This was not on the mom job application

Noggin = cable tv channel with a target demographic of the preschool gang

What Noggin says – “Hey kids, here’s a wonderful craft that you can do that will be fun and it’ll make you smarter and cooler and all your friends will be jealous of your amazing skills.”

What Noggin means – “Hey, parents, here’s a craft that will require you to have a degree from MIT, a background in physics and the technical support of NASA and you will still come out looking like the most incompetent parent EVER!”

My girls happened to catch such a craft segment. It was so cute, the little British girl with her neat accent, her crafty little craftiness all cute and crafty. She must have been all of 5 years old and my kids have not yet learned that there’s a lot to be said for television editing. The project itself didn’t seem that difficult but it was made to look as if she did the whole thing herself. Which my girls brought to the conclusion that they too could perform these amazing feats of art!

A full carton of eggs later, I’m yelling, “Just let me crack the stupid eggs myself!”

“Oh, mommy, you said stupid, that’s not very nice.”

Yeah well, I’m covered in egg yolk, we’re down to three eggs and I wasn’t feeling very nice towards the eggs.

The trick is that you have to crack the egg in such a way that you just cut off the top leaving the bottom in one piece. Try after try ended up with eggs mushed to pieces, not even usable for cooking because the egg has been delicately devastated. The girls are just ridiculously put out because they can’t make the “egg head” with only a shell shard, they have to have the whole stinking egg shell! Then you’re supposed to paint the egg shell to look like a face, stuff the inside with wet cotton and sprinkle seeds on it that will grow into a form of hair. Mind you, the editing issues? It didn’t say “5 DAYS later”, NOOO they went from sprinkling the seeds to the fun of cutting all the little sprouts like a funky egg hair stylist. My girls are staring into the egg, waiting for the seeds to shoot up. Again, disappointment all around.

I loathe Noggin. This is totally their fault. I might have to write a letter and send it in an envelope with a dozen smooshed eggs.

Something I forgot to mention was the amusing experience of going through the self-checkout with Peyton. We had to make a trip to Wal-mart to buy her school supplies and we took our cart full of loot to the self-checkout lane. If you’ve never done that, in particular with a 4 year old, you should make sure you have an extra 45 minutes and do it right now.

A few things you need to know. The whole process relies on weight, you scan your item, then you put your stuff in the bag and it weighs each item and it knows if you put the right number of items in the bag or the right thing in the bag. It’s VERRRY sensitive. If you burp on the scale then you can’t proceed without assistance from an employee.

So, I hand an item to Peyton with the barcode face down so she can rub it on the scanner and it beeps and then she bags it. It was a slow tedious process but she lit up each time the scanner made a noise so I couldn’t take this new experience away from her.

Scan, beep….error….scan, beep….error…..scan, beep….error. I could see the Wal-mart employee assigned to the brainiacs using the self-checkouts was getting seriously annoyed with us because she kept having to come over and correct the errors. Finally she looks down and tells me that Peyton’s hand is on the scale and that’s throwing off the monitor. In a tone of voice that would have had me giving my kids a solid swat on the butt. But she was a lot bigger than me and I think she could take me.

So now I’m handing her the items, holding her hand so she doesn’t rest it on the scale, trying to ensure that no dust falls from the ceiling and lands on the scale and throws off the entire order of the universe. We finally get everything scanned, bagged and in the cart and I turn to get my wallet and I hear the machine start beeping furiously! There’s Peyton, bag in hand, rescanning items and putting them back in the bags. Now I have to go back and recount each item and make sure that the Wal-Mart chick takes off the items that we’ve already scanned.

When we finally get done, we have successfully purchased our items and the Wal-Mart chick looks at us and says, “You may want to go through a regular checkout next time.”

I glared at her and said, “Next time, I’ll bring all three of my kids and let each one have their own cart!”

Peyton is at school right now, so I’m able to post during the daylight hours again. It was a struggle to get her off to school this morning. She was tired because we had our family group meeting at the Children’s Cancer Center last night and it means she gets to bed late, almost 10 PM. She decides that she’s not going, she wants to go to the gym with me and then to Cracker Barrel. She’s decided that the sub-par eating arrangements are reason enough to give up this whole school endeavor. I can’t wait to see how she does during steroid week because she’s likely to chew off the arm of the kid sitting next to her and I’m almost positive that could end up in a time out. We’ll see how it goes and if needs be, I’ll just keep her home with me on the roughest days of that week.

That is the nice thing about it being preschool. If she feels cruddy as she sometimes does after her big chemo day she can stay home, if she’s totally steroid raging, she can just skip a day or two. But I want her to be there as much as possible, it’s good for her to be in an organized learning environment. I’m all about her being oppressed by the MAN. Get used to it!

One thing the teacher told me was so sweet. Tuesdays will be our days that Peyton doesn’t do school, it’s her normal clinic day and we will continue to do Little Tales that day as well. Tuesday was the first day back to school, so not thinking about me already telling her that she wouldn’t be there, Mrs. Longanecker had the kids all hyped up for Peyton’s arrival. She had her name on the table, the cubby all ready to go, the kids were anxiously awaiting her arrival….and then she didn’t show.

She got there on Wednesday and you’d have thought she was the flipping Rolling Stones parading in. Apparently her reputation proceeds her because the kids were all happy to have her there, super nice to her, wanting to show her this or that….or they were just excited for fresh meat…or they’d been warned that she’s wicked crazy when she’s on steroids and they were unsure if she’d unleash the demons on them…but they were so full of kindness that she went to the teacher and said “These kids, they’re bothering me.”

Like, can you get my secret service detail to come in and make sure these little people mind my personal space boundaries??

When I left her in the classroom this morning, she was giggling and playing with her two little buddies, Jenna and Avery. I guess she’s learning that these “kids” are ok.

f.r.o.G…fully relying on God
—Anissa

**HUGE Thank you to God for Mathew Gliddon’s bone marrow results on Thursday!! I bawled all over my keyboard at the news that he’s in remission now!! Sweeter words are rarely said. Now that he’s reached remission he’ll have another month of treatments then they’ll head north to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia for his bone marrow transplant. His baby brother is the perfect match for him, so it’s awesome that all this family has been through, some miracles are really starting to happen for them.