Drops of Awesome

Personal Blog of Author Kathryn Thompson

Archives for January 2013

Tuppence Per Each Bag

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I’ve been trying to eat well lately. In theory I’ve been trying to eat well all my life, minus college. In practice I’ve been getting progressively better for the past 5-10 years. I’ve very recently turned to a hard-core, stop-eating-anything-that-doesn’t-taste-like-a-literal-nutrient way of eating.

I’m struggling with perplexing health problems and if you have perplexing health problems, eventually you turn to examining your diet and when you examine your diet, you find that if it tastes good, there are at least ten people who live on the internet who will tell you that what you’re eating is causing your specific problem.

I don’t listen to those ten people because they obviously hate brownies.

However, last week my naturopath told me that I should consider severely limiting my grains. Also, my “random thoughts that come into my head right after I finish praying” told me I should severely limit my sugar intake.

Blech.

So I’m trying to eat like a good girl, I am. Lean meats and vegetables, baby!

But there are days when Doritos must be imbibed. So, I was having one of those days but I was trying to have it Drops-of-Awesomely, focusing on the fact that I only bought the supersized personal-sized 50% more bag, instead of the supersized FAMILY-sized 50% more bag. I planned to enjoy every morsel.

Then Wanda walked in. She had many questions, questions about what I was eating, about why she was not also eating it, about, please please, could she please eat it.

So I shared.

Begrudgingly.

If I was going to unlimit my grains, I wanted to unlimit them all the way down.

But she had cuteness on her side and I really shouldn’t have been eating that much grain, much less that much grain coated in nuclear cheese dust. I should be feeding it to my sweet, growing child person.

She started plowing through the chips faster than I would have thought possible. She’d grab one, say, “Thanks,” and leave the room. Two seconds later she’d be back for more. With increasing dog-protecting-his-bone-ish-ness, I handed them to her. Grrrr….

We made short work of the bag and I continued my quest to eat things that are green and crunchy and capable of making me feel smug and self-satisfied when I notice them hanging around like a lump in my stomach and later coming out in Dr. Oz approved luscious deposits.

But, as I went outside later to pick up my kids from the bus, what to my wondering eyes should appear, but a mother lode of Doritos all over the porch and front walk.

“Look!” Wanda grinned, “I’m feeding ALL the birdies!”

It was obvious from the sheer number of slimy glowing orange chips that the birdies had absolutely zero interest, or they assumed that something the color of a construction cone was inedible, from previous painful personal experience.

So I smiled and congratulated her on her good deed-ery, sighing at all the lost cheesy goodness. And when she wasn’t looking, I threw them over the fence into the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. I don’t know what goes on back there but we have found animal bones. And broken clay pots circa AD 1985.

Now all that’s left to do is put on all my Newsies-colored dresses and skirts in multiple layers, tease my hair like a crazy rock star homeless person and start singing on my front porch steps. “Feed the microscopic organisms in the decaying bamboo forest section of my crazy-sauce back yard. Tuppence per each bag.”

You know you’d pay money to see that. Way more fun than giving your coin to those mean old guys at the bank, right?

Sunburnt

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After six years working with the teenage girls at church, I’ve moved on to a new job. It’s… a “little” different. The class of three-year-olds in the Mormon church are called Sunbeams and I’ve written about the experience of teaching them over at the Time Out For Women blog.

“Sunbeams are warm and lovely, vibrant and life-giving. But if you get too close, they will incinerate you.”
[read more at TOFW.com]

Just Love Em, Dad Gum It

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The weirdest thing happened at dinner tonight. My little angel babies of light were *gasp-snork* fighting with one another. And it wasn’t a good fight or a noble fight. They were not fighting to protect the honor of a fallen comrade or to maintain their basic human freedoms.

They were fighting about whether or not Magoo had seen me and Dan kiss. He maintains to this day that he NEVER sees us kiss. We’ll kiss in one room and he’ll yell from the next room, “I didn’t see that!” It’s sort of a joke in our family. Well today Dan and I were on the make-out war path. He’d kiss me mid-sentence, whenever he thought Magoo could not possibly miss seeing it.

Magoo would calmly close his eyes and say, “Didn’t see that.”

Well, by golly, Laylee was pretty sure he had seen one of them and she would not stand for the lies, those dangnable, dangnable lies. If a person has seen two other people snog at the dinner table, he’d better darn well man up about it.

She would not let it go.

“I didn’t SEE IT!” he protested.

“Yes you did,” she persnicked.

“Did not.”

They would not stop. Dan told them to stop. Then he commanded them to stop. But they just kept nitting and picking at each other. Tears were shed and the war waged on.

Dan encouraged them to use kind words. “We just need to build each other up. I know you love each other. Why say things that are hurtful? Will this fight matter in ten years?”

“Well he did see it,” Laylee said in that really annoying voice of a Disney star, who’s bound to get busted for shoplifting or a DUI because she’s so mad to be 18 and still playing a 13-year-old snot face on TV.

AAAAAHHHH.

Then the thought came to my mind, the best way to behavior modify is to set a good example. You’re supposed to love them into wanting to be kind.

But that takes too long.

Maybe if I love them really really hard.

So I grabbed Magoo and asked Dan to grab Laylee and I said, “You guys are obviously sad because you don’t feel loved enough. We’re just gonna love you until you can be kind to each other. We’re gonna love you like widdle babies, yes we are, goochy-goo-googly goo.”

We scooped them up into our arms, 7 and 9 year old infants, giggling and struggling to get free.

“Do you feel loved enough to be kind? I just want to love my widdle Magooly-face until he feels the love in his heart just spilling over into the way he talks to his sister. Do you feel loved enough?”

At this point we were rocking them back and forth and everyone was laughing.

“Yes, I feel loved, I feel loved. Put me down!”

So we did. And the cycle was broken. The fighting stopped. Stellar parenting? Not necessarily. But it got the job done. Love heals all, even raucaus, what-the-heck-are-you-doing-Mom love.

Stop! Person Who Made a Poor Choice and Stole Something!

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I would title this post, Stop! Thief!, but that would mean labeling one of my children and from what I’ve read in these here parenting manuals, there is no such thing as a “bad child,” just a child who makes poor choices. Although, if you read Dickens, there is such a thing as a “poor child” and according Robert Kiyosaki, there is also such thing as a “poor dad.” But that’s neither here nor there. The sweet little fruit of my loins shoplifted this afternoon, bless her heart.

Wanda is not highly diabolical. In fact, she’s not even the most diabolical three-year-old I know. She is an addict, always looking for her next sugar fix. And her head often resembles a muffin. One might say she was muffin-headed. But she pulled a pretty smooth con today.

So, we were at the grocery store today, buying the supplies for the OhMyGoshICan’tTellYouHowMuchILoveThem meals from my meal planning service and Wanda was a big help. She helped me throw the giant butternut squash on top of the other produce. She helped me develop stronger resolve to eat healthy by asking me to buy every single processed food in the entire store. She helped me load items onto the conveyer belt. And then she helped herself to a baby bottle pop.

I’m not sure where she hid it or why I bought her a coat with pockets, but I didn’t notice the thievery until we’d driven home and I went to unload her from her seat. She was grinning from ear to ear and her entire body, car seat and inside the car seat buckle mechanism were covered with pink toxic sugar dust. She was SO proud.

I didn’t know quite how to explain to a barely three-year-old pumpkin face about the wrongs of stealing. But I did know we needed a memorable lesson, so I gave her a simple definition and my best “I’m disappointed but I still love you but oh NOOOO this was not a good choice” talk.

We drove back to the store. She gave a muffled apology to the Customer Service manager who, coincidentally, was also her church nursery teacher last year. Then I made her empty out the dollar and twenty-five cents from her allowance envelope and give all of it in payment for the pilfered merchandise.

She was slightly stricken but handled it all pretty well, frequently burying her face in my sleeve.

Then our friend handed her the candy she’d just purchased and I DUN DUN DUN… took it away.

That’s when the emotionally fueled detenatory convulsion occurred. I carried her from the grocery store, sobbing and yelling, garnering pitying looks from strangers. I’m not sure if they pitied me or Wanda. Maybe both.

It’s so hard to be a three-year-old felon. Even if you don’t have to wear hand cuffs. Even if your mug shot looks like this.

sunbeam4

Three-year-old felons persons who have committed felonies don’t ever ever get to eat the spoils of their offenses.

Photobomb

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It felt like a betrayal of pencils and chalk and teachers’ mugs full of bad coffee. This year, for the first time ever, I did not order school pictures for my kids.

I have a camera larger than a VW Bug, I thought. I’ve totally got this.

We haven’t had great luck with school pictures in the past and they cost more money than my collection of Boy Band MP3s, which, not to brag, is extensive. It was a win-win because I could save money, get better pictures, and feel like a sort of awesome hipster photographer mom because I took them myself with my own neck-strapped paparazzi device.

It ended up that the pictures were WAY cheaper than usual. The cost was zero dollars because I did not take them. Oops.

There are pictures of my kids on my cell phone so we will remember that they were alive this year, just not with perfectly coiffed hair or facial expressions that say, Someone just told me to smile while I’m surrounded by big white umbrellas and a mottled blue vinyl backdrop.

Well, Dan knew we weren’t doing pictures so he was confused when he came home from work one day and found a school photo package envelope sitting on the kitchen counter with Magoo’s name on it.

“What’s this?” he said, picking it up. “I thought we weren’t ordering school pictures.”

photobomb

“Wait. What? Why are all of Magoo’s school pictures actually pictures of you?”

PHOTOBOMB!

“I snuck into Magoo’s school, waited in the photographer’s black supply trunk for hours with nothing but the birds, angry, angry birds to keep me company. I bided my time and just as the photographer commanded him to smile, I burst from concealment and jumped in front of the camera. ‘Boo-ya! PHOTO-BOMBED, CHUMP!’”

“No, seriously. Why are you in his pictures?”

“They take pictures of all the school volunteers so they can make us name badges and they… um… sent mine home with Magoo so they had to put his name on the package.”

I think Dan found that explanation slightly disappointing. Didn’t we all?

“Oh,” he said.

But, the good news is, I do have my own child ID cards now from the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. So, if Dan ever loses me in a mosh pit or a sea of clearance purses at Macy’s, he’ll have an easier time helping the police track me down.

photobomb2

Yogurt – As Promised

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This is the label on the case of yogurt I bought at Costco recently.
yog
Really?! Zero percent non-fat? So that makes it what percent full-fat?

MAXIMUM FLAVOR UNITS!

Drops of Thank You

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Thank you so much to everyone who read and shared my post from two weeks ago with your family and friends, maybe enemies whose attitudes you were hoping to change. The number of people who have shared their kind words and stories with me is such a throat lump, I’m not quite sure what to say.

Many of you shared very raw and personal stories and I’ve been moved to tears daily as I’ve read your comments and emails. I’m not a huge crier. Okay. I cried at the Backstreet Boys Concert. And pretty much every time I’ve ever seen a flash mob on YouTube. And because… ballerinas. But I rarely cry over blog comments.

When I first had the Drops of Awesome flash of inspiration, I desperately needed it. I was having one of the “dark times.”

As you know if you’ve read this blog for long, and most of you haven’t, (WELCOME!) I dealt with some pretty crushing panic and anxiety disorder following the birth of my second child seven years ago. It was humbling in a way I hadn’t imagined possible. To suddenly not be able to trust your own thoughts and feelings is terrifying. I’ve found some amazing help and healing but I still deal with it off and on. It’s something I may struggle with for the rest of my life.

And that’s okay.

I’ve been tested to my limit no more or less than I’m sure you have been tested to your personal limit. We grow. We gain more empathy. I know Christ didn’t learn love and empathy by spending his days in a bubble surrounded by fluffy bunnies and marshmallow peeps. He felt and experienced pain on an incomprehensible level.

So when this flash of inspiration came, I was grateful for it. It got me through a really hard time. When I felt inspired to share it with the teenagers at church, it was for them. I felt that and it was reaffirmed when one of the girls I’d had the hardest time reaching texted me that night to say she was still thinking about our lesson. I was so grateful that inspiration had come to me that was sharable, that could make a difference to someone else as well.

At the time, I put my current fiction project aside and started writing a Drops of Awesome book, that I soon abandoned. Maybe it was just inspiration for me and Young Woman X, I thought, and I was totally cool with that. But then I wrote up a short version of my thoughts in this post. It has since been shared and reposted by everyone and his mama and I’m filled with gratitude and awe. I am not alone! WE ARE NOT ALONE. And not just in a God Loves You kind of way, but also in a Shared Human Experience kind of way which seems very immediate and tender.

All that being said, since originally posting my Drops of Awesome thoughts before Christmas, and seeing how they’ve been received, I’ve been scared to post anything else.

You see? This has never really been a religious blog, not at DaringYoungMom.com or for the years I blogged at Parenting. I am religious and it sort of oozes out sometimes, but mostly I write about silly stuff. I blog about life in all its weirdness. My next post will likely be about yogurt or photo-bombing my son’s school pictures.

You might have to wait a long time for inspiration lightning to strike again. I hope it does. If it does, I will totally share it with you. If not, read back through the comments on the Drops of Awesome post, because they are… well… awesome. In the meantime, read about my yogurt and tell me about yours and we will drip away together toward something magical.