The beginning of school: Sanity returns

Here's our editorial from GTWoman's Sept/Oct issue... now that the kids have been in school several weeks, it turns out we're psychic because this stuff is all happening.

The summer was one for the books. Lots of hot sun, wild kids and laughter long after bedtime. It’s not to say we didn’t love it, but there is something delicious about the start of school…. when someone else starts telling your kids where to be and when.

Things that shall re-commence now that school has begun:

Electronics shall return to their rightful owner.
How many iPhone induced rages can a girl handle in a summer? Try about three a day at our households. Every time we turned around to use our phones, they were not where we’d left them. But rather, for example, Kandy's was running on a 1 percent battery in Star Wars sheets of a twin bed. Cue the rage.
Editor’s note: Plug in and repeat one hour later.

Staying up late shall be a treat.
The magic is back. We, as parents, can now grant this and take it away, ground and unground like sleight of hand. No longer is every night a debate. There are now five glorious school nights to observe and, when it comes to late nights, our reign is back in session. Be sure these don't coincide with wine nights.

Sports equipment shall be put away.
Kandy’s husband ran over a soccer ball a few mornings ago while leaving the driveway. A soccer ball the children were told to put away and/or shove under the back tire of the truck out of sight. The same soccer ball that spent the entire summer on the front lawn with various sides fading in the sun, killing perfect circles of grass. Not once did Kandy see the ball actually get kicked, touched or netted. The same soccer ball Kandy thought was a small, fierce animal each time she was the last one outside at night. To have it end like this seemed melodramatic yet fitting.

The couch shall be sit-upon-able during the day.
Cushions shall be in place; forts shall be dismantled. Oh the simple joy of sitting in the living room and not feeling the springs too low and too hard coming up to meet you. Also, being able to see the floor, the tops of end tables and the face of the TV is nice too. You’ll discover pieces of furniture you forgot you had. Consider it a housewarming party.

Lunch shall be actually eaten.
What if we sat through a whole sandwich and didn’t have to make another, wipe a face (ours included), draw an imaginary line between two brawling children, fish a Lego out of a milk glass or confiscate a deck of Pokémon cards from below the table? Delicious, we say, better than a sandwich could ever be.

Decent appearance shall commence.
Well, with Kerry’s girl Brook, that was never an issue…but as for the boys… tattered shoes, be gone. We can now demand a higher dress code. Hair shall be brushed, cut even. Toenails shall be clean, cut even. And PJs shall not be worn all day; clothes shall be donned. (We will, however, adhere to the opposite dress code.)

Here’s to the arrival of fall! Enjoy the changes that accompany it and, come next summer, we’ll be ready to take on the craziness of a houseful of kids again!

Growing out your hair? Don't.

I’ve been growing out my hair for over a year now. I went through the predictable stages of hating it, loving it, eating it and other joys. Many of you recently noticed that I took several inches off, ponytail be gone. Here’s what happened and why:

Stage 1

The first thing to grow out on your head? Bangs. The rest of your hair stands still but the bangs go gangbusters. Bobby pins re-enter life for first time since wedding in 1996. Lose all 100 of the pack you buy, overnight. Find them all again as soon as you buy new pack.

Stage 2

Hair approaches ears with caution, then passes over.  Sleeping bad. Scratchy hair on pillow mucking up your ear on both sides. Every morning you try tucking it behind your ear only to have it spring out. You look and feel like a 7^th grader defying his parents.

Stage 3

Hair reaches shoulders. Not all at the same time. There are patches that descend the side of your head beautifully. You see only these when you toss your new hair in the mirror, hair that moves, a new phenomenon. You ignore the tufts of horse hair sticking out from under the cooperative layer. It needs to be cut off but you are still in the stage where you won’t cut a single fricking strand.

Stage 4

You hate it. It’s a goddamn mess, it’s in your eyes, face, mouth. All these women walking around with long hair are part of a silent suffering tribe who won’t admit that long hair is a pain. You look at them and wonder, why? But you say nothing. You can’t believe hundreds of years of long hair could be this troublesome. You’re doing something wrong, but what?

Stage 5

You take out some scissors. It’s a bad hair day. You just spit toothpaste into your hair when it came swinging forward to greet the day with you. You feel rage, you feel helplessness. The time has come. You are leaving the tribe, a bunch of snaggle-haired lying fakes anyway. You clip one, then two, strands out. What looks like a few hairs turns out to be about a million fanning out in the sink below you. Oh no, you think, my hairdresser is going to kill me. You put the scissors away. You decide to suffer a little longer, wondering how it will end.

Stage 6

Your hair stinks. You used to wash your hair every day when it was short, when you combed it and styled it with a towel. Now you’ve found yourself dreading the chore of washing horsetail, so much so that this could be day 3? day 6? since you used shampoo. You are clean from the neck down only. Also, you’ve gained 5 pounds and it’s all hair weight. You feel like a nasty pig. You realize you’re going to have to force yourself to care for this beast growing out of your skull. The price of beauty is mighty. A little part of you dies inside for you know this must be the tribe initiation. The cleaning, the time, the worship of caring for it becomes a rite, the hours invested too much to lose.

Stage 7

You are halfway through a turkey sandwich picnic and yet again, you pull a hair the length of your cranium from your mouth. The wind picks up the minute you turn your back and your hair races into your mouth. Again. Your friend keeps talking. She, too, is eating hair. Everyone pretends this is normal, tasty even. You feel the tribe closing in on you.

Stage 8

Finally, you reach your breaking point. Your hair is long and nearly all grown out. It’s sitting on your shoulders, you can feel it on your back. You sit through a doc appointment and notice you can feel hair on your back above the paper robe. It feels like a finish line of sorts. I’m done, you think.

Next morning, you go to the hairdresser's with the war cry, “CUT IT OFF!” The entire salon looks bemused and continues cutting their clients’ hair. Your hairdresser doesn’t even pick up her scissors. “You’ll make it, don’t worry,” she says. You’ll repeat this scene three more times, a few months between outbursts, reducing your plea finally to “Give me bangs, please? At least?”

Stage 9

You join the tribe. You decide you’re willing to buy lots of hair product, wash your hair a lot, dry it a lot, worry about it a lot. The deciding vote? You go to a concert and realize you can fix your hair up all pretty for the first time since your wedding. You ask your husband about 100 times, Isn’t this pretty? What do you think? I look like a new woman, don’t you think? Huh, don’t you?

He replies, “I like it short.”

Stage 10

You consider getting rid of him or the hair. Your decision sways each day. Finally you decide on axing several inches off. It took you 20 years to groom him, the hair only one.

Stage 11

You think about growing it out again, your bangs at least.

The Griswolds Go West

It was the classic All-American road trip: Badlands, Wall Drug, Mt. Rushmore, Yellowstone. Played out in a 20-year-old travel trailer and a pick-up truck in the glaring heat of I-90. Two kids in the back, two overgrown ones up front. I've been talking about doing this trip for 10 years and we looked at the kids and realized another 10  could sail by just as easily.... that we had to go, it was time.

Mapquest promised the worst: 27 hours one way. But it came as no surprise. I’d grown up doing this trek nearly every summer as a kid. There was no way around it — it was three days of travel each way with a trailer and kids in tow.
Or, in our case, four days. Less one trailer awning, plus one flooded kitchen and the purchase of a brand new transfer case on the truck to the tune of $2,500.

The awning incident came on Day 1. There’s nothing good about a car pulling up next to you on the Interstate and the passenger making flapping movements with his arms before speeding off. When you take a closer look in the rearview, sure enough, your awning has unspooled and laid itself nicely along the top of your camper, flapping like a flag.

This was no big surprise either. The spring broke on the awning last year and we knew it was on the countdown. We figured a thunderstorm would take it out in the end. But this was a blaze of glory, even by our standards.

You see, the beauty of our trailer is that it’s old and it’s imperfect but it’s ours. Each new “incident” brings a wash of love over us. Remember when the bathroom trim came off in my hand that night? How about the time we noticed the plastic was burning through, melted from a fire in the overhead light? And don’t forget the day the latch on the fridge broke and the milk exploded all over the floor AND the ceiling. Them those are the good ol’ days.

So Tim secured the awning in the dusty parking lot of a failed 24-hour café in Iowa. Tool of choice? Duct tape. The awning was taped into submission, its arms taped tight. The awning was a lost cause, tattered, its final stretch a reach for the heavens in a prairie sky. We held a moment of silence to recognize that we would not, in fact, have the enjoyment of shade on this trip.

Next up, the day we went to Bear Country, U.S.A. This is a drive-through animal park. Elk, bear, big horn sheep next to your truck, hysterical kids begging to roll down the windows. Totally worth it. We went at feeding time and watched the wolves defer to the 20-year-old kid in khakis with a bucket of feed. “That boy is the Alpha Male,” I told the children, “leader of the pack.” This led to an age-old face-off between Tim and me on who was alpha in our family.

After dropping $40 in the gift shop, we headed back to camp, stuffed bears in hand, necklaces swinging from our necks. And when we pulled in, we noticed a small rain shower coming from beneath the camper, a lake forming in its path.

“Here we go,” Tim said.

Inside, a flooded kitchen, water running over the discolored linoleum and down through the floor and out into the campsite we were paying a hefty $39 a night for.

Tim opened the cabinet under the sink and water burst out in welcome, a water line loose, broken, routing water everywhere.

Small potatoes, people. This same floor was flooded once before. In fact, the rotting floorboards in the kitchen have given rise to a few doubtful moments when the larger members of the family make a breakfast of buttered toast.

Once that was fixed, it was time for the biggie.

The breakdown arrived politely. It waited until we were 19 hours and one Mt. Rushmore into the trip. We left bright and early on a Tuesday morning headed for the Big Horn Mountains and beyond, Yellowstone. The parking lot simmered in South Dakota heat. Tim’s truck offered up an unusual hum, a rattle, a warning call.

“What now,” Tim said.

He ferreted out the problem, flat on his back in the parking lot of a GM dealership — not much fluid in the transfer case. The what? No matter, my tool man had us back on the road after a few quarts of fluid.

“Is it fixed?” I asked, filing my nails.
“Who knows,” Tim said.

Exactly 40 miles later, we knew. It was a major problem. Transfer case fluid had leaked out and blown all over the front of the camper in the 40 miles we’d traveled. We found a GM dealership three miles away and the guys took us right in. A new transfer case was needed. Cue the $2,480 bill. A weakness ran through my legs.

“Go drop your trailer down the road at the Rec Center,” the man in overalls said. “Bring the truck back and we’ll have it ready by 5.”

We were at once shocked and relieved. We were broke! We were alive! We lost one day! We lost only one day! We didn’t know whether to cry or cheer.

But when we pulled into the Rec Center, fanning our credit cards out for selection, my mom handed down a little bit of heaven and tipped the scales in our favor.

For what stood next to the Rec Center? A water park bigger than Mt. Rushmore itself. And only $7.50 a person for the entire 90-degree day. It was unheard of bounty in our time of need.

“Get your suits on!” I called. Thank God, I thought. I’d been imagining an eight-hour day in a parking lot with a deck of cards and two small badgers.
So we played all day in the park. I was talked into doing the rocket red slide once, which made the kids look upon me with something close to kinship. I quietly booked a chiro appointment for the day we returned home.

Tim shook off the setback after hiking back to the rec center on foot and rode the slides all day with the kids. I read my book in the shade, wrote a little and avoided eye contact with the red slide.

The truck was done at 5 as promised. The kids were happy but tired. Tim and I were broke but resilient.

“What a great place to break down,” we said that night, penniless, lying in our camper with our duct-taped awning and waterlogged kitchen floor. “Isn’t vacation the best?”