Mom, the Ultimate Party Pooper

Let me start out by saying that I have never claimed to be a fun person.

I'm not terribly energetic, for one thing, and I have never been particularly spontaneous. For example, if you decide you'd like to meet me for lunch (not that you would), you can't just call and say, "Hey, Sarah, how about lunch today?" That would totally freak me out, because it is NOT ON MY CALENDAR FOR TODAY. And if things are not on my calendar, I tend to hyperventilate when someone suggests them. Most days of my calendar are filled out weeks in advance, so if you would like to have lunch sometime in January, by all means send me an e-mail as soon as possible! I would love to pencil you in. (Yes, my calendar is actually on paper, not on a BlackBerry or iPhone. I can barely figure out how to update this blog, so give me a break here!)

The only truly out-of-character spontaneity I have ever experienced -- and this is a big one -- was a spur-of-the moment, four-hour middle-of-the-night road trip to Memphis, Tenn., in October 1993. One of my traveling companions who's been at this blogging thing much longer than I have wrote a better description of it than I ever could, and he just posted a comment with the news that it is right here.

Anyway, this is all a very long-winded way to say that I am not one of those fun moms you read about in magazines and newspapers (often in the police blotter, I might add). I have certain ideas about the way any given day should unfold, and those ideas include sitting together as a family at the dinner table.

Until recently, I was under the impression that the two males who share my household were on board with this. But since my shift to part-time work, which puts me at home three entire evenings a week -- and all in a row, no less! -- it has become increasingly clear that eating dinner at the kitchen table, or even in the kitchen, has not been the standard operating procedure these past few years. They were able to pull it together enough to put on the act for Mom two nights a week, but it all fell apart when the act was required for three full nights.

Although he's a kid of few words, Elijah can communicate quite a bit with those few words.

"Mom should go to work!" he declared one night at the dinner table shortly after my schedule change. He's repeated this request, with increasing desperation, week after week. Clearly, things are much more fun when Mom is at work, which pretty much confirms the suspicion I've had the past five years that when I'm away, the inmate runs the asylum.

To Jeff's credit, the inmate does actually eat more nutritious foods when he is not forced to endure the indignity of sitting at a table. Jeff literally follows him around the house with a bowl of broccoli, or carrots, or chicken (but never all three at once -- they might TOUCH, and therefore contaminate one another). He puts food into Elijah's mouth, just like spoon-feeding a baby, while they watch TV, dance to YouTube videos, draw or play with TinkerToys. Enormous meals are consumed in this manner, night after night.

By contrast, meals with Mom the Merciless generally involve all courses being placed on the same plate at the same time (leading to countless cross-contamination possibilities) and plopped down in front of him at the table, along with the appropriate utensils.

That's it. No music. No dancing. No toys or crayons or videos. No promises of post-dinner ice cream as a bargaining chip to encourage broccoli consumption. And, perhaps worst of all, no games involving bodily noises.

So the whining begins, and eventually Jeff takes over while I resign myself to another evening of irrelevance. I finish my dinner, then try to keep myself busy while the two of them wander through the house completing Elijah's dinner. After a rollicking YouTube video dance jam at what I consider ear-splitting decibel levels, it's bath and bedtime, which Elijah does allow me to be involved in, but only if Jeff reads him his final bedtime story.

One of these days, I'll share the grisly story of his birth, and perhaps he'll appreciate me just a bit more.

But just to be on the safe side, I'll give him big bowl of ice cream, too.