We now have three days of preschool under our belts and each day my children acted like I was sending them off to slaughter at drop off time. Crying. Screaming. Holding onto me for dear life. And then, at the moment they know I must leave, pleading with me, "Mommy! Please don't go! I love you!" And then these heartbreaking words from Lulu: "Please take me home with you, Mommy! I promise I'll be good!" Like I am doing this to punish them for something. I don't have the mental constitution for this. I might be destined to become one of those home-schooling freaks.
In wardrobe news, we are going on seven months that Moxley has worn her beloved "flower pants." I am down to one pair of 4T's that don't have a hole in the knees. Target is now out of stock, thanks in large part to this household buying them in bulk. When this last pair is in tatters, I'm not sure what's going to go down. She may need to be medicated. Or possibly hospitalized. I was encouraged recently when she declared she wanted to wear a suit to school when her last pair of flower pants finally ripped. When I pointed out it would be hard to play in a suit she countered, and rightfully so, that Father Bear plays in his... My child's fashion muse is a middle-aged bear who wears a three-piece suit -- even to bed.
Our "flower pants problem" may rapidly turn into a "Chaz Bono problem." But wanting to dress like a boy (or even be one) isn't the upsetting part. The part that disturbed me is when she said she wanted to wear a bow tie in lieu of a regular tie. Ever meet that guy at work whose shtick is to wear a bow tie every day instead of a regular one? They're all weird, and there's usually one at every company. I would sit in meetings just staring at these oddballs trying to figure out their psyche and wondering what motivated them to unilaterally decide one day that their corporate identity would revolve around donning a bow tie day in and day out.
One evening, circa 2001, one such fellow approached me at a company happy hour and said something along the line of, "Would you like to grab dinner one night?" I was horrified. He must have mistaken my staring at him in the board room as romantic interest rather than a perverse need to know what motivates a grown man to buy 30 different bow ties so he never wore the same one all month. (I kept track.) This was my opportunity to get to the bottom of this. I ignored his advance and replied, not unkindly: "Let me ask you something. What's with the bow ties?" He turned on his heels and never spoke to me again unless it was absolutely necessary for work purposes. The bow-tied gentleman didn't even give me a chance to float my theory that he had a deep-seated emotional need to differentiate himself due to feeling invisible during his formative years.
In other news, we have a bunch of large insects with about a million legs running around our house. They freak me out. I usually attack them with a whole roll of paper towels so their guts don't seep through and possibly leak on me like they might if I used only one sheet. Yesterday one crawled by my bed and I had no paper towels handy and was too afraid to get off the bed so I dropped a book on it and then left the book in place for my husband to deal with when he returned from work. This seemed like a completely reasonable reaction on my part but he seemed perturbed by it. At first I thought he was annoyed by my choice of book (Sh-- My Dad Says) but upon further reflection I learned he didn't like to be greeted with a demand to remove a smashed insect carcass immediately after a hard day at the office. I stand by my actions. If I wanted to clean up murder scenes I'd work for one of those firms CSI calls in to mop up blood after all the fingerprints and DNA samples are taken.
So how many days until my kids stop going ballistic before school? I come home every day and cry for the 2 hours and half hours before I have to turn around and pick them up. It's highly unproductive.
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