Full of it...

There are few things my kids do that leave me stumped.  Dropped a penny in the sink disposal?  Of course.  Burped while talking without missing a beat?  That’s old hat.

Last week, though, my son came home from camp with some new tricks up his sleeve.

Remember going to camp as a kid?  I have strong memories of sitting in the hot gym of a YMCA wearing a fruit punch-stained t-shirt, my hair caked in to a hard ponytail from swimming, and playing Uno and giving out cootie shots for hours.

And while some of that went down during my son’s week at gym camp, he got schooled in a few other arenas.

First of all, he tried to teach me this hand game called Pikachu.  My first impulse was to cry Bullshit!  That’s just some animated show, not a hand game! It can’t possibly be a real thing!

I thought perhaps it was some hair brained game made up by some bored kids at his camp, but a quick Google search .

 
It’s a mashup of Miss Mary Mack and Rock, Paper, Scissors.  Except that when you loose your scissor to your friend’s rock, you get to squeeze their cheek with one hand and battle on.  The first person to loose twice gets their face smacked.

And now my kids have an open invitation to slap each other.  All in the name of good old fashioned fun!

But the best thing he brought home, besides an extra pair of swim goggles and some stranger’s underpants was a thirst for “Your Mama” jokes.

Luckily, his arsenal is G rated.  Like “Your mama is so skinny, she hula hoops with a Cheerio.”  Here’s where my son’s superhero power of total recall comes in handy.  He had about 27 jokes memorized and rattled them off in rapid succession at dinner.

Boom!  Zing!  Snap!

As he’s firing off one Your Mama missile after another, through my laughter all I’m thinking is “Man, I have absolutely NO comeback.”

I’m horrible at this game. Horribly horrible.  I’m one of those people that find the right zinger to say three days after a conversation has taken place.   People wouldn’t say I’m quick on the uptake.

So I lost to a 7 year old.

It was hilarious to see him delivering these putdowns with confidence, that wild sparkle in his eye knowing he’s got a kick-ass punchline coming.

Yet, as he was challenging his sister, slamming her mother as being old or fat or stupid, he failed to realize one simple fact.

He was insulting his very own mother.

Guess they didn’t warn him about that in camp.

On any given day, dig a hand in to the backseat of my car and you’ll come up with enough crumbs and morsels to feed a family of rats, their cousins, their aunts and uncles, their in-laws and their in-laws’ in-laws.

Add to that smorgasbord a small library of books, water bottles a plenty, orphaned socks, a treasure trove of pencils and pens and markers, and a surplus of trinkets that would put Chuck E. Cheese’s prize display box to shame.

At times, it makes me want to ralph.  Or at the very least, stay inside the house to avoid having to get in the garbage dump that is the back of my car sometimes.

As much as I’d like to stage a ban on food, drinks and toys in my car, it’s easier said than done.  We spend an ungodly amount of time in the car on a daily basis.  As low as my tolerance is inside my home, or even in the front seat of my car, to clutter and mess, when it comes to the backseat, I’ve eased up quite a bit and learned to turn the other way when they treat the backseat like their own personal tour bus.

Living way out in the ‘burbs like we do, a “quick” trip to the library can take over an hour and a half.  The kids can’t make it the half-hour ride home from school without needing a snack or a beverage so I often cave and give in to the pleading for food.  Plus, as a bonus for me, it’s harder for them to annoy the shit out of each other when they’re occupied by reading the books or coloring the pictures they’ve schlepped in to the car with them.

To give the kids credit, they have gotten better about leaving the car with the items they brought in.  But it only takes one small trinket or snack box of raisins to slip through the cracks before the floodgate opens.

Things only got worse when we went on a recent road trip.  I’m not talking about the short four-hour jaunt, but the full-day, 12 hour one way kind.

Because we were going to be spending oodles of time in the car, I wanted to make sure the kids were comfortable back there.  So I found some cheap baskets at the dollar store and loaded them up with books, things to color, reading lights, electronics, bubble gum, lovies…basically everything from their rooms.

It worked like a charm.  They spent quite a bit of time entertaining themselves in the backseat, and we only watched one movie each way, which is a family record.  And, bonus!  I got to keep my spine in alignment by avoiding turning around every three seconds to hand someone something.

However, when we returned home, I dreaded cleaning out that backseat.  When we rolled in to our driveway, I glanced behind me, hoping it wasn’t as bad as I thought.

It looked like a tornado had touched down in my back seat.  Someone call FEMA, I’m going to need a clean up crew.

Crap was thrown everywhere.  It took four or five trips just to gather everything together just to get it in the house.  Gone was the organization in the baskets where things were lined up by size and category.  Instead, items were shoved in any way they would fit.

And once all the debris was cleared?

Holy. Crumbtown.

I couldn’t even identify half the food I found in their seats.

I get it, I really do.  There’s not much to do when you’re trapped in your seat in a 5-point harness for hours on end.  I, for one, would hate to be stuck in a car seat for more than 20 minutes, so I give the kids mad props for not losing their sanity in the first place.  And it’s pretty hard to keep track of your food particles when you have a book in your lap and headphones on and you’re kicking your shoes off at the same time.  Road trips wreak havoc on the best of cars.

As a result of my ambivalence towards the backseat’s cleanliness, the kids did amazingly well on the road trip.  The benefits were two-fold.  The kids got to ride in comfort and discard items at will, living a care-free chaos they don’t get to experience at home.  And I got to ride almost undisturbed, grabbing the chance to catch up on reading and a much needed nap.

I’d do it all over again.

But I still wouldn’t mind a travel dustbuster.