Apparently, when my children ask, each and every night, "What's for dessert?", I'm supposed to whip out a menu with a laundry list of options.
We have a rule about dessert in our house: don't ask about dessert until everyone is finished eating. Because without fail, the other kids who is still eating (it's Finn 99.9% of the time), will drop his fork, say he's finished, and want to know what's for dessert, too. This rule is hard for them to follow. Because let's face it, dessert is really exciting. Unless you live here.
A kid: "What can I eat for dessert?"
Me: "Well, there are some banana muffins, some vanilla ice cream, some sorbet (note: They're these sorbets in fruit halves that we bought at Costco. Totally delicious. . .and totally artifically flavored. Sigh. Won't be buying those again.), or you can have some fruit."
A kid: "Is that it?"
Me: "Yes, that's it. This isn't a restaurant you know." I'm annoyed. We go through this every night and I have to relive the insufficiences of my dessert offerings 365 days a year. "Or you could have nothing." I'm so mean.
A kid: "Do we have any cones for the ice cream?"
I wonder if I said no they'd launch into some Meg Ryan as Sally Albright-esque description of how they wanted their ice cream instead. . .
Sally: "But I'd like the pie heated and I don't want the ice cream on top, I want it on the side, and I'd like strawberry instead of vanilla if you have it, if not then no ice cream just whipped cream but only if it's real; if it's out of the can then nothing.
Waitress: Not even the pie?
Sally: No, I want the pie, but then not heated.
I think my kids are high maintenance dessert eaters.
How often do you have dessert at your house? Do you make a homemade dessert all the time? What do you offer? Because clearly I'm sub-par here.
I swear, next time they ask what's for dessert, I'm going to say flan, baked Alaska, and pineapple upside down cake and see how they react. Just kidding boys. Your choices are banana muffins, vanilla ice cream, sorbet or some fruit. It's deja vu all over again.
Tuesday and Wednesday we're off to Denver for bloodwork, an eye exam and an echo EKG--all for Finn. We're squeezing in a trip to the Museum of Nature and Science, which looks awesome, and staying at a hotel. We will be eating out. I wonder if they'll ask for dessert.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Tuesday, August 5, 2008
Sunday, August 3, 2008
Slug Bug Red!
When I was a girl. . .as many stories in this house start, we didn't fly anywhere, we drove. I didn't travel by airplane until I was 15 years old, a laughable comparison to the Rooney boys who were both international travelers in their first year of life.
So all of us who grew up traveling by car -- before the age of in-car or portable DVD players, portable music players of any kind, or your parents making any effort whatsoever to entertain you except to reply to you in monotone that we'll be there "soon" -- we had to entertain ourselves with car games. Car games that didn't have any magnetic parts or pieces, just simple games that you played by talking to each other.
One of our favorites was My Grandfather Owns a Store. Surely you played this one, too. It starts out, "My grandfather owns a store, and in it he sells something that begins with . . ." and you choose a letter that corresponds with a product from the store and everyone else tries to guess it. Sort of like 20 questions about food. Unless you were being really devious and choose something like "C" and it was for charcoal. That was a good stumper. I'm guessing this game became annoying really quickly for my parents because my sisters and I used to say, "My grandfather owns a store, and he really does, and in it he sells. . ." We said it every, single time. How that must have grated on the old nerves on a drive to Florida in the brown Oldsmobile that I don't think had any air conditioning. But it was true. Grandpa did own the only grocery store, an IGA, in West Mansfield, Ohio. Clearly, we were very proud of this. Proud enough to be really, really annoying.
Another favorite game was the Cow Game. If you're not from some state that has large herds of cows grazing in pastures next to the road, you might not be too familiar with this one. Each kid takes a side of the car. As you drive and see cows, you count them and keep track. The first to get to a certain number, I think we used 100, won. The bummer--if you passed a cemetary on your side AND the other person saw it, your cows all "died" and you have to start over. We did some drives so often--Columbus, Ohio, to Lake Cumberland, Kentucky, for example--that we knew what side of the car was best to be on to win at this game. Cheaters.
And of course, there was the license plate game. You could play this one of two ways: try to get through the alphabet finding letters on license plates or look for as many different state plates possible. I think we usually did the letter version.
Finally, there was probably everyone's favorite: Slug Bug. Ah, the VW bug. Such an icon of the automobile world that it had its own car game. A simple, and yet painful, game. See a VW bug, lean over and slug the person next to you on the arm and shriek, "Slug bug red!" Or whatever color it was. I don't think it was actually so much of a game as a way to be loud and annoying in the backseat and cause bodily injury to others. We didn't play this one a lot. But then again, we were girls.
So what do kids do today when there really aren't that many bugs around to slug each other for anymore? The other day I found out. Declan, Finn and Garvin were in the backseat and suddenly someone yelled out, "Prius! Green!"
The times, they are a changin'.
Got a great car game? We've got a car trip ahead of us in August, so let's hear it!
So all of us who grew up traveling by car -- before the age of in-car or portable DVD players, portable music players of any kind, or your parents making any effort whatsoever to entertain you except to reply to you in monotone that we'll be there "soon" -- we had to entertain ourselves with car games. Car games that didn't have any magnetic parts or pieces, just simple games that you played by talking to each other.
One of our favorites was My Grandfather Owns a Store. Surely you played this one, too. It starts out, "My grandfather owns a store, and in it he sells something that begins with . . ." and you choose a letter that corresponds with a product from the store and everyone else tries to guess it. Sort of like 20 questions about food. Unless you were being really devious and choose something like "C" and it was for charcoal. That was a good stumper. I'm guessing this game became annoying really quickly for my parents because my sisters and I used to say, "My grandfather owns a store, and he really does, and in it he sells. . ." We said it every, single time. How that must have grated on the old nerves on a drive to Florida in the brown Oldsmobile that I don't think had any air conditioning. But it was true. Grandpa did own the only grocery store, an IGA, in West Mansfield, Ohio. Clearly, we were very proud of this. Proud enough to be really, really annoying.
Another favorite game was the Cow Game. If you're not from some state that has large herds of cows grazing in pastures next to the road, you might not be too familiar with this one. Each kid takes a side of the car. As you drive and see cows, you count them and keep track. The first to get to a certain number, I think we used 100, won. The bummer--if you passed a cemetary on your side AND the other person saw it, your cows all "died" and you have to start over. We did some drives so often--Columbus, Ohio, to Lake Cumberland, Kentucky, for example--that we knew what side of the car was best to be on to win at this game. Cheaters.
And of course, there was the license plate game. You could play this one of two ways: try to get through the alphabet finding letters on license plates or look for as many different state plates possible. I think we usually did the letter version.
Finally, there was probably everyone's favorite: Slug Bug. Ah, the VW bug. Such an icon of the automobile world that it had its own car game. A simple, and yet painful, game. See a VW bug, lean over and slug the person next to you on the arm and shriek, "Slug bug red!" Or whatever color it was. I don't think it was actually so much of a game as a way to be loud and annoying in the backseat and cause bodily injury to others. We didn't play this one a lot. But then again, we were girls.
So what do kids do today when there really aren't that many bugs around to slug each other for anymore? The other day I found out. Declan, Finn and Garvin were in the backseat and suddenly someone yelled out, "Prius! Green!"
The times, they are a changin'.
Got a great car game? We've got a car trip ahead of us in August, so let's hear it!
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