posted by Momo Fali on July 5, 2007
We have recently started having conversations with our five year old son about strangers. We waited so long to start these conversations because he’s had numerous health problems and for a really long time, he didn’t want anyone to touch him. Not Mom, not Dad, not sister, nor grandparent. It is my belief that he thought if anyone was going to touch him, it would result in a needle being stuck into his body, or his liver being manipulated and moved about by some doctor’s large, cold, rubbing-alcohol scented hands. After 18 months of occupational therapy to help him with these issues, we now have a kid who is the extreme opposite of the one we used to know. Now we can’t stop him from rubbing people, or going up to random folks at the ballpark and telling them, “Hold me”.
My friend, Bean, let us borrow a great DVD called Stranger Safety. The host, who calls herself Safe Side Super Chick, is a combination of Robin Williams, in his Mork days, with a little bit of Pippi Longstocking. Though incredibly odd in so many ways, it was informative and fun for all of us to watch. But, since then my son is obsessed with knowing who is a stranger and who isn’t. He points at everyone we see and says, “He’s a stranger”…”She’s a stranger”. The cashier at Target, the mailman, the trash guys, pictures of people in all his books, dogs, cats…turns out, just about everyone is a stranger. And, after all these discussions about who it’s okay to talk to, and when, we found it had all paid off in a very backward sort of way. Because as I picked up my son at the grocery store the other day, he started yelling, “NO!! Help! You’re a stranger! You’re a stranger!!” Looks like we have more work to do.
posted by Momo Fali on July 2, 2007
My eight year old daughter, who prides herself on listening to every word we say even though she’s pretending to watch The Disney Channel, has recently become extremely frustrated to hear her father and I speak in Pig Latin. We went through the spelling-words-out-phase, and when she caught on, we had to move to spelling them backward. When she figured that out, we were in a quandry. What to do when you need to yell to your spouse in the kitchen to hide the last ice cream bar so the kids won’t find it? So, somewhere from back in my husband’s middle school brain file, he pulled out Pig Latin. Of course, we’re getting older and our Pig Latin comes out very slowly as we try to figure out what letter comes second, which now needs to be the first letter of the word. Yesterday, we sounded like a couple of sick cows. “Ooooooday oooooouyay aHntway oootay AAAAAktay UHthay idskay otay UHthay oooooolpay?” That’s, “Do you want to take the kids to the pool?” Of course, we really feel like idiots, when “the” is the hardest word to figure out how to say.
Never mind, that we could’ve walked down the street, talked to each other about going to the pool, then come home, in the time it took to utter that one sentence. The fun of it, is that our daughter can’t figure it out. After we finished our pool discussion, which literally made her stomp her feet in frustration, she turned to me and said, “I’m going to start my own language too! Sand sou sill sever sigure sit sout!”
posted by Momo Fali on June 28, 2007
The gas man just got here to restore our service, and as he knelt down next to our stove, my son greeted him with a warm, “EWWW! He stinks.”
posted by Momo Fali on June 28, 2007
The other day, we woke up to find trucks parked in front of our house. Big, yellow, heavy-duty trucks. Because our neighbors are having their driveway completely redone, we didn’t think another thing of it…that is, until a backhoe started digging up our front yard. My husband went outside to find there was a gas leak, though no one bothered to tell us. Good thing, considering I probably would’ve wound up in a panic, packed up the two kids and the dog (I would’ve left the fish), and ran from the house. The pipeline workers assured us it was okay to stay, and since they had to shut the gas off to work on the line, I felt pretty safe. That was at Noon, day before yesterday. At 9:30 that night, the gas company finally came out to turn our gas back on. Of course, and I say “of course” because we have the WORST luck of any people I know, when they went into our basement, they found FIVE gas leaks coming from the pipe in our house. Not that I don’t want to know there are five gas leaks in my basement, but we had no control over this. This all started when the backhoe folks showed up that morning. Next thing we know, the gas company tells us we have seven days to fix it or they’re shutting it off. Nice.
Since then, we’ve had two trips by a repairman and three from the gas company. We’ve had gas for approximately 10 hours, most of which was overnight. I do not know how people lived without hot water coming straight from a faucet. My kids have had to take cold-bordering-on-lukewarm baths the past two nights (only bordering-on-lukewarm because there was a little bit of water left in the hot water tank). It’s no wonder women used to wear those big, long, dresses with lots of layers. It was to hide their stench.
In addition, my husband noticed this morning that the pipeline people, who had so delicately torn up our yard, also crushed the drain running from our TWO sump pumps to the street. Those sump pumps run all the time, so we need that drain. The pumps are the result of five different trips made to our house by a waterproofing company to fix our constantly flooding basement. We recently found out that was due to a broken water line in our front yard. We had it replaced a couple of months ago. The flooding caused a mold problem that actually DID send me into a panic and made me pack up the two kids (I left the fish AND the dog) and run from the house. We’re going camping this weekend, and I think I’m going to feel like I’m living in luxury compared to this place.
I can not stress this enough people…buy a brand new house.
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