Batter up!

My husband's a really big baseball fan. He desperately wanted to share that with his sons and was really excited with my first pregnancy. Imagine his surprise and disappointment when he found out we were having a girl! He took it fairly well, though there was this one time when he was teaching Lizzie to play baseball......

She was maybe four or five and had a plastic bat. My husband, Marc, taught her to hit just like a real ball player. She'd take the stance with her legs firmly planted, the bat over her shoulder, and then, just before my husband pitched, she'd go through her pre-batting routine. She'd lift her head, spit with authority, and then she'd reach down between her legs to grab her crotch and adjust her non-existent balls. Satisfied that his daughter could one day play with the major leaguers, Marc would finally throw.

I had alot of explaining to do the first day of PAL softball.

kentucky fried potty

To my eldest, Lizzie, pottie training was an adventure, and she approached it in a most creative manner. We kept up with her creativity by keeping a potty on each floor of our house, one upstairs in the bathroom next to the main toilet, one on the main floor in the kitchen (we had no powder room on the main floor), and another potty in the basement. I even kept a potty in the car, for those occasional adventures in mobile creativity that Lizzie found so amusingly necessary.

One evening after having served my family a nutritious and tasty dinner of good old KFC, original, not extra crispy, I put the left-overs back into the box and put the box into the fridge. A while later I'm upstairs when I hear my husband calling me frantically to come down to the kitchen. So I come running, expecting murder and mayhem, or at least fire and a little blood. I come running around the corner to the kitchen and what do I see? My little 3 year old Lizzie, sitting on the potty with her pants around her knees, the KFC box on the floor at her side holding a drumstick to her mouth and munching away with neither a care in the world nor a piece of toilet paper in sight.

Potty training with an appetite.

blog the 1st

Whenever the kids got unruly, I'd call to them, "Now just who's the mommy around here anyway?" They never quite got that they were supposed to be filled with awe as they answered, "You are, Mommy." They invariably answered something to the effect, "We are." They always knew who the boss was.

I became a SAHM just in time for my oldest girl to go off to college and my youngest girl to turn teenager and ignore me. Just the latest in a long history of doing things bass-ackwards. When my girls really could have used me around, I had to work full- or part-time to earn just enough money to keep them in day-care. That was really more about sending my husband back to day care, I mean graduate school, for his newest advanced degree, and his last shot at changing careers. A good man with a great education and a now infamous work history. Another story entirely.

I think a good blog can make good therapy, and since my kids don't need me, I have some time to fill. I'll fill it with self-help, and take out some of the funny stories that I love, and some of the sad, and maybe hurtful ones too. It takes all kinds of stories to make a life, doesn't it?