Things I Learned While Hanging Out With My Niece and Nephew This Evening

My parents had "time off" from entertaining my niece and nephew this evening, so the kidlets got quality time with me.  My niece is 11 and my nephew is 6.  I do not have kids of my own, so I'm all about fun time.  As long as I return them safe and sound -- no broken bones and everyone is alive and breathing -- I feel I have done my job.

I learned a few things while hanging with the kidlets this evening:

1) My niece has some kind of secret voodoo powers when it comes to the Claw game.  You know the ones: outside movie theaters or in arcades, you drop in the money and you have a certain amount of time to maneuver the claw up and over to see if it can grab a toy and hang onto it long enough to drop it down the chute.  $1 later and she is now the proud owner of a  pinkish-purple and leopard print cow-bear-dog thing.  That takes skill, my friend.

2) My nephew is smart enough to realize that when there are large amounts of geese around there is also a large amount of goose poop in the area, and you should not roll down the hill in the park.  This will not, however, keep him from diving to try and stop his sister while running a race.  After landing with his hand in goose poop he will then run over to you, the adult-type person,  freaking out about it.  What makes him awesome is that after you squirt his hand down liberally with hand sanitizer and tell him to dry it off on the grass, he is good to go until he can get home to wash it.

3) My nephew will ask an endless amount of questions about mummies.  Are they real?  How do you make them? Why did the Egyptians do that?  He will be equal parts fascinated and disgusted when told about the brain being pulled out through the nose.  "Well, it's a good thing we didn't live back then, guys!  That's just gross!  Does anybody still do that?"

4) My niece can drink an entire medium-sized Oreo Cookie Vanilla Bean Coolata from Dunkin' Donuts in the 10 minutes it takes to drive from said establishment to my parents' house.  She can do this without getting brain freeze.  Upon arrival at the house she will then announce that her stomach is killing her, change into her pajamas, and proceed to fall asleep on the couch for an hour.

5) My nephew has decided it is his job to remove all bugs from the house-- a fly, a moth that somehow got in.  My mother has embraced this and got him his own fly swatter.  He will hunt down a moth, and then open the front door and declare, "We can do this the easy way or the hard way.  Which is it going to be?"  He will also randomly pop into the room with questions like, "Aunt Tammy, do Daddy Longlegs eat flies?  Because there is one on the porch, and I just scooched a fly over to him."

6) My nephew has apparently memorized the channel options at my parents' house, and will give advice on what you should watch.  "Wander Over Yonder is on, Aunt Tammy!  Or, we can watch Starz On Demand.  We already saw Frozen, but they have other good movies like Planes, Hotel Transylvania, Monsters University, and that one about the family with the mom who has super-stretchy powers."  I don't know what it says about my maturity level that I knew he meant The Incredibles without having to check the guide.

7) After sleeping for an hour, my niece will wake up and ask if she can have an Italian ice for dessert.  She will claim to have no memory of the entire conversation about how her stomach was killing her and the threat of puking.  I made her wait half an hour and then gave her one.  I figured if she hadn't hurled by then we were probably safe.  Go on and enjoy that sugar high, kid!  It's mostly water anyway, right?

8) My nephew loves the movie Hotel Transylvania.  A lot.  "This is the good part, Aunt Tammy!  Are you watching?"

9) Neither of them will go to bed without having the air conditioner on, even though it is only 66 degrees outside. Do not even try negotiating this point.

10) Neither of them wants you to read them a bedtime story.  They each have a tablet or Kindle, and they want to watch Netflix until they fall asleep.  Really?  My, times have changed!

Santa and His What Now?

First, the briefest back-story  possible....

When I was little, my parents took my brother and I on a trip to The North Pole.  My Uncle John,  Aunt Robin, and my cousins went as well.  When we went to visit Santa he was on a break, and we got to see Mrs. Claus.

Apparently my dear brother was not going to tolerate that.  Later on in the day, he decided to go back and see Santa by himself, without telling anyone.  Not good when you are just a little guy.  We found him, eventually, hanging out with Santa, but not before my Aunt had started checking all of the ponds and water features, sure that he had fallen into one of them and drowned.

The point of this awesome story -- there is an amusement park in New York state for kids that is called The North Pole.  I even included the link above for your enjoyment.

Got it?  Good.  Keep that in mind as you read on.

My niece and nephew are here staying for a few weeks.  Here is a guide to the people involved in tonight's conversation:

L: My niece.  She is 10.
A: My nephew.  He is 5.
Mom:  My mother.  She would kill me if I listed her age.
Me:  That would be me.  And old enough.

This is the conversation that took place in the car earlier this evening.

A: I've never seen snow.
L: I have!
Mom: We know.
Me: Austin that's why you should tell your Daddy that you want to come visit in the winter!
L: For my birthday!!!!!
Me: I tried mailing you a can of snow for Christmas.  Did it work?
L: Sort of, but it didn't really feel like snow.

Kids are chatting in the back of the car...

Me: Maybe we should take him to The North Pole.  They had that cool ice pole thing that was there all year round!
Mom:  Did they have snow?  I don't remember.
Me: I remember Aunt Robin thought Brian had drowned somewhere.

A: I've been to the North Pole!
L: No you haven't!
A: Uh-huh!  I was there, and I saw Santa, and I was throwing snowballs at him and his midget clowns and...
Me:  Wait wait wait...what?  His midget clowns?!
A:  Yeah.  His midget clowns.
Me: You mean his elves?
A: Yeah -- his midget clowns.  The guys in the funny suits.  They hate children.

At this point I kind of checked out on the conversation.  I was laughing so hard about the "midget clowns" instead of elves that I never did hear why he thought that they hated children.

Cinco de Mayo

Hola, amigos!

So today was Cinco de Mayo, or May 5th with lots of people drinking for no real reason except they had an excuse.  View it as you wish.

I went out to dinner with my friend, Lisa.  We went to a restaurant somewhere south of here in the Fishkill/Hopewell Area, that's all I can tell you.  Take me off of Route 9 and I am lost.  We decided to have margaritas and pretend we were in Mexico.  They were even playing theme-appropriate music!  This place also had a couple interesting patrons who made their presence known before we were even seated.

Now, the restaurant had a bar, as they often do.  This particular place had a patron and her friend  meandering their way back through the restaurant to get to the bar area.  I would guess she was in her 50s, or else she has done some hard living and it has taken its toll on her face.  Totally normal, and you probably wouldn't think anything of it unless you had our view and she was walking toward you.

She was wearing what I will call a Flashdance-style pink t-shirt -- you know, with the neckline cut open so it slides off of one shoulder?  This was either a home-made "I'm-Going-to-Cut-Out-the-Neckline-and-Make-Myself-Sexy" job gone horribly wrong, or she really doesn't know how to buy clothes the right size. 

So they are strolling through the restaurant, and about half-way to where we were waiting she realizes that her shirt has slipped, and she pulls it back up.  When I say slipped, I mean her entire right shoulder and boob were hanging out, as well as a good chunk of her stomach.  Thank all that is holy she was wearing a black bra!  And she just kept walking, no big deal, got to go back and get another drink.

Seriously?!  Did you not look in the mirror when you were in the bathroom?  How did you not feel a draft?  Also, WTF kind of friend lets you walk out of the ladies' room like that?  Shouldn't she have given you a little warning -- a quick, "Hey Babs (I don't know her name, obviously), your tit popped out again."?  (Yes, I am assuming this wasn't the first time it happened.)

We sit, we have dinner and a drink.  As we are leaving, don't we run into Babs and her friend again?  They were having some kind of dispute with the hostess.  Lisa thinks they were getting kicked out.   Babs at least had her shirt on all the way this time, but her friend was somehow tripping on the floor mat while standing still.  I'm not really sure how she managed it.  It was like she couldn't quite lift her foot high enough to get it the few millimeters off of the floor and onto the mat.  We left, and they were still arguing.

On the drive home I encountered the police in Wappingers.  Not near the restaurants or bars, where you might expect them to be when a lot of people have been out drinking.  Nope.  They were parked in front of the County Players theater, and I mean directly in front.  Lights going, officers out of their cars, one was walking up to the doors.  I have no idea if this is normal practice when they have a performance.  I think the performance must have been over, as there were far fewer cars than usual parked on the side of the street.  Riot in the theater, perhaps?  Cast party gone out of control?  Biggest and brightest full moon of the year tonight, you never know what might happen!

I got almost all of the way home, and then I saw something that just made me sad and a little angry.  Remember my post about the dumpster, and how a coworker had to cajole one of our younger patrons to get out of it?  It was about 10:45pm, and as I am driving home I see our little patron, his brother, his sister, and a couple other children hanging out on the street corner.  My best guess is that the oldest was maybe 13 years old.  Does no one care about these kids?  WTF are you doing letting your kids wander around at that hour of the night?  They were at least 2 blocks from home, no way a parent or anyone else could see them to know that they were safe!  I almost pulled over to talk to them and tell them they had to go home, but I wasn't sure they would recognize me outside of work and I didn't want to frighten them.  I guess saying we would call his parents and tell them he was climbing in a garbage dumpster wasn't really much of a threat.

And that was my exciting Cinco de Mayo.  Anyone else have some good stories?