My Thanksgiving List
I am staring at my blank page and haunted by my one-week blog deadline. I am trying to create a post reflecting the Thanksgiving holiday, but to be honest, my Thanksgivings usually STINK! I have erased and rewritten several times because a narrative of the events of my weekend sound angry rather than possessing that trace amount of bitterness that shape my soul. I officially have a love/hate relationship with Thanksgiving. Some people in my little corner of the social media world have been bombarding the web with daily declarations of their gratitude for many things from children to technology, so perhaps I should give my spin of mayhem on this tradition by sharing my list of love/hates.

I love/hate having children that eat. I have so many friends who complain that their children won't eat anything. To them I say, “They will eat when they are hungry enough.” (stolen from my mother-in-law). “Kneel down and give thanks because the opposite side of this coin is horrible!” and “Hey, are you going to eat that? If not, could you brush the mold off and push it at my son, he is salivating over there.” My children eat ANYTHING and EVERYTHING. I am not being figurative when I say this, I mean that if the item holds still and doesn't bite them back, they will eat it. I have been reading so many “posts” and “shares” and “boards” encouraging me to do creative things with my leftovers. Leftov...huh? I have friends who boast not having to cook because it is “leftover night.” What in heaven's name is that? I have to get up with the sun in the morning and pray that my children didn't drink the raw eggs and wash it down with a side of butter, just so I can make breakfast.

Each year, my family makes Ukrainian food for Christmas Eve dinner. These recipes usually have an abundance of potatoes, onions, cabbage (usually as sauerkraut), and sour cream. Last year to begin preparations, I bought three Goliath-sized jars of sauerkraut and two industrial-sized tubs of sour cream. I woke early Christmas Eve morning and began preparations for our feast, only to find that TWO of the jars of sauerkraut were full of only a miniscule puddle of salty brine clinging to the edges of the glass; every possible morsel of cabbage had been sucked clean. I hadn't served a large amount of sausages or hotdogs, where would this all go? The answer is simple.....my six-year-old minion had been eating it by the chubby little fistful. (Pausing to hold back the threat of vomit.) To be honest, our Thanksgiving abundance was gone in less than 12 hours from the conclusion of dinner, therefore alleviating my need for any culinary creativity.

I love/hate extended family gatherings. Of course I love my family, but frankly I am completely perplexed that I share genetics with any of these weirdos. Before I even began packing for our excursion over the river and through the woods, I received FOUR phone calls advising me that my children needed to be quiet and calm. These events alone make me immensely grateful for caller ID and the mute function on my ringer. Having six children is much like having an orchestra. If each instrument plays “quietly and calmly” it is still a combination of six little maniacal instruments and that is never going to be quiet or calm.

Every time I go to a family gathering, I feel like that stone-age video game with the little white pixel bouncing wildly between the two lines on each side of the screen. “Can you make your child stop (insert mildly irritating behavior)?” So, I abandon the turkey to scold the mildly annoying child who is mildly annoyed about it. “Is that turkey in the oven? We won't eat until midnight if you don't have it in NOW.” So I bounce back to the kitchen and continue stuffing the crevice of a dead bird and thinking about other HUMAN crevices that I could stuff with great delight. “Hey, your child is doing it again!” “Has anybody seen the baby, don't you keep track of your own children?” “The other two are fighting now!” “Your child just licked his fingers and touched the turkey!” “Your child is trying to eat raw potatoes!” “Your child is trying to chew through the can to get the olives!” With sore feet, several cuts and burns, and a truly foul disposition, I collapse on the couch after dinner. I am then greeted with that overly sweet voice of criticism that only a mother can give, “You know, you have completely ignored your children today.”

I love/hate Black Friday. Yup, I said it! In fact, I am truly UN-American and for that matter, I am truly UN-female in that I hate to shop. I hate to spend money, and additionally I hate crowds. My children and many others have misinterpreted my boasts about bargains as a declaration of economic hardship. Nope! I just have a self-satisfied bubble of victory that rises in my soul when I can stick it to the capitalist-corporate-greedy slime and only pay a penny for a laptop computer that I know costs $400 to make. I will bring sales clerks to suicidal tears while haggling over the semantics of newspaper advertisements, but would rather have my fingernails removed with a pair of rusty pliers than fight the crowds the day after Thanksgiving. Only once have I attempted a Black Friday event and sometime between pulling the blonde lady's hair and elbowing some old lady in the nose, I realized that for my dignity, I would rather pay the extra $2 and come another day. THAT is saying something.

I love/hate car trips, which will someday be a rant unto itself. I love/hate preprocessed food that is hatched in a chemistry lab. I love/hate people who complain about Christmas songs before Thanksgiving while simultaneously love/hating radio stations who are playing Christmas music in September. I love/hate packing children and dressing them up to look uncharacteristically angelic for relatives that you don't even know. I love/hate the inevitable trivia quiz (this comes with the homeschooling aspect of my life) and talent show that erupts whenever a grandparent is near. I love/hate tryptophan-induced comas that only effect adults and leave children buzzing around the house unsupervised. I love/hate parades with more commercials that floats. (Am I the only one who remembers when the Thanksgiving Day Parade had numerous gigantic balloons. I was really disillusioned.) I love/hate centerpieces that children are scolded not to spill on (or eat), but are just going to be thrown in the garbage after Thanksgiving dinner. I love/hate football, which keeps me chasing children away from the television screen so men can watch their program unimpeded, when actually they are all sitting in recliners snoring.

Now, don't get me wrong. I am grateful for so many things that are neither humorous nor bitter. At the end of this long weekend, I was grateful for my beautiful home and its blanket of filth that may not be hygienic, but it is MINE and a comfortable place for my children to be neither quiet nor calm. I am thankful for a house full of wonderful minions to keep me on my toes. I am grateful for my husband who narrowly talked me out of rash behaviors that would have me celebrating the Christmas season in a jail cell. I am grateful for the chance to fill a blank page with words that may not be read, but are definitely therapeutic.

Human Napkin
Today marked the official start of cold and flu season in our household. I am sitting with wide, glazed eyes at my computer, while my body reconciles the daily doses of essential caffeine with the nighttime decongestant I just took. It is similar to those cliché cartoons with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other. I wait with baited, wheezing breath to see which side will stomp out the other and achieve ultimate supremacy.

Each year, I reassure myself that being an isolated home school family (away from the petri dishes of school playgrounds, lunch rooms and public toilets) will somehow protect our little clan from the inevitable attack of Rhinovirus, knowing deep-down that we are doomed. Usually the onset of the sniffles sends me retreating like a mother bear to the comfort of the cave, where we find the warmest pajamas, best movies and wait for the storm to pass. But, tonight we gathered our lotion-filled tissues and ventured to my mother's annual holiday party.

As always, we had a lovely dinner and opened presents and decorated sugar cookies for Santa. We blissfully sit around the table like some sort of twisted-Rockwell magazine cover and try to help small children have messy fun without making a mess (which is another chapter altogether). My darling daughter, with frosting-covered knife in hand and a cookie perched gingerly on the tips of her fingers, lets out the most gentle of coughs—more of a barely audible whisp of escaping air. From the opposite side of the table comes the nameless adult mumbling, “Remind me not to eat THAT cookie.” The offensive Christmas tree is blacklisted and banished to the pizza pan at the far end of the kitchen. As the half-hour project continues, the population of blacklisted cookies becomes unruly, each with it's own little flaw: “he touched his hair,” “she itched her cheek,” or the most common, “he licked his finger.”

REALLY! My children span in age from 1 to 11 years old. They are lured to the kitchen table with promises of sweets and then armed with sugar-filled cookies, creamy frosting and brightly colored sprinkles-- I am in awe that their fingers pause to decorate a cookie and are not on direct route from the frosting to their face. It is then that my entry for tonight takes shape. With my sweet toddler squarely in my lap, he tops another snowman cutout, and I watch in suspended slow motion as he rethinks licking his chubby fingertip clean and reaches under the table to wipe it on my black dress slacks. The horrifying thought struck me, “I have been demoted to human napkin.”

I remember having picnics in the park and upon soiling my fingers reaching underneath me and wiping them discreetly in the grass. Many may read this with an air of superiority and say out loud, “Ew, I have never done that.” But, you cannot lie to yourself. Without the presence of napkins, or moist towelettes, even the outcast of the paper-product family—toilet paper, we have all been reduced to stoop and wipe on the common grass. With the addition of children to my life, I have become the equivalent of an ultra-absorbent roll of paper towels.

I am led to think of a time when my oldest child was less than three-months-old. I sat in a church meeting donned in a rosy silk sweater and innocently basking as I watched my adoring husband hold our young son. I point out that this was my oldest child because silk was still a fiber I owned. My dear hubby bounced our sweet boy on his lap and in another suspended moment the wretched man recognized the newborn grimace of a child about to regurgitate and launched the infant horizontally into my arms. Disheartening realization number two: in a pinch, I double as a human barf bag.

So as I sit and try to combat the oozing that accompanies the common cold, I reflect on all the times that I have stood comfortably conversing while a child lovingly stood shyly behind me and wiped a green nasal invader on the soft fabric of my skirt. I think about how many occasions I have been the victim of the infamous “Bury and Blow Maneuver.” This is maneuver is performed when the drowsy child is supported sturdily on one hip. While hopefully anticipating a welcome sleeping baby face buried in the shoulder of your shirt, allow the child one loud, squishy and viscous blow. The exercise is completed with the child firmly pushing his nose into your clothing and shaking his head from side to side in an attempt to cement his achievement permanently in the fibers of your garment. Alarming realization number three: I am a human hazardous waste bin.

A while back, my husband and I laughed at some faceless stand-up comic who realized one day that his mom was a woman with an underpinning of beauty, masked in an air of defeat. As I daily dress myself in the uniform of motherhood (usually a pair of sweats or medical scrubs), I amend this man's statement. I am not masked in an air of defeat, I am shrouded in a cloud of empowerment. I accept and realize my three-fold duty in this world and dress in anticipation that at any moment my attire may have to be sterilized or possibly incinerated.