This morning I thought I would go to the grocery store and buy milk. We were out of milk. So I thought I would go to the store and get milk and that would be that. We would come home with our milk, eat cereal and then get on with our lives and find the cure for age spots or build a fort in the den out of blankets. Either one.

So I mentioned to the little boy that we should get in the car and go buy some milk and if – IF! – he was a good boy and a cooperative boy, there could be something in it for him. It is probably an indictment of my parenting that I no longer even bother to pretend that bribery isn’t central to my parenting philosophy. It is. Don’t judge me people. Anytime I can buy some cooperation for $1, I’m in.

If you don’t have a three-year-old, then perhaps you are imagining that we jumped in the car, drove to the store, bought milk and a matchbox car and came home.

If you have a three-year-old, then you know that we didn’t leave for the store for another two and half hours.

What could take two and a half hours you are wondering? I wonder this too. Here is what I remember:

There was dawdling, dragging, dilly dallying, frittering, loitering, lolling and lollygagging,  slithering, dithering, stalling, straggling as well as horsing and monkeying around. There was a lost shoe, a boo boo, a shirt with an itchy tag and the grand finale — the announcement of a poopy diaper just as I snapped the latch on the car seat.

So then, we went back in the house and repeated the above in reverse order.  By late afternoon, I decided we didn’t really need milk that bad.

And there you have it. That’s what I do all day.

Last night, Sean and I were having a discussion about food and somehow or another, we got off on the subject of things he used to eat when he was a baby.

I told him about the two-ounce bottles that he used to drink from when he was first born and then later the little jars of food.

He was fascinated by the concept of little jars of food.

“Yes,” I said, “Back in the day, you used to eat all kinds of food, even meat! I used to feed you meat and fruit and veggies from itty bitty jars.”

“Meat? What kind of meat?” he asked. Here we go again with the meat I thought.

“Well there was beef and ham,” I said, “and lamb and chick…”

“Lamb? You fed me lamb?” he asked, appalled.

“Yes. And you liked it. And there was chick….”

“Did you feed me the fur?”

“Um, no, I didn’t feed you the fur.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh or wretch at the idea of feeding my child lamb fur out of a jar.

And then I changed the subject to vegetables so I wouldn’t have to tell him how the furless lamb got in the jar.

Sean has never been much of an eater, but when he was around 18-months old eating stopped almost entirely.  Somedays we are lucky to get five calories in him.  We try not to worry about it because watching us nervously wring our hands at the dinner table has not increased his appetite.  Wise people say when he’s hungry he will eat.  Wise people are wrong.

In an effort to encourage eating, we tell Sean that if he hopes to grow up to be big, he’s going to need to eat something — specifically something not made of orange dust or coco/fruity/frosty/gummy/happy stuff – something with protein to build bones and muscle, something like meat.  

Apparently he has been giving this concept some consideration because the other day we had this conversation:

 “Mommy, I’m going to start eating MEAT like you so I can be big –  like you!” 

“You eat MEAT all the time and you are willy willy big (holding hands out in front of him in a big circle.” 

“That’s fabul  ….. hey, I’m not that big.” 

“You eat sooooo much MEAT!  You eat hamboogas and pork chops and ham and wunch meat and woast beefs and chicken and hamboogas and…. (pauses to think up other varieties of meat) you are big Big BIG!” 

“Look dude, I’m not that big.  Okay?  According to the insurance charts, I’m average.” 

“Oh no mommy – you are SO big (again with the hands in the big circle) because you just eat meatmeatmeat all the time.” 

“You are big MEAT-eating BIG!” (making a circle from front to back like a hula hoop).

“Go away before I eat you.”

Whenever I’ve talked about how that at St. Cabrini, where I attended Catholic grade school, our 4th grade class saved up to buy a pagan baby, I’ve gotten one of two responses.  People who did not attend Catholic school in the 1960s will look at me in stunned silence as though I were from Mars.  People who did attend Catholic school will nod their head knowingly and sigh at the utter absurdity of the notion.

How does a fourth grader go about buying a pagan baby you might wonder?  Well, we brought our scavenged pennies and nickels into school and put them in a jar until we finally had enough to send off for a pagan baby, I guess from the pagan baby store which was probably somewhere in California.  That’s where everything cool was, or at least that’s what mid-western Catholic school kids thought.  If you could get your parents to move to California, then you could automatically be cool.  Anyway, $4 and some box tops later, or something like that, and we were the proud owners of a heathen.  I have no idea how much a pagan baby cost, no one ever told us, and being good Catholic children, we didn’t ask.

Eventually we would get a certificate of some kind in the mail.  The class would vote on a name and afterwards we would have a naming ceremony.  For a baby girl, Sister always pushed us to choose Mary something – Mary Beth, Mary Alice, Mary Margaret, Mary Catherine, Mary Jane, whatever.  The Mary list is endless. For a boy we were expected to choose a name like Matthew, Mark, Luke or John.  But in 1969 the names we fourth graders favored were names like Ringo and Twiggy.

Since it was a class vote with Sister having two votes to our every one, we compromised on Mary Twiggy. We thought it so very funny to exasperate Sister with our zanyness.  As a class, we were supposed to pray for the salvation of little Mary Twiggy throughout the school year. So you see, there was a seed of goodness buried deep deep within such a warped idea.  And somehow?  It made sense at the time.

I wonder what ever became of Mary Twiggy…

Originally published July 2006.

I have two or three boxes of maternity clothes in my closet that I can’t bear to part with or pass along.

Part of it is that my pregnancy was the most joyful time in my life and I want to hang on to that. The other part is that I had some darn cute maternity tops and dresses that I didn’t get to wear nearly enough. The pants? Not so much. Good riddance. There is no such thing as cute maternity pants.

So the other day when I was in my closet the boxes called out to me. And like Pandora, I wandered over and opened them up. The next thing I knew, I was standing in front of the mirror holding up a few of the blouses and dresses and reminiscing about when I last wore them and how fabulously pregnant I was.

And then, just for kicks, I tried on one of the tops and it fit pretty well. Yes, it was kind of loose, but isn’t that loose-peasant-y look kind of in style right now? If anyone can look like a loose peasant, it’s me. And then I tried on one of the dresses and I was thinking, this doesn’t look so much like a maternity dress. It has the little ties in the back and lots of non-maternity dresses have the little ties in the back. I could wear this to church. Who would know? And for a full minute, I gave that thought some serious consideration.

But ultimately, I put everything back in the box and stashed it away for fear that I might get into an accident on the way to church on Sunday morning and be found unconscious wearing a maternity dress. And it would be reported on the local news:

Jane: “Steve, This morning a Texas woman was found unconscious at the scene of an auto accident. She was wearing a dress with tie backs, but the label found in the collar clearly reads Motherhood Maternity (pauses to grimace). The woman was last known to be pregnant in 2003. (raises eyebrows slightly). It is also reported that she was not wearing good underwear (shakes her head). Her mother had this to say. (Video clip of Wivian) “I always told her to wear good underwear in case she was in an accident. But does she ever listen to me? No. She never listens to me. I can’t explain the maternity dress.” (she waves off the camera and closes the front door) Back to you Steve.”

Steve: “Speaking of crazy, Jane, we have had some cuh-razy weather lately. We are in for another round of showers, but apparently not baby showers! So you can put those maternity clothes away, ha ha ha…”

And then instead of dying of a concussion, I would die of embarrassment.

We were at a restaurant recently and Sean was busy playing with the poison pink/yellow/blue packets. He was angling to dump one or seven packets into his drink, my drink or anyone else’s drink that was within reach.

AM: (removing the chariot of aspartame to a nearby table): Sean, stop with the packets.

Sean: Why? Papa Ed drinks sweet tea. I want sweet tea like Papa Ed.

AM: You can have some sugar if you want, but this stuff — it’s not good for you. We don’t eat it. We only eat the natural stuff that God made.

Sean: Oh! Like Cheetos!

AM: Touche my friend. Well played.

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It’s true. I love my adopted home state of 26 years, yes I do, but I am not blind to the fact that we may have cornered the market on weird.

Recently as we drove through East Texas on our way to Pa Palmer’s funeral, we saw this airplane on the side of the road. We thought at first that it was abondoned, which is odd enough, but then we saw the homeowner underneath the fuselage running the weedeater (if you look closely at the photo, you’ll see two tiny legs under the airplane) – which only begs more questions than it answers. Was someone living there? Was this the Taj Mahal of trailers? Why bother with the weedeater when a stick of dynomite would work better?

As we drove down the road, Antique Daddy and I had an interesting discussion where we considered different scenarios explaining how the airplane got there. All my theories involved a keg of beer and someone named Bubba saying, “Hey y’all! Watch this!”

Internets, meet Deen. Deen meet the internets.

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Last summer we had Margie, who summered with us and then mysteriously disappeared on Sean’s birthday in November when winter arrived.

This year, Deen is the new Margie.

Sean named him Deen, because, you know – he’s deen with a widdle bit of wellwoe. But that was too long so we shortened it. Deen is our favorite peeping Deen. He (She? How would you know?) hangs around the back door, clinging to the window screens, silently peering in, fascinated I’m sure, by all the Antique weirdness therein. No doubt you’ll be seeing more of Deen here as the summer wears on.

“Mommy can I have some Jello-O”

“No, not right now, it’s 7 o’clock in the morning.”

“Well then I don’t wudz you anymore.”

“You can have some yogurt if you want.”

“Oh! Okay! I wudz you again.”

It has been kind of nutty this week. I am having my kitchen cabinets repainted and if this post doesn’t make any sense it’s because I’m still high on White Whisper and Oreos.

Being shut out of my kitchen for two days has meant that I had to make lunch at my coffee table in the den yesterday. Because for some reason that’s where the bread ended up when I had to clear out the kitchen. It seemed logical at the time. Sean thought having a picnic in the den was a great idea and that we should eat every meal at the coffee table. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that we used to do that before he came along.

At any rate, when I’ve been in my house for two straight rainy days with my spouse, my child, three painters, paint fumes and no access to my Cheetos, I’m even crankier than when I’ve been on a marathon phone call with the phone company. If you can imagine that.

As I’m sitting on the sofa busily slapping together a sandwich which I know my child will not even eat, he flings himself onto me and hugs me tight around the neck and says, “Put that cheese down woman and snuggle me!”

And so I did.

And that gave me some much needed perspective and vastly improved my attitude.