Daring Young Mom

On Magoo’s Mind – The Crushing Weight of Monarchical Responsibility

Posted on May 14, 2013 by The Daring One

We’ve been going to Costco for the past 11 years lately and each time we go, we have to get our receipt “checked” by the receipt checking person at the exit. They don’t really check. But they are good with a marker. They look searchingly, even longingly into your eyes, swipe the marker down the receipt, and hand it back to you. Sometimes they mumble, “Have a good day.” Usually they seem to mean it.

I love Costco. They have lunch for $1.50 and ice cream bars as big as your head, if you’re into that sort of thing and… A NEW CAR!

Now if you are under the age of, say, me, and you hand them a receipt, it is unwritten or perhaps written Costco policy that the employee must draw a picture on the back of the receipt, unless you’re that guy in the blue polo shirt who hates fun and the laughter of babies. All other Costco employees will draw a smiley face if Wanda or Laylee or Magoo hands them the receipt.

Over the last 10 years, I’ve seen these drawings escalate to the point that I think you need to have previous experience as a caricature or police sketch artist in order to do the receipt checking at Costco. Lately, they always draw pictures of my actual kids, sometimes with cat ears or a pig nose or holding a balloon, but the pictures have gotten very elaborate.

Today, I was with Wanda and Magoo and we got this:

It is Wanda as a princess, obviously, and Magoo as a prince.

Wanda: Look Magoo! I’m a princess and you’re a prince. It’s so NICE!

Me: Thank you for checking to make sure I got both cartons of free-range brown-because-brown-eggs-make-me-better-than-you eggs listed on my receipt, except, wait, you didn’t look at the front part of the receipt because you were creating the greatest Costco receipt sketch of all time.

Wanda: You’re like a PRINCE!

Magoo (shaking his head and rolling his eyes with an exhausted sigh): If they asked me to be a real prince, I would never do it, and not just because it’s embarrassing. You have to make so many choices about so many things. No way.

So, today, in the parking lot of our fair Costco, Magoo pre-abdicated the throne. I’m not sure what to do about this. He is my only son. But the crushing weight of monarchical responsibility has obviously weighed heavily upon his mind for some time now. He had his answer ready without a moment’s pause. It will not be he who ascends to the Thompson throne. We must seek another.

Posted in around town, Honesty of Children, shopping, What Thompsons Do | 2 Comments

Alright With the Rain

Posted on May 13, 2013 by The Daring One

We were enduring a typical Pacific Northwest underwater baseball practice the other day. I was hunched under my giant umbrella, wearing a slicker, sitting on my Tommy Bahama chair. Wanda, on the other hand, was running around like a maniac through the field, kicking a ball, getting soaked and loving it.

She pulled down the hat on the slicker and just let the rain run off her skin.

“Do you wanna come sit with Mamma?” I asked.

“Mo-om!” she answered, “It’s okay. I’m alright with the rain.”

Sometimes I’m alright with the rain too. Sometimes I can be surrounded by all the junk that’s out there in the world and think, This will pass. I’ll just let it roll off my back. I’m alright with the rain.

Other times, I’m hunched down in a parka with my umbrella, afraid to leave my house, afraid to turn on the TV or Facebook because I just don’t want to hear one more depressing news story. Everything feels too personal. If it happened to her, it might as well have happened to me. I get mired in the false belief that the world is a scary place, that there’s more bad then good.

A friend recently reminded me that the news doesn’t report every time a plane lands. It only reports the crashes. For every hateful or fearful political post on Facebook, there are a billion acts of kindness that slip quietly by. The reality of my life is pretty blissful, if I can learn to be alright with the rain in my periphery, if I can make my heart understand the differences between the things I can change and the things I can’t.

A few days after the baseball practice, Wanda and I were driving in the Swagger Wagon. Suddenly the rain was not okay.

“Mom,” she cried, “There’s rain all over the windows!”

“It’s okay,” I told her, thinking, We live in Seattle. What else is new?

“It’s making me nervous! I don’t like it.”

“The wipers keep the windshield clean so we can see where we’re going.”

“But there’s rain here and here and here,” she said, pointing at the side windows and parts of the windshield the wipers couldn’t touch.

“But the wipers clear off just enough that I can drive safely and get us where we need to go. It’s gonna be okay.”

“But I want all the rain to go away.”

“Well that’s not going to happen until the sun comes out.”

“When is the sun coming?” she asked.

“I don’t know, Sweets. I don’t know. But for now we’ll be fine.”

I truly don’t know when ALL the rain will go away or when the sun will come but I do know it will and until it does, I know that enough of the rain will be cleared away. I can see enough to get where I need to go. And, we’re doing just fine.

Posted in get serious, weather | 3 Comments

Day of Moms

Posted on May 12, 2013 by The Daring One

Dan made breakfast for breakfast and breakfast for dinner. They made me presents at school and I set up the hammock Dan bought me right in the middle of the living room so it wouldn’t get rained on.

We read stories on it all morning, mostly Mo Willems. Wanda’s turn. Then Wanda’s turn. Then Wanda’s turn. Then Magoo.

He said, “My turn,” handing me a copy of Hooray for Amanda and Her Alligator.

“Do you want me to read this book to you?”

He cuddled up sheepishly.

“I wasn’t really listening when you read it to Wanda.”

Love that boy. Love them all. Mother’s Day morning makes me want to have babies forever. And then Mother’s Day afternoon and evening make me want to throw them all in the brig and drink things Mormons really shouldn’t drink.

But Dan’s putting them away and I’m back on the hammock, remembering the good morning vibe and the sweetness and knowing that every morning comes with a reset button and more breakfast.

I hope your Mother’s Day was lovely!

Posted in all about me, holidays | Leave a comment

Wherein One of My Wildest Parenting Fantasies is Fulfilled on Mothers’ Day Eve Courtesy of Martin Scorsese

Posted on May 11, 2013 by The Daring One

Some Mothers’ Day gifts are planned. A hand squished in cement and bejeweled with fish tank marbles. A scarf. The hammock you texted a picture of to your husband and he asked if it was lame if you picked it up while you were at Costco. (You said “no” because you really wanted the hammock and you’d really rather spend the night canoodling with your husband rather than sending him back into town to buy the item that you were standing right next to earlier that day.)

But some gifts come unexpectedly.

Tonight, we finally watched the movie Hugo and it lead to one of my wildest parenting fantasies coming to fruition.

I studied film in school. I initially had hopes of becoming a screenwriter or director, possibly even a cinematographer, but when I took my first documentary film class, I was hooked. I could imagine nothing more wonderful than making films about the beauty of real life, about actual human experience. My Hollywood dreams melted away and I settled into a burning passion for all things non-fiction, if there is such a thing in filmmaking.

This doesn’t mean I wasn’t more than happy to act as script supervisor for the occasional student vampire flick, or fumble my way through being key grip on an all-female crew woman power film, the plot of which I’ve long forgotten. I loved movies in all forms, especially fascinated by documentary and early film.

After graduation, I took a job at a public library with a gigantic, I mean truly remarkable, film and music collection. I was in heaven, every day working amongst the greatest films ever made, and Tommy Boy. I got to help develop programs to teach people about film history or a certain unknown-to-the-public-but-staggeringly-brilliant foreign film director.

I once led a man on a several month journey of film discovery, culminating in handing him what I believe to be one of the greatest films ever produced, sure to lead you to a place of self-discovery and religious transformation. When he returned the film, he brought it to me personally, with a thank you note. One day I’ll show that film to my kids, but they’ll need to work up to it. And Scooby-Doo ain’t gonna get them there.

I left the job after Laylee was born and have let the film world slowly drift away. There is more of Disney than Errol Morris or Zhang Yimou in my collection now. And for the past 7 years, struggling off and on with crippling anxiety and panic disorder, my film searches now have more to do with content than craft. Too many images I’ve seen in the past have become the raw materials for my waking postpartum nightmares.

But, I’ve always wanted to share my love of filmmaking with my kids. I keep a copy of Landmarks of Early Film, a collection of the first moving pictures ever captured and I think, One day my kids will appreciate these. One day I’ll show them Lumière brothers’ actualities and tell them about how and why they were made and they’ll be as captivated as my audiences of three at my public library programs. One day, they will beg to see A Trip to the Moon or anything starring Harold Lloyd.

I’ve brought the DVD out a couple of times and it’s been like a kale and turnips fiesta. You can make us eat it but you can’t make us like it.

Then tonight we watched Hugo, a quiet film about an orphan and a robot and a whole lot of film history, and when it was over, Laylee and Magoo were begging me to watch A Trip to the Moon and the Lumière actualities and listening with rapt attention as I spouted my rusty film history knowledge. They were AMAZED that I knew this stuff! They were thrilled that I owned these movies. They interrupted our family scripture study three times to explain new ways we could do our own special effects with Méliès-style editing.

It was an almost out of body experience for me, something akin to Wanda suddenly asking Dan to tell her all about how to write code… and soaking it up like he was the genius that he is… and then trying to write her own code all the way through family scripture time.

It was like Dan had paid them to do this for me, so I could cross one huge unimaginable thing off my parenting bucket list… and then they had suddenly transformed into the world’s greatest thespians and pulled it off. Now, tomorrow for actual Mothers’ Day, they can clog the toilet because they used it ten times without flushing, tell me to kiss off with their piercing eye daggers, and fight about a lollipop… because… MINE. You know? The usual.

I guess I want to thank Martin Scorsese for making a film to help me bridge the gap with my kids, to make them hungry to learn about one of my long lost passions, to transform the turnips into chocolate. I want to thank him for one of the best Mothers’ Day gifts ever.

Posted in all about me, family fun, film, What Thompsons Do | 6 Comments

I Am Thankful for Fish

Posted on March 25, 2013 by The Daring One

Remember back in January when I got my trash kicked by a group of 3-year-olds at church? Well, the following week Dan and I had a planning meeting, aimed at finding a way to take the power back… in love, of course.

And with a few changes, things got better quickly.

Each week we do a camp-song-style roll call at the beginning of class, putting magnets on the board with each of the kids’ pictures. We also put their pictures on the backs of their chairs so there’s no need to wrestle for position, climbing over the chairs or picking them up and smacking each other over the head with them, in pro wrestler fashion.

We also let them choose the agenda. We put pictures on the board of all the activities we can do during our hour together and then they decide as a class what order we’ll do them in. They always choose to have snack first. And then they always choose to never have a lesson. So when “Lesson” is the only card left, Dan and I slip it in near the top and teach them while they’re eating and any other chance we get. You could call it sneak teaching.

Well things have started to go so well that this Sunday I was bragging to a friend, snapping my fingers around like a diva, “Oh, Sunbeams? We’ve got Sunbeams down.”

Even if there’s not a reality TV camera following you around, never snap your fingers like a diva and say, “I got this” regarding something that’s fully dependent on a gaggle of preschoolers cooperating with you in any way.

Cue the worst week we’ve had since week one. During sharing time, one little boy pulled up my skirt and nestled himself underneath it like a tent. As I awkwardly extracted him from my nether regions, attempting not to flash the entire room, he pulled back with a huff and then slammed his head forward, crashing it into my knee.

I pulled him up onto my lap and comforted him while the rest of the kids melted down all around us. He kept saying, “I need to go talk to my dad. I just have to tell him one thing. Please let me go talk to my dad and tell him one thing.” Well, his dad was busy and I figured he could wait and tell him after class. Eventually I asked, “What do you need to go tell your dad?”

“I need to tell him how you hit me in the face.”

Yes you do.

So, the day continued with much crying, screaming, jumping, tattling, refusal to participate, refusal to NOT participate even though it wasn’t their turn, and even a moment where my own personal 3-year-old was fake crying so loudly, I turned to my husband and said, “We should take her to her parents.”

We made it through and we still loved them, more in a You-Are-All-Children-Of-God kind of way, than a I-Wish-You-All-Lived-At-My-House kind of way.

That was yesterday. But then this morning, we had a last minute shift in our non-church-related play group that consists of essentially the same group of kids and subsequently four of them did end up playing at my house all morning.

Things went fine until about five minutes before parent pickup, when they suddenly got way too quiet in the other room. I entered to find them gathered around the fish bowls, where our Bettas “live”.

One was missing.

“Where did the fish go, you guys?”

Blank stares.

I looked all around. There was water on the sofa table and on the couch. That’s when I noticed that the red fish had magically migrated to the bowl with the blue fish. They hadn’t discovered each other yet, at least not enough to start devouring each other, so I grabbed the net and spent 5 minutes chasing them around until I could move them back into separate living quarters.

“How did the fish get into the other bowl?” I asked.

They all said a name, the name of the tiniest kid in the group, a kid who isn’t nearly strong enough to pick up one of those bowls full of water and pour the fish into the other bowl.

“How did you do it?” I asked him.

“I just grabbed it with my hand,” he grinned.

At least now I know who I’d want to be stranded on a desert island with. The fish grabbing kid. Have you ever watched Survivor, where they swim around with full fishing gear, harpoons, masks, nets, and traps and can’t catch a piece of seafood to save their lives? I am like those losers. Five minutes it takes me to nab one of my fish with a net. This kid? 30 seconds alone and BAM! He grabs the fish like Danielson chopsticking a fly.

Two weeks ago, our lesson in church was “I am Thankful for Fish,” and we took our little fish in a jar and learned about Jonah and sushi and loaves and fishes. We passed around the jar until they started shaking it like Darla. They LOVED THE FISHY! I guess this little boy really took the lesson to heart. He wanted the fish to be free to play with its cannibalistic friend. At least my little friend didn’t eat the fish, or put it on land to see if it was amphibious.

According to our class, Jesus is amphibious. He is amphibious because he can go on land and on water. He is also amphibious because I asked them to name some amphibious creatures and, odds are, if I ask them a question at church, nine times out of ten, Jesus is the right answer.

Posted in shish | 13 Comments

Life at the Moo-zeum

Posted on March 24, 2013 by The Daring One

I would go to a different museum every day if that’s what it took to get Wanda to keep saying “Moo-zeum” in her cute little gravelly voice. Doing this, however, would require planning, hopefully on the part of someone other than me. Lately we’ve been compelled by external forces toward museums around Seattle and that suits me just fine. Point me in the direction of a cultural experience and I’m there.

Most recently Target hosted us at The Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience in Chinatown in Seattle. Did I know there was a Chinatown in Seattle? No, although I had my suspicions. Did I know there was a museum there with a really long name? No, I did not.

But someone at Target was persistent enough to keep emailing me about a blogging event there until I actually read the email and realized it would be a cool way for my family to spend a Saturday, eating Chinese food and learning about experiences of people from other cultures.

“What if you were born in China?” I asked the kids as we drove across the bridge on Lake Washington in our borrowed Prius. The Swag Wag was in the shop.

“Hmmm…”

“Your spirit could have been born into a body in Japan or Korea. Isn’t that interesting to think about?”

Fuel-efficient crickets chirped.

“Well, stop reading and look at stuff.”

When we arrived, Dan breathed in deeply and wondered aloud if all Chinatowns everywhere smelled the same. He liked the smell. It reminded him of Chinatown in New York City where he served a two-year mission for our church. The kids fell immediately in love with the red and gold fish painted on the poles under the overpass, the dragons clinging to the street signs.

The museum sucked me in pretty much immediately. It’s a gorgeous space, thoughtfully designed with ever-changing exhibits created by committees of volunteers from the community. There is no curator at the Wing, something you would not guess by visiting it.

We snagged a few freebies from Target, who treated us to lunch and told us about the work they’re doing to give back to communities. I already knew they donate a bucket load of money to schools, but wasn’t aware of all the community groups and non-profits they partner with. Every third Saturday since 2008, they’ve partnered with the Wing to offer Free Family Day on the third Saturday of each month.

This Saturday it included a paper-making/collage activity with plenty of water and mayhem to keep my people engaged. When they mentioned that they do summer camps, I was seriously tempted. If it weren’t a million miles from my house, I would seriously consider it. A little multi-cultural immersion would serve my people well. Our town is rather monochromatic.

Honestly, it’s thrilled me this year that Magoo’s teacher comes from another part of the world and has taken a lot of time to share with them about her country and culture. He is mildly obsessed with her background.

When we learn about differences, the otherness of those we encounter, we inevitably circle back to the realization that we have more in common than we thought, that although each person and culture is unique, our stories share threads that bind us together in this human experience.

My kids enjoyed the scavenger hunt and the version of pin the tail on the donkey that played a lot like pin the facial features on the Asian Mr. Potato Head. They were inserted into dragons.

They bought ceramic cranes and lace fans and tried to get out of eating Chinese vegetables the same way they would work to avoid American ones.

I don’t know that it was a deep or profound cultural experience for any of them. But it was fun. And it made the otherness of the Asian American experience slightly less “other”. I’d call it a success.

Posted in Random | 2 Comments