MOM DECKED OUT FOR CARPOOL DUTY (Plus a Household Hint)

“Mom, you must be really mad at Mrs. Jones,” eleven-year-old Jennifer pipes up as I drive the kids to school.

There’s nothing that girl misses.  From the rear-view mirror, I see her huddled with her siblings in the backseat, a bemused smirk upon her face.

“Mad at Mrs. Jones?” I exclaim. “Now, Jennifer, why would you say a thing like that?  You saw me wave at Mrs. J.”

“Yeah, you waved at her, and she waved back. Then you both ducked your heads and looked the other way.”

“Of course we ducked our heads.  Neither Laura Jones nor I had time to comb our hair this morning, and according to the code…”

“According to what code?”

“Why, the code of the Bathrobe Brigade.”

“Bathroom Brigade?  Come on, Mom, I thought you were the only mother around who drove her kids to school without getting dressed!”

“No, Honey,” I say, pulling further into the school parking lot, “You see Mrs. Smith over there?” 

Jennifer’s eyes follow my pointing finger to a snow-covered mini-van crammed with about twenty children.  “Notice how she doesn't get out in the snow to pry the kids out?  She’s got her bedroom slippers on for sure.

“Then there’s Mrs. Green up ahead. She is getting out of her car, but she’s got her husband’s trench coat on.  You can bet your lunch money she’s wearing PJ's underneath.

“Now notice Mrs. Hansen just leaving the drop-off loop.  See how carefully she’s maneuvering her Ford.  There’s no way on earth she’s gonna’ risk being pulled over by some cop and get arrested for indecent exposure!”

“Oh, you’re putting us on!” Jennifer protested.

“No, I’m not.  I’m putting you out.  The school bell’s already ringing.”

“Well, Mom, I just hope you don’t have car trouble going home.”

Even as the children wave goodbye, my palms grow clammy, and my heart begins to pound. 

The four blocks to our house have never seemed so long.  

When, finally, I ease into our driveway, I  turn off the ignition and scan the neighborhood.  Making sure the coast is clear, I make a bee-line to the house.

***

Today's household hint:  When making popcorn balls, let popcorn mixture cool until touchable.  Then slide your hand inside a clear plastic gift bag, grab a handful of coated corn, and pull the bag back over the popcorn. Shape the corn into a ball and tie the bag with a piece of raffia, ribbon, or bridal illusion. Repeat for each popcorn ball.

My kids like this easy, colorful recipe.

JELLO POPCORN BALLS adapted from COOKS.COM 1 c. white syrup 1 c. sugar 1 (3 oz.) pkg. Jello, any flavor 9 c. popped popcorn Bring sugar and syrup to boil; reduce heat. Add Jello; stir until dissolved. Pour over popcorn. Butter hands and make into balls or use the bagging method described above. Turn bag inside out and insert hand. Grab and shape handfuls of popcorn. Then pull bag over popcorn right side out .  Tie bag with  raffia, ribbon, or bridal illusion as shown

GRATITUDE'S PRAYER

*Inspired by President Thomas S. Monson:

It was a lovely meal. The jack rabbit tasted like turkey
and the turnips were the mildest we could recall. . . .
“. . .Our home…, for all its want, was so rich to us.

THANKSGIVING

Had I but turnips and carrots to eat,
stewed with a tough old hare,
and only a candle of tallow and wick
lighting my table so bare,
I’d still bow my head in gratitude’s prayer,
as though I were quite well-to-do,
if I could sit down in my humble abode
and share precious moments with you.

--Sharon Nauta Steele
November 18, 2010

With grand kids during a 2010 cottonwood tree "snowstorm"

*Read President Monson's beautiful message, “The Divine Gift of Gratitude,”
in the November 2010 Ensign, pp 87-90

http://lds.org/ldsorg/v/index.jsp?hideNav=1&locale=0&sourceId=16f72582ba4db210VgnVCM100000176f620a____&vgnextoid=f318118dd536c010VgnVCM1000004d82620aRCRD

Watching the Wire, Nov. 22, 1963

A law was made a distant moon ago there;
July and August cannot be too hot.
And there’s a legal limit to the snow there.
In Camelot.--Alan Jay Lerner

As a child, I really thought I lived in Camelot, that fanciful kingdom where people could live happily ever after, where even the weather defied cold reality.

But the devastating news of a winter day in 1963 would cause me to begin looking at the world more thoughtfully, without rose-colored glasses.

Fifty years have come and gone since the tragic day John F. Kennedy was assassinated, but what happened that November 22, remains forever linked in my heart to the loss of innocence and beginnings of awareness I experienced when the snot-nosed teenager I was just happened to be standing near an AP teletype machine in the Salt Lake Tribune newspaper office, as the news of Kennedy’s death first hit the wires.

I was 15 years old. Like most of my peers, born in the late forties, I had escaped any first-person recollection of World War II. Even during the ensuing Korean conflict, I was too young to understand, let alone worry about, what it meant to be afraid of anything more threatening than the neighborhood bully.

That week, as a sophomore school girl chosen to represent Clearfield High School in a televised current events game show, I had studied headlines on tensions in the United States and Communist encroachment in Viet Nam with adolescent detachment. No one I knew had yet been drafted, and I was naively living in a bubble where life was filled with homework, high school drama, or fun and games.

From my carefree point of view, most people in the world were basically good, and, if you said your prayers and pledged allegiance to the flag, things would be all right. When newsmen used the word Camelot to describe the years of JFK’s sojourn in the White House, I believed.

And so it was I left school, along with five other students, on a blustery Friday in November, to appear on the Salt Lake Tribune-sponsored Inquiring Editor. We were to tape our segment for its broadcast the following Saturday morning, after which we had been promised a guided tour of the Tribune offices.

Of the actual taping, I remember little, except that I vainly worried that the wind had damaged my bouffant hairdo and that Newspaper Columnist Dan Valentine’s name was the answer to one of the game questions I missed.

Even the details of the news office tour have become as cloudy as the funnels of smoke wafting upwards from ashtrays dotting the desks of a few reporters who sat pecking away at their typewriters.

Besides an occasional telephone ring that muffled the drone of our guide’s voice, there wasn’t much going on.

“When something important happens, this office really comes to life,” I remember hearing him say, as I half-heartedly scanned the paper inching beneath rattling teletype keys. I think I yawned about then.

But standing next to me, so close I bumped his elbow, was a handsome boy named Bob who was actually paying attention. I remember being more interested in looking at him than in observing what was coming across the machine. Until I heard someone laugh--a high metallic kind of involuntary staccato. And then Bob’s face was twisting as he pointed to the line of type he had just finished reading. President Kennedy shot in Dallas, perhaps fatally...

Days later, Clearfield High School’s newspaper The Talon recorded what Bob felt, what we all felt, as we read those terrible words:

“I thought there was a mistake in the teletype--no, I thought the conductor of the tour was trying to pull a stunt to make us realize the importance of journalism. I read further and realized that there was no mistake in the report; I shuddered…”

There we had stood, six high school kids who, as the tour guide told us, were among the first people in the state of Utah to learn the tragic news--all of us sobbing.

During our long journey home from Salt Lake City, there was none of the light-hearted banter that had accompanied our trip into town that morning—no one joked about the force of the wind sand-blasting the station wagon we were riding in. No one said a word about the weather or anything else. We just sat there paralyzed with the grim realization that the little bubble of Camelot some of us had been living in had burst. We were so sad and so very afraid.

As we passed post offices, businesses, and schools, turbulent winds whipped home the cold reality of what we had just learned, every flag along the way unfurling at half-staff.



I was a snot-nosed high school girl!

All the flags were at half-staff



This column was edited, updated, and reprinted in the Standard Examiner on November, 22, 2013.  

www.standard.net/stories/2013/11/21/watching-wire-nov-22-1963



"Don't Tell" Gives Kids License to Blab

“Just look at that golf hat!” Dave pointed with enthusiasm to the jaunty, beret sitting at a rakish angle on the head of a department store mannequin.

 “Since when were you interested in a new golf hat?” I tried not to sound suspicious.  “You already have three!”

“Yes,” my spouse admitted, “but that red one would go perfectly with my new golf bag.”

“What new golf bag?”  I countered, though I knew exactly which bag.

“The red leather one you’re giving me for Christmas.”

“Who told you?”  My lower jaw sagged a full inch, as I remembered threatening each of our six kids not to let the cat out of their dad’s Christmas surprise golf bag.

“No one had to tell me.  I merely drew upon the  powers of my superior male brain to figure out exactly what was in that long box you hid in the fruit room.

“Oh, I get it!”  The words came out after a long pause, “Jennifer told you there wasn't a long box for you hidden down there, and then Stacee informed you that what was in the long box wasn't for you.  Michael said that what was in the long box wasn't red leather, and Matthew added that what was in the long box that wasn't hidden in the fruit room and wasn’t for you  wasn't something you put golf clubs in.  Superior male brain, indeed!”

“Yep,” the man threw out his chest.   “And after Christie and Julie both crossed their hearts that it wasn't a red leather golf bag, I finally figured it out!"

Child Rejects Cracked Cookie

There is absolutely nothing more repulsive to a preschooler than half a graham cracker, unless it’s a whole one with a corner broken off.

Even though my son Matthew bulks at beans, yucks at yams, and squeals at squash, such manifestations of  distaste are mild compared to his reaction to anything less than a perfectly symmetrical, undivided honey graham.

“Look, Little Guy,” I say to the hysterical boy in the half second he takes to breathe between convulsive shrieks. “These two halves make a whole.”

Matt looks at me like he’s just seen Godzilla. There’s absolutely no way he’s going to swallow such simplistic reasoning, let alone digest a broken cracker. Recoiling from my extended hand with its sundered offering, he gives a double shoulder shudder. “I want a whole cwacker!”

So I resort to bribes: “Gosh, Buddy, I can’t help it if the grocery man dropped the box and cracked these cookies—maybe that’s why they’re called crackers. If you’ll just take one teensy little bite from each half, I’ll buy you a horse!”

For a moment my toddling connoisseur of crackers looks hopeful.

"Wiff a real saddle and a bridle?" Then seeing the gross inequity of the deal (imagine anyone silly enough to think a mere 2,000 pounds of horseflesh could compensate for a cracked cracker?), he lies down on the floor to kick his feet. He wants a whole cracker, and he wants it now!

At last, I try a threat: “Look, Mortimer, either you eat that cracker this instant, or Mommy’s gonna’ run away!”

His eyes flash an answer to the challenge.

“That’s the way the cookie crumbles,” I expect to hear him say!

What kind of mom gives a child a broken cookie?

Crawling Learned, Inch By Inch

Tiny Julie, only 5 months old, knows that she must crawl. No one has told her so, but some inborn prompting bids her stretch one hand before the other, palms down. And then the knees.

It’s in her nature to comply. Downy eyebrows widen with a furrowing of forehead, as she listens to an inner voice--push with your toes.

Plop! She’s down. Undaunted, she postures to try again. Julie will crawl.

Arching her back, she push-pushes pudgy feet to work an unseen treadmill, wiry arms outstretched to balance 14-pounds of body weight. She knows she will do it.

Not this time, though. Down she goes again, skidding forward onto nose and chin. The shock brings fleeting tears. But her eyes deepen to a darker blue as she struggles for control. Julie will crawl. It’s her nature to succeed.

And she’s up again, frustrated when a corner pushes back against her efforts to move forward. For a moment she rests.

I could help her. The thought goes through my mind--sit beside her lotus style. Synchronize those little hands and feet. No, Julie will not have it. She rolls to her back for a tickle and giggles before returning to her solo act.

“Roll the ball out there, Mommy, but let me fetch it myself,” I imagine her saying. Like a shell-bound chick, she must go through barriers to mobility alone, or not go at all.

This time she scoots to her target quickly. On her belly. Perhaps she’ll be an Olympic swimmer some day?

Wait! Her back is up again, and coordinated hands are working in opposition to dimpled knees. One hand forward, and then a leg….

Julie

From Mud Pies To Sand-wiches

“Mommy, I made you a special tweat,” pre-schooler Stacee announces, and I'm so wishing I‘d never made the mistake of pretending to eat that little girl’s mud pies.  

Turning my face sideways and crumbling sun-baked soil from my mouth into the open collar of my shirt, I tasted everything from mud meringue to gourmet grit.  With true grit, I downed my daughter's “chocolate” doughnuts by the “dirty dozen,” as her trips from the sand pile to the kitchen became more frequent.

Eventually, Stacee's cooking skills evolved to include real foods, but the sand-wiches she makes are well named.  She can turn even the creamiest peanut butter into extra crunchy.

So this time I pause to ask her if she washed her hands before she made my “special tweat.”

“Didn’t need to,” she says with indignation thick as honey on her tongue.  “I just wiped them on the bwead.”



Chef Stacee

 


Peanut Butter Sand-wich

 













So What's A Mom To Do With The Left-Over Jack O' Lanterns?

"Mama killed our Jack O' Lanterns," four-year-old Michael wailed to his older sisters the moment they came home from school.

Funny, the knack that kid has for making me feel guilty! Yes, it was true! I had thoroughly scrubbed, baked, and pureed the grimacing remains of the kids' Halloween pumpkins. No matter how appealing Jack O’ Lanterns look adorning the porch before October 31, one minute after Halloween, their orange faces leer an open dare for cruising teenagers to splatter them in the street.

But letting those hollowed-out orbs rot and molder in the garbage really goes against my waste-not-want-not mentality.

So with Thanksgiving coming, I did what any thrifty mom would do--salvaged what I could, the house taking on the cozy incense of ginger mingled with cloves and cinnamon.

Stirring a huge kettle of  pumpkin pie filling, I turned to my usually famished children for approval. No way!   From the disgusted looks they gave me, you’d have thought I’d killed their cat and made him into stew.

I couldn't even appease them with a promised piece of  pie.

”No thanks,” my round-eyed son replied, his face so stony pale that each freckle stood out in bas-relief. “I wouldn't want to do that to a friend.”

This little grandson seems to share his uncle's sentiments of so long ago.

Mike and his little brother Matt.

Dog Has Feelings, Too

"Empathy," my college speech teacher once explained, "is like when someone else eats a pickle, and your mouth waters."

I thought about that the other day when Christie, my two-year-old, tried relentlessly to drag her puppy from beneath the family room recliner. Mandy, our little flop-eared Maltese, had flipped a desperate somersault seeking refuge underneath the chair. But she wasn't quick enough. Just as it looked like the terrified creature might actually succeed in her efforts to avoid playing "baby" in yet another game of "house," Christie grabbed one furry hind leg and began a tug-of-war.

"Mandy doesn’t want to wear Strawberry Shortcake's nightgown," I tried to reason with my daughter. "It's too tight around the neck, and there's no place for her tail.

"My daughter looked at me with the condescending smugness of a child who knows for sure her mother was never a kid and continued without pause to dress the dog. "No, no, no, Christie!"

When Mandy began making strangled sounds, I had to intervene. Without a word, the chastened little girl released her canine prisoner and toddled off.

Moments later, I found Christie earnestly engaged in a single-minded effort to reduce my prized jade plant to a pile of tear-shaped leaves.

"No, no, no!" This time my reprimand was loud. "You'll hurt Mommy's plant!"

Startled, Christie looked up at me, one baby hand still clutching a succulent green leaf. Tears welled in her crystal eyes, glistening in momentary suspension before streaking salty dew down tender cheeks into the corners of her mouth. And then she ducked her head to hug my legs.

With a taste of remorse on my own tongue, I gathered up that tiny guileless child. Halfway through a muffled sob, she wiped her nose upon my sleeve.

Mandy