I Almost Failed

Hello, old friend. It’s been another looooooooooong stretch since I’ve recorded the amazing and riveting chronicles that hold hands to make up what I call “my life.” Really, not much exciting stuff happened. Let’s see… We got through the holidays fairly unscathed. The only real casualty was a holiday that Americans don’t celebrate anyway — el Dia de Los Reyes Magos (Jan. 6). But we Mexicans do, and I did when I was a wee kid, most notably by leaving my shoe outside my bedroom door. I’d wake up the next morning to find two bucks in my kicks. There’s also a bread ring with a little plastic baby inside. Whoever gets the baby in their slice of bread has to throw a party, or something. I don’t really know. (I’m only half Mexican so cut me some slack.) I’m trying to pass this stuff onto my kids so when they’re 65 and try to lock me up in a home, I can say, “How could you, #1? After everything I’ve done for you. We celebrated weird holidays and I put money in your shoe!”

Anywho, after making a big deal out of this day (which is a celebration of the three wise men bringing gifts to Jesus Cristo, I think), I screwed up on celebrating it by forgetting about it until Jan. 7 while I was strolling along the mall. But we celebrated it the following weekend. I thought they didn’t notice but then #1 made some comment about how the wise men forgot them and I felt like a super-loser. Ah well. This little snafu did get them five bucks, versus the standard two. Because I throw money at problems to make them go away. In the end, everyone won out.

It’s gonna be a great year.

It’s October, and it’s been MONTHS since we last shot the breeze, right?

So much has happened. #1 started school and he seems to be thriving. I volunteer on Fridays if my work schedule allows. My volunteering so far has consisted of cutting a small forest worth of paper (I cut all the paper for all the journals for the year; 1 journal per kid per month = a small forest). I am mostly responsible for keeping the library organized. This is super important work. Whatever. It lets me spy on #1. I don’t know what’s up with that kid and the ladies. The other day, I was picking him up from school and this one girl looked at me and then looked at him and said, “You’re so handsome.” Step off, girlfriend. Then the next day, some other girl was all, “Hey you wanna come to my house?” And then John said the following day he was holding some other girl’s hand. What IS UP? If this is freakin kindergarten, what’s eleventh grade gonna be like?

We had our first parent-teacher conference. The teacher said she really likes #1. Do they HAVE to say that? I mean, I like #1 but duh. Does the kindergarten teacher ever say, “Yeah, I really hate the fact that your kid is in my class”? So I’m not sure if she likes him or is just being courteous. But I like the teacher. She seems like good people. And what’s more, because of her tireless efforts, my kid can write!

So Halloween is coming up and I asked #1 what he wants to dress up as. He says he wants to be a Pizza again. Folks, this is a costume I bought on super sale at Old Navy years ago. I paid like seven bucks for it. This will be the third Halloween in a row that he’ll be wearing it. No skin off my teeth. If the kid wants to reduce, reuse, and recycle, far be it from me to kill the dream.

In case we don’t talk again for a while, Happy Halloween, Veterans Day and Thanksgiving.

#1 starts El Kinder tomorrow. Part of me wants to throw in the towel and homeschool him. Part of me says, “Feed him to the wolves, for he shall look at the wolves, rip their eyeballs out, and snack on them during recess.”

Part of me is worried that #1 will change into some annoying kid that likes Cars and Spider-Man. (RELAX – it’s OK to like Cars and Spider-Man. I just don’t and prefer if my kid didn’t. If we all liked the same thing, you would really be into Lifetime movies featuring former Charlie’s Angels. See why it’s OK that we don’t all like the same things?) I already had to buy #1 a Thomas lunchbag. He wanted a Von Roll lunchbox but I thought, “Kids are assholes. They’ll make fun of him if he rolls in with a Von Roll lunchbox.” Maybe I’m the problem. I shouldn’t call kids assholes and I shouldn’t assume they would make fun of him. But I live in the real world. So I went with his second choice. Thomas. I hate Thomas. Thomas the Tool Engine. Real mature, right?

I packed #1′s lunch already. I signed all these papers. I contemplated joining the PTA. My head says, “ABSOLUTELY NOT.” My heart says, “You’ve GOT to see what really goes on!” I’ve heard stories about the PTA. Crazy stories. I most likely will not join. But maybe…

Norma says she will cry tomorrow. I will not cry. I almost cried at Walmart the other day. I was looking for clothes in his size (not that I was going to buy him anything, and, FYI, I wasn’t not going to buy him anything because it was Walmart clothes but because I’m SO cheap that I won’t even buy him Walmart clothes) and I realized he wasn’t in the little boy section anymore. He was in the big boy section with all the stupid superhero and lowrider t-shirts. Bummer. But that was a shortlived melancholy because at Target, he’s still in the little dude section.

Anyway, my one hope is that #1 doesn’t crap his pants or cut the cheese in front of everybody. At least not on the first day of school.

You don’t want to have kids? What’s wrong with you?

Nothing. You are fine. In many ways, you are probably enjoying this day a lot more than me. I had to wake up at 3am when #1 started shouting that his TV was broken. Huh? In my sleepy haze, I said, “Get back up to bed!” And then I made the hike up the ladder to his bunk bed to continue my sleep, because I knew it would be the quickest way to get him to stop talking and have all of us resume our slumber. I woke up at 5am to go back to my bed, and he said, “I love you, Nose Picker.” Thanks.

This morning on the news, I saw an interview with Kat Kinsman who wrote an editorial called I am nobody’s mother and never will be. She mentioned how she got a lot of scathing emails essentially calling her a broken, pathetic creature, and how not having kids is unnatural, and how her life has no meaning.

What a bunch of idiots.

The bottom line is there are a lot of people out there who have kids that should never have been parents. You know what’s the one thing I’ve learned from my professional work AND my experience as a mother? You shouldn’t have kids unless YOU really want them. You shouldn’t have them because that’s the expectation in life. You shouldn’t have them because society says this is what comes next. You should ONLY have them because you are ready to give up your happiness for someone else’s.

I love my kids more than I could imagine I was ever capable and I understand things differently now. DIFFERENTLY. Not better. Not more. Different. And that’s the deal with people who choose not to have kids. They’re not wrong. They’re making a different choice. And this mother thinks that’s just fine.

Four days ago, the light of my life walked out of our house and said she would not be back until Tuesday. UGH. These four days have been brutal. Well, actually this last day was brutal. Norma doesn’t come on the weekends so it shouldn’t have been such a big deal but for some reason, not having her come last Friday plus Monday (today) was giving me a mild case of anxiety that, if unchecked, could have spiraled down into something ugly and weird.

(And before you go all mocking my inabilities to do what normal women do every day with way more kids, you should know this: You’re right. You’re better than me. All of you, way better than me. Are we cool now?)

On any other Norma vacation, I would have planned lots of activities that consisted of several trips to McDonald’s, Target, Walmart, and any other place that would have demanded some sort of bribery to behave nicely. And by bribery, I mean Kit-Kats not carrot sticks. These trips cost money. Too much money, some may say.

(We did squeeze in a trip to Sea World but we have passes so it only cost us a few bucks worth of gas.)

Fortunately for everyone’s health, I just finished reading The Cheapskate Next Door and now I feel dirty spending any money on anything that isn’t critical to our survival.

I think I’ve always been somewhat of a cheapskate but now I’m getting crazy about it. I’m about to cancel our cable. OH SNAP. I figure we’ll be saving about a thousand bucks a year AND I’ll have more time to read, which means I may actually surpass my 2012 book goal. It’s not like watching the Real Housewives of New Jersey is making me a better person anyway.

Here’s to saving a couple a bucks. College ain’t getting any cheaper and I only have 14 more years to go before Harvard gets that first tuition payment.

One of the lamest qualities about me is that I bawl like an idiot every time I watch Toy Story 3. I’ve seen it about a hundred times thanks to #1′s obsession with trains. (What the hell is it with trains and kids?!?!? Homeboy is fascinated by the “flying train” in the opening sequence. What I’m fascinated by is my amazing luck when I was perusing the toy aisle at TJ Maxx and found the playset for this very scene for only $7.99 just in time for Christmas 2011. Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.)

The other day, #1 was sitting on my lap and we were watching Toy Story 3 together. John came in and freaked out. “What’s wrong?!?!” he said as he saw me all teary-eyed. Then he looked at the TV and rolled his eyes. “You’re ridiculous,” he said, and went on about his business.

How’s that for sympathetic.

I have been freaking out about my son leaving for college since he was about six months old. I remember when I went off to college. My mom dropped me off. She said goodbye to me, walked out of my dorm building, and hopped into a cab. It was tragically cinematic to me. Yeah, yeah, no one died or anything, but it seemed like a big deal to me so I went back to my room and cried and cried until my new roommates showed up and I was all of a sudden that cool, collected Republican from SoCal (that’s a whole ‘nother story).

Anyway, for some reason, saying goodbye to my mom is one of those sad moments in my life. Bittersweet is probably a better word. I was so ready for NY when I left. So much so that when I finally got to NY, I felt a peace that I had never felt in my entire life. I still feel that way when I go back there to visit. But when I left NY for good, I did not want to live there anymore. As a mother of small children, I still do not want to live there. I don’t have the balls to rear children in the city and have a deep respect for those who do. I do look forward to taking #1 there to visit, hopefully next year. He’s going to TRIP OUT when he sees the subway system.

And that’s where we’re at now. He’s getting bigger and the nightmare of our last plane trip (Cancun when he was 14 months old) and my accompanying PTSD are fading. I’m actually thinking about traveling 3000 miles with this kid, by myself, because he’s getting OLDER. He’ll be starting kindergarten in July. It’s official. We’ve decided on an excellent public school which has an amazing track record with language arts, and pretty much everything else.

But it’s the beginning of the end. He’ll start El Kinder in July. We’ll blink, and he’ll be an eleventh grader telling me how he wants to be an English major at a tiny liberal arts college. And then we’ll get into a big fight about it. It’ll go something like this.

“I’m going to study English at Reed.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you need to become a doctor. Preferably a surgeon.”

“But I hate science! I want to be a writer!”

“Writer?!? Are you on drugs?!? The path of the writer is one of doom and destruction! Who the hell taught you this? Where did you learn this?”

“I learned it from watching you!”

Silence on my part. Note to self: Get a new career before #1 is aware of what I do for a living.

Anyway, it’s going to go by really fast. This makes me sad. That’s why I cry every time I watch Toy Story 3. Well, I also cry because I have a weird guilt about throwing out my toys. I always thought they had feelings too, and the movie pretty much validates that. (Let’s ignore the fact that it’s an animated movie, not a documentary. It makes no difference to me.)

*****************************

If #1 tells me on the day of his high school graduation that he has decided to not go to college, the conversation will go like this:

“I have decided to take some time off.”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m not going to go to college.”

Deep breath. “Okay. There are a bunch of boxes in garage.”

“What are those for?”

“I love you. You have 30 days to move out. You don’t have to go to college but you can’t stay here. Good luck.”

El Kinder Chronicles will chronicle (duh) #1′s kindergarten experience and my experience as the overreactive, paranoid, freak parent so I can share these choice moments with the popular kids at #1′s school when he starts telling me how much he hates me and how I am ruining his life.

I took #1 to the pediatrician to get his physical the other day because homeboy is getting ready to start el kinder. Since I choose to ignore the horrors of the world outside of me, I spend my days and nights worrying about where my kid should go to school next year. Right now, he’s in preschool at a nearby Catholic school. I really like his teachers and the office lady who says hi to me all the time. I’m a sucker for people who say hi to me (that’s what few friends I have). But I went to Catholic school and it turned me into a weirdo, because Catholic school gets weird after kindergarten.

So after much deliberation, and careful calculations, Catholic school is off the table. It kept crawling back onto the table when I would hear horror stories about public school. But I had to take a good look in the mirror and recognize that I am a Reynoso, not a Rockefeller, and even if I could squeeze the few thousand clams a year to put the kid through school, I’d rather spend the money on something fun – like a Vegas vacation full of hookers and blow. (You realize I’m only saying that because we’re talking about Catholic school, right? My idea of the best party ever is going on a roadtrip to a paintball tournament in Phoenix and getting the 50 piece chicken McNugget meal.)

My father-in-law spends half his year in the Philippines taking care of business and he brings us back all sorts of treasures. This time around, he brought us a shitload of religious statues. I’ve finally gotten around to unpacking some of them. I don’t know what to do with the rest. How many giant Marys can one display without it being too much?

Anyway, one piece wasn’t a statue – rather a wall hanging. I think it’s kind of cool so I put it up in my room. By the way, I’m borderline Atheist but you wouldn’t know it, walking into my house. Thanks to my in-laws, we LOOK like we’re really Catholic. I haven’t voluntarily gone to mass since the 90s. I almost broke up with John when he revealed that he wanted to go to church more often during our “engagement encounter”. (SPOILER ALERT: I think I’ll write about our enagagement encounter hijinks for our tenth wedding anniversary in July.)

The other morning, #1 wandered into my room at the buttcrack of dawn and saw the wall hanging for the first time. He said, “That’s Mary, Joseph, and baby Jesus.” Awwww. He doesn’t know his ABCs but he does know the Holy Family. Catholic school was back on the table. Then I went back to sleep. When I woke up and my senses were clear, it was off the table again. Aside from the fact that it costs more money, the Catholic school has some strict guideline that says you have to be 5 by Sept.1. Unfortunately, our little hero of this story misses the cutoff by days and so he’d have to do another year of preschool – this idea horrified my mother, who knows a thing or two about education. Remember that part about the kid not knowing his ABCs? I lied about that. He knows his ABCs. According to my local school district, he is pretty darn ready AND HE WILL CONQUER PUBLIC SCHOOL. And if it doesn’t work out in public school, I’m not above fostering another generation of weirdo – home schooling.

Lately I’ve become obsessed with blind gossip items. I have no idea how it happened but now I have to look stuff up every night because this is my addiction. Not smoking, drinking, or crack cocaine. Blind items. I start on Gawker and then work my way to other mischievous websites.

I just read something on Gawker that was not a blind item. There’s this phenomenon (yes, I know I keep using that word a lot, bite me) called The Brant Brothers. Stephanie Seymour, that chick who was banging Axl Rose when I was in 6th grade, apparently has teenage kids with some billionaire and one of them, Peter Brant II, is gay. He’s supposed to be super fabulous and clearly leads an existence that is far beyond my comprehension and comfort zone. BUT what appeals to me is that the Gawker piece mentions that at one point, young Mr. Brant described himself on his Facebook account as “Designer, Art Collector, Socialite, and Model”. I thought that was a pretty good move so now I am going to start describing myself as such. Who cares if I don’t hang out with the cool kids at Fashion Week and I’m too short and for anyone to want to take a picture of me. I design training materials, I occasionally collect my kid’s preschool art, I socialize with at least ten people who are not related to me, and I am a role model (to myself). Take that, super privileged and good looking people. The common man, er woman, can be a Designer, Art Collector, Socialite, and Model too, and that’s who I am now. I’m going to get business cards made. The free ones from Vistaprint.

I have never been UP on cool technical trends or websites. I did manage to score an invite to Spotify back when it had just become available to us Americans (thank you, Jennifer Mitchell) but that was pretty much it. Our former-nanny-current-VP-of-in-house-operations informed me recently about this new phenomenon called Pinterest. “It’s an online pinboard?” A what? “A pinboard?” Huh? It’s one of those things that you have to look at it to see what the hell it is and when you see it, you may never escape.

Say you’re thinking about your laundry room and how much it sucks. You could type in “laundry room” in the search field and see all these images regarding laundry rooms – many of which would be laundry rooms that are way cooler than yours. This is key for me because I have a SUPER CRAPPY laundry room and though I didn’t put it on my vision board or my 2012 to-do list, I would like to tackle that eyesore before my 50th birthday.

I also want this swim up bar in my backyard.

See one of the many cool things about Pinterest is that you can embed the beautiful images on the virtual pinboard onto your blog and you’re even able to scale the pictures AND IT’S SO EASY. Like is this for realz??? And because it’s so easy, I’ll show you yet another image:

I’m starting this tomorrow…

I’ve been in this terrible funk lately. I’ve been worried about all kinds of stupid things and I have a headache right now. (I NEVER get headaches. My mother almost died of a headache. This makes me think I’m going to die on those rare occasions that I do get headaches.)

The books that I’ve been reading lately are kind of depressing. The Steve Jobs biography is depressing because the guy seemed like such a douchebag. The Hunger Games is depressing because it just is. Even the first book I finished in 2012 (only 9 more to go!) – How Starbucks Saved My Life – was kind of depressing. So I started looking for a happy book and couldn’t find anything but I did visit an old friend. Well, not really friend, but a book I read that I REALLY enjoyed: The Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin. I started poking around her toolbox website (http://happinessprojecttoolbox.com/). I’ve signed myself up for some challenge but one of the things that I really dug was keeping a one sentence journal. You’re supposed to write one sentence a day, because that’s manageable. And how. So I’m keeping my one sentence journal here starting right now, because I cannot guarantee that I am happy, I cannot guarantee that I will smile more this year, but I can guarantee that I sit in front of a computer every day of my life (that is unless I die from this stupid headache).