Mo and Shay are “Irish Twins.” For those of you unfamiliar with the term, it
doesn’t mean they are Irish or twins, but that they are less than a year apart
in age. So for eight glorious days this year, they were both seven. This delighted Shay the Younger and
infuriated Mo the Elder. It’s
funny. Kids don’t understand that just
because they briefly hold up the same number of fingers in response to someone
asking them how old they are doesn’t mean they are, in fact, the exact same
age. So for eight days, I heard various
versions of “you can’t tell me what to do, you’re not my older sister anymore,”
and then eight days later I heard, “yea!
I’m the older sister again!” And
to throw an even bigger wrench into the mix, Mo’s birthday is on March 1st,
so I briefly (VERY briefly) tried to explain that if she had been born on a
leap year, her birthday would have been February 29th and would
therefore have been a leap baby.
Jesus. If you can avoid it, never try to explain a leap year to a
kid. I think pre-teen is the best time
for that. PG-13 movies, the big sex
talk, and leap years. Because when I
told her that every four years their birthdays are nine days apart, and that if
she were a leap baby she would only have had one birthday so far, her face
twisted up so much I was afraid it would hurt her. So I told her quickly to forget about it,
that I’d explain it later. For some
reason I always forget they are seven.
Probably because they seem oddly grown-up at times, which always takes me
off guard. For instance, the other night
I thought the girls were in the other room, so I turned on The Walking
Dead. A part came up when a zombie’s
head was closed in a hatchback door, causing it to explode all over the
windows. Pretty sweet. And before I could open my mouth to say,
“AWESOME!”, from behind me I heard Shay’s impish voice say “oooooh!” and then start
laughing in a way that indicated both disgust and amusement. Just as I was doing. I think Shay may be my movie buddy in a few
years. Mo gets scared at “Babe: Pig in
the City.” Maybe Mo can go see some
“Traveling Beaches Ya Ya Joy Luck Fried Green Vagina Pants Sisterhood
Monologues” with Mom, and Shay and I will go see zombie flicks. But I digress.
Because the girls are foster kids, they are not allowed to
stay overnight at anyone’s house that hasn’t been vetted by Child Protective
Services. That means there have been
some tears when the girls are told “no” when a friend asks them to a sleepover. They don’t understand why the rules are what they
are, especially when they have known their friends since before they were foster
kids. They’ve stayed at friend’s houses
before, why can’t they stay over now?
Kind of hard to explain to them, so we just tell them it’s the rules,
we’re sorry, and try to get them to stop crying by distracting them with sugar
or movies or some other terribly lazy parental ploy. And in the thick of one of these moments of
woe, we told them both, that because their birthdays were so close, we would
have “one big party and your friends can sleep over.”
Whoops.
I thought they might forget what we had said, but that’s
wishful thinking. Kids don’t forget anything
you want them to. So the next day they
were hootin’ and hollerin’ about their sleepover party and asked almost every
day for the next three months about it.
Stuck.
So, we told them to give us a list of kids they wanted to
invite, phone numbers of parents, that kind of thing. Slowly but surely we compiled a list of just
about everyone in BOTH their classes. They
had asked if we could have a bounce house for the party. We thought about it, figured it was cheaper
and hell of a lot less creepy than a clown, so we relented. Upon this news, the list of kids saying they
were coming doubled. Dread set in as the
day grew near, and that day finally came about three weeks ago. God, we had no idea what we had gotten
ourselves in to.
The Friday prior to the party, Amy gets a phone call from
one of the parents. This parent voiced
some concerns.
Mom: “Does (let’s
say, Amber) really have to bring dresses and eye shadow to the party? And are you taking the kids to Chuck E Cheese
afterward?”
Amy:
“Uhhhhh…nooooo….neither of those things.”
Mom: “Oh. Okay.
Good. Amber said there was a
fashion show and then Chuck E Cheese. I
was wondering what the real story is.”
Amy: “I think Mo might have been exaggerating on the party a
little. It’s just a bounce house,
classmates, some of our friends with kids, and the girls can sleep over
afterward. We have dress up clothes and
whatever for the girls.”
Mom: “Sounds
good. Also, Amber said (let’s say,
Sarah) is invited to the party and might go.
Sarah is kind of a bully and Amber is worried about her. I didn’t know if you knew Sarah.”
Amy: “Uh oh. No, don’t know her, but we’ll keep an eye on
it. Thanks for the heads up.”
The rest of the day we spent cleaning and getting ready for
the party.
Fast forward to one o’clock the next afternoon. I’d been outside smoking two briskets and
three racks of ribs. A truck pulls up
with a trailer and backs into the drive.
It’s the rental guy with the bounce house. He gets out, looks around, and begins
wondering aloud, “where is this thing going to go?” So I walk up to him and ask him how much room
he needs. Turns out this damn thing is
HUGE. Seventeen feet tall. Almost as tall as our real house. When we figure out where this pink and purple
monstrosity will go, he blows it up with some industrial fan, and the entire
driveway is transformed into a princess castle.
Now, I have to tell you that one of the things on my bucket
list is to get a bounce house and spend all day just keeping kids out of
it. You know, jump out of bushes and
what not and tell them to “Git the hell outta here!!!” That kind of thing. It’d be awesome. But, I figured today wasn’t the day, so I let
the kids get in and have fun.
Four o’clock rolls around the place explodes with
people. There must’ve been forty kids
and almost that many adults. It really
was a lot of fun. Dads hung out in the
garage, snuck beers, talked about each other’s smoking recipes, motorcycles,
cars, basketball, ruh ruh ruuuuuh!
Ladies talking and watching kids bounce around. Every now and then some bizarre phrase would
waft over to me from the parents surrounding the throng of bouncing children. “Shelly,
don’t take your pants off,” or “Get off his head,” or “Did you poop? Did you?
You better not poop! ” I just let those tidbits of randomness rise up and
float away like the smoke from the barbeque.
Pretty fun.
After people ate came the piñata. Amy made the announcement and led a trail of
screeching kids to the front yard like some pint-sized Pied Piper. A few minutes later I decide I don’t want to
miss the impending melee. As I’m rounding the corner, I see a line of
kids thirty deep. At the front is an
older kid, holding an old broom handle.
Without a blindfold. She’s
carefully gauging the arc of her cut with slow, malevolent practice swings, like
Babe Ruth had just stepped up to the plate.
Before I can remind everyone that the children need to be blindfolded
during their turns, this kid laces into the papier mache and the whole damn
thing disintegrates into a perfectly symmetrical starburst of cheap, flying candy. The radius must have been twenty five yards
when it was all said and done. A
communal moan of disappointment escaped from the line of expectant kids as they
sulked and stomped around for chalky candy hiding in the cold grass. The home run champ looked pretty proud of herself
as she eyed the evidence of her swift and decisive victory. “Well, shit, I guess that’s all done,” I
think to myself. Amy’s wondering how the
kid could have done it in one hit. I
tell her it’s because she didn’t have a blindfold and was probably 100 pounds
already. Next time I’ll know, she
says.
When I was in the first grade, I went to a friend’s birthday
party. He had cake and a water balloon
fight in his backyard. Another friend of
mine started to cry and moan because he didn’t want to eat cake before the
water balloons. He cried for half the
party. The birthday boy’s Dad STILL
holds it against the kid (who isn’t a kid anymore but a doctor), and every time
that person comes up, my friend’s Dad just rolls his eyes and begins to talk
about how annoyed he was. I never
understood that until this party.
Turns out, Amber was worried about Sarah being a bully
because she in fact is a bully herself.
And there ain’t enough room in the bounce house for two bossy kids. But hooray for Amber, Sarah couldn’t come to
the party anyway, so Amber had her run of the place. “Mo is MY best friend and nobody else’s!”
she’d scream. Which wasn’t true, Mo
barely likes the girl, who towers over the rest of the kids and probably has
twenty pounds on them. She’d cry because
there were other kids in the bounce house, she’d cry because someone gave Mo a
better gift than she did (which, by the way, was the creepiest, weirdest
life-sized baby doll in the world, and I hate that it is in my house now,
watching me from the chair), she wanted the “best friends” necklace Mo’s actual best friend gave her, she wanted
the bowl of chips to herself, etc etc etc.
Cry, demand, mock, laugh, cry, demand, mock, laugh. So is the cycle of bossy kids. We just kind of ignored it when she’d
complain to us about something, like the chips weren’t her favorite or
whatever. We figure it was her parents’
problem not ours and we just had to get through the night. Earlier I had been a little perplexed by how
many parents just kind of dropped their kids off for the night, barely
introduced themselves and were out of there like a shot. “Here you go, here’s my number, call if she’s
dead, BYE, SUCKA!!!” That’s kind of what it felt like. Well, I guess now I know why.
People trickled out around eight. I was already exhausted, and as I was helping
the bounce house guy load the princess castle into the truck, I realized how
long my night was about to be. From
inside I just heard screaming and laughing and banging. I went inside, and they were having some
fashion show, so
I did a quick about-face and went back to the garage with
some friends. What was I going to do
with a damned fashion show? I guess I
could have pretended to take pictures or something, played along. Probably should have. But, I didn’t. Couldn’t.
Didn’t want to. Besides, I knew
by the look in Amy’s eye that she’d be asleep in exactly twenty five minutes
(that’s the precise amount of time between the onset of “sleepy eyes” to utter
system failure). I knew at that moment I
was to be the night shift sheriff of the girl’s party.
They watched some ridiculous movies up in the guest room
until about midnight. That’s when I went
up and told them to start winding down.
What a stupid thing to do. Why do
we always say “hey, it’s time to start thinking about maybe getting ready for
bed?” Good Lord, you might as well throw
Mountain Dews and Pixie Sticks at them.
Amber the Big Boss snickered and giggled mockingly at me. Briefly I entertained the idea of swiftly defenestrating
her and then laughing down at her from the newly smashed window, but decided
against it. Jail would suck. So I figured I’d just do the Bob Kieber and
hold it against her for the rest of her life.
There was an inverse relationship between my pleasantness
and the number of visits I made upstairs.
On the second visit I told them to separate into a “sleepy” room and a “movie”
room, but that there was no “loud” room.
They promptly separated into two rooms and made them both loud.
On the third visit upstairs, I opened the door and realized
that little girls to the EXACT same thing little boys do on sleepovers. They fart and laugh about it. I opened the door and thought I had stepped
into a bathroom stall with a backed up toilet at a truck stop in hell. Somehow I wasn’t surprised Amber was at the
center of this gastrointestinal holocaust.
I opened the windows, told them that tomorrow I was going to have to
hire Chuck Norris to throw this room into the sun because there was no hope for
it. Amber rolled her eyes at me. Again…defenestration. Again…no, let her parents deal with this
little bundle of joy. I’m much sterner as
I tell them to go to sleep, as proofed by the amount of times I used “seriously.”
“No, seriously, you can’t sleep in the closet. No, not all of you can fit in that bed. Seriously.
Find a place and lay down.
Seriously, guys, seriously.
Totally serious here.” Might as
well of told them that I was a toothless little bitch.
On the fourth visit, I told them that enough was enough, it
was two in the morning and if they weren’t going to go to sleep then they had
to go home. That only made Mo upset with
me because I was starting to embarrass her, which was not my goal. Well, not on her birthday anyway.
Fifth visit, most were sleeping, few were awake, but Amber
was now crying because someone told her to shut up. I told the girls to be nice or go home, and that
no one says “shut up.” But I wanted to
find that girl and shake her hand. Well
done, little hero. Well done.
I woke in a panic at six am, still in my clothes, reeking of
barbeque, sweat, fear, and anger. A DVD
menu loop was blaring at me over and over again. I had fallen asleep on the couch to some
horror movie I rented. I listened. No sounds from upstairs. I smiled, curled up, and slept for another
half hour.
Woke up, snuck out, bought a couple dozen donuts and
presented them to the girls, who were, by the time I got back, awake and
thumping around upstairs. They
complained about who got what donut, who got two, etc. I just nodded and smiled and said, “well, you’re
going home in an hour.”
An hour later sheepish parents showed up, saw my raggedy
appearance, and shook their heads at me.
One guy asked if this was my first sleepover. I told him it was. He started laughing. Told me I was brave. I told him it wasn’t bravery to do something
when you don’t realize the danger. If I
do it again next year, well, that…THAT
would be brave.
