We didn't ride this ride, nor take this picture. The line was too long and my camera was in the car.

I have no pictures to prove it, but  we went to Legoland over spring break. We, the foursome Funkhouse along with the greater population of Los Angeles and San Diego counties, descended upon  the freaky plastic brick universe and set out, come hell or high water, to have fun. Did you hear me? I said Fun. F-U-N.

Problem is, my parents didn’t do theme parks. Maybe once or twice, but not with the obligatory and regularly scheduled pilgramges parents these days entertain.

So I never learned how to embrace spinny rides and fake towns and adults dressed in suffocating character costumes, not to mention the accompanying annoyances: long lines, crappy food, expensive crappy toys, expensive crappy themed lanyards and book bags, and the just plain insidious crap lurking behind every hand-sculpted bush.

And since Theme Park love is genetic, since you either have the propensity to remember your camera, and wear the right kind of congenial smile, and stand in ridiculously long lines, or you don’t—I’m f*#ed.  My Theme Park Gene (TPG) is dry.

*****TPG is  located somewhere in the lower right quadrant of the left helix, same general vicinity as the County Fair Gene (CFG). Neither can be supplemented, bought on the black market, grown in small containers, implanted or divined.*****

Anyway, that Good Friday afternoon at Legoland, I was the only parent putzing through Lego Star Wars Miniland totally  TPG free.  I hoped like second-hand smoke, if I stood close enough to these folks basking in TPG, maybe I’d pick up a trace, maybe find my kids’ every grimace and pose absolutely breathtaking, maybe feel moved to snap pictures of them at every single Lego statuette: Honey, hug the plastic princess. Honey, sit on the plastic turtle. Honey, stand near the plastic fountain, the plastic rock, the plastic river.

I purposefully bumped shoulders at Pirate Shores with a short-cropped woman clearly  fueled by TPG. Her double stroller dangled with three bright yellow gift store bags. The two mild-mannered kids drank lemonade from souvenir cups and fiddled with their fresh sets of Legos. I thought: she’ll help make the lines tolerable, a dash of her TPG and I’ll  be okay with standing on stamped concrete and waiting ninety minutes like it’s free lifetime babysitting on the other end and not a three-minute spinny ride. The transfer failed.

We didn’t buy any souvenir cups or even eat the souvenir food. We didn’t take pictures or wait in any lines. I think we might have frowned, once. Suffice it to say, we won’t end up front and center on  any marketing material.

But to be positive, becuase PAL appreciates positivity and becuase I appreciate his effort to keep me focused on the positive, we did enjoy the weather—breezy with intermittant blazes of sun. We did find it adorable that the kids loved the one ride that we actually rode (the line was 5 minutes long. Translation:the lamest ride in the park, bless their hearts, but they LOOOVED it, despite the outdated, clunky animatronics.).

We still have a day left on our passes. Meaning, in the next ninety days we can return gratis. The thought is nice, and well, let’s just not tell the kids.

Meantime, we’re interviewing folks with TPG. Don’t tell PAL, he’s also fiercely protective and might be uncomfortable pushing his kids off on a stranger. But if you promise to take pictures of the kids  galloping from attraction to attraction like crack-head squirrels and pictures of them caught rapt in wonder at God knows what and pictures of them standing upright while waiting patiently in line, I’m sure he’ll agree to hire you.

Otherwise— hell I don’t know, we’ll have to smuggle in margaritas. What’s not to love on Dino Island with a buzz?

PS. Sorry. School is to blame for the gross lapse in posts. That, and I’ve been crafting non-stop with the kids. We’ve built balsa wood hummingbird-houses and dried and pressed petunias and glued more cotton balls onto more paper rabbits’ asses than you can imagine. We’ve also been baking homemade squaw bread and gathering our own honey from a wild hive and churning butter and raising and butchering our own meat. Oh wait, it’s late and I’m having a lying seizure.

Recently I’ve culled my expectations for my kids down to five big ones. Here they are, in chronological order:

1. Learn to wipe their own asses

2. Read obsessively

3. Play an instrument

4. Nurture a passion

5. Be a liberal

This list outs a few basic things about me: I’m practical and immoderately idealistic; part taskmaster, part dreamer; part outspoken smart ass, part tea-sipping pacifist.  Which may or may NOT bode well for raising sane kids; time will tell, or rather, therapy bills will tell.

In any event, I’m confident my first four expectations will fall into place without massive effort. But number five is a different story,

The more conservative PAL can’t help but pull the kids (gently) under his right wing. But since I’m hell-bent on cultivating the buds of liberalism I can already see pushing up at the fertile soil of their souls, there’s no doubt our funkhouse will flourish with lefties.

This entre into liberalism is as close to homeschooling as I’ll get, and includes all sorts of “lessons” I’m loathe to put into practice (cause I have the patience of a day trader), but for the sake of an entire generation’s salvation, I’ll give it a shot.

If I don’t start the acclimation (do I mean edification?) process now, I may end up the only liberal in my house which makes for sordid odd-man-out scenarios I’ll be compelled to pepper into my short stories.

Here’s how I propose we start liberalizing our kids:

1. Play Monopoly and insist all their money go toward defending Park Place with tanks and spy planes and whatnot. But that’s not in the rules, the kids protest, and Park Place doesn’t need our help.  Oh Contraire, you say, if your government is LIBERAL you won’t see that, otherwise, you’re S-O-L, sweeties.  Up the ante on the lesson:  When they’re not looking, sneak 90% of their money and heap it in an “Invade and Shoot ‘em up” pile.

2. Read the Bible at bedtime. Liberals galore—including the amiable protagonist in the second half.

3. Sit the kids out on the back porch for the night; deny blankets, pillows or water until they go get a job. Yell through the screen door: This is what happens if you’re homeless in a conservative world. Don’t be homeless. Don’t be conservative. Clear? That’s what I thought. Bring them in before it becomes a memory they one day exaggerate in a memoir, then cuddle and practice spelling E-M-P-A-T-H-Y.

4. Run into their rooms at 2 a.m., scream, turn on the lights, scream some more, puke (if you can) on their pillows.  Rattle them to their contended little cores. Wait for them to mumble, “Mom, what are you doing?”  Answer: You want a world without birth control? A Santorum world? Then let’s hope you don’t get pregnant in high school. Otherwise, plan on not sleeping a full night ‘til you’re incontinent, is all I’m saying.

5. Refuse a Band-Aid next time someone scrapes a knee. Demand an insurance card. She gives you what she has in her piggy bank. Laugh out loud, say that hardly pays for you to open the Band-Aid, let alone hand over a Sleeping Beauty Band-Aid. You chide, welcome to a conservative healthcare system. Think about maybe one day checking “liberal” on your voter card, sista.

Meantime, while my kids work on mastering the forward to aft butt wipe, I’ll be taking them to more independent coffee shops. We’ll sit next to same sex couples and talk about how they’ll one day be allowed to get married or give a homily.

We might even get out pom-poms and pipe cleaners and do some kind of craft paying homage to liberalism. Probably not, but you can.  Then send it to me and we’ll tape it up.

 sMother: (noun), as in a mother who smothers. A mother whose hypervigilant hovering, constant emotional redirection and excruciating involvement in their kid’s every tic, rant and loose stool is downright clinical.  A sMother can be found refereeing playdates, manning the slide at parks, and always in a doctor’s office. A kid of a sMother is rarely allowed to eat his first tree nut without a paramedic on deck, nor skip through a park without strict instructions for skipping.

Sad part is: they’re everywhere, these sMothers with their mini antibacterial bottles clipped to key chains, flashcards rubberbanded in their purses—and they’re dangerous, viral.

My biggest concern is, of course, a mostly selfish one. I’m worried my kids might someday date/marry/shack up with a kid of a sMother and I can only assume the racket of dealing with a partner who’s never picked out her own socks, who’s never been allowed to dismember a dung beetle, one appendage at a time.

I’m no psychologist, but based on my vast experience with psychosis I sort of should be, and so have compiled this handy guide to reference next time you’re sharing a bench with a sMother and wonder, what kind is she? They’re a species and should be duly categorized:

1. The First-Aid sMother: Good on her, she’s got a Ziploc baggie busting with Neosporin and band-aids and anti-venom, but she’s still making her second grader sit in a bucket swing.  She volunteers to man the first-aid table at the school’s annual fundraiser.

2. The “No-Touchy” sMother:  You can hear that grating chirp in your sleep. “No touchy, Timmy, that’s a flower and flowers should be looked at not touched. No touchy the dirt Timmy, no touchy the doggie, no touchy your friends, your food, your eyes, your penis. Timmy, did you hear me? The world doesn’t like to be touched.” You will smuggle a gift card for counseling into Timmy’s pinch-free lunch pail.

3. The Grammar sMother: Former English teacher turned full-time mom. She can’t get her job back, nor can she get off her high-horse about bygone rules.  She makes you self-conscious of every word so you shut up when she shows up at the school’s annual fundraiser and sits her schoolmarm ass at your picnic table.

4. The Choking sMother:  She choked on a grape once and can’t get over it. Her kid is ten and she still shreds his cheese sticks into smithereens.  You saw her the other day, fishing Cheerios out of her teenager’s mouth, all petulant and singsongy: One at a time, sweetie, one at time.

5. The Academic sMother: She goes beyond quizzing her kid in the car, at story time, at the dinner table.  What’s this letter? What’s five times five? Who gave the Gettysburg Address? This sMother supplements the rigors of private school with pop quizzes at breakfast, trips to art museums and re-runs of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. She makes you feel like a dope, so at the annual school fundraiser  you start a rumor that she’s a stripper.

Five types, all of them equally detrimental to the psyche of this up and coming generation. It’ll be a fetid pool of wishy-washy, scaredy cats without a single lumpy scar to show off at a bar someday—if you don’t intervene.

You can get a sMother help. Send her here: www.halfassedmom.com. I can set her straight. Sure I can.