OmegaMom

We like to play “The Animal Game” at dinnertime.  It’s a variation of Twenty Questions “made up” by OmegaDotter.  Her buddy A. enjoys playing the game when he’s spending the night, which he is doing tonight.  Thus, we had a round of The Animal Game to enjoy.

A. started off, but the dotter guessed his animal in record time—an owl.

“It’s a screech owl!” quoth A.

“Oh, then it’s Lady Gaga!” quoth OmegaDad.

I slapped OmegaDad on the arm.  “She doesn’t screech,” I said.

“She does too!” was the response.

Next up was OmegaDotter.  She always starts with, “This animal has eyes.”  Which makes OmegaDad and I roll our own eyes, because it’s useless as a clue.  But we moved on…does it live on land or sea?…is it bigger than A.?…does it have fur?

“Yes,” answered the dotter.

“Oh, then it’s Lady Gaga!” shouted OmegaDad triumphantly.

I slapped him again.  OmegaDotter rolled her eyes.  A. fell down laughing.  (Hey, it doesn’t take too terribly much to amuse 8-year-olds.  Or fifty-year-olds, for that matter…)

The dotter stumped us with that one, because we forgot to ask if it was extinct or not; it was a mammoth.

She went again, starting—of course—with “this animal has eyes.”  There was a question as to whether it ate other animals.  A. wisely recited their teacher’s rhyme about how to distinguish predators from prey (“Eyes on the side, they like to hide; eyes to the front, they like to hunt”).  Then he took to helping the dotter, because she wasn’t very sure about aspects of her animal.

Somewhere along the line, of course, OmegaDad had to ask if it was Lady Gaga.

OmegaDotter got very frustrated at this point, and proclaimed that he was no longer allowed to use those words together for at least two hours.

OmegaDad won that one, at which point the dotter and A. both grumbled, because they knew his animals are hard to guess, mostly due to tricksy initial clues that send you haring off in the wrong direction.  Luckily, because my husband’s mind is an open book to me, I was able to guess his animal—a pine bark borer beetle.  Both the dotter and A. were disgruntled at this, saying that they had no idea what that animal was.  So OmegaDad got to go again.  But he passed his turn on to me.

I took a cue from the dotter:  “This animal has eyes.”  Hah!

So they asked if it lived on land or sea—land.

They asked if it was a mammal—I said yes.

They asked if it was a wild animal—I had to think about this, but eventually said no.

Did it live in trees?  No.

Did it have fur?  No.

Did it have hair?  Yes.

Was it bigger than A.?  Yes.

Do people own it as a pet?  I answered no.

Are people allowed to own it as a pet?  No.

At which point, OmegaDad, having seen my slight smile while I was debating the “wild animal” question, asked, “Is this animal a human being?”  Yes.

And A. burst out, loudly, “Is it Lady Gaga?!”

Yes.

Har.  That’s my tale of our brush with the Fame Monster, and a slice of (silly, pointless, fun, and boring to those outside the family) life around our dinner table.

The real estate agent who helped us find our house (and is a dear, close, personal friend of our ex-governor’s) is a relentless saleswoman.  We get letters in the mail with helpful tips and tricks!  We get–at irregular intervals–a coupon to a local ice cream store or dollars off on purchases at a locally owned business.  And, this Thanksgiving, we were given a pie, apple or pumpkin.

So, we now have a store-bought pumpkin pie for free, sitting in our fridge.

We have a turkey thawing out, alternately in the sink and in the fridge.

We have lemons and rosemary and garlic to stuff the turkey with.

We have taters, parsley, and cheese for OmegaDad’s trademarked Green Smashed Potatoes.  (Om nom nom!)

Somewheres in there we have a vegetable.

All that’s left is for us to put together the feast.  I will provide chopping and dicing; OmegaDad is le chef and I will do only his bidding in the kitchen.

It is time to list the things in life that make us thankful.  Really, it would be a good idea to do this on a regular basis; maybe the world would be a better place for it.  So long as it’s quiet and private and not trumpeted to the world.  My tidbits of thankfulness wouldn’t stand up to the scrutiny of the world; they’re all small and personal and, face it, pretty damned selfish.  What I am thankful for, someone else may find picayune, and vice versa.

Number one on my list is OmegaDad.  This guy is an endless font of incredible spoonerisms and malaprops that leave me laughing at the same time as I am left in gaping awe at his inventiveness.  I have asked how he does it, and he shrugs:  it just sort of “comes out–I don’t do it on purpose…”  We have been together for almost 16 years, and I still find things to talk with him about, still find him gentle and sweet and thoughtful and intelligent.  And, dayum, he cooks up a storm, dontcha know!  This year’s focus has been bread, and we have been the recipients of yummy flatbreads, lavosh, pizza dough, challah, plain white bread, breadsticks, French bread, tortillas, and homemade hamburger buns.  Wow.

Next is OmegaDotter.  She’s just amazing.  OmegaDad recently challenged her to finally pin down her back flip, offering a differing amount of money depending on how long it takes her to get it solid.  In the course of a week, she has managed to reach the point of always flipping over and 75% of the time ending up on her feet again.  (The practice is on our bed.)  She is reading by herself, and we alternate nights when I read to her with nights when she reads to me.  Every once in a while she will bestow a piece of artwork on us that makes my jaw drop.  And she’s beginning to bring out more and more unasked-for flashes of empathy and moral grounding.  Yee-haw!

Then there’s GrannyJ.  She’s 82 and still going strong, walking her small town, taking photographs, blogging and nourishing a local blogging community, and challenging me with new and interesting science fiction authors all the time.

We have our health.  We have our house.  We have friends and family.  We have a standard of living that would make 70% of the world gasp in awe.

We had Kai for eleven years–that’s good.  We’ve discovered that chickens, though they may be pretty damned dumb, still have a lot of personality.  Our garden overflowed with vegetables, even though we were moosed at times.  We have long, lovely hours of sunshine in the summer to balance out the cold dark months of winter.

There’s a lot to be thankful for.

A very happy Thanksgiving to all my U.S. friends and readers, and generally thankful warm fuzzies to my non-U.S. followers!

Remember this?

It happened again, this evening.

So, instead of relaxing and watching some nice dark science fiction (aka Stargate Universe), OmegaDad and I have spent the past 40 minutes dealing with OmegaDotter’s social life–or, currently, lack thereof.

Once again, she started making plans with A.–as in, “We’ll pick you up at…”–without sitting down and asking us first.

It’s not a lot to ask, I think.  I’d like to have her request that a friend can spend the night, and actually talk about it with us, before she starts making plans with that friend.

Not to mention, she had already asked a different friend to come over tomorrow afternoon.  (A friend whose phone number we do not have, by the way, so we can’t call his folks and say “It’s off, sorry!”.)

Not to mention, she had already asked me if she could do “Parents’ Night Out” at her gymnastics facility.

The result:  No friends over at all tomorrow.  No overnight.  And “Parents’ Night Out” only if (a) they have space, and (b) she behaves supremely well tomorrow.

I wanted to talk about other things in my post today, but I’m grumpy and tired and about to head off to bed to wallow in being Mean Mommy.

The scene:  OmegaDotter picks up the phone, dials a number.

“Hello?  This is OmegaDotter, who is this?…Can I please speak with A.?”

“Hi, A.?  It’s OmegaDotter.  I blew it.”

“I made a poor choice.”

“You can’t come to the fair with us tomorrow.  I’m sorry I said you probably could.”

The backstory:

A.–OmegaDotter’s current best buddy–is coming over for a sleepover tomorrow night, as a result of some parental badgering on the dotter’s part.  The Big Fair is running from yesterday through September 8.  We were planning to go tomorrow.  The dotter asked us prior to dinner–while on the phone with A.–if he could come to the fair with us.  We said we’d make our minds up later, but it was dinnertime and time to get off the phone.

During dinner, she asked again.  And again.  OmegaDad said that he had been wanting a “just family” day.  I personally was leaning towards saying, sure, why not, let’s bring A. along, it’ll be fun, but said we needed to decide later.

Dinner was over, the dotter cleared the table, I stepped out for a smoke, OmegaDad stepped out with the dawg to do the dawgly duty.

When we got back inside, the dotter was on the phone with A., telling him that yes, he could almost certainly come to the fair with us.

Oops.  Big mistake, kiddo.  Don’t go making plans with someone else based on no decision from your parents.  We told her to say goodbye to A., that she’d call him back later, and to get her cute little butt back to the dinner table so we could Talk To Her.  At which point, we laid out the fact that (a) we had not made the decision yet, (b) she called A. and told him we had, (c) as a result, our decision was that he was not coming with us, even though I had been leaning towards taking him along, and (d) she had to call A. back, tell him she was wrong, and apologize.

Oh, lordy.  Y’know, sometimes being a parent is just a plain old pain in the ass.  Damn.  Chores need to be supervised, so it’s more work than just doing it myself.  We need to remind her to do the chickens.  We have to explain that not everything is going to go her way.  We have to explain courtesy, and patience, and junk like that.  (We also have to explain that talking in class is a Bad Idea, that while it’s polite to listen to someone who is talking (!!!  Yes!  She claimed she was listening and talking to A. in class because he was talking to her and it was the polite thing to do!), the teacher talking takes precedence, and quiet time in class takes precedence, and, and, and…)

Bah.

On the good side, though, we applauded her phone call (she was saying it all very quietly, in another room, so it wasn’t for show), we all played five-card draw, and B.S., and Crazy Eights, and I read another chapter of her Karito Kids book to her before bedtime.  I guess it all balances out.

We have returned.  We had a lovely time visiting with GrannyJ and OmegaBro and family.  We swam, we walked, we visited, I worked (multiple days, bah, but it was mostly my own stupid fault), we hung out, we got lots and lots of sun, and OmegaDotter now is no longer scared of bugs but is busy collecting them (courtesy of OmegaBro and Niece and Nephew).  I got lots of dark nights (yay!) and some stars (yay!) and lots of clear electric blue skies, ponderosa pines, and monsoon storms.

But I will discuss those things in more detail later.  Maybe.

The most important thing, though, was that I managed to locate and contact One And Only True Love’s family in secret and managed to get the dotter up to Small Mountain University Town for a visit with him without her knowing what was going on.

I lied my head off to do this.  I told her I had looked them up in the phone book and couldn’t find them.  I told her the surprise I was working on didn’t work out.  When I said we were going up to SMUT, with a stop at Slide Rock State Park, and she asked if we could please, please, puh-leeze find a way to meet up with OAOTL, I shook my head with a sad smile and reminded her that I couldn’t get their information and didn’t remember where they lived.

Hah-hah!

So we did Slide Rock, then motored on up the hill to SMUT, and she fell asleep–worn out from playing, and I had to drive out one of my favorite roads hoping I could time her rise from her nap to coincide with us getting back into the right neighborhood at the right time.

Which I did.  (Picture OmegaMom with a smirky, triumphant grin right now.)

At which point–she was awake and excited to be back in SMUT–I said, “Hmmm.  Now I think I can remember where he lived–wasn’t their house down this way?” and turned off the road onto another, and then another, and she started recognizing things and got excited.  I pulled the car to a stop across the street from their house–which had been painted so I couldn’t recognize it when I went scouting–and she said, with great excitement, “That’s it!  That’s his house!” 

I said, doubtfully, “Hmm.  I’m not sure, love, it doesn’t look the same to me.  But maybe we could knock on the door and see if they know where he lives now.”  We went across the street, up the deck stairs, to the door, and before I could even ring the doorbell OmegaDotter was trying to open the screen door, and OAOTL’s mom was there, and OAOTL was barging out saying, “OMEGADOTTER!“

At which point, OmegaDotter became quite suddenly still and stiff and shy, which she has been doing lately.

Um.

Now this I had not expected.  I had expected her to swarm all over him like a crazed monkey.  I had expected her to stand with her hands clasped at her waist with a particularly goofy grin that she has when she’s over-the-moon happy.  I did not expect awkward silence.

At this point, I was terrified that everything was Going To Go Wrong.  But she pulled my head down and whispered into my ear to ask if this was my surprise, and said, quietly shocked, “You lied!  Oh, you bad mommy!”

So she and OAOTL sat, awkwardly, on different spots on the sofa while OAOTL’s mom and I made small talk.

OAOTL produced the most lovely, sweet drawing with “I LOVE YOU OMEGADOTTER!” written on it, and huge hearts, and two pictures of two kids holding hands, one in a boat.  OMG.  It was simply not the sort of thing you’d expect from a seven-year-old boy.  (OAOTL’s mom tells me that all of his “girlfriends” have looked just like her, and his latest had said something like “OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter, OmegaDotter!  I am so tired of you talking about OmegaDotter!” shortly before she stopped being his friend…)

The kids, however, were still not smiling or touching or anything at this point.  It was…just plain awkward.

Luckily, we had made arrangements to take them off swimming at the swanky new aquatic center.  By the time we got there, the awkwardness had evaporated: the dotter and OAOTL were chattering their heads off, and once we were in the pool area, she and OAOTL sprinted off to the waiting line to go down the immense water slide.  We hung out there for an hour, and then headed off for pizza at the cheap Chuck E. Cheez clone, and then back to OAOTL’s house for trampoline jumping and playing, and then it was time to go…

Both kids swarmed into OAOTL’s bedroom, scampered up onto his bunk bed, and started bouncing onto and off of each other and shouting “NO!” and “Can’t I spend the night?!” and “When can she come back?!”

OmegaDotter later told me I was the very best mom ever, and it was the greatest surprise ever.

Here are the kids towards the beginning of the visit, just beginning to warm up again:

And here they are when trying to avoid her going back to GrannyJ’s:

I now have address, phone number, and email address safely sent–via email–to all three of my email addresses, so there is no way we can lose them now.

I was finishing off a book last night, so I sat in the dim living room reading it, then plodded off to bed at 12:45 a.m.  I snuggled up against OmegaDad, then had my nightly just-after-going-to-bed hot flash and cooled off, snuggled up again and had finally started that interesting, dreamy descent into sleep…

When the phone rang.

I was jerked awake.  OmegaDad jerked up, with a muffled, “Wha-?!  Wuff.  Wha-??”

I looked at the clock.  1:15 a.m.

Immediately all the possibilities–all of them dire, of course–began running through my head:  Something had happened to mom.  OmegaDad’s Uncle B.–in the hospital due to a massive stroke–was dying.  If this had been about 20 years ago, I would assume it was one of my buds in the middle of a horrible break-up.

Look:  In my world, people don’t call at that time unless something bad is happening.

I staggered out to the living room, fumbled around in the dark, grabbed the phone, and peered at the caller ID.

Not Arizona.  Whew.

Not Oklahoma.  Whew.

“Alaska Digital” caller.  WTF?

All of this had taken a second or two.  I punched the button to talk.  “Hello?”

“Hi.  Can you tell OmegaDotter that I called her?”

Okay.  WTF?  “Who is this?”

“It’s S.”

Of course, I already knew it.  S. calls at terribly inappropriate times, but this was the worst.

“::Sigh::  ::yawn::  S., sweetie, it’s almost 1:30 in the morning.  Sweetie, this is a bad time to call people.  I will tell OmegaDotter that you called, but please don’t call us this late again.”

“I’m sorry.”  Small voice.  “But please tell OmegaDotter that I called.”

“Okay.  I’ll do that.  But, S., please don’t call this late.”

“Okay.”

I said goodbye, I hung up, I went back into the bedroom.  OmegaDad was sitting on his side of the bed, wide awake, and said, “Let me guess.  It was S.”

So we talked about S.  S. is the gal whose mom and step-dad had a rather abrupt parting-of-the-ways about twenty minutes before the dotter was due at their house for a playdate.  Since S. had called five times that morning about the playdate, when I heard the phone ring, I assumed it was S., and just let it roll over to the answering machine.  Besides, OmegaDad had the dotter out shopping that morning, and was going to deliver her to her playdate on the way home.

Alas, when they got there, it was awkward, because the step-dad had to invent a family emergency on-the-fly and the dotter was miserable at not getting her playdate.  And then the next day, we got a call from S. where she told the dotter that–surprise!–she was moving to Big City, and could the dotter come play with her there?

Um.  Since then, S. has called at very odd hours.  We have the dotter on a pretty regular schedule; she’s in bed and asleep by 9 usually, even in the bright summer hours.  OmegaDad and I get some alone time, she gets plenty of sleep.  This is a Good Thing, because if the dotter doesn’t get enough sleep, she is hell on wheels and a major pill to be around.  This seems to be an early bedtime for a lot of her buddies, apparently.  S. calls at 9:30, 10, 10:30…and now 1:15 a.m.

OmegaDad was judgmental about the parenting she’s getting as a result; this afternoon, I realized that if our dotter were to wake up in the middle of the night, we probably wouldn’t know it and she might even be moved to try calling one of her friends.  But I still worry about S. in general and hope she’s all right…