Shhhh! Don't Tell Liam, I'm Saying This...

I can't be all bad if my teen is voluntarily calling me from camp, right?

This summer has Liam's first two experiences with sleep-away camp stuff that doesn't involve being at Kandy's or my mom's. Boy Scout Camp was the first, and since he's been with these boys and their dads for several years now and was going with Nick, whom he's known since he was 2, and Nick's dad and little brothers, this was not exactly a hard one. And I pretty much knew that they weren't going to be using their phones much, I didn't expect to get calls. But I did get a call, because Liam sliced his finger and needed stitches, so I got to talk to him twice and of course, when I said "I love you" he gave me the usual, "Yeah, OK." See, there were other people around. At least, I hoped that was the reason. Whenever I get him on his cell, like when he calls to say he made it to his friend's house, I close with an "I love you" and never says it back, but there's almost always people around him, right? Surely that's the reason?

Then he went off to Ultimate Frisbee camp. Here again he was going with a group of boys he'd played Ultimate with for the past three years, but it was a bigger camp, the kids were usually grouped in the dorms to be in geographically diverse groups so they'd meet new people, and believe it or not, we worried that Liam might not be in shape enough for it. Yes, I know, you're thinking "In shape for FRISBEE?" but I'm telling you, watch a game and you'll see that it's as much running as soccer, if not more so. The camp information explicitly states that campers should arrive in good shape and should NOT expect camp to be a getting-in-shape experience--otherwise, the camper will be too tired to fully enjoy and benefit from the camp. So I was not nervous, but was a bit more on edge than I was with Scouts, even though Frisbees have no sharp edges like the knives they use as Boy Scouts.

TO make things even more interesting, we didn't drive him up to Amherst--he went up with his friend Adam and family, and we're doing pick-up. I sent him off all packed up and honestly, once I was convinced he wasn't lacking anything important and Jake would get him to Adam's on time, didn't give it another thought. So Sunday my friend Karen, Adam's mom, called and asked, "I was just calling to let you know how things were up there--or did you hear already from Liam?"

This was when I felt like a bad mom....Liam had his phone, but I hadn't explicitly told him to call and check in. Liam is also blissfully un-addicted to his phone--he doesn't carry it around with him, and unless he's walking to his friend's house or out somewhere that I've required cell phone check-ins, he wouldn't notice a call on it because it's likely to not be in the same room with him. Karen had talked about alllllll the information she'd gotten from both her boys while at jazz camp the week before as well--she had a rule that if she texted them, they had to answer back or she'd start calling, so her oldest would send back one-syllable responses and she'd ask for more detail and he'd ask her to please stop texting him and she'd explain, as one often has to with boys, that if he gave her the information she was asking about in a more thorough way, she wouldn't have to keep asking questions...I admit, the image of a teen being interrupted by a text from Mom doesn't seem conducive to eager communication, but then, it's less intrusive than a phone call. Liam had long ago earned the privilege of a texting plan, but I'd never gotten around to adding it and he hadn't asked, so I figured, "Great, delay the addiction until he remembers and asks us to add it!"

Only now I had my son in Amherst and me in NJ and I was getting my info second- or third-hand from Karen or through Karen from her son because I hadn't told him to call and didn't properly get him attached to his phone so that I was likely to get calls or texts from him. I could call him and hope to get him, but just then I was feeling a bit lonely that my son probably wouldn't think to call home himself. Karen seemed to have minute-by-minute updates on what was going on--I had sent my son off on Friday and here it was Sunday and I hadn't thought to stress about the details of exactly what he was doing--he was at a well-supervised camp, right? I knew he'd be playing frisbee and they'd feed him--but now I was feeling like a pretty lame, bad, un-missed mom.

So imagine our shock when the phone rang at 10:15pm that night, and it was our eldest, calling us from his dorm room single ("Adam's mom says the dorm rooms are kind of old and not that great?" "Eh, they're fine--lots better than the tent at Camp Wakpominee, that's for sure!") to use the last remaining minutes before curfew to tell us about his day. Awwwww....

And when it was time to get off the phone, I said the usual, "I love you." And, sitting alone in his single with no one around to hear, he did not hesitate at all to say, "I love you, too, Mom. Good night!" And he's called every night before bed. I'm a happy mommy.

Never lie

As Jake was putting the kids to bed, G came up and asked Jake: "Do we lie?"

This is less a moral/ethical question than a backdoor to a toothbrushing topic, namely the fact that Garrett responds to "Did you brush your teeth?" with "I ACTually did!" Eventually I figured out that any time "ACTually" was mentioned in a sentence about what G did or did not do, it was a clear signal that he had not done the task and furthermore, had no desire to. To get around this annoying retort to the twice-daily toothbrushing inquiry, we explained to him that when he says he did something when he had in fact NOT done it, he was not telling the truth, which meant he was lying, and lying was wrong. This led to him connecting lying with "fibbing" (see "Larry Boy and the Fib from Outer Space"), but did not cut down on the "I ACTually did!" statements. He'd say, "I ACTually did!" and whatever our amused, annoyed, pretend-deaf or play-dumb response, he'd follow it up with "Saying I ACTually did is fibbing" or "We should not lie!" or some similar variation.

It was when our beloved Girl Next Door, Liz, (who no longer lives next door because we moved) stayed with G and the littler ones one night and put them to bed that we realized how dumb we were. In our defense, G loves Liz and would not try to be a pain in her butt as much as he enjoys doing it to us, but when he went to get ready for bed, she simply asked him, "Is there anything you forgot?" and he replied, "Yes, I forgot to brush my teeth." So now, when we think about it, we don't ask if he brushed his teeth, we ask if he forgot anything. Still, he misses the old pattern and tries to find ways of referring back to it--hence the inquiry about lying just when it's time to brush teeth.

So, G had just asked Jake, "Do we lie?"

Jake claims he had in his head something like, "It's not usually good to lie" but then thought that that was a stupidly equivocal thing to say. So instead responded with a very clear-cut, "No, we never lie."

That's *exactly* when Alex walked up to him and said, "Dad, what does the Tooth Fairy do if you lose TWO teeth?"

Long, but...

...I think it's worth it. I just couldn't make up Alex stuff if I tried, seriously.

The other day, I came downstairs to the whole get-Garrett-breakfast- and-out-the-door half hour and found Dunc and Alex already running around, very active and excited. I was less so, having stayed up to do paperwork and nurse babies and yes, OK, watch Scrubs till midnight (being used to the re-runs in the post-11pm time period, when I watched an actual current episode during prime time at some point this past week I just couldn't help thinking that JD's heart just wasn't in the slapstick anymore. Even when he was fake-racing through the hospital hallways, he looked like he was faking faking it. It felt stale--so sad.) Plus K, who has done some very decent stretches at night, slept till morning, at which point I've been getting up to nurse her at 6:30am so she's not hollering for food during the getting-G-going 7-7:30 time frame--only this particular morning she didn't go back to sleep after filling her belly and didn't want to be put down, either. So I was tired and holding a baby (old hat, for me, yes, but it doesn't mean it's my favorite hat, or even a hat I like) and Dunc and Alex were racing around chittering like very very loud squirrels while Garrett was saying, "I'm so tired!", and Alex came by and said something about "decorating the WHOLE HOUSE!" and then chitter-chitter and "So can we have Duncan's SLEEPover BIRTHday party too-MAH-row?"

A distracted: "Um, no." Duncan has been planing and discussing his Sleepover Birthday Party since Cory had her birthday sleepover last April (or maybe it's been since Dunc's last birthday--since we have seven birthdays squished into five months from January to May, everything that happens any spring can be described as since or around X's birthday, where X is a child that is not Alex.) It started as a Thomas Sleepover Party, then his Thomas Sleepover party with Lego Star Wars, then Thomas with Lego Star Wars and Indiana Jones, then Thomas Party with lots of Legos, and then I think the Thomas part dropped out when Dunc very seriously told me that Richard hates Thomas, and I'm not sure which of the 583 Lego variations are to be featured anymore because, honestly, I have five years to go back to listening to this topic before it actually matters. But I told him he couldn't have a sleepover till he was nine.

"AWWWW! Please, Mom? Please, please, PLEEEEEZ? Can we have it tomorrow, pleasepleaseplease PLEEEEEEEZ?"

"No! Don't whine at me, it does NOT work--we do not have parties on one day notice and we don't celebrate Duncan's birthday in July, that is simply NOT how it goes." Yes, I actually went in to how much notice one needs to give invitees.

Alex's shoulders dropped immediately ("schluump" is the proper term, actually) and a pitiful, sad, Alex face pouted as he schluumped away, saying in a tiny voice that was only just below dogs-only range, "But we PLANned it all OUT and EVVrything..."

I felt bad, but was still about to take G out to wait for his bus (which is a minivan), so I threw out: "Why don't you write down all your plans? Go get a piece of paper." This is Alex--if he even decided to get out the piece of paper, the odds of him doing it promptly and then not getting happily distracted while waiting for me to show up were low. This doesn't mean he'd forget about it--if I never did it with him, at bedtime he'd turn to Jake with a forlorn face and wail, "But we didn't write down the plans for the PARTY yet!"

But after G got on his way, Alex did spot me and ask me to write The Rules for Duncan's Sleepover Birthday Party, though he couldn't find any paper. I had a fussy baby ready to nurse and go back to sleep on one arm, so I looked around, couldn't see any blank paper other than the triple-line lettering-practice paper (you know what I mean--the paper with the dotted line between the top and bottom lines to make sure your a's and o's are exactly half the height of your h's and l's that every child uses until about second or third grade), grabbed a sheet and a pencil and asked Alex what I should write down.

"Well..." He looked skeptically at the paper, which was just enough to accommodate five kindergarten renditions of "Alexander Freivald" if the a,l, and d were very skinny. "There will be a LOT of rules to write down..."

"I'm a mom, I get to write small even with big lines, hurry up, tell me what to write." I was jiggling K on my knee to appease her for what I thought would be a couple minutes, and the jiggling lends itself to a rushed mentality.

"OK, these are just THE RULES." RULES went along the top.

"First, Duncan is....." I wrote in nice small print. "Duncan is the...." The. "Duuunnncan iiiiiiis theee OHHHHHHHHHnnnnuhLEEEE wuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnuh....Got that?"

"Yes, 'Duncan is the only one'--Alex, I can write faster, can you just tell me the whole sentence and I can write it all down?"

"K. Duuuuuuuuunnnnnncan iiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssss thee OHHHHHHHHHHHHHHnuhleeeeee wuuuuuuuuuuuuunnnnnnh.....that.

"That what?"

"That......GETS......gets, Ok, you wrote that..." I was just realizing that Alex might just be a good enough reader to follow along with what I was writing, which made me wonder why he couldn't see that I was more than keeping up.

"Alex, just say the WHOLE sentence!"

"Duncan.....is........the......ONly.......one.....that......gets....... toooooooooooo........rrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuunnnnnn."

"Run where?"

"Run. Everyone else has to walk, but since he's the birthday boy, he gets to run."

"Oh, OK."

"Second." I dutifully wrote a number 2 and a period and waited. BIG breath....."Ttttthhhhhhhhhuuuuuuuuhhh............GUESTS..........aaarrrr rrrrrre....."

"Alex, just say the whole sentence, the whole thing all at once, really."

"OK, second, tttttttthhhhhhhuuuuuuuuuh, um.......GUESTS.....arrrrrreeeee....NOT....uh- LOUD......tooooooo......rrrrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuuunnnnnn."

"Just say, 'The guests are not allowed to run' and I can write that down and this will go a lot faster, OK?"

"OK.'

"Alright, is that it? Are we up to Number Three?"

"Yup. THIRD...Nooooooooo.....Dyyyyyyyyyyye....VING"

"No diving?"

"Yes."

"Where?"

"No diving in the pool. Because then," very serious and stern and wide-eyed, "You can BONK your HEAD."

"That's true, if you dive into a pool and it's too shallow, you could bonk your head. But what pool are you talking about?" Maybe he and Duncan had plans for a trip to the town pool, or Grandma's pool?

Again, all wide-eyed seriousness: "OUR pool, Mom." For the record, our pool is four feet across and is usually filled to a depth of about six inches, though on a daring day we may go up to ten inches.

"Oh, well, there certainly should NOT be any diving in our pool. Alright, what's Number Four?"

"Next--this is ALL about Duncanball."

"Ah, OK." Clearly Duncalball is a spin-off of Calvinball, from Calvin and Hobbes, and as we all know, the one rule of Calvin Ball is that there are no rules. I waited.

"IfsomeonetouchestheoppositepolethenDuncanistillinthenosongzone."

"What? If someone what?"

"IfsomeonetouchestheoppositepolethenDuncanistillinthenosongzone." With a look to me like this was clear and simple and obvious.

"Um...." Darn! We went from talking so slowly we were going back in time to supersonic speeds on a topic that was not going to lend itself easily to maternal decoding based in intuition and juvenile predictability patterns. I finally got him to say a whole sentence and it's gobblygook, but if I ask him too blatantly to say it slowly then I have to go one excruciating syllable at a time for the rest of these Rules. "So, if someone touches...the...the what, again? The baby was distracting me." I hoped the baby didn't urp on me for using her as a scapegoat.

"The opposite POLE, Mom!" Could his tone say "DUH" any more clearly?

"Of course--the opposite pole. OK, what happens if they touch the opposite pole?"

"Then DUNcan is still in the NO SONG ZONE." It was at this point that I really wished I had a recorder going.

"Alright, got it."

"Next, if you hit someone with the Duncanball, you have to sing-- except Duncan, because he's the birthday boy."

"Wait--if YOU hit someone with the ball--"

"The DUNcanball!"

"With the Duncanball, do YOU have to sing, or does the person who gets hit have to sing?"

"The one who gets hit has to sing. Except Duncan, because--"

"Because he's the birthday boy, I know, I'm writing it. Is that it for Duncanball?"

"No. Next, in Duncanball, if you STEAL the FLAG, you have to sat, 'Ollywallyumbumpfizz.' " He could not have said that with a more serious face.

"OK....steal flag....What is it again? Ollywally, what?"

"Um-bump-fizz."

"Olly-wally-um-bump-fizz. OK."

"Now, the Flying Disc--DUNcan gets to throw it high up in the air, but no one else can throw it up high."

"There's a flying disc in Duncanball?"

"Nonononononono! This is the FLY-ing DISC part, not the DUNcanball part! After DUNcanball, we do the FLYing DISC part."

I wrote in a number 5 with an arrow to indicate that the indented bullet point under #4, Duncanball, was actually a new rule. Yes, I did indented bullets for rules with sub-rules--how else does one stay organized when planning the rules for a sleepover birthday party five years in advance?

"OK, next--what number is this?"

"Number six."

"OK, no RULES on the PARty stops."

"No rules on when the party stops?"

"Wait, what?"

"You mean when the party stops?"

"The party doesn't end, Mom, it's a sleepover. It ends at midnight or something." Midnight to Alex is pretty much the same as "Never."

"So there's no rule on when the party stops?"

"Well, there's ONE rule on the party stops, which is 'Don't let the dogs out.' "

"What do the dogs have to do with when the party ends?"

"What?"

"You said the one rule on when the party stops is not to let the dogs out--what do the dogs have to do with the party stopping?"

"Nononono, the PARty STOPS. During the Party Stops, you can't let the dogs out."

I had finally figured out that Party Stops was a plural noun of some sort. "Alex, what are Party Stops?"

"It's when you walk around and look at stuff but don't touch anything, except Duncan can touch stuff."

"Because he's the birthday boy?"

"That's RIGHT!" he smiled. I was as proud of myself for getting that as he was.

"No letting the dogs out during the Party Stops, then."

"Now, the next part is when I will tell everyone to go to the living room for a wrestling match and pillow fight."

"Is that a rule?"

"Um, yeah, they have to do that. And THEN the next part is TV Watching. During the TV Watching, no one should get in the way and no one should be fooling around." Gee, funny how that is exactly what we'd like to tell Alex when it's TV Watching NOT during a sleepover birthday party.

"Next, is Dress Up Time. Duncan gets to do whatEVer he WANTS--fool around, be noisy. The OTHers do NOT. THEN, the last part, is.....aNOTHer wrestling match. Same. Rules. Apply."

"Same rules?"

"Like no fooling around or being noisy and stuff." Of course--can't have fooling around and being noisy during a wrestling match, after all. Though I admit, I would like wrestling in the house a lot more if these rules always applied.

"Then...?"

"Then, that's it. Then it's the sleepover part. Those are all the rules."

"Great! So, you have all your rules. It should be a fun party!"

Through all of this, Duncan was hopping all over, occasionally saying stuff like, "EeeeeeYUP! I'll be the Birthday Boy!" Alex came over, took the paper from me, went back to stand between the dining room and living room and, in stark contrast to Duncan jumping from couch to couch behind him, solemnly explained, "*I* am not going to be doing the stuff. *I* will be standing off on the side....Like when it's Pool Time, I won't go in the pool. I'll be over on the side like this--" Took three steps back from an imaginary pool. "-- and I'll say the TWO pool rules. NO diving, and NO....Hmmmm." He was looking at the paper, and I realized he could in fact read a lot of what I'd written and wasn't seeing a second pool-related rule. "Where's the other Pool Rule? I don't see another Pool Rule!" He brought it over to me and pointed to the tiny print under the diving rule. "What's that say?"

"It says, 'Duncanball.' "

"But no, this right here, under 'No diving in our pool,' what does that say?"

"That says Duncanball--those are all the Duncanball rules. I don't see another pool rule. Should there be another one?"

He studied the paper. "Hmm, I guess not." He walked back around the table to stand in his spot off to the side of the imaginary pool again. "No diving in the pool."

"That's an excellent reading of the rules."

"Aw, thanks, Mom!" And he went to hop around on the couches with his Rules in his hand, chatting with Duncan, while I started to nurse Kayleigh. After a minute or two Alex said, "Hey, Mom, what SEAson is Duncan's birthday?"

"Season?"

"Yeah, like...Is it AFter we're in school, or is it, ummmmm...Yeah, what season?"

"It's in the winter, in February, and yes, you guys are in school then. It's after Christmas. But Alex, do you know which birthday this party is for?"

"Duncan's! It's his sleepover birthday party!"

"But do you know WHICH BIRTHDAY? Duncan, which birthday is this for?

Duncan was spinning in circles. "Whaahh?"

"How old will you be when you have your sleepover birthday party?"

Duncan flopped on the couch and sat up with a big smile. "OH! I will be NINE!"

Alex froze and just gave a quiet, "Oh."

He stayed schluumped for about ten seconds. Poor kid, he's now old enough to get that a four-yr-old's ninth birthday is not right around the corner. I felt bad for him, really. But then he matter-of-factly informed me, "I think it should be when Duncan is, um, Matthew's age. I think that will be good." Matthew is a neighborhood kid who's five--well, he's probably six now, but I'm pretty sure Alex was thinking he was five. He then took to following Duncan around the living room, the two of them on an endless loop stepping across couches even though my Rules when it's not a birthday party don't allow walking on couches. It is, I admit, a rule I only enforce when I can see them doing it and care, but perhaps I should write it down on three-lined paper and let Alex stand-to-the-side and read it out for me. As they pranced and hopped, Alex tried out his fledging skills persuasive speech.

"Duncan, don't you want to be FIVE when it's your Sleepover Birthday Party? Don't you want to be Matthew's age? We can do it when you're Matthew's age! You'll be FIVE, it will be fun. Duncan? DUNcan! Let's do it when you're FIVE, OK? Duncanduncanduncan, can we do it when you're five? ANswer me, Duncan!" All I could think about was that there was no way I'd be done nursing the baby in time to write this all down before we left for Bot's check-up...