"The Elfin Wars" OR "Once More Into the Breach"

I read this article in The Huffington Post, and it really got my knickers in a knot.  The key quote: "If you feel like a bad mother for not buying into the Elf on the Shelf, that's on you." Well. Can I just say that I feel like a bad mother multiple, multiple times in any given day, but never once has it had to do with an Elf -- shelved or free-range.

Here is the comment I left at the end of the article:

"The problem with "that's on you" is that YOUR kids are coming to school telling all the other kids that they got tickets to "The Nutcracker" from their elf. YOU are hosting parties for your elf, and staying up all night getting your elf up to cute capers and shenanigans, and nodding knowingly and disdainfully to other Elf-Lovers at the class Christmas party when a frazzled fellow mom expresses her angst about how much she still has to do before the grandparents arrive, and how the dog chewed the family elf, and how she wishes she could just once get her shit together. Most anti-elf mommies are not actually Grinchy about Christmas -- or even about the Elf. We do object to the Elf on the Shelf as a competitive sport. 

If you want to tear apart your house in the middle of the night every single night in the lead up to Christmas, that's on you. If you want to wrap a gift for every child in your house to be delivered every single day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that's on you. But when you post it on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, the Huffington Post, you are dumping it on me. When your kids make other kids cry because their families got "lame" elves, that's dumping it on them -- and by extension on me.  

By all means -- let's all parent our own kids. And let's support each other in our frailties, insecurities, and mistakes. But mommies competing with each other in the Elfin Wars (like the Hunger Games but with more powdered sugar) is one more reason why I will continue to speak up. 

[Interestingly the whole notion of Advent as a time of spiritual preparation for the birth of Jesus never seems to come up when mommies are flinging Elf anger back and forth at each other this time of year.]"

Harrumph, is what I really meant to say.  But the good news is that according to the article's title, I am [finally] a "cool mom." So that's something.

+++++++

Advent book!

An Amish Christmas is a great book that introduces the Amish customs of the Christmas season. Even without Santa or twinkling lights on the Christmas tree, these children see the wonder of Christmas -- and have lots of wintery Christmas fun, too!

You be the judge

Who can tell me what's hilarious about this picture? No, It's not that my Christmas wrapping paper is still at the ready as we all turn to face the sun, wearing our traditional and festive Vernal Equinox garb. That's just sad.

But look a little more closely. As I was shoving a pile of laundry out of the way so the vacuum could have a path, I glanced down at the cover story of this magazine (which I think was slipped into my bags as I was leaving the fabulous mother-in-law's place one night -- because she is never one to drop a hint when she can roll it up in a magazine and swat your behind with it).  People, I almost fell over laughing.  Or maybe it was crying.  I can't remember which.

I guess a place to sit is too much to ask for . . . .

 

Well so here's just a little update on my first day of classes at the community college:  What the hell?

Every student showed up to attend this composition class and receive the gift of my brilliance or at least snag a copy of the syllabus.  The class size is supposed to max out at 27, and believe it when I say the doodahs and pooh-bahs bang it into our heads that no class may ever be expanded beyond that maximum number.  "Don't make any false promises to a student!  A closed closed is a closed class!" they say.

 So I was thrilled and not at all surprised to find 28 names on my roster.

And it was even better than that because this classroom has only twenty desks.  Being gifted at math, I used my fingers and my toes to count them up, and said to myself, "I think this might be a problem."  Then I took some students with me on a stealthy mission to steal chairs (extra actual desks would be too much to dream about).  I figured I only needed seven more.

 

So this nice-seeming girl went home after her first day of college and reported to her mom that she sat on the floor.  So that's tuition money well-spent, don't you think?

Snapshot: then and now

So some of you may remember that I mentioned once a long time ago that we had a hole in our carport ceiling from when the tall boy fell through it.  Here's how it happened:

The young tall boy (he was twelve) was fetching camping gear from the carport attic, in preparation for a Boy Scout adventure, when he stepped in the wrong place.  He crashed through the drywall ceiling of the carport, bounced off the top of the minivan, and landed flat on his back on the cement floor, right next to the trash dumpster.  Inside the house, the husband and I heard the crash, and seriously -- one of us said to the other, "Huh.  I wonder what that noise was."  Then we both picked up our coffee mugs and went back to whatever we were reading. 

And people, I swear that's exactly what happened.  When you think I'm exaggerating, or making something up for comic effect -- that is when I am telling the precise truth.  The stuff I make up cannot hold a candle to the shit that really happens to me.

Well -- after a spit take as we both realized that our beloved child was in the carport attic -- and the noise had come from the carport attic! -- we put down our coffee and strolled outside to see what all the racket was about.

Actually, I did make that part up.  Once we realized that the noise and our boy were probably connected, we did bolt out the door pretty quickly.  We're morons, but caring morons.

There was the tall boy, splayed like Wile E. Coyote after he chased the Roadrunner off a cliff.  The husband said, "Can you move, buddy?"  And the tall boy said, "Uh, no . . . ."

Insert all your own worst nightmares here.  They will be an accurate representation of the thoughts that ran through my head in slow motion.

While I was imagining my new life as the parent of a paralyzed child, and looking around for a discreet place to throw up, the husband responded to the horizontal tall boy:  "Listen.  Is it that you can't move, or that you're afraid to move?"  And the tall boy shot his father a pitying look.  "Dad.  I just got the First Aid merit badge.  You're not supposed to move a back injury."  And the world bounced back into place.

After determining that our boy could in fact move his fingers and toes, his arms and his legs, the husband got him up off the ground and dusted him off.  "What do you say we head on over to the hospital and see if you're brain-damaged?"

The tall boy laughed dismissively.  "No way, Dad!  We're going camping!"

And that was the end of that.

* * *

Well, so the hole in the carport ceiling was huge, and needed repairing in the worst way.  But somehow we never quite got around to it.  I have joked that we are lazy, and it is true -- but we're not that lazy.  In the ten years since the hole appeared, we have painted almost every room in our home, replaced flooring, renovated our kitchen, built a lovely fireplace mantel, gutted, designed, and restored one whole floor of our house, replaced a deck, and put up a split rail fence.  Some of these chores were accomplished by hiring professionals, but many of them were done by us, our own lazy selves.

And yet the hole in the carport ceiling lingered.  Why?  What was the weird dysfunctional thing going on that would not allow us to get rid of this unsightly and dangerous and embarrassing open wound?

I have no answer.

But it's gone now!  Our long national regional local pathetic nightmare is over!

And somebody needs to slap me, because I did actually say out loud to the husband, "You know, if we wait just a little longer, we can have a tenth anniversary party for the hole . . . "

I'm drowning in twelves -- and I can't stop singing about it!

Well, I mean -- what kind of Advent book selection did you expect on the twelfth day of the twelfth month of the twelfth year?

You all know, of course, that the twelve days of Christmas are actually the days from December 25 to January 6, when the western church celebrates Epiphany or Three Kings Day.

But those freaking twelves have been calling to me all day.  

And just for fun and because I have done nothing to get ready for Christmas, where nothing equals not one damned thing -- and because I am getting just the teensiest little smidge of a bit angsty about it -- here is a festive little Merry Christmas song that the fabulous Woodbridge Singers used to wow 'em with.  This twenty-first century choir does a swell job, too: