Monday, April 30, 2012

Repeat, repeat, repeat

Do you ever feel like you need your own personal 007 spy style mini-voice recorder?  Like installed in my eye glasses or something.  Hell, I've got bifocals now, what's another gizmo added to them going to matter?

Mostly I need this kind of gadget because clearly I need to just have certain things recorded and ready to play at any given time.  I want one that you can program to play certain things at certain times, like "Go brush your teeth."  You could pre-record everything, set the timer and then save your voice.

This is how our morning goes, does it sound familiar to you too?  Five minutes of "brush your teeth!" followed by another five minutes of "go brush them again" because they still have that same hair-curling-ice-melting-did-a-cat-crap-in-your-mouth morning breath after their cursory 30 second swab of their gum tissue.  Note that at least 10 minutes were spent in front of the mirror HOLDING the toothbrush, but 9.5 of them were spent making faces at themselves.

Then another fun five minutes of "put on your shoes, coat and backpack" followed by about two panicked minutes of "hurry and put your shoes, coat and backpack because it's time to go" followed by one simple "I'm leaving now" as you jump in the car, back down the driveway and watch your kids come unhinged thinking you're actually leaving them at home.  Alone.  Again.

After school time is equally awesome with several verses of "get your homework out", followed by the "I'll help you with your math but I'm not going to do it for you" refrain, and not to be forgotten the "put your homework in your homework folder" crescendo.

But not to be outdone, our nighttime routine includes a gentle reprise of the brush your teeth melody from the morning, with a splash of "put your dirty clothes in the hamper" phrasing for fun.  I really think there is money to be made on some type of device like this.  Imagine, sipping your coffee in peace while your wrist watch yells at the kids for you.  Relax with that nice glass of red wine while your eyeglasses do all the work.

Honestly, it feels like groundhog day.  EVERY day.  I know we have the technology, we just need someone to put it together.  There's got to be an app for that, right?  RIGHT?!

Friday, April 20, 2012

This year we opted to send our kids to private school for a variety of reasons.  One of them being the fact that I work in public education, I know the odds are stacked against my beautiful blonde easily distracted by shiny things girl.  Also, we thought that we could provide them with a good Christian foundation, because clearly based on the contents of my blog this is something I'm not capable of on my own.

We also thought the uniform was a cool idea, until I discovered that the school serves chocolate milk to Kindergartners who wear a white polo shirt every day.  But that is a whole different blog post entirely.

We also needed to be sure we had an all day Kindergarten placement for Brady due to my workschedule, and again because of the wonders of public education and their fantastic funding structre our local elementary school could not guarantee he could have a spot in the all day class.  Again, this is another post for another time.

I was very aware that the kids would be learning Spanish, in the school they attend they have the sweetest young lady teaching the kids conversational Spanish.  I giggle when they yell "Hola!" and I smile when they say "Gracias!".  I ask them what new words they've learned and it's always fun to hear.  Except when it appears there's a teacher's helper in the second grade class who speaks three languages fluently, luckily enough one of them is good old Espanol.

So far most things this little helper has taught the kids, likely during recess, have been fairly mild.  My personal favorite to date was Kaylee learning how to say BOOBS in spanish.  Granted, I'm sure it was slang, but nonetheless her accent was impeccable.

A couple of days ago, however, I almost totally wet myself.  I just love our little Spanish sessions, they are almost always on the way home from school.  Often times they relate to the topic at hand, something conversational, or on the rare occasion as referenced above, something that should never be repeated.

Kaylee says to me "Hey Mama!  I know what Ay Carumba means in Spanish!"  Naively I say "what does it mean?" and my sweet little innocent (yes, she is/was) blue eyed girl says "It means fuck."  My brain immediately thinks "ay carumba" and as I'm saying to her that she should never ever ever in the history of the earth ever ever ever utter that four letter word again or she'll get time out soap in the mouth and hung by her toenails Brady yells out "did she say FLUCK?"  Yes Brady, fluck.  O.    M.     G.

After running triage for awhile and once I felt I had sufficiently scared the shit out of the kids enough that they won't even THINK about saying the word I asked her where she learned it.  "Oh my friend "Betsy" (name changed to protect the girl, but innocent she's not) taught me today at recess."

Oh my flucking God.  That's just FLUCKING awesome.  Flucking unbelieveable.