In which we inflict our weirdness on an unsuspecting world.

I have some little quirks of personality that make me unique, you undoubtedly do yourself and so have The Beautiful Children. We know and love each other and we're pretty cool with each others weird stuff. When we are at home we do have lots of chat and everyone tries to outfunny each other, we are a big fat bunch of show offs and a whole heap of strange. But you kinda don't notice that in your own house where you exist in a cosy little vacuum.

But we went out today, all together, the family Von auntiegwen went to the dentist.

We arrived and were met by the world's most sullen dental nurse (Olympic standard for sure), we did some form filling in and then entered the waiting room. Cue the Twilight Zone music. There aren't 4 seats together so we find seats where we can. Now regular humans are there, being quiet. This does not perturb The Beautiful Children at all, they continue to hold their conversation across the room, they didn't get the memo that says you have to be quiet in any kind of a place that smells antiseptic and people wear white uniforms.

Eldest Beautiful Daughter starts getting twitchy because on the wall there is a plug socket, a double plug socket and one switch is on and the other is off. They have to be both on or both off, yep, this is the same one who has a phobia of feet. So I can see her looking and I wonder if she'll get up and flick the switch in a nonchalant fashion or if she'll hyperventilate and faint. Oh no, the bold girl herself, marched up and switched them both to off and explained to a rather startled waiting room that uneven switches make her feel sick, then proceeded to tell them how in her sociology class there is a row of 3 double plugs and she has now trained the teacher to sort them before her lesson. She returns to her seat, not a bother on her and I flippantly (I know everythings my fault before you start) say "Good girl yourself, I thought you were going to have to sort the magazines out"

Oh my, back up she gets and starts to tidy the magazines up, she arranges them in size order and straightens out the bent covers and makes them all line up exactly in a row.

Then The Beautiful Son chips in with "You didn't arrange them by genre or date, you're such a fail at OCD, they'll take your badge back off you"

So with every eye in the room on her and the regular humans beginning to wonder if we should be out without a carer back up she gets and starts to re sort the magazines.

We have been waiting around 15 minutes or so when The Beautiful Son gets up and has a wander round the room, reading the notices, still talking loudly in his very exaggerated Scottish accent about when he was a laddie (he pretends to be a very old Scottish man, he sounds like an unsexy Sean Connery) when he stops in front of a picture that has 3 photos of smiling mouths and he exclaims in delight (so much so that he forgot to do the accent) "Look, it's me, remember when Mr Dentist took my photo the last time" and he points to a very obviously female mouth, in his defense it was the nicest one. His sisters hoot with derision and tell him that a- this is a woman's mouth and b- that photo was an x ray. He recovers quickly and back in unsexy Sean Connery voice retorts " Ah dinnae ken why he was xraying ma mooth, it wisnae even a bit broken"

The Beautiful Baby Daughter who is the most functional and sensible of us all looks totally disgusted and disgruntled at her fate of being landed with us, the weird family. She plugs her thumb back in her mouth, puts her ipod in and ignores us, she still manages to look more adult than the other 2 combined. This is actually quite hard to do whilst sucking your thumb.

The waiting room are perplexed at the bizarre theatre of strange before them but are glad when we are called through. We could hear (from the other room) and were hurt by the collective sigh of relief.

We don't have our usual dentist but a new one, a Sith Afrikken one, and now TBS morphs into a bad Nelson Mandela Accent and "yisses and viry nice to meet yi" to the new dentist and we all get a clean bill of health, 3 weans all teens and not a filling between them, ever, in their whole life, surely that's worth a good mummy badge?

As we get ready to leave, I'm sure to the whole building's delight and I have to make the new appointment with the sullen girl, remember her? from the beginning of this long and sorry tale, she asks us who we want the appointment with and The Beautiful Son decides he's going to make her smile, with his bad patter, and starts off with a "I've been wi Mr Dentist since I wis a wee laddie, fur 9 years I've been cummin heer and fur 17 of these 18 times I've had Mr Dentist, he's ma pal and I dinnae want 1 of yer new fancy dentists, I'm loyal to ma ain dentist"

And right on cue behind him comes his own dentist who is more than a little surprised to be so enthusiastically greeted by TBS who grabs and shakes his hand all the while explaining that he didn't choose to be unfaithful to him (still in the bad old man unsexy Sean voice) that it was sullen girls fault for sending him to the other dentist. This was accompanied by pointing and wagging of finger to sullen girl. Who has upgraded to cross and sullen and is now in training to be a Doctors receptionist. Or in therapy.

Like I say, we don't go out much with the regular humans.

Cross-Dressing Teens...

Grizz and I were watching a very challenging TV documentary the other night. It concerned very young children who had elected to start making changes to their pre-pubescent bodies as a result of feeling that they did not belong in the sex they were born to.

I was marvelling at the patience and stoicism shown by most of the parents portrayed. That they could be so honest about the process of letting go of their little boy, for example, to embrace the little girl who came into their lives instead...

The children appeared mainly to be so set on their paths, determined at a very early age to right the wrongs that fate's hand had dealt them, to go through excruciating medical procedures and torment, no matter what their peers might throw at them; This was extraordinarily brave. The parents appeared to be living with the undenable alternative which, to them in every case, was perhaps to lose their child to an early choice of death at their own hand... Which no parent should ever face.

Grizz was tussling with the choices of the children featured. They were brave. They were going through bizarre things. Weren't their parents amazing to go through all those heartaches? Didn't that boy look right as a girl? Wouldn't it be weird to have to make those choices?



And then, as I followed him up the stairs to bed, I noticed that he was wearing black linen pants. A pair that I'd never seen him wear before... I asked where he had got them from, and he pointed out that they were mine, that he'd plucked from the linen basket earlier that evening, to fetch something from the car... 'I could get very used to these,' he said. 'Aren't they really comfortable, mum? Do you think anyone would notice that I was wearing women's pants?'

He did look really good in them as it turned out. And we laughed out loud, after watching such incredible journeys being made. That this was my son's first foray into anything like cross-dressing!

(I have yet to tell him, of course, of the story that when he was born and we had to spend days in hospital, for he was a little premature and pretty jaundiced. And I asked my hubby to go off and buy a couple of babygrows at Mothercare as we were running out. And he returned with a packet of two, ostensibly white, baby suits but he had failed to notice that one had a faint pink horizontal stripe running through it and the other was adorned with pretty pink daisies... I ensured that the baby Grizzler wore them until he outgrew them, mind you. I've never been one to waste pennies unnecessarily!)

Does anyone have a Mother-Teenager Dictionary?

Have we talked about this before?

Forgive me if we have... But I was very keen to share this clip with you from the British Comedy duo, Armstrong and Miller.

In their recent sketch show, they often portray war-time 'Johnnies' as you might see them in any black and white film of the period - But these potential heroes speak as only our British teenagers can... 'Yeah, but! No, but!', and so on and on and on.

I, and I'm sure many others, find these clips hilarious, illustrating as they do, the vast gulf, nay chasm, that opens up before us when we are dealing with Teens, Tweens, Text-talk, MSN and just generally chatting...

They even appear to communicate with one another in very different ways to those we used and those we use now...



I keep chiding my teenager, Grizz, for how I hear him speak to his girlfriend on the 'phone... It sounds as if he is fighting with her, disrespecting her, putting her down - as I listen with my glass held up against his bedroom wall! The reality is in fact nothing like that, it's just the tone that jars my old-fashioned ears somewhat...

Alexander Armstrong (bizarrely, the son of the lovely learned man who was once my doctor!) was interviewed, in THIS article:

“THAT Vera Lynn, she’s well fit”.

“You like, crashed your plane, isn’t it?”.

“You can’t actually stop me cussing because I’ve got a hyperactivity disorder, I’ve got a note and everything.”

These are just a few lines from one of the best comic creations of recent times – the World War Two pilots from Armstrong & Miller, who talk in teen speak.

The inspiration for them came from a writer who heard two teenagers talking at the back of a bus. What makes it funny is the comparison between 19-year-olds today and teens who were risking their lives in the war.

Alexander Armstrong says: “The pilots highlight how our generation has evolved into this terrible state of self-regarding compensation culture, from the selflessness of the previous generation.

“Our pilots have a whole list of disorders they suffer from, which somehow should excuse them from any responsibility. Notes from their mum, asthma, learning difficulties...it’s a wonderful performance piece but a nightmare to learn.”

It's been a week, in the UK and Europe, where we remember and mourn our dead of so many needless wars... That in the end, we come to rely upon really young people to fight the brave fight, puts all of my own, self-obsessed, whinges into perspective sometimes...

Still, maybe we should start compiling that dictionary now? It took Johnson nearly nine years to complete his, after all!

Could you P- LEEAZZZE...

I remember quite clearly a time when Moannie wrote a list of do's and don'ts for the teens in her family, partly illustrated as is her style. This was a cry for help that l recognised, I had long since left home, married and I was visiting one day when I could tell she was at the end of her tether. I think this was also around the time she, at the end of a meal, in response to a simple question like, would you like some pudding too? that my fathers response was less than polite, probably sarcastic in his snappy Latin inimitable style, and she poured the contents of a can of chantilly cream all over his bald head with it.

We all hesitated with held breath for more than a nano second, realised he wasn't going to implode and instead we all laughed together, including the french student who looked aghast but just a bit impressed at the goings on within his anglo/french host family.

This list of heartache my mother poured out on to a large card, which she put up for all to see (And sign that they read and understood if l recall) in the dining room. This was the result of her lazy teenagers, showing her little respect, albeit unwittingly. And for the lackadaisical demeanour shown by my siblings and my father to her at the time.

I thought this was all fairly amusing and typical of my slightly manic and turbulent and very reactionary family. So no surprises there.

But now, almost 3 decades later, I GET IT MUM!

I wonder if you still have that list from which we could all here draw upon here.

Mine would have such detail and beseechments as;

PLEASE for the sake of your mothers sanity...

• pick up your clothes of the floor
• remove all food stuffs, milky mouldy glasses, old foiled wrapped sarnies now blue green and put them in the bin
• close the inner packaging in the cereal boxes, that's why they go soggy!
• don't stack the dirty dishes on top of the dishwasher, the machine is good but it cannot, as yet stack itself
• close the front door when you enter, no l don't mean lock it I mean CLOSE it.
• lock the doors and close windows when you leave the house unattended,
• tell someone when you drink the last of the milk/bread/butter and leave none for the morning
• correction, please do not DRINK the last of the milk, LEAVE some for the morning
• Don't leave lights, computers, speakers and hair straighteners on, for so many reasons, least of all costs and safety!
• It would be grand that after 14 years of early mornings and school runs, if I could have a lay in on MY day off, and you get yourselves up, JUST ONCE maybe!
• Don't bang doors
• Don't swear under your breath, I take it personally
• Don't talk to me walking halfway up the stairs I don't have bionic hearing
• I still give you lunch money, that means food & drink, not Starbucks and not to spend on the bus, its only 1.25 miles to school! If it rains l give you lift! OH Whatever!
• do say please and thank you to ME! Everyone tells me how Fab you both are, how polite and respectful but WHAT ABOUT ME! Thank me for the lifts here, there and everywhere!
• Please get up and answer the door to the postman when l'm at work and you're home (in bed asleep) the note he leaves has a time of attempted delivery, so l know what time you were still in bed. AND if l can get out of bed on MY day off and sign for YOUR ebay items, then you can scrub my back also....

Please feel free to add your rants here..............................Phew!

I KNOW there's so much more, but l need to take a break.

Heart in your mouth

So, amidst all the Halloween stuff that is big business here in the States, the Queenager decided to give me even more gray hairs. She drove herself and a friend to another friend's house on Friday night. Eek. First time in the car without a parent.

Such is the carefree nature of youth that she wasn't really bothered about having no idea where she was going. We dont have the fancy navigational stuff in the car, although there is a compass and if you keep going east you hit Lake Michigan, so I suppose you can't really get lost. But she has no sense of direction and didn't know the streets near her friend's house very well. Plus, they're all one way streets, so if you make a wrong turn it's not just a question of going around the block to right youreself. I insisted on printing a map of the immediate vicitinty with big arrows pointing to the road home, much to her chagrin.

Ten minutes before she left with her friend, it started lashing down and of course it was dark. Not great driving conditions, espectially since no one here seems to make any accommodations for inclement weather and other perils of the road. So off they went giggling and laughing about this great adventure, while I stared at the clock in the kitchen and tried not to imagine the police call telling me to meet them at the local emergency room, or Queenager herself tearily explaining that she somehow managed to hit a parked car. I did however, expect her to ring me when she got to her friends - you know, just to calm me down. But no! Having far too good and liberated a time to think about dear old mom. (I did call and she'd made it there in one piece, even managing to park the car in one manoeuvre.)

It's not that I don't trust her or think she's a terrible driver (she's actually quite good), but I remember my first foray on my own after I'd passed my test and it was pretty scary. I realise that parents of driving teens all go through this, but I'm glad the maiden voyage is over - for everyone's peace of mind!


Expat Mum
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Day 7 - A.D.

The drive back from the therapist was an opening.

My son bubbled over with chatter and deep conversation. He was my little boy again.

Then we spent most of the weekend together. Hey, without friends and laptop I am not such bad company for him.

He sat next to me while he completed college applications and drafted an essay.

Yes, he sat next to me.

He is taking all of his many consequences with grace. He has not complained except to say that he wonders when he is going to stop being surprised by consequences. He asked when some of them might be lifted. I told him that I didn't know -- I had never had a kid before who smoked pot -- this is new for me, too.

Hey, today he laughed at one of my jokes.

Hey, today I joked.

One step at a time.

Meanwhile, I am keeping this boy close to my hip.

I've always said that kids (especially boys, at the risk of sounded sexist - but since I have 4 of each, I may have enough experience to make this judgement) are brilliant when they are in the kitchen with their moms. Right and Wrong seems very clear while standing near the homefire.

As kids get further and further from the kitchen, they get dumber. Yes, they do dumber things.

And the more teenage brains are in in one place, the dumber they get. Brain mass actually atrophies.

Yes, I am getting my sense of humor back.

I recognize him more as my son as time goes on. And I recognize myself a bit more, too.

Thanks for listening to me as I go through this little dip in the raising teenagers journey. I am sure that we are not done yet...but I think I will pause from sharing the day-by-day with you.

Now back to our regular parents-of-teenagers-tongue-in-cheek posts. I'm ready for the laughs.

Day 6 A.D.

Finding out for certain that your son has been smoking pot is not unlike having a houseful of kiddos with swine flu: A parent worries and stresses, plans to prevent, and prepares for the worst, then once it happens, the energy shifts. Now it is time to take action and do all the things that need to be done.

Over the last 6 days there has been very little talking. There has been no yelling, no lecturing. There have been no temper tantrums (by parents or son). Everything has been communicated through actions.

My 17 year old has been following me around the house a bit. He just seems to want to be with me.

This evening he started to talk. He said he was feeling anxious and a little stressed. We actually ended up lying on the floor, facing the ceiling and talking.

He is wondering when some of the consequences will be lifted...he is starting to ask questions: What do the clothes I wear have to do with smoking pot? Why can I not see my friends? Why are you meeting me off the bus? Why can't I ride in the car with friends? He says he has stopped smoking pot now and he wants to return to his B.C. (Before Confirmation of drug use) life. Why do I have to see a therapist if I have already stopped smoking?

Ahhhhh, finally, an opportunity for me to teach him. No lecturing, just answering questions.

So, here are some simple short points I wanted to be sure to make:

1) When a boat hits rough waters on the ocean, the sails are pulled in, the cargo is sure to be tied fast. We hold on tighter until the storm is over and the sails can be opened again. We are in rough waters right now, and we are pulling in. Not because we don't think that we will get through the storm, but rather because we know that if we take these steps we will get through to the other side with less damage. Dad and Mom are the captains. We are in charge.

2) Stopping drug use is easy. Living life off drugs is hard. Our job is to help him to live life now. The therapist offers expertise we don't have. We need the resource. We are doing things now to help him live his life without needing to smoke.

3) The consequences are not punitive -- they are constuctive. What do we need to do to help you get through this? We are not out to get you. We are in this together. We are on your side.

He stayed on his back for over an hour. We talked, I listened. He was quiet. Most of the time. I was quieter. I was just there, beside him.

And I decided that I had to be the one to out-wait him. He had to be the one to get up first. I wanted to symbolize that I was not going to leave him. I wanted him to feel that although we have 8 kids, he is special enough for me to give him this gift of time.

Quiet, solid, still. I need to offer him what he needs. He needs to be willing to reach out and take it.

I think he is getting it.