Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson
If you observe my children, you’ll start to think we have a series of very interesting rules in place in our home.
#8. Refuse to eat food that is more than five minutes old because it is “leftovers” unless it’s more than two days old and you find it on the floor.
I saw a woman in the line at the grocery store today who was a dead ringer for Dame Judy Dench. It made sense to me because Dame Judy seems to pop up in all kinds of places. But then I thought, “Why would an older woman with a British accent be required to play ‘woman buying avocadoes at Safeway’?” No, they could have gotten anybody for that role. Heck, I’ve played it before.
Judy Dench should be kept available for playing roles like: persnickety housekeeper, or snobby aristocrat, or hard-bitten head of British intelligence, or The Queen.
In his Easter basket, or rather under it, Magoo got a gigantic illustrated Lego Star Wars encyclopedia. In a plastic sleeve on the bottom corner of the book was a tiny Lego Luke Skywalker. So Sunday night he’s talking to some friends of ours about his Easter and he says, “You wanna see the awesome thing the Easter Bunny brought me?”
“Sure,” they say. What else can they say? The entire evening’s been a frantic show and tell, the likes of which only a second child with a captive audience can pull off. I am a second child. I would know. They know that he’s gonna show them the present whether they say, “Sure,” or, “Why don’t you take your pathetic Easter present and shove it where the sun don’t shine?” so they might as well be gracious.
At this point they’ve already seen his gaping tooth orifice and the way his tongue can slide through it, heard all of his jokes, learned how you can amputate the legs from multiple Lego guys to make stilts for one lucky Lego guy, and been subjected to detailed descriptions of multiple video games. What’s one more exhibit? Besides, we’re holding them hostage and if they want pie, they need to play along. Also. He is adorable.
So he brings out the tiny Lego guy and goes off about all of its many amazing properties (hair, moving limbs, painted-on medallion, relation to Star Wars) and its deficiencies (lack of light saber or weapon of any kind, representation of a part of the movie that involves kissing). He loves this Lego guy and is so glad that he got him for Easter.
“Oh, yeah,” he adds as an afterthought, “And he comes with a book.”
I’ve spent the last 4 days in D.C. at the Mom Congress conference and I’m inspired and exhausted.
Click here to read how I stayed close to Dan and the kids while hanging out on the opposite coast.
There are days when I’m not the greatest mom, at least not on paper. Now, I’m not necessarily a bad mom on these days but I sure look less than stellar. These are the days when my kids tell their friends that I yell at them ALL the time when I only yell at them one or two of the times. These are the days when they somehow slip past my watchful eye and end up at church wearing muddy tennis shoes with their baptism dress or to a formal occasion wearing a dress shirt, tie and sweatpants. These are the days when they say I never read to them or tell their teacher I don’t feed them breakfast. I had one of these days last week.
I’d been up late the night before so when Wanda went down for her nap, I went down with her. I turned off the ringers on all the phones because there was only an hour and a half until Magoo got home from kindergarten and I wanted the nap to count. I don’t nap often and when I do, I rarely turn the ringers off. But this day, I was exhausted.
With ten minutes left in my nap, I heard a loud knock at the door. I ignored it. Whenever I get up from a nap to answer the door, I find a package left on the doorstep and I regret having missed out on my sleep. The knock came again, only louder. On the third insistent knock, I made my way downstairs to see who was so desperate to see me. It was a friend of mine who Magoo’s school office staff had asked to come and find me. He was barfy sick and they’d been calling me for the last hour.
They didn’t want to send him home on the bus in his condition so he was sitting in the health room, miserable, waiting for me. All of my emergency contacts were either not answering or their numbers had been disconnected. So I raced to change out of my pajamas, grabbed the baby in her ratty play clothes and sleep-disheveled hair, and headed to the school, unshowered and un-made-up.
I explained to the staff that I hadn’t heard their calls because I’d been napping with the ringer off. I think they were very impressed by my stay-at-home mom attentiveness to my children’s needs. I pulled my baseball cap further down on my nappy hair. My friend in the office said Magoo might just be hungry since he’d told his teacher that I hadn’t fed him breakfast that morning. Of course I’d fed him breakfast that morning. In fact, I’d made him a spinach smoothie for variety and extra nutrition but he didn’t count it as breakfast because it was drinkable.
So I took my sick boy and my poor hygiene and headed home, where Magoo told me about how they’d been working on a clay project at school that day. The CLAY PROJECT! I was supposed to have sent in money for the clay project. I’d even gotten a reminder notice from the teacher saying he could not participate if I didn’t send in money. And I’d forgotten. And she’d let him participate anyway because she is simply awesome like that.
His teacher? Awesome. Me? I have my moments.
I tend to get a bit overwhelmed when I read about the process of getting my novel published. Yesterday I wrote half a chapter and then spent a good chunk of time reading and researching. I’m reading The Essential Guide to Getting Your Book Published, a book that came highly recommended by a published friend, and I also stopped by Query Shark and several other sites.
Venting to Dan, I said, “I don’t know how I’m supposed to find time to write if I’m worried about attending conferences, formulating pitches, developing a social media presence, networking, maintaining the status of “voracious reader”, and you know, being a mom and having a life and stuff.”
“What’s a vor-each-iss reader?” Laylee asked.
“It means you read tons of books all the time.”
Then today I got cozy on the couch with my laptop and Laylee curled up on the floor beside me with book #1039 from the Guardians of Ga’hoole series.
“Are you gonna read with me while I write?” I asked.
“Yeah. You worry about writing. I’ll do the vor-each-iss reader part for you.”
Sweet. So now I need Dan to attend conferences for me, Magoo to work on the pitch, and Wanda to tweet and post to Facebook after her nap.
This post was originally posted on KathrynYoungThompson.com