Spring Break Without Screens

“I could write a blog about tonight.” 

I closed my eyes as I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair and the evening’s events replayed in my mind.

“No, never mind. I probably shouldn’t. I don’t think I could portray us very well.”

Tighe turned off the faucet where he was brushing his teeth.

“Yeah, definitely not,” he agreed.

But here I am, six nights later, and for some reason I’m doing it anyway. 

It’s just that I have to explain why spring break was incredibly painful this year.

I mean, first of all because we didn’t go anywhere. We stayed home, Tighe and I were all amped up to get some spring cleaning done. We rented a dumpster, where we deposited three broken pieces of furniture; miscellaneous, discarded toys; and our swingset, which was aging and rotting and unsafe. Half of one of the legs of the ladder had been torn off, it was an emergency room trip waiting to happen.

Plus we have several more trips coming later this spring and summer, and amidst the chaos that is lacrosse, soccer, and rugby season, a week to do nothing sounded pretty darn good. 

Except it ended up being eleven days because it started with an unexpected snow day and a scheduled professional day for teachers. 

But the first two or three days were pretty good. We structured the kids’ days around some chores and outdoor play time and board games and puzzles and reading. 

All of which would earn them some screen time later that afternoon.

Seemed fair. But excessive screen time leads to bad attitudes, misbehavior, and a sense of entitlement. Which is a nice way of saying that they turn into jerks.

So it should have been no surprise that Sunday evening when the broccoli, sausage, and penne casserole I made for dinner was met with disgust. 

A chorus of “I’m not eating that” circled the table. Even from Lou, who usually eats whatever’s served to him.

Tess was the only one who didn’t complain. She’s so picky that she’s used to not eating what I serve for dinner. Every night, she scans the table for something she likes and when she doesn’t find it, she hops down from her seat, scampers out to the kitchen, and fishes some string cheese out of the deli meat drawer. 

Which is what she did this particular night, too. Slowly peeling the strands of mozzarella in silence as she watched her brothers melt down around her. Broccoli sets them off every time.

“I’m going to pour my milk into it!” Nate said, marching over to the casserole and pretending to dump his milk into the Pyrex dish. “Then no one can eat it!”

He was smirking, but he was also cautiously watching our reactions, knowing he was pushing limits.

“Don’t you dare!” Tighe boomed, “I think you guys had too much screen time today. I like the casserole and if you ruin it so that no one can eat it, you won’t get screen time for the rest of the school year!”

Whoa. That’s quite a threat. 

Nate took his cup of milk and returned to his seat, where he sheepishly slumped his shoulders and watched the table in silence. Still smirking, but quiet.

Sam, on the other hand, doesn’t always realize when the limit has been reached. 

“Yeah, it’d be a shame if I dumped my milk in there,” he said with sarcasm, positioning his cup just above the dish and pretending to pour.

“Sam!” I was still feeling pretty patient, but I have no tolerance for wasting food, “You have a history of clumsiness, so you probably shouldn’t even fake it. Or pretend to fake it.”

“Yeah, Sam,” Tighe kept going. “Or you seriously won’t get screens until May!”

A big time threat, but since they were both warned, the risk seemed small. 

Sam set his cup down on the table and we carried on with dinner. They each—except Tess— tried tiny bites of casserole. Not broccoli, of course, but at least some noodles. Then they filled up on milk and apple slices. 

But their snarkiness continued. Even Lou was being a smartass. Well, not intentionally, he was just mimicking what he saw his brothers do. It was loud and vaguely hostile, and in all the commotion, Sam, somehow—and I honestly don’t really know how—bumped his milk in such a way that it projectiled into the casserole dish. 

Which would have been fine had it been white milk. It would have made it a bit creamier.

But this was chocolate milk. 

And I don’t care how progressive you are, chocolate and broccoli and sausage do not mix.

I stood up, my hamstrings shoving my chair back into the buffet behind me, and then I ran to grab paper towels. 

Tighe stood and started shouting. His patience was worn and he had to follow through on his threat.

“Sam! I warned you! We told you not to do it. Erin told you not to put your milk there because you spill a lot, but you were careless.”

Sam had fallen to the floor, crying. He knew what was coming.

Nate, at the other end of the table, clutched his hair with both hands in suspense and fear.

Tess, who had barely said a word the entire meal, had paused her string-cheese peeling and her mouth was wide open in anticipation. 

And Lou, unable to read a room, laughed his deep belly laugh and pointed at the milk puddling in the pile of noodles. 

“No screens until the end of the school year!” It was the most tyrannical statement he’d ever said. That I’ve witnessed anyway. 

I lowered my head to hide my shock at the harsh sentence. This is a punishment to us. 

“That’s it, I’m done!” Nate grabbed his last remaining apple slice and headed upstairs. We didn’t see him again until just before bedtime. 

Lou was still chuckling and stabbing his food with his fork.

Sam was on the floor crying and refusing to help clean up any of the milky mess. This was a death blow for him.

Already we had a “no screens on weekdays” rule. And weekends were usually jam packed with birthday parties, sports, and playdates, so they were too busy to overdose on video games. 

But screen time is still a good incentive. And by incentive, I mean bribe. Whether it’s the iPad, the Nintendo Switch, the Kindle, the TV, or the use of my laptop, it’s how I get them to do chores and other activities they deem unpleasant. And maybe that’s not healthy, but it works. 

As we cleaned up dinner later, I consulted my calendar to count the number of weeks until summer break.

Eleven.

Eleven weeks. 

“It’ll be good,” Tighe was saying, “Every time we’ve banned screens, they’ve been great. Better behaved, more creative, more outdoorsy. They always find more to do. And they’re more pleasant.”

And by “they,” he meant Sam. And he’s right. 

Sam is like two different people when he has screen access and when he doesn’t. 

Without screens, Sam’s more intrinsically motivated. He makes messes and builds things and colors and tutors Tess and lectures Lou and rides his bike around the neighborhood and tries to “cook” and plays basketball and constructs forts and reads books and does logic puzzles and agrees to go on outings and helps out around the house and cures cancer and solves world hunger. 

Okay, we’re still waiting on those last three, but we have high hopes. 

So it’s been almost a week without screens and without school and without sports and other extracurriculars. And most of their friends have been in Colorado or Florida or Mexico or California or anywhere else that’s not a simple bike ride away. 

And Nate and Sam have survived. 

And so have we. 

Frozen Pizza Surprise

If I had a nickel for every time the fire department stopped by… shaking my head…

Especially since, according to Tighe and all the other recent Ukrainian-Russian geopolitical experts populating the world, the value of nickel is through the roof right now. My gosh, I’d be ridiculously wealthy.

I mean at this rate, they’re probably on the verge of calling Child Protective Services on us.

Are we that inept? 

And it probably didn’t help that Sam had boobytrapped our front entryway that morning with dining room chairs, toy bins and boxes, pillows, blankets and our blue, round ottoman. You know, to make a fort. On their fifth snow day in about eight weeks. 

But let me back up and explain the whole fire department thing. 

Something leaked in the oven, and I have no idea what it was. I didn’t even realize it had happened until one random Tuesday evening after returning from lacrosse practice when I darted inside, preheated the oven and then left again to drive the babysitter home. She only lives three blocks away, but it’s cold.

The kids were anticipating a frozen pizza, but when I stepped in from the cold again, smoke poured out of the kitchen.

It’s like our house is just destined to burn down.

“What is happening?” I said to no one in particular. 

Tighe was out of town, hence the babysitter, and it’s not like the kids noticed the smoke at all. 

I turned off the oven, turned on the vent fan above the stove, and left the back door open. 

Within a minute, the smoke detector started going off—remember the smoke detector? The very same one that DIDN’T go off when the candle exploded and the dining room caught fire a few blog posts ago?

Well, this time it went off. With a running jump, I reached up to silence it and used a tea towel to fan the smoky air out the back door. 

It worked well enough that the smoke detector didn’t go off again that evening. 

“Shoot,” I said to Lou, the only person who ever listens to me, “no frozen pizza tonight!”

“I want chicken nuggets and… cheput!” Which is what he calls ketchup.

I made grilled cheese instead. No one ate it because no one ever eats dinner during lacrosse season. Babysitter supervision means an afternoon smorgasbord of snacks.

“This is why you shouldn’t keep good snacks in the house,” Nate said, carrying his full plate of food to the sink.

Don’t get me wrong, Nate loves snacks as much as the next person, but he also loves a chance to be judgmental and condescending. 

Two more nights went by, complete with two more stovetop dinners—a stir-fry and spaghetti—and then we were faced with a snow day. 

Which means we were all home for an unprecedented amount of time. Since the last snow day, anyway. 

So I decided it was a good time to clean the oven.

I pulled some of those foaming oven-cleaner sprays from the cabinet under the sink, but a google search advised me not to use those stinky, toxic chemicals.  Just use the “self-clean” function on the oven. 

The four-hour setting. It’d be finished in time to make dinner. 

Set it and forget it, easy peazy. 

So that’s what I did. 

But google didn’t realize how dirty our oven was. 

And in less than five minutes, there was smoke coming from the top of the stove. Not a ton of smoke, but just a little.

“Hmm, that’s not good.”

I had hoped to do a workout while it cleaned itself, but I decided I should probably stay in the  kitchen and monitor the situation.

But first I had to go tell Tighe something. I don’t remember what, probably to share a meme or something. Or some gossip. Well, Tighe calls it gossip. I call it “meaningful and critical information for understanding why someone is the way they are.”

Anyway, I stood in the doorway of his office, telling him something either absolutely vital or hilariously funny when the loud shriek from the smoke detector cut me off. 

I jumped in the air, and Scooby Doo-ed my legs on the hardwood floors, scrambling to make it back to the kitchen to shut off the smoke detector. 

“Oh my gosh, it’s so much smoke!”

And it was! Like a dark, grainy fog clouding the entire kitchen.

Way more than there was a few nights ago.

I jumped to smack the button on the smoke detector, then slid across the wood floor to hit the “cancel” button on the oven.

Within seconds, the smoke detector was going off again, beeping loudly in that rhythmic yet irritating way. Alarming even.

I threw open the back door to the outside as Tighe reached up and turned off the smoke detector again. 

And so we raced back and forth, taking turns to swat the smoke detector and fan the flames out the door. 

“Ew, it smells like smoke in here,” Tess complained, mounting the steps from the basement.

Which was an understatement. I was coughing and the dogs were trying to escape out the door.

My phone lit up with an incoming call.

“Who would call at a time like this?” I said, gasping for air and trying to maneuver a small fan at just the right angle on the counter.

“Answer it!” Tighe was standing right next to me.

“Hello?”

“Ma’am, this is ADT, is everything okay?”

“Oh yeah, *nervous laughter* we just… the oven was smoking, but it’s off now and we’re just airing out the house now, trying to get all the smoke out of the kitchen.”

“Ma’am, what’s your password?”

“Uhhh… password? I don’t think we have a password?”

“Shoot! We have a password, I can’t remember what it is!”

Fortunately, the ADT guy was a professional. 

“Ma’am, is this your address? Are you at the home right now?”

“Yeah, I’m here, everything’s okay.”

“Ma’am, if you can’t provide the password, I’m going to have to call 911…”

He continued talking but whether it was his accent, a bad Verizon connection, or my own anxiety, I could not understand anything he said until…

“Good-bye, ma’am. Have a nice day.”

And he hung up. 

“I think the fire department’s coming,” I said to Tighe.

And sure enough, less than a minute later, I watched as a big red pumper truck, blue and red lights flashing, turned down our street and pulled up to our house.

“They’re here!” I announced. 

Tess didn’t budge from her seat on the couch—TV is an incredible babysitter—but Tighe scooped up Lou and carried him outside to meet the firefighters. 

They let him check out their oxygen tanks and sit in the front seat for a brief minute, all of which Lou’s actually done before. No big deal, our kids aren’t impressed with emergency professionals any more. 

“You sure everything’s okay?” one of them called before they drove off.

“Yep! Thank you so much! We really appreciate you coming out!” Tighe called out to our heroes, bringing Lou back into the house.

“See you next week, I guess,” I muttered to myself, waving and pulling the front door closed. 

About an hour later—I let the oven cool completely while I searched Nebraska Furniture Mart’s website for in-stock gas ranges—I pulled the cap off the oven cleaner spray and started scrubbing off the mysterious spill. All is well now. We have a functioning, non-smoking oven again. Frozen pizzas for everyone.

Trust the Science

It had been a Lou Day. 

Lou is almost two and a half years old and in those 30ish months of his life, the definition of a Lou Day has changed. 

It used to mean a day where he was colicky, cried a lot, and didn’t nap. 

Now it means he talks all day long and makes messes everywhere he goes.

And not your standard kid mess where they dump out Legos and puzzles and scribble on the walls with markers. I’m used to that. I’ve been enduring that for almost 10 years now.

I’m talking messes that leave me wondering “where did he find pliers?” or “why is he covered in ashes?” or “what is this screw from?”

And granted, I don’t supervise him as well as I did Nate and Sam. Tess never needed supervision because she’s perfect. Moody and irrational, yes. But otherwise perfect. 

But Lou’s toddler days find me at a different stage of life. I’m old. I’m tired. And I’m not as charmed by the toddler antics as I was the first few times. 

We don’t sit together and do puzzles or build Lego houses or construct towns on his train table. Okay, sometimes we do, but mostly I let him outside when I let the dogs out in the morning and he comes in for meals or an occasional diaper change. I peer outside every hour or so just to make sure he hasn’t crawled through the fence to the neighbor’s yard or disassembled the swingset. 

On rainy days or days that the weatherman has deemed “frigid,” I send him to the basement. Or he busies himself in the living room. Or the kitchen. Or Nate and Sam’s room. And again, he comes up for meals and occasional diaper changes. 

I should mention that Tess is only in school three days a week and she does a great job of playing with Lou and keeping him safe.

Meanwhile Tighe and I are working. Neither one of us understands what the other one does, but we have laptops and phones, so we look busy. Sometimes I sneak into Tighe’s office and print something out. 

But when we poke our heads up from our screens, we usually discover Lou has made a mess. 

On Monday, the day that I deemed a Lou Day, I walked into the kitchen just before lunch to find about 12 gum wrappers on the floor, a spilled bottle of bubbles, and three plungers in the center of the room.

Oh, and a smiling Lou. He held up the plungers with pride, “Look, Mom! I found these!”

If there’s one thing I don’t want in the room where I store and prepare food, it’s tools that have delved into porcelain bowls of feces.

“Where did you get these?”

“I got them down there,” he said, pointing to the basement. I have to admire his enthusiasm.

“Okay, well they don’t belong in the kitchen, so let’s put them back.”

“Oh, they not go in the kitchen?” 

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

He’s always so sincere.

“Mom, call me worker.” I guess this is his Marxist proletariat phase. 

“Okay, worker. Can you please put the plungers back in the basement?”

“Okay, mom.”

He did as he was told and returned to the kitchen while I cleaned up the gum wrappers and laid some paper towels on top of the bubble spill.

“Thank you, Lou.”

“No. Say ‘thank you worker.’”

“Okay. Thank you, worker.”

“You’re welcome, Mom.”

I mean, he really is so sweet. It’s hard to be mad at him.

So I wasn’t.

Until a few moments later, when, closing all the drawers and cabinets he had opened, I discovered another spill. 

He had squirted a bottle of sunscreen—like the good, expensive kind that doesn’t clog pores or cause cancer—into the drawer. 

The drawer where we keep car keys and my wallet and the extra clicker for the driveway gate and a small bowl of miscellaneous screws and allen wrenches and our never ending supply of gift cards.

Yeah, okay, it’s a junk drawer.

But it’s still annoying.

My favorite sunscreen that I rely on heavily during lacrosse season.

So, as I wiped the thick white lotion off of each gift card and a pair of heavy-duty kitchen shears I’d actually ever seen before, I yelled at him.

“Why? Why did you do this?”

“Betause I did that.” ← Not a typo, that’s how he says ‘because.’ He’s so adorable.

“Okay, well you made a big mess in here!”

“Oh. I made mess?  Sorry, Mom.”

“That’s okay, Lou.”

“No. Say ‘that’s okay worker.’”

“That’s okay, worker.”

He spent the rest of early afternoon eating his lunch—with pliers—opening and shutting the back door to talk to the dogs, rearranging the contents of the kitchen cabinets, spilling his milk, and poking around in the fire pit on the patio with a stick. A stick he later brought inside. 

By naptime, we were both exhausted. As usual.

He truly welcomes his nap every day. He earns that rest. 

I, meanwhile, finished some laundry, sent some emails, updated a spreadsheet or two, and prepared myself to head to lacrosse practice. 

Because yes, I’m still coaching lacrosse. 

But when I went to grab my keys from the drawer—you know, the lotiony one—they were gone!

And of course, I was already late. Gathering my mittens, scarf, hat, and handwarmers takes a bit of time.

I rummaged around for a few minutes, checking and rechecking the basket of masks that sits on the counter above the drawer, but alas, no keys.

“Lou took my keys!” I called out to Tighe, frustrated and flustered. I really hate being late.

Lou and Tess had both been carrying around a spare set of keys that go to nothing lately, and since he was in that drawer earlier, I knew it was him.

“What?” Tighe called back from his office.

I grabbed the extra set of keys that remained in the drawer and dashed out to the car. 

When I returned home just before dinner, the house was in shambles as expected. Homework was strewn about the table, markers were all over the dining room floor, and all four kids were taking turns sledding down the plush carpeting on the basement steps. On an actual sled. 

It was loud and chaotic.

“If you see my car keys anywhere, please let me know!” I yelled into the basement.

“What?”

“Look for my car keys!”

“Why?”

“Because they’re missing! Lou stole them!”

“Lou! Give Erin her keys back!”  Nate loves a chance to reprimand anyone else.

No time to look for them myself. I was minutes away from a zoom meeting, so I was hurrying to make dinner, eat dinner, clean up, and make the next day’s lunches. Followed by the bedtime routine. 

Later, as I was rocking Lou in the dark, I whispered in his ear, “Lou, where did you put my keys?”

“Um…” 

I could tell he was really thinking. But he also looked a tad confused.

“In the box,” he replied.

I returned to a quiet first floor and began my hunt. I started with anything he might call a box. Drawers, tupperwares, the shoe basket under the coat rack, the cleat basket which is next to the shoe basket, the basket where we keep hats and mittens and gloves, and various bins of toys in the basement.

At one point I did find a half-eaten tortilla in the basement toybox. It was solid as a rock, but didn’t have any mold so it couldn’t have been that old. I was still full from dinner, though, so I threw it away. 

I also checked under the stove (per my sister-in-law’s suggestion), in the fridge and freezer (per my other sister-in-law’s suggestion), in the floor vents (per my brother’s suggestion), and outside on the patio. 

I even checked inside the blender and the food processor, which are two kitchen appliances that he loves to fiddle with.

I stood in the kitchen, staring up at the ceiling and collecting my thoughts. I was tired and annoyed, but knew I needed to piece the day back together to figure out where he’d been and where he put them.

Think like Lou.

I recalled first thing that morning when Nate asked me to unlock my car so he could get his favorite hat out before he headed to school.

So I definitely had my keys then because I stood at the kitchen door and pressed the unlock button for Nate.

Didn’t I?

Were they my keys though?

Or were they the extra set?

Did I leave my keys in the car?

“Tighe, I’m going to run out and check my car!”

“What?”

I dashed outside, careful not to slip on the ice that had accumulated the night before, and flipped the garage light on. Rummaging around in the center console, which is full of granola bars, extra masks, and gum, my index finger suddenly looped around a metal ring.

A key ring.

Relief!

Embarrassment. 

They were in the car the whole time. I must have left them in there when I took Tess to a birthday party on Sunday afternoon.

I’m going to have to apologize to Lou tomorrow, I thought to myself. 

Sorry, Lou. Or worker, or whatever you identify as these days.

But honestly, Lou, you probably owe me for the first two and a half years of your life.

Let’s call it even.

PS I called this blog “Trust the Science” because parallel to Lou making messes that day, Tess was conducting “science experiments.” She filled ziploc bags with water, hand soap, nail polish and shredded notebook paper. I thought the blog might take me that direction, but it didn’t. You just never know when your fingers hit the keyboard…