Clean up on Child Three

The hardest part about going on vacation is coming home. That’s probably mostly because of the stress of smuggling five suitcases full of tequila, illegal Mexican fireworks, and my cool new switchblade past the customs agents at the airport. But also because we had to come back to the reality of having kids.

We were only in Mexico for five days, but, apparently, God thought we were getting a little too comfortable in our south-of-the-border kid-less bliss So, He smacked us straight in the face - mostly the nose, really – with reality. Literally the first thing we had to do when we saw the kids was clean up vomit.

My wife and I flew back from Mexico into the San Francisco Bay Area and stayed the night, and Grandma drove the boys to us the next morning so we could all continue on a family vacation for a week. Grandma has apparently lost the ability to say no, or the ability to make good decisions, or both, because on her way she said yes to cherry-red Slurpees for breakfast on the road. Son Number Three’s body rejected the eight A.M. overload of high-fructose corn syrup and red dye #40 about a block from our hotel.

Welcome back. There’s red puke all over the inside of your car. And your son. And one of your other sons. Road trip!

There’s not too many things that can make me miss the unpleasant wafting aroma of the under-engineered Mexican sewer system, but cleaning bright red Slurpee vomit off the back seats of the car with a baby wipe at a gas station is one of them. It’s great to be back with the kids. Thanks for watching them, Grandma. I guess we forgot to mention it, but “No” is an acceptable word to use with the children when inside a 7-Eleven.

(Please don’t misunderstand – even though Grandma seems to be losing it, we will still gladly use her babysitting services in the future. It takes a lot more than projectile Slurpee to get fired from that job!)

Our destination was San Diego to stay with relatives for a few days in their beautiful, upscale, clean, well-appointed home. We arrived and promptly took over their laundry room to de-puke-ify the contents of our quarantined trash bag. After the laundry was finished we went to bed happy that the clean-up was behind us.

I guess God thought we hadn’t quite paid for all the time off.

The next morning, I woke up to Son Number Two in the kitchen with bright blue hands and ten dismantled ball-point pens on the granite countertop, trying to wash off the blue ink that had spread everywhere inside his backpack. He was busy trying to wash the pens. The pens! Because to my eleven-year-old, saving the twenty-four cents’ worth of crappy pens was the main concern.

I traced the ink spill back to his bed on their living room couch, where he first discovered the Bic-xon Valdez had run aground. There I found the backpack, and various items from within, all a vibrant fresh blue ink color, many of which, in his haste to save the precious disposable plastic pens, had found their way onto the sheets, the staircase next to the couch, and the large area rug.

After I collected all the little pieces of my head that exploded all over the room, I spent the next hour perfecting the technique of using rubbing alcohol to get ink out of a carpet. Given enough time and excruciatingly-manufactured patience, rubbing alcohol and an endless supply of clean rags removes bright blue ink from carpet fibers amazingly well, which is the only reason Son Number Two is still with us here on Earth.

It was starting to look like penance for a week off from parenting was going to involve a crazy mess from each child. We’d had bright red and bright blue, so it was looking like a patriotic theme was developing.

We kept Son Number One away from marshmallows and milk for the rest of the trip.

It’s great to be back.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2017 Marc Schmatjen

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Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!

The Tornado Watch

The date was March 26^th, 2014, a day that will live in infamy. Oh, the humanity. Oh, the senseless destruction of lawn furniture. Well, OK, destruction is a bit much. Senseless slight relocation is more like it.

It started like any other spring day in the greater Sacramento region. Then the weather moved in. Thunder clouds, lightning, actual heavy rain. Wow, this is exciting, we thought.

I must pause here, and explain the greater Sacramento area weather to all of you who are lucky enough to not be from the greater Sacramento area. We have the most boring weather on earth. And not in the good way, like in San Diego, where the residents “complain” about how the weather is boring because it’s always the same.

“OMG, 78 and sunny again today! It’s supposed to be winter! Sometimes I wish we had real weather! It’s so boring here. LOL”

Bite me, San Diego.

Sacramento weather is not always the same. We have noticeable seasonal weather changes.

We notice in the spring when it’s 29 degrees in the morning and 85 degrees by noon. Our kids go to school in snow suits and come home in shorts. We lose a lot of jackets.

We notice that it gets so hot in the summer that we can’t touch our steering wheels or the metal parts of the seat belt. Vinyl car seats? Good luck.

We notice when the fog gets so thick in the fall that we have to feel our way down the road. Watch out for that boat launch ramp!

And we notice when it rains all winter, but only snows once every ten years, and only for five minutes. Quick, kids, make a snowman… never mind.

You see, that’s the problem. We get weather, just not any of the exciting kind. It’s all the boring kind. I guess the incredibly thick fog isn’t exactly boring, but you get tired of accidentally driving into things after a while.

We’re in the flat part of California. In less than two hours we can drive to the place that has the most recorded snowfall in the United States (in California, believe it or not), but we don’t get any snow ourselves. The beach is far away. The forest is near, but we’re not in it. Because of the location, we don’t get any of the exciting natural disasters, either. No mudslides, no forest fires, no hurricanes, no blizzards, no ice storms, and no tornados. Until March 26^th, that is.

We were just finishing dinner, gathered around the dining room table. (Actually, I need to be honest here, we don’t eat in the dining room, it just sounds better in the story.) So anyway, like I was saying, we were all spread out around the kitchen table/bar area/sink just finishing dinner, when my mobile phone buzzed furiously in the front pocket of my jeans. It didn’t feel like any normal text, and when I pulled the phone out to look, my heart dropped into my stomach. Or it may have been the burrito.

A red triangle with an exclamation point inside was flashing at me from the screen.

“Severe weather alert – Tornados in your area – Seek shelter immediately.”

Some unknown weather authority with access to my phone had just advised us to “Seek shelter immediately.” So what did we do? We went outside.

Tornados? Cool! We’re not going to miss this!

From under the edge of the patio cover in the backyard we looked up into the sky, and amid the thunder and lightning we saw a very large cloud, directly over our house, swirling lazily in a circle. No funnel, but the cloud was certainly spinning.

Hmm…

We went inside and turned on the news. The local meteorologist was almost wetting his pants on the air from all the excitement.

Finally people will take me seriously! There is actual news that I am in charge of. I’ll bet that anchor chick that makes three times more than me doesn’t even know how to spell funel cloud!

Funnels had been spotted. At least three of them. None of them had actually touched the ground, but that was beside the point. One of the newscasters was chasing the storm, taking incredibly bad video from the front seat of the vehicle, reporting breathlessly back to the meteorologist who was now in charge of the whole broadcast for the evening. Shut up, Nancy. This is my show, now. Weather channel, here I come!

As the winds in our backyard began to pick up we stood around and contemplated just where to go. We don’t have a basement. Being outside probably isn’t the best idea, but that swirling cloud above us hasn’t dropped a funnel out yet, so we’re probably still OK. How about a bathroom? Hmm… Lightning, metal pipes… I think I heard something once about that being bad... Or maybe it was good because you would be grounded… I can’t remember.

We settled on the downstairs hallway. We didn’t actually go there, but we did decide that was the best place.

As we continued STORM WATCH 2014 from the patio, one of our three-pound plastic Adirondack chairs was blown over and moved a full two feet. It almost put a dent in the lawn. The two swings on our play structure became hopelessly tangled for a minute, then untangled, but that minute was almost unbearable.

Then it was over.

When the fearless roving newsman made it to the highest point in town, the tornado had passed, but do you know what he found?

The rest of the town.

Everyone had jumped in their cars to do the same thing; follow that tornado! So many people ended up on the high overlook road that the reporter couldn’t even find a parking spot.

Other people may seek shelter in a tornado, but not us. We’re so starved for weather excitement, we follow it with our cell phone video cameras rolling.

People in Kansas might just call that a normal summer day, but for us, it was all we could talk about for the next week. Birdhouses had been knocked down. Fences had been blown to a precarious 30 degree angle. Tales of wanton lawn furniture relocation were plentiful.

Turns out, it is pretty exciting here. Take that, San Diego.

See you soon,

-Smidge

Copyright © 2014 Marc Schmatjen

Check out The Smidge Page on Facebook. We like you, now like us back!

Also visit Marc’s Amazon.com Author Page  for all his books. Enjoy!