8 ~ Time Out for some random
Stories about kids and family life
I got tired of writing serious stuff, so maybe you’re tired of reading it! Every family has amusing stories about their kids. Here are some of ours, lest you think that our life only consisted of hospitals and gloom.
Tempting the Fates (Summer, 1986)
Danny’s best friend when he was five was a beautiful dark haired six-year-old named Abigail. They had terrific times together, either at our house or hers. They loved to turn packing boxes into rooms or forts or firehouses, ride their bikes, have parades with Danny’s little sisters using anything that would make noise, or jump off of Danny’s top bunk into a pile of blankets (until Danny missed the blankets and broke his collarbone). I was entertained by their play and didn’t usually worry about them.
One afternoon, the doorbell rang. I went to answer it and there was my neighbor from around the corner, livid, twisting one of Danny’s ears in her right hand and one of Abby’s in her left. She was so upset that she could hardly talk. But once she caught her breath, she couldn’t stop talking.
“I see now how little you think of me,” my neighbor wailed, “sending your children to kill themselves right in front of my house. Of course the police would think it was my fault. I have no intention of spending the rest of my life in jail, you hear? You get your children under control or I’m going to lodge a complaint. Better I not wait to suffer terrible consequences when I’ve already had this terrifying warning of what your family is capable of!”
After we managed to free Danny and Abby from her grip, and all sat down in the living room and settled down a little bit, the story finally sorted itself out.
The street in front of my neighbor’s house was a busy one, whereas ours was quiet. Bored, Danny and Abby had dared each other to run back and forth between cars on the busy street without getting hit. This was the scene which our neighbor had viewed out her front window and which had so upset her. I was upset myself when I heard it.
After assuring our neighbor that nothing of the sort would ever happen again, I put Danny in one room and Abby in another to meditate on their crime, and called Abby’s parents. Together we settled on the most severe punishment we could think of: Danny and Abby would not be allowed to play together for two whole weeks! That taught them not to tempt the fates or test the tolerance of neighbors and parents quite so dramatically!
Too Little, Too Late (November, 1987)
David went to Singapore for a conference, and would be gone over Thanksgiving. I decided that the kids and I would go somewhere too. Since we were penny-pinchers, I bought round trip Detroit-Kansas City tickets on the cheapest airline available, to visit my aunt and uncle and the foster family I had lived with during high school.
Our friend Steve offered to drive us from Port Huron to the Detroit airport (an hour and a half away). He agreed to pick us up early enough that we could stop by McDonald’s for Happy Meals on the way, since we wouldn’t get fed on the plane. I was seven months pregnant with our fourth child, Valerie. The other kids were two, four, and six.
The agreed-upon pick-up time came and went. No Steve. Minutes chased each other around the clock while I tried to locate Steve. Finally he arrived muttering something about having lost track of the time. I threw the kids and suitcases in the car and begged him to drive as fast as he could. I really didn’t think we could make the flight. We would lose our nontransferable, nonrefundable, never-again-usable tickets, and with them, our vacation.
On the way, of course, the kids all reminded me that I had PROMISED them a Happy Meal, a very big deal for them, usually reserved only for birthdays. OK, Steve, next time you see a McDonald’s with no line at the drive through, get three identical Happy Meals and then bust on out of there. No, kids, you may not eat them in the car; you have to wait until we’re on the plane.
We screeched into the airport, leaped from the car and ran to the check-in counter too late to check our suitcases, and almost too late to board the plane. The lady looked down her nose at us and said she would ask the pilot not to close the doors for five more minutes. Of course, being the cheapy airline, the gate was the furthest one on the concourse furthest away from the check-in desk. I had Rachel in the stroller holding her Happy Meal, with suitcases hung from each handle, a bag and Rachel’s little backpack over my shoulder, and the other kids one on each side, holding onto my coat with one hand and their Happy Meals with the other, their small backpacks on their backs. “Kids, we have to RUN,” I yelled, while the lady stood looking down her nose at us and shaking her head.
We took off, dodging people and honking vehicles (none of whom offered us a ride), the limiting factor being Karis’s four-year-old running speed. Soon we had another limiting factor: the Happy Meal Cokes were sloshing inside the cute little Happy Meal cardboard containers, which were quickly disintegrating. We stopped our mad dash long enough to pile Danny’s and Karis’s Soggy Meals on top of Rachel’s in her lap, and she clutched all three with the gleam in her eye of a girl with a mission, while we took off again.
Of course, because it was a cheapy airline, when we got to the very last gate on the concourse, we discovered we had to go down two flights of stairs, out a door and across the tarmac to get to the airplane, and then up that long flight of narrow stairs into the plane. Yeah. Two year old, four year old, six year old, stroller, suitcases, bag, backpacks, and the precious Sloshy Meals, with the flight attendant glaring at us from the door of the plane at the top of the stairway.
She did, very kindly, leave the door of the plane open until we got in, but that was the extent of her generosity. We faced an entire plane full of hostile faces, people disgusted with having their flight delayed for those five or ten minutes or whatever it was by then. And of course, being a cheapy airline, there were no assigned seats, which meant that the only seats left were scattered through the plane. The flight attendant pointed them out to me, but made no effort to move anyone so that I would be able to sit near my children. I deposited Danny with his Squishy Meal in the first one, whispering to him urgently NOT to open it until after we took off. The routine was repeated halfway back with Karis, and of course, the seat left over for Rachel and me was in the very back of the plane.
I had to extend my seat belt to its maximum length to accommodate myself, my unborn child, and Rachel. Never was a seat belt so difficult and uncooperative. A collective sigh of relief accompanied its eventual “click,” and the flight attendant began her routine while the pilot taxied to the runway. “Welcome to Flight so-and-so nonstop to Des Moines . . .”
--a collective panicked intake of breath!--
“JUST kiiiddding; we’re going to Kansas City . . .”
Unbelievable.
As soon as we were allowed to move, I settled Rachel in my seat with her limp French fries redeemed by that essential squirt of ketchup, and made my awkward way up the aisle to help Karis with her Coke-drowned hamburger, likewise disguisable under all-forgiving ketchup, and finally to the front of the plane to help Danny rescue whatever was left of his little prize. By the time I got back to Rachel, she had, naturally, spread her ketchup around as far as it would go. I cleaned her up, made a largely useless attempt at cleaning up the seat and floor, and settled her with crayons and a coloring book. Back up the aisle; to help Karis collect the vestiges of her Sloppy Meal and find her crayons and coloring book. Then Danny. By the time I deposited the drippy trash in the rest room receptacle and lumbered back to Rachel, it was time for seatbacks-and-tray tables-in-upright-position because we were getting ready to land. Waddle back to Karis, then up the aisle to Danny; check seatbelts; put away crayons and coloring books; and stumble all the way back to once again get that seatbelt around Rachel and my “lap.”
“Just stay where you are when the plane lands,” I had firmly instructed Danny and Karis. “Let all the people go by, and wait for me.” So, all the people got off the plane, and I told Rachel to SIT STILL while I gathered all of our stuff. With Danny’s and Karis’s eyes fixed on me from their distant locations in the now-empty plane, while the flight attendant at the exit door tapped her foot impatiently, I reconstructed the stroller/Rachel/suitcases/bag/backpack arrangement, now mercifully minus three Squashy Meals. (I had already ascertained that in Kansas City we would be able to leave the airplane via ramp rather than stairs.)
I had just managed to pull the last item out of the overhead compartment when a voice came over the loudspeaker: “Isn’t anyone going to help that pregnant lady with her nursery school?”
Little Ray of Light (April, 1987)
I have to tell you a story in connection with my pregnancy with Valerie. Dave and I were headed to Brazil as missionaries. Dave thought three kids was the perfect number, because they fit in our two-bedroom house, they fit in a standard-sized car, and a family of five just seemed more manageable and portable. He was right, of course, but as much as I tried to transfer his logic from my head to my heart, the more I longed to have one more child. I just didn’t feel like our family was complete.
Finally, Dave decided that he would fast and pray for a week, asking God to show him whether we should have a fourth child, because if we were going to do it, the sooner the better. At the end of his week-long fast, he told me that he was convinced that we were not to have any more kids.
The next week, I discovered that I was pregnant--which means that I was already pregnant when David embarked on his fast. Honestly, I swear to God as I did to Dave that I didn’t do anything I shouldn’t have to make this pregnancy happen! God just wanted Valerie in our family.
Dave concluded that God meant we were not to have any more kids after this one. And he promptly scheduled a vasectomy.
After Valerie was born, I never again felt that longing for another child. Our family was now complete, and despite Danny’s initial disappointment that she was another girl, I can’t imagine what would have become of us without her. The rest of us tend to get too intense and serious. Valerie brought us so much joy, and fun, and laughter. She was always able to see the funny side of circumstances and hold on to faith and optimism even through some of our darkest days. In high school, her friends gave her the nickname PRDL, “Pequeno Raio de Luz” (Little Ray of Light), a fitting expression of the brightness that she brings to every situation.
The Living Snowman (A wintry Michigan afternoon, 1989)
When we lived in Illinois, we sometimes traveled to Michigan to pick blueberries. When we moved to Michigan, we still picked blueberries, and we discovered a whole new world of family fun. Port Huron is located at the southern end of Lake Huron, where it empties into the St. Clair River en route to Detroit. The Bluewater Bridge arcs over the St. Clair River to Sarnia, Canada, and on to many interesting locations in Ontario: the Shakespeare plays in Stratford, Storybook Gardens in London, the wonderful hands-on children’s museum in Hamilton, the shortest way to Niagara Falls . . . Every Christmas there was a fabulous ice sculpture exhibit along the riverfront in Sarnia.
Much of the recreational life of Port Huron revolved, of course, around water—even in winter. We had friends who were members of the Polar Bear Club, committed to getting into the lake or river at least once each month of the year, even if it required chopping through ice. Intrepid souls fished in the freezing water from the banks of the river.
As soon as the ice melted in the spring, the boats would be out. Long before I thought the water was even close to swimmable temperature, our kids would be eagerly accepting invitations to go out on the lake. Our friends Bill and Jacque seemed to love taking us out in their speedboat as much as we loved going. They would pull the kids through the frigid water clinging to tubes, and let Danny steer the boat out into open water.
Summer, of course, was high season for water fun. The Bluewater Festival attracted fancy sailboats from long distances for the annual Port Huron-to-Mackinac Island sailboat race, the largest freshwater sailing event in the world. One rite of passage that Dave felt impelled to conquer was to swim across the swiftly flowing St. Clair River. He and two friends did make it across, ending up about half a mile downstream from where they started.
When the water turned too chilly with the coming of fall, we turned our attention inland. Apple-picking outings to the cider mill included hayrides through the gorgeous fall colors and the most delicious fresh cider donuts I’ve ever tasted. I tried in vain to duplicate them in my own kitchen.
Our first house in Port Huron was within walking distance of the beach, so lakeside picnics were easy. Dave adored Weather, so when there was a particularly glorious thunderstorm, he would pull me out of the house and down to the shore to watch the crashing waves and feel the power of the wind and rain.
We loved that house, with its fireplace and easy-beach access, but it only had two bedrooms. When I discovered that I was pregnant with Valerie, I immediately started searching for a larger one. In late summer of 1987 we moved across town to a two-story with a finished basement that was terrific for kids’ play in inclement weather. (I resisted letting Dave take the kids out in thunderstorms, though I couldn’t prevent him taking them into ocean waves from the time they were infants.)
Danny quickly discovered that he could climb onto the back porch roof of our new house through a window in Dave’s and my upstairs bedroom. He managed to keep secret from me the fact that he and Karis played on the roof, until one snowy afternoon in mid-winter. They were trying to figure out a way that they could slide or jump off the roof into a pile of snow below without getting hurt, when Danny had a different idea. He loved to make snowmen, the bigger, the better, even when his ambition required dragging out a ladder in order to affix and decorate the head.
This time, though, he decided to make quite a small snowman, a living one. On the roof, he arranged Karis in the pose he wanted, then packed snow all around her. Pleased with his art, he told Karis to hold very still while he went for a camera so that he could take her picture. Locating the camera was not so easy, however, since Dave had taken it with him on a trip. In the process of discovering that fact, Danny got distracted and forgot about Karis.
I only discovered all of this when suppertime came and Karis didn’t appear. The poor little snowman had obediently held very still and waited—and waited—and waited--for her brother to come back. Despite her snowsuit she was almost a truly frozen snowman by the time she was rescued. Mean Mommy put a stop to rooftop play for the whole rest of that winter.
The Sunglasses (Summer, 1989)
There was a lovely park not too far from our second Port Huron house on 20th Street where the kids liked to play. Getting there, however, required crossing Griswold and Oak, two very busy one-way streets. (We had one car, which Dave drove to Detroit for work, so the kids and I walked a lot.) Getting across Griswold and Oak was no small achievement, because the lights were not quite long enough for Rachel to pedal her tricycle all the way across. I couldn’t push Valerie’s stroller and pull Rachel on her trike quite fast enough either. It was like one of those logic games where you have to figure out how to get everyone across a river in a small boat when no two of certain passengers can be together.
We devised a plan: I would leave Karis on her bike and Rachel on her trike, with strict instructions to WAIT FOR ME TO COME BACK AND GET YOU, on the north side of Griswold, while I hurried Valerie across in her stroller with Dan on his bike. Leaving him to watch over the baby, I rushed back over at the next green light in order to at the next green light push Rachel across on her tricycle, following Karis on her bike. At Oak Street, we repeated this procedure, and then we were home free (until the kids tired of the park and we had to make the trip home again).
This convoluted exercise seemed to work, and for Danny the hint of adventure added spice to our park outings. One day though, I was halfway across Griswold pushing Valerie when I glanced back, as I always did, to make sure Rachel and Karis were OK. This time, to my horror, I saw Rachel peddling her little tricycle into the crosswalk. By some unaccountable three-year-old logic Rachel had decided she had to follow me right then, ignoring the anguished imprecations of her big sister Karis. I knew that within seconds the light would be changing and the drivers wouldn’t be able to see Rachel’s little figure.
Well, what would you do in a situation like that?
I had time for two thoughts to flash through my mind, “I don’t deserve to be a mother,” and “HELP, LORD!!!” before the driver of one of the cars waiting at the light leaped from his car into the crosswalk and frantically yelled and waved his arms to alert the cars in all of the lanes not to move when the light changed. Our guardian angel-turned-hero kept the cars in their places until all five of us were safely across.
Just writing this gives me goose bumps all over again. From then on, I took Rachel across first, and despite her outrage at this indignity, made Danny get off his bike and hold on to her until I got across with Valerie and Karis.
But the story I started out to tell you did not involve bikes and trikes. When we walked the other direction from our house, to the grocery store and K-Mart on 24th Street, we left the bikes and trike at home since we didn’t have chains for locking them all up while we were inside the stores. (Yes, in that neighborhood of Port Huron such things could disappear.) One sultry summer afternoon, the six-block walk seemed like six miles. We dawdled a bit in K-Mart, savoring the air-conditioning, before our long hot walk back, with everyone helping to carry the groceries.
Two blocks from our house, Karis pulled from under her sweaty shirt a flashy pair of purple sunglasses. When I noticed, tipped off by the swagger that had come into her walk, my heart sank. We stopped on the sidewalk for a conversation. Karis tried to tell me she had done nothing wrong. “There were lots of them, Mom. The store doesn’t need them, and I do. The sun was bothering my eyes and I knew you wouldn’t buy them for me. I don’t think anyone at K-Mart will even notice that they’re missing.”
The four-block walk back to K-Mart now felt like forty miles. I dragged my grimy crew to Customer Service and asked to speak with a manager. When he came, I told him that Karis had something to say. Mortified, she held up the glasses and told him she was sorry she had taken them.
We still had to walk all the way back home, and by then our ice cream had melted into the grocery bag. As far as I know, none of my kids ever stole anything again. The consequences were just too costly!
The Haircut (Fall, 1989)
My beloved daughter Valerie almost drove me to distraction. From the time she was born, the child seemed to need less sleep than I did. Early, early in the morning she would start singing in her crib, and if I didn’t fetch her quickly she would waken her sisters, who shared her room. Once she could talk, her favorite phrase was, “two-year-olds are never tired.” Later this morphed to, “three-year-olds are never tired.” She simply would not take daytime naps, although I did find her from time to time crumpled sound asleep under the dining room table surrounded by her picture books, or UNDER one of the beds, after thinking she had communicated to the family that she was playing hide and seek.
Val was also the one who told me one day she had learned a verse. (I taught the kids Bible verses as part of our family devotions.) Here it is: “Mommys should buy their little girls a new dolly. Psalm Eleventy-nine Three.”
With four kids, I didn’t seem capable of keeping any of my ducks in a row. In winter, by the time I got the fourth one hatted, mittened, snow-suited and booted, the first one already needed to go to the bathroom. In summer, while I changed the baby’s diaper by the pool, Danny started screaming that his sister was drowning. And there she was sure enough, floating upside down with her face in the water at the deep end of the pool.
One Friday morning, early, I heard a knock at our door. It was my friend Betty, mother of five kids just older than each of our four. Betty lived by the motto “it’s no big hairy deal.” When she started losing too much weight after the birth of her fifth child, she learned to sit down and eat first, before she called the family to the table. Otherwise, in helping everyone else, she never got around to eating herself.
This morning, when I found Betty at my door, she said, “I just came by to tell you, it does get better. Just thought I could give you a little encouragement.” With that she ran back to her van where her kids were waiting!
When Dave and I got home from a lovely date night out that evening, the babysitter met us at the door with a terrified look on her face. (This was way before the days of cell phones, and since Dave and I had been walking along the river, she had no way to reach us.) All kinds of horrific scenarios flashed across my mind before the distressed teenager managed to communicate to us that Karis had cut her hair.
Karis’s best friend Erin, who lived next door to us, sported a brand-new pixie cut, and Karis thought it was wonderful. She begged her dad to let her cut her hair, but he loved her long blonde hair that still had some baby curl at the ends. So she took matters into her own hands.
Once Mom and Dad were out of the house, she took her plastic safety scissors and locked herself into her brother’s room. She managed to cut down to her scalp in some places, and missed one long curl that still hung down her back. I didn’t actually see this masterpiece until the next morning, because the kids were already in bed and Dave went into her room by himself to talk with Karis while I consoled the babysitter and took her home. I never knew what that father-daughter conversation consisted of, because by the time I got back home both father and daughter were asleep.
The next morning, while Dave stayed with the other three, I took Karis to the $9.95 salon next to K-Mart to see whether they could make anything more socially acceptable out of Karis’s handiwork. The young hairdresser took two whole hours to accomplish this feat. She pumped Karis up high in the barber chair and walked around and around her, studying her head from all angles. When Karis started to squirm, the gal sharply reprimanded her. “Nope—after what you already did, you’re not going to give me any trouble. You are going to sit perfectly still until I’m finished with you.”
By the end of that agonizing ordeal, Karis was thoroughly chastened, and heartily wished she had never taken scissors in hand. The hairdresser did relent enough to give her a hug and a lollipop at the end. And Karis’s pixie was just as cute as Erin’s, despite the bald spots.
Noah’s Ark (A wintry Michigan afternoon, 1990)
I was sitting on the couch reading stories with six-year-old Karis, little Valerie, and cousin Claire (age four). Danny, age eight, was outside playing in the snow. My husband David was traveling, of course (somewhere in the Caribbean this time). Rachel, age four, was playing upstairs with cousin Sarah, age three. Claire and Sarah had come to stay with us for a few days while their parents went on a trip. (Our dryer, incidentally, was broken. This became more significant later on in the afternoon.)
Rachel’s curly head appeared over the banister and she asked, “Mom, can we play Noah’s Ark?”
The kids owned a Noah’s Ark set, complete with plastic ark and little plastic figures of the animals and of Noah’s family. I said “Sure, honey,” giving only the briefest attention to the little question niggling my mind of why she would feel she had to ask permission for playing with that set, before returning to the storybook. BIG MISTAKE. I was an experienced mom, was I not, and had already had multiple opportunities to learn that one should not say “Sure, honey” without absolute certainty as to what one is agreeing to. Like the time I was enjoying tea and conversation with a friend, and almost-two-year-old Danny came to the door, looked at me, and said something unintelligible but with the clear inflection of a question. I said “Sure, honey,” and turned back to my friend. Danny toddled over and bit my knee, hard. At my yelp, he looked at me all innocent as if to say, “You told me I could!”
But did I remember this hard-earned wisdom on that wintry afternoon in Port Huron, Michigan? No.
In particular, I should have been suspicious because the child asking the question was Rachel. Rachel had a knack for creative play. Even at eight months when we were packing to move from Wheaton to Port Huron, she was an expert little thing. She would wait for me to turn my attention elsewhere and then crawl over to rapidly unpack whatever box or suitcase I had just managed to pack. She was the one I found singing a little tune while she smeared Vaseline on a page of one of my big nursing textbooks, turned the page, smeared again, turned the page . . . After we re-wallpapered our kitchen (getting rid of little green frogs and seven more layers of old wallpaper), it was Rachel who papered our bathroom as high as she could reach, with squares of toilet paper dipped in the toilet. One day she climbed into our game cupboard, opened the thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle boxes one by one and dumped the pieces into a huge mound on the floor. (And yes, I was obsessive enough to sort them all out again after she was in bed!)
When the couch girls were replete with stories, I wandered upstairs to use the bathroom and—you guessed it—felt the first squish of soggy carpet. For, as we shall always and forever remember hereafter, you can’t REALLY play Noah’s Ark without a flood—right? Nor will I forget Rachel’s wail, “But Mommy, you told us we could!”
Those two little girls had found two little buckets among the sand toys stored away in the closet and had worked industriously, with a persistence never seen before or since, to flood the entire upstairs: all of the beds, down to their mattresses (all but the top bunk), the entire carpeted floor, and everything that happened to be on the floor. (HOW did I fail to hear the sound of water running over from the bathtub? That is one of my top-of-the-list questions for when I get to heaven.)
You will remember now, as I did, that the dryer was broken. My husband was out of town, and I was alone in the cold winter twilight with six children and not a stitch of dry bedding (except for the top bunk). How would we sleep? Well, though we didn’t own extra sheets and blankets, we did own two sleeping bags. Spread out on top of each other on the basement floor they made an OK mattress. (The basement was carpeted; the main floor was not.) I cranked up the heat to ease the basement chill, lined up the six kids on top of the sleeping bags, and spread the bedding from the top bunk over them. (No pillows, sorry; this is an important lesson in the unfairness of life— I get the one from the top bunk cuz there’s only one dry pillow and only one of me, but six of you . . .). Eventually they stopped wiggling and tickling each other; we all slept and we all survived.
How did I ever get everything dry again? That I do not remember and don’t care ever to know, since I don’t intend to repeat the experience. But once in a while, when I see a rainbow, I nostalgically remember our own personal flood.
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