MUSINGS FROM THE MIND OF AMANDA

This is an old piece I wrote for my son’s tenth birthday. He just turned 19 and I’m still traumatized.

Well. On Friday, The Boy turned ten. We had a couple of his friends spend the night, and then took them on a day trip Saturday. My hands have almost stopped shaking, and I can finally type again.

Have you ever traveled with two ten year olds and an eight year old? Hold the screen up real close and I’ll show you how it sounds…..BLAHBLAHBLAH HE TOUCHED ME WHERE’S MY STUFF WHAT’S GOING ON WHERE ARE WE GOING NEXT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Holy moly. We took them to a place called IJump first. It’s basically a big floor with trampolines in it. Why couldn’t I have thought of that? So…they bounced and bounced and chased each other and looked for us and them and bounced and bounced for an hour….then we took them to a museum full of taxidermied animals. Seven hundred and twelve questions (per child) later, we left and headed to CiCi’s Pizza. For those of you not familiar with this phenomenon, it’s sort of a post-apocalyptic pizza buffet, where only the fastest and most annoying people get the good pizza, and everybody else gets that alfredo pizza crap. Also, the good tables are scarfed up by the people who take four plates and 37 pieces of pizza (and leave you with the alfredo crap.) And of course, there’s a game room, so after you pay five or six dollars for the Three Musketeers to eat all the pizza their pre-adolescent bellies will hold, they are going to eat one piece, swear they are so full, honest, and scamper away to play games. When they run out of tokens, they scamper back, swearing they’ve never been so hungry because YOU NEVER FEED THEM!

At this point, the outnumbered parental units lost what sanity remained and took the crew to the Toys R Really Expensive Superstore and wandered amongst the desperate parents for forty five minutes while The Boy searched out the perfect Nerf gun. On a side note, please do not visit my house without prior notice and a signed, notarized cease fire order.

At this point, the cold front blew in and the temperature dropped THIRTY degrees in about forty minutes. Brrrrrrrrr.

Finally, we went to a delightful place in Athens (Texas, y’all, not Greece) with eleventy bazillion lights and signs and wooden cutouts. It was gorgeous. And the boys, the sweet boys, sat in the middle row right behind us and read signs. Each boy read one sign, AT THE SAME TIME. And never two boys reading the same sign, either….all children must read separate signs at top volume simultaneously. (I really do recommend Land of Lights in Athens)

But The Boy had fun, and his friends had fun, and The Husband got to drive, and I had several small panic attacks, and possibly a blackout, but all’s well that ends well.

He only turns ten once