Granny Smith

Last night my mom called me up and informed me that she would be less than an hour away from my house for a church event and did I mind if she stopped by after the meeting to see "my grandbabies." I said of course not, and we had a nice afternoon going to lunch and then sending Tim home with the girls so we could go shopping. I had tap shoes to buy, and then we stopped in at Marshalls where I proceeded to pose inappropriately with large plastic apples (see pic), because I'm actually twelve years old. I swear, when I'm around people I grew up with, I regress something awful. Just ask my friend, Meg. She has learned not to go with me to Target, or at least to bring a camera if she does.

I was always kind of an off the wall kid. I was dramatic, too, especially when I was mad. I didn't do it maliciously, though sometimes the results weren't great (tip, kids: Even if you're really, really ticked at your parents, three-year-old you should never scream "Help! You're not my mommy! Put me down!" in an international airport). Just in case you were wondering where my kids get their "creative" behaviors from when I write about them here, the apple (heh) didn't fall far from a certain tree. It's especially evident with Mary as she's older and talks the most.

I was the kid who would dress up in sunglasses and snow pants and go swing on the swings at the top of my lungs.Mary knows all the words to a lot of show tunes and finds stores and waiting rooms to have perfect acoustics for belting and awesome floors for dancing.

I was the kid who managed to fall asleep in the bathroom the night before school started, bang my face into the counter and walk into nursery school with a literal shiner. We're talking a dark blue ring around the entire eye. I've seen the pictures. I look like a DCYF ad. Anna and Mary were playing "race" in their new light up sneakers and Anna decided to put her hands over her eyes and run straight into a wall at full speed before I could stop her. No bruises, thank goodness.

This is a recipe for disaster...

I had the journalist bug in me early: If I knew something interesting, I thought the world needed to know. This led to announcements about where babies came from, tales of incarcerated relatives and scaring the crap out of the other kids in Sunday School with tales out of the book of Revelation or the news. More than once my mom had to come to me after church and say something like, "Now, hon, I know your dad lets you read Reader's Digest and that's fine, but little so-and-so was very upset when you talked about the kid who got impaled on a pipe and had to have surgery. That's not something to bring up in Sunday School." Mary's preschool teacher came up to me and informed me that Mary told the entire class her cat had gotten hit by a car and had "gone to Jesus." Said cat had died over a year before that but a new audience is hard to resist, I guess.

I used to rope my poor little brother into being in my plays in the backyard. There's one picture that exists of me in one of my mom's old disco dresses, and him (probably three years old) in an old dragon Halloween costume, clipped to the dog's run. Mary taught most of the girls in her preschool class to "fetch" when she threw a ball. Anna has been playing "puppy dog" since before she could say "puppy dog."

And today, while I was getting dressed, I hear Mary and Anna playing down the hall and this from the mouth of my eldest, in a Dramatic Voice:

"O wizards! There are monkeys on my lawn! Please get rid of them and all the horses!"

How do ya like THEM apples?