Children: The New and the Old(er).

Congrats and much love to my brother and sister-in-law on the newest addition to our family. A new niece has been added to the fold, and like all newborns she is absolutely precious. I love babies because, to me, their needs are so simple; feed me, change me, hold me. Life at it's easiest and most basic, as far as I'm concerned.
And then, they start growing and eventually learn to talk and think.
At some point, if we parents are lucky, they will learn some common sense and understand there are so many ways to make their lives easier, not more difficult. Sadly, for some children, this takes years, and years, and years to comprehend.
Let's take my little darling, for example. I love the girl, and lately I've been trying like heck to figure out her mindset, aside from the fact that she's in the throes of the teenage years.
Last night, she handed me some paperwork from her Geometry teacher that needed my signature. Two dismal quiz grades. Not the end of the world, but her teacher noted that my darling daughter had not been coming in for any extra help in order to improve her grade.

"Do you know when Ms. N is available to help you?" I asked.
"Yes, she has free time after school," said daughter.
"Why aren't you getting help?"
"I was going to go this afternoon," she said, "but I have detention."

HUH???
"Why...?" I could feel a cluster headache simmering in the back of my brain.
"I wasn't wearing my nametag. It's broken."
"Well for the love of God, go buy a new tag." If I'm lucky, I thought, maybe this headache will segue into an aneurysm and kill me before she graduates.
"You know, I thought about doing that but I didn't feel like climbing all those stairs to the third floor office."
GAAAAAAAHHHHH!!!!

Give me a drooling baby with a stinky diaper any day. Much easier.

Giving One for the Team

Kudos to you moms who have more than one child, especially those with children involved in sports and other after school activities.  I don't know how you do it. One high school athlete is about all I can handle. 
I've been trying to update this blog for two days...so much for those plans to sit down and write every day. My life doesn't swing that way, apparently.
Work takes up about nine hours of the day, starting bright and early at five a.m. Teenzilla (she'd kill me if I used her real name...MOM, I can't believe you're talking about me on a blog...) takes up the other half. Believe me, I do it gladly because I love her, and because one day, she'll be choosing my assisted living facility. She's a great kid (okay, a little mouthy, but I'm sure it's passing phase) with a wicked sense of humor, but her volleyball schedule is killing me!
Let me get this out in the open, right here and now: I'm a bad sports mom. Oh sure, I show up at games and bring the Gatorade when asked, but if I had my way, I'd be at home taking a nap. It's not my fault, I was born without a competitive nature gene. The "good" sports moms know all of the girls on the team, their jersey numbers, their positions. I know to pay attention and act like I understand the game of volleyball when Teenzilla is at the net.
     When she made the JV team, I was thrilled. JV plays first which meant, I thought, only an hour of my time invested and then we could grab her gym bag and continue on with the rest of the afternoon. I would have about an hour to run errands (take a nap, who am I kidding?) before dealing with dinner. Yeah, right. Teenzilla volunteered to be the line girl for the varsity games. From what I can tell, the line girl holds a red flag and plays a role in determining whether the ball is in or out of bounds. Excuse me...isn't that the job of the referee?
     Now I sit in the stands for an extra hour or so and cheer on girls whose names I will hopefully learn before the end of the season. Why not just leave after the JV game, you ask? Take your nap, run to the grocery store and then pick up Teenzilla after the varsity game. Well, you see, it's those good moms again. They never fail to show up early and cheer on my daughter and the rest of the JV team. It would be rude to not do the same for their daughters.
     On the drive home from last night's game, as we went to pick up Chinese for dinner, my daughter made the offhand comment about how Mrs. "L" had the weekly schedules of all four of her children, and her husband, programmed into her Blackberry.
     "Do you want me to put your schedule into my phone?" I asked, hoping like heck she wouldn't because I can barely retrieve my voicemail messages or send texts. "Would that make you feel better?"
     "No, it's okay," she said. "Besides, Mrs. "L" is kind of of a Stepford wife, it's pretty scary."
     I made a mental note to retrieve the October school calender from the bowels of my oversized purse. It's crammed down there, somewhere, between bills that need to be paid, raffle tickets that need to be sold for the Mother's Club, and the empty order form for the school fundraiser that's due later this month.
     No one will ever hurl accusations of being a Stepford wife my way...at least I have that in my favor.