When Your Biological Clock Goes Off, Sometimes You Should Hit the Snooze Button

(It’s August and Tuesday so here’s something from the archives. I remembered it after I read 7 Signs It’s Time to Have a Second Child on Baby Center. The author of “7 Signs”, Mommy Shorts, says it sparked some controversy. I say, if you don’t think “7 Signs” is funny, you shouldn’t have a first kid, never mind a second one.)

It must be a trend. Three people have told me recently that they’re trying to figure out if they’re ready to have kids. One of them is barely more than a kid, herself, so I hope she decides to wait awhile. The other two are both in their thirties, so I suppose they’re thinking that time is running out, but I hope they take a while to think about it in spite of the time crunch.

One mentioned having kids in the same conversation in which she mentioned that they were going to have their cat declawed. This is a cat that they adopted from the Humane Society as kind of a trial run for having a baby. She and her husband, Stewart, fell in love with this little black and white scrap of fur the minute they saw it and have been giving us goofy updates ever since.

I get calls from Donna on her cell phone on her way to work, to let me know that Cleo is so clever that she can turn on the faucet in the bathroom sink. She is so smart that she fetches her catnip mouse when Stewart throws it for her. She’ll only eat one kind of cat food and has to have her water bowl refilled every time she drinks from it.

Of course, this is the same kind of information overflow that you get with new parents, although maybe without the catnip mouse, and I thought it was a good sign for their future parenthood that they were so enthralled by this fur-baby. But then, when she was about four months old, Cleo started clawing the furniture. Suddenly, she wasn’t so cute or appealing.

Donna asked my advice, which is funny if you’ve ever seen the woodwork next to my sliding glass door. Thanks to my cat, Benny, who ignores sixty acres of scratching posts disguised as trees but never fails to scratch the door trim on his way out, the wood looks like a fast food restaurant for porcupines. We’ve tried everything to get him to stop, but nothing has worked over the six years that we’ve had him. No way would I give him away, so I just put up with it.

Not so, Donna and Stewart. Cleo was wrecking the arm of their couch and also scratching the leg of their dining table, so they talked it over and decided that Cleo’s front claws would have to go. When Donna told me, I counted to ten and then asked her if she knew what declawing a cat involves. She said it was like taking off their fingernails and they were asleep when it was done, so it didn’t hurt them.

I informed her that it does hurt and it’s not just taking off their fingernails (although I wonder how Donna would like hers pulled off.) It’s more like removing your fingers up to your elbow. I referred her to this website where you can find out everything you need to know if you’re thinking of having your cat declawed, hoping that she’d be more receptive to reading an expert’s opinion. Then, having negotiated that minefield, she moved on to the even dicier subject of whether I thought she was ready to have kids.

I confess. I waffled. I said I really couldn’t give that sort of advice, because it’s such a personal decision, but I did say that – if she and Stewart were upset enough to declaw a cat for wrecking the furniture – maybe they should really think about what their reaction would be to 18 years of what kids do to furniture, walls, your best white blouse, your ability to get a whole night’s sleep and complete a sentence.

I think she thought I was being facetious and we didn’t talk long after that. After we hung up, I thought of all the other ways you can tell if you’re ready for kids – not that we’re ever really ready for kids until after we’ve raised ours and have grandchildren. I think these are the questions people should ask themselves when they’re thinking of having kids.

First, of course, is “Would I declaw a cat?” If the answer to that is “yes”, probably the only kind of kids you should have are Cabbage Patch Kids. Ask yourself some questions that reveal whether you’re too selfish to be a parent. Do you always take the biggest piece of cake? Do you ever get up in the morning and worry about someone else before you’ve had your first cup of coffee? If you use your husband’s car, do you gas it up for him so he won’t have to do it?

Next, how much of a control freak are you? Control of your life is the first thing you lose when you have a kid. They have to come first, because they have NO control over their lives. They’re completely dependent on you for everything, which isn’t as attractive as it sounds when it’s three o’clock in the morning, your infant is screaming, your husband is throwing up in the bathroom with a stomach bug, your stomach feels queasy and you have a really important meeting the next morning with your boss and the people from Cleveland whose account you need to get to secure that raise or maybe even your job. If your main worry here would be your job, wait awhile to have kids.

How good are you at rolling with the punches, being spontaneous and thinking on the fly? Can you tell someone that their pet goldfish swam off into the ocean via the toilet bowl? With a straight face? Can you shop without a list with headphones on playing talk radio at full blast and with a monkey jumping in and out of your cart and pulling things off shelves? That’s a rough approximation of how you’ll be shopping for at least ten years if you have a kid.

These are just some of the questions you should ask yourself and your partner before you add the patter of little feet (that will need two pairs of shoes a year at around fifteen bucks a pop for almost two decades.) And even if you’re sure that none of the above phases you in the least, before you start marking fertile days on the calendar, there’s one more thing you should do.

Sit down with your partner and play twelve straight games of Candyland, Hi-Ho Cherry-o, or Sorry while simultaneously watching Barney, Dora or Blue’s Clues. Then take a break and have a big bowl of that radioactive-yellow macaroni and cheese from a box with a glass of cherry Kool-Aid to wash it down. If it stays down, you’re ready for a kid. (If you find yourself saying, Delicioso, or saying, “Swiper! No swiping!”while tapping your husband’s hand when he reaches for more, you’re ready to open a daycare.)

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Posted in family life, having kids, humor | 4 Comments

My $25,000 Antique Alarm Clock

alarm clockMy neighbor, Bill, dropped in the other day in a bit of a swivet. He’d been to the bank and had a sorry tale to tell.

“I almost got arrested,” he said, as I poured him a cup of coffee, “And I’m beginning to think that Willie Sutton had the right idea on how to treat banks.”

Rummaging around in my mental filing cabinet, I found Willie Sutton under “B” for bank robber. He was the man who said – when asked why he robbed banks – that he did it because “that’s where the money is.” Bill is about as law-abiding as my friends and neighbors get, so I didn’t think he was the bank robbing type.

“I simply wanted to cash a check,” Bill went on, “It was drawn on their bank, so I went up to the teller and signed the back of the check and told her I’d like it in large bills. She said, ‘That’ll be $7.50′ and that was the first hint that me and this bank weren’t going to be on each other’s Christmas card list.”

I had heard that the banking laws had changed, but I had no idea that they were now charging for checks drawn on their bank. I mean, what’s the point of going to their bank to cash it? Although, come to think of it, the charge to cash a check NOT drawn on the bank you’re trying to cash it at is probably even higher.

“The teller told me I could avoid the charge by opening a free checking account, but I don’t want another stinking checking account, so I told her that and then I told her that I was cashing the check and I wasn’t paying seven-fifty,” Bill went on, his eyes flashing sparks. It was clear that he was channeling Willie Sutton and possibly a couple of the James Gang here. If I was a teller I think my toe would be reaching for the panic button on the floor if I was confronted by Bill in this mood.

“So, did she cash it?” I asked.

“She said she had to check her list of approved accounts, and if the check’s issuer was on it, she’d waive the fee. So I told her to check the list and if the issuer was approved, give me my money. And if it wasn’t approved, give me my check back so I could take it to a bank that doesn’t gouge people.”

“She came back, smirking, and said it wasn’t on the list, but she could try putting it through anyway and I told her to do that. Que sorpresa! It turned out that it was approved, even though it wasn’t listed and she gave me my money and I left, but I was steaming, I’ll tell you.”

“So was it a local company?” I asked.

Bill gave me the look of a man whose biscuits were burnt right to charcoal.

“I’ll say it’s local! It’s the jeezly state of Maine or one of their agencies that I did some work for.”

Bill left and I pondered the subject of banks until my mind drifted back to an incident that led to my having the antique, $25,000 alarm clock mentioned in the title. It all started way back in the mists of time, about three years after Geekdaddy and I got hitched. We were  childless. I was working for a well-known crystal jewelry firm, weighing and handing out precious metal, and the geek was repairing Volkswagens in our yard. Neither of us was making more than minimum wage, we were mortgaged up to the hilt and things were getting fraught, financially speaking. So much so that I insisted that the geek give up his beloved habit of buying a scratch ticket every time he went to the local convenience store, which he seemed to have to do at least once a day.

He promised he would, but he wasn’t too happy about it. One day, just before lunchtime, he showed up at the jewelry factory and asked them to buzz me out of the locked room I worked in. They weren’t happy about having employee’s spouses show up during working hours and I wasn’t happy to see him either, figuring that he was just stopping by to show me some stupid car part he picked up at a junkyard or something equally trivial. Instead, he handed me a paperback book and said, “Open it to where it’s bookmarked.”

I did and there was a scratch ticket where you could win $25,000 if you scratched off six 6′s and that’s just what he’d done. Well, I’m one of those slow reactors who register things just fine on the surface, but underneath, my mind is slowly turning over the ramifications, so I cussed him out for breaking his promise, told him to let me have the ticket and go home and we’d talk about it later. And we did. At length. I even forgave him for breaking his promise. (I was famous for being magnanimous even then.) Then we borrowed enough money for gas from my brother (we were flat broke at the time) and drove down to lottery headquarters, picked up the check and drove straight to a local bank to deposit it and get some money to make it through the weekend.

It was Fleet Bank and the folks were really cordial. They said we’d have to open an account to deposit the check into and offered us a choice of a toaster, a mixer or an alarm clock. We opted for the alarm clock, because we didn’t have one. We didn’t have a toaster or a mixer either, but we seemed to manage fine without them. Without an alarm clock, sometimes I barely made it to work on time. So we signed the paperwork, signed the check, opened the account and got a few temporary checks and I wrote one out for a hundred dollars and handed it to the manager, who had taken care of all this.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, “I can’t give you any money until the check clears, which will take 3 business days. Today being Friday, that’ll be next Wednesday or Thursday, depending. But you can have the clock now.”

“But the check is drawn on the state of Rhode Island,” I said, “You can’t trust the state to cover its checks?

The bank manager shrugged.

“Well, if we let them slide, next it’d be the local towns and then the local businesses and pretty soon, everyone would be kiting paper and we’d be looking at banks failing left and right. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”

We left with the clock, shell-shocked but happy that we’d won enough money to pay off our mortgage and get us solvent. We looked at that clock a lot that weekend, as we ate macaroni and cheese and hot dogs and drained gas from junk VW’s to get me to work on Monday. It’s a really nice clock. It’s made by Sony and is called a Dream Machine. It plays “Ode to Joy” for the alarm and has a light, although the light button got knocked off at some point. It even has a radio, although we never use it. The plastic face got cracked when a cat jumped off the bed and kicked the clock with its back feet. But it still sits on my bedside table and every year, when I change the battery in it, I think of how we got our $25,000 clock, and of how it was a “wake-up” call for me on the state of the banking industry in this country. I’m even more alarmed about the whole banking biz now.

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Sex Ed – Coming to a Restaurant Near You

(Warning: This is a little racier than my usual stuff, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.)

Has anyone ever asked you how your kid is going to learn about sex if they don’t go to school? Well, several people have asked me that and now they’ll get an answer. Mind you, I think it’s a pretty stupid question, because the human race managed to keep itself stocked just fine way before there were schools, so the little nippers must have been learning about the birds and the bees somehow. But now, apparently, we don’t feel capable of explaining  how to reproduce and, more importantly, how not to reproduce, and also what all of that has to do with love, respect, responsibility and all like that.

Well, at least in my case, my restaurant karma, which you may remember from a couple of other posts here and there, brought sex education right into the dinner table conversation, just like they tell you to do in those public service announcements on TV.  By the time we were done, we just about had to hide our heads under the tablecloth and my tendency to snicker when served with breadsticks, which I acquired during my other restaurant visit with the two salesmen who were discussing how to “enlarge your proboscis naturally” with diagrams they drew on napkins, had progressed to any “stick” shaped food. But back to the lesson.

We were sitting in a local restaurant, right next to a table where four Canadian women were just being seated as we ordered. Daughter was trying to decide whether she wanted an iced tea or a raspberry iced tea, which seemed to be on a par with China deciding whether or not to devalue its currency, only a little more complicated. I was trying to find something that didn’t have a nickname like “Bunyan-sized” or “Belly-buster.” Our neighbors to the North (do they still call Canadians that in social studies? do they even HAVE social studies any more?) were discussing the relative merits of drinks before dinner or drinks with dinner or, maybe even, drinks with dessert, one of them said boldly. There was much snickering and trips down memory lane to other occasions when “Barb had that coconut drink and we didn’t know it was triple strength and the waiter was so nice about his  mustache getting singed and his zipper getting stuck halfway.”

Finally, they all agreed that they’d just start with a couple of shots before dinner, go with beer with their meals and maybe have a little sweet wine with dessert. I should have left at that point, but Daughter had finally decided she’d just have water and I had found a menu item in the “good for you” category, which meant that it had fewer than 600 calories. Actually, it said, “less than 600 calories” but I automatically translate “less” into “fewer” thanks to my 4th grade English teacher, who drummed the whole “fewer if you can count it” and “less if you can weigh it” mantra into my head, where it stuck and won’t get out unlike other more useful mantras like “don’t put the kettle on and go outside just for a minute” or “check your bank statement before you write that check”, but I digress.

Daughter and I were having our usual restaurant conversation which consists mostly of her saying how hungry she is and me saying why don’t you eat a roll and her saying that she’d be too full to eat her food if she ate a roll, when the ladies next to us all let out a huge bray of laughter that made us look over at them. They were all very red in the face, so I figured the shots had done their work, but then Barb, who seemed to be the most highly charged of this group of live wires, said, “But how do you BOTH use it? Don’t you kind of have to hook up to it?”

I was starting to have a suspicion that they weren’t talking about installing software and the next round of conversation proved it when they went into very graphic detail about what we’ll euphemistically call a very advanced marital aid with, er, how shall I put this? Well, let’s just say that if it was a video game, and there probably will be one of these out at some point if there isn’t already, it would be a two-player game with dual controllers.

By this time, Daughter and I were both very red in the face and hardly knew where to look. Every time I looked over at her, she burst into wild laughter and the same thing happened to me when she looked at me. Now, we’re not prudes, either one of us. But she IS 13 and says “eeeuuww” whenever things get too racy in movies or on TV or at the mall. She doesn’t like “people who are falling out of their clothes” or “people mauling each other in public” either. And, I guess we could add “people talking about sex toys in restaurants” to that list, at least for her. Me, I was getting an education. I’m 59, but my motto is that  you’re never too old to learn. I’m an auto-didact, which has nothing to do with anything kinky, by the way. Well, unless you’re learning something kinky. Oh, just look it up. More digression. I’ll try to stay on topic here.

We got our food and started to eat, although we were thinking maybe that was a risky thing to do in view of the choking issue when you’re laughing like two hyenas. The ladies, who all looked like either schoolteachers or librarians or maybe school librarians, got their food and one of them, probably Barb but I didn’t quite catch which one it was, motioned to her plate of spaghetti and they were all off into gales of laughter again. I was hoping Daughter wouldn’t look over at the arrangement of meatballs and a sausage, but she did and then we were off again. I was starting to feel like an 8th grader, back when anything to do with sex or bodily functions was hilarious because it was so scary and unlikely sounding and forbidden. Then I realized that – if anything like this had happened to me and my mother when I was 13 – she probably would have gone over and whacked Barb with her purse, given her a Bible tract and then come back and whacked me up-side the head for listening.

Luckily for my daughter, I’m not that kind of mom. I did kind of try to distract her when the conversation next door got even more x-rated as the drinks kicked in. By the time they got to dessert and the wine that went with it, even the waiter was blushing and she had tattoos, a green Mohawk and a shirt that would have made a nice belt if there had been a little more of it. Daughter was jotting down terms to look up when she got home … Oh no wait; that was me!

We decided to forego dessert and left just as Barb was getting up to show the folks at the next table “the flamenco dance I did in Barcelona last winter, when I fell on top of that drummer and just about busted his c******… ” I won’t tell you what Daughter and I thought Barb said, but I will tell you that the term for a small drum used in flamenco music is spelled “cajon” in case you’re wondering, and Barb pronounced it plurally, so I guess she broke at least two of them. The poor man. I wonder if it ended his musical career? It’s hard to make beautiful music with busted cajones, I would imagine.

Anyway, believe me, I’ve only touched the surface of the conversation we overheard here. There was much more about how to get pregnant, how not to get pregnant, how to seduce husbands away from their Blackberries at 3 a.m. (yeah, there’s an app for that and Barb has it) and how to avoid sleeping on, um, damp sheets and how they get damp. (Pouring a glass of water over an unresponsive mate will do it every time. Ask Barb.) Daughter and I are considering giving up restaurants for a while, or maybe just picking up takeout for our once-a-week treats. Which reminds me of something Barb said about her sex life, but I promised I won’t digress any more and I won’t.

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