worst goat rodeo ever

so we went out last night to the mill, an iowa city institution. it's a family restaurant and bluegrass venue, so instead of paying a babysitter $10 an hour to see a good music show, we just buy the kids $4 plates of spaghetti. we've taken the children there twice now without major mishap. last night though, after an hour and a half, we were so relieved just to get them all in the car that i told prm, "let's never do that again." for some reason, they were all just wired - to the point that i was looking for empty energy drink tallboys hidden in their rooms when we got them home. i'm not talking "bouncing off the walls" wired... i'm talking "trying to chew his own arm off" wired. we've been very pleased with their steady progress in the effort to act civilized in public over the last year, and have been able to take them more places for longer. but talk about some regressing - last night was like a bad acid flashback to the days when the twins were toddlers and evilgremlin was... well, himself, only younger and with less impulse control.

first, we get in and find the only open table big enough for the six of us is right next to the stage. any of you who have been reading about evilgremlin over the years know that this is a bad, bad idea. after herding him safely past the dance floor, he picks the seat that is closest to the stage, where the colorado state mandolin champion, nick amodeo, is already playing (one of the nicest things about the mill is that the shows start either on time or EARLY.) EG immediately starts playing air-banjo.

seriously, at this point, i'm realizing how long it's going to take me to tell this damned story if i use a normal narrative style, so let me break now to just give you a bullet list of things i had to yell at the kids:

- do not talk to people on stage. any questions they seem to be asking the audience are rhetorical.

- do not put your hands in your soda.

- AND THAT'S WHY I'M ALWAYS TELLING YOU NOT TO PUT YOUR @&$^@) FEET ON THE TABLE. NO, YOU DON'T GET A NEW SODA.

- sit down.

- IN YOUR CHAIR.

- when you're the last person clapping, stop.

- don't throw the horns and hoot in the middle of a song. you can throw the horns quietly.

- i know they asked for audience requests, but bluegrass musicians generally don't know erasure songs, so don't request them.

- just because you've finally gotten one of the musicians to acknowledge you from the stage does not mean you have free license to further interact with the musicians.

- not even if you get up on stage. which you may not under any circumstances do.

- yes, i remember that one time i let you get up and sing and dance on a stage. i still regret it.

- no, you cannot bring your instruments next time we come.

- no, i'm not bringing my instruments next time we come.

- no, you can't borrow their instruments. i know he can't play his mandolin and his banjo at the same time, but his mandolin is probably worth more than your narrow white ass, so sit it down and don't even look like you're going to go ask.

- fork, dude. please. i know you can pull this off.

- GIVE ME THE *^&@#$*)&@ SALT SHAKER.

now, this is just what we had to yell at the older three. trogdor, at just a few days shy of seven months old, doesn't even understand the word "no" yet, though i think he's starting to catch on to the fact that when i say that word, it's connected to me doing something that really pisses him off, like blocking him from putting a crayon in his mouth.

i may not have mentioned this before, but trogdor loves music. in utero, he never failed to wiggle and kick when i played my banjo or his daddy played his guitar for him. when i pull out my banjo, he gets a huge, moony grin - the balls-out kind of full-body grin that's so big and goofy it looks like he's leaking his IQ points out his ears - and when i start playing it, he starts to dance. if he's on the floor, this involves flailing limbs and a scooting butt. if he's in his supersaucer, he jumps in time to the music - in fact, if i make a mistake and lose the rhythm, he stops and looks at me expectantly until i pick it back up correctly. i think it's probably time to get him on the preschool waiting list at the Preucil School of Music.

so prm and i have to pass his bowling-ball butt (seriously... bowling balls are about 20 lbs too, right?) back and forth, because it doesn't take more than a few minutes worth of supporting 20 lbs of pure sexy dance mojo before your arms are about dead. after eating some baby food - minus the first two bites, which he spit into his daddy's lap "this is for my homies" style - he got pissed when i wouldn't let him take the spoon, and proceeded to toss several fistfuls of salad into my lap - helpfully spilling the dressing on me, as well. while i tried to clean that up, he grabbed his next handful of salad, dredged it through what was left in the cup of dressing knuckles-first, then jammed that into his mouth. he was happy enough slurping on the dressing, but upon sucking down an arugula leaf, he started coughing. and i don't mean a cute little "baby needs the heimlich again" cough. i mean a "hey this new noise i make is pretty cool so i think i'm going to make it as loud as i can for as long as i can and embellish it with a red face and huge grin" kind of ear-splitting cough. this turned into screeching when i took the salad away from him. i finally got him calmed down with a mozzarella stick dipped repeatedly in marinara sauce, but after pounding his way through a good half-cup of marinara, the cheese was gone and he was getting pissy about it. thankfully, at this point enough of my salad was on the floor that the pickle spear on my plate was uncovered, which kept him happy and busy for the next 20 minutes.

yeah, that's right. this baby eats pickles. i handed him one to be funny a couple of weeks ago, thinking he'd make that cute little facial expression babies sometimes make when they're thinking "this grapefruit is the work of satan!" but he loved it. give him enough time to work it over, and he will completely vampirize a huge pickle spear, leaving only the floppy skin behind. here's proof.

trogdor's pickle movie 1

trogdor's pickle movie 2

trogdor's pickle movie 3

trogdor's pickle movie 4

so then he drops his pickle, and he's pissed off that i won't let him dive headfirst after it, and even more pissed off when i won't let him replace it with a big green crayon. at this point, we've been there for an hour and a half, the older kids have finished their spaghetti and pizza, spazmonkey is starting to need near-constant threats to quit screwing around, evilgremlin is leaning over to see what's in the empty banjo case sitting at the side of the stage, and it's time to GO.

the waitress, who has been chatting with the kids all night, says she loves their names, they're all adorable, and are they all boys? when i tell her they are, she just laughs, and then kisses me on the head.

EG: mom, what'd she do that for?

me: because i only have boys.

EG: and no girls?

me: yep.

PRM: she has a thing for girls.

(she probably did. and hey, i'll take it. it's not like dudes are lined up around the corner to hit on a woman with four kids, and she was cute. my ego is a sensory organ and does not care who's stroking it!)

to top it all off, as we're standing up to leave, spazmonkey suddenly freaks out because he can't find the notebook he's been doodling in. stupid me, i think that telling him it's in my backpack will calm him down. "MY NOTEBOOK WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!" yep. every head turns to follow us out the door. never had that happen before! (insert ironic laughter here.) have i mentioned that the twits are the loudest children on the planet? seriously, even in a crowded pediatrician's office on flu shot day, the screams from genetically inferior children are but whispers compared to those of my own hardy viking-spawn. the first time spazmonkey got immunization shots, there were nurses poking their heads out of doors down the entire length of the 200-foot hallway - pediatric nurses who hear kids screaming ALL DAY LONG, and they were freaked by how loud spazmonkey was wailing (to the point that two of the nurses actually came running to see what was going on, and i actually heard one of them say "holy shit." they stood there in disbelief upon reaching our exam room and seeing that it was just a baby getting shots.)

so we get the kids the hell out of the restaurant, i hand spazmonkey his notebook, which he thanks me politely for. "YOU GOT FOOD ON YOUR SHIRT!" he points out helpfully. as we walk back to the car, i'm just thankful that it is now bedtime and the ordeal is over... until i look at trogdor's face peeking from over his daddy's shoulder. "dude, do we need to take him to the emergency room?"

apparently, trogdor is allergic to something in the marinara sauce that he snorted his way through, because everything on his face below his eyelids has turned an angry, blotchy red. and all i can think is, god, there had better be a drug dealer on a corner between here and the hospital, because i have never come so close to beating my children in public before, and i am not sitting in an ER waiting room for 4 hours with these kids without some chemical help.

mother's only half a word.

and not my favorite half. by far.

so let's add up my cumulative bank fees for a single goddamned mistake.

in closing out my old bank account, i forgot about a $50 check i had written 3 months ago - which magically got cashed the day after i took the account balance to zero. my mistake, i'll fix it. i'm not pissed off yet. i called my old bank last night and carefully asked for specific instructions on how to fix the problem.

after going to my new bank this morning to wire $80 ($50 to cover the check, plus the $30 overdraft fee) to my old bank ($15 wire transfer fee) i came home, and a couple of hours later checked the balance at my old bank... negative $8. now, i was specifically told yesterday on the phone that the $8 per day "continuous overdraft fee" wouldn't start until midnight tonight. and i asked the question slowly, several times, in several different ways, to make sure that wiring $80 this morning would make the problem go away.

so i called my old bank... and was told that they "couldn't" credit that back to me despite the fact that i was told yesterday that the $8/day would kick in tomorrow. it "wasn't a bank mistake." i knew i was going to get nowhere, but to make myself feel just a little better, i made the supervisor admit that a bank employee gave me incorrect information - a mistake, unless you want to assume it was deliberate and malicious - and an employee of the bank, legally, is "the bank." he then tried reverting to "if" i was given false info yesterday... oh, did i smack that all to shit, like lego princess leia bitch-smacking a storm trooper.

"ma'am, the notes about your call yesterday don't say that you were told that, so i can't verify-"

"stop. under what circumstances would an employee give me incorrect information, and then write a note saying 'i gave the customer incorrect information.'?"

"uuuuhhh..."

"okay, then."

he tried the "IF you were given false information" thing several more times, and it got to where every time he said if, i yelled, "STOP! not if." he was pretty well-trained in the "unwavering stream of bullshit" technique, but i finally won that little pissing contest, and he quit saying "if." because my kung-fu is better!

i also forced him to agree that it was bullshit to claim he'd help me IF he could prove i was misled, when there's no way to do so (short of them recording every call - which i suggested they start doing.) i then helpfully suggested that they could raise their profit margin even further than all the egregious fees were accomplishing if they simply stated their blanket policy of not helping customers, and quit paying people like him to answer the phones and talk in circles to pretend that there might be some circumstances under which they might help people, when those circumstances are actually impossible. as you might imagine, this was met with silence.

oh, and as he was explaining why they couldn't credit back *that* kind of fee - the continuous overdraft fee being sacrosanct and irreversible by anything short of acts of god - i said, "okay, so there are fees that you CAN reverse? you know the additional $15 i'm going to go spend to wire you some more money? how about you refund THAT fee?"

long silence.

"yep. didn't think so. but humor me and explain why!"

he said he couldn't refund any fees because my account was in overdraft. i explained in my best pat-the-retard-on-the-head voice that my account would not be in overdraft once i wired the $8 to it, and he would then, by his own reasoning, be free to refund me that $15. he started hemming and hawing about how he couldn't do it today.

"so how's tomorrow work for you?"

long pause. "no." hey, i may have gotten screwed, but i proved my arguing skills to be far superior to that of a double-minimum wage minion, and quite possibly ruined his day. so that's ... something.

so, i got to go back to my bank and spend another $15 to wire another $8. that brings the total for this mistake to $68. so far. i really, really need to steal some shit to make me feel better. sort of a pay-it-forward thing with my own personal true-neutral karmic twist. if what goes around comes around, then me shoplifting some chocolate and randomly breaking a chair at the bar tonight should eventually turn into a steaming pile of shit in national city's corporate lap. i'm sure of this.

academia

so i've got one kid (dramaqueen) who's kind of a motherfucker. dramaqueen is the kid who, when i tell him it's bedtime, looks at me and says, "NO!" and then gives me an expectant grin - like the fun is just about to start. remember now, he's nearly 4-1/2, so he fully understands that there are consequences to his actions. so i tell him, one more time, sternly, that it's bedtime, and include the helpful reminder that i start taking away toys for a day when you try to make bedtime your bitch.

huh-uh. YOU are bedtime's bitch, son.

so. last night, after i tell him to go to bed the second time, he yells, "NO!" with an exquisitely dramatic stomp of one foot, the likes of which hasn't been seen since 1950 live-action disney movies. and then he starts up the stairs toward bed. "NO! I NOT GO TO BED!" he says this as he actually marches into his bedroom and flops himself onto his bed.

so i'm following him, wondering, i'm pretty sure i don't have to punish him for this, right? because if the behavior is what he knows i wanted, and the defiance is only verbal, then it's really just come down to an academic point, right? and how fucked up is it to stand there trying to have an academic discussion with a kid who can barely string a sentence together?

besides, from the gleeful look on his face, i'm pretty sure that if i punish him... he wins.

or maybe that's just paranoia.