way way back machine...

When I brought my kids home from practice today, my son started talking to his mother about the card that he had made for her in class. Mother's Day will be upon us in a few days so, as is tradition, school-age kids everywhere are putting their creative minds to work and constructed masterpieces that they will proudly present to their mom's on Sunday. He went on and on about the cards and the gift that they had made in the class. You could see the excitement overflowing from within as his face lit up. You'd have thought that he were in some special lab at that school making a Rosie the Robot maid that will cook mom breakfast and bring it to her in bed on Sunday. You could tell that he wasn't supposed to reveal what exactly it was that he had made, but he could hardly contain it. He was about to burst at the seams. Luckily, mom changed the subject by asking him to get something out of the kitchen. It was pretty hilarious how this little diversion made him lose his train of thought and move on to the next.

I'm sure I was like that too. I remember spending whole days mixing up some plaster concoction to make an imprint of my hand or my face and then doing my best to color inside the lines to make the card look like Hallmark had made it. Maybe Hallmark should hire some kids to make their cards. How cute would that be? They could put a bunch of kids in a room with a box of crayons and some white walls and let them make giant cards. They could then take those images and mass produce them and sell them all over the place. They could pay them in cookies and milk, and if a kid accidentally smeared some chocolate on the wall where he was creating the card, they could leave that in for authenticity. As usual, I'm getting way off the subject and probably suggesting some sort of twisted Simpsons' style child-labor camp that would make Nike sweatshops seem like Disneyland. Speaking of which, when my kids ask me "Hey Dad, where are we going? what are we going to do today?" I sometimes reply with "We're going to a child labor camp. You guys are going to make toys all day." Half confused and half mortified at the notion, they always pause to give me a funny look before saying, "No...you're just kidding...right?" I smile and try to keep from laughing. They cease to ask that question anymore until we get to wherever they are going. What? Is that mean? It's better than the one I borrowed from Jack Handy's Deep Thoughts when they were younger.

"Dad, I want to go to Disneyland!" my son would exclaim as if putting an imaginary stake in the ground.

"Disneyland burned down," I would explain, motioning to an old vacant lot that we would drive by. He would survey the situation very closely and would start to look very concerned. My daughter, 2 and a half years his senior, would be my straight man, having adopted my sense of humor at an early age. Sometimes she would even add her own twist to it. "Yeah...it's true! Mickey and Donald were able to escape on one of the spaceships from Space Mountain." He doesn't fall for that one anymore.

But I have digressed. Mother's Day gifts. How sweet the memories of childhood were. For much of my adult life, my mother has called me to tell me precisely what I am to get for her, where I am to get it, and how much it costs for every single birthday, Christmas, and Mother's Day. It takes the fun right out of it. I stopped wrapping them years ago.

Stepping back into the way way back machine...

Remember when kids would walk to school? When I was in kindergarten and first grade, a group of us when meet up on our block and walk to school in a big pack, getting into varying degrees of mischief along the way. We'd kick rocks, throw rocks, jump in puddles, and taunt scary dogs from the safe side of the fence. Some of the older kids would leave even earlier and play tan-bark tag on the jungle-gym in the park adjacent to our school until the bell rang. We'd do it all again on the way home. Those were the days. I had a key that sometimes was worn around my neck, sometimes carried in a pocket, and sometimes just lost. It's a good thing that my parents didn't have those double-paned windows with the locks on them or an alarm system back then, because I was frequently climbing through the bathroom window in the back of the house to get in whenever my keys had disappeared. It was quite a feat too. The window was up about 7 feet off the ground, so I had to climb up to it and pop the screen off, and it wasn't a full sized window, so I had to slither through it. Once inside, I had to reach across to the rail that held the shower door for balance, my body fully horizontal at this point. Then I'd slide my legs through and swing down into the shower while hanging on to that rail for dear life. I'd usually remember to put the screen back on the window, but had I ever thought to clean the muddy footprints off the floor of the shower, my mom would've never known.

Those were the days. Chores, Tom and Jerry, and eating leftovers. That was the life. I'd do all of this before my parents got home. One of my friends might even come over to help me. Then I might get dressed and get on my bicycle and head to practice, wherever that might be. I might have a friend of mine riding on my handlebars as we rode to practice. Of course, this was before kids wore helmets while riding their bikes and Amber was not an alert, but probably just some girl in your class.