Wheatzie

“Hey, Mom,” my 16-year-old son said to me as we sat in our sunroom together one Saturday morning recently, “how are you going to spend two entire nights at Uncle DJ’s house and not fight with him?” I paused, coffee cup halfway to my mouth, suddenly deep in thought.   “I hadn’t thought about that,” I murmured.   “Maybe we should cancel the trip.” My husband and two teenagers and I were planning to stay at my younger brother’s house in Las Vegas for two nights before hitting the MGM Grand for a night, then driving our rental car four hours to Los Angeles to spend the last two days and nights of our spring break trip hitting every single tourist trap L.A. had to offer (update: it was amazing) before hopping on a plane to fly us all the way back across the country to Missouri. My younger brother DJ has been in the military for the last 26 years and he’s always living in really exotic, faraway locations, so we don’t see each other very often.  Maybe once every couple of ...

My junior high schoolers performed a beautiful Christmas concert last Friday.  Yesterday, as I was at the front of the classroom teaching my “5-Paragraph Essay in 15 Minutes” lesson to the 7 th graders, one of them raised her hand. “Mrs. L…were you crying last week during our Christmas concert?” I wanted to say something like, Yeah , you guys were so bad it brought tears to my eyes because that’s the type of relationship we have. Instead I said, “I was.   I guess you could tell?” “ A little bit ,” she replied, smiling and holding her forefinger and thumb about half an inch apart. “A little bit” is putting it mildly. I’d been bawling all over myself.  My husband had been teasing me about it and had asked if I wanted a tissue, but he’d never brought me one—probably because he would have had to do that crouch-walk all the way across the gym as he attempted to snake his way to the bathroom around 300 parents catching video of their children.  You kno...

One Thanksgiving about 20 years ago, I made brownies. “They taste like….” my younger brother said, chewing around a piece carefully as he furrowed his brow in concentration, hoping to find just the right word, “…they taste like paint .” I snapped my fingers and nodded because he’d done it.   He’d found the right word.   Even though I had never actually tasted paint, not even one tiny lick of the wall when I was a little girl, they did.   Those brownies tasted like paint. There were a lot of excuses made for me that day from well-meaning members of my extended family:   the oil was probably bad; the butter might’ve been salted; maybe the chicken that had laid the particular egg that I’d used in the recipe had been feeling a little “off” that day… “Or maybe she just sucks at baking,” my older sister suggested as she floated through the kitchen to refill people’s drinks. Well, of course she would say that.   She was the one hosting Thanksgiving that year...

My boys once had a neighborhood friend we all grew to love. Notice how I said that:   grew to love.   It took a couple of years. When he was just a little guy, probably three years old, he would come toddling into our yard while my 1-year-old was playing with the big toy dump truck that one of his aunts had gotten him for his birthday.   He would swiftly grab it from my son, who was a pretty laid-back kid.   My son’s eyes would grow wide when he realized what was happening, and my son would snatch back the truck that he had been playing peacefully with for the last 30 minutes.   The neighbor kid would look up at me and say accusingly, “Jay won’t share!!!” I would do what any good mother trying to teach her children valuable life lessons in a somewhat- functioning society would do: shrug my shoulders and suggest the neighbor boy play with a different toy or go home and play with his own. It didn’t take long for the neighbor kid to realize that he wasn’t ...

Last Friday marked the conclusion of the first week of school.  It wasn’t a full week, but it was close since we started on Tuesday.  A few teachers wanted to complain about that— The first week of school usually starts on a Thursday to ease us all in! —until I reminded them that if we’d done it that way, we would have had to start the Thursday before to get in all the required days. Unpopular opinion that’s probably better left unspoken but I’m not too good at that: Teachers will always find something to complain about.   Always. Fridays are my favorite day of the week.   Even though it’s a school day, there’s such a festive feel in the air: fun music floats from classrooms as you walk down the hallway; the kids have an extra pep in their step; recesses are a little longer; a word search might take the place of pages in the grammar book. We have this deal at our school where teachers can pay $1 each Friday to wear jeans, and at the end of the year, we giv...