Brat Stew

I recently read an article entitled 16 Things I Have Learned About Being A Mother by Chris Jordon (a mother of seven, which means she is one child crazier than my own mother...if that's possible).

I think this title inspired me to view the other day as a series of lessons in motherhood rather than as a prime example as to why animals eat their young (and sometimes bite the heads off their mates...but we might save that for another blog).

So here we go:

Lesson 1: The phrase "Poopy Butt" is an unacceptable classroom expression.

Let me set the stage for you (and forgive me if I go off on a tangent--I've had a lot of coffee today):  The day began in relative calm. Elsa and I took Rollie to school. Dropped him off without incident.  Elsa and I went to Target for some Icees, diapers and Holiday Season Overload. (Side note: if I were Thanksgiving, I'd be really pissed off right about now. Halloween costumes on clearance, candy on sale, and Christmas Trees going up where foam tombstones and skull-shaped fog machines used to be. Where the hell are the gravy boats and cornicopias? Where are people supposed to go for all their pilgrim garb and ceramic turkey figurines? If Thanksgiving were a person, it would be the Middle Child of the holidays. It would be the one to shave its head, sneak out to 7Seconds concerts, burn incense in its room and get in suspended for hurling ice cream sundaes at underclassmen. Christmas is lucky Thanksgiving doesn't sneak into its room in the dead of night and cut off all its hair.)

So after a little mother-daughter bonding (which included cleaning up half of a cherry Icee from the middle of the hair-care aisle), we went to pick up my sweet, darling Rollie. 

When I poke my head into Rollie's classroom, I don't even see him at first. His teacher notices me and ushers me in.

"Where's Rollie?" I ask.

She points to a corner of the room by a bookcase, where Rollie is seated with his back to the room.

Oh no.

"Rollie, you can come out now," his teacher says, "but why don't you tell your mommy why you were in Time Out?"

I kneel down to his level, but he won't look me in the eye. Gosh, if he ever wants a future in professional poker, he's gonna have to work on his tells big time.

"What did you do?" I ask. Several different ways. And I get nothing. Except a couple of I don't knows and one face-plant into my shirt.

Finally his teacher pulls me aside and says in her best ventriloquist impression, "He said Poopy Butt."

I almost start laughing, and immediately want to ask: So did he get in trouble for the Poopy or the Butt? In what context did he use it? Did he use the words consecutively? In a derogatory manner? Was he merely repeating someone else's phraseology? Ah, so many questions, so few Time Outs.

As we're leaving, I attempt to lecture Rollie about how it's not nice to hurt people's feelings by calling them names like Poopy Butt, but Rollie interrupts me.

"Momma, I wasn't calling Aiden a name, I was telling him a funny story."

"But Rollie, your teacher didn't know that."

"Momma, you said 'but.'"

"No, that's not the same as the Butt you said."

"Butt rhymes with But, Momma."

"....So it does."

Wow, so that went a little long. Guess I'll have to save the other fifteen things I've learned for another post (including the reason why I recently almost went Praying Mantis on Jeff). And this first lesson may not have made me want to cook and eat Rollie for dinner, but by the time Lesson Nine rolled around, every time I looked at my son I imagined his head as a personal pan pizza. 

Until next time, loyal readers.