I'm told that when dealing with kids, keep it simple. That's why I came up with 3 easy rules that encompass all a child needs to know in order to peacefully grow up in my home.
Rule #1: WTAM
WTAM stands for Would This Annoy Mom? I teach my children to ask themselves this before doing anything. That loud, repetitive cackling sound? You bet that annoys me; don't do it. Whining? Don't even think about it. Saying my name over and over again? Just. Don't.
I borrowed this reminder from the church crowd. Remember WWJD (What Would Jesus Do)? That acronym was sold on bracelets, Bible covers, t-shirts, bumper stickers, and anything else the Christian bookstore could think of to sell. And so in that same preventative spirit, I decided to make it simple for my kids by providing 4 simple letters to keep themselves in check.
Rule #2: Clean Up After Yourself
Really, who doesn't have this rule. But let me ask you this, how do you enforce this rule? I have a 2 step approach to implement this.
1) I throw it away. I find that my best cleaning is done with a big, black trash bag. Once it's in the garbage, we never have to put it away again. When my kids go through some economic depression in the future, they can look back on this time as the fat years when mom chucked the broken toys instead of fixing them.
2) Ban the kids from whatever made the mess. Some parents think that motor skills determine when a kid can cut with scissors, use glue, or enjoy play-doh. For me the litmus test is whether or not they can clean up after themselves. Honestly, I could care less what they are making. Whether they are tinkering with land mines or blowing flour from a hair dryer, it is all fine with me. But if they can't clean up after themselves, then they have no business doing any of those activities.
Rule #3: Make Me Laugh
At some point, the kids will break these rules. But if they can make me laugh, then I'll let them go scot-free.
Only one of my children as taken this last rule seriously. The other day, Pearl came to me with a pen in one hand and a clipboard in another.
"I'm going to ask you a series of questions and I want you to respond with very funny, funny, not very funny and not at all funny," she said writing something down on the paper. She began to tell me some jokes that the kids learned from school and told over the dinner table over the past few weeks. "Now I need you to tell me the funniest joke that you've ever heard in your life."
"Pearl, why are you asking me all of this?"
"I want to understand your humor so that when I get into trouble, I can make you laugh and not get into trouble."
This whole process tickled me so much that I think I might gloss over the next few of her infractions.
On the surface, these 3 rules probably come across as selfish. But I assure you that I'm teaching them a valuable life lesson. We all need to learn to make the one in charge happy, right? Doesn't everyone look busy every time the boss comes around? It's no different in my house. As the old adage goes, "If Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy."
There once was a woman who lived in a shoe. She had so many children, but she learned just what to do. The children laughed at mother from morning til night and learned all of their lessons mostly right. To keep their memories close to her heart, she blogged all their adventures as her work of art.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Monday, January 13, 2014
The Smoke Alarm is My Dinner Bell
It's
no secret that I'm a bad cook. In fact the smoke alarm in our house
has become our dinner bell. One day smoke poured out of the oven,
the alarm went off, and instead of anyone screaming or cowering in
fear, my children's attitude was nonchalance. My son leaned over from
where he was sitting on the couch and yelled up the stairs to the
other children that, "Dinner's ready!"
But
does the apple ever fall far from the tree? While there are wonderful
cooks in my family, it seems that bad cooking is a recessive gene
that pops up through the generations. I don't have much knowledge
about many of my ancestor's cooking skills, but I do know about a few
grandmothers.
The
farthest back that I can go up the ancestral tree is my paternal
great grandmother. According to my grandfather, his mother didn't
like her gig as a stay at home mom. Instead of doing housework or
perfecting recipes, she pined for a college education. With all of that
free time she had avoiding the kitchen, she taught herself painting
and literature because she was constantly learning. Her zeal for all things
cultured even lead to her acquiring 2 pianos despite it being the
Great Depression. Each of her children were required to practice
piano 5 hours a day during the summer and 3 hours a day during the
school year. And probably the most shocking of all was when she told
my grandfather to pursue concert piano because, "there's no
money in engineering."
After majoring in concert piano, my
grandfather did study engineering, and from what he told me, one of
the perks of college life was the food. While everyone else
complained about how bad the food tasted or how they missed their
mother's cooking, he happily overate. He told me that since his
mother's cooking was so bad, he was the only one at his college who
actually liked the food and gained weight.
Like
my father's family, my mother's family line also produced a memorable
chef. In the case of my Panamanian
grandmother, this lack of cooking expertise broke a famous
stereotype. You see, she was of Italian descent. And a grandmother.
An Italian grandmother. Usually, those two words together conjure
images of a warm-hearted woman who loves to push delicious food on
anyone who enters her home. Warm hearted she was not. Upon seeing me
shove spaghetti into my mouth and using my teeth to cut the noodles
(a method I still employ today), she challenged me. "What kind of
an Italian are you?" At that moment, actors on the
family room TV were correctly twirling spaghetti with a spoon before
raising a perfect little ball of noodles up to their mouths. "Look!
Even those American actors can learn the right way to eat spaghetti."
Even
if she wasn't warm-hearted, she at least did like to push food on us.
However, we didn't like the food. When she visited us after a
trip to Russia, she made borche. We kids still talk about that disgusting soup 30 years later. Another memorable food fail was when my friend spent the night and excitedly came to the table when she heard my grandmother grilled sandwiches for us. Maybe it was the frozen vegetables that my grandmother used to make it healthy, but these sandwiches were actually soggy instead of crispy. That's right. Soggy grilled sandwiches. I can remember being so embarrassed about my grandmother's cooking because I could hear my friend gag ever so slightly as she tried to get the food down. What always boggled my
mind is that my grandmother had no idea that her cooking tasted gross.
When she pushed food on us, she'd say in her thick Spanish accent,
"Eat it! But it's gooood for you!" It wasn't long before my
body cringed at those words, unlike Pavlov's happily salivating dog.
Staying
close to the tree, I haven't fared much better in the kitchen. I
loose count when I'm measuring ingredients, confuse 2 TBS of salt
when I should only use 2 TSP, or my classic move is to overcook food
because I forget that I'm cooking. Sometimes I tell myself that I can
make a recipe even if the key ingredients are missing, or I'll just
forget to put in the key ingredients.
Following
in my Panamanian grandmother's footsteps, I probably embarrass my
children when other kids spend the night. I have one nephew who
doesn't even eat here anymore. He will politely tell me that, "I'm
not hungry, Aunt Lizzy. We ate an early dinner."
And
this food legacy continues. So far, I have one daughter who loves to
cook like the wonderful cooks in the family and one who is falling in
my footsteps. The one who loves to cook is so serious about food that
she even plans to grow non-GMO food for the restaurant that she will one day own and where she will be the head chef.
However, my other daughter seems to
manifest the dreaded recessive bad cooking gene. Like her dear mom,
she's not very precise when it comes to following recipes and has
gained such a reputation for baking hard cookies that even her
classmates will cover for her and bring in food on days she's
assigned the task. They just don't want to be stuck with those hockey
pucks that she tries to pass for cookies.
It's lucky my house didn't
burn down the day she tried to make those cookies for class. It's also the
day my daughter learned what a convection oven is and how little time
cookies need to bake. The smoke in the house from that failed attempt
could have been used for "Stop, drop, and roll" videos. We now know that there really is clear air below the thick smoke. But who am I to
judge? I pity her knowing that she has to live with this crippling disability for the rest of her life.
But
so what? I fail at cooking and my food can be repulsive. I've come to
terms with it and I'm no longer apologetic. If my food was perfect,
wouldn't I be doing my kids a disservice? They would be so picky!
Now they will be able to go anywhere in the world and eat whatever is
put before them just like my grandfather did at college. And when
they are deep in the jungles of a foreign land and take their first
bite into that bug larvae and the guts squirt all around their mouth,
I know my kids' eyes will well up with tears, and with conviction
they'll say, "This tastes so much better than my mom's cooking."
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