Broken by Summer Break

We've been in the throes of summer break for roughly 168 hours. My oldest has spent 150 of those hours fighting, arguing and complaining.

I find myself having frequent out of body experiences due to the stress. I envision Calgon commercials. I try to envision myself sitting on a mountain top dispensing wisdom to other mothers in crisis - trying to take something useful away from this with me. I think the only thing I'll end up with is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

I just had Mommy Talk (tm) with my oldest. I thought I was going to get a lot of Mommy Points (tm) today. He started complaining when I asked him to GET DRESSED. (Oh the injustice!!!) It's the 7th day in a row he's thrown a snit when asked to get dressed. (This is only one of seventy snits he throws each day for various things he's asked to do).

I put a show on for the littles and Will went with me to the porch swing. I thought, we'll talk rationally on the porch swing. I'll treat him the way I'd treat an adult - having a conversation with him, giving feedback, blah, blah. I will use the time with him to call him out and remind him that I'm not fooled by his bullshit. He needs to be reminded that I know what's going on in his head because he lets some really scary things rattle around inside that head of his.

Spending about 25 minutes in lecture mode, I emerged energized and happy. I had shared my wisdom with him. He was going to change and be happier. (Because honestly, the biggest heartbreak for me is seeing him dwelling on his unhappiness every moment of the day. How truly sad I am for him and for this choice he is making. It's pretty frightening too because I know that this thought pattern is just what the devil will use to make his adolescence a living hell). But onward -

Thirty seconds after my brilliant talk was over, my middle son, Mr. Cubby emerged from the house. The show had ended and he announced he was going to check the chicken eggs. A complaining groan issued immediately from Will's body. I quickly dismissed it as an old habit dying hard. I knew my last 25 minutes had not been spent in vain. Woo hoo. They could work TOGETHER gathering the eggs. Will now understood that I loved him just the same as I loved his brother so now, being equal in my eyes, they would live in harmony.

Red flags flew all over the place in the next 67 seconds. I told Will to go and work together with Mr. Cubby. Will bolted from his seat next to me and shoved his feet into his muck boots while Cubby was still trying to carefully tuck his feet into his boots. Will leaped from the porch steps and hit the sidewalk at a run.

"Come on, Cubby," he shouted. "Let's feed my rabbit first."

Mr. Cubby to his credit, is used to living with Will and his pathological need to be first and to micromanage every moment of the day and so Cubby followed as quickly as he could without complaint. I heard them in the rabbit house and things seemed fine enough. Then their voices faded as the two made their way to the chicken house. I listened for what I was now sure was inevitable.

And then it happened.

Mr. Cubby yelled the angriest yell he could muster. "Will. Stop. It." I was crushed - even though I knew what was coming I still hoped Will would control himself. Shortly after Will emerged from the chicken house with a triumphant spring in his step. Mr. Cubby followed in tears.

The two of them stepped up to me on the porch for judgement.

I have to stop at this point and explain what happened for those who don't have pathological children. Will loves to prove me wrong. He loves to be right at the expense of me and his dad. Sometimes he's open to love and tries really hard to do the right thing. Sometimes these talks I have with him are productive. But as often as they are productive, they fail. So now, I had two boys standing in front of me and Will's mission had been accomplished. I had just told him that I loved him as much as Cubby. He went to the chicken house as a "helper" and emerged as the bossy pants bully who gathered all the eggs himself and chose which eggs to give to his little brother. He didn't let Cubby have any say in what happened. Will led when he was supposed to follow and he led very selfishly.

And he stood before me now wanting me to "prove it." He wanted me to prove my love for him by letting him keep the egg he had bullied his brother out of. He wanted me to prove that I would chose him no matter what.

So what is a mother to do? It would seem that I couldn't win. Pick Cubby, Will is proven right. Pick Will, Cubby is once again the victim of manipulation and injustice.

So what did I do? I just sat and rocked and thought. In the silence, Will spoke up as he does, and gave a defense. Cubby countered angrily. I asked Will if he thought what had happened was fair. He said yes. I just looked at him. Then, in a huff, he traded eggs with his brother.

The heartbreak here was that he did it in a huff. There was no conversion today. He understood what he was called to do but his heart is still too hard. The bickering continues.

A mother who is a home educator (homeschool mom), emailed a group I'm in with the top 10 reasons to homeschool. Her final point was in bold. "To have the children home where they belong." I'm pretty sure, in her eyes, there are no exceptions to this. I think she's very much of the mindset that children should be home no matter what. But as I survey the current toxic environment of my home, I know beyond the shadow of a doubt, that there are some children who need to spend time away from home. If for no other reason then to allow their siblings the freedom to know it is possible to live a life free of manipulation, anger, and mistrust.

I had high hopes that this summer wouldn't be a mandatory Summer Camp summer but it's looking like we're going to have to go that route to keep Will's influence to a minimum.

How To / Not To With Fly Paper

I'm cringing as I write this. My poor, poor chickens. This is my first How To/ Not To installment. Unfortunately, I think this will be a regular part of my blog.

It's no secret that City Dog (a.k.a Your Next Kill Will Be Your Last) enjoys the hunt. A lesser known fact is that he's a wasteful hunter. He does nothing with his kill. His last kill was yesterday. He took down two turkeys and one hen. It was bad. The chickens were terrorized. They don't need the stress and there was a lot of it.

More stress today. On the heels of this massacre, I notice the flies were getting really bad in the chicken coop. It has been hotter than August and bugs just love the ripe smell our chickens produce.

So I bought fly paper.

Seemed like a good idea at the time.

I hung it in the chicken coop way up high, out of the reach of the chickens. How exciting it was to think that soon our coop would be fly-free. Reducing the fly population would be a great thing. Why didn't more people do this, I wondered. It's so easy.

A-hem. Right.

At chicken bedtime, DH called out to me that a chicken was stuck.... in the fly paper. Oh for the love...!!! He didn't want to pull the paper off because he was afraid to hurt the chicken. I took the chicken, that was kicking frantically and had one wing stuck to its body, and explained that hurting was inevitable. What we wanted to avoid was breaking the wing. The chicken could take a few missing feathers. It would have to.

Carefully, holding the chicken under my left arm, I pulled two pieces of fly paper and countless feathers off the poor chicken. It look some doing. Gently pull the paper off in the direction the feathers grow. If you pull in the opposite direction of the feathers, you risk breaking feathers and I can't imagine that is good for the chicken.

Fly paper is disgustingly sticky and gooey. It sticks and sticks and sticks. I recommend having someone close by who can remove the fly paper from your own hand if there is more than one piece stuck to an animal.

Lesson learned.

Incidentally, the chicken is recovering well and doesn't seem at all phased by her bald spots.

Garden Update

There is a slight, ever so slight, greenish tinge to my thumbs. The impossible has happened. This garden that I'm STILL digging, is producing plants. It's amazing.

The tomatoes are heirlooms but I don't know what kind they are. The kids like to stick the id tabs in their ears and then group all the tabs together in one area. So it's anyone's guess.

I thought all the cherry tomato plants were dead. I left the baby plants outside in the frost on more than one occasion and killed a whole bunch of them. Anyway, all it took was a heat wave and BAM, the cherry tomato plants took off. It's so cool. They don't have flowers yet but the big tomatoes do.

The peppers aren't impressing me. They're just not growing very quickly. I think they need a motivational speaker. Maybe if I plant some hot peppers?

Dragon Tongue Bush Beans came up today. The kids love these too and were looking for signs of dragons on the plants. I didn't have the heart to tell them... The watermelons are up and getting bigger by the day. We spotted cucumber leaves too. Popcorn and rainbow corn are planted (non GMO) and some summer squash. The second round of radishes are sprouting. Our raspberries are covered in leaves and have flower buds. And our lettuce, spinach and Swiss chard is ready to eat.

I'm a little worried about our potatoes. I have no idea what I'm doing. Two days ago I attempted to mound the dirt around the plant leaves but it rained and the rain washed the dirt away. I'm going to try again. We might not get potatoes this year. I'm okay with that.

I forgot about our peas... twice. I left the seed packs outside in the rain (oops). The pea seeds mixed with some flower seeds and some flax and broccoli. I spent about 45 minutes after the rainstorm, sorting seeds into piles in our wagon because the wagon was handy. Then my darling husband came by with the lawn mower and dumped the wagon out into the grass. So then I spent another hour picking pea seeds out of the grass. I felt like Cinderella, when she had to pick lentils out of the fireplace. I could have just bought a new pack of seeds but it was the principle of the matter.

I'm really getting off into a tangent. Didn't know planting peas was so chaotic, did you? Well it is here.

My point is that the peas were forgotten along the fence and when I found them, they had been nearly strangled by weeds and were dying of thirst. I fixed all that and now they're a bright green and have sweet white flowers. I think it will be worth it in the end but I did lose several plants to neglect.

Next year I'm going to make a pea tepee. My mom did that when I was a kid. I remember sitting inside the tepee pulling peas off the vines and eating them. What a tricky awesome way to get kids to eat veggies.

I'm proud of the plants because I grew them from seed. Nothing from the Home Depot nursery this year.

Meet Daisy

As I led my poisoned goat down our hill with bribes of oak leaves, I found myself wondering if Laura Ingalls Wilder ever did what I was doing. I don't think they ever had a goat. They were more sensible, limited their farm to a cow, chickens, a pig and some horses.

I was lulled into a false sense of security before we brought Daisy home. We have a fully fenced pasture but the pasture was fenced for horses, which, I have learned, is an important detail in the "are you prepared for a goat" checklist. Goats are notorious escape artists. They can climb, wiggle and jump through all kinds of enclosures. I've read that to really keep them in, you need fence as high as a deer fence and as strong as a fence for bulls. Or you can systematically remove all poisonous plants from the environment and pray for the best. We've done neither.

I'm working on re-fencing a small pasture but I'm doing it alone and it's time consuming, especially when you take into account the three littles who like to play hide and seek in our run-in, that is literally falling apart. It's so falling apart, the goat actually got stuck in it and couldn't climb out. You have to understand that this goat can climb nearly anything, including the "rock wall" on our swing set. Mr. Cubby told me the story later, after they had rescued her. I'm not sure how two three year olds and a four year old managed to rescue a baby goat but I didn't want to pry. They didn't get tetanus so it was worth it.

Daisy is a Saanen/ La Mancha dairy goat. She's white and has freaky eyes with rectangular pupils and tiny, tiny ears. We bottle feed her. She's 8 weeks old and could be weened but bottle feeding her is supposed to make her more tame... we'll see. People I know have bets places on how many more months she'll continue to survive on our little farm, and this was before they had heard about her eating our azaleas. I think that as long as we can keep her contained she'll be fine.

Mom vs Mouse

I wanted to restart a blog and call it City Mom/ Country Mom but I don't have the energy to reregister and start over so I'm just continuing, afterall, it's all under the auspices of motherhood. It's just now I'm in the country, at long last.

Today I spent the better part of my morning vaccuuming my minivan. Moms in the DC metro area will all attest to the fact that we spend more time in our car than in our home. This is due, in part, to the tragic type-A moms that have overrun this once gentele Southern area and in part due to the horrendous traffic. Kids eat meals, change outfits, and do homework while enroute to the next activity. From sunrise until well after sunset.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the door to my minihome and found the tell tale signs of mouse infestation. (I know what this is because once month after moving into our Little House in the Country, we had a mouse problem). Signs of a mouse problem include shredded paper and poo. The more poo, the bigger the problem.

My car had been empty of people for about 12 hours. I have no idea if the mouse had been joy-riding with us to taekwondo the night before or if he had hopped in for an early morning snack of Wendy's french fries.

Let me explain that I am absolutely astonished that I haven't had a mouse infestation before now. Our four kids liter the car with chocolate milk bottles, chicken nuggets, goldfish, animal crackers, M&M's, french fries - and that's just what I found on the floor the day I discovered the mouse infestation. It's truly gross. And I normally clean the car out once a month but since we had just moved and were remodeling our kitchen, I just hasn't gotten around to it.

Alas.

So yesterday, I smeared some organic peanut butter on a mousetrap and put it in the car on the floor on the driver's side. As evening fell and there was still no mouse, I moved the trap to the passenger side thinking that maybe there was more to be explored from that side. This morning, I checked the trap and I could swear I was suddenly in a cartoon. I was Tom and the mouse was Jerry, mocking me, by carefully licking out ALL the peanut butter from the trap WITHOUT springing it. Mind you, I could hardly get any peanut butter on the little trap lever without setting it off and somehow that mouse, managed to lick it clean.

So my eyes bugged out of my head and steam came out of my ears. I'm pretty sure my face turned red and I had a thought balloon of me chasing the mouse with a mallot and smashing it to pieces.

I re-peanut buttered the trap and set it in the car again. Through out this entire mouse incident, mind you, our car is not drivable. So I'm driving our old beater farm truck around. It's an Isuzu Trooper with 200,000 miles on it. You can hear it coming three miles away and by the time it has covered those three miles it's used five gallons of gas.

But I digress.

Fortunately, second time was a charm. The following morning, I walked to the swagga wagon and the mouse had been iced. It's a lovely thing - a dead mouse. The kids were excited until they saw it and proclaimed it to be a "baby mouse" and called us mean for killing it. Trying to reason with preschoolers is impossible. If it looks small, it must be a baby ergo, the mouse was a baby.

I don't want to think about what will happen when we serve their pet rooster for dinner.

Country Living

So it's official, we're in the country. It's amazing. Blue Ridge Mountains in the distance. Big creek in our backyard. There are big, big trees with ancient trunks so wide that we could hollow one out and make our own replica of the Pit of Despair inside. The view is breath-taking. It's why we bought the property.

The house is a simple cape cod. The kitchen is tiny, smaller than the kitchen John had in his Arlington apartment. It's also dirty. The entire house is dirty. I'm not sure what happened here but there is a bedroom upstairs that appears to have soot on the ceiling, which is very odd since there isn't a fireplace anywhere near there. And the carpets are discolored. The vinyl floor in the main bathroom is peeling up. The hardwood flooring has been worn down to the bare wood which is scratched and stained. The roof, HVAC, and water heater are all original to the house and the house is more than 20 years old. There seems to be dry rot setting into some of the wood on the porch and around some of the windows. Honestly, the house hasn't been kept up.

We love the area. We love the property. The house has a lot of potential too. We plan to redo the kitchen first, make it amazing and huge. The rest of the things will come later. I have a Honey Do list a mile long and I think many of the things on it will turn into Mommy Dos. The nice thing is that we can take it a little at a time since we plan to stay until we die.

As we add and change things to the house, we also plan to add other things like chickens, cows, and horses. The chickens will come first. Not sure where we will keep them but we'll figure it out as we go. We're also hoping to add a lot of fruit trees and a huge garden. You should know, though, that I'm not a gardener. Gardening has always been my mom's thing. I'll be a person with a garden not a gardener. Can't call myself a farmer either. Seems a little snotty for a former city girl, most recently a suburbanite to fancy herself a farmer just because she's got some land. Maybe in time.

So for now, I'll just be a person with a garden and some amazing land and a house that needs work.

Mohawk is to public school as crew cut is to...

So the school year begins. We're off and running. My blog has been dormant for a long, long time... roughly the time it took me to homeschool my oldest through third grade (though he could easily pass the test to graduate high school in D.C.) He doesn't play the violin or speak any foreign languages fluently but he does smile more often and he loves his mohawk.

Speaking of mohawks - I love my son's mohawk... mainly because it was my idea and my way of rebelling against the "establishment." My DH hates it. He threatens to shave it off every day but I know he doesn't have the time to do it so on we go. Will gets tons of compliments and comments on it. I love the look I get when moms ask, "So who gave him that idea?" and I say, "Me."

His pediatrician asked him which tribe he was a member of, Mohawk or Iroquois. The kids at camp called him "Mohawk Kid." I can't think of any other comments right now but there have been plenty.

I'm asked all the time my by conservative friends (and even the liberal ones) why I shaved a mohawk onto my son's head. I freely admit that I'm rebelling through my son's hair. If I was young enough, I'd shave my own hair into a mohawk but since I'm nearing 40, I thought my oldest boy could pull it off better than I. Is that wrong? I don't think so. Is it healthy? I don't think so. But it's unhealthy like a brownie is unhealthy - in moderation it won't hurt anything.

I know that there is potential for problems with body piercings and tattoos later on. The mohawk is a gateway hairstyle, afterall. But as misunderstood as my son feels, he's also a big fan of silly things and since Goth and Emo kids don't laugh at anything, ever, I think I'm pretty safe for now.

As for this blog, I'd like to keep it up - maybe change it up a bit but I'd probably be better served by spending my time working out. It's tempting to continue post, believing in my own, narcissistic way that people want to read what I have to say. We'll just have to see how it shakes out.

One last comment. I just ate my last cookie from Holland. In Holland, known for tulips and windmills, they have little celophane bags with red and white checks and the picture of a fat, mustached little baker that contain cookies that taste like the complete opposite of crap and are as addictive as crack and have many more calories. At least I think they have more calories. The bag is entirely written in Dutch and even though the numbers they use are the same as ours, I still have no idea what they mean. I also have no idea what they're called or what's in them. I will die if I don't find more of these cookies.