It’s raining right now. Normally, I’d welcome the rain. Especially since it has been so bloody hot and dry here. Not today. Today Carmen, the nanny, is having a birthday party for Beck at our house. I asked her, how many kids will be here? Do I need to come home? She replied, “No..no….joos 15.” TOTAL? “No, joos da cheeldren.”
How does my not-even two-year-old know that many kids? How does he have that many friends? I don’t have that many friends! She assured me that she is taking care of everything. She is cooking classic Peruvian fair, and will order cheese pizza. She even bought him a piñata!
I said to myself, “It won’t be bad. We’ll just keep them all outside with their juice boxes and sticky fingers and hose ‘em down before they can come back in.” But now? Now it’s raining! Now I’m going to have blind folded two-year olds swinging a bat for candy in my living room! I am TOTALLY coming home. There is going to be some serious supervision necessary here as well as some beating of other peoples’ kids. The good news is that each and every one of them comes with a care giver so that the nanny to child ratio should be about 2 to 1. Hell, I’m doing “Zone D” anyway. To the kid wiping his chocolatey hands on the dog: “Who are you? Yeah? Well… stop that!”
In other news...
My husband’s mother, Grandma Jane got herself a computer. Her other son was up from NC and decided that grandma’s WebTv really needed to be replaced, that Grandma shouldn’t be emailing from a keyboard on a TV dinner tray in front of her Zenith. So now she has been set-up with a 17 inch 
monitor, 200 gig + Compaq CPU and a pretty solid color printer. The only problem is, he left town without showing her how to do anything more than turn the darn thing on, leaving me to be Tech support to a 79 year old woman. I spent 30 minutes on the phone with her Wednesday night trying to help her open email.
What are you seeing?
Well, I see the list of my letters.
What happens when you click on it?
Click on what?
Click on the email.
How do I “click?”
With the mouse… Put the pointy thing right on the subject line and go clicky- clicky!!....
Well… Heavens…
Nothing happens?
No.
Did you clicky-clicky fast enough? You really have to go more like…clickyclicky!
It was obvious that this was something that I couldn’t do over the phone so last night, over I went. Oy. It is a fine rig for basically accessing email and printing out photos of the grandkids for her “brag book.” (Quit bogarting that gig, Grandma and send some my way! God knows I need it, what with more than 4,000 pictures of Beck and all those iTunes…)
First things first, I made the “pointy thing” as big as possible. It is now black and the size of a miniature schnauzer. Now, on to a simple explanation of windows: “You know how you have all those papers on your desk? And how you stack them? Well, just because you are writing a letter, doesn’t mean that you have put your bank statement away. It’s just behind your letter. See? See? You didn’t delete it. It didn’t go away… you just made it small.
I didn’t want to make her feel bad, but it was a struggle to be as can-do and positive as possible. I have gotten those silly email forwards that are supposedly real-life tech support transcripts and I have always scoffed. Now, I believe that someone may have put the mouse on the floor and stepped on it like a sewing machine pedal. In fact, that person may have been my mother-in-law.
More “in other news…”
My sis in South Bend has hooked us up with some Notre Dame tickets. I was pretty excited to visit Touch Down Jesus again, but the husband broke it to me: “You? No way, there are only two. It’s me and Tim. You and your sister can come and tailgate but we’re not wasting a ticket on you.”
Now, granted, I get a little bored actually watching football games in a stadium. And maybe, once or twice, my husband has taken me to a Redskins game and quite possibly I have tried to chat with people around us, friends of his or other people that I am trying to make friends with. Apparently huge guys covered in red and gold and waving big foam Number 1 fingers don’t want to chat with me during third down, and inches, or something. Fourth and goal and inches? Is that right? What does that mean? Is that good? Or bad? Does that happen often? What do you think they should do? You know, if you were the coach? Have you been a Redskins fan for long? Because generally I watch the Packers because I went to school up in Green Bay and all and did you know that the….. My husband can only shoot an apologetic look at the guy and elbow me. Hard.
So, yes. I’ll just be tailgating, but I’m ok with that too.
More so than the Irish battling USC, I’m excited to see my kid battle my sister’s kid. My kid is a bruiser. He’s in the 90th percentile and he’s tough. He likes to go down the stairs face first and has a very high threshold for pain. (“Mama? Boo boo!” Oh my god, he took a chunk out of his knee!) My sister’s kid at just 2.5 is also a bruiser. He likes to break things. With his head. He climbs, he wanders. He takes dumps in dump trucks. We really like him. We’ll call him “Seamus.”
I have been joking for quite some time that getting Beck and Seamus together will be like 
some little toddler Thunderdome. (“Two baby enter! One baby leave!”) I want to clear their living room, set up the play yard gates, cheer and shake fistfuls of money at them like we’re in some poorly lit basement watching an illegal cockfight while they hit each other over the head with Tonka trucks and dinosaur books. It’ll be great.
In fact, my sister’s kid has such an Irish name, (for the sake of future googles well say “Seamus O’Keefe”) and my kid’s name is so German (We’ll say… “Beck Reichmacher”) that I want to make up little t-shirts, with their surnames on the back and slogans on the front. Seamus’ will be green and read “I’m Gonna Shamrock You Up.” And Beck’s will be red, or yellow and read, “You are Leder-hosed.”
In this corner, weighing in at a onesie-busting 36 pounds…. the Beast of South Bend…… Seamus O’Keefe!!!!!!! And in this corner, weighing in at a trim 33 pounds… the Antagonizer of Arlington, Beck Reichmacher!!!!!! (Booooooo…. Come on, everyone always booos at the Germans. It’s some bitter holdover from WWII.)
We will drink and cheer until only one toddler is left toddling. We will then patch up the boo-boos and bite marks, put the broken toys away and go get some juice and goldfish.
Cue music: “We don’t need another heroooooo..”