Life Lessons

Lesson 1: Have fun with your kids.
The boys and I were talking politics the other day. This was their take on the President Elect;

Oldest boy (age 8, 2nd grade): "Nathan Freeman (not real name) told me that if Obama is elected president (this was the day of the election) then he is going to make a law saying you can hunt animals all year round."

My reply: "Hhmmm! That is interesting. Is that good or bad?"

Younger son (age 6 1/2, 1st grade): "I heard Obama hates dogs and always says bad things about dogs."

I can see that this is turning into a witch hunt so I decide to have a little fun with it.

My reply: "I heard that Barack Obama eats live human babies every morning for breakfast."

Both boys, with a mixture of fascination and disbelief: "Really!?! Are you kidding mom? Where does he get the babies? Really?!?"

Me: "REALLY! I heard it. Someone told me. It must be true."

Both boys: "You're kidding mom, aren't you? Does he really eat human babies for breakfast?"

Me: "It's true. Someone told me, so it has to be true."

Boys: "We can see you smiling mom. We get it!"

This was our first lesson in 'don't believe everything that you hear'.

Lesson 2: What's mine is mine and it's not yours!
Our next lesson, on sharing, occured the next morning.

Oldest son (to younger brother): "Give that back to me! It's mine!" (He's normally not too surly, but he was having an especially difficult morning and he yanked a pencil with photos of all the American Presidents away from his little brother).

Younger brother sits there stunned, still too dazed from having just woken up to put up much of a fight.

Lee: "I let him look at it. Give it back to him so I can explain something to him."

Oldest boy: "But it's MINE!"

Lee: "I told you to let him look at it."

Oldest boy: "But, I got it. My teacher gave it to me. He might mess it up."

Lee: "I'm trying to explain something to him."

After about 5 minutes of this, I couldn't take it anymore and my award winning mothering skills took over. I decided that I needed to provide oldest boy with an illustrative lesson and I took away the plate, but left him his toast.

"Give me that plate. It's mine! You know what, give me that cereal bowl. It's mine too."

This is where I officially lost it. I dumped his cereal on the counter and took away the bowl. My son started laughing at me and bent over and started eating the cereal like a dog off the counter. So, at this point, I decided to use my hand to push the cereal off the counter into the sink saying, "You know what? Give me that cereal too because it is also mine."

Both boys and my husband stare at me like I've lost it. The lesson in sharing quickly devolved into yet another example of how suddenly and seemingly little provocation mom can go from normal person to stark raving lunatic in just moments.

Lesson 3: Don't ever have rodents as pets.

Snowflake escaped. She plotted and planned and she succeeded. When the mice moved from our daughter's room to the boys' room they started escaping from their cage. The boys claim that they had never assisted the mice in their flight to freedom, but I don't believe them. Lee moved the mice to our spare bedroom thinking that this might solve the problem, but when he went to check on them this morning, Snowflake was gone. Coincidentally, there is a stange odor in our backyard. It smells remarkably like a dead animal. But, I don't think Snowflake could decompose that quickly and after a pretty thorough search, we couldn't find any escaped mice, dead or alive. My solution to the problem was to let the other mouse (Piggy) go in the backyard and then in a couple of days tell the kids that both mice had escaped and we would be free of our mouse responsibilities (because I REFUSE to buy any more rodents), but Lee, suddenly getting all moral on me said he wouldn't participate in any mouse genocide. He told me that I could do it, but he wouldn't be a part of it and he didn't want to know about it. When I reminded him that my mom made my brother and I set our mice free in the back yard when we were little he said my mom had been a sad and sick woman and obviously I was still suffering the effects of my childhood. To make matters worse, when I went to check on Piggy, she looked lonely and depressed. When I told Lee that I thought Piggy was depressed he said, "Of course she's depressed." Then I thought he was just shitting me, but he assured me that mice can definitely experience feelings of loss and sorrow. Now I feel bad for the poor mouse that her girlfriend (I'm not sure if Piggy and Snowflake were lesbians. They might have just been girlfriends in the sense that they are/were both female and roommates) is gone and I'm feeling like I should go out and get a replacement mouse. So, now I'm depressed because I'm never going to stop having pet mice because they keep dying or running away. In the mean time, Snowflake is going to start stinking soon.