out to get instant oatmeal, which he eats the Boy Scout way, which means, he pours cold milk directly into the bag and eats from the bag with a spoon. Barbaric, but saves on dishes, which could be a generalized description of camping as well.

The other day we went to my brother’s house for a swimming party with him, his wife, and their the kids. Yes, I know, I didn’t mention that my brother lives in Mankato too. I have to apologize to him for not giving him top billing on the beginning of this story – for not saying that it was visiting him, as well as my father, that drew me here.

Okay, fine, I wanted to see him too, it’s true.

My brother and his wife have just celebrated their 20th wedding anniversary and when we show up, the news of the day is that their oldest child, a daughter, is getting ready to leave home and move to New York City, because she wants to be an actress and things in this Southern Minnesota town are just too slow and dull for her. The parents are less than completely thrilled by their daughter’s choice of destinations but are trying to be good sports. My nephews, ranging in age from 16 to 9, seem more in tune with the local way of life – they love sports, video games, WWF, and hamburgers and hot dogs – and they also come out and play in the pool which is fun.

We have hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner and roast marshmallows in a brazier by the pool, which is a great time. Then my brother gets out a few of the fireworks he bought last year in Missouri and the real fun begins. These are not sparklers and bottle rockets; they are miniature copies of the real fireworks set off by the firemen in displays at football stadiums and over rivers all over America. My brother is going to shoot them off from his own backyard. Not much to worry about, he reasons, except for them being illegal in Minnesota. But if the police show up, he will just sweet-talk them out of ticketing him. My brother is a lawyer and he can be very persuasive, both with civilians and cops. Probably, as they used to say, he could talk a hind leg off a donkey if he tried.

He starts off the show with a red rocket that he fires by planting the launching-pad stick in one of his wife’s decorative flower urns. The rocket shoots into the sky and explodes with a lovely waterfall of light, which is small but more dramatic since it is not particularly far away, maybe 100 or 200 feet above us. . Next, a green one, and then a white. Now he brings out a huge fat firework. “I wonder what this is,” he says at he places it on the ground on it’s built-in platform. We all back up. I wonder to myself if I am being a bad parent, letting the kids watch this and perhaps be endangered by his lack of firework knowledge?

“It will probably be just one of those Roman candles, that stays on the ground,” he says as he lights it.

The firework sits inert for a second. Just as someone cries, “it’s a dud!” a huge boom issues from the tube and a rocket shoots out of the package into the sky. Everyone jumps back. The firework explodes in three stages – red, blue, then white cascades falling down. Everyone says “ash.”

“Good thing I didn’t blow me hand off with that one,” my brother says as he goes to get another.

“It’s a good thing Bill and his wife got divorced and he moved out,” my sister in law says. “He would definitely be calling the cops right now.”

“Just let the cops come,” my brother says, “I’ll have a talk with them when they get here.”

“Did you know that four people were killed lighting off one firework on the 4th?” my sister in law asks. She read it in the paper. I’ve noticed that the Mankatoans all read newspapers, as many as three different ones a day, local, state and national. Only my father acknowledges getting news from the web.

“Four people killed at once by one firework? Where?” I ask. She thinks it was one accident, somewhere back east. I try to imagine this nuclear bomb of fireworks that kills with such abandon and can’t do it. I suppose I should look it up on the web, but since I’m not on-line out in the campground, I can’t browse Google to determine the true facts of the case. Perhaps this is how myths get started – newspapers or word of mouth stories are bandied around with not enough verified background information, and then embellished with fanciful conjecture, through necessity, because the bare facts alone weren’t clear and didn’t actually make sense. I sit back to watch the last firework in the show. We’re going to make it. We’re going to watch my brother’s crazy fireworks show and live, and thus stay out of the newspapers for another day.

This is all pretty exciting, I reflect, sitting here in the backyard, reflecting on fireworks, stories of home fireworks operatives who didn’t make it, and the threat of police action. My niece wants to go to New York City for the excitement and all, but if she really looked she could see we have a kind of excitement here too.

But no. It’s not the experience and adventure of a home fireworks show that she wants – it’s the eyes of the world upon her. And for that, she will have to go to the City. How that works out for her remains to be seen.

I wake up in the morning in Minneopa Park, where we are camping outside Mankato, a town of 50,000 people. The campsites are very private here, with none of that disarming feeling of sleeping on the ground with other people’s cars going rolling by, hoping they don’t get off the road and wander onto your tent.

I go out for a bike ride first thing and see three cottontail rabbits. There’s a large screen of trees between our tents and the road. The trees are not large, perhaps 20-25 feet, but there is grass between them, and boulders, round and gray granite ones, that were probably pushed here by some glacier that came out of Canada. I must ask my father where they started.

He’s here, in the campground, though like everyone else he’s still asleep. I suppose we can forgive that, it’s only 7:30. They didn’t wake up even when I train went by very close below us, down the bluff. We are sitting on a kind of ridge, just above the Minnesota river valley. Far off, in town, I suppose, you can just hear the interstate a kind of hum like a beehive, but it doesn’t sound like a center of civilization, like at home, it sounds like an outpost. I have the sense of being in the provinces.

I drink my coffee – percolated camp coffee, spiced up by putting a half pack of instant cocoa into it, for an instant Minneopa Park Latte – and listen to the birds. There are so many. One that goes eee—-oooo, and one that goes chucka chucka chucka, and one that goes more or less tweet tweet tweet and one that sounds a lot of R2D2 – and then a dog barks but the birds could not care less, they are up in the trees, safe, and they keep right on going. The camp sleeps. I drink my coffee. It’s peaceful, is all. That’s all there really is to say about it.  I feel less worried than usual, I drink my coffee, I listen to birds, and I relax.

After driving almost 1000 miles, we’re traveling down Highway 14 toward my family’s ancestral home in Mankato, Minnesota. After two days in the car, including one night camping out in the bluestem prairie of Kansas, we’re anxious to reach our destination, where we will spend the week. The terrain here is just as I rememeber it from when I came out to visit my grandparents here as a child – green swards of soybeans and corn, cut by long thin groves of trees running along a slough or bordering a pond or lake. The sky is filled with puffy clouds, as evening comes, and the air is a moderate 80 degrees.

I haven’t been here for years – six to be exact – and if it was’nt for our annual camping trip with my dad, I might have put it off for longer. But maybe I wouldn’t have, either. The children are now at an age when they can begin to appreciate the depth of the family history here. My father’s family has lived here since they immigrated about the time of the Civil War; and the grandparents that lived here were my closest extended family members in childhood.

What held the ancestors in southern Minnesota all these years, I wonder, when other families have wandered hither and yon? And how did I and my children somehow fall out of the loop to be born elsewhere? Is there something in Minnesota that makes them want to stay, or are they the type of people who would have stayed anywhere?

This is agricultural country, I reflect as I look outside the window. One who lived here would have the comfort of knowing that if food transit methods broke down, they would probably still have plenty to eat from local farms. Fall livestock can be seen in the fields as we approach Mankato along a two-lane highway bordered by old-fashioned telegraph poles. The road meanders, it, like my family, has been here a long time. During this week, I will try to figure out what it was about this country that keeps people generation after generation.

This week my parenting crisis involved a great deal of controversy of the people yelling back and forth at eachother type. It began when my sons, aged 12 and 14, came home from a friend’s and reported that they’d had a great time “airsofting,” which is apparently what you call it when you take special small guns, which shoot plastic pellets, and play a war game by firing them at eachother. It’s kindof like paintball. But you play it anywhere.

That wasn’t the problem. The problem was they wanted ME to buy them airsoft guns to use around here.  I thought about it for ten minutes, then said, “No, no tradition of gun ownership here. No airsoft guns.” And then the screaming the yelling, the complaining, the demands for an explanation began.

“I’m the mom, I don’t need a reason,” was my first reply. Then, to the older, “why didn’t you stay in Scouts, they had you shooting guns there, if you want to shoot so badly.” And finally, “leave me alone, I just got home from work, I don’t want to argue about this. If you don’t stop, I’ll give you extra chores.”

They skulked away. A couple hours later, after being a good kid, walking the dog, emptying the dishwasher, and talking with the adults at dinner, the older son came in to my room. “Can I talk to you, mom?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Why won’t you let me have an airsoft gun?”

Long sigh. “Let me think for a moment.”  Finally I said, “I do not think an airsoft gun is an appropriate amusement. I’ve always defended the rights of individuals to have guns, but we dont’ have them and I don’t want to start having them now.”

“But it’s not a real gun.”

“And that’s the other reason. This game you’re talking about, running around shooting your friends as if you’re an army man, it’s stupid.” He startled. How could I dare? I continued, “it’s a fake game simulating real violence. I want you to have real experiences, not simulated ones. Guns are for two things, shooting animals and people. Your ancestors homesteaded on the prairie and they had to take a gun out and shoot game, watch it bleed, and die, bring it back home skin it, gut it, prepare the meat and cook it. You have ancestors who fought in World War I, in the Civil War, in the Revolutionary war, who took their guns out and shoot at other men and my great grandfather died out there, and you want to turn this all into a game? Where we shoot at our friends? Not on my watch.”

He tried a few more times to start the discussion, but I think he knew he had lost. And this morning, when I asked him what that strange red cut on his leg was — it looked like a cigarette burn — he admitted it was a wound from one of the airsoft guns.  I gave him a look. He tried to explain that it didn’t usually leave a bloody mark on you, but I think he knew it was hopeless.

I believe that sometimes, yes, you just have to say no to your kids ideas.  So it’s not democratic, or whatever, this is my house and I’m not buying them airsoft guns. Call me a mean mom or whatever. If no one else supports me on this, I feel sure the ancestors do. I can feel it in my bones.

We had career day at our elementary school today.  Although I’m the music teacher, I did have to take a class to see one presentation, by the Southwest Dairy Farmers, which consisted of one representative dairy farmer, and one representative cow, a Jersey named Maggie.

“That’s my mother’s name,” one of the kids I was in charge of told me as Maggie was introduced.

The man who ran the show, Farmer Dave, wore a huge straw cowboy hat, sunglasses (he took them off for a second so, he said, we could “check out his eyeballs”) and a long, long handlebar moustache. He looked like a cross between a biker dude and a country western dancer. 

Maggie stood in the trailer, which opened so you could see her whole body, with only two metal bars holding her inside. She was pulling down hay from a net hanging in front of her, and looked as us out of the corner of her eye with an expression less friendly than that of Daisy the milkbottle cow, but of course not malevolent. She was, after all, a cow.

Dave told us a little bit about the importance of drinking milk — three glasses a day — and then demonstrated the milking process using a milking machine, all installed neatly in the trailer, with a door opened so you could see the fresh white milk splash into the collection bottle. It was really quite impressive. 

Before he started this job,  he said, he used to milk 600 cattle three times a day — they give more milk that way than if you milk them twice — and even with the machine that got a bit fatiquing. So travelling for the Dairy Farmers with Maggie was actually less work. He nows farms, we might say, public relations opportunities.

The presentation, for first grade and kintergarden, was short and sweet, emphasizing that milk comes from cows and it is good for you. “Take care of your body,” Farmer Dave said at the end. “Your body is going to be the most valuable thing you have until you have your own children.”

That was a fine way to end a fine presentation, and I gave Farmer Dave and the Southwest Dairy Farmers an A.

A couple of weeks ago, a piece of paper arrived on our doorknob, inviting us to a block party last weekend. It sounded fun — they had arranged for a bounce house and a visit with the fire truck. On the other hand, I had never been to a block party for our neighborhood — there hasn’t been one in a coon’s age, apparently — or met any of these people, although we’ve lived here for three and a half years. I was nervous.

Still, we needed to meet our neighbors, especially since the burglary and all. We got our hamburgers and cupcakes to share ready, and looked up the hill, to where the party was said to be occurring, around a bend in the road and behind a barricade set up by the city. We couldn’t see what or who was up there, or even if the party the flyer had announced was happening. What if we showed up and there was no one there?

I was too scared to go. I didn’t want to walk in like I knew what I was doing, when I didn’t. How could I gather more information before showing up? I looked at the kids. “Go ride bikes up there and scout out the scene.”

Perhaps they understood my feelings, because they hesitated, but then they rode up the hill. When they came back, they approved. “There’s one of these jump things, a bunch of tables, a tent-like thing, and some barbecues,” they reported.

It sounded promising. We walked up, reassured by the reconnaissance I’d ordered. And sure enough, our neighbors turned out to be good folks. Of all ages, the adults were wearing nametags with their address on them. And you know what — they were fun! We liked them. We ate our dinner, were never left standing off to the side with no one to talk to, and by the end of the evening, we felt like we’d gained some friends. Our local policeman stopped by and said no one on his beat had done the block party in 5 years … that’s too long. As the twilight came on and people began rolling up their blankets and carrying away their chairs, I felt real gratitude to those who’d put it on, and to the fact that I hadn’t chickened out, as I’d felt like doing.

Fortune favors the brave.

In childhood, we didn’t go to the cemetary on memorial day, since no one from my immediate family was there to be visited, and so the idea of the holiday to commemorate U.S. soldiers lost in battle was somewhat lost on me for decades.  It took many years, as many as I have now lived, in fact, for me to wake up one memorial day morning and ask myself  “who was the last member of my family to fall in battle?” Surely, there were some losses somewhere. My family has been here in the U.S. for a long time — the last immigrant arrival was 1880, and more than one line of descent apparently goes all the way back to the Mayflower — so surely someone served and fell in war.

I reflect: so far the men under 50 in our clan, like Bill Clinton, did not serve, although my father did, between Korea and Vietnam. The last member of the family to see wartime action was probably my great uncle Don, who flew in the Pacific in World War II; and my mother believes that my great uncle Herb must have been the one who brought the German Mauser rifle, said to have been taken from a dead German soldier, home to Minnesota from his tour during the U.S. invasion of Germany, and leave it to my grandfather.

To find an actual fallen soldier in the family, you’d have to go back to 1918, and the Great War. My great-grandfather, George, had been married to a young woman of his home town for long enough for my grandfather to be born when the marriage split up, a terrific scandal in those Edwardian days, and George decided, at the relatively late age of 35, to enlist in the service, to get out of Wisconson and away from everything and everyone there.  He served as leutenant, and is said to have died in March, 1918, somewhere in France, though his body was never found.

I asked my mother about this today, as she visited for dinner on her 70th birthday, and she retold the story. Right away my son chimed in, “if they never found his body, how do you know he’s dead?” he asked.

“He went out, and he didn’t come back,” my mother said, as she ate her birthday cake, “what else could have happened?” Suddenly for some reason, the whole situation seemed hilarious, and she was laughing, laughing helplessly. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know, it’s not funny, it’s not. But what were they supposed to think? He was gone.”

My son shrugged, satisfied, wandered off to play somewhere in the living room. She looked around at all of us. “You know, lately on the TV I heard the strangest thing,” she said. “Sure, there were unknown soldiers in the war. But they said that some of the guys who were listed as killed in action actually deserted and stayed in France. They just didn’t want to come back, they started a whole new life there. It occured to me that my grandfather could have done that. He would have had the reasons.”

We looked at each other. No doubt, either way, he was gone by now. But the idea of the alternative tragedies — killed in war, or living as a man without a country, in a foreign land, struck me as poignant. “Does anyone know any more about the story? I asked mom.

“You’d have to talk to my sister, she keeps the family history records.” My mom finished her coffee. “She has it all on a pdf somewhere. She even went to Wisconsin and checked the court records, talked to people.”

I stared at my mother. Suddenly the image of my ancestors flared up, large, living, and mysterious. It was a good way to feel on memorial day, to remember those who served, to respect, and to wonder.

I have been working as a long-term substitute music teacher, and that means I’ve been working full time. Though I can’t really feel it’s full time when I get out at 3 and can pick up my own kids from school. There is something so precious about the last two hours of the work day — you can rest, drink a cup of coffee, pick people up, talk, cook dinner, and help with homework.

School teaching is work, of course, and when you’re on duty, you’re on duty. As the music teacher, I have five classes from 8:15 to 12:05, and there are NO BREAKS in the morning. Then there’s two more classes in the afternoon. I do get an hour of planning every day, but I have to use it for lesson creation, since I have to come up with something for the kids to do. 

The lessons come out of a group of music books made by Silver Burdett, which combine student texts, large flip books, transparencies, support music, and sets of CD’s. These CD’s in themselves are remarkable. Each grade year consists of 15 or 16 CD’s of music from all over the world and American history, and one CD devoted entirely to Texas music. There are about ten times as many lessons as are needed to complete a school year, and I’m only covering six weeks, but still, in order to teach them you have to prep by learning:

1.  the songs

2.  the history of the songs

3.   the rhythms if the kids are going to play maracas or jinglebells or drums or triangles, and

4.  any dances or hand gestures.

I originally thought this would be a good job for me because it fit my schedule and location needs, and because I was asked — getting a long term job as a sub is at the school’s discretion, of course, and since you get paid more these jobs are somewhat sought after. But I am beginning to like it more or more, even to the level of considering teaching music over the long term. As I walk around the house in the afternoon singing to myself “I got shoes” or “Caballito Blanco,” some of the songs I”ve learned from the music books, and my own children tell me it’s just a little uncool, I say, “Don’t take my music away! This is my job, after all!”

And when the kids at school have a good time dancing the Vibora or the Rock and Roll Hokey Pokey, lessons I found, rehearsed and then taught, I admit, I feel very satisfied. So, for now, I am pleased with music teaching. I’m also pleased with the approach of summer and of payday.