Follow the road as it curves and ascends.

Make your first right.

Climb again. This time even steeper.

It’s the second house on the left.

Remember the Red Doors.

Through those Red Doors, you will find a wooden floor that socked feet slid upon during sibling chase scenes.

Don’t run into the grandfather clock. It was a gift. An anniversary gift. Mom will be pissed.

Make a right and see the bedroom door on your left. The door that had to be replaced because a cowboy boot punched its way through because you were inside. And he didn’t want you there. It was his space. It was a safe space. You wanted to be safe.

Return to the hall. Go to the next door on your left. The cool porcelain that was never dirty. The tub where you learned to shave your legs. The bathroom art that made you question why people drew pictures of toilets to hang in bathrooms. Wasn’t there anything better to draw? Why would anyone want to look at a picture of a john when they were sitting on one? Life’s great mysteries.

Return to the hall. At the end. There it is. A room where ghosts and demons lived in the closet and you willed them away each night with memorized verses and mumbled hymns. A bookshelf with a boom box that fueled pop star fantasies. A three-story Barbie condo with cardboard walls warped from dog pee.

Return to the hall. The door to your left. The door to your left. To enter it is to be transformed. It is not safe. Drawn in and compelled to flee. Drawn in and compelled to flee.

Flee to the Red Door, dear child. Flee to the Red Door.

This post is in response to a moving experience I had with The Wilderness Downtown. Check it out and see what you’d say to your younger self.

Special thanks to Amy from Taste Like Crazy for sharing this amazing find.

No, she’s not perfect.

She makes lots of mistakes.

It’s just that, for the past two years, she’s had the opportunity to fix them before her teacher’s red pen hit the page.

Now, she’s flying without a net.

She forgot to check and make sure she did both sides of a worksheet.

She mixed up a “p” and an “a.”

She confuses her “d”s and “b”s.

She’s under time constraints and is feeling the pressure.

Her teacher is nice, but focused on performance, not feelings.

Boo is learning hard lessons.  She’s feeling the pressure. The days of getting by with her charm are over.

She’s got to deliver the goods. She’s got to take her time to do it right the first time. She’s got to focus on the task at hand.

Tough stuff when you’re six.

I nearly forgot it was the start of a new “school” year and he would be changing rooms.

He was already familiar with his new teachers, having had them in other rooms at other stages of his development.

But this time, when I dropped him off, his new teacher asked me a question…

Is there anything you’d like me to know?

Well, yes. There are a few things you should know about my son.

• He loves trains and dinosaurs.
• He gets grumpy when he is tired and/or hungry.
• When we drop him off, he’ll usually start his day with a banana.
• He’ll be the last child to settle for his nap and the hardest one to wake up.
• Please don’t let him nap longer than an hour and a half. Otherwise he’ll be impossible at bedtime.
• We’ve given up the fight for a nap at home on weekends and holidays. He is allowed to play quietly in his room while I regain my sanity.
• He’s a picky eater, and manage to make a mess with whatever he decides to put in his mouth.
• He’ll greet whomever is picking him up with a smile and hug that makes him/her believe he’s been waiting all day just to see him/her.
• His favorite movie is “Cars” and his favorite hairstyle is “spiky.”
• He’s fully potty trained, but likes an audience and needs help wiping.
• He needs to work on his language and fine motor skills so he can be ready for his Pre-K evaluation at Ye Olde Catholic school this spring.
• He loves to ride bikes and go down slides the wrong way.
• He’s broken his arm twice on playground equipment. He’s a risk taker and does not bounce well.
• You can usually get him to share if you ask him to “take turns.”
• He does well with a routine and clear and consistent expectations, but he reserves the right to change the rules on you at any time.
• Sometimes he falls apart, the only thing that will calm him down is to hold him and hold him tight. Yes, he will fight you, and may take a swing at you. His cries can peel the paint off the walls, but he will settle into a heap of sobs and cling to you with profuse apologies for his transgression. He will love you even more for teaching him how to pull his shit together.
• His best friend is the little curly redhead boy. They’re always together and can’t leave each day without hugging each other.
• He’s learned to put his shoes on.
• He’s a master manipulator. Don’t believe him when he tells you he can’t do something. Please don’t let him get away with it.
• Please don’t soothe his moods with food. If you feed him healthy stuff on a regular basis, you should be fine. Giving him cookies and sweet stuff turns him into exactly what you’re trying to avoid — a blonde tornado of preschool hell. Sweets are cool on occasion and (please) not just before he comes home.
• It takes a village to raise this little man, so you’ll see quite the cast of characters trouping through this room at pickup and dropoff. There will be me and his dad, our respective partners, aunts, uncles, cousins, grandmas, grandpas, and an awesome babysitter. Have no fear. He knows his people.
• I fully expect him to come home filthy each day. It’s how I know he’s had fun.
• Hug him often and remind him he is loved.

I am thankful, dear teacher, that you’ve decided that locking yourself in room with a dozen 3-4 year-olds is your life’s calling. It’s a job that I would take only if the alternative was being Paris Hilton’s publicist.

If there’s something you need, please don’t hand me a gift wrap or cookie dough catalog. I have enough paper for three Christmases and my ass needs cookie dough like Angelina Jolie’s lips need botox. Just tell me what you need and we’ll get it.

If my angel is being a pain in the ass, please tell me. Trust me, this will not be news. Let’s work together to figure out why he’s being an asshole and fix it together. Because, in the end, we want angels, not assholes, right? The world has enough of the latter.

So, here’s to a great school year. I look forward to bawling with you this next August when we look back on how much he’s grown and changed as he heads off to reform Catholic school with his big sister.

Love,

Doodle’s Mom (but you can call me Nancy)

Doodle refuses to get dressed….to eat breakfast…to brush his teeth…to get in the car…to pretty much do anything I need him to do.

En route to school, I check my calendar (at a stoplight) and discover that Boo has a half day and there is no after care. I failed to make arrangements with Steve or family to pick her up, so the busy nine hour day I had planned is now an insane three hour blur.)

I check Twitter (again at a stoplight) and see that it’s supposed to be #complaintfreemonday. I sigh and resolve to focus on the good stuff. After all, I get to share in Boo’s first day of school and get 1:1 time with her in the afternoon, right?

First day of school drop off = parking lot madhouse. We barely get to class on time because I have to park in the deepest recesses of the parking lot.

Boo has no interest in standing still for 30 seconds for me to get shots like this….

I discover, on the hike back to the car, that I chose the worst possible shoes to wear for hiking across lawns and parking lots. (I take some solace in knowing that at least I look good and then I remember how ugly and pained women look when they’re hobbling like I am at that very moment. So instead of looking good, I just look like a wobbly jackass.)

I smack the back of my minivan into a light pole, smashing one of the sensors that should have been beeping to warn me that I was going to hit something. The rest of the car is fine. Just the damn sensor.

I pull back into a neighboring space and take a moment to cry. Not because my baby’s growing up, but because I am obviously too inept to function today.

I am so late that I do not have time for coffee.

I am a half hour late for work.

My three-hour blur of speed-work is now a two-and-a-half-hour blur. My boss is patient and understanding of my plight, but is obviously not thrilled with my memory fail.

I rush out of the office at 11 with plans to run two work-errands on the way to get Boo. One gets done. The intended second errand is sucked into the time/space vortex that is random, unexplainable Vegas traffic.

I manage to get to the school’s drive-through pick up line before school lets out. *yea me!* However, teacher’s vague instructions (i.e., “we’ll be under the big tree”) turns into epic panicky fail when I realize the school has been there since the dawn of time immortal and all the trees are “big trees.” I abandon my running car wedged in the pickup line and flag familiar parents to see if they’ve seen Boo.

Curse my shoe choice yet again as I hike to the tree that is the furthest away from my car. I find Boo and assure the confused teacher that, yes I am her mother, and yes, she did meet me yesterday, and no I am not here to kidnap her and leave her rotting corpse in the desert.

Boo and I hike back to vehicle only to be ushered through the lot right in front of the tree where the girl had been waiting. Hiking was unnecessary. Next time, I vow to activate my patience brain chip and deactivate paranoid fear of Boo feeling left and/or forgotten.

Afternoon plan to be productive from home = epic fail. Efforts to teach the girl to entertain herself without the use of television or computers = substantial fail. I gave up and let her watch TV just so I could check my work email and get a few small projects done.

I take a break to research the cost of replacing my parking sensor. Without replacing it, none of the sensors will work. I shake my fist at the sky and curse the automotive industry for adopting Christmas light engineering and technology. The repair will run $400-$600. My deductible is $500.

The freelance project money that had been designated for the vacay fund is now mostly re-designated to vehicle repairs. At least I’ll be able to bank some in the vacay fund.

I console my lack of work productivity by dragging Steve and Boo out on errands before retrieving Doodle from daycare. Steve and I decide to give the dog a shot of uncrated freedom in our absence since all he does is lay on his pillow and sleep all day.

We stop at the bank, Starbucks, Petsmart (to get blockade supplies for Max who somehow thinks there are tootsie rolls in the cat litter), and Home Depot. A happy Doodle is retrieved from his day keepers and we head home.

After our tow-hour excursion, we arrive home. We cannot get into the house through the garage because the door from the kitchen was somehow locked and our keys don’t work in that lock. I blame Boo.

We hike around to the front door and enter to discover the dog had not slept in our absence. Instead, he has shredded the vertical blinds on four windows, scratched the paint on two doors down to the bare wood/metal, and gouged about an inch into a patch of drywall. The sofa is in tact and I count myself lucky.

Massive cleanup begins. Fortunately we are able to relocate blinds from the back of the house to cover most of the damage to the damaged blinds on windows facing the street. We start a shopping list, Vacay fund is about to be at $0.

At least the kids went down with relatively little fuss and, thanks to my late-day Starbucks, I have the energy to clean 10 houses.

The downside of that much caffeine — I was not asleep until nearly 1 a.m. and my wake-up call was 5:30 a.m.

So much for a #complaintfreemonday. At least I waited until Tuesday to bitch about how heinous Monday was. That counts, right?

Here’s a rough recap of the conversation this afternoon.

Boo: So, Mommy, what do you think the tooth fairy is going to bring me tonight?

Me: Well, I’m sure she’ll leave you some denomination of money under your pillow. (Crap. I need to hit an ATM and break a twenty before bedtime, or this is gonna get ugly.)

Boo: What’s “DEMONIMATION”?

Me: Sigh. She’ll leave you some money, Boo. I’m sure.

Boo: Well, Daisy told me the tooth fairy left her money AND a coloring book last time.

Me: Well, isn’t that nice for Daisy.

Boo: Are you SURE that the tooth fairy won’t bring me a coloring book AND money?

Me: Boo, I’ll let you in on a little secret. Every family has a designated tooth fairy. My family’s fairy has always left money. She’s never left presents.

Boo: We have a FAMILY fairy?

Me: Yep.

Boo: What’s her name?

Me: Crap, gotta be fast with this one. C’mon brain. I need a fairy name STAT! Petunia! Petunia is our family fairy. She’s been with our family for generations. And she’s a tooth fairy, Boo. She’s not Santa.

Boo: Pouts

Me: She’s can’t carry a bunch of stuff around. Think about it. She doesn’t have a sleigh and she’s tiny. How in the world is she hauling around coloring books and toys, especially if she’s carrying a bag full of money and teeth?

Boo: Well, maybe you could help her.

Nice try, Boo. But the number one rule of being a con artist is to never try to con another con artist – especially if she’s your mom.

Oh Petunia, you're looking a bit on the furry side. Maybe you should cut back on the pillow drop and save up for a wax.

Through homemade cakes and pies to applesauce, she shared her childhood with me – memories of a Canadian farm where she was in charge of the chickens and her only precious porcelain doll that one of my mischievous uncles broke.
In that kitchen, my mother shared her history, taught me the chemistry of salt and soda, and showed me how an oddly shaped cookie could transform into Santa’s sleigh with icing and candy.

She taught me that mistakes were avoidable, but inevitable and usually correctable. She showed me how a spoonful of sugar in a barbeque sauce could counteract a salty mix-up between “teaspoon” and “tablespoon.”

Our countertop was often graced by father’s mother’s cookbook. It was so well loved that the cover was long gone and the ring-bound spine held the remaining pages together.  Starting with the basic recipe, we would taste and sample, strategizing how we could make it different, make it better, make it our own.

Now that my kids are old enough to tip the balance of “kitchen help vs. kitchen hazard, I love to cook with them. Each is given age-appropriate tasks. The six year old learns that two half-cups equal a whole cup and that without salt and soda, our cookies would be chocolate-chip rocks. The three year old is recognizing his numbers as we switch the mixer dial from “2” to stir to “5” to cream.  His focus is on listening and following directions…and not picking his nose before he tastes the dough.

We train our palates to recognize tastes and textures – sweet, salty, crunchy, smooth. I watch their eyes pop with shock as egg whites whip into stiff peaks.  They giggle as they roll pizza dough into funny shapes and see how many pepperoni slices it takes to cover the top.

They’re beginning to understand the joy of sharing food with others that comes from their hands and creative minds instead of a fast-food drive through.

Oh, and I share my stories as we go…the memories of the mustard yellow kitchen that is so near and dear to my heart and the woman who showed me how to cook in it.

_____________________________________

If you like this…go and check out my feature on the National Savvy Source site where I talk about banging my shins on stepstools while cleaning up fallout from flour clouds.

And, to be honest, I really wished their CEO could have waited until after back to school season to exercise his constitutional rights to be wrong.

It would have given me a chance to get the blackout drapes I wanted for Doodle’s room on sale…so maybe he could sleep past 6 a.m. on a weekend.

It would have made shopping for shoes and folders and lysol disinfecting spray and electronic wipes and lunchbox every other item on Boo’s first grade supply list a one-stop effort instead of a trek through three stores and the Internet.

I could have picked up a new lullaby CD for Doodle while I was at it, since his attempts to transform the current disc into a frisbee have made 90 percent of the tracks as skippy as a gay pride parade in San Francisco.

However, I am not budging. I’ve held my ground despite the extra miles, extra pennies and inconveniences. So far, Target’s missed out on about $500 in purchases from me. In. A. Week.

But all is not lost (for me at least).

I’ve had some amusing and entertaining finds along the way.

Stuff like this:

Hillary Clinton 1st Cleaning Lady Toilet Scrubber

Now this is a gift to get all of my conservative friends who feel it appropriate to use the Secretary of State’s head to clean the head.  I am sure it will provide hours of entertainment and educational value as they teach their kids to scrub toilets (like I did) with a foreign policy lesson as an added bonus. (Note: If you lean to the left as I do, take heart, Amazon carries a George Bush brush as well. Get the pair and you can entertain the kiddies with debate reenactments during bathtime!)

Imax Chairs Cast Iron Decorative Scuptures

Need a little extra seating about the house? Is it time to put your high and mighty mother in law in the throne she deserves? Try these on for size. Frankly, I’m interested if these come with a matching trebuchet to launch my 3YO to the crow’s nest for “time out”. Of course, the seat will have to be lined with velcro to keep him there.

Kyjen Hide-A-Squirrel Puzzle Toy

The Kill Bill Lunchbox

You got to take the dog for a walk around the block…by yourself. And THAT was a REALLY BIG DEAL.

It meant I trusted you.

It meant that I knew you understood the rules, had a solid sense of your surroundings and believed that you could handle the dog on your own.

And you did it.

Yes, Steve was secretly watching you the whole time, but you did it…and you did it well.

Your little brother was waiting for you on the lawn as your blond ponytail bounced around the last turn. Your face beamed with pride and joy.

You did it, Boo.

_____________________

*The pieces of my plan are coming together…soon you will be a pint-sized cleaning machine driven to fight every stray dog hair and speck of dust so I can stay on the couch watching Deadliest Catch as I wash my Cool Ranch Doritos down with a frosty Diet Coke.

I have had “my side” for more than…well…let’s just say a long time.

It wasn’t a problem until Steve moved in and we discovered that “his side” and “my side” are one and the same.

Being the gracious gentleman he is, I got to maintain “my side” and he adapted to a new orientation. (We attempted a room rearrangement that failed miserably).

And then we moved.

I opted to be the gracious one (for once) and offered Steve “my side” closer to the window. It also afforded a clearer view of the TV and he would be less apt to be disturbed by sleep-walking children looking for someone to hit and kick in their sleep for the rest of the night comfort.

Yep. I’m a giver, yo.

Soon we discovered that neither one of us slept well in our new positions. It carried over to our trip to Hawaii where we maintained the new arrangement and, despite the amazing hotel room and incredibly busy and exhausting days, we we were both pretty restless at night. We racked it up to the time zone and foreign surroundings.

So, we came back and gave it a try for another week.

In addition to our restlessness, Doodle started crawling into bed with us between 4 and 5 a.m. every single day. We figured he was still adjusting to his new room…. or perhaps the light of the early dawn was peeking in between his blinds…or perhaps the A/C was kicking on after he’d kicked off his covers, waking him up and sending him for warmth and cuddles.

Finally, Sunday night we experimented. We swapped back to our previous “sides” and gave it a go.

And you know what?

It worked.

We both slept better than we had in weeks. The boy? He stayed in his own bed until I woke him this morning. When he want to bed last night, he had no way of knowing that he’d have to crawl past Steve to get to me.

It’s probably just a coincidence, but I’m using Steve as a shield more often. He’s better than bamboo and a bowl full of rocks, that’s for sure.

Here’s a quick recap of our Oahu trip last month.

Nancy and Steve’s Aloha Adventure (follow the link)

(Music: “This is the Life” by Kolohe Kai)