TV and other mommy crimes

I ran out of cheesy secondhand teen horror novels, was just slightly underwhelmed by tonight's installment of my current television obsession, and am nowhere near tired enough to turn in, so here I am, scrounging out a long overdue (but pretty fluffy) blog post.

In Alex news, he's becoming a chess champion but still ends up guessing the wrong person when you play Guess Who? with him, which leads me to believe someone, somehow, is doing something wrong. We've made sure he knows the difference between a beard and a mustache, and where a goatee falls in the mix, and whether or not someone with just a ring of hair around the sides counts as bald and that "orange" hair is actually called red hair, and still, you'll be down to the wire and he'll be all, "Is your person George?" And you feel a twinge of pity when you have to say, "No. My person is Nancy."

But ask him which ways pawns move or what's the best strategy to protect your king or bishop or whatnot, and he's all over it.

He is now Alexander at school, in part I think because the other Alex in his class is an Alejandro, and the teacher wanted to differentiate but was iffy on how to pronounce the latter (or maybe just hasn't heard the Gaga song). And Alex is fine with being Alexander, and I am fine with him being Alexander because that's what I wanted him to be in the first place but everyone takes liberties and it's easier to just let them.

He moved up another reading level, he's into origami, and I'm easing him into becoming a horror-genre fanatic like his mama. We started small, with Goosebumps and R.L. Stine's Haunting Hour, but I have big future dreams of his accompanying me to the theater to see Blair Witch XII or Texas Chainsaw Massacre Returns years down the line. We were both a little freaked out by the Scary Mary episode of Haunting Hour, but in my defense I was subjected to a disturbing (if giggly) Bloody Mary experiment with my sister and her friend at the tender age of 5 and will never quite live down the trauma. But since then, and once you get past the extreme 1990s, extreme Canadianness (no offense intended), and extreme bad child acting of Goosebumps, it's not so horrible. And it's a sight better than Caillou.

Yes, Katherine has fallen under the spell of that infamous bald 4-year-old boil on the butt of cartoon-kind. If I were a better mother, perhaps I would stimulate her brain by reading to her all day, having her put together 100-piece puzzles singlehandedly, or taking her on a new, stimulating cultural adventure every day. Unfortunately (and not), I have to work. So she watches some TV. Her preferences are Mickey Mouse Clubhouse (tolerable, now that we're far enough out from Alex's Mouse-ka-days that the hot-dog song doesn't make me want to drive rusty nails into my eardrums), Fresh Beat Band (even WITH the new Marina and her giant mouth and never-gonna-measure-up-to-her-predecessor desperation), and yes, leading the pack, Caillou. She likes Elmo but has no patience for the other residents, whether human or monster or unidentifiable muppet creature, of Sesame Street.

Most of the time, though, she has no patience for sitting and watching TV, which is great except when she brings me a toy, book, or random object and slaps it right smack down into the middle of my keyboard, either coincidentally or not (as I'm beginning to believe) shutting down the program I was working in or inserting a whole bunch of errors that my clients would likely frown upon.

When she's doing something wrong and I catch her at it, she immediately stands up, smiles so sweetly you'd swear she's the female Damien, waves, and says, "Hiiii!" And you're wrong if you think that's not persuasive. Sometimes I manage to hide my laughter in the couch cushion, but my girl she is no dummy. But I tell her every day, cute will only get you so far. We still don't rip pages out of books, lick the dogs, or poke our fingers into the Blu-Ray player slot. And now that Christmas stuff is up, we don't take the crudely constructed wooden baby Jesus out of his makeshift cardboard manger and try to eat him. Call me strict.

Christmas shopping is all but done, and every day that goes by that I trip over Katherine's play vacuum or slip on an errant marble or jump when T.J. Bearytales lets out a bone-chilling blat of discordant music as his batteries slowly die makes me more set on the idea that my kids just don't NEED a whole lot. Give Katherine an empty box and a Happy Meal race car. Give Alex a piece of paper and find him a YouTube video of the lady who does step-by-step origami. They're all set.

That's it for now. I'm skipping over the ugly details of our recently ousted stomach virus because I'm still two brain-bleachings away from completely forgetting the ordeal. In fact, I'm skipping over a lot of things. But here is my nod to what we're up to in this almost-December of 2011 world. I take some solace in the fact that there's no more significant news to report.