Signs of Mommyhood

There are many signs of motherhood.

Today you can tell I’m a mom because I have one green finger and one pink finger. This is what happens when you are dyeing a few more eggs on Saturday before Easter and those silly little scoop things fails to pick up the newly dyed egg from it’s vinegar scented bath. When I saw the look on my child’s face, the look that said “AAAAHHHH MY EGG IS FALLING,” I was forced to dive into action, leaving me slightly more colorful in the process.

Another sign of motherhood is goldfish debris. I don’t think I ever ate a goldfish cracker until I had children. Now I’m more aware of the level of the goldfish supply in our house than I am of the Dow Jones Industrial Average on Wall Street. I have to admit it comes in handy - f I’m ever not sure I’m in the right car, I just have to check for a slight crackery smell and the tell-tale orange fragments in the back seat.

My socks are another sign. Ever since I foolishly let my daughter raid my sock drawer, I have stopped having matching socks. This happens because I caved when I was in a hurry, and it was going to be dark, and who looks down anyway, and I wore the spotted one with the stripped one. That was it. It was over. Now I’m trapped in a perpetually mismatched sock laundry cycle. There’s no way out, short of buying new socks and hiding them in my purse. (By the way, I don’t recommend this approach because it’s awkward when you’re in the grocery check-out lane fumbling for your wallet, and the socks fall out. You know right then the clerk is wondering if they should alert security or simply look away. Consider yourself warned.)

Another sign of motherhood is the sheer number of things I carry out of the car every single time we get home from going anywhere. It’s as if an explosion goes off every time we get in the car. I can enter the car with two fairly small children and a purse, and moments later I’ll exit carrying three partially crumpled food bags, four water bottles, discarded shoes, a mismatched pair of socks, a book, and a small pile of broken goldfish.

Still, I wear the signs of motherhood proudly. After all, it’s the best part of my life in many ways. Although I have to confess, I’m glad sandal weather is right around the corner.

I Got Nothin'

I have no idea what to write about this week. I knew this would happen, when we’d finally have a fairly ordinary weekend and nothing funny would have happened and I’d be scrambling for something amusing to say.

Sure, there was the truck we saw pulling out of Bucee’s hauling a trailer loaded with about a dozen port a johns. Such a sight can never go by without comment amongst the Prosapio, of course, and we immediately started shouting out possible collective noun options – was that a passel of potties?  A jumble of johns? Or a port-a-posse?

Funny, sure. But trust me; a teetering trailer of toilets is not enough to build a column on.

Then there was the day when I realized that I can’t travel with another group of adults without resorting to embarrassing parenting behavior. I’m not just talking about throwing my arm out to keep someone safe when we come to a sudden stop, either (although that’s pretty bad). I’m talking about encouraging grown adults to use the “facilities” because it’s a long way to the next stop.

But that’s barely a paragraph! I’ve still got nothing!

Unless you count the time when we were in the checkout line and we were bantering with one another about something when suddenly Sierra stopped and looked at me and said “Do you ever notice that we are the only ones talking in check out lines?”

Yes, honey. Actually I have. Not that that stops us, apparently, much to the dismay of long suffering retail employees everywhere.

Then there’s the moment when I’m trying to write my column at the eleventh hour and in a total state of PANIC when some little person comes up because she hasn’t been able to sleep. And a tiny part of me is hoping something funny will come up while we’re trying to work through the things that have kept her up, fretting about band practice.

Nada! The entire experience was completely without value as humor column fodder! It’s all I can do to refrain from shouting WORK WITH ME, PEOPLE!

 Granted, we watched a couple of amusing YouTube videos, but what good was that? It’s not like anyone wants to read about the video where the woman laughs for five minutes because she’s making swishy faces with her computer program. But if you have a minute, you really should watch it, it was hysterical.

Because, frankly folks, I got nothing.

Number Please. PLEASE

Lame. Lame. Lame.

It was a pretty ordinary day. I was trying to make a call on my landline phone when after a few frustrating moments, I realized something. This phone is dumb.  Really, really dumb.

To be fair, I wasn’t helping. I was trying to dial too fast and entered in the wrong phone number over and over. But there was no way to go back and correct the final number 3 when I meant to hit the number 6. When I did it again, that’s when it hit me. Here’s this piece of technology that is three times the size of my cell phone, has been around for 50 years more, and they still haven’t thought to add an erase key to the thing.  Talk about resting on your laurels!

Granted, I should manage to dial correctly, but would it kill landline phone manufacturers  to add an erase key so I didn’t have to redial  ten numbers? We’re not exactly talking about sequencing the human genome, here.

I had to face facts  -  my phone dialing skills have severely atrophied since everyone in my life is on speed dial.  It’s part of the downside to our smarty pants phones.  My phone may be completely destroying my ability to not just dial, but to read maps, memorize strings of numbers, or remember faces if they haven’t been added to my phone’s address book.

As a matter of fact, don’t tell her, but I’m not even sure what my own mother’s phone number is because I never dial it, I just ask my phone to call her. These days  I  ask my phone all kinds of things. She (yes, she) answers silly questions like “how much wood would a wood chuck chuck?” and “what is the airspeed of an unladed swallow?”  She stores way too much information and has enough computing power to send a man to the moon, and yet is perfectly satisfied with letting me play scrabble for an hour.

Our daughters have always lived in a world where phones didn’t just sit there and wait to ring or to dial out. Their phones have been personal assistants, music machines, game consoles, and cameras. I have a feeling our landline phone won’t be one of the things we pass down to them. 

But it will make a good conversation piece about the days when we used to have to get the number perfectly right or else end up talking to the Comal County Sheriff’s Department.

I’m just saying…