Braving Boys

I’m not sure if Joey wanted to go to church this morning for a dose of religion or if he just wanted to wear his fanciest clothes. It doesn’t really matter what motivated him. The point is that he wanted to go, and we went. And we learned this really good lesson about using our dashes to the very fullest. You know, the dash. That little thing between the year you’re born and the year you die. It symbolizes your whole life, and so you should make it matter. And that’s what we’re going to do — we’re going to use our time wisely, help others and make a difference in the world. How about you?

G-FORCE: Movie Trailer – The top video clips of the week are here

My boys love movies, and I love movies, and all three of us usually head straight to the theater for any new kid flick that comes our way. Even though they’re dubbed kid-friendly, though, I sometimes wonder about the appropriateness of some. Still, I usually just wing it and hope like heck my boys don’t come home mimicking bad words and sex scenes. So far, so good.

No more guess work for me –  I just found three rockin’ websites that do the dirty work and dig up everything mom and dad need to know about movies and their ratings.

• kids-in-mind.com — awesome details on the new movie G-Force.
• parentpreviews.com — movies get grades, and while it might look like fun for kids, Transformers earns Cs and Ds.
• commonsensemedia.org — “On,” “Off” or “Iffy” ratings here. The new Harry Potter gets an “On” for kids 12 and over. Oops, my eight and under set saw this one.

Mommy: What are you doing right now?

Danny: Coloring and making a book.

Mommy: Tell me about your book.

Danny: It’s a dragon one. There’s different kinds of dragons.

Mommy: Tell me three things you can do really well.

Danny: I can color, stay in the lines and things on Wii I can’t figure out, I figure out.

Mommy: What do you want to be when you grow up?

Danny: A shoe store manager.

Mommy: Why?

Danny: I think it’s fun, and I get to wear shoes.

Mommy: What do you like about school?

Danny: That I’m going into a different school, and I’m going to learn new stuff, and I’m going to have really fun. [Note: Danny is not going into a different school, just a different grade.]

Mommy: What the best thing you’ve done so far this summer?

Danny: Play Wii.

Mommy: Anything else?

Danny: Play with you, play games, do everything with you.

Danny: I just want to color now!

Boys with corn, July 2009

Joey and Danny have checked on their backyard garden every day since they worked so hard to plant the thing, which makes that plot of dirt and all of its sprouting nutrition a project well worth making. I figured long ago that even if food was never born from that box out back, my guys would grow and blossom because of their masterpiece — they hand-picked their favorite packets of seeds, shoveled and pushed wheelbarrows full of sand, dirt and mulch, sunk their hands into the earth and still, months later, they monitor the progress of the fruits (and veggies) of their labor with unwavering excitement. I love that my boys have become gardeners (their great grandma would be so proud), and I love that today, they came shouting for me because of what they discovered: Corn.

And here it is (the corn), in all its glory (and taller than my tallest baby), with little cobs popping up all over the place. And here they are (the boys), in all of their glory — and with their favorite summer harvest: Fla-vor-ice. (Apparently, they are not the only fans.)

No playing at the table, we tell our boys. Mealtime is for eating, good manners and calm behavior. We’ve been saying it for years — still, we’re not quite sure Joey and Danny get what we’re saying. Case in point: This morning.

Does it count as playing if the toy just simply sits on the head during breakfast?

Ocean + Boy + Boogie Board = Boo-Boo

Writer Abigail Thomas offers in her book “Thinking About Memoir” the following writing exercise: Write two pages (one post) in which a child comforts an adult.

That’s easy.

The child was Joey. The adult was me. And it happened in February, 2005, one day after I realized my hair was shedding from my scalp faster than I could say chemotherapy. It had been 13 days since my first treatment with the toxic breast cancer drugs Adriamycin and Cytoxan, and not a rubber band nor a hat could hold my wisps in place. My scalp was sore, each hair still attached to my head hung with a weight that was nearly unbearable, and it had become abundantly clear that the moment had arrived: It was time to shave my head.

“Don’t worry, mom, you’re not going to die,” announced my almost 4-year-old boy, who was taking his turn shaving away the last of my chemo-stricken hair. “It’s only a haircut,” he assured me.

Whether he knew it or not, Joey was absolutely right. It was only a haircut. I didn’t die. And while some of his comments during my years fighting breast cancer weren’t as comforting — “You look like an alien,” he revealed while visiting me in the hospital in March of that same year — this is the one that still brings tears to my eyes, because, well, it was innocent, it was real and most of all, it was damn comforting.

The child, almost 4 years old

The adult, 34 years old

This post can also be found at my Breast Cancer blog.

Just boys, on the Fourth of July

My mom just shared with me some writing exercises that come from writer Abigail Thomas, and I’m going to practice some of them here. Basically, I’ll list a topic set forth by Thomas, and I’ll write. I’ll relate my stories to boys, because, well, this is a boy blog. And while Thomas recommends writing on topic for two pages, I’ll adapt that to post length. Here goes:

Write one post on fighting about food.

We have fought about food in our house since the very day I fed Joey his first spoonful of baby mush — rice cereal, I think it was. I put it in; he spit it out. And it’s gone pretty much just like that for the eight years he’s been alive. Now, there are some foods he’ll happily eat — candy, cakes, brownies, ice cream — but for the most part, he rejects what we give him. He might like it at first — he loved salmon the first few times he ate it — but in short time, he’ll start gagging over the mere mention of foods he could once list as favorites. A big fan of steak for a long time, Joey now has no urge to eat the stuff. Pasta and meat sauce: He liked it so much a while back, we added it to our dinner rotation. Now he frowns when I bring out the jar of pasta sauce, because it has little green things in it, and chunks of tomatoes. And he doesn’t like turkey burgers (beef is OK), he refuses to eat any sort of sandwich, apples are a thing of the past, watermelon has too many seeds (even the seedless ones) and I could go on and on — which incidentally, is another one of Thomas’ exercises:

Write two pages (one post for me) that end, “I could go on and on.”

Poor Danny. The guy was sitting next to John in the very front car of the Gwazi roller coaster at Busch Gardens today when a supervisor came by and told us she needed to check his height. He’d already been measured twice for the ride, and twice he was given the green light to board the Southeast’s largest and fastest wooden coaster — 7,000 feet of track, and Danny could taste every inch we were about to travel.

But he didn’t ride, because the supervisor said he was not tall enough. He’s 47 inches. He needed to be 48. We’re all for safety, and after riding the monster myself, I’m pretty sure Danny would have been tossed around a fair bit. But he should have been stopped at the front gate, not once he was buckled and ready to roll.

John and Danny exited Gwazi. Joey and I rode. And my little guy was awarded Quick Que passes for the trouble he was caused — and we jumped six times to the front of the lines at the park.

Danny recovered from the sting of his ejection, and he had a ball at the park. He rode the upside-down Scorpion, the neck-whipping Cheetah Chase (42-inch rule on these two), the Log Flume, the Sky Ride, Bumper Cars, and pictured below is our not-quite-tall-enough man on the Congo River Rapids, just minutes before he and John were soaked through to their socks.

Congo River Rapids, Busch Gardens, Tampa