Chalk Up One For Mom

It was a pretty good day.

Eldest rolled out of bed early to drive a friend to the airport. He was back as I finished breakfast and had taken over the family computer – checking e-mail and browsing the web with that air of cheerful, abstracted anxiety that comes naturally to new college graduates.

When his younger brother emerged, the computer was fiercely guarded. During the morning round of social phone calls, I warned him tell his friends that they’d have to go without video games until Eldest was finished.

Fruitless warning, of course.

But prescient. When Best Friend arrived, even the combined persistence of two 11 year olds couldn’t match the entrenched surliness of a 22 year old who had gotten up too early.

The ecstatic squalor of dumping the massive lego accumulation of twenty years onto the living room floor averted the first onset of complaints. They built a huge gondola for their planned lego dirigible. Broken radio-controlled helicopters were salvaged for engines and propellers. A little after lunch the kids walked downtown in search of the helium balloons that they were sure would take their creation to the skies. It's a small town, with lots of free range kids. Nobody batted an eye.

Well, the balloons kind of worked.

It turns out you can attach a radio controlled helicopter to two big balloons and drive it around the house.
Or suspend four lego mini-figures from a javelin, attach it from balloons, and float just about at equilibrium for more than hour, following out air currents.

You can’t, of course, suspend a lego-built gondola. Unless you take out lots of pieces. And then add the helicopter motors. And then maybe give it a kind of push . . .

About that time the squabbling broke out in earnest.

“Can’t we PLEASE go to Yesterday’s for some ice cream . . . . “

You know the irresistible pleading cat eyes of Puss ‘n Boots from the Shrek movies? They’ve got nothing on the kids.

I looked at the time. 2:30. Okay, I needed to stop at the post office and stop at the market. We all needed a walk anyway.

“Sure, you guys can get a kiddy cone.”

Then it started.

“WHAT! “

"We NEVER get those . . . "

"I’ll pay . . . "

"They are SO LITTLE!:

"I only like sugar cones!!!"

No good deed goes unpunished.

Never had a six block walk seemed so long. And TWO of them! That’s the problem with best friends – they know you almost as well as your own kids do, but you don’t have the same implicit power over them. They're only held back by politeness. Hmmm . . . ice cream v. politeness. Give me a break.

At around block four I could feel my resolve weakening. So what that I was trained developmental psychologist? Who studies parenting? Who knows that giving in to whining only leads to more whining? (After all, it's only an ice cream . . . Maybe I'm just being Puritanial . . . ?)

So what if I had good arguments on my side? The kiddy cones are plenty big . . . It’s the middle of the afternoon . . . You've already had lunch - this is just a snack . . . If every time you get a treat you complain that it's not good enough, it doesn't make me feel like giving you treats . . . When I was a kid we only got ice cream as a treat when we visited my grandma. Okay, maybe the arguments weren’t overwhelming. But they were perfectly reasonable arguments.

And I had already said no. Probably 8 or 9 times by now. There is no way they could failt to notice that their begging had worked. And it works both ways. It was just an ice cream. And a small cone IS plenty big.

We pushed open the shop door and the kids both shot me a look of disgust. They both know better than to go for the eye roll.

I smiled at the tired man behind the counter. “Two small cones, please. Kids – what kind of ice cream do you want?”

Grudgingly, they ordered. Strawberry shortcake and rocky road.

And then the miracle occurred.

Slowly and lovingly, the clerk curled the ice cream from the big bucket, pushing it gently into the cones.

A bit more . . .

A bit more . . .

My son took his, gazing in amazement.

Best Friend shook his head bemusedly and grabbed the rocky road.

They held them up to the cone samples.

“Wow . . . They put just as much ice cream in them as the regular ones. The cone’s just a little smaller.”

I nodded my head, plopping my water down on the table.

“And this is really good.”

I nodded.

They picked up the wooden tic-tac-toe board and started a game.

“Not so bad?” I asked.

They grinned. Any time you’ve got chocolate smeared on your face from nose to chin, things can’t be all bad.

Chalk up one for mom.

Maybe I’ll make it through the rest of the afternoon.

© 2010 Nancy Darling. All Rights Reserved