Easy as 1, 2, 3

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."

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."