The Judges' Lounge

My kids are nerds.

I'm excessively proud of that fact, mostly because after that initial Aren't They Cute When They Try to Play T-Ball stage and a few sketchy years of Catholic grade school sports (my stint as a girls' basketball coach is why my left eye twitches), I haven't had to spend entire weekends baking in the sun, watching my kid play (insert name of sport here) while hanging out with other (insert name of sport here) parents, and for that I'm eternally grateful.

And don't worry. Catharine and Joe are both relatively well-rounded, if not athletically gifted. As a matter of fact, Joe is a very accomplished policy debater, an activity that requires an incredible amount of research, advanced logical reasoning, and this weird type of yelling that is very upsetting if you don't know what you're listening to. It's held in classrooms and hotel rooms and generally parents aren't required or encouraged to go. Plus, as an added bonus, because debaters are expected to spend their summers researching the topic for the year ahead, they have actual debate camps where kids like Joe spend weeks at a time living on a college campus.

As in, not here at my house. Yeah, it's pretty excellent.

So when I listen to my friends go on about their sunburns, bad backs, snack issues, fellow sports parents, and carpool woes, I have to admit I feel a little guilty since I've managed to emerge relatively unscathed from all that.

Of course, being Catholic, that guilt thing can get pretty intense, so when I got the annual Welcome to the New Year, Speech and Debate Parents! email that announced Brophy was hosting a debate tournament in September and they needed parents to help stock and staff the judges' lounge, I volunteered, with another parent, to head up the effort.

And let me tell you, after the weekend we had, that guilt? It's gone.

Unless you've attended a speech and debate event, you can't truly appreciate the bizarre collection of humans these things attract. A few years ago, when I was still trying to convince myself that there was a chance that Joe was cool, I was helping out at another tournament, and while I was loading up a cooler outside in the hallway a bus pulled up and unloaded a group of business-suited high school students.

Wow, I thought to myself. Look at these kids. They're all professional, serious-looking, studious types. This is great.

Until one of them, a young man wearing a bright purple tie and green shoes, walked up to the pillar about four feet away from me and started talking to it.

Ruh roh.

Not that they're all like that. They aren't. But let's just say some of them have more social skills than others. One time, walking through a large group of speech kids hanging around in a hallway waiting for their results to be posted, I said, "Wow. Looks like a Young Republican convention here."

One kid looked at me, pushed his glasses up on his nose, and said, in a monotone, "You're saying that because we're all in suits. It's a stereotype. But I actually think I'll vote Democratic when the time comes."

Now the judges at these speech and debate tournaments, they don't tend to dress up. As a matter of fact, if you walk into a judges' lounge, it kind of looks like the local homeless shelter is giving their best and brightest the night off. Lots of questionable hygiene, unmatched socks, bad fashion choices, and, my personal favorite, horrendous manners. Oh, and I should probably mention that judges are simply grown up speech and debaters, so you can imagine the diverse personality of the crowd.

Let's just say we knew we'd be having an interesting weekend.

Right after we got the food set up on Friday night, a huge guy who must've gone about 320 waddled in, heaved his backpack down on the ground, and started rummaging around on the table for something to eat. His clothes and epic b.o. indicated that he wasn't a big fan of any type of soap and water, but he was pretty personable and started chatting us up.

"This is a nice school," he said, grabbing seven cookies, three brownies, and a piece of broccoli (you know, for the vitamin C and the roughage) in one fell swoop. "Are you parents here? How old are your kids?"

We told him. As we got to talking, he told us he'd judged one of our sons in a speech event last year and that the kid was really good. (We moms live for that crap)

Then he said, "Yeah, I don't have kids of my own. I never found the right woman to settle down with. I just started internet dating..."

That's when I stopped listening and found something else to do. I mean, come on, really? Thanks a lot, dude. First I'm forced to watch you eat, and now you're conjuring up a mental picture of you on a date? Ewww. Plus, if we're being honest here, my eyes were starting to water from the smell coming off him.

Later that same evening, we ran out of food. And of course we felt bad, because hello! we're all moms and it's in our nature to make sure everyone gets fed. But then the mousy, bitchy woman with bad teeth came up to me and said, "Did you know how many people were coming? How could you run out of food?"

Hang on, hang on, I said. Are you scolding us? Can we help it if you judges are a bunch of locusts? I almost directed her to the really, really big girl in the sundress (what is it with really, really big girls and their sundresses?) who took four sandwiches but at that point had only powered down two, because I really think I would've enjoyed watching a catfight and in a best-of-three-falls, the big girl would've totally kicked the mousy, bitchy woman's ass.

I finally just said, Okay, we're sorry. There's nothing we can do about it now. But hey! Look! A granola bar! These things have over 25% of your RDA of riboflavin, and I know just from looking at you that you haven't had enough of that today. Here, take two. Then you'll be halfway there.

A few of the people within earshot laughed as the mousy, bitchy woman stomped off, clutching her granola bars to her chest.  Then a round-faced, red headed-kid in a Mr. Wizard t-shirt with actual duct tape holding his glasses together stood in front of me and declared, "You're cool."

I'm bummed I didn't get his name. I'd like to use him as a job reference.

And so it went. Friday night morphed somehow into Saturday morning, and I found myself back in the Judges' Lounge again, dealing with another group of speech and debate parents (who were delightful) and the exact same group of judges, some of whom were wearing the same clothes as the day before.

I overheard a group of six or seven college-age kids debate who was the worse villain--Darth Vader, Voldemort, or Khan. I saw two guys playing cards and thought, Excellent! Someone actually does something normal in here! until I realized that instead of poker or even Go Fish they were playing a game called Magic, the Gathering, which seems to me to be a bit like Pokemon for older kids. There were countless conversations about the validity of this argument or that, and there was even a group of young men who, due to the giggling I was hearing, I'd have to guess were looking at something untoward on their iPads.

Oh, but good news. Mousy, bitchy woman hovered and hovered in the lounge on Saturday and I'm happy to report she was the first one in line for our Mexican food luncheon extravaganza. After she filled her plate, squirreling away tortillas and piling on the refried beans and machaca like it was her job, my red-headed buddy with the duct tape on his glasses who was filling his own plate looked over at her and said loudly, "Does anyone know how much riboflavin is in this Spanish rice?"

It's official. I have inside jokes with Debate Nerds. Not exactly what a girl dreams of, but at this point I'll take it.

We Have a Dog

Joe's the one on the right.

You can ask any of my friends -- I am not an animal person. I'm allergic to cats, and, while we always had a dog when I was growing up, I've found that it's tough enough trying to keep a house clean with two kids and a husband. Like I always say: what do I need a dog for? I just got Joe to stop pooping on the floor.

And of course, animals can sense that. Every time I walk into a friend's house who has a dog or a cat, that thing is on me like acne on a freshman. Somehow they figure out exactly who isn't thrilled to see them and the next thing I know I'm the only one wiping dog slobber off my shins. It's eerie. So imagine my excitement when I answered the doorbell early one morning and our neighbor's daughter was standing there with Lady straining at the leash.

Backstory: Phyllis, our across-the-street neighbor, lost her husband six years ago and her kids decided that, instead of just hanging out with her, it would be a good idea to get her a cocker spaniel puppy as a companion. (Pause for eye roll.) Phyllis herself could barely walk, so when Lady knocked her down in the middle of the street going after a rabbit one morning, it became apparent they needed a backup plan to get the dog some exercise if Lady was going to stick around.

Enter young Joe Skoog.

He would haul his butt out of bed at 5:30 every weekday morning and take Lady for a walk. It wasn't a really long walk or anything, but it got her out of the house, and occasionally, during breaks from school and on weekends, he'd bring her over to our house and she'd hang out with us for awhile.

So we had a nice relationship, the Skoog family and Phyllis. She'd call us to do things like fix her tv or show her how to work her answering machine, and in return my kids could think they had a dog for short periods of time. Perfect.

Until that April morning, when Lady came bounding into my house, slightly traumatized, very hungry, and more than a little happy to see me. "We had to take Mom to the hospital," Phyllis' daughter explained. "You want to watch her here, or we can just leave her at the house and you can look in on her. We left her alone last night and she seemed fine."

Now, I'm no animal behaviorist (we'll get to that later), but even I could tell that poor Lady was freaked out by what she perceived as her abandonment the night before. So I took the leash, asked about Phyllis' health (not good), closed the front door, and suddenly the Skoogs had a dog.

A dog with dependency issues.

And who has she become dependent on? ME. If I'm in the house, she never lets me out of her sight. Right now, as I type this? She's lying right next to my chair. Snoring. And apparently also dreaming, since every once in a while she makes a yelpy, barking sound that is more than a little distracting. If I get up to, say, get another glass of water or a snack, she follows me. She follows me when I go to the bathroom. She even follows me when I start down the stairs, forget something, and then have to turn around and go back for it.

I have to say, this is a whole new thing for me. My kids were never this attached to me. Never. I remember looking on in wonder when my sister would leave her children's sight and they'd start wailing uncontrollably (my dad once commented, raising his voice above the shrieking, "Did you forget them at the mall one time or something?"), since my kids would, from a very young age, actually hand me my keys as I was getting ready to leave the house.

And Lady's a nice companion. Really she is. We go for walks a couple times a day, she provides me with someone to talk to when no one else is around, and she's very affectionate. But let me be clear about one thing: I'm not one of these Animals are Better than People types. Even though it's a close race, I can still honestly say I still like my kids better than the dog.

So I was more than a little dismayed when we realized one Sunday night that there was something wrong with Lady, and it was going to be necessary to take her to the vet. We called the same vet she'd seen before, loaded her up in the car, and I got to experience my first-ever Vet Visit.

Right off the bat, here's what I noticed: At the vet's office, they separate the cats from the dogs, and the cats have a much nicer waiting area. Discrimination! We were forced to sit on hard concrete benches with little dividers on them while some People's Court-type show was on in the background (I sided with the woman whose husband slept with her sister and lit her car on fire) while the cat people got nice chairs and the Today Show. But they finally called us into the examining room, and then the fun really started.

When the vet tech tried to take Lady's temperature, Lady got a little aggressive. And who can blame her, really, since it's not like they're putting the thermometer under her tongue. The tech sort of smiled at me sweetly, patted Lady on the head, and went to get the vet. And a muzzle.

About five minutes later, here comes the vet, followed by the vet tech. The vet, whose name is Dr. Nick (it's his last name, really), looks to be about 17 years old and has that earnestness about him that comes with being young and smart and good at what you do. He started off the conversation by holding up Lady's chart and showing me the big red W on it. "See this? This is a W for warning, since we've had issues with her trying to bite us during examinations."

I stifled the urge to say, "Then shouldn't it say B for biter?" and just nodded at him. I was new at this, after all. Then he started talking to me in that slow way you speak to people who you're trying to keep calm during Big Crises. "So, we're going to put a muzzle on her to keep everyone safe. Then I'm going to examine her..."

I held up my hand. "Okay, I need to stop you right there. I'm going to be honest with you. I like this dog, I'm worried about her seeming to be in pain, but I'm not all freaked out about this. You do whatever you have to do to examine her and figure out what's wrong, and I'll be over here holding the leash."

He looked a little startled at first, then started the examination. Diagnosis: she pulled a muscle in her leg. Treatment: rest and a dog anti-inflammatory. Total cost for visit: $87.

After he was done examining her, he sat down across from me and got all serious and dad-like. "First of all, do you have any idea how you saved the dog when you agreed to take her? She never would've been readopted. But as we discussed with Phyllis several times, there are a few behaviors Lady exhibits that might need to be addressed. I know a good animal behaviorist in Mesa who you could take her to. There's about a six month wait to get into see her, but..." I stopped listening at that point. Come on! A dog behaviorist? I have enough trouble scheduling my kid to see his counselor--I'm not going to get on a waiting list to take my dog to a dog psychologist just because she bites at someone trying to put a thermometer in her butt. Please. Heck, if you tried to do that to me, I can't be certain I wouldn't bite you.

Plus, it's bad enough that my son's teachers also have that young earnest thing going on, do I need it in a vet? Last fall I'm sitting there at a parent night listening to one of Joe's teachers (who looks like he's been able to legally drink for about a month and a half) go on and on about the importance of the class and how this is going to impact our son's ability to get into a good college and how high the expectations are and all I can think is, "Skippy, lighten up. This is history. It already happened. We aren't doing high level espionage or any sort of life-saving surgery in here, are we?"

But I digress. The bottom line is, the Skoogs are now dog owners. And it's been a surprisingly good thing, having Lady around. I kind of like her.

There's one thing I can't get used to, though. Last week I took Lady to the groomer, and when I went to pick her up, the receptionist leaned over the counter and hollered down the hall, "Meggan! Lady's mom is here!"

Really? Lady's mom? No, I'm Catharine and Joe's mom. As far as I know, I've never given birth to a dog.

This is going to take some getting used to.

Parenting, Part I

I'm going to admit this right out of the gate: I'm not a great parent. In fact, I'm not even particularly fond of children. I mean, sure, I love my own kids, but I also blame them, to put it bluntly, for ruining my life. And not for the usual reasons (ruined body, no sleep, no money, no time to yourself). No, it's because when you have kids, you're forced to hang out with other people who have kids, and that's when things really start to suck.

It's all well and good when your brothers and sisters and your high school and college friends start reproducing, because these are people you  grew up with and drank with and you all kind of come from the same place. You know you don't know what you're doing, and that's cool, since you're in the same boat with a bunch of other people who don't know what they're doing, either, so you're learning together. And generally, there's beer.

But these cute little non-communicative infants don't stay infants. They grow up. They talk, they walk, and then you're forced--by law!--to send them to school.

That's when the fun starts.

I could not have been more excited to send my kids off to preschool. As a matter of fact, I almost wept with joy when our pediatrician told me at Catharine's 30-month check-up (after a long discussion where the two of them talked about little brothers, colors, and Congressman Dan Rostenkowski's recent defeat at the polls), "This is a child who needs school. Have you checked into preschools in the area?" And I did. And initially I was scared.  But that's a story for a whole other blog post. (I mean, have you ever visited a Waldorf school? Really? What's with the wood?)

Joy of joys, I discovered that our parish in Chicago had a Montessori preschool. Now, when I was in college and learning about all those different education philosophies, I have to admit I thought the whole Montessori thing was a little off. I came from a pretty rigid Catholic school background, and the idea of basically doing what interested you, at your own pace, made me more than a little skeptical. (This was reinforced when I student taught in an inner city high school in Milwaukee. If I had let those little darlings do what interested them, I would've witnessed more felonies in one semester than you see in an entire season of Law and Order--regular, Criminal Intent, and SVU. Combined.) But I figured, she's young! What can a little free choice education hurt? Especially when the education was taking place somewhere other than in my home.

And the actual school part of it was great. Catharine totally thrived, had great teachers, made a lot of friends, and I had the added bonus of a few kid-less hours to myself every day. But then I realized that once your kid ends up at school, you are, by default, a member of the worst group of mammals imaginable:

School Parents.

You can't get away from them. Because by the very virtue of you having a student, you're sort of forced to hang out with other students' parents. You want your kid to have a social life, right? But then these kids come to your house and you start to realize that not everyone has the same exacting standards of child raising that you do.

Not that I ever had any standards, exactly. Mainly my child rearing revolves around trying to get the least annoying kid possible. You know, use the inside voice, put your stuff away, don't touch my stuff, here's how you open the refrigerator and get Mommy a beer. Basic community living, don't-be-an irritant skills. But these other people? Ohdeargod, it's awful.

I realize that not everyone parents according to the Darwinian School of Child Rearing like I do (kids either figure it out or don't survive). That's fine. But then there are the mothers who, early on, basically give it all up and let the kid take over. "Johnny doesn't like to sit in his car seat." "Johnny won't eat at the table." "Johnny doesn't want me to wash his hair." "Johnny only drinks juice."

So let me get this straight. Johnny is a smelly little bugger with bad teeth who's going to trash my house when he comes for dinner but I won't have to worry about any of it because he's going to end up in the ICU with a head injury after you get into a fender bender on the way over. Oh, okay.

My eyes were permanently opened to this phenomenon after Catharine started school and I started trying to be a Good Mom by volunteering in the classroom and offering to have kids over to play. I could go on and on about the wacky moms I was forced to hang with, but all the craziness I encountered during those first years can be summed up into one person: The man hating, obviously frustrated fundamental Christian repressed lesbian teacher who was more than happy to lecture me about how my husband was neglecting his family (the fact he traveled on business meant he didn't care about us), how I needed to raise my son to be a feminist (I should encourage him to try on Catharine's dresses now and again), and how raising my children Catholic was going to cause them to kill me in my sleep one day (which they may still do, but it's going to be for bigger reasons than me simply taking them to church).

Oh, and her kids? She had three daughters who were all budding sociopaths. The oldest was one of those kids who smiles sweetly at the grownups while stealing and hiding another child's favorite toy. Or, better yet, taking away another kid's floaty thingy in the pool and watching passively while the kid slowly sinks to the bottom. ("I wanted the green one and she had it," she squeaked matter-of-factly after the other child was fished out of the pool and eventually revived.) The middle one was just a brute--I watched her toss a boy down a flight of stairs at preschool because he got in front of her in line. (The poor boy's sprained wrist and black eye were shrugged off by the MHOFFCRLT: "Buffy gets aggressive when she's hungry.")

The littlest one seemed fine, until it came time to toilet train her. One morning the mom brought her over to my house, stripped her naked, and explained to me that she thought the only way for a child to learn about her bodily functions was to let things happen "organically." That right there was the last straw. I told her to bundle her kid up before anything organic ended up on my newly cleaned carpet, then I started talking about how I thought the only way to heaven was through the Catholic Church, women shouldn't be allowed to drive, and Republicans were generally awesome. She left shortly thereafter and didn't come back.

And don't even get me started on the whole competition thing. "Oh, Catharine's reading?" the MHOFFCRLT said to me one day when Catharine was struggling through Hop On Pop. "My kids showed signs of early reading comprehension at 18 months." Pause in the conversation while I pried her daughter's teeth off my dining room table leg. "Of course, it's been proven if they read too early it affects their reading appreciation and spatial skills as they grow. And they tend to be less social. But, you know, good for her!"

And this has continued through the grade school, high school, and even college years. Different people, but the same basic conversation, now dealing with test scores, athletic ability, grade point average, shoe size--everything is some sort of competition. It's exhausting.

Trying to raise children while being a School Parent is the hardest thing I've ever done. But it's also made me more realistic. After listening to these nimrods, I came to the realization that being a student is my kids' experience, not mine. We aren't in high school--Joe is. And I'm probably doing the worst job of parenting in the history of the world, but we've had our share of laughs and I think we've raised these kids not to be complete jerks. I guess that's just going to have to be good enough.

I did feel a small flicker of hope recently. The other night, at a Mother-Son Dance, I got a little bottle that contained a questionnaire Joe filled out about our relationship. Question 3: "What is the one piece of advice your mom has given you that will always stay with you?"

Joe's response: "Don't be an idiot."

Phew. My work here is done.