Teenagers and The Family Christmas Card

Every year, I ask my family to pose for what I think is a fun family Christmas card. I have shared a few here with you before. When my boys were little, they really got into it. As evidenced here:

At age two, my little angels were only too happy to pose and wish everyone "peace, love and joy." At age three, they happily posed with their dad as the "three wiseguys, offering gifts of gold, Frankenstein and Merv:"

As the years went on, I got less and less cooperation. This year they refused to pose and said they didn't care what I did for the family Christmas card. Hence this year's offering:

I simply cut heads from their school pictures and applied to this original photo found at the hilarious website awkwardfamilyphotos.com (which is also a fabulous gift book). I have no idea what the family who posed for this was thinking. ("It's Christmas! Grin and BARE it?") I do know it's totally put me off of "figgy pudding!" If I were built like that woman, I would certainly want to show it off, but I am not sure posing for a family Christmas card photo while wearing a coconut bra and fig leaf is the way to do it. But that's just me. After receiving this, one neighborhood mom thanked me, saying it has persuaded her once-reluctant boys to happily pose for family Christmas cards from now on.

Anyhoo...wanted to wish everyone in the Ungirdled nation a very happy holiday season and a new year filled with lots of peace, love, laughter, great health and prosperity! Thanks for visiting throughout the year!

Teenage Enigmas

If you’ve ever encountered a teenager, either in the wild or its natural habitat, you know the species are walking-sassing contradictions. I have the torment pleasure of observing two in the habitat I share with them. Some observations from the field:

• The same subjects which spend hours grooming their hair to get it just right will play it fast and loose with the rest of their bodies while operating a motor vehicle. Need proof? Watch the chaos in the student section of a high school parking lot ten minutes before the first bell rings. Your hair will turn gray - if you live to tell about it.

• The cross country athlete who will regularly run 5 or more miles at practice will find it impossible to make the 17 foot trek from table to dishwasher.

• The member of Model UN, a group which focuses of solving the world’s most pressing problems, can’t figure out how to shut the refrigerator door.

• The same specimen which will not let you forget that you got the name of one of his six teachers wrong FOUR YEARS AGO can’t remember to pack the next day’s homework in his backpack.

• The subject which rarely misses a shot on the basketball court can’t seem to ever make an item of dirty laundry land in the hamper or used tissue in the trash can.

• The typical specimen can text 272 words a minute to a friend, the same amount of time it takes them to type five for their English essay.

• While in its natural habitat, subject behaves as though separated from John McEnroe at birth. Natural enemies teachers report behavior of angel while outside the habitat.

• The student who dreads oral presentations doesn’t ever seem to mind lecturing you at home. Not ever. Favorites on the in-home lecture series include: “You don’t know how to act in public,” “My life is WAY harder than yours!” and “There’s nothing to eat in this house.”

• You constantly ask yourself how the most clueless, most embarrassing couple in the entire universe could have produced people who know absolutely everything except how the two of you can be so lame.

I know there are some I missed, because the study of these creatures can be exhausting and the liquor intake required to live with the can make you forgetful. What contradictions have you observed in your study of teen behavior?

Card above is ©Tracy Kunzler and sold at www.bottman.com, see “Reel Life Horrors” cards.

Family Vacation: A Chance For Parents To Be Dissed In Exotic, New Locales!

We recently splurged on a family trip to Costa Rica over spring break.  We wanted to make some special family memories and show our boys the beautiful country my husband and I had visited when first married 20 years ago.  Also, we craved the opportunity to be berated and dissed in a foreign land by 16-year-olds who somehow know way more in their 16 years than my husband and I could possibly know in our combined 100 here on earth.  (That just blew what mind I have left to add up our ages and realize they equal exactly 100!)

Costa Rica afforded us the opportunity to hike the base of one of the world’s most-active volcanoes, go white-water rafting, trek through the rainforest and be insulted for something entirely new!  This time, the source of insults, eye rolls and heavy sighs was our command of the Spanish language, or rather the lack of it.  Our little darlings have been studying Spanish in middle school and high school for several years now and are very eager to pummel us help us along with their knowledge. 

To me, my husband has great command of the Spanish language.  The only things I know how to say in Spanish are, “Hi, thank you, two beers please, and where is the bathroom.”  I had many a good time during both a trip to Mexico and one to Costa Rica with my own personal command of the Spanish language.  Anyhoo…. to me, my husband speaks beautiful Spanish.  Perhaps it’s because I have no idea what he is saying, but I remember him getting me and four other non-Spanish speaking adults around wonderfully in Costa Rica 20 years ago.  During that trip, we had a really tense moment in a bar in Limon with a drunk and belligerent Nicaraguan who obviously did not like blue-eyed Americans.   He was in our faces spewing what I knew was hateful speech when one of the gentlemen in our party said in a language very dear to me (redneck), “What the f#@k you trying to say to me?!” My husband stepped in, spoke a lot of words I did not understand and with the help of a couple friendly Costa Ricans, quickly diffused the situation. 

But back to our family trip.  We were resting in our hotel room one evening, when our children where ragging on us gently pointing out there were areas for improvement in my husband’s Spanish, saying what he spoke was Spanglish, at best.  They took various phrases my husband had used with tour guides and cab drivers and slammed him suggested better ways to say those things.  My husband replied that he thought he knew more Spanish than they did, to which Thing Two, who seems the most comfortable of the two Things with his Spanish, seem to take great offense.  His tone became very insulted as he said, “Oh really?” and then began rapidly thinking up and spewing off challenges to my husband which I jotted in the notebook I was carrying.  Here is some of what he asked my husband  (I swear!) if he knew what to say en Español:

“I want to pour cologne on your jacket and feed it to my fish.”

“My uncle can kill a dinosaur with only a knife.” 

“I went to the bathroom in the neighborhood garden.”

“Yesterday, I ran over a turtle with a truck and I put it in a cardboard box and put it on the top of my friend’s car so the police would write him a ticket for not disposing of his roadkill.”

“I want to climb to the top of Mt. Everest with a rope made of my own hair.”

We had to give it to him.  These were indeed important things one needed to know how to say in the native tongue of the country they were visiting.  I was convinced the boy did not need a Spanish tutor.  I was now wondering, however, about the services of a mental health professional…

It Must Be Good To Be King

For those of you who don’t know, I am the zookeeper mother of 16 year-old twin orges boys.   Most of you Ungirdled women who have/had teenagers will relate. 

They were THE sweetest children.  They actually seemed to like us and even thought we might know a little more than they do.  That all started to change just a couple months before their thirteenth birthday, or as we now say, just before they turned TURDteen.

Now, of course, my husband and I are the lamest, stupidest, MOST EMBARASSING people on the planet. Yet we somehow produced the two smartest people in the universe.  If you have teens, you know what I am talking about.  If you don’t and you think you might want children, forget that carrying-around-an-egg-for a-week-thing to see if you’re up to the job.  Just borrow a teen (there are tons of willing parents!) and parent that teen for a couple hours.  If you can do this and still think handling teenagers is no big deal, then by all means, go ahead.  But, before you do, please go sign up for the special forces - they could really use a few people like you.

Our two teen-type “people” not only think of my husband and I as lame, embarrassing morons, they think of us as servants.  Consider the love notes our angels taped outside their bedroom doors for us last night.  (I should preface by saying my husband and I wake our angels from their slumber each morning.  This week, local high schools are conducting SOL testing which means students can go in much later than normal when they don’t have an SOL test scheduled, which mine did not.)

Anyhoooo…this is the love note left by Thing One in about 157 point type: 

DO NOT, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES,

GET ME UP ANY EARLIER THAN 8:35 A.M.

 

And this beautiful letter was penned by Thing Two:

If it is earlier than 8:25 a.m.,

turn around and walk away.

If you are still having difficulty,

proceed to jump face-first off the balcony.

“Touching,” said my husband as he and I stood outside their rooms reading these love letters around 7:00 a.m.  “Yes,” I acknowledged.  “Makes me want to reach out and touch the authors.”  My husband then said, “I guess dem boys plum forgot dat I’s too stupid to know how to tell time,” just before he began rapidly and loudly pounding on their doors well before the “allowable” times. 

I love that embarrassing moron-servant.

Greeting card featured can be purchased (along with a lot of other terrific cards) at Bottman Design under Reel Life Cards.