Outnumbered Two to One

When we signed up to go to Islands of Adventure for my tween’s 5th grade class trip, the big prize at the end of the interminable predawn bus ride was the prospect of riding the Incredible Hulk Coaster. Walking in to the park, the snaking green tracks dominated the skyline. The roar of the coaster unmistakable as it twisted and dove at nausea inducing angles.

My daughter’s friends were not keen on riding. They balked immediately at the idea, but she and I were itching to get strapped in to the seats and scream ourselves hoarse.

As we approached the line that boasted a brief 20 minute wait, my eager, bouncing daughter was instructed to sidle up next to the measuring post. The minimum height for riders was 54″, marked by a horizontal black and white ruler. My daughter fit comfortably under it, with barely half an inch to spare. She was turned away at the entrance.

Talk about disappointment. Talk about crushing blows.

Sure there were other rides, sure there was an abundance of fun to be had, but the Hulk and Dueling Dragons were off limits.

To add insult to injury, it seemed almost every other kid on the bus ride home was bragging about having ridden the Hulk coaster at least twice.  So our return trip wasn’t lightened by excited chatter about how great the park was, instead it was tainted by my daughter’s soured expression and brooding silence.

Bummer.

Don’t worry, it wasn’t all gloom. We did manage to get on Dr. Doom’s Fearfall ride, among others. My biggest gripe…lunch. Seriously, it was like prison food. You’d think with the exorbitant amounts they charge for admission they’d at least be able to serve something decent at the in-park eateries. The “grilled” chicken sandwich I had was more like a dehydrated chicken nugget with sear marks on a stale bun. Thank God for condiments, without the help of the eight mayo packets I had to lubricate that chicken with I don’t think I would’ve been able to choke it down. Yikes.

At least she was able to muster the occasional smile…

Saturday, per my son’s birthday request, we took a rare cross-county excursion to Lion Country Safari to check out some wild animals from the comfort of our air conditioned vehicle.

Now the stars of the winding, hour long safari through the preserve should be these guys:

since their name is the one in the actual title, their faces slapped on all the marquees and brochures. The lions should be the main event, in theory. Unfortunately the only big cats we saw looked more like this…

and apparently there have been some changes made to the drive-through enclosure. Where once the lions were able to roam freely among the cars paying a hefty admission fee to be able to do so, now the lion dens are enclosed by a second eight-foot fence, surrounded by an electrified line, topped with barbed wire, and reinforced with a steel highway barrier.

Uhm, what the hell happened at Lion Country Safari since the last time we traveled through?

I’m pretty sure whatever “it” was, involved an cocky, asinine passenger, rolling down their windows (which the signage very plainly discourages) and possibly taunting the sleeping lions to the point where one perhaps tried to dive in through someone’s windshield.

I’m just guessing.

Although I suppose the park employee in the idling zebra striped pick-up, shouting over the strategically placed loud speakers at someone to “immediately roll up their windows” was probably a good indicator.

The lions, on the other hand, barely noticed.

We did see plenty of these guys though:

And as my son is quick to remember…poop. Lots and lots of poop.

Ah, but it’s better than that, it’s poop in its natural habitat.

Since tomorrow is my son’s 6th birthday, we thought we’d include his Kindergarten class in on the celebration by bringing cupcakes to school for everyone to partake in. Luckily Publix has this nifty creation called a pull-apart cake, which is basically individual cupcakes set up in rectangular formation then iced and decorated like a normal sheet cake would be. Any decorated cake they offer can be set up in this fashion.

My son, the dino nut, opted for a prehistoric theme…

Lovely, isn’t it?

The great thing about this cake is that there are roughly two and a half inches of butter-cream frosting smothering the tops of these 30 cupcakes.

In case you don’t know, most 5 to 6 year olds will only eat the frosting off the top of their cupcake, the actual cake part will end up (still wrapped neatly in its paper liner) face-down in the garbage can. Then said children will promptly ask for a second cupcake they can similarly lick clean.

Seems kind of like a waste of $40 but look at these faces…

Tomorrow, we embark on a birthday safari…stay tuned.

• I broke my kids’ Guitar Hero controller. It was nothing personal, I just dropped it right on its magic sensor and poof the damn thing stopped working. Luckily when we purchased it we got an accompanying warranty for just such accidents. Yesterday when I called for service, after a lengthy 20 minutes of navigating their voice menu, the kind gentlemen on the telephone took down all my pertinent information, then asked me whether or not the strings had broken on my “guitar”. I was a little puzzled for a moment before I realized this guy was a little technologically clueless. I had to explain that the wireless guitar comes with buttons and stickers and complex internal mechanisms but alas no strings. Then it was his turn to be puzzled.
• My two year old likes to use my basket of clean folded laundry as a recliner, he plops his butt down on a stack of clean tee-shirts and sits back. I can almost envision him 20 years from now on his own Lazy Boy, sporting a beer gut and holding the TV remote in a death grip, the other hand tucked neatly in to his pants. It makes me proud, he’ll make some lucky girl a fabulous husband.
• My husband doesn’t understand why I dislike Rachel Ray but love her 30 minute recipes. It’s simple mathematics E-V-O-O + Yummo + Delish = Annoying. But a tasty recipe in 30 minutes or less is genius. It’s even better if you can trick someone else in to making it for you. Preferably not Rachel Ray since the overwhelming desire to flick her in the nose might have adverse effects on your appetite.
• People around me keep getting knocked up and having babies. Been there, done that. Still it makes me feel a little left out, like I embraced a trend a little too early then got over it after months of ridicule only to have it suddenly become all the rage. Like I gave all my over-sized shirts and stirrup pants to Goodwill, but now the 80s have suddenly made a come back. I vow to never wear shoulder pads again. EVER.
• Keep your sweet smelling newborns to yourselves. I mean it.
• My two year old, the laundry sitter, finally got his hair trimmed last week. The lady who gave him his haircut spent so much time remarking about his cuteness and making goo-goo eyes at him, that it affected her styling. Now my son alternately looks like Moe from The Three Stooges or like he’s sporting an old lady wig. I paid $12 for that? I could have done better myself with a pair of nail scissors. At least it will grow out.
• My five year old son was unharmed during the haircut fiasco.

For more Randomness go find Keely but whatever you do don’t mention zombies.

Also thanks for all the birthday wishes yesterday, it made getting older just a little less painful.

Last chance.

After spending all day Saturday dressed in our PJs and rooted to the Wii, the husband and I decided that Sunday we would venture out in to the great outdoors and expose our kids to some nature, lest they start fearing the sunlight. So, we packed a picnic lunch, put on our day clothes, and headed over to a local state park to hit some walking trails.

Now, ideally this little excursion would go off without a hitch. There was nothing complicated in the equation. Sit down, eat sandwiches, walk through the woods, go home. Except of course for the fact that when you go anywhere with children, plans are often abandoned in favor of getting whoever is screaming the loudest to pipe down.

The photo above is the first picture we took, barely thirty feet in to the nature trail that curved through an open canopy of trees I could never identify (except for the orange trees, which were, you know, bearing oranges.) If you’ll notice, my two year old is not smiling. He’s also exiled himself to the opposite end of the tree trunk, perhaps correctly assuming that his siblings have the cooties.

Let me just say, it was downhill from here.

Now, you’d assume that as experienced parent’s, we would know that taking a child on an outing during said child’s routine nap time would be a recipe for disaster.

We actually do know this, we just chose to completely disregard that fact.

After several minutes of bird watching and stump sitting…

the two year old began to have a major walking meltdown. It would have been difficult to spot any wildlife within a three mile radius of this…

There was loud monkey screeching to accompany the look of discomfort on this child’s face. If there was anything alive anywhere on this nature trail, it probably headed out to the nearest freeway in favor of some peace, quiet, and a permanent asphalt nap. For a good twenty minutes, this kid was howling because he adamantly refused to let dad carry him. By this time the rest of the children were wondering aloud where the exit was, how far the minivan was from the trail, and why mom had been so dense as to leave the Gatorade in the trunk.

Almost an hour later…

Nature kicked totally kicked their butts.

Occasionally I get out of my shackles, order a pizza for the family, and slip out the door while they’re watching reruns of iCarly.

Friday night was that night, the rare and coveted occasion when I’m able to shirk my motherly responsibilities and leave behind my brood for an evening of reckless abandon. Interpret reckless abandon to mean dinner and a movie. Not as exciting as say bungee jumping off the Brooklyn bridge, but definitely enjoyable in its own right.

My sister and I had a lovely dinner at PF Chang’s, consisting of appetizers, an entree, and dessert, during the course of which, I didn’t have to take anyone to the ladies’ room mid meal, I didn’t have to scold anyone through gritted teeth, and I didn’t have to walk out of the restaurant to field a loud, screeching tantrum. The only food I spilled on my person came from my own plate and I promptly licked it off, cause I’m classy like that. I even managed not to give myself indigestion …I wore my big pants.

We watched a 10ish showing of Four Christmases, in the hopes that it would put us in a festive mood. Alas, twas not the case. While it had it’s amusing moments, the sappy, heavy handed and too neat ending, had us both rolling our eyes. Alot.

The highlight of our evening, apart from a banana spring roll with coconut ice-cream (oh yeah, it was that good…HASAY who?), was this stylin mannequin with the porn-star rack.  I mean she’s no Kim Cattrall but obviously, she’s had some work done.

I suppose it wasn’t enough that we were staring, pointing, and giggling, we had to photograph her with my sister’s camera phone for bloggy posterity too.

Don’t we just reek of dignity and maturity.

For almost four years he’s been a dinosaur junkie. He could barely form sentences and he was already expressing his awe for the mighty T-Rex.

Of course, my husband and I being the good parents that we are, fed his obsession with the requisite enthusiasm, filling his closet beyond capacity with dinosaur toys, dinosaur puzzles, dinosaur books, dinosaur DVDs and dinosaur clothing. And while he was learning to identify all these prehistoric monstrosities by name, well…so were we. We know more than we ever care to about the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods.  That’s why when we heard the North American tour of Walking with Dinosaurs Live was coming to an arena near us, we had to mortgage the house to get the family some tickets to last night’s show. Here’s a little taste of the main attraction, Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The dinosaurs were incredible, I’ll give them that. They were mammoth and their movements exceptionally lifelike. It would have been difficult not to be impressed. My son watched the whole thing with wide eyes, perched right on the edge of his seat. Even my toddler didn’t utter a single peep once the dinos started to march out, other than to point and say “dinosaur” in his baby speak.

I loved watching the kids’ expressions, but for me the show was so-so. I thought it was a little dull, there were some tense moments but really it was just a dinosaur robotics pageant. They came out, they roared, they did their little choreographed battles, they roared, the end. My older children were hoping for some kind of dino animatronic evisceration, but that wasn’t in the cards. And those arena seats, dear God, I don’t know how I managed to fold myself in to them and balance a two year old on my lap. By the time the performance was over and we had to stand up to leave, I swear I could hear my knees creaking, it actually took me a while to straighten them out.

Still, it was totally worth it to see the look on this kid’s face at the end of the night.

Yeah. Dinosaurs totally rule.

Our elementary school’s PTA was hosting a Harvest Festival fundraiser today, complete with “rides” and a petting zoo. I think they’ve sent home fliers every day for the last two weeks trying to work up some hype. Needless to say my five year old and ten year old (aka the tween) were working themselves in to a froth at the prospect of attending the big event.

The big event in question was a series of eight different inflatable “rides”, a rock climbing wall and a bungee trampoline type contraption. For this they sold $12 bracelets that gave you unlimited admission to all the “rides” except of course the rock climbing wall and the bungee, for which you were only allowed a single shot, extras would cost you a buck a pop. Oh and they had a hand cranked hamster wheel thing that was pretty popular as well.

I wasn’t too happy about shelling out the $24 for bounce house entries, but it went toward a worthy cause, so I bought each kid a wrist band and set out on my way to guard shoes while they frolicked.

I’m not a big fan of crowds personally, and hordes of restless children make me antsy. Especially since nobody knows how to wait their turn and I’m always compelled to run interference for my offspring just so I can muscle any stray line cutters back a place or two. Being mother hen gets a little exhausting actually. Pecking other people’s kids in the shins and such because my own kids are either too distracted or too shy to mark their territory.

They had a good time for the most part. Although that good time mainly consisted of spending an hour manhandling farm animals, and running the same inflatable obstacle course at least 17 times. It’s all relative I guess. Hopefully the PTA will earn the money back they had to spend renting all those air powered amusements.

What’s worse than a single teen making mischief all by her lonesome?

Well, four teens of course.

Four lanky, giggling, squealing, smart alecky girls, who coincidentally thought they were the cat’s meow today when I dropped them off at the local movie theater to see a 7 PM showing of “Twilight”. (I completely realize hip teen girls do not say cat’s meow, or hip for that matter, I’m not a total square.)

My daughter had a blast in spite of not really caring for the film. The theme of the night was of course boys. The one thing she couldn’t get enough of. Eye candy. Or as she puts it “hot guys“. And she’s not talking about boys wearing parkas in the middle of summer either.

I love that she wants to share the experience with me. I think it’s sweet, and with her I’ve got to take the communication where I can get it. That she volunteered our house as the central location, and me to chauffer the minivan is rather flattering. But man oh man have I had my fill of teen chatter today.

Did you know the average teen girl can fit 250 words in a sentence without introducing a single mode of punctuation, except for a high pitch shrieking sound meant to express excitement, disgust, and/or hilarity?

Did you know when four teenage girls are trapped in a minivan for fifteen minutes they will all talk non-stop simultaneously over one another?

Did you know it makes a teen girl giggle to hear a grown woman say “What the flock?” when she almost rams a distracted driver who cut her off in traffic?

Did you know a gaggle of teenage girls can make you feel about ten years older than you felt when you got out of bed that morning?

I so need a nap. And maybe some hot tea. And some rice pudding.

See, I am old.

We have not been to a movie as a family in almost two years.

Sad, I know.

The kids are the ones who have truly suffered. Forced to wait months to view all the new releases, oblivious to those integral pop culture references their peers spun at them. Obliged to listen while their friends yammered on about over sized bags of popcorn and superior picture quality on those gigantic screens.

Oh, the humanity.

Okay, maybe it wasn’t as dramatic as all that.

The last family film we saw at the overpriced mega-plex nearest us was “Monster House” and I was six months pregnant with our youngest. After his tender arrival, well, we could never fit it in. And taking a baby to the movies is never fun, at least not for us. We used to take our other children as infants but that was back when they could be pacified. Our youngest has never once used a pacifier. Don’t get me wrong, I tried like the dickens to plug him up with a binky, but he just wasn’t having it. So on a regular basis we had to weather his wails with…nothing really. A little jiggling, a little cooing, a little waiting, and he’d stop. Eventually. Not exactly considerate when you’re doing it in a dark, crowded, theater, usually during key moments of dialogue, or hilarity, or plot advancement.

This weekend after the release of “Madagascar 2″ we finally felt he was ready. Not really, but he sits through the better part of a movie here at home and we figured clowning animals were right up his alley.

Let me just say, he was a champ for the first 45 minutes. He sat in his daddy’s lap through all those previews (almost all of them canine in nature, what’s up with that?), he laughed at all the right moments, danced during the obligatory “I like to move it, move it” scene, and was really a model movie goer.

At some point it got old.

A little secret about toddlers, they need to move. A lot. He climbed down, then climbed up on my lap, then climbed down, then tried to sit on his brother. All this while I tried to reel him back in with candy bribes (Halloween candy we smuggled in, mind you, because a box of chocolates at the movies is like $25). He took the candy, half chewed the candy, spit the cand out in a gummy wad in my hand, then promptly threw a tantrum for more.

Yay.

There was quite a bit of hissing from our aisle. Most of it coming from me and my husband who were trying to drown out the toddler’s ever-increasing-in-volume shrieks with our shushing sounds.

Thank goodness for Surround- Sound-Dolby-ear-drum-rupturing noise systems. I don’t think we disturbed too many people. Luckily on the opening weekend, there were at least three other little kids almost as loud as mine. But let me tell you, I was clapping pretty enthusiastically by the time the credits started rolling. Clapping right in rhythm with my throbbing migraine as I didn’t have time for coffee that morning. (I think that makes me a caffeine addict.)

Overall the movie was pretty entertaining and the toddler…he was zonked out asleep in the first five minutes of our drive home, which explains his fabu attitude.

Then again he wasn’t nursing a wicked headache and wishing for a cup of Joe.