Ways to panic a 5 year old, #728
The scene: slogging through the week’s worth of mail- and 30 some odd holiday cards- that piled up in our absence.
Wench: “Oh, wow, that’s impressive.”
Lad: “What?”
Wench: “The principal of that headhunter group made sure to send me a card.”
Sean: “WHAAAAAAAT?!”
So, in the annals of ‘conversations I did not expect to have’, yesterday I found myself chatting with my MIL as we stood in a museum filled with Giant Objects That Once Flew Or Blew Shit Up (Zombie King noted that the section gloriously dedicated to man’s exploration of space dedicated a fair chunk of real estate to ’so that we may better pwn your ass from above’). And the conversations went something like this:
“Do I need to open up that box and do anything?”
“Well, there are some small turquoise wrapped presents right on top- you can give one a night to Sean once Hanukkah starts. Oh, and the menorah and candles are in his suitcase, if you want to light with him, otherwise I’ll just start that when I get there.”
“No that’s fine, we’d be happy to. Anything else?”
“Yeah, on the bottom of his suitcase is a book called ‘What Star is This’, about the real meaning of Christmas.”
Why yes. A Jew making sure the short one knows it’s not all about the jolly red fat guy. Sean is 5 and well and truly in the throes of Santalove.. Enough with the fat guy. You’re obsessed with the fat guy. In perfect timing, the NYT just had a huge article on interfaith at this time of year, and had a weigh in from a priest and rabbi pretty much saying we are EVIL and FUCKED and WRONGWRONGWRONG for telling Sean he’s both.
And thus, a big thank you shout out to the gang last night, for keeping me sane and plying me with an amount of wine I have not been party to in over 6 years, as the Jew handed her precious snookiekins off to her lovely Catholic in laws, and prayed silently Sean did not start telling his poor grandparents his numerical RANKING SYSTEM for how cool Santa, God, and Jesus are.
Like a newly discovered and confirmed serious allergy to Red Dye #40!
Ho ho hooooaaaaand over that candy cane kid and go decontaminate!
Conversations I did not expect to have
“You do NOT dance around the house yelping ‘booty booty booty I shake my booty!’”
“No you may NOT do your math workbook until you finish your reading.”
“Are you SURE you’re done with your cookies?”
“Yes, Santa could likely defeat the Lich King but let’s not discuss that at school.”
“6 games of chess in a row is enough, kindergartenboy.”
“Yes they have special powers but neither God nor Jesus is a superhero. No they’re not in the Justice League with Superman and Aquaman and Flash and….”
“Hi yes, is this Dr. N’s nurse? Great. Question. If I just skip the week 4 sugar pills and start in on week 1 all over again will I skip my…yes….yes I’m 35…look, it’s been a long time since college and I had to pull this trick.”
Dear Blurb,
I love making books with your software. So easy! So cute! I do not love the now annual tradition of how did Blurb fuck up this year’s grandparents’ and great-grandparents’ holiday photo book of the kid. Kudos to you, though, no mere simple smudgy printing error like last year. Having the correct covers but the revolting and foul cartoon stylings of some random weirdo inside who thinks his work’s the hysterical hybrid of ren and stimpy and aqua teen hunger force? BRILLIANT. I can only imagine what my grandmother’s face would have looked like when she opened up her eagerly anticipated book and found cartoon characters killing each other. AWESOME.
No love,
Wench
Dear office,
K, so, I get it that I’m supposed to not work overtime. SO QUIT CALLING ME.
Smoochies,
Wench.
Dear gourd that hid in the market basket and rotted all over the handknit Tanguy psycho hat I made for Sean last year,
ew! EW EW EW EW EW! And furthermore, ew!
Thanking god her husband has a high tolerance for gross,
Wench.
Dear cookies,
Bake your own damn selves, would you? And recruit the cards to address themselves, too.
Wench
Dear Credit card company,
Thank you for being so damn fast on the pickup on seemingly weird activity on the card. Mad props to you.
Gratefully,
Wench
Dear moronic subscription service that ran our card 5 times guessing at the expiration date thus triggering fraud prevention,
Thanks to you, we now have a new card coming, which means I have to stick around here tomorrow to get the delivery of it, and which means we have to change all of our auto-billing that goes to that card. You all suck, and I enjoyed it so very much when your left hand didn’t know what your right hand was doing and your right hand had the temerity to email me about the problem with the card and get you a new number that’ll work tonight. Bitches, I enjoyed canceling your ass.
Wench
That’s the sound of:
a. water melting off the eaves
b. my brain leaking out my ears
c. the faucet Sean’s forgotten to turn off #!@#&&! again
I’m in that weird headspace where life is little vignettes, where I think blazing fast in full paragraphs but am hard-pressed to write a sentence. In a blaze of barely keeping track of what the hell I was doing, I bought a metric crapton of presents off of Etsy on Saturday night (I must confess, I was fueled by the holy ‘nog, and so consumer math was something of a challenge. Maybe this is why it took me so long), and I am braindead enough that I fully anticipate the next 4 days being a rondeau of surprise at the mail. Who the shit did I buy THAT for?
And no, we have not made arrangements for Sean to get cheese for Christmas. He has gone back to avowing he wants 1. a pirate ship and 2. a Star Wars Clone Wars Book from Santa. Thank you, child, because I do not want to explain to the TSA in hissed tones so you don’t hear precisely why I am hauling a 5 pound wheel of Stilton.
Meanwhile, we have entered fully into the Car Talk zone, and I don’t mean Frik and Frak. I mean that lovely period when children regard the car as safe space, where a parent can’t really turn and look at them in horror, a space with a defined beginning and end, and so they commence to spring Big Difficult questions on their parents during car rides. Given I am the one who takes him to and from school each day, I am the lucky winner the majority of the time. So far, the hit parade includes:
1. “Mom, if the baby grows in your tummy, how does it get out? Do you barf it out? Pooping it out would be gross.” “Barfing it out would be kinda gross too you realize.” “Barf is less gross than poop because poop comes out your butt and barf comes out your mouth, which you also use to talk and kiss and make silly faces. Butts are just for sitting and pooping.”
2. “Mom? What’s ‘Prop 8′?” (please note, I did not relate this to his stated thoughts re: butts per #1)
3. If Jews believe in God but not Jesus, and Christians believe in God and Jesus, what do Muslims believe? How about Buddhists? And- god help me (hah HAH!)- he asked what that ‘Shinto’ thing is that dad and I refer to.
4. If Santa knows if every boy and girl has been bad or good, and can get around the entire world in a night, and sees everybody and knows how they’re doing, Santa is as good as God. Better, even, because he gives presents. (I nipped that one in the bud. Which then lead to the comedy of his Jewish mother attempting to convince him that while, yes, it would be nice to prioritize God #1, Santa #2 in the divine pantheon, perhaps he’d like to leave a little room for Jesus?
All of this lead to my misguided attempt to find some religious instructional reading material for my darling moppet, and the selection at the local Border’s was…. tragic to say the least. A quick search on Amazon was instantly derailed when I was cheerfully informed I might like Bacon flavored toothpicks. Lamentably, I am not kidding. It only got worse when I involved Matilda in the proceedings, told her what I was trying to do, and then searched under children 4-8, religion, judaism. I was informed by Amazon that the top five books I needed! were a Child’s Book of Jewish Prayer, What Makes a Jew, The Children’s Tanakh, Goodnight Sh’ma, and…
Golem. Which is a fine, fine book but as I said to Matilda, I sincerely doubt that right up there with what is God I need to be teaching my kid how to make a mindless violent mystical mud giant (because I have every, every certainty that if I dug that book off the shelf and handed it to Sean, I’d find him in the backyard come spring with his little plastic shovel and my religion books from college). I returned to my computer a few hours later to discover she’d taken up the effort in my absence, but had lamentably discovered the extent of offerings for teaching your youngster about their Jewish heritage and faith ran to ‘yay Jew food….and we’re not Christian’.
Oh, and
5. “So if my blood makes me Jewish and the water from when I was a baby makes me Catholic are they gonna like fight it out inside me? POW POW! POW POW POW! So is there a lot of God in me? Am I a Paladin inside, cause paladins are HOLY but PRIEST means CHRISTIAN?”
Please send resource books or alcohol. Or both. Perhaps now I understand why I am so braindead these days.