We're not in Kansas Anymore, Toto.

Ermahgerd, I haz a 12 year old.

First, I will have several pictures of my laundry room in a few days, now that the tile is laid and grouted and curing. I have only hurt myself once, I stabbed myself in the hand with the utility knife trying to shave off some tile to make it fit (it's vinyl tile, fyi, but looks real.) My nurse neighbor friend recommended that I just superglue it together since it was gaping but not bleeding, so didn't really need any stitches. But anyway, today I have something more important that rogue home improvement projects.

YOU GUYS. My oldest child is 12.

Twelve years ago this morning, I was at Menorah hospital for the second time in four weeks, having thought I was going to have that baby early due to a lovely bout with kidney stones. But no, he waited, and though I went into labor on my actual due date (whoever heard of such thing?) he didn't arrive until 36 hours later. Not in a hurry, this one.

He was beautiful and happy and easy. So, so easy. If he cried he needed food or a diaper, he never cried where I couldn't figure out what his problem was - with the exception of the first week where I couldn't make breastfeeding work, and once I gave up and switched to formula he was happy as a clam. A classic First Born, he walked at 10 months and controlled the remote at 12 months. He slept through the night at about eight weeks. He made me believe I was the best new mommy in the world, and for that I am grateful. I had struggled with self-esteem my entire life to that point, never finding that thing at which I really excelled, until this child was born. And suddenly, my life had meaning beyond my own needs. Ah, that's what I was missing.

Now, he's your typical mouthy tween boy, all testosterone and swagger, but with a decent amount of responsibility and humility. He is, I'm pretty sure, smarter than his father and me put together. He has the brain of an engineer - he thinks in straight, black and white lines. He is maybe not all that socially adept, but that's the thing about genetics  - DNA can be both amazing and sucky. Sorry, babe. If you're lucky, you'll have my skin instead of your dad's in high school. Maybe that will help.

The Hunger.

Yes I know it's Easter. But that's how it works, apparently, for me to find time to write. Another beautiful Sunday afternoon to myself while the kids play outside and I try to fend off the nap I've wanted since drinking two glasses of wine at brunch.

I've been busy. Not just with work and carpool and laundry, either. A couple of weeks ago I discovered The Hunger Games Trilogy. I mean, I knew it was out there, I just hadn't had time to start it. I think part of me knew that I would need to clear time to read it all together, which is exacty what happened. But when the movie came out and Drew wanted to go see it, I figured I better read it first. I started on a Thursday evening, and finished Sunday morning at 2:30am. All three books.

So, I've been reading. And reading, and re-reading. I didn't think I loved it that much after I read it the first time through, in fact, I was kind of upset about it. But then I realized I was angry because it was over, not because I didn't like it. I keep re-reading it for one reason: I keep hoping to find more in the story. Because I don't really want that to be all there is to it. I keep hoping to find a sentence I missed, a nugget of detail that satisfies my need to know these characters more than I already do. It angered me, reading these books, mostly the second one, Catching Fire, because the ending left me so distraught for the characters that I couldn't fathom not finding out more, and so I began reading the third book at 10pm on a Saturday night and read it straight through until 2:30 in the morning. The dog was quite content to keep me company downstairs on the couch while I listened to my husband snore through the floorboards as background noise while I inhaled the story.

I haven't read like this for a while. Probably not since Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I will admit to you that I sucked down the Twilight Series, all four books, over the course of a week, the last two over consecutive days of a weekend. But I didn't re-read them. I liked it, it was good fun, but I didn't feel the need to keep going back. I didn't want to prevent the story of Bella and Edward from being over. I could let them go - unlike Katniss and Peeta, people who felt such a part of my life I can't allow them to fall out of my immediate conciousness. This is what makes a great story, to me.

Last weekend I took Drew to see the movie. He read all three books before I did, and had been looking forward to it. He's just 11 and a half, true, and it's a pretty violent story. But I don't really worry about what he sees in the movies, especially if we are going with him and then can help him process what he sees, and even more so if he's read the story beforehand. We're talking about a child who read all seven Harry Potter books the summer between 3rd and 4th grade, one right after another. He's read The Hobbit and The Fellowship of The Ring, and all of Rick Riordan's Olympian's series. (If I could only get him to inhale food instead of pages with such fervor.)

It made me remember the novels and short stories I read as a child that left me with the same raw emotion that these books did. Black Stallion. The Color Purple. Flowers In The Attic. The Stand. Clan of The Cave Bear. Centennial. The Veldt. I was a precocious reader, you may be thinking.

The Veldt. Oh Ray Bradbury - how did you know children could be so evil? I knew - I had met them at school - they were in my class. But adults don't like to admit these things. Yet here he was, writing about it for all to see. Mesmerizing. Much like The Hunger Games.

Here's the thing. People keep saying kids younger than 12 shouldn't read it, or see the movie. That it's too violent, a story about children murdering each other. Do they not remember Lord of The Flies? The Veldt? Roald Dahl's The Swan? Or Charlie and The Chocolate Factory, for that matter? Have these people even read the great young adult fiction of our history? Or have we bleached ourselves and our kids of such horrific violence so that they don't recognize it when they see it?

Children can be mean. Children can be murderous. No more and no less than adults. It shocks us when children in stories act this way, instead of the innocent. Violence isn't the moral lesson, humanity is. The point behind these stories is the humanity that lies between.

I was never more glad to read the news this week than to find the movie Bully was finally granted a PG-13 rating. We can't keep trying to protect our children from violence, they are already experiencing it, seeing it, reading it. We need to teach them how to interpret it, how to learn from it. And how to be above it.

 

* For the record, there is a huge difference to me between a violent story with a greater message of society and say, Fight Club. I think he can wait a few years to read that one.

**I feel the need to defend against some (ahem, husband..) who will give me a hard time because I don't like to let my kids play violent video games but I'm not worried about books and movies. It's the development of character caught up in violence that matters. There is not much character development in the video games my kids want, and there's certainly no moral. (At least not beyond good guy vs. bad guy. That's not enough, for me. )

 

 

Hope for Hackleburg.

Yesterday afternoon, we left Kansas City bound for Alabama. A trip both to visit my husband's family, and to drop off the books we collected as part of the Books for Alabama book drive. Before I forget, many thanks to Cagey for running a book drive of her own to support us, and Rita and Kate and 435 South Magazine and the UPS Store and all the others who brought us books and helped spread the word via Facebook or their own blogs. We were blown away by the response to our little idea to help.

My dining room has for weeks been the main depository of all that we've collected, and my children have enjoyed having their own little library of new and interested books to raid during the process. But yesterday morning, after much packing and repacking and jostling, we managed to get it all into the back of my Explorer.

before packing: many boxes of books.

Mad Jenga car packing skillz, I haz them.

And so we set out to deliver our goods, and to get a closer look at the damage in Hackleburg. We spent the night in Memphis, and this morning we met a first grade teacher from Hackleburg in a parking lot of a Hardees, and transfered the books to her husband's pickup. And then we followed her down the road into Hackleburg. As we got closer to the town, you could see the trees along the side of the road, bent over, in perfect little rows. The most bizarre thing.

And then we began to notice, wow, those are empty lots, where houses used to be. A driveway, a concrete foundation, and nothing else. No debris, no trees. Just gone.

new electric poles, next to the stumps of the broken ones.

 
What's left of the Napa Auto Parts store.

And then. We arrived at the school. As we pulled in behind Suzanne the teacher and her husband in their truck, I lost my breath. And then I teared up.

As I snapped this picture, Suzanne whispered from behind me, "those are my daughter's handprints."

 

I can't even explain, and pictures do not adequately show, the total amount of devastation in this little town. It is amazing to me that more lives were not lost. It is completely amazing to me that there were no children in this school, they called school earlier in the day because of the potential these storms showed on the radar. They would not have survived. There is no way.

Drew, Will, Suzanne the teacher, and me in front of the football field.

There are strange juxtopositions. The first thing they dealt with at the school campus was the football field, because the high school seniors wanted to have their graduation at their own school, instead of in some other town, at some other school. I can't blame them, when you're 18 years old, you want normalcy, in whatever way you can get it. (Prom had already taken place, so there were no problems there.) So they cleaned up and sodded the field first thing. Suzanne told me it wasn't until she was at graduation, sitting in the stands, watching these young adults she had taught so many years earlier walk across the stage in their pristine caps and gowns against the backdrop of their broken school, that she cried for the first time. Until then, she'd been in crisis mode, salvaging what she could, helping where she could, not really looking deep into the cracks and broken glass.

She pointed out to us that before the tornado, you couldn't see the schools from the main road, because there was a neighborhood there. Not a house or two, but an entire neighborhood. You couldn't see the water tower from the school parking lot where we were standing, because of the houses and the trees blocking the view.

Here's the other thing that's got the people of Hackleburg worried: The status of Wrangler plant in town that employed hundreds of people from this and other nearby towns, and that may choose not to rebuild.

This is what's left of the Wranger plant: a pile of twisted metal and insulation.

 

I have lived in the Midwest most of my life. I've taken cover many times when the sirens have gone off. I've never lived through something like this. I've never before seen this kind of devastation up close.

But these people are strong. They are busy. They are hopeful. And they are recovering.

 

Drew commented this afternoon about how once the tornado devastation in Joplin happened, everybody stopped talking about Alabama. And I know Joplin was so much worse, so many more dead and injured, so many more families displaced, and so much more to do. It's hard to imagine. Seeing this up close helps you start to imagine. And we told him, the major news networks stopped talking about it, but the local people didn't forget. And we didn't forget. Our little book drive will go a long way toward helping them re-establish a little normalcy for these kids, books they can check out, read, and learn. Temporary trailers and buildings started arriving today, and the bulldozers come in next week to start leveling out the broken brick structures. School will start on schedule, mid-August. 

There's hope in Hackleburg. It's a new day.

 Here's what you can do to help. Reach out to Wrangler on email, on Facebook, where ever you find them, and urge them to rebuild in Hackleburg. This town cannot survive if they have no jobs.

 

 

Everything he needed to know he learned from The Simpsons.

Last week my ten year old was hovering around my bathroom vanity waiting for me to finish brushing my teeth so we could head out to cub scout day camp. Suddenly he became very interested in my pack of birth control pills.

"Mom, what are these for?"

"Uh...they help me control my hormones."

"What are hormones?"

"Welllllll, that's how our bodies change during puberty, girls start having their menstrual cycle, and...didn't they tell you about this at school? About girls have periods?"

"Uh, no? What's a period?"

(shiiiitttttt)

(Deep breath) "a period is when a girl's reproductive system..."

"Wait! These are pills that make you NOT have babies, right? Like on The Simpsons!"

"Yes...wait, wha? You know this from The Simpsons?"

"Yeah! There's an episode where Bart stole Marge's's pills to make her have a baby because he wanted what Lisa had, a little sister - he wanted a little brother."

"And he thought just stealing his moms pills would make that happen?"

"Right!"

"..."

"Mom? I don't want any more little brothers."

"Don't worry. You're not getting any, dude. I can't believe you learned about this from The Simpsons."

"Well I don't think they'd be talking about it on Food Network, mom."

 

 

Oh, hai. I can haz summer now.

School has been out since June 1st, but my summer officially started today. Last week was Cub Scout Daycamp week, where I volunteered for the entire week in the 95 degree heat, trudging around covered in sunscreen and bug spray. My job, for the record, was running the Tot Lot, otherwise known as the holding pen for younger siblings and pre-teen girls. Pre-teen girls, it turns out, are pretty darn helpful with three and four year old boys, at least the one I got. And three and four year old boys are just so damn excited to be trudging along the swamp just like big brother the cub scout, they will follow you like rats to a Pied Piper. It was fun, it was hot, it was a little stressful, and I'm glad it's over, for another year.

This morning at 9 am, I put my oldest son on a chartered bus to H. Roe Bartle Scout Reservation, along with 150 of his best scout friends. Much like kindergarten, it was a first for many parents, including me, but my kid couldn't have cared less if I was there or not. He was busy, doing busy boy scout things, like making faces out the window, God mom, just leave already. Sure enough, dude.

Stairsteps: A live demonstration of the percentile growth chart (3-95%) of nearly 11 year old boys. 

I am certain the child will not change underwear for 10 days, with the possible exception of Visitor's Day next Sunday, when I force him to give me the clothes he has on and put on new ones. As I told another mom today, I do not care how gross he is upon his return. I care only that he returns with his glasses and his retainer.

So. Now that's done, and I'm finally free to enjoy my summer. I have only one kid to worry about, a dog to walk, 18 loads of laundry, and the nastiest hardwood kitchen floor this side of a bar at Last Call. Time to get to work. Oh wait, is that the new Entertainment Weekly magazine in my mailbox? Niiiice.

 

Books for Alabama. Join us.

Yesterday morning, I did my usual roll over, pick up my phone from my nightstand and start flipping through email, Facebook, Twitter and the news before even sitting up. This is what I do while my husband is in the shower, now that I'm not the coffee hound I used to be. I jumpstart my brain by reading on my phone. My husband calls it an addiction, but whatever Mr. Mayor of a Jillion Places on Foursquare, this is how I wake up.

Anyway, this article caught my eye. It didn't just catch my eyes, actually, it made them well up with tears, and my nose with sniffles and by the time I got up and shuffled to the bathroom my husband had begun to tease me thinking I was having a full blown allergy attack. No, I said, just reading news about tornado devastation and recovery in your home state. Which shut him up nicely.

By the time I got the kids off to school and returned to the computer to read the article more thoroughly and see the pictures in a larger scale, I had decided we needed to do something. And I wanted my kids to be involved. I can't throw them in the car and drive down there and start handing out water bottles, as much as I want to. But, we can raise some money and do some collections here, which is what I suggested to Drew when he got home from school yesterday afternoon. Because the article was focused mostly on the destruction of the schools there and the students who didn't WANT to go somewhere else, they wanted to go to THEIR school, thank you very much, we decided that thing which we could do is a book drive. But Drew read the article and said, "Mom, we need to do more than just books. They'll need school supplies." That's my boy.

 

 

We put a bin on the front porch, emailed everyone we know, and voila! Books have already started showing up on the porch. Drew is very excited. My eight year old drew that picture, and I want you to know he freehanded that state of Alabama with only a passing glance at the shape on a T-shirt my husband was wearing. It gave me goosebumps watching him draw it. And now I know that on top of what we need to be saving for MIT for his big brother the engineer, the Kansas City Art Institute is like $43,000 a year and Holy Cow, help me.

Anyway, back to the books.

If you live in the Kansas City area and want to bring me a collection, email me. For now the bin is only on my front porch, but we have some feelers out to local stores who may let us put a bin in their lobby or front entrance. If you live outside the area, I urge you to start your own collection, or go here and donate in other ways. If you want to know more about Hackleburg, Alabama, visit this Facebook page.

I know there are lots of other little towns with massive destruction like this one. I know there are more people who need help. I know there is much to do. I am one woman, we are one family, we are four states away, and this is what we can do. Do something, whatever you can do.

 

Friday Flashback: I am not an athlete. I do not play one on TV.

This is a side note to an article that I wrote for BlogHer about being a soccer mom. Check it out here.

Growing up in the 80’s in Kansas City meant Comets indoor soccer - the days of Gino Schiraldi and Enzo DePede - OMG the short shorts! My family had season tickets, and we were all big soccer fans. I remember my 4th grade teacher dated a Comets player, he came to our school once, and the entire school fawned over him, teachers included. My younger brother played soccer starting in kindergarten, but it wasn’t really an option for me, I don’t know why. Girls soccer was just taking off in the surburbs of Kansas.

I remember going to some kind of soccer workshop once on a Saturday with my brother, and though I didn’t play, they asked if I wanted to stand in line and get a lesson from a Comets player. It turned out to be that same player who had visited my school, and was dating my teacher. I had a wee bit of a school girl crush on him, and here I might even get to talk to him! You betcha I lined up with the boys.

Down the line he threw the ball to each boy, practicing blocking the ball with your chest. He got to me, paused, and said, “are you sure you want to do this?” I didn’t even know what he meant. But I nodded and he threw the ball, and as it hit my chest the little breast buds I didn’t even know I had seared in pain. I was humiliated, and very freaked out. A grown man I had a crush on was more aware of my body than I was, and on top of that had called it out for all the other boys to snicker at.

Awesome.

Perhaps if I’d been playing soccer starting at age four, as is much more common for girls now, I would have learned that trick at an earlier age, before it became an issue, and would have been able to adjust as my body changed. Perhaps if team sports in general had been more accessible for girls then, I would have had female coaches as mentors, helping me find my way in a boy’s world.

Instead, I turned my attentions to other things, and by high school I was active in music and singing and drama. Theater wasn't a boy's world or a girl's world, thanks to the gays. What you looked like on the outside didn't matter since you were gonna load yourself up with pancake makeup and costumes anyway, and I thrived in that cocoon. I had found my people.

I certainly never expected to grow up to be the mother of two little soccer player boys, and let's just thank the little baby Jesus they got their father's genes.

I never expected that I would find myself to be a Johnson County Soccer Mom. But I am. And I'm totally okay with it.

 

 

 

Band of brothers.

Remember the band Oasis? In 1996, Two Britpop brothers and a couple of friends had a mega hit with the song Wonderwall. 

 

 

They had a couple of other hits, and then a few years ago they put out another album that was a hit and became popular again. And then, in 2009, the brothers got into a fight backstage. A big one. And the band broke up over it. And then the rest of us sort of forgot about them. 

Or at least I had, until I saw this article in Entertainment Weekly last week. 

Nearly a year and a half later, the brothers still aren't speaking to each other. More than that, they hate each other. 

You guys, this could happen to my kids. I worry about it. 

My boys are so close in age, just over two years apart. And their personalities are so, so different. Yeah, they both like Legos and Wii games, and they are - physically anyway - nearly clones of their father, but that's about where it ends. They used to be buddies and play together, especially when they were younger, but these days that can't really be in the same room together without some arguing and shoving and then the beatings begin.

Lots and lots of beatings.

Mostly I let it all play out. I try not to get involved, unless they are throwing down in front of company or out in public. I let them work it out. Except for the little passive aggressive thwomping on the head which is usually what will start a sure enough throwdown, when I'm not in the mood for it. And let's just admit right now, I am rarely in the mood for it. 

My brother and I fought, sometimes violently. At least, until he got bigger than me one day, and then it pretty much stopped. But I remember that hot, vitriolic, sibling anger. The stuff of pre-pubescent angst that doesn't exist anymore, as adults. My brother and I are pretty close, these days, although we don't see enough of each other due to opposite work schedules (he's a bartender, I'm an office drone.)

But I saw that article about Liam and Noel Gallagher and it really bothered me. Can you imagine being so angry with a family member that you stopped speaking to them, or they to you? I cannot. Yes, I have had toxic people in my life, whom I have found a way to avoid. I have family members who make me so crazy I can only deal with them in very small, very structured doses of time. But even people I really can't stand I learned I can be polite to for the course of a Thanksgiving dinner (wine helps, it's true, but there's a point of no return on that.) But I've never considered that I might never speak to a family member again. Think of what this is doing to their parents, other siblings, mutual friends. My God, the consequences of what was really, a giant temper tantrum.

I'd like to believe that my two boys will someday move past their overactive competitive spirit, and find common ground. Maybe that won't happen until they're adults. I've tried to direct them into different interests and sports, though they both play soccer and they both do boy scouts, but they each have at least one other focused interest that doesn't overlap. 

Of course, when they are adults, I may be their common ground. Maybe, they will band together and text each other under the dinner table saying things like "OMG, will she ever shut up? Pass the bread," or "dude, have you noticed mom's grip on reality is notsomuch? LOL How soon can we have her committed?"

I guess I can live with that. 

 

Friday Wine Goodness: Let's blow some sh*t up edition. *

For Christmas, my youngest got a special kit to make Coke and Mentos explosions. Since we live in Kansas, and winter has been upon us, we only just now got it out to actually do it. Behold, my Walmart expedition this morning.

Plus, a little extra fortification for mom. It's National Drink Wine Day, after all.

 

Anyway, here's the video. The little boys are excited about the geyser, the older kids just want to drink the leftover Coke out of the bottle.

 

 

TGIF, people. Party on, Garth.

 

* this is as close as we get to actually blowing sh*t up at my house. That's what Boy Scout camp is for, thank you very much.

 

The calliope crashed to the ground.

Yesterday we had a snow day around these parts. Since Monday was the MLK holiday and Tuesday was a teacher workday, and there were two snowdays last week, let's do the math: five of the last ten school days in session.

So we're a little stir-crazy.

Today things were back to normal, if by normal you mean everyone overslept because they'd gone to bed late, THANKS daddy for taking care of that, and so both boys had to be dragged from bed kicking and screaming. They continued to kick and scream through breakfast, through brushing their teeth, and finally reached a level of meltdown we hadn't seen in a while. My youngest, unable to undo the knots in his shoelace, screamed like a wounded banshee and threw his shoe across the kitchen counter, nearly taking out a jug of orange juice.

Fullstop.

So instead of leaving for school dropoff, I sent both boys to their rooms to start over. And I made them stay there until 8:45. Which is ten minutes past when school starts.

I wasn't about to let them take the cranky with them to school, and then take it out on their teachers and classmates. That isn't fair, to anyone. They needed to regroup, they needed to realize how out of control they were, and they need to be late to school because of it, and suffer the consequences.

And so we slipped into the school office at 8:55 for tardy slips and, because I had sent an email ahead of time, a little Come to Jesus meeting with the principal.

There are a lot of people at our school who do not like our principal. She's a hardass, she does not mess around, and she does not suffer whining Leawood parents very well. I will admit to having some issues with her early on myself, at times I have been a vocal critic. But she and I have come to an understanding over the last five years. And that understanding is this: I know my kids are a handful, two handfuls, really. (I think there are a lot of parents who will not admit this.) I will do my job as a parent, and she will do her job as a principal, and as long as we are constantly, openly communicating, then we are on the same side, and that is the side of my kids' success in school.

It really is that simple.

And so I trust her. And she trusts me. If my kid gets sent to the principal, and that is an appropriate action, I will enforce that at home. But if something happens that I don't agree with, or my kid has been treated unfairly, I will not be sitting at home waiting for a phone call, I will be standing outside her door. She's not always perfect, and neither am I. But we will call each other on it.

We really haven't run into that in a while. And so it's all good.

Today, I sent her a message that my kids needed her bad cop routine. And she did it. It worked pretty well.

Tonight we're snuggling in for some quiet, and going to bed early. I so hope our weekend gets better. It's not looking really good for that though, as tomorrow is the annual Cub Scout Pinewood Derby car race, and in usual Meade family fashion, our derby cars are still downstairs in the basement needing another coat of paint. And my ten year old has a soccer game Sunday morning at 6:05 am.

That is not a typo. SIX OH FIVE A-FREAKIN-M. Oh hell to the no.

Also it's supposed to snow more. Shoot me now.