Life According to Me

Kid One is on the verge of 15. A High Schooler. At 3 o'clock, everyday, I morph into the Mom Taxi, as I collect anyone who needs a ride. First, the elementary pick up. Next... High School . Driving up to the behemoth of a school Kid One attends, I feel like I'm on safari.   All the interesting characters mingling about, in their natural environment. If you've ever made the trek, you may relate to this observation... High School girls look like Real House Wives Of The Jersey Shore. Boobs. Tanned. Extensions. $350 Jeans. Stilettos. Designer handbags. BMW's. They look like their 25! I want to be them! I ask Kid One, "Is that a STUDENT ??!" "Yep..." Egads. When I was in High School, the girls looked like they were in High School.  Not like they were waiting for their own reality show. Pobrecitas. Step away from the tanning bed. Cancel your botox appointment. Get an Ed Hardy Intervention...ST...

I was listening to a news report about a woman who put her kids out of the car and made them walk home(around the corner) due to their unruly behavior. Old School. She caused a shit storm for herself with her technique. We are living a time of "it's everybody's business". Had she done that 25 years ago no one would have blinked. When I was a kid, my cousin and I would sit on our Holly Hobbie metal lunch pails, strapped in with a lap belt...in  the back of a 71 Ford Pinto. Moms in the front seat, s ans seat belts , flying down a road they called "Blood Alley". Old School. No One blinked. My lunch pail contained my sandwich made on white bread with mayo and salami , and no little frozen freezer cube to keep it chilled properly so I didn't get food poisoning. Old School. No One blinked. We rode in the back of my Dad's pickup truck...on the freeway....and pretended to fly. Old School. No one blinked. From age 12-17, every chance we got...

I'm standing in the bathroom putting on mascara. Kid One pops in. He watches me for a moment. A very curious expression spreads across his face. We make eye contact. "Is it really necessary to make that FACE when you put that stuff on??" I look back at my reflection in the mirror. Hmmm...I wonder if it really IS necessary? I try to apply the mascara without making the mascara face .  I poke myself in the eye. My eye shuts tight. When I open them, I have black smudges around my eyes. I look like a line backer. Kid one speaks first. Ohhhhh.... wow. Nevermind. You were doing it right. Oh. Gee....Thank you, Captain Clinique.

A few years back, we took a trip to the mountains smack dab in the middle of winter. During a blizzard. We spun out into oncoming traffic. The windshield wipers broke. They closed the road. There we were trapped on a mountain highway with Kid One (8) and Kid Two (10 months). This was before we had a car with entertainment properties. I know. Tragic. Kid One kept asking if we were going to die. Maybe. Kid two only stopped crying if we played The Copacabana...over and over and over. Not sure why we had Barry Manilow in the car, but I'll be forever grateful to Lola who was a show girl and liked to bump it to a good beat. That trip left and big ugly memory scar . I swore we would never make a trip again if it was snowing. And we didn't. Untill Easter 2010. We decide to spend the Holiday in the mountains with family. It was April. Blizzard Schmizzard. We get to the summit. It's Snowing. Lots of snowing . I give myself a little internal pep talk. Yep...

Mommiedom is  all  and  nothing  it's cracked up to be. Just when you think you've figured it out, someone puts a marble up their nose. Or sticks little suction cups all over their face, resulting in a polka-a-dot hickey pattern. Or draws a sharpie clown face.... I'd like to thank Kid One and Kid Two for giving me a fantastic black hole of things to write about.  (Happy "Macaroni Necklace Day" to all my Mommie peeps!!)