[It’s been a while since I did a throwback. I wrote this one is about the accidental art gallery that happens in so many kitchens.]

            Show me a person with nothing on their fridge door and I’ll show you someone who just had a new refrigerator delivered. The metal exterior and wide-open space seems to lend itself to magnetizing everything and anything to the fridge door – well at least anything that a magnet can hold up. Before you can say “What’s for supper?”, someone has christened that gleaming exterior with a take-out menu and matching magnet.

            The fridge door is really a microcosm of the household, showcasing what’s important and memorable to the family that lives here. At the very least, it’s a great place to stick stuff that you’re not really sure what to do with. Nearly every home has at least one or two photographs on their icebox, a collection that usually grows into a multi-people collage just shortly after school pictures and Christmas cards come out. And of course, if you’re a parent or a grandparent, or even a neighbor to a family with children, chances are you’re going to have some wax crayon, glitter glue and egg carton creation adhered to the fridge with at least a dozen magnets or more likely with some glitter glue that seeped to the back of the project. Because the fact of the matter is children are prolific artists. Even if your three-year-old had just scribbled a two-second blue circle with a nearly dried-up marker, they will insist that you hang it on the fridge because (apparently) that blue circle is a picture of you and it goes with the series of twenty-five identical pictures of you already layered on the fridge door. (You probably never guessed you were so complex until you had children.)

            But the short people in your household aren’t the only culprits. The fridge may be the place where you stick a funny comic strip you cut out from the newspaper (usually mirroring your life is such an eerie manner you wonder how the cartoonist got into your house.) In our home, the refrigerator is close enough to the garbage where I go through the mail. Therefore, the fridge is the place that all those reminder notices from the dentist get pinned up. There are other reminders, too. I have something up that’s called “Prayer for a Tired, Irritable Parent”. Although I don’t actually read it that often, just seeing the title reminds me to be thankful for noisy, wrestling children because (apparently) that’s a sure sign that they’re healthy. Well, healthy except for reaching abnormally high sugar levels on cookie baking days. And another clipping encourages me to be thankful for things like high gas bills because it means we’re warm and for snug fitting clothes because it means we have enough to eat.

            Which most of us do. And because the Pavlovian response to any sort of anxiety, from high gas bills to wrestling children to “How am I going to get this glob of petrified glitter glue off my brand-new fridge?” is to open the fridge door. So many of us will use this spot to strategically display some sort of deterrent to doing just that. One does need to weigh the matter carefully, since fridge doors are somewhat like public property. Everyone who walks into your home is going to look at what’s on your fridge and some will even go a step further and check the contents inside. (These are good people to play the marbles-in-the-medicine-chest-trick on.)

If you choose to put up an inspiring picture of yourself at your fittest and thinnest, some may look at it and think, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” If you put up a picture of yourself at your worst, some may look at it and think, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” If you put up a picture of some attractive girl (which really doesn’t work any way), you may have a problem with your husband making too many trips to the refrigerator and some clueless people will still say, “Man, did she ever let herself go!” And finally, if you put up a picture of some attractive male, people will assume your marriage is on the rocks.

Which is why I have a nice, unassuming calorie wheel on the fridge that will tell me that eating that cookie dough myself will sentence me to seven and a half hours on the treadmill. Seeing this induces such stress, I find myself struggling to open the fridge door, anyways. Luckily, I can’t. It’s been sealed shut with glitter glue.

[It’s birthday season around here and birthday season makes me nostalgic for my little boys and maybe a little relieved that I’m not making elaborate superhero cakes anymore. Here’s a throwback to those days.]

            A little conversation earlier this week with my youngest son Simon tweaked a memory for me. As I helped him get dressed for the day, he relayed to me his latest make-believe-action-adventure that I had interrupted (although he did tell his brothers he’d “be right back after these messages”). He described to me how first he “haf-ted” to do this, then he “haf-ted” to do that. It clicked with me that I had seen a similar verb form on the pages of a Dennis the Menace comic book.

            Some quick research from my home library (“Dennis the Menace: Make-Believe Angel”, © 1961) confirmed my suspicions. In fact, several of Dennis’ grammarisms and mannerisms were awfully familiar to this mother of three young boys. For instance, Dennis dropping the typewriter (“Anyone could drop a typewriter!”) was not unlike a situation in my house this week. Midway through shampooing my hair, my eldest called through the bathroom door in a half-pained, half-panicked voice: “Mom! The TV fell down!” While he was maneuvering it to a better angle, the TV fell from its perch but heroically, Gil managed to saved it from almost-certain death, partially cushioning the blow with his leg. (The resulting purple bruise is very impressive.) I arrived in the living room dripping wet and found three boys sitting on the floor watching the television that kept on ticking, except with its own the purplish bruise on the corner of the screen where it had landed. Needless to say, I didn’t use conditioner on my hair that day.

            If Hank Ketchum – creator of Dennis the Menace – was willing to pay for the copyright, I’m sure that Dennis, too, would have been playing with Batman, Spiderman and Superman, in make-believe-action-adventures just like the ones my boys love to play. Recently, at a major department store in the superhero aisle, my boys salivated over and comparison-shopped for the Most Excellent Toys to put on their Christmas list. A bewildered grandma-type-person stood nearby, considering a plush Spiderman and listening to the boys like they were market analysts. When she asked for help, the four of us convinced her to choose Magnetic Spiderman (he sticks to the fridge!) over the sissy Spiderman pillow. She thanked us, and then gratefully escaped to Barbie Doll Land. We would be no help there. Plus, Barbie has a restraining order against my boys.

            Dennis epitomizes the saying, “He’s all boy.” Actually, he’s all boy and then some. I’m thankful that my boys aren’t nearly as early risers as Dennis or as distrustful of soap and water or as prone to repeat everything they shouldn’t have heard their parents say. While Dennis prefers a slingshot as his weapon of choice, my boys are fond of Dollar Store swords and spears, or cardboard tubes in a pinch. Just like Dennis, however, they have no reservations about getting into a fight and if they get a shiner, that’s makes it all worth it. Even his favorite foods Dennis will rename to make them more appealing to his boyish sensitivities, calling spaghetti and meatballs “Worms and Golf Balls.” When the boys helped me make a chocolate pudding cake this week, they dubbed it “Poopy Pudding”. I have to admit, it did sort of look like that before we put it in the oven.

            And so it is with wry amusement that I realized my husband and I have inadvertently perpetuated the Dennis the Menace trope not once, but three times. Their antics may not be quite as mischievous, but they could certainly fill a (comic) book nonetheless.

[This throwback post is in honor of my niece Jaime who just added a third little boy to her brood in much the same timespan that Rick and I had our three little boys. There’s always someone around us having a baby – it never fails to call up all those memories of “the good old days”.]

I don’t remember the exact moment that I signed up to be a parent, but I believe my endorsement was a reflex action after the stick turned blue. When Rick and I got married, we knew we wanted kids eventually. After all, my new husband had two years of schooling to complete first. Who knew that after four months of practicing “planned parenthood”, much to our surprise we were planning parenthood?  After three kids in four years and lots of curious people inquiring if we knew what was causing it, we were pretty happy to be parents. In a way, having children is like stepping onto a scary, exhilarating, stomach-upsetting roller coaster. Once you have one, you often ask your partner, “You wanna go again?”

For all the satisfaction of producing a cuddly, adorable, dependent little baby there is nothing that replicates the shock of being awakened night after night by the same hungry, wailing, dependent little baby. Things like a full night’s sleep (four hours in a row feels amazing), bathing, hot meals (after re-heating it twice in the microwave, you finally just wolf it down cold), spit-up free clothing and two free arms become a luxury, like a fairy tale beginning: “Once upon a time, a LONG time ago…”           

Well, we’ve made it through that stage of parenting and we’ve successfully weaned, potty-trained and surgically removed soothers from our three boys, but our training in selflessness is far from over. The same issues of sleeping, eating and crying just resurface with new challenges. The kids still wake us up at night with nightmares, sleepwalking or parching thirst. As if that isn’t enough, now they can get out of their own beds and crawl into ours. If it’s already been a pretty bad night and we’re particularly unconscious, we might not even notice. That is, until the next day when you wake up with a horrible kink in your neck because some child was sleeping horizontally in your bed with one foot stuck in your ear. Then just as you drop off in the afternoon to catch a few winks to make up for the bad night and the bad neck, some child (who is supposed to be playing quietly in his room) calls from the bathroom for your assistance with the toilet paper.

And do I really need to mention the pitfalls of trying to feed young children? Just when I think I’ve developed a safe repertoire of spaghetti, chicken nuggets and grilled cheese sandwiches, the oldest child announces that he no longer likes the very thing that used to be his favorite and his adoring younger brothers follow suit. My kids don’t even like potatoes unless the cholesterol and fat levels have been exponentially increased and they come in a red box with an “M” on it. Which isn’t to say that I don’t make them eat their requisite age-numbered spoonfuls of mashed potatoes. There’s just a lot of nose pinching and gagging that accompany the process. When people see my three boys and comment that our grocery bill will certainly skyrocket when they’re teenagers, I just think that I can’t wait to see them eat a full meal.

I do have to say that the crying issue has changed a great deal. I no longer cry as much as my kids do. The initial burdens of childcare had me weeping daily for lack of sleep and lack of resources for managing this parenting thing. After a few years of motherhood under my belt, I feel like I can pretty much tackle anything. The roller coaster hasn’t really changed, but maybe now I’m just getting used to it. In fact, I’m loving every minute of it.