Monday, June 21, 2010

Late Post from the World's Worst Mom

In my mind I am an old lady. Here I was, all satisfied with myself for posting about Father's Day and The Sweet One's birthday and about half way through my shift at work today, I realized that that I totally missed posting about The Mouth's birthday, which was on the 5th.

Now this may not seem like an unforgivable crime unless, like me, you are prone to montage-type hallucinations of the future in which your children have been driven to the Psychiatrist's couch my something you have said or done. Side note: a lot of my futuristic hallucinations involve my children in therapy...nevermind.

So, without further ado:

This is The Mouth.

I have named him The Mouth for blogging purposes because, well, he talks a lot. I plead the 5th on where he inherited that trait :)

So, his birthday was a couple weeks ago, but in my defense Hubby was in the middle of a very long medical ordeal and despite trying my best to keep that separate from my son's birthday celebration, my brain really wasn't focusing at the time. A couple of years ago The Sweet One decided that he was too old for cake and ice cream birthday parties anymore so we started a tradition of taking him and a couple friends to do something cool on his birthday. I think he was turning 13 at the time, and this was an outward way to express his "teenage-hood". So, it goes without saying that of course, his little brother was suddenly "too old" for parties as well. We've been doing the "special day out" birthday for the two older boys ever since.

This year, The Mouth decided that he wanted to go to the local go-kart track/amusement place for his birthday. Because of Hubby's medical issues, guess who was left to go go-karting with four 11 yr old boys? Correct. So, we show up at this place, which is slammed because it's the first Saturday of Summer Vacation. As soon as we check in and get our bracelets guess what happens?? The bottom falls out of the largest storm cell to pass through in several weeks. I literally checked the weather on my phone thinking that certainly this was like a rogue tropical storm that I wasn't aware of. That's how wicked this thing was. We didn't even get to ride the go-karts once. In fact, no rides for us at all. Everyone (which in this particular park happened to be about 200 people) had to hang out in the arcade to keep dry.

So, we're shoved into this tiny arcade, which is already loud and stuffy, waiting for the rain to stop. We wait...and wait...and wait. Thirty minutes into it we decide to go ahead and have our pizza now since there wasn't anything else to do and it sure beat standing at the windows with our faces pressed against the glass.


One Cheese pizza did not really help the situation at all since it's life span was exactly two minutes long. Now it had been raining for an hour and I was starting to severely sweat the fact that I was supposed to have these boys home at a decent hour, we hadn't done anything fun yet and all the cheese pizza was gone. I finally tracked down a manager and did my best "I know this isn't your fault, but I was just wondering where my money is going since we are standing here doing nothing and the sun is going down" face. As overwhelmed as she was, and believe me -with an arcade built for about 50 people that was now holding about 200- she was way overwhelmed, she really was great. After talking with her and asking Birthday Boy what he wanted to do, it was decided not to postpone for another weekend. I mean, it's summer in the South...it rains ever day here during Hurricane Season. Postponing it didn't guarantee anything and even the children knew it.


So, she made us an offer we couldn't refuse: $40 worth of arcade tokens and three games each of Laser Tag. This is a picture of four 11 yr old boys discovering a real "vintage" Ms. Pac Man/Galaga game. He totally asked me if he could have one for his room. I teared up a little. Two hours later all the tokens were gone, all the Laser Tag games were played and everybody had bag of useless crap from the token store.




I did get them all home by bedtime and no one cried, fought or broke any bones. In Boy-Land that's a home run kinda day. I missed having Hubby with me to navigate the mess but somehow even in the midst of all of his medical drama he had the time to text me...."Sucks to be you :)" Jackass.

In the end they all raved about what an awesome birthday it was, which was good for me to hear since the entire time I was staring out the window at the tree branches flying by, I was explaining myself to my child's imaginary-future-shrink. I learned that boys will always be happy if you feed them and give them game tokens and that laser tag is so a real sport. I'm just happy I lived to tell the tale :O

Happy Birthday to my Mouth! Hope this year is super awesome, just like you.

2 comments:

Candance said...

I continually have to ask the man I'm dating how old my son is. We've been dating for two months, yet he knows. Maybe if we send out kids to therapy together, we can get a group discount ;0).

You are a good woman to stick out the hurricane-like storm/crowded arcade/gaggle of boys alone and without stabbing anyone. You probably earned your wings just for that alone.

Melanie said...

I never said anything about not stabbing anyone, did I??

Post a Comment

 

Blog Template by YummyLolly.com - Sponsored by Free Web Space