Tag Archives: temper tantrums

I Blame It All On iOS 7

Posted on by Stacy Swiger

Since I got such a great response to my last post, I decided to share another story about me jacking stuff up.  Gather ’round, my friends.  It’s a pretty good one…

The very first weekend after I returned from the cruise, Sheepdog and Kid B had to go out of town for a soccer tournament.  I was a little jealous that Sheepdog got to go do all of the fun stuff, but decided to shut my trap because I had just returned from my own fun stuff.  I focused instead on being happy about sleeping in my own bed;  I was totally going to be sleeping spread-eagle in the middle of that king-sized mother.

Friday night was clear and easy, but Saturday was looking to be a doozy of a schedule.  The day was starting very early with baseball pictures that I wasn’t even planning to buy, several kids had to be in different places at the same time on multiple instances throughout the day, and I couldn’t even drink about it because I was the only parent within state lines.

In a glorious turn of events at 6:55 on Saturday morning, I received a text.

“Picture Day has been canceled due to impending rain.”  Sweet.

An hour and a half later I heard another beep from my phone, “Park is closed today.  All games are canceled.  Please stay off the fields.”  Double sweet!  Except for ballet class, which Kid A drives to and from anyway, I had the day off.  It was turning out to be a DVR-catching-up-in-my-pajamas kind of day!  With Sheepdog and Kid B likely playing soccer in the rain, I definitely got the better end of this deal.

The boys were fine with being relegated to the basement to have their own video game marathon, and the girls went off to pirouette and tour jete.

But by mid-morning Kid E started whining.  And he Just.  Would.  Not.  Stop.

I watered and fed him…full belly.  I checked for a fever… nothing.  Had he pooped?  Like clockwork.  I offered to play with him, read to him, snuggle with him… un-uh.  I could not figure out what was wrong.  Technically, he was just being a real pisser.

The only things that remained on our afternoon and evening schedule were parties, and Kid E was supposed to go to one of them.  But there was no way in hell-o I was taking this little twit out in the pouring rain just to have him cling to my leg and act all weird and shy, while the other kids climbed the rock wall and played basketball and had normal, birthday party fun.  And what a great party favor to share… potential illness from one of the other guests.  I decided to text the party mom to tell her we weren’t coming.

I typed her name into my phone.  I thought it was a little weird when I was writing the message that her info came up as “Her Older Son‘s Mom.”  That’s how I put people in my contacts until I actually know them.

Yes, you are ID’d solely by your kid until one or more of the criteria have been met:

  1. We have interacted regularly for a while
  2. More than one of your kids plays with my kid(s)
  3. I feel comfortable enough with you to say “vagina” and/ or “penis” in our conversations

It’s my system and it works.  But it was odd that Party Mom’s ID was so retro… our relationship had surpassed the rules years ago.  She and I have discussed spider bites on balls, for goodness’ sake.  Her name is in my phone.  She earned it.

So I typed in the bail-out message.  I felt like an ass for canceling last minute.  Then, as if on cue, Kid E started throwing another holy fit for no particular reason, so I felt like I was making the right choice.  I took a deep, cleansing breath and typed in two more quick texts.

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Party Mom is a friend who always responds to texts right away.  Sometimes it’s just a stupid emoticon and other times she writes words, but I always know she saw my message.  But this time, I got nothing from her.  I chalked it up to her likely being busy with a six-year-old’s birthday party about to start, and I set off to diffuse my own six-year-old time bomb.  Regardless of my reasons, I still harbored guilt for being a shitty friend who texted we weren’t coming less than 15 minutes before the start of the party.

An hour and a half later I got this message back:

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OMG.  OMG.  OMG.

The reason the name “Her Older Son‘s Mom” came up is because iOS7 pulled her old phone number as the primary cell number from some GD cloud somewhere, even though I deleted it some two years ago.  Shit, I thought, She’s totally pissed at me.  And then, Shit, I thought, She passed her old phone down to her daughter.  I had canceled last minute (and maybe she got charged by the party people for a kid who didn’t even show) AND I texted “douche” to her 5th grader.  I am totally killing it today.

I felt like I was going to throw up, with literal puke in my esophagus.

That message was so cold and formal.  It didn’t really sound like her at all, but maybe I had crossed a line.  Or… OMG.  OMG.  OMG.  What if her daughter got the text and then showed it to Party Mom’s parents or her in-laws because she was busy running the party and one of them sent the response?  Holy hell, I am such a douche.

I immediately texted an apology to Party Mom’s real (I double-checked) cell phone.  The puke stayed right there (puts hands around throat in chokehold) all night.

The next morning I got up and checked my phone.  Still no response to my apology from Party Mom.  I had decided sometime during my totally sleepless night (even being spread-eagle in the middle of the king-sized mother couldn’t help me) that I would go over to her house and apologize in person to her and her daughter because it was the right thing to do.  Then I saw that Party Mom “liked” something of mine on Facebook.

Well, that was weird.  If she was so (rightfully) pissed at me, why would she “like” anything of mine?  My curiosity got the best of me.  I sent her another text.

“Good morning.  Are you still speaking to me?”  She began typing a response immediately.

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The puke slowly started to recede.  I gave her the short-story recap of my douche-baggery, in all of its glory.  And this is what she texted back to me:

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I blame it all on iOS 7.

Wish me luck for tomorrow…

Tales from the Trip – Part Two

Posted on by Stacy Swiger

The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep. - Robert Frost (this many miles, to be exact)

Three a.m. announced itself with a crappy song on the alarm clock radio.  I did not get nearly enough sleep and I had none of the “I’m going on a family trip today!” excitement that fueled me through the drive there.  But Sister B was due to arrive that afternoon with her three kids in tow and we would be even more hard up for decent sleeping arrangements if we stayed.  So I reluctantly got out of bed, made myself some coffee, and woke up some kids (best part of the day so far… just a small payback for all of the times they have done it to me).  Kid E woke up crying.  I don’t know if he was still going from the night before or if he was starting fresh, but he was working up a mighty fine fit.  What do I do about that?  Let’s all strap ourselves in to a confined space for about fourteen hours.  But first I shall spill about half of my freshly brewed coffee on my seat.  Awesome.

What is nice about the trip in this direction is that we are on the highways pretty quickly, so the kids would be melodically lulled back to sleep.  What is decidedly not nice are the number of toll booths on those same highways that are preceded by those things in the road that sound like machine gun fire when you drive over them so that if you are by chance sleeping while driving, you will indeed wake up just before you pull up to/ crash into the toll collector’s booth.  And so will everyone else in your vehicle.  Super cool.

I have my iPod in one ear while I drive and I had loaded some excellent new music before the trip up, so I was verily entertained even whilst everyone else was sleeping (/being woken up/ falling back to sleep again).  Traffic was pretty light and the weather was remarkably clear given the hideous storm just hours prior.  We even made it to the other side of Washington, D.C. by about 7:45 a.m., where we stopped for some breakfast, refueling and a leg stretch.  I noticed a party at a long table behind ours that seemed like it had a lot of kids.  There were car seats everywhere.  After watching them while we waited (forever) for our food to come, I realized that there were actually more adults than there were kids… about one mom and dad for every 1.5 babies.  And when I got a true head count I also became aware that there was only one more kid in their party than in mine.  So I realized that I have a lot of kids.  Then I think we contracted a mild case of E. coli from the food because we have all had shooting stomach pains ever since.  Fantastic.

Back on the road we continued to roll along nicely, but with eight hours still ahead of us it seemed like the never-ending road trip.  Certainly the antics from the peanut gallery would help us pass the time…

Every single time there was a noise on the highway or from the vehicle Kid D said, “That was probably a bike falling off.  You should check.  No, really Mom – I think a bike just fell off of our car.  I heard it.”

One time during a period of relative quiet on I-85 just south of Richmond, I began to pass an oil truck.  About mid-way through there was a BANG! that made me presume that someone in the backseat was setting off fireworks.  After first asking if anyone in our car had been shot, I quickly assessed the windshields.  None were cracked, so I can only assume that it was a piece of debris or a rock that shot against our undercarriage.  Holy Crap!  Now I’m definitely awake.

Kid E was in no mood to travel.  He made it clear in the driveway prior to takeoff when he started crying something about how his pillow was “broken” and such.  His lines of the day (meaning he said them no less than a bajillion times) were, “I want to go home.”  I responded with, “That’s what I’m doing, Big Man, driving us home.”  He would then reply, “No!  I want to be home NOW!”  Don’t we all?  “Here, have a roll of Smarties.”  He was clearly buzzing high on sugar by the time we got home.

“I’m hungry,”  “I’m thirsty,” “I want to watch a different movie,” and “I’m bored,” “Where are we?” and “How much further?” were frequent fan favorites of the day.  We also had a couple of the predictable “I have to pee!” and “I have to poop!” emergencies, so we got to see more rest stops on this go around.  Rest stops have gotten a bad reputation lately with the whole foot tapping thing and the sexual predator hangout stereotype, so I had forgotten how clean they usually are.  I was pleasantly reminded each and every time we had to swing into one.  They also have a lot of pretty landscaping now too, which was also nice.

Speaking of rest stop predators, maybe they were keeping all of the police officers busy because I did not see any of either of them.  Well, that’s not totally true, as I did see a few state police cars in North Carolina, but only in the northbound lanes.  I wonder what determines where the police lie in wait to hassle people who just want to get where they are going keep the roads safe from dangerous speeders.  I’d like to know the answer to that so I can avoid those routes whenever possible.

This is how we roll (at the Equator)

Our last stop for refueling was in South Carolina at about 3:30 in the afternoon.  When I stepped out of the car I was assaulted with a chest-crushing heat.  The whole time I was filling the tank (“Jersey Girls don’t pump gas!”) I struggled just to breathe.  Welcome back to Summer in the South.  And so begins two more months of never leaving my house during the day, else I will be soaked through to my underpants in sweat within sixty seconds.  Super Sexy!

Finally, around 5 o’clock we pulled into our driveway.  Yeah!  We were finally home.  It was still an unholy kind of hot outside, but the truck needed to be unloaded so I could pull it into the garage.  As I wrestled the bikes, disassembled the bike rack, climbed atop the truck to empty and detach the cargo bag, pulled everything out of the inside of our vehicle and piled it all in our driveway (I didn’t have five kids for nothing… they were going to carry all of this crap into the house for me), I realized that it was only by a Road Trip miracle (or undetectable extension charm) that all of these things fit inside.

So while the chickens were putting stuff away, I got a nice, cold shower.  Sheepdog was still on the West Coast riding in the Tour of the California Alps Death Ride 2011 (and yes, just based on the name alone I confirmed that his life insurance policy was up to date prior to letting him ride in that race) and we had been gone for close to four weeks, so our cupboards were bare.  I quickly ran out for some necessary groceries and Mexi-food for dinner.  By the time I finally sat down I was too tired to even open a bottle of wine.  Now that’s tired.

… but I would have gotten right back into the car the very next day just to go back to the beach.  Sigh.

Wish me luck for tomorrow…