Has anyone read the new Berenstain Bears book titled, "Too Many Snow Days Followed by a Professional Development Delayed Opening"? It got so-so reviews, but the plot sounds fascinating. It centers around the children who don't know what to do with themselves after a dump of 2 feet of snow strikes Bear Country and they're stuck at home for two days. They spend exorbitant amounts of time searching for matching gloves, and stepping in puddles inside the treehouse, then stomping around shouting that their stuff is all wet. Once outside, so the story goes, they hurl things at the dog as it repeatedly grabs all of the snowbear's accessories. The story progresses predictably as Mama is depicted outside shoveling snow for two hours, just to escape from the children and their incessant whining, only to wrench her neck. The climax is the story's undoing, veering strongly from the typical Berenstain Bears moral denouement. Front and center, Mama can no longer take it: the crying and the complaining, the constant needs for food and drink, and the huge messes in every room. She finally screams and threatens making such a scene, but backs off in the end, because she is simply too exhausted to enforce any rules anymore.
I while ago, I wrote about something I don't do well as a mother - bathing my children. Short of risking people thinking that there's only one white whale floating in my pond, let me enlighten thee. I'm a bit embarrassed as the things that escape me tend to be pretty basic, and yet I've never nailed them. For instance, bundling. I have never been a mother that fusses over getting every appendage covered before heading out somewhere, even in the bitter Vermont winters that our two oldest children weathered the first years of their lives. As infants, my kids were on the less is more program because their mother didn't go the extra mile with the sherpa surrounds. I relied on them. Certainly, if they could cry to nurse, than they could cry if they were too cold.
I'm serious about this blog. For the first time in almost ten years when my first child was born, I am taking a genuine stab at something other than surrendering myself to the improvement of my home (and yes, cleaning toilets qualifies), or endeavoring to build genius material among my brood. Yet clearly I'm not cut out for this since just over two weeks into it, I find myself making pathetic apologies to my children for oversights. Last night, I promised to wash some clothes for my fashion plate. At bedtime, the clothes had indeed been washed, but I crawled into bed forgetting to dry them. By morning I remembered, and slunk downstairs to turn on the dryer. When my daughter was getting dressed and asked after her jeans, I hemmed and hawed, all the while apologizing that they were still tumbling. I suggested she wear her PJ bottoms until just before we leave for school. At the appointed hour, she extracted her jeans from the dryer, only to find that they were uncomfortably damp. I was annoyed, but I actually felt bad about the whole event. As she whined well past the time we usually leave, I thought a tardy would quickly turn into a "sick" day. She rallied, we left, and her jeans were dry by nine. How can it be that the addition of a thirty minute-a-day blog can wreak havoc for a family of five? And what does it say about the matriarch and her habits, schedules and accomplishments?
