Belle Weather (9 page)

Like a lot of kids her age, my Princess is big into music, mostly pop and rock listened via sparkly ear buds hooked into her MP3 player. It’s a constant companion, this little gizmo that can hold hundreds of songs so that you are guaranteed that you will never have to experience the horror of a quiet, utterly still and silent moment no matter where you are.

She likes Gavin DeGraw, Hellogoodbye, Fall Out Boy, Panic! at the Disco, and a bunch of other people I’m too un-cool to recognize.

Sometimes I can barely suppress an urge to tell her about the truly great rock and roll bands. I want to put on a cardigan (because frankly it’s cold all the time lately) and tell her that back in my day, you had “your Led Zeppelin, your King Crimson, your Jethro Tull” and so forth. I don’t think she’d care much, though.

Soph and her little friends walk around with their iPods and MP3s hooked to them like tiny rhinestone-dotted colostomy bags. They wouldn’t think of leaving home without their tunes.

Which is why I’ve decided that one way to make the Princess listen to me would be to reach her through music, a medium that she obviously is passionate about.

Moms all over this great land have their own
Greatest Hits
or
Best of
collections with them at all times, these mantras that we repeat all day, eighty times a day, to our kids. Sadly, our nagging “hits” aren’t nearly as much fun as Fergie describing why she’s so
Fergalicious
or Nelly Furtado boasting of being a
Promiscuous Girl.
Double ick.

It almost makes me nostalgic for those dreadful Kidz Bop CDs favored by the five-year-old set and featuring the annoyingly wholesome vocal stylings of a fresh-faced bunch of kidz who just want to grow up and marry their own Usher some day, even the boys.

You won’t find my “greatest hits” on the shelves at Best Buy or even the scruffy-but-cool independent store where the sales guy has a barbell in his tongue and keeps trying to sell me Rage Against the Machine, and I’m thinking how does this weird barbell guy know about my ongoing problem with my overpriced piece-of-crap vacuum cleaner?

Mom’s Greatest Hits
won’t make it to the Billboard charts but it might sell well on one of those late-night TV commercials if I can scrape together enough dough for the studio time to actually lay down some tracks. (That’s music lingo to you ordinary cats; try to hang.)

Unlike other mail-order CDs such as
Music From the Godfather,
as played on the pan flute, my greatest hits are targeted to moms like me. Here’s a sampling from my unofficial, yet-to-be-released CD:

And who can forget the classic stylings of:

The hits just keep coming with:

And who can resist the classic chart-topper:

Admittedly, it’s hard to compete with the music kids really like so you’d have to have cool artists record
Mom’s Greatest Hits.

Beyoncé could be pointing to the laundry basket that needs to go downstairs when she’s saying “to the left, to the left” instead of a cheating lover being instructed on how to get out of her house pronto.

As in:

When they’re not listening to music, kids are playing video or computer games.

And when I tell my kid that she and her friends should play outside, they just stare at me like I’m Psycho Environmentalist Chick.

I just think it’s sad these kids don’t know the sublime pleasure of trapping lightning bugs in a mayonnaise jar on a sultry summer evening, as I did as a child. I’ll never forget the magic of watching these graceful, charming creatures glow orange and yellow, elegant little flashlights in the night darting about inside the jar until they finally collapsed into a dead, crunchy heap because, my bad, I’d forgotten the damn holes in the lid. Again.

At least I know I’m not alone in thinking that kids need to get outside and play.

A new study has found that children today have “Nature Deficit Disorder.”

They’ve lost connection with nature, this generation that is nauseatingly fluent in Wii, MySpace, and
High School Musical.
When tested, only a few could identify a wild salamander or recognize poison oak.

To be honest, I don’t know a wild salamander from a tame one, but I’m guessing that the wild ones party with Timbaland. I wondered how the Princess would do with a test on nature.

“In which direction does lichen grow on trees?” I asked her.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “What’s lichen, anyway?”

“I think I left a pot on the stove,” I said.

Hey, the acorn didn’t fall far from the lichen-covered tree, now did it?

I’ve never been a big fan of the outdoors, particularly the part that’s outside.

I’ve always been mildly suspicious of fresh air and exercise. People who camp always crow about how “food always tastes better outdoors!” No it doesn’t. It tastes better indoors served on lovely china with napkins folded to resemble the backs of swans.

And although I know I should exercise more, I can’t help thinking about that poor Chinese housewife who went for a hike and ended up having a two-inch-long leech stuck in her nose.

Turns out she paused on her long hike to splash some fresh water from a stream into her face. A tiny leech swam right up her left nostril.

Later, she would tell reporters that she wasn’t worried about leeches in the water, explaining, “I’m used to seeing all these worms in the water while hiking.”

OK, I have to throw up.

Anyway, two weeks later, she felt something strange in her nose. She went to the doctor who discovered the leech was getting bigger by the day.

At this point, I would’ve keeled over dead but this woman was tough, hons. The kind of woman who washes her face with worms. Doctors tried to remove it but were unsuccessful so it kept growing for another couple of weeks. If this leech had gotten any bigger, Angelina Jolie would’ve tried to adopt the sucka.

Finally, doctors sprayed the leech with a nasal spray chock full of anesthesia. After the Longest Two Minutes of Anyone’s Life Ever, the leech slowly backed out of the woman’s nostril and was gunned down by the S.W.A.T. team. OK, retrieved with forceps but you get it.

At this point, the woman ran screaming from the room and jumped out of a tenth-floor window, plummeting to her death. No, no really, she’s fine.

All of which is by way of saying that hiking’s bad and napkins shaped like swans are good.

So perhaps I’m partly responsible for my daughter’s abysmal lack of knowledge about flora and, uh, the other one. Could she be suffering from Nature Deficit Disorder? And, if so, what was the cure?

That’s easy. To combat this disorder, which, I’m guessing, is easily diagnosed by detecting a fixed stare and excessive Cheetos orange dust around the mouth and fingertips, children suffering from NDD are being told to “climb trees, build forts, and explore creeks.”

And in possibly the weirdest marketing tie-in of all time, even McDonald’s and Hummer are helping find a cure.

My kid’s Mega Happy Meal last week came packaged in what looked to the jaded grown-up as an advertisement for a Hummer. But no! Look closer! It’s actually a moment in environmental exploration brought to you by Hummer.

Is it just me or does anyone else find this as hilarious as the phrase “Singer Paris Hilton”?

I read the Hummer Happy Meal “fun maze” copy with a mixture of revulsion and admiration. You gotta have some set of balls to suggest that you park your Hummer to “stop for a hike” because “it’s a fun way to see the outdoors and get exercise!”

Yes, drive your eight-million-pound Barbie war machine twenty miles so you can get some exercise. Makes perfect sense to me!

At the end of a fun day of Hummer-inspired swimming, hiking, and climbing you can “sleep under the stars.”

Stars? What stars? Wasn’t that the ozone you just burned up?

My favorite suggestion was that the Hummer will help you cross over a fallen tree on your path. Go ahead and run over Susan Sarandon clinging to it while you’re at it.

How fortunate that Hummer is here to help our nation with this awful epidemic of Nature Deficit Disorder!

Sure, it’s a little like asking Michael Richards to emcee the Essence Awards but no matter. It’s for the children.

I told Soph that she needed to unplug herself from that glittered colostomy bag and get outside and get some fresh air, experience nature up close and personal and she—being a Princess and all—said that was a great idea.

“It is?” I said, hopefully. Maybe that
Mom’s Greatest Hits
was really helping.

“Sure. We’ll go to Ulta and get some peach-pulp pedicure lotion ’cause that’s very nature-y.”

That’s not exactly what I had in mind, but I shouldn’t have been surprised that this was her take on “nature.”

USA Today
did a big story on how ten-year-old girls, who are notoriously suffering from NDD, are going to the spa for massages and facials these days.

What does a ten-year-old need a massage for? Tough afternoon of sitting around playing Dream Life got your neck muscles sore? Shopper-shoulder from hauling around bags full of overpriced T-shirts from Aberzombie?

Puleez.

Maybe I’m just jealous. I was forty before I got my first manicure and it just seems more than a little unfair that a ten-year-old is working in a mani-pedi between homework and oboe lessons.

While a facial would’ve been a good idea for those of us who grew up as teenagers in the pre-Accutane era, it’s hard to figure out why a ten-year-old (or even younger according to the article), really needs one.

At that age, isn’t it still OK for the banana-berry facial to be less from a fifty-dollar treatment administered by someone named Ramone and more from the yummy remnants of a Baskin-Robbins smoothie?

It’s not just little girls, of course. There’s also something called the “mini-metrosexual phenomenon.” This explains the astrounding success of preteen boys’ body sprays such as Tag and Axe.

Clearly, we’ve come a long way from the date-night dousing of Brut that I remember gagging on in high school.

Still, there’s something creepy about a ten-year-old boy fretting about hair products when he should be analyzing box scores or putting his sister’s bra in the freezer. I mean, what kind of freaks are we raising these days?

Nature Deficit Disorder freaks, that’s what kind.

Of course it’s fun to dress up, experiment with makeup, and play big-girl hair. I mean you’d have to be Cruella De Vil mean not to allow that once in a while. But the notion of regular spa appointments for little girls sits with me like a bad fish taco.

I’m not ready for Sophie to breathlessly inform me that Rumi has had a cancellation by another “client” whose “like, grandmother died or something” so now she can get her hot-stone massage after all.

It started out innocently, I’m sure. Just another way for moms to bond with their daughters. But it’s gotten out of hand and now we have an entire industry catering to seven-year-olds who tweeze.

To them I just take a page from Hummer’s playbook and advise them: Go climb a tree or something. Bark is great for exfoliation.

Although I’m still not paying for my kid to have a spa day, until she can have hers at Fantastic Sam’s like a good redneck girl, the message apparently isn’t sinking in.

When I asked the Princess what kind of birthday party she wanted this year, she didn’t hesitate: “A sleepover with professional salon make overs for everybody and facials and hairdos and manicures and pizza and we’ll give everybody AeroBeds with their names monogrammed on them in fancy hot pink thread and we’ll go to the waterslide and the bowling alley and maybe a movie afterward.”

“Do what?”

“Well, you asked me what I wanted,” she said, bottom lip out to here. “I was thinking we could get an artist to come and give all of us henna tattoos for our arms and our ankles and maybe a really big one around our
necks
! And we could
pierce each other’s ears
!”

OK, as long as she keeps things within reason.

As I tried to recover from this announcement, Soph scampered off to find paper for a list of party supplies.

“We can rent a popcorn machine and a Slushie machine and have a make-your-own-sundae bar and we can make s’mores!” she said consulting a list entitled “Party Fun.”

“Won’t all that junk food make everybody hurl?” I asked.

She gave me a look that clearly said I was a dumbass.

“Nobody
ever
gets sick at a sleepover. They’re too much
fun
!”

“What about the kid who got the 104-degree fever at your last sleepover and thought she was Willy Wonka?”

“Oh, that was just that one time.”

On the appointed day, nine little girls arrived with sleeping bags, inflatable beds and apparently eighteen pairs of pajamas and twenty-two singing Hello Kitty toothbrushes apiece.

We’d downsized the party considerably (Slip ’n’ Slide, cookout, and a movie shown outdoors and projected onto a white bedsheet) after I told the Princess a lot of parents might not be thrilled to discover that their daughters were freshly tattooed and pierced the next morning.

“What about spray tans?” she asked. “That would be cool.”

I had a momentary flashback to a horrific tanning-bed scene in
Final Destination 3
in which two teenage girls are trapped in overheated tanning beds and their skin starts dripping off their bones like queso dip.

“No!!!!”

At the party, hubby and I realized that nine-year-old girls have extremely short attention spans.

“When are we eating?”

“Can she open presents now?”

“Is my arm broken? It really hurts. My daddy’s a lawyer and he said that the Slip ’n’ Slide is just a tort waiting to happen. Did you know that? Did you?”

“I’m going to ask you for two hamburgers but I’m really just going to eat one small bite out of one and say it tastes “too hamburgery.”

(Crying) “She said I liked a
boy
!”

At exactly 1
A.M.
, my official lights-out deadline, I reminded the girls they’d better go to sleep or I’d have to stay up with them and then I’d be too tired to make pancakes that look like Hannah Montana the next morning.

“Really? You can make pancakes that look like Hannah Montana?” my kid asked.

“Of course not, but my wine buzz gave out, like, five hours ago and I gotta get some sleep. They’ll understand.”

Besides, if pressed, I could always just glue a photo cut out of
Tiger Beat
to the pancakes because Hannah (really Miley Cyrus) is the modern-day equivalent of Partridge Family heartthrob Keith Cassidy for “most pictures in a preteen magazine ever.” And, yes, it’s beyond unsettling that I know that.

When everything was dark and I was finally threading my way around and between ten sleeping bags to head upstairs to bed, I heard a small voice.

“I forgot my white-noise fan.”

Pretend I didn’t hear that and keep heading for the stairs.

“Sophie’s mom! I can’t sleep without my white-noise fan. Do you hear me?
I can’t sleep without it!!!!
”

Crapcrapcrapcrapcrap.

“OK, honey,” I said with as much cheer as anyone could muster at one o’clock in the morning. “We’ll figure something out.”

“Just call my mom and dad. They’ll bring it over.”

“But, sweetie, your mom and dad live ten miles from here. It’s one o’clock in the mother—, I mean it’s one o’ clock in the morning! We don’t want to wake them up at this hour, do we?”

“They won’t mind,” she said. “They love me.”

“Trust me,” I said, patting her hair gently and looking at her sweet face in the soft moonlight streaming through the living room windows. “I’m sure your parents don’t love you
that
much. No one does!”

Her eyes got all wide and wet like one of those Precious Moments dolls. What? What’d I say?

“Sweetie, it’s like this. The big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the one.
Get it
? I’m not calling anybody at one o’clock in the morning unless it’s the cops because a stranger with a bloody ax has stumbled in here and threatened to open our skulls like a pile of ripe nectarines. Now night-night.”

OK, bad idea. There were now ten exceedingly hysterical little girls sitting bolt upright in their Diva sleeping bags.

“Mommy’s just kidding,” said Sophie. “She gets really cranky when she’s tired and she says crazy stuff.”

“So there’s nobody with an ax coming to get us?” the sweet, shy kid who hadn’t said a word all day asked. I just knew that before the night was over she was going to pee on my new couch.

“Of course not, darling,” I said. “I’m just having some fun. Gawd, haven’t y’all ever told spooky stories at a sleepover?”

What was wrong with me? Now I’d never get to sleep. Don’t children have any sense of humor? I thought the ax nectarine thing was pretty funny, but kids? You can’t make ’em laugh unless you fart.

While I pondered this in an exhausted haze, the clock ticked closer to 2
A.M.
Finally, mercifully, I looked over and realized the little girl who needed her white-noise fan was sound asleep. I wanted to wake her up and tell her “Ha! You don’t need that fan. You were
asleep
!” but that would have been self-defeating, I guess. Still, it has always been very important to me for everyone to know when I’m right about something. Which is basically all the time.

While some might say that’s an annoying character trait, I would just say that’s just one more thing they’re wrong about. Being right all the time is a burden, people. Feel my pain.

Finally, one by one, the little girls began to wear themselves out. By two-thirty it was all quiet and I crept upstairs, finally, to sleep.

And wake up again at 6
A.M.
Yes, three and a half hours. That’s how long they slept before crawling out of their pink cocoons and deciding it was time to
play Twister
!

I punched duh-hubby to inform him that the girls were awake but he just mumbled “OK” and resumed snoring.

OK? No, not OK! He’d been asleep since 11
P.M.
Where was the fairness in this?

Still, I knew in my heart that little girls get freaked out at the sight of men in boxer shorts and “Dook Sucks” T-shirts stumbling around in the early hours.

The sleepover is primarily the responsibility of the mommy-host and that will never change.

While hubby snoozed with a big smile on his face, I went downstairs to make the damned pancakes.

“These don’t look like Hannah Montana!” one little girl screeched.

“Of course they do. Now just be quiet and drink your mimosa,” I said. “Have a few, as a matter of fact. By the sixth one, the pancakes will look like any damn body you want ’em to!”

“Aaaaahhhhhh!!! You said the ‘D’ word. Sophie’s mommy said the ‘D’ word.”

I silently reached into my robe pocket and tossed a dollar into the Swear Jar on the kitchen counter.

I’d installed the Swear Jar a year earlier to curb the urge to cuss by any member of the family but, as of this moment, I had been the only one who had actually put any money into the jar. We’d emptied it at least three times.

I’ve always had a problem with “potty mouth” but the most embarrassing moment had happened years ago on the job.

As the wedding editor for the newspaper, I was used to dealing with demanding nut jobs day after day but one, in particular, led me to unleash a few well-chosens as soon as she was out of range.

A Yankee man I worked with stared at me, mouth agape.

“You eat with that mouth?” he asked.

I was mortified. To be corrected on manners by a Yankee man was beyond humiliating.

But here I was, cussing in front of a kitchen full of nine-year-olds. What was wrong with me?

Sleep deprivation, that’s what.

Hubby emerged in jeans and a clean shirt, freshly showered and feeling energized by his undisturbed ten hours of sleep.

“Yummy! Something smells great! What’s for breakfast, honey?”

“We’re having pancakes that look just like Hannah Montana,” I said sweetly.

“Really?” he said, scowling slightly at the griddle. “They don’t look much like Hannah Montana to me.”

I considered slamming his head into the griddle and asking him if he’d like to think again now that he had a closer look, but that would’ve resulted in having to put more money in the “Violent Behavior” jar, my latest anger-management tool for occasional perimenopausal outbursts.

“Sophie’s mommy said the ‘D’ word,” one little girl snitched to hubby with obvious delight.

“You got off lucky, kid,” he said, reaching for the orange juice.

Four hours later, all the mommies arrived to pick up their little girls, who were all leaving with little director’s chairs with their names on them that we’d used for the outdoor movie. All in all, it had been a pretty great party.

“Is it true that they only got three and a half hours sleep?” asked one of the more high-maintenance moms.

“Yep.”

“And that you used the ‘D’ word and gave them mimosas?”

“Guilty as charged. Except their mimosas didn’t have champagne in them. Who do you think I am? Michael Jackson?”

“And that you told them a man with a bloody ax was going to come through the door and chop them up like nectarines?”

“Of course not. You know, you can’t believe everything a kid tells you.”

The “Lies” jar is getting pretty full, too.