This year Claudia was to be a cheerless leader and Ian was going to be a stealth ninja.

Did you notice the past tense even though Halloween is still two days away?

Yesterday was the “Fall Spirit Parade” (see: Halloween parties for the politically correct) at the Goon Squad’s elementary school.  Technically they were supposed to dress as storybook characters, but after three years we have learned how to work around this system. First you buy the costume, then you find a book with a ninja in it.

I am such a good role model.

Okay, I’m a terrible role model but I was so sick of fighting with them AND finding two costumes that I thought we could make this happen. You have to choose your battles and this year it was between the Halloween costume fight or the homework and chewing with your mouth closed fights.

I just said yes. You can wear that to school. Just don’t take any weapons.

Back to the Fall Spirit Parade! It is a huge parade around the field with every kid in the school and 70% of the moms in the neighborhood. The parade is insane. It is like a a 45 minute long Lollapalooza except the music sucks and most of us weren’t high or drunk. I know I was painfully sober. At our school we have a party in the classroom with crafts and games and treats and then everyone changes into their costume and goes outside for the main event.

As a parent of more than one child I have to volunteer in more than one class. My usual plan is to run back and forth between classrooms the entire time. It is stressful, but it usually gets me out of being in charge of the crafts and I loathe doing crafts. So yesterday as I make my way back in to my daughter’s classroom she is walking out of the changing area and saying “I forgot to bring in the main part of my costume.” We look in her costume bag. Is isn’t there. We look in her other bags.

Her costume is nowhere to be found.

She starts tearing up.

“Don’t worry.” I say “We’ll figure out something.”

She is starting to really cry. I know it is embarrassing to cry in front of your friends.

“Okay, let’s just take the pom poms.” (pom pons? whatever)

She shakes her head no. Then she says “IT ISN’T FAIR!”

I said. “Hey! Don’t yell at me. I didn’t lose your costume.”

But then I felt bad. I knew she was looking forward to this and I knew it was devastating for her. This is something they look forward to all year.

I offered to run home and see if it was there. But I could see her, feeling like a mess, embarrassed that she was so upset, but really really upset. So I asked if she wanted to run home with me to see if we could find it.

Keep in mind, this is 20 minutes until the party starts.

This post is already really really long, so I will just make you a list of the things that happened next.

• couldn’t find her teacher
• cleared the plan with another teacher
• found teacher
• explained plan to teacher
• signed her out of school
• ran to car
• got car out of very, very, very tight parking spot with daughter yelling “WE WILL NEVER MAKE IT ON TIME!!!”
• drove home
• ran inside and up the stairs

The costume wasn’t there.

Her costume wasn’t anywhere. My best guess was that is somehow ended up on the bus.

The following are ideas I came up with and were all rejected in the five minutes after the shocking discovery that the Tinkerbell costume from three years ago wasn’t long enough (all of it involving screaming and crying): Harry Potter, Hermione, a stormtrooper, a Tae Kwon Do student, a football player, a jedi, Princess Leia, a baby.

Desperate I scanned the closets (also where I found the other eight options) and saw the flower girl dresses.

“Do you want to wear a flower girl dress?” I asked.

“Which one?” she said.

“I don’t care,” I probably actually yelled “How about the green one.”

As I am putting on the flower girl dress from her Aunt and Uncle’s wedding over a year ago I notice the size of the dress which is a 4.

Claudia wears a seven or an eight. Thankfully she is tall and skinny and it zipped up even over the long sleeved white shirt we had to put on under it because it was 42 degrees out and windy.

She looked beautiful.

“Okay.” she said.

“Then run.” I said.

And we ran. And we drove and she cried “We’ll never make it on time! This isn’t fair! You don’t even like me!”

I remained calm-ish. I explained that if I didn’t like her I wouldn’t be doing any of this and how far out of my way I had gone for her and that I should be returning client phone calls but instead I was driving her back to the spirit parade which isn’t even that fun for moms.

I also told her that if she gave me anymore lip there would be no trick or treating on Monday.

We parked the car and ran – RAN – out to the field where the festivities were just starting. “We’ll never find my class.” she said very careful not to whine or cry.

But we did. We found her class easily. She almost started to cry again until her best friend turned around and said “She looks pretty.” and then “Claudia, sit here.” and then she made some space.

And all was well.

For about an hour and a half.

(The Halloween Costume Debacle – Part II to follow.)

I can hear the boy chanting under his breath.

Sack of C. Sack of C. Sack of C.

Awesome.

If any of you have children and a potty mouth, you might have realized long ago that words that you think aren’t curse words sound terrible when they come out of a little kid’s mouth.

Those words include, but are not limited to:

• Suck
• Crap
• Pagina
• Nuts
• Friggin’
• The lyrics to “My Sharona”
• Bastages
• Fugly

The phrases “Oh my God”, “pisses me off”, “shut your hole”, “bloody hell”, “What the eff?” and “mother of Christ” sound really bad too. I could go on, but you get my point.

I got Mother of Christ from The Sopranos. One time Tony said “Mother of Christ, Carmella!” and it has been one of my go-tos ever since. Bloody hell is the fault of Harry Potter and Gordon Ramsay.

Anyway, my six year old is chanting “Sack of c, sack of c, sack of c…” when he suddenly yells up from the bottom of the stairs “Hey Mom! Can I say the C Word?”

Now, I know that in this case the C word is crap, because I stopped using the exclamation “son of a whore” and replaced it with the more innocuous “sack of crap” in front of the children.

My mother-in-law however, doesn’t know this, and I can only assume that she  thinks he means a the more commonly known C-word.

My mother-in-law is pretty cool. She isn’t stuffy or a prude and she has heard her share of bad words, but that doesn’t mean this isn’t going to reflect poorly on me if I don’t hurry up and rectify this situation, and she is looking horrified, so really quick I say “Yes! You can say that C word. One time.”

And so my darling boy yells up the stairs “Sack of crap. Heh. SACK OF CRAP! SACK OF CRAP!”

1)  I know there is an ongoing debate about the status of the word crap as a curse word, but it sounds foul coming out of a child.

2) I yelled “I said you could say it one time!” and then I started laughing, because I can’t help it. Little kids saying bad words is funny and everyone knows it.

3) It gets worse.

So Ian is at the bottom of the stairs laughing, and then he says “Huh. Ass.”

But he says it more like “Aaaahhhhsssssssssssssssssssssssss.”

I yell “HEY!” and he stops.

Temporarily.

This isn’t over yet.

Three minutes later he is putting on his shoes and he starts saying “eff you see”. Then again “eff you see, eff you cee, eff you cee” and I am trying to ignore him because obviously the laughing was just egging him on, but his helpful and suddenly literate sister says in a really snotty voice “Ian, don’t you mean eff you see kay?”

All the adults yell “HEY!”

I said “That is enough. I don’t want to hear any more of that kind of talk.”

Because I am a hypocrite, but in this case a justified one.

Lessons Learned

1) There is more than one C word.

2) Don’t get him started.

3) They are all bad words if you use them in the correct context with the right inflection.

4) I am very lucky to have a mother-in-law that also thinks little kids saying curse words is funny. VERY LUCKY.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“Getting sheveled.” he says.

* * *

Another song that sounds terrible coming out of a six year old’s mouth.

“Down to This” by Soul Coughing

“Yes”

“What is your favorite series of words?

I paused. “What do you mean my favorite series of words? Like a phrase?”

“No. Your favorite series of words.”

I still had no idea what they were talking about, but they were both looking at me.

I looked back at them blankly. “I don’t know. Nouns?”

“No mom. Series of words. For example,” she says “My favorite series is bad.”

“Bad words?” but as I said it out loud I suddenly understood what she was talking about.

“Yes, bad words.” she says.

“Mine too!” he says.

Then, because clearly I am an idiot. They explained it more clearly. “Like a-s-s and s-h-i-t…”

Because they know they aren’t supposed to say the words they just spell them instead.

“…and s-h-i-t.” she spells agin because we all laughed the first time.

I told them that was enough and changed the subject.

But upon further reflection bad is probably my favorite series of words too.

When my twins were two years old we got their very first school pictures from preschool. Both sets came back just adorable. Claudia had on a little pink and red dress and Ian was wearing a green striped sweater that made him look like a big kid. I gave one picture of each child to each set of grandparents and then I promptly lost the rest of them. Deep down inside I believed that we somehow managed to accidentally throw them away, and I have been secretly devastated for about two years.

It was almost as bad as when I lost a full 8G memory card during my sister-in-law’s wedding.

Well, I’ve been looking for their new school pictures. You see, they made thank you cards for their Great-Grandmother for their Christmas gifts (Shut it. Yes, I know it is late February, but I usually forget all together so this is a good thing for me.) and I really wanted to send her the school photos with the thank you cards.

But I just can’t find them, and I’ve been looking for a week.

Fortunately, this year I scanned the school pictures. I bought the CD too. I learned my lesson, and while I may have to make copies for myself and the relatives at least they aren’t lost forever.

Today I was in my filing cabinet – again – looking for the elusive “School Pictures” folder. These pictures have vanished. They aren’t anywhere. I was starting to feel like I was losing my mind when I spotted a manilla folder in the bottom of the drawer.

You know what was in it?

My slightly less charming daughter said “Ian, she is the only mother you’ve ever had, so she is also the worst.”

“No.” maintained my boy “In other lives.”

“Ohhhh,” his sister agreed, “Right, in other lives.”

The good news is that I am the best mother that Ian has had in any of his lives.

The bad news is that in this life they assigned everyone in the family Harry Potter roles. She tells me “Ian is Harry, I am Hermione, Daddy is Gilderoy Lockhart and you get to be Snape.”

“I am Snape?” I ask. Surely I can be McGonagall. Maggie Smith is a badass, and if Gabe gets to be a dandy I think we can make the leap to me being Maggie Smith. I’d even accept Bellatrix Lestrange or Cho Chang or Madame Maxime. I am female after all. “Snape?”

“Because of your hair.”

So I’m off to wash my hair.

I don’t know how I get into these discussions with my kids but I always do.

Anyway, we were talking about how you could get a penis put on (and no, I wasn’t sure if you could use it to pee, but I suspected the answer was yes. Doctors are pretty clever these days.) or how they could construct a vagina (A pagina? A pagina! said the incredulous girl who doesn’t believe vagina starts with a “v”.) and the real question was obvious.

Could one get a new butt?

So I said “Well, everyone already has a butt, so you don’t really need a new butt to become the opposite sex. I suppose you could get a butt in a different shape.”

“Like a triangle?” asked Claudia.

“That is the shape I was going to say!” Ian yelled.

“Calm down everyone,” I said. “No, not that kind of shape. You can’t have a triangle butt.”

Then after I stopped laughing I said. “You know, like rounder or flatter.”

“Like a circle butt?”

“I want mine to be shaped like a diamond!”

“How about a rhombus?”

They are learning about geometry in school.

Then because I am a masterful parent (and right after I explained that if your butt was triangle or diamond shaped the pointed corners would rip holes in your pants) I changed the subject to Harry Potter, because in my family the only thing that is more fascinating than butts is talk of house elves.

Did I mention that my son loves Harry Potter and all of the movies and he isn’t scared of Voldemort- he wasn’t even scared when the death eaters burned down the Burrow, or skeletons climbed up out of the water, but he is terrified of Dobby?

Ah, but that is a post for another day.

ps – If you look up vaginoplasty on wikipedia you get an eyeful. Feel free to take that as either a tip or a warning depending on your interests.

pps – I found the barbie butt picture on a website that discusses the body types of Jem dolls and how they differ depending on country. True story. Gripping or truly outrageous. Again, you be the judge.

In your face Alanis Morissette!

Originally uploaded by GoonSquadSarah

Ian: No it isn’t. It is made out of Hershey bars.

This argument continues for about 15 minutes.

Repeat to fade.

This year I thought I avoided that.

I came home from New York and I had plenty to write about.

Then all of the sudden I didn’t. I haven’t written here in a week and my last post was three YouTube videos.

I owe you more than that.

You know that I used to write for the now defunct DC Metro Moms Blog, right? Well, I did, and every once in a while I wrote something worth reading over there. Now that they have closed their doors they are allowing us to cross-post our work on our personal blogs. I wrote this this particular post last summer. It got picked up by several newspapers so it must be decent, right? Anyway, with back to school season upon The Goon Squad this seemed like an appropriate time to share it with you.

* * *

The Class of 2022

My twins turned five this week. Between all of the preschool birthday celebrations and the birthday party (you know the one where I invited every child in both of their classes? Can you even imagine 32 four and five year olds in one room… after eating chocolate cake?) I didn’t have time to think much about kindergarten orientation.

Okay fine. I didn’t know about it until a week before so I didn’t have much time to obsess about it.

I came prepared the way any good blogger would. I had my camera and my iPhone. I figured I could twitter during the boring parts.

The tweeting never happened. First of all, I got stuck in the front row and second of all as soon as the principal started talking I was riveted.

She walked out and said “Welcome to the class of 2022.”

The class of 2022! Let’s pretend for just a second it doesn’t sound like something in a science fiction book. I remember thinking 1984 was futuristic. 2022.

That reminds me of a quick story. My husband and I were shopping for a couch recently and we went into a furniture store that could only be described as “mod”. The stuff in there was very cool, very uncomfortable and very overpriced. The problem is it all had the effect of Tomorrowland. You know, yesterdays idea of the future.

I said to my husband “That looks totally 2001.” The I realized that I had to clarify “Not the year, the space odyssey.”

It seemed so odd that 2001 was eight years ago. Now here I am sitting in a small plastic chair thinking about my babies graduating from high school.

In space suits.

I’ll fly to their graduation with my jet pack. Even that idea is outdated isn’t it?

I’d like to propose a toast to the class of 2022. It will be here sooner than we think.