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Laura on Life
Laura Snyder may be reached at lsnyder@lauraonlife.com
Or check her website www.lauraonlife.com for archived columns

Wearing Mocha Milkshakes aaa 5-29-08
My husband was having a bad day, he said. Well, I thought, it's not going to get any better with the plans we had for the evening. Painting the outside of a house is not a job that would make a bad day better.
There were two pluses, however. He would get to use his new paint sprayer – every guy likes to use new tools – and we'd be eating at his favorite restaurant.
He still had a frown on his face when we pulled into the parking lot at the restaurant. I tried to cheer him up. "Look, honey, they have a special on mocha milkshakes."
I saw a hint of interest and for a moment his bad day seemed to take a back seat to the anticipation of sipping a mocha milkshake with his meal. The specter of his bad day was apparently still in evidence, however, because the moment that mocha milkshake hit the counter, he reached out to grab it and had a spasmatic reaction (Not a word, but it hopes to be one someday.).
The sweetly anticipated mocha milkshake was suddenly decorating not only the stainless steel counter but also my flip-flop clad foot.
"I can't believe this!" my husband groaned. "I told you I was having a bad day."
I looked at my foot; sticky, cold and completely buried in mocha milkshake. I looked at his feet which were both clean and dry with no evidence of collateral damage from the spill.
"I'm just so glad to be included in your bad day, honey," I said between chattering teeth.
Experimentally, I picked up my foot before it became one with the floor, shook it a little and thought, "Nope. That's not going away."
As women have done throughout history when something disastrous happens, I headed for the restroom, leaving a trail of brown, sticky footprints in my wake. A girl rushed a yellow mop bucket to the scene of the accident. I heard my husband talking to her.
"What happened?" she asked him.
"You see that clean spot right in the middle of that spill? Well, that's where my wife's foot was. I'm having a really bad day."
When I got to the bathroom, I wasn't quite sure what to do. I mean, I've had many experiences with emergencies that required a restroom visit: Ketchup on a white shirt, diaper changes, running mascara, broken bra straps and breast-feeding crises. But I've never had an entire milkshake spilled on my bare feet.
As I saw it, I had two options. I could – assuming this was still possible – hike my foot up to the sink and run water over it, or stick my foot in a toilet and flush.
If there were more women in the restroom, I may have chosen the toilet. At least I could've closed the door and no one would have seen me do it. But considering my innate distaste of public toilets, instilled in me by my mother over the last four decades, I found it nearly impossible to consider that option. As it was, the restroom was empty, though I didn't know how long it would stay in that condition.
The Rockettes would have been proud of the way I hoisted my foot up to the sink, slinging mocha milkshake hither and yon. Since I can't reach down and touch my feet even under normal conditions without squatting, trying to turn on the faucet with my foot in the sink was considerably more difficult.
After several failed attempts, I finally hopped on one foot to where I could lean against the wall, and reached with one hand, while draping my other arm over the paper towel dispenser for balance.
That's when two women walked into the restroom. They looked shocked. I found some nerve I didn't know I had and said, "What are you looking at?" as if the spectacle before them was an ordinary restroom event.
These were smart women who knew they should never engage a lunatic in a discussion about sanity. They disappeared into the stalls as I hurried to get the mocha milkshake out from between my toes. I did not want to be there when they came out!
Considering that the day hadn't ended yet, it was not at all surprising that the first thing my husband accidently sprayed with his new paint sprayer was the back of my legs.
As I slowly turned around to face his horrified grimace, he looked as if he were at a serious loss for words.
"I know," I said. "You're having a bad day!"

Plastic Playground 5-18-08
My husband and I had an unusual experience at a fast food restaurant the other day. While our children ate outside and watched other children climb on the plastic jungle, we ate in relative peace inside and enjoyed a conversation that did not include one potty word.
That peace would be short-lived, however, as I noticed a little boy standing directly in front of our window. As I watched, a look of concern came across his face and I saw a liquid stain spread across the crotch of his shorts and make its way down his legs.   The liquid dripped off the hem of his shorts and saturated his socks.
When he was done, he apparently thought that this was no excuse not to have a good time. After all, there was a giant yellow slide attached to a blue and red spaceship right in front of him!
He ran, stiff-legged, toward the flight of plastic stairs in the manner of someone who was trying to keep cold pants away from his sensitive parts. His socks made little wet footprints on his way and his pants dripped a trail similar to the bread crumbs left by Hansel and Gretel. His mother would have no trouble finding him, I thought.
The idea of all the other children following him up those stairs, into the space ship and down the yellow slide (which would be considerably more slippery) made me a little queasy.
Then I noticed that my youngest child had finished his food and was starting to climb the stairs. We waved, knocked on the window and gestured frantically, but of course, he didn't see or hear us.
We abandoned our food – we couldn't eat it anyway – and ran out the playground door. Our panicked faces probably startled many French fry-gobbling patrons as they looked around for the fire.
We reached the playground just in time to keep our other two children from going up the stairs and stepping in the yellow puddles with their bare feet.
The youngest, however, was already at the top. There was no sign of the wet child either, so he must be at the top too; no doubt enjoying his fantasy of flying through some celestial nebula in his wet pants.
I hoped to get my child to come down the slide before the wet kid but I knew he wouldn't hear me. Being in a plastic space ship with a bazillion other kids is like being three feet from the amps at a rock concert. I am long past the size and weigh required to climb those plastic steps - even if I wanted to. So I did the only thing I could do under the circumstances. I walked, gingerly, over to the tube slide, avoiding the yellow puddles, and bellowed into it.
"Come down here…" OOF!
Someone came down the slide and rammed full force into my leg. It was the kid with the weak bladder. Unfortunately, he was still trying to keep his soggy pants away from his body, so his legs were apart and they straddled my leg when we collided. Oh…my…gawd! Now my jeans had been baptized as well. His mother finally collared him with a regretful smile in my direction. I sent a weak smile back and shook my pant leg a little…as if that would help.
Now that the slide was also contaminated, I quickly turned to call up the tube so as to prevent my child from coming down that way.
Just as I opened my mouth, I got kicked in the stomach by him. For some reason, he decided to come down the slide on his back with his feet in the air.
Disgusted, we walked back to the car. I hobbled, stiff-legged, to keep my wet pants away from my body.
Honestly, those fast food restaurants should provide showers and a change of clothes.

Drive-in Disaster 5-18-08
One very good use for a minivan is going to a drive-in theater. There aren't very many of them around anymore, but when you find one, it's like taking a trip back in time.
My husband and I used to go to the drive-in all the time when we were dating, but now that it's so easy to rent a movie, plus the fact that most people have a bazillion channels on their TV, drive-in theaters have become almost extinct. The next generation apparently thought you went to a drive-in to watch movies. On the contrary. For us, it was more of a…um…social event. We never saw much of the movie.
Not long ago my husband got a little nostalgic and "googled" drive-in theaters to see if any still existed. He actually found one about an hour from our town. We decided that it would be fun to revisit our youth with the added benefit of actually watching the movie. We would be taking our children with us, so it would be more of a historical event this time…Or maybe cultural…But an event nonetheless.
We packed blankets and pillow for the kids in the unlikely event that they would want to sleep during the second movie. Another nice thing about drive-ins is that you get two movies for the price of one.
On the drive there, we ran into a small rain shower, but it looked clear in the distance, so we drove on, thinking optimistically.
Just before we arrived we stopped and bought some snacks because, although the drive-ins from our youth had a snack stand, we weren't sure about this one. My husband was certain that not having popcorn and M&M's would ruin the whole experience.
When we pulled in, we both breathed an ecstatic sigh. It was just like we remembered it!...Except there were no poles sticking out of the ground with the speakers you were supposed to attach to your car window. I can't tell you how many times we drove off with one of those speakers still attached to our car. But back then, we couldn't be counted on to even know when the movie ended much less remember a trivial thing like possible damage to someone else's speaker or the bill for a broken car window when we ripped it off the pole.
Here, we found that we didn't need speakers, however. They project the sound through your radio now. Smart. There must've been a lot of irresponsible people going around ripping speakers off the poles.
After we parked our minivan backwards, ran each child to the restrooms, and settled them in with their blankets and pillows, we brought out our lounge chairs and prepared to have a relaxing evening. That was the plan, anyway.
Somewhere in the middle of Horton Hears a Who, it started pouring rain. Before we could shove the kids into a corner and haul ourselves into a position which would allow everyone in the minivan to see, there was collateral damage. The popcorn got soggy, the M&M's were damp and I sat on someone's juice box.
When the movie and the rain stopped, almost simultaneously, we assessed the damage.
The first thing I noticed was that because I had been jammed up against a piece of metal protruding from the floor of the minivan, my butt was now completely numb. My doctor says that I may never regain full use of my butt again.
My husband had a rainbow stretching down one entire leg of his pants from sliding across a handful of wet M&M's.
My shoes were left outside next to my lounge chair which apparently formed the perfect conduit for collecting rainwater and dumping it directly into my shoes.
My daughter used the bag of soggy popcorn as a pillow and now her hair looked like she had been the victim of a packing peanuts explosion.
The juice box that I had sat upon was apparently not empty until I had. It seems that the contents had jettisoned itself onto my youngest child's pajamas. Having already wet himself, he was unaware that he had also been the recipient of a full box of juice...minus the box.
I used up my entire emergency supply of industrial-strength wet wipes from Joe's Crab Shack. I keep extra ones in the car for emergencies. This definitely qualified.
When we finally packed up and the kids settled in for a long, hopefully sleep-filled ride home, my husband asked me if I could drive because he'd lost his glasses somewhere.
"Sure," I said, trying to stay optimistic.
Then we realized that the driver's side window had been fully open to the windward side of the storm.
Geez, this drive-in experience was nothing like I remembered it.

Refrigarator Monster AAAA 5-3-08
Okay, I've put it off as long as I can. I'm going to have to simply suck it up and do this thing. I don't really want to, but somebody's got to do it.
This is almost as difficult as telling my son what happens when a man and a woman are in bed with each other. I managed to do that without too much fallout. His only response was, "Oh gross! What if they wake up while that's happening?!"
I guess I needed to add a little clarity, but we got through it. But this…this is another story.
It's time to clean out the refrigerator. I open the door and peer inside. Lots of places for refrigerator monsters to hide. There might be one in the vegetable bin where a head of lettuce has been fermenting since the last time we had a salad. Considering the fact that the kids think eating vegetables is a form of torture and my husband and I don't eat salads unless we're on a diet, that lettuce has been sitting there a while. Once I free it from that organic glue that keeps it stuck to the bottom of the bin, it'll probably leak some noxious brown juice.
Speaking of vegetables: How long do onions last? If they shrivel up like my grandma's underarms, is it time to toss them? Or can we wait until they are oozing brown liquid as well?
Maybe I should start with the easy stuff. Any salad dressings that have an expiration date anywhere between "Holy cow!" and "Oh…my…gawd!" should be tossed (no pun intended). You wouldn't think there'd be too many of those considering the lack of enthusiasm for salads in my house. But every time we have a salad, I buy new dressing because, well, the old one had probably expired, right?
After eighty-sixing the expired salad dressings, I find that I have room in the door shelves for the pickles and olives that have been taking up space on my milk shelf. Dill pickles don't last long in my house – they are the closest thing to a vegetable that my kids will eat – but I have to chuck the gherkins. Gherkins are generally served in a relish tray on holidays. Nobody ever eats them, but there's some kind of rule that you can't have a relish tray without your gherkins.
Next to go are the jars of pizza sauce and applesauce that are half-full of product. The other half is some gray, fuzzy stuff that I'm pretty sure no one will eat.
By this time my trash bin weighs about as much as a small construction vehicle. I'm envisioning my husband trying to take out the trash later this evening. The last time I cleaned out the refrigerator, it took him twenty minutes to haul that bag out to our cans. If not for the sounds of broken glass, the trash men might have thought we'd hidden a body in there.
That thought makes me smile, because if I've got to do this disgusting task, I figured that my husband should have his share of misery as well. Why? Because I'm a bad wife.
My smile stops abruptly as I realize that I had not gotten to the hard part yet: Those "mystery containers". You know. Those 6 million "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter" tubs that are filled with unrecognizable leftovers from the Cold War.
I wouldn't hesitate to throw each and every one in the trash without even looking inside, because, well, "not-butter" tubs are a dime a dozen at my house. It's not like I'm never going to buy "not-butter" again. The problem lies in the fact that at least one of those tubs actually has "not-butter" in it. Maybe more than one. In fact, there might be one that's never been opened. That would be like finding a lottery ticket in your refrigerator!
Gingerly I take each one out and shake it. If it shakes, I add it to the tonnage in my trash can. If not…if not, I have to look inside. If I don't spy a creamy, yellow, "not-butter" color, I close the lid quickly so as to stifle any smells that may have ambitions of escaping and flying up my nose.
By the time my husband comes home, I've seen every possible variety of mold and have been intimately introduced to their respective odors.
"What's for dinner?" he asks.
Trying to hold back the urge to vomit, I look at him reproachfully and say, "There's a trash bag over there that's calling your name."

Trains, Wrecks, and Necks 3-8-08
My neck has started bothering me lately. It wasn’t really a problem. I only had trouble looking up…and down. Oh…and left…and right…and sitting. Well, okay, it was a huge problem.
My husband suggested that I go see my doctor.
“I don’t need a regular doctor,” I said. “I need some sort of doctor who does bones…a bony-ologist or something. Is there such a thing?”
He gave that look that told me I was a few noodles shy of a full pot.
What? How am I supposed to keep track of all the –ologists out there?
A friend told me to try a chiropractor. They work with bones and might be able to help me. So that’s what they’re called! A doctor that doesn’t end with –ologist. Who knew?
I made an appointment and was pleasantly surprised when I didn’t have to wait two weeks to see him. In fact, I could go the next morning! I’ll be darned!
While sitting in the waiting room, I only made it three paragraphs into the magazine article I was reading before a girl with a blinding smile and a clipboard came to retrieve me. Only three paragraphs! What kind of doctor’s office is this?
The girl with the clipboard, who reminded me of the cruise director onboard a ship, led me to Fun Room #1, where she told me to put on a hospital gown.
“You know,” I said to the cruise director, “It’s my neck that hurts and I didn’t wear a turtleneck.”
“Mrs. Snyder, your neck is connected to the rest of your spine, so we need to know how the whole thing is working.”
Since I am neither a bony-ologist nor a cruise director, I had no choice but to accept her explanation.
When she came back, clipboard in hand, she took an X-Ray, something I was familiar with. My dentist made sure of that. Then she sat me down and proceeded to run an instrument with two wheels down my back. These two wheels straddled my spine like a choo-choo train on a railroad track. She told me it would find the bad spots.
Maybe she didn’t hear me. I had no problem identifying the bad spots. I was reminded of them every time I moved my neck. But I let her finish the scan…just for the heck of it.    Then she told me to get dressed again, picked up her clipboard and left Fun Room #1.
When the cruise director came back, she told me I was ready for some “therapy.” Seeing the look on my face, she said, “Don’t worry, you’ll love it!” She flashed that 100 watt smile again and led me to Fun Room #2.
She then placed some pads with wires attached to them on my back and told me to lie down on a bench which was missing the middle section. Was this some kind of sick experiment?
When the pads started vibrating and the roller under the bench started massaging my back, I was relieved. Okay, this is good. The cruise director shut off the lights, turned on a recording of rain and left the room. Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about! I didn’t care what they were going to charge me, this was worth every penny! I would have paid extra if they had offered a cucumber wrap and a mud bath.
A very short eight minutes later, just as the sounds of raindrops were forcing me to consider answering the call of nature, the cruise director reappeared and showed me to Fun Room #3. She flashed me a smile and closed the door.
This room didn’t look quite as fun. There were pictures of deformed skeletons that kind of freaked me out.
A knock on the door, and in stepped the bony-ologist, Dr. Yummy. I had nicknamed him because my brain had temporarily stopped functioning. I told myself it was because of the “therapy”, but it was probably because this guy didn’t look like any doctor I’d ever seen. He was actually cute! They sure don’t make doctors like they used to.
Appearances can be deceiving, however, and it wasn’t long before my star-struck opinion was radically altered. He explained to me how the train on my tracks had derailed and I was left with a wreck in my neck that would take a lot of work to clean up.
Then he told me to lie down on my stomach and we would start the first of many torturous treatments. As I heard my back “CRACK!” I thought, “Oh man, that can’t be good.” But Dr. Yummy seemed to think that crack was the objective.
After that, I was told to lie on my back. He then attempted to pull my head off my shoulders. It didn’t work though, so he tried something else.
You know those scenes in the movies where someone sneaks up on a guard and yanks his head sideways and kills him? Well, I’m here to tell you that you can survive that sort of thing. I did…twice. In fact, I felt pretty good when I left Dr. Yummy’s office. I have another appointment tomorrow. I’m actually thinking about going back. Maybe I’ll ask for that cucumber wrap.

Where do Beavers and Gophers Come From 2-21-08
When I was a kid, I used to have a puzzle of the United States. I learned so much from repeatedly solving that puzzle, that when I saw a similar product in a store, I bought it for my children.
So many kids have no idea where on the planet they live. If you asked my six-year old where he lives, he’d tell you, “In a house.” Well… that narrows it down considerably.
I always worried that if my children became separated from me in a mall or at the fairgrounds, would they be able to tell the authorities where they lived? “In a house” probably wouldn’t cut it.
“What’s your name, son?”   (Kids don’t generally speak in syllables and as a result their name comes out sounding nothing like what’s on their birth certificate. So the answer to this question might not be easily translatable.)
“Where do you live?”
“In a house.”
“Which house?”
“My house,” the boy says, trying to be polite.
“Okay, but what’s your address?”
Thinking the man is a little off, but still trying to be polite, he answers, “I’m a boy. This is a shirt, not a dress.” Man, if he has to count on this guy to get him back home, he’s in real trouble.
“Ah…right.   Do you know your telephone number?”
“Yes.”
“Well, what is it?”
“I’m not supposed to tell strangers that.”
“Okaaaay, maybe you could push the numbers on the phone and call your house?”
"Okay, but you can’t look.”
The boy would hunch over the phone and push the buttons. After a moment, he’d hang up and say, “The lady told me to hang up and try again, but that loud song hurt my ears!”
That are the chances that he’d know the area code?
So, my kids now have a puzzle to teach them where they are and where everything else is. This puzzle also tells the nickname of each state, but my children tend to take things pretty literally, so I’m not sure if that particular feature will help or hinder their education.
Because Wisconsin is called the “Badger State”, they now think that Wisconsin is the only place you can find badgers.
Similarly, the only place you can find beavers is in Oregon. The only place for gophers is Minnesota and Utah is the only state that has beehives. The jury is apparently still out on whether the wolverines found in Michigan are animals or X-Men.
They can’t wait to visit Kentucky to see if the grass is really blue; and, by the way, if Oklahoma is the “Sooner State” why isn’t there a “Later State”?
The questions included “Why does Texas only have one star?” My daughter decided it had to do with the American flag. If Texas had more than one star on the American flag, there wouldn’t be enough room for all the other states’ stars. How considerate of you, Texas.
They wondered why, if California was the Golden State, Nevada was the Silver State and Idaho was the Gem State, why was Montana the Treasure State?
They concluded that since Missourians say “Show Me” so much, there are no maps in Missouri.
I wanted very much to straighten them out on some of these issues, but the one time I did, I got myself in trouble:
“Mom, I can understand why Iowa would want to be called the Hawkeye State because hawks see really good, but why would Ohio want to be called the Buckeye State? Is it like buck teeth, only it’s their eyes that stick out? ’Cause that sounds like a scary state to visit.”
“No, honey, buckeyes are nuts.”
“Oh…that’s not very nice, mom.”

Our Mattress Has Alzheimer's att 2-16-08
When my husband and I first married, we slept on a waterbed. It was warm in the winter and cool in the summer and it satisfied our thirst for adventure on the high seas.
However, it wasn’t long before my husband’s 185 pound frame turned into one of a linebacker. The combination of his weight gain, his restless sleeping habits and our free-flow waterbed caused me to feel as if I were a small ship on a stormy sea.
When our waterbed finally bit the dust (a whole ‘nuther story, read my book), we decided that we’d get an ordinary mattress and box spring. That seemed to work well for a while and sea-sickness was no longer an issue for me.
In time, our new mattress began to sag. No matter how neatly the bed was made or how thick the blankets were, you could still identify exactly where we slept and if you looked close enough, you could make out our favorite sleeping positions.
As far as I was concerned, that was too much information for the casual observer. Thinking back, my logic was not all that clear on this because it was rare that any observer, casual or otherwise, would be invited to our bedroom unless we’d just put down new carpet, painted the walls, or installed matching furniture. That’s the kind of stuff you have to show off.
However, even if casual observers were few and far between, I still had to look at the massive divots in our mattress. It only served to remind me that my diet wasn’t working.
My husband and I don’t tend to sleep right next to each other, spoon-style, because he says he gets too warm. I never understood how he could possibly get too warm, with a block of ice (me), plastered up against him. Like so many other things about men in general, that just doesn’t make sense.
Anyway, because of our tendency to sleep apart, our mattress looked like the rolling hills of Kentucky. After a while, it became very difficult to climb the hill between us, so it was much easier to snuggle into our separate valleys and stop wondering what was on the other side of the hill.
About five years ago, we decided not to let that hill come between us any longer. If we couldn’t climb the mountain, then we would simply park our bodies on a different piece of real estate.
Enter the newest craze in sleeping comfort: The memory foam mattress. We bought it in May and loved it from the very start. I have never had the opportunity to test the commercials where they place a glass of wine on one corner of the bed and jump up and down in the middle. First of all, I would never put anything liquid on my bed; that is what side tables are for. Secondly, I can’t think of an occasion that would require performing that particular stunt. Thirdly, if I were to jump up and down on my bed, I would cause serious injury to myself, my bed, and the floor joists, whether the wine spilled or not. I mean, there is a ceiling fan above my bed. How do you explain that scenario to an emergency room doctor?
“I got my head stuck in the ceiling fan because I was jumping on the bed…please don’t ask me why.”
We enjoyed that bed all summer. Then it got cold. Apparently when memory foam gets cold, its memory becomes…oh, how shall I put this?...HARD AS GRANITE!
When I crawl into bed at night I feel like I’m lying on a stone altar, waiting to be sacrificed to some pagan god. Sure, when my body warms the stone mattress, it becomes soft right where I’m lying, but anywhere else it’s still stiff as a board.
This effect creates those same rather nostalgic hills and valleys we used to loathe in our last mattress. Fortunately, when the warmer weather returns, the memory foam starts remembering again. It remembers why we bought it and becomes the bed of our dreams again.
In a way, you could say that our mattress has weather-related Alzheimer’s disease. If we were truly a friend to it, we would consider moving it to a warmer climate.

History Of Thirst 2-7-08
I am going to tell you about the history of thirst. This is history as I understand it. Anyone who doesn’t have a sense of humor is cautioned not to read this column because the obvious inaccuracies would be too much for your staid sensibilities.
In the beginning, there was water. Just plain, pure water from a non-polluted, non-minerally enhanced, non-chlorinated running stream. At some point in time, possibly around 10,000 BC, some hyperactive cave child got bored and decided to squish some grapes into a gooey mess. Then, like children everywhere, he forgot about his experiment for a few seasons.
One day his cave mother saw that cleaning your cave was all the rage among other cave mothers. She recruited her son to help by cleaning his section of the cave. That’s when he came across his grapey mixture. Who knows what a child is thinking when they decide to put something like that into their mouth? But he must’ve tasted it, because where else would wine have come from?
This cave boy probably became a little tipsy and decided to lie down. His mother saw this as a miracle because her child was ADHD. She showed the other cave women what she had and then became the most popular cave woman in 10,000 BC. Her name is lost to history because cave people couldn’t read and write.
Wine became the beverage of choice for a long time. It was used for drinking as well as medicinal purposes. It was the first pain killer, anti-depressant, antiseptic, and first Ritalin. This stuff was great!...Until public school was institutionalized. Algebra became nearly impossible for those under the influence of the funny grape juice.
People discovered that they could flavor water with juices and make a beverage nearly as palatable as wine without the side effects that were now, in light of the new math, undesirable. This fruit juice was especially helpful during Prohibition and the Depression. Without it, the human race might have expired of thirst.
In time, some enterprising mom, who had not gone shopping that week, realized that simply adding sugar to water when there was no fruit around, would work, too. Add a little food coloring and you’ve got Kool-Aid! The kids were again bouncing off the walls but, I believe, quantum physics was also developed during this time period.
After that, some wise cracker put Pop Rocks in someone’s flavored water and soda pop was born…At least, that’s how I think it happened. Soda pop ruled in most civilized countries. Kids loved it. It was something about the challenge of how loud you could burp after drinking soda through a straw that was the big draw.
Then the revolutionary idea of “healthful living” arrived. As moms desperately tried to replace soda with milk, kids became more addicted to Coke-a-Cola. The rumor still exists that there was cocaine in Coke way back when, but I think some governmental body would have had an issue with that.
Meantime, caffeine and carbonation were suspects for health risks. I remember an experiment in grade school where a penny dropped into a cup of Coke…disintegrated…or something. So to satisfy the healthful cravings of mothers as well as kids’ addiction for sweet drinks, beverage manufacturers came up with non-carbonated, diet drinks that were passable in taste and healthier than their sugary counterparts. The question lingered as to whether the ingredients used to make these diet drinks taste good were good for you. Many thought not.
So they took out everything and ended up with plain, pure water, again…except… it was in a bottle. They say that bottled water is much better than tap water. Who are “they”? Mostly, the soda pop manufacturers, who are now our suppliers of water in a bottle. Hmmm, sounds suspicious. That’s like tobacco companies selling air filtration systems because they can’t sell enough cigarettes any more.
Anyway, now we are back to water as our beverage of choice. The difference is that we don’t get it from a clear, running stream. Most of us would be trespassing on someone else’s property if we were to find one of those.
The bottles of water we buy in the store do have at least one benefit over tap water, though. They all come equipped with some pertinent “Nutrition Facts”. For example, judging by all the zeros on the chart, we can draw the conclusion that water apparently has no nutritional value whatsoever. One wonders why we drink it.

The Breakfast of Champions 1-31-08
How many rules is a kid breaking when he has fudge nut brownies for breakfast? It’s hard to count them all, since I only have ten fingers.
I baked a big batch of fudge nut brownies yesterday and we had them for dessert last night. There was still some left over this morning. When my children woke up and made their way to the kitchen, yawning, the first thing they saw was the brownies. Everybody knows it’s going to be a good day if there’s going to be fudge nut brownies in it. Consequently, their eyes brightened and I could see the wheels start turning: “How can we negotiate one of those brownies.”
“Mom, can we have a brownie?” they asked hopefully.
“Brownies are not breakfast,” I said like a good mommy, as if my mouth wasn’t watering at the sight of them. I thought to myself, “When they leave for school, I’m going to snag a nice hefty one for myself.” Yeah, so I’m a hypocrite.
My daughter tried one more time, “We’ll eat our breakfast right after we eat our brownie.” I said no, as she knew I would.
Faces falling, they scuffled to the cupboard and brought out the cereal. Same old thing: Colorful fruity rings with marshmallows and chocolate flavored sugar balls…
Wait just a minute! I read the labels, as I should have done before I bought them, and found sugar, sugar, high fructose corn syrup (whatever that is), and more stuff I couldn’t pronounce. It read like a recipe for spontaneous combustion!
Why would they put all that bad stuff in breakfast cereals for kids? I think I may have discovered the origin of ADHD! Or then again, maybe it’s the only way parents can get their kids to drink milk, which is good for them. Hmmm.
What do fudge nut brownies have in them, I thought. Sugar, yes, but not as much as the cereal. Flour, certainly. Nuts have protein and fiber. Eggs, that’s a great breakfast food. Why? I don’t know. Someone declared eggs a breakfast item and the rest of us agreed with him, I suppose. It seems just that random, this categorizing of breakfast, lunch, and dinner foods, doesn’t it?
Why don’t we eat a salad for breakfast? Or roast beef and mashed potatoes? Or how about a nice big plate of liver and onions? Why do we only eat certain foods for breakfast and everything else is off limits? Doughnuts and muffins aren’t so different from fudge nut brownies. So, why are they considered breakfast foods? It doesn’t seem fair that fudge nut brownies should be blackballed from the breakfast list.
Well, so far, fudge nut brownies were beating the pants off the cereal for the “Breakfast of Champions” title. However, it doesn’t do very well in the milk category. But…what if…we drank a glass of milk with it?
Bingo! Here is where I sprout wings and become my children’s fairy godmother. I wave my magic wand and say “You guys can have a fudge nut brownie for breakfast if you drink a glass of milk with it.” Woo-hoo, that felt good!
My nine-year old yells, “Dad! There’s an alien taking over Mom’s body!”
I frown at him and say, “Okay, but if you tell your Dad I’m an alien, you’re never getting brownies for breakfast again, because your mom won’t allow it.”
“Never mind, Dad! Just kidding. Can I have the piece in the middle?”
So, okay, we have established that I have no discipline whatsoever, but these are fudge nut brownies we’re talking about, after all. Manna from heaven. Ambrosia.
My children and I are all devouring brownies and gulping milk when my husband comes into the kitchen.
“Fudge nut brownies for breakfast?” he questions me. “Who are you, and what have you done with my wife?”
One of my children whispers, “He knows!”
With my mouth full, I answer him, “You want your wife or a brownie?”
“That’s a no-brainer”, he says, pulling up a chair and helping himself to the unexpected treat.
I know I should be insulted, but I’m eating fudge nut brownies. All is well in my world today.

The Case of The Missing Mango 1-24-08
It was an ordinary day in the Snyder household that day. I had gone shopping with my daughter for groceries. I was happy to get out of the house, my daughter was happy to get away from the boys, and the boys were happy to know that I would soon be bringing home some food.
When we got to the produce section, my daughter said that she’d like to try a mango. She’d never had one before, so I bought one for her. My daughter was the one kid in my house that could be counted on to try something new once in a while.
She wanted to eat it as soon as we got home, but it was almost time for bed. I told her she could eat it tomorrow. When morning arrived, however, it arrived too early for most of us and we were late getting ready for school. As a result, there was not enough time to trouble with peeling the mango and cutting it up, so I told her she could have it when she got home.
Sometime between the time she left in the morning and the time she got home, that mango vanished into thin air. The first person she came to for an explanation was me, since I was the only person home all day. I swore I didn’t eat it. I don’t even like mangoes.
The next person we questioned was her older brother. He is eleven years old and prone to pull pranks, but he was never known to lie. Exaggerate, yes…excessively. But not lie. He said he didn’t know what happened to the mango, but the last time he saw it, it was in the fruit bowl.
My daughter remembered taking it out of the fruit bowl in the morning and setting it on the cutting board. So obviously, she had seen it more recently than he did. He was cleared.
Her nineteen-year old brother was next to be interrogated. He claims to not like mangoes either. He also had never seen it. So he was cleared.
My husband, who coincidently likes mangoes, said he did not eat it. Darn, I thought we had the culprit. If he was hungry enough, he would definitely eat something that was obviously not his, but he wouldn’t lie about it. He’d say “I didn’t know.” Mostly because he actually didn’t know…at least that’s what I’m supposed to believe. So he was cleared.
There was only one person left. This was my six-year old who 1. Likes mangoes, 2. Would eat something that doesn’t belong to him, and 3. Would lie about it. These are the reasons we interrogated him last.
One thing about this little guy, though, is that he’s not very good at lying. When I asked him about the mango, however, he looked me right in the eye and said “What mango?”
I could only conclude that he’s either getting really good at lying or he honestly didn’t know what he ate. Or maybe, just maybe, he really didn’t take it. If that is true, though, where was the mango?
Now I am certainly aware that there are methods that can be employed to make a six-year old talk (threatening him with a bath comes to mind), but he was a lousy liar, so surely I would have known if he was trying to pull the wool over my eyes. I simply was not getting those motherly vibes, though. We cleared his name from the suspect list.
Sometime the following day, the mysterious mango showed up in the fruit bowl again inside of a plastic Ziploc bag. Not a bite was taken out of it. There goes the only motive I could think of for someone taking it.
This leaves only one explanation for the missing mango: Perhaps I am simply losing my mind.

Scheduling a Shower 1-17-08
The trouble with having a large family is getting everyone clean. I’ve long ago given up on keeping them clean, but a daily bath is definitely in order for the youngest ones in my family.
I try to give my younger children a bath at night. But unless I stretch bath time out for three or four hours, considering how long it takes for the hot water heater to recover, they all can’t take one on the same night.
When they were babies, I could get away with putting them all in the tub together. Even if they would tolerate that now, which they most emphatically would not, my bathroom would quickly deteriorate under those circumstances. They’re much more…active…now.
I’ve tried using the same bath water for all of them. My daughter loves very hot baths and she is usually the cleanest of them, so she would go first. After that, however, I had trouble convincing my germophobic son that the water was cleaner than he was. If I couldn’t get him in the tub after my daughter, there was no way I’d get him in there after my six-year old. That one attracts dirt like a Swiffer. Honestly, I’ve never seen him roll around in a pile of loose dirt, but he always looks as though he has.
Dirt imbeds itself under his fingernails, behind his ears and on any part of his body that has been exposed to whatever he spilled on himself that day. There are many times that I have considered hosing him down before he came in the house.
So, anyway, the bath water is definitely unrecyclable after he’s been in it and there is no hot water left for a shower.
We’ve finally decided on a staggered bath/shower schedule for the older two and an on-demand schedule for the youngest.
Getting a hot shower for myself from day to day is a crap-shoot. It’s not because of a shortage of showers – we have three of them in our house – it’s the shortage of hot water. What good is having three showers if we can’t use them all at once?
The adults in my family include my nineteen-year old son when he is home from college. We all need to take a shower in the morning. If we take one at night, it results in moderate to severe bed-head which no amount of gel, mousse, or other industrial-strength hair care product can make right.
Since I am the only woman fighting for the shower in the morning, I figured the easiest way to solve the issue was for the men to shave themselves bald and shower at night. However, they were not inclined to be reasonable.
As a result of this need for a hot shower in the morning, we are all motivated to rise and shine much earlier than any sane person. However, regardless of my diligence where rising and shining is concerned, sometimes I am still the last person to take a shower.
Thinking that I’ve waited long enough for the hot water to recover, I’ll get in the shower, lather up, and only then discover that…I was wrong.
No matter how much I adjust the cold water to allow more warm water, I know that I’m eventually going to be freezing my butt off under a stream of frigid, arctic water. At that moment, my mindset changes very quickly from “How long can I stay in this shower?” to “How fast can I get out?”
Some people say that taking a cold shower is “exhilarating”. Those are the same people that jog 20 miles every morning, climb Mt. Everest for fun, and jump out of airplanes with nothing but a backpack with a large handkerchief inside.

Winter Vs. Spring 1-10-08
Winter is officially here. I can tell it’s here not because of a date on the calendar, but rather because my grass has turned an ugly shade of brown, and my socks keep sticking to my chapped heels.
Winter is not my favorite season. It used to be tolerable when I lived in the north and there was enough snow for skiing, skating, and sledding. Those things took the edge off the boredom, but you still had to tolerate the cold.
Now I live in a climate where there is not much snow but I still have to scrape the frost off my windshield every morning. I’m still not sure whether that was a wise move or not. One thing is for certain, though, if the trade-off was hot summers for snow in the winters, I know I’ll never have to shovel heat.
Winter is not only cold, but when there is no snow, everything looks naked. The trees stick obscenely out of the ground without the cover of leaves to dignify their presence. You can now see the nests left behind by the wildlife that were smart enough to go to a warmer climate for the winter.
Winter is the season for runny noses and cough medicine. It’s the season for dressing in layers, which, to someone who has to do the laundry, equates to more dirty clothes to wash.
Even my cats are bored. There are no birds to chase. The lizards and spiders have gone into hiding. If my cats can’t see the look on my face when they leave a dead animal on my front porch, their nine lives are not worth squat.
If cats could go on strike, that’s how you would describe what they do in the winter. All they do is park themselves on the back porch waiting for their next meal, which, if they were smart, they’d know only comes once a day. They sit there waiting for food even when there is food in their bowls. They are a lot like children in that way.
My youngest child could be sitting in front of a full plate of spaghetti and ask me for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He’ll say he doesn’t like spaghetti but it’s more that he likes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches better.
My children spend more time indoors during the winter, which, if I were a heartier person, would no doubt, make me want to spend more time outdoors.
Like my cats and my children, I am looking forward to springtime. I’m looking forward to planting a garden, seeing the grass turn green again, and…listening to the woodpeckers destroying my eaves.   Well, okay, there’s that.
But I can’t wait for the warmer weather; when the flowers bravely peek out of the ground, new buds sprout on the trees and…the squirrels dig up my garden. Hmmm.
Well, springtime does mean that the birds will be building nests in the trees again, laying their eggs, and…flying into my sliding glass door. Oh yeah. I forgot about that.
My cats will be busy catching the moles that threaten the new grass, shedding their winter coats, mostly on my back porch, and…being a pain in the, uh, tail feathers to the nesting birds. I wonder why they don’t pick on the squirrels and the woodpeckers? Probably because those two pests are in cahoots with my cats to destroy my sense of springtime happiness.
Perhaps I should simply enjoy winter while it lasts.

Middle Age 1-01-08
Middle age can be defined as the spring cleaning of life. Out with the old, in with the new. It is a period of makeover for our minds and bodies.
Young people might say that it’s out with the new and in with the old and decrepit. In fact, that’s what I used to think. Now, however, I am middle-aged and those thoughts do not apply, of course.
That’s actually part of the transition: You need to convince yourself that you are at the peak of your life and not on the downhill slope. How long you stay on that precarious peak is entirely up to you. I’ve come to realize, though, that it is better to be on the downhill slope than the uphill slope. The uphill slope was way too much work.
Middle age is a time of discovery. You are just recognizing your full potential and you’re beginning to reap the rewards of your hard work. You are discovering strengths you didn’t know you had: Strength of mind, courage in your heart, and wrinkles on your face.
It’s a time for trying new things to eat because the kids are no longer on a diet that is exclusively macaroni and cheese or Chicken McNuggets.
My husband made fried potatoes with eggs for breakfast one morning and decided to spice it up with something he’d found in our front lawn. He said they were wild onions, but as far as I’m concerned, anything from my lawn is called grass. I tried it anyway, though, because that’s what we middle-agers do.
Middle age is also the time when the boiling tempo of love has quieted to a slow simmer. It’s definitely there, but making love has become dependent on whether we picked the winner on American Idol. I think we had more energy on the uphill slope.
Sometimes it’s hard to tell whether you’ve reached middle age. If you knew ahead of time at what age you’d kick the bucket, you could divide that number in half and know exactly, to the day, when you’d reach your peak. Thank goodness, we are not privy to that information. But that means that calculating middle age is about as difficult as nailing Jello to a tree. It also means that you get to decide when it’s going to start and when it’s going to end.
For my husband and me, it was easy to recognize, though. My husband has a one-cup coffee maker that uses those little, tiny, one-serving coffee products that look like a Dixie cup filled with coffee. That should have been our first clue that middle age had arrived. It was an extravagance that we could not have afforded on the uphill slope.
I have a watch that my husband had given me for Christmas five years ago, whose battery had just given up the ghost. It was the first watch I’d ever owned without numbers on it and I was starting to have trouble reading it. As a result, I don’t know how long it had been dead before I realized it. That should have been our second clue.
But the thing that put us over the edge is that his coffee could only be bought in Bed, Bath and Beyond, and my watch battery could only be found in a Radio Shack.
This is when my husband found himself with a surprisingly deep and abiding urge to visit a linen store and I found myself desperate to find a store that sells primarily electronic parts.
We never really thought the day would come. But it had. We are indeed middle aged.

12 Pains of Christmas 12-18-07
Did you ever notice that there is a season for plumbers? It’s called the Holiday season. It never fails. I don’t know if it’s because of the increased number of guests that need to use your toilet or that December is the time for all humans to shed hair. But whatever the reason, nearly every holiday season, I have trouble with my drains.
I love the Holiday season with all of its ups and downs, and I usually have a lot more ups than downs (especially with my drains). However, I could use a little help during this time of year since there are so many things that need to be done.
For example, I love to shop for gifts, but I don’t like to wrap them. You can’t give a naked gift, though. It’s just not done. So I need some help wrapping. Does Merry Maids do that?
I would love to buy a “wow!” gift for each person on my list. The problem is that “wow!” gifts usually cost a lot and I never seem to have enough money to get exactly the right thing for everyone. Of course, I also want to put something in the Toys for Tots bin and contribute to the “Angel Tree” and put a little something in that hanging red pot next to the guy making that incessant ringing bell noise in front of every department store. I figure if I pay him, he’ll stop ringing the darn bell. He doesn’t play nice, though.
I love to eat Christmas cookies. The smell of anise and chocolate chip cookies brings back so many wonderful memories. But I burn at least 50% of everything I bake and that smell is not very nostalgic. Now, because of my incompetence, my kids’ memories will be that of burnt cookie dough. I may have started a whole new tradition. My Great-great-grandchildren will probably burn a batch of cookies every year in memory of me.
I’m not exactly a creative cook either, but my turkey and stuffing usually come out moderately decent. What I wouldn’t give for the skills of Julia Childs, though. To be able to put on a spread that deserves a standing ovation is a long-term dream of mine. Instead, my cooking tends to result in loose fillings, a cracked cap, or the evacuation of some child’s two front teeth. I’ve always related well to that popular holiday favorite: “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”. That kid’s mother must’ve been a lousy cook, too.
One thing that annoys me is that I can never find a large enough turkey at the grocery store. I need a 24 lb. turkey for our large family, but the largest I can find is 18 pounds. Do two 12 lb. turkeys have the same amount of meat as a 24-pounder? Even if they did, my cookbook doesn’t tell me how to cook two 12-pounders. They assume that sane people only cook one turkey at a time.
The point is, I need certain things at the Holiday season that I don’t usually need. The number one thing is… time; time to finish all the cleaning chores that we women obsess about. Your carpet can have Koolaid stains on it all year long, but not during the holidays. As a result of all this cleaning, my hands are as dry as the Sahara in July. So I need lotion and rubber gloves.
Throughout all of this pre-holiday activity, I still need to type out my column, too. I need a few typists just to do that. Of course, my computer needs to work for that, and it tends to break down just when I am the busiest. My husband is a technological wizard, but he’s too busy fixing other people’s computers to deal with my “little problems”. I need some little, tiny, on-call, elf-nerds living inside of my laptop. They can fix it when it glitches. Maybe Santa has a few of those lying around.
I need folding chairs, folding tables, folded napkins, and maybe even someone to fold the laundry. I wonder if the Wrapping Merry Maids would fold laundry too? Probably not.
Most of all, I need sleep, which being as exhausted as I am would almost certainly be possible if my true love was not also a sleep-talker.
When, on the twelfth day of Christmas, he -my true love - asks what I want for Christmas this year, I’ll tell him:
Twelve Plumbers plumbing
Eleven Typers? typing
Ten Lords a-sleeping
Nine Ladies baking
Eight Maids a-wrapping
Seven Hundred Dollars
Six Teeth a-staying
Five Folding Things
Four Calling Nerds?
Three French chefs
Two Rubber Gloves
And a Twenty-four pound turkey
If my true love will grant me these things for Christmas, I will never again ask him to fix my computer, wrap a present, or take a plunger to our toilet.

No Footsteps To Follow 12-13-07
Raising children is hard. It always has been. There is no instruction manual. As a result, I don’t know what I’m doing any more than my mother did. Although I can take some of my cues from her, my experience raising kids is so different from my mother’s.
Because my mother taught me, I know that the standard answer for why a child should not watch two dogs doing the nasty on your front lawn is: “Because I said so!” Tell me you haven’t caught yourself saying that once or twice; even when you swore you never would.
However, other than the occasional “Don’t make me come back there!” raising children now is different. Disagreements between teens and their parents used to be about wearing makeup, cutting their hair and when to get their ears pierced. Now, it’s about cell phone minutes, tattoos, and whether to get their – (insert random body part) - pierced.
It’s no longer viable to send a kid to their room as punishment, because they want to be there. That’s where they do all their socializing on My Space. If they are banned from the computer, you’d never know if they were receiving one of hundreds of text messages a day on their cell phone.
Teens are masters of the “the code” for text messages. Once while sitting next to my 16-year old nephew, who was texting at the time, I read something that looked like: “Bananas, no, chickens, save me!” What exactly does that mean in their language? I’m not sure if the kid was describing an unappetizing lunch buffet and hoping my nephew would not delete it or if it was an SOS call from someone caught in the produce section of a poultry farm.
Whatever it was, it was definitely not something my mother ever had to deal with.
My mom says I have it easy because she never had disposable diapers. That may be true, but no tree-hugging ex-flower-child ever made her feel guilty about soaking cloth diapers in her toilet. Disposables come with the requisite guilt trip for filling up landfills, and using trees to cover our babies behinds. Being a mom who was once in the excrement-filled trenches with five children, I can’t imagine a better use for a tree. Ask me again in twenty years when the memory of those trenches fades.
Some things my mother never said while I was growing up:
“Put your Game Boy down and load the dishwasher!”
“Did you remember to put that 2-liter bottle in the recycle bin?”
“Put your seat belt on!”
Some things I’ve never said to my children:
“Got a headache? Crush an aspirin in a teaspoon of water.”
“You just wait till your father gets home!”
“Well, if you don’t like I Love Lucy, try the other two channels.”
My point is that things have changed and we can no longer raise our children the same way our parents did.   It’s not surprising that so many parents wonder about their own competency. Our points of reference have gone the way of the typewriter and eight-track tape player.
We’re floundering in a 21st century sea hoping for a 20th century life preserver. My dad used to say that the only way to teach a kid to swim is to throw them in the deep end. If we did that now, we’d be imprisoned for child abuse. Our parents believed that if you spared the rod, you would spoil the child. My generation said “Rods are not necessary for discipline.” Today’s young parents say, “What’s wrong with spoiling them?”
Without that 20th century life preserver, we seem to take any floating flotsam to come our way.

Alien Gender Problems 12-03-07
There have been many stand-up comics whose best material had to do with the differences between the genders. That’s because there is so much material of this kind to work with.
We’re simply on different wave lengths. I don’t think that any interstellar theories like the popular Venus/Mars thing can completely explain the crossed wires that can occur between men and women here on Earth.
In fact, I would go so far as to say that if both males and females inhabited Venus and Mars, they would pretty much have the same problems.
Venusian Male: Where do you want to go to eat?
Venusian Female, primping her horns: I thought either Lobster Haven or Pastas ‘R Us, you choose.
Venusian Male: I’m taking you out, you choose.
Venusian Female: You never make a decision. I want to go where you want to go.
Venusian Male getting into the SHoVeT (Space Hover Vehicle Transport): “Okay, Pastas ‘R Us”, he said, his five stomachs growling.
Venusian Female: Great! Pasta it is!”
After a few minutes of silence in the SHoVeT the female says: “Does Pastas ‘R Us serve crab?”
So they SHoVeTed to Lobster Haven.
Why didn’t she just tell him she wanted to go to Lobster Haven? Just to see if he was thinking the same thing she was? I think we’ve established here that that particular phenomenon only happens while in the dating stage.
“Oh migosh! We have so much in common! We even finish each other’s sentences! We’re like two parts of a whole! Sometimes we even wear the same clothes!”
Remember that time? What happened? It’s as if we uttered the words “I do” and somehow became completely rewired. We act differently.
A woman can go into a drug store, in broad daylight, and buy a can of Barbasol for her man, but if a man runs out of shaving cream, he’ll grow a ZZ Top beard before he’ll stoop to using his wife’s moisturizing, raspberry-scented shaving cream or a pink razor in the privacy of his own bathroom.
That is why women buy pink shaving cream & razors.
We think differently about most things, too. After being disillusioned by so many so-called diets that didn’t work, I finally settled on one that made more sense. All the experts say that you merely have to take in less calories than you are spending. Well, I had no idea how many I was spending because my body did not come equipped with a calorie gauge. So I decided that simply eating ½ of what I wanted to eat would do the trick.
I told my husband of my plan in hopes for his support during this undoubtedly fleeting interim of diet hell.
He said, “So that means that if you want a candy bar, you’re going to buy two but only eat one, right?”
“No, it means that I only eat ½ a candy bar. But thank you sooooo much for opening up that loophole for me.”
“Then who gets the other half?”
“I could give it to you.”
“Bad idea. I’m going to be as big as a house if I have to eat my candy bar plus ½ of yours.”
I’m not sure if I just illustrated crossed wires or a loose screw, but either way the same conversation could have been heard on Venus, Mars, or any planet where there are males and females cohabitating.

Dressing in the Mirror 11-26-07
I looked at myself in the mirror. Passable, I thought, but I wish I looked a little more…something. Maybe I should change my clothes again. No, this is crazy. I’ve already changed three times.
Am I wearing too much make-up? Not enough? Heels or flats? Do I look intelligent? After all, aren’t my brains more important that my looks?
No, I don’t have a date. I have a parent-teacher conference today. Why am I so worried about it? Because the teacher’s perception of me will indirectly relate to how she treats my child.
If I walk in the classroom the way I’d dress for a day of sweeping floors and cleaning toilets - in sweatpants, my cleaning t-shirt, and a pair of slippers - the teacher would not only think my child needed remedial math, but guidance counseling as well. On the plus side, she might sign him up for free lunches.
If I show up in a business suit and heels, the teacher might feel that I spend way too much time at the office and maybe more homework would keep my kid off the streets.
Sure, I want to know how my child is doing in school. I want to get his report card as well. They hold the report card for ransom, so that they can be assured that we parents will show up.
I have gone to many parent-teacher conferences. Always, without fail, 100% of the time, they will start with “Your child is doing great. I’ve loved having him/her in my class.” It’s something they learn in teacher-school, most likely.
What you want to say is: “Yeah, right.   That’s not what he says.” Instead, you simply say, “Thank you” and wait for the bomb to drop.
“Mrs. Snyder, your child will be getting a low grade in reading because he hasn’t brought in his signed reading log.”
“Well, it’s in his backpack when he leaves every morning.”
“Yes, but it’s not signed.”
So basically he’s getting a low grade because I didn’t do my homework, right? Alright, this means war!
“”Well, you know, I noticed a couple of words on his spelling tests that weren’t wrong that you marked wrong.” Take that!
“I assure you, Mrs. Snyder, if I marked them wrong, they were wrong.”
Okay, I shouldn’t have worn jeans. Maybe my black slacks would’ve conveyed the proper amount of intelligence required to convince her that I do indeed know how to spell.
I looked down and checked my white shirt for spaghetti stains. Nope, it wasn’t the shirt. Definitely the pants.
“Here is a picture journal that your child made last week,” she continued.
“Is that what I think it is?”
Yes, I believe it’s a dog doing his business on the hood of your car.”
“But we don’t have a dog and our car is red!”
She looks at me skeptically. Is my hair in a style that subliminally transmits “moron” to her? “I think I’m going to recommend that your child see the school psychiatrist.”
“No, really, he’s fine. He just has a good imagination.”
She raises her eyebrows. Maybe my mascara has clumped. “Mrs. Snyder, I know the difference between a good imagination and a warped imagination.”
Maybe it was the cranberry lipstick. Darn! I should’ve stuck with the clear gloss.

Moving Dirt 11-16-07
In the beginning, God created man. Then He took one of man’s ribs and fashioned a bulldozer to be his companion. But the world was not yet ready for bulldozers; Eden had no dirt. So He decided that woman was the next best thing.
We had to rent a little Bobcat front-loader last weekend. My husband, the electronic genius, plunked into the driver’s seat of this little dirt mover and turned into a big kid with a giant Tonka toy.
He moved tons of dirt that day. He leveled the high places and filled in the low places. Sometimes he made low places just so he could fill them in. Any garden gnomes that stood in his way didn’t stand a chance.
This uninhibited display of testosterone resulted in a yard full of giant tractor tracks that criss-crossed in chaotic patterns all over our lawn.
The learning curve for driving this vehicle was about 4 hours during which time he did 360s at least a dozen times before he realized that every time he spun the thing, sod would wrinkle and huge holes would appear in the lawn. So he stopped doing that…not that it mattered anymore.
I had no intention of getting into that machine. It intimidated me. If it did that to the lawn, what would it do if I ran into a tree? There was no way that I was going to play bumper cars with a construction vehicle.
I can hear my husband now: “Honey, why did you drive into that tree?”
“Well, if I had turned, I would’ve put another hole in the lawn.”
Obviously, you can’t operate the thing without making a few turns and I didn’t have the heart to do it. So, I left it to my husband, who was all too happy to take the job.
Since I was not driving the dozer of destruction, I wielded the rake. He’d dump some dirt and I’d rake it out. However, it seemed like I was doing a lot more raking than he was dumping. I’d get a spot all nice and flat just to watch him dump another load on top.
“That was flat!” I’d yell over the roar of the machine.
“Well, it looked like a low spot from here.” From Mr. Tonka toy’s perspective, our entire yard looked like a “low spot”.
He sat there most of the day driving his dream machine around and moving dirt, and I stood with my rake snorting dust all day.
They ought to have a day-camp for “big boys” where a guy can go drive a dump truck, a backhoe, or a bulldozer. All day they’d just move dirt from one place to another. Guys would pay good money for that.
The day eventually ended and we had to take the dirt digger back to the rental facility. My husband is now making a list of all the things he could do around our house that would involve a rented construction vehicle.
“Honey, what do you think about us building a swimming pool?” Swimming pools need a lot of dirt moved.
“You don’t know how to build a swimming pool”, I pointed out.
“Well, he said, “How about just a pond?”
We already had a pond, but far be it from me to spoil his fun.