©Lisa Barker

My oldest daughter is shy. Writing this column probably won’t help things either, but you know parents just can’t resist telling a great story no matter what.

So there we were at church on Sunday, visitors just passing through. We chose a neutral seat somewhere in the middle and my youngest, the wiggle-worm, proceeded to wiggle right on down the pew. The family in front of us immediately got up and moved ahead a few rows and my daughter remarked, “That can’t be a good sign.”

She was right, so I thought it prudent to move my little one to the ‘cry room’ that wonderful room they seal you in while kids scream and tear around at breakneck speed. Usually the room is soundproof, the service is piped in and one wall is made of glass so desperate parents can see what is going on. At this particular parish it was directly behind the altar.

I hadn’t intended the older kids to follow me in, but they did, and to her horror, my shy one found herself face to face with the entire congregation. While she tried to pray quietly in the shadows the wiggle worm ran straight up to the glass wall and launched himself at it, sticking like a bug on a windshield.

Father prayed as if a million sticky little children had hit that window before. He didn’t miss a beat. My son, nose and open mouth pressed up against the window imitated with hands held high in praise. I furtively snapped my fingers and growled under my breath, catching his attention, and the wiggle worm hopped over to me then hopped in place for the next twenty minutes.

My daughter wept silently letting her long hair fall forward and hide her face.

“Hey, Rachel!” Wiggle Worm whispered as loudly as a whisper can go. He waved at her, he waved at the whole congregation, but little by little he coaxed a smile and a giggle from his shy stricken sister. It’s hard to stay angry with him especially when he tries so hard to do the right thing. And he was trying.

He waited patiently for the collection basket to come our way and when we were overlooked, he yelled out, “Over here!” The acoustics are marvelous at this particular parish, and with the door to the cry room open his little voice ricocheted from stained glass window to stained glass window.

My shy one may regret this column. She may regret the antics of her little brother in public, but someday this daughter is going to be a great leader. My youngest is just breaking her in to the public life one humiliation at a time.

LISA BARKER of Greenfield, California is a syndicated humor columnist and mom of five. Her latest book is “Before I Had Kids I Was A Size9.” See www.JellyMom.com for more information.

©Lisa Barker

My youngest son has fallen in love hard. He is completely infatuated with one of his older sisters. No doubt the treats she shares with him, the trips to the park, the piggy back rides and the stories she reads him has all made her the light in his eyes.

He informed her twin the other day of his devotion. “I dreamed I was in love with Nicole and I made her a delicious dinner!”

Rachel was heartbroken. I understand how she feels. Not long ago, I was his princess!

He’s been a laugh a minute with some of the things that come out of his mouth lately. And here I thought that the funniest times with him were over now that he is in kindergarten this year.

The other day he cleared his place at the table without being asked. “Wow! That’s so nice of you to do that all by yourself!” I praised him.

That’s because I like the color purple,” he informed me. What? Sometimes I can’t follow his thinking.

Another time he came running into the kitchen to tell me, in the throws of a hearty fit of laughter, the best joke in the world. “Tubby the motorboat!” he shouted, while doubled over, tears in his eyes from laughing so hard. “Pbbbbfft! Pbbbbfft!” he said, and ran off.

Apparently, our cat Tubby would make a great motorboat and the sounds she would make are just hilarious.

He’s cute. Who wouldn’t fall in love with him? I mean, who wouldn’t fall in love with him minus those who know that his nickname is ‘Leprechaun.’ He’s a trickster with the ire of the Irish. The boy can pitch a fit that makes that makes a hurricane look like a gentle breeze. But as soon as it starts, it’s over.

So now he’s in love with his older sister. The rest of us are chopped liver – or so it would seem. On the sly he gives us a smile or a hug, but not if the love of his life is in the room. He must defend his love for her ever gallantly. “No, I love only Nicole!”

But the true measure of his love was lately discovered. Like the pets in the house, it’s only ‘tummy love.’ He found his favorite sister’s stash of chocolate, corn nuts and gummy worms and ate his fill.

“Mommmmm! Keep him OUT of my room!”

The little one marches out of the room undeterred and quickly sidles up to his other sister. Is it true love this time? “Rachel, you can buy me an ice cream from the ice cream man.” I swear that kid batted his eyes.

Such is the love of a baby brother.

LISA BARKER of Greenfield is a syndicated humor columnist and mom of five. Her latest book is “Before I Had Kids I Was A SIze 9.” See www.JellyMom.com for more information.

©Lisa Barker

Why is it that when you want to talk on the phone, the kids show up in droves and make enough noise to drown out a marching band but when a telemarketer calls not one child can be found?

Ten minutes into the call a child strolls by. You motion fervently for him to start squawking and a miracle happens. He starts to get along with his brother who also happens to enter the room and then the two proceed to be nice to each other and share.

“Start bickering!” you whisper harshly at them so you have a good excuse to get off the phone quickly. They give you blank stares as if chaos and calamity are foreign concepts to them.

To encourage them you toss one child a cookie and ignore the other, hoping they will go at one another’s throats and provide you with a great excuse to get off the phone. Amazingly, they split it evenly in half. So an idea begins to form. You realize now that you will never get off the phone and will end up sending the Society to Stop Some Abomination a check for fifty dollars, but you’re on to something.

What if you pretend to be speaking to a telemarketer the next time the kids start bickering? You can call yourself by using your cell phone to dial your landline. Then, you can sit there looking bored out of your mind and desperate whenever the kids start at it. The trick is to look like you want to get off the phone as soon as possible.

These are the machinations of a mother gone truly mad.

“He stole my car!”

“I did not!”

“Give it back!”

Rrrring! “Hello? Firefighters For Smokey The Bear’s Retirement Fund? Can I send you $100?” And suddenly peace descends on your household.

It’s either that (pulling a ruse the children might see through especially if the catch you with two phones in your hands) or signing yourself up to be called by as many telemarketers, pollsters and solicitors as possible. Do you think they actually have lists with times of day to call haggard moms? If not, what if we started one? I could post it on the Jelly Mom website.

Free phone numbers for people too cheap to pay for advertising. Just call these numbers and make your pitch, PLEASE. I know I could really use a call just before all the kids arrive home, hungry and raring to pick an argument. They’d come home, see me with a phone stuck to my ear and my eyes rolled back, not saying anything, and they’d tip-toe about hushing one another.

At last, there’s a reason to welcome calls from hell.

LISA BARKER of Greenfield is a syndicated humor columnist and mom of five. Her latest book is “Before I Had Kids I Was A Size9.” See www.JellyMom.com for more information.

Don’t you just love how kids reason?

©Lisa Barker

It’s antelope season at my house again. Another child has reached the age
where he can print and sound out some words so writing letters to Grammy and
Auntie are high on his list. So are antelopes.

“Momma, I need an antelope for my letter.”

Aw. It takes me back. Little does he know that his older siblings needed
antelopes as well or the even more rare ombilope a direct cousin of the
antelope.

Antelopes are fascinating. They have a strip of glue on them that, when wet,
makes a perfect seal securing the letter safely inside. Unless you’re a
five-year old and drool like a Saint Bernard.

“Don’t worry. Momma’s got a hair dryer and lots of tape.
It’ll dry completely before it reaches Grammy’s.”

The next step is to cover the back of the antelope with stickers. It
doesn’t matter if they are from the Publisher’s Clearing House
Sweepstakes or if they are Mom’s special stationery stickers, each antelope
needs at least three stickers. The more stickers you find on the back of an
antelope, the more love there is inside.

The card inside harkens back to caveman days. There are hieroglyphics of
square people with stick legs and a message written in a strange language that,
if read from left to write reads:

I LOV
EYOU FROm
A TO GRAmmY
IDEN

The best part is running to the mailbox and stuffing your antelopes inside.
Now begins the slow agony. Every day for the next week it will be, “Did I
get an antelope?”

“No, not today. Maybe by Friday.”

“What’s today?”

“Monday.”

“Is tomorrow Friday?”

Sigh. Antelopes come and go. Most of them are from Bill. Why does he keep
writing to Momma? She doesn’t like his antelopes very much.

At last an antelope arrives with my son’s name on it. But he doesn’t
tear right in. An antelope from Grammy or Auntie Jenny requires careful
dissecting with mom’s antelope opener because we don’t want to
accidentally tear any stickers.

Older Brother enters the room. “What did you get?”

“I got an antelope from Grammy. If you send antelopes to people, they
send antelopes back!”

“It’s not ‘antelope.’ It’s ‘EMBALOPE.’ It’s
the illiterate leading the illiterate.

Still this is all good practice. In a few months children will be writing
letters to Santa. The older ones will ask for world peace, the middle ones will
ask for every high priced item ever conceived by the elves and the youngest will
still ask for a lollipop, some cake and a book.

“If you behave, Santa might send you a letter back.”

“Does Santa have antelopes?” I can just hear the youngest ask
innocently only to be swiftly corrected by an older sibling: “No, Santa
has reindeer.”

LISA BARKER of Greenfield is a syndicated humor columnist and mom of five. Her latest book is “Before I Had Kids I Was A Size 9.” See www.JellyMom.com for more information.

©Lisa Barker

My eleven-year old son is given to outrageous temper tantrums and will stop at
nothing to up the ante. One day he swallowed a tack to spite me. I showed
great concern.

“Why, what will happen?” he asked.

“I just saw a show where this guy was scraping tacks off a ceiling and
accidentally swallowed one. Later when he was eating dinner he started throwing
up blood.” (This is true. It was on one of those medical mystery shows.)

On and off over the next couple of days my son asked what could happen. I
didn’t think much of it, but my attitude remained unchanged. “It’s
would be a pretty stupid thing to do because you can tear your esophagus,
puncture a lung or tear your intestines,” I told him.

“What does that mean?”

“It means you will have blood come up out of your mouth or out the
‘other way.’”

I soon discovered that the boy does have a conscience and it worked on him real
good for two days until he couldn’t take it anymore and came running to me in
a panic. “Momma, I swallowed a tack and I didn’t tell you because I
didn’t want you to be mad, but now I just don’t want to die!”

Something clicked inside my head. Without missing a beat, I said, “No,
no! Don’t do that! You don’t want to tense up, you could cause a
tear!” He immediately calmed himself—a miracle.

So my husband and I decided to milk this for a while. As far as my son knew it
would take up to two weeks to pass anything. Meanwhile, he was to tell us as
soon as he saw any signs of blood from anywhere and no matter what, “DO NOT
TENSE UP. Because the tack might catch and tear you somewhere.”

He said, “I think I can do that. I don’t want to die!”

“Yeah,” I said. “You don’t want major surgery either.”

Now I know it was a calculated risk, but I had questioned him in great detail.
It wasn’t a pushpin; it was a metal tack that was bent in two. Of course, I
panicked inside because if something terrible did happen to him it would all be
my fault, yet it was a stupid thing for him to do, and I didn’t want to spend
$800 taking him to the emergency room for x-rays for nothing. Sounds terrible,
doesn’t it?

So I prayed for his safety and the chance to prove to himself that he can get
through life without the histrionics. He made it three weeks. I am calling
this the miracle of the tack. God works in mysterious ways.

—————————————————
Jelly Mom™ is written by Lisa Barker, author of “Just Because Your Kids
Drive You Insane…Doesn’t Mean You Are A Bad Parent!” and “Before
I Had Kids I Was A Size 9,” syndicated through Martin-Ola Press/Parent To
Parent. To publish Jelly Mom, buy the book or leave comments, please visit
http://www.jellymom.com.

©Lisa Barker

A reader introduced me to a quote recently that completely expresses my point
of view. “Raising children is like being pecked to death by a chicken.”
Amen!

Little by little, day-by-day, they wear you down. “Momma, she’s touching
me. Momma, he looked at me. I don’t like sauce on my noodles! How come HE
gets to stay up late and I don’t? I don’t want to pick up my toys.”

I used to try to reason with them. “Don’t sit so close to each other and
then you won’t touch. You look out the left window and you look out the right
and then you won’t look at each other. Okay, if you don’t want sauce on
your noodles, just move them over to the side of your plate. Etc., etc.”

Now I just say: “Shut up.”

I know, real mature of me. But I don’t care about fairness anymore. I
don’t care about setting a good example. I don’t care about teaching them
something. I just want peace and quiet.

Now this has nothing to do with the number of kids I have. It has everything
to do with the fact that these people think it’s their job to break me. They
won’t let up until I am a bent old woman, with hazy eyes and silver hair.
That’s how they know it’s time to stop picking on me and start having
grandchildren.

Thank God for osteoporosis. I know that when I start slumping over my torture
is complete. Until then, I must endure.

“I don’t want to pick up my toys. It’s too hard. I don’t want to eat
my dinner. I’m allergic to it. I don’t want to fold my clothes. It takes
too long.”

If they’d just do what I ask of them, we’d all get along much better. But
my expectations place restrictions on their pleasure and yet when I leave them
to themselves all I hear is how bored they are.

“There’s nothing to do!”

“This basket of clothes needs to be folded.”

In my day this was my cue to leave the house immediately and find something
else to do beyond the scope of my mother’s radar so that I would not have to
do any chores. The logic is simple. If she can’t see me, she can’t think
of something for me to do that I don’t want to do.

My kids don’t get that. In fact, they think I’m making humorous
suggestions. My son laughs and counter suggests that I take him to the store
and buy him some snacks.

“Hello? No, son, really. Fold these.”

“But it takes too long!”

“And so does raising you. Now hop to it.”

—————————————————
Jelly Mom™ is written by Lisa Barker, author of the new book “Before I
Had Kids I Was A Size 9″ and syndicated through Martin-Ola Press/Parent To
Parent. To publish Jelly Mom, buy the book or leave comments, please visit
http://www.jellymom.com.

(Just a taste of my new career, for those who have been keeping track. This was actually a contest piece which had to be under 500 words, so it was seriously butchered. Hope you like it anyway.)

Boredom Cries

The mother carefully attached the last piece of cotton onto the paper plate bunny as her daughter watched with big, brown, innocent eyes. The little girl wrinkled her nose, twisting her mouth in a pose that indicated she was thinking with all her 6-year-old brain power.

“Is it done, mommy?” the child asked, still deciding if she thought it was a work of art to be treasured or something to be delightfully destroyed.

Her mother tilted her head, pausing for a moment before replying.

“Yes, I think it’s done.”

The small child began to protest. This was not what she had in mind when her mother said they would make her a bunny. She had envisioned something that hops – something she could chase around the backyard, giggling with glee as it ran in circles around her.

“It doesn’t really look like a bunny though,” the child pouted.

The weary mother sighed heavily. There seemed to be no pleasing this vexatious angel. Peering over at their table full of various crafts, she realized the battle had been lost. There had been flaws with every project they had done today. The popsicle people had been too small. The construction paper cat was too flat. The painted picture wasn’t drying fast enough. No matter what, the girl would start crying, demanding they make another project.

Tears were welling up in the girl’s eyes while her bottom lip began to quiver. The wailing would begin in seconds if her mother did not act quickly. But she was exhausted with the child and was officially throwing in the towel. She no longer could attempt to make her daughter happy.

“You know what? Go outside and play. I need to get supper ready,” the mother stated firmly as she began picking up the scattered remains of their craft day. Glitter, glue, construction paper, and markers lay in a messy pile across the dining room table.

The girl halted her tantrum count down ritual, temporarily appeased with the prospect of finding a suitable activity outside. The Mother watched her offspring skip out the door, and into the backyard, knowing there would be something to fuss about outside in just a matter of minutes. Peering out from the kitchen window, she shook her head.

“Lord, please let me survive until school starts.”

©Lisa Barker

(An excerpt from Just Because Your Kids Drive You Insane…Doesn’t Mean You Are A Bad Parent!)

When it comes to parenting pet peeves, one thing most parents can’t stand is stupidity in children.

I’m not talking about the usual brainless things that happen around the house that you EXPECT with children, things like spilled milk, kids lolling all over the sofa instead of sitting like regular human beings, clothes that never make it two feet to the hamper, and a myriad of half-baked chores that never quite get done; things you have to stand over children and cite the obvious, repeatedly, all so they can ignore you and continue on in blissful ignorance.

I’m talking about DUMB things…like walking through the house with a plastic bat whacking yourself in the head over and over and over.  That’s my one year old.  (Bonk!)  “Ow.”  (Bonk!)  “Ow.”  (Bonk!)  “Ow.”  I have to take the bat away before he gives himself a concussion.

What about hurrying up to get ahead of your mom or dad in the hallway just so you can slow down to a crawl and get tripped over?

Or following so closely BEHIND Mom that when she stops, you find yourself back in the womb?

How about walking into walls?  Why do kids do that?  “Bibble bibble bobble boo,” they babble and ‘bonk!’ into the wall they go.  And they don’t even cry.  It’s just ‘bonk!’ and repeat and then change course like one of those battery operated cars they make for kids these days…and all the while they keep on babbling.

Ever notice that?  When you EXPECT your kids to get hurt, they don’t.  You watch your kids play at the park.  They fall off slides, out of trees, off the jungle gym.  They run into walls and signs posts.  They get up and start running and do it all over again.  Then they walk two feet and trip and here come the waterworks.  What does this tell us?  That science is wrong about physics?  No, it tells us that kids are, well, sometimes complete idiots.

And the reason that parents hate this is because odds are somebody is going to think our children take right after us.  Am I right?

Like somebody is out there thinking, “Man, I bet that mom just loves going around the house whacking herself in the head with a blunt object.”

Well, actually I do.  I’m having one of those days today.  All anybody seems to be able to do is whine.  There are NO WORDS!  It’s just whiiii-iii-iiii-ne about this and that and everything in between.  WHY?????  I don’t know!  (Bonk, bonk, bonk!)

Here’s one.  If you put your finger in the cat’s mouth, it will get bitten.  That’s a no-brainer!  And yet the same child will put the same finger in the cat’s mouth three times more immediately after getting bitten…and cry about it!

“Momma, it hurts when I do this!”

“Then, don’t DO that!”

What about walking on sidewalks?  My kids (all five of them) can’t walk on a sidewalk to save their lives without tripping into somebody’s garden or falling into the street.  And THREE of my children are older than seven years!

I’m SURE that the neighbors are thinking, “Man, idiocy just RUNS in that family!  What kind of person CAN’T walk down a sidewalk?”  And here we are, a whole family, putting on a prime show for those behind-the-curtain-peeping neighbors.

So I’m sitting with my foot on ice today because I fell off the sidewalk on the way to the mailbox this morning… and I’m thinking about a parent’s fear of stupidity and getting labeled as such.

Bumps and bruises are like nicks and scrapes on any inanimate object.  If you treat your property that way, it shows you don’t care.  And when it comes to kids, if they end up with all these bumps and bruises, we must be doing something wrong!

But we aren’t.  And we can’t stop them.

The best we can do is buy some kneepads and helmets hoping we’ll help our kids escape the Darwin effect…so they don’t kill themselves walking down the hall.

And when they reach the age of twenty-five we can congratulate ourselves because our kids SURVIVED childhood.

Now pass me a cookie because my foot is really throbbing!

—————————————————
Jelly Mom™ is written by Lisa Barker, author of “Just Because Your Kids Drive You Insane…Doesn’t Mean You Are A Bad Parent!” and syndicated through Martin-Ola Press/Parent To Parent. To publish Jelly Mom, buy the book or leave comments, please visit www.jellymom.com