Figuring out what I wanna be when I grow up.
Oop..I AM grown up...


Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Tuesday In karen-ville


"Silly Putty"picture and product info, From www.crayolastore.com:

Silly Putty, The Real Solid Liquid, has been the standard of excellent fun since
1950. This pack features classic Silly Putty in its original red plastic egg.
Silly Putty is a very unique substance. It stretches without breaking, yet it
can be "snapped off" cleanly. It bounces higher than a rubber ball. It floats if
you shape it in a certain way, yet sinks if shaped in other ways. It can pick up
pencil marks from pages and comics from some newspapers. If you slam it with a hammer, it keeps it shape, yet if you push with light, even pressure, it will
flatten with ease.
This product has a Small Parts Warning, not for children
under 3 years.

Hmm...that's VERY interesting. Oh, let's check that warning again...small parts, blah blah blah, not for children under 3. Alrighty then--sounds harmless, right?

WRONG

So let's back up a few nights: Saturday night, I went to my homegirl's house and had many, many laughs, and probably too many drinks. Took a cab home, but rolled in after 1:00 AM just the same. Sunday is my SAD DAY, for thinking about my Mom, etc, so my system decided to go into panic attack mode in the evening, which lasted until about--oh, whattaya know, 1:00 AM. Panic, by the way, is a relatively new, fun thing for me. I was never a panicky person, nor the type of person who suffered from anxiety. What--with this low metabolism??? My brother used to make this (tiresome) joke that one needs to hold a mirror up in front of my face from time to time to see if I'm still breathing. Haw, haw, haw. This is actually grossly untrue, since I can be both manicly exciting, and a hyperbolic maniac. So, there. But, just the same, since the rapid, out-of-seemingly-nowhere death of my Mom, my stomach will twist itself into knots from time to time without warning. Good-o.

So, last night (Monday) was my night to sleep. Aw yeah, I was going to bed at a decent hour, I wasn't even going to read first--nope, I was just going to lie there in my cozy bed and twitch and jerk myself into a better place.

And then, at 1:00 AM (1 AM again...waaait a minute...something creepy is going on here, and I'm not even making this up) Ella woke up in the middle of the night in her Ella kind of way, ie; SCREAMING AND CRYING. So, since I was desperate for sleep at this point, I sent The Man stumbling off in the dark. Well, she'd had a bad dream. Fair enough. I don't know though--do kids even get the concept of talking in a night-time appropriate volume level? I could hear her yapping away upstairs to daddy. Then I heard Jack talking. Then I heard them all shuffling around upstairs. Then I heard crying and panicky coughing. Please, I begged nobody in particular, please let him not be up with some horrid stomach bug.

So, I come upstairs and find Jack panicking in the bathoom, and Jon working away with a washcloth trying to get SILLY PUTTY off the side of Jack's neck. Apparently Jack had decided to take his glow-in-the-dark silly putty to bed with him. For the record, I had already concluded that stuff had disappeared for good, to that secret place where Barbie's shoes and jewellery go, as well as all super balls. Well, Jack wakes up for some reason in the early morning, or very late night, depending on how you want to view 1:00 AM, and finds that his neck is "all sticky." Here's the best though; The Man can't get the stuff off the kids neck, and now has done the worst thing possible in a situation like this: he used a 'grave' tone of voice, and said; "I don't know HOW we're going to get it off!"

"I frantically waved this away with a hiss and a "geez! Ssssh! Zip! Don't say that in front of him, you'll make him panic even more!" So, first off I got the acetone-free nail polish remover. Hm...didn't make a dent. Jack begins to lose hope. So, I do what all good wives and mothers do--I bark an order at my husband:

GO GET THE PEANUT BUTTER.

He's perplexed: "the peanut butter?? What if we tried to use this other piece of silly putty to get it off his neck?"

GO GET THE PEANUT BUTTER.


Incidentally, the peanut butter was the shiznit.
Incidentally as well, you should see how it's crammed onto Jack's shirt.

So there I was, up in the middle of my night spreading cold peanut butter on the kid's neck. Ella sauntered in at one point, all happy now, thinking we were having some late night soirée, and eyed the peanut butter jar. "Mmm!" she said; "I can have some peeEEEanut butter!" I snapped; "IT'S NOT A PARTY, GO TO BED."

Still, the peanut butter got all the evil silly putty off Jack's neck. Remember this one, people, in case your child decides to go to bed with a ball of silly putty.
And THAT, my friends, is why I wear THE MOM SHIRT. BOO YAH!

In other news, how does one broach to some children, the delicate other meaning of some words? Jack, finally at the age of 6, is super affectionate now. He tells me he loves me all the time, and will even hug me once in a while. The other day, he looked at me adoringly and said; "Mom, you're just the best lover."
"erm, thanks honey."

"I love you mom."

"I love you too."

"You're such a good lover."

Out of the mouths of babes, right? So, I hadn't corrected him yet, because a) he'll get offended and p*ssed off at me, and b) how exactly do I explain "lover" to the kid? Oh wait, I'm formulating something even now. Perhaps I'll say that's something only grownups call each other, or perhaps I'll say that it's a word only boyfriends and girlfriends can use...must work on this, and soon. It kinda makes me cringe every time he says it.

Early the other morning, Ella climbed into bed with me and informed me that when she was little she had "chicken coops." Chicken coops eh, I said. And what, pray tell, do 'chicken coops' look like? "Well," she said; "they're like little circles on your arm." For the record, Ella neither had "chicken coops," nor "chicken pox," as the latter has been slightly eradicated by a vaccine (now I'm pondering if something can truly be SLIGHTLY eradicated. I seem to be proffering a contradiction in terms).

Ella says a ton of hilarious things, and I should really start writing them down. I got a kick out of it when The Man came downstairs after his morning scrub, and Ella, surprised, said; "oh, Dad--it's you! I thought it was that little maniac, Jack."

And so, I am ONCE AGAIN freaking tired. Big surprise. That's my number 1 broken-record single, isn't it: "I'm so tired." But I am!

So this has got me thinking about goofy things that happen to kids, and happened when I was a kid. I do have a memory of silly putty: I got a tantalizing egg of the glow-in-the-dark variety one time, and after spreading it flat over the colour comics several times, I decided to try it out in the dark closet with my brother. Well, we charged it up next to the light for a good few minutes, and then shut the light off. Oh how exciting to see that little green ball glowing before us. Then my brother did the kind of thing he did best and whipped it against the inner closet wall. BOING BOING BOING and the thing disappeared. We couldn't find it! It had DISAPPEARED. Oh the heartbreak! Anybody who's ever had Silly Putty remembers what a treasure it was. Well, mine was gone.

Fast-track several years later, as my mom is searching through this same closet looking for a maternity top she wants to lend to someone. She finds the top, and on it is stuck--no, WELDED this blob of...well, what the hell is that??? Yeah, you know it was the Silly Putty. Funny, no?

If anyone else has had any goofy Putty experiences, by all means, share! Or, if anyone has a freaky story of something being stuck to their kid, or a general misadventure, I want to hear from you!

I wonder if I have time to squeeze in a nap before dinner....

16 comments:

  1. I loved silly putty!! My mother hated it and this was due to the fact of me putting it in the pocket of my new jeans...that she then washed and well you get the picture!
    You had me laughing Karen!!
    Oh and by the way off topic here but i love your new profile picture it is Gorgerous!!!!!!!

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  2. thanks Pam! I crammed the makeup on :)
    That's a good anecdote about the silly putty. But just like you said; everyone loved it.

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  3. I just recently had a silly putty incident over the summer. I picked up my older son and daughter from Summer Rec and the boy was playing with something, me; what do you have, him; silly putty, me; throw that out immediately, him; why? I like to play with it, me; throw it out, I do not want that stuff in my car or house. I have enough problems with play dough. Well I thought he threw it out, but later in the day, he comes in to bother me while I am having some computer time, him;mom something is sticking to my shorts, me; lift your shirt, what did you do? Is that silly putty? You see he did not throw it out, he stuck it in his underwear to hide it and forgot about it, on a 85 degree day. Yes it was stuck to him and his clothes. I told him it would wear off and to get the clothes off and do NOT put them in the laundry. I read all the steps it would take to get the stuff out of the clothes; they went in the trash. Sorry so long, I guess I am chatty. Sorry to hear about the manic, mine is worse at the holidays and I crash big time in Jan.

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  4. Remember the story of Mom and the silly putty??? When she was just a little girl and got silly putty... she was oh so excited! (Probably because any kind of toy was such a rare thing) She took it into the basement and smashed it with a hammer and blammo.. the thing smashed into millions of teeny weeny pieces. It was as good as GONE.

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  5. I love karen-ville, but I would never stay overnight. Jon could have said, "Now we'll never survive the night..." I also think Ella reminds me of you - spontaneous, witty, blunt verbage. Woe to her future "man".

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  6. Alaina! I'm LOVING IT! L*O*V*I*N*G it! Seriously, what the hell is that stuff?!?! Yeah, I am at the mercy of my hormones all the time. Two weeks of the month lovely, nice, and affectionate, the other two weeks? I wouldn't live with me. Like Jekyl and Hyde! Yay me!

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  7. Aim, I almost posted that anecdote about mom and the silly putty. Funny though, because in the advert I posted, it says that if you smash it with a hammer, it retains its shape??? Perhaps they got back in the lab and modified it?

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  8. Matt, yeah; Ella's a little hot head like me. So cute and chubby though--wait--still like me! Hooray!

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  9. I don't understand how silly putty can get that stuck to skin.
    Must of spun web strings with it, and slept on it. I don't know.

    Now, silly putty in the hair, that 1 I know. Girls don't like it when its stuck in their hair.

    Funny how in some cultures, having putty stuck in their hair, and on their skin is sometimes worn for ceremonies, and such.

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  10. You can remove Silly Putty from carpet with WD40. Don't ask how I know. ;) WD40 also removes melted crayon remnants from car upholstery.

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  11. thanks Bennet, now I have to google that. I also cannot fathom how the silly putty totally moulded itself onto Jack's skin, but it was weird--it was like a patch of second-skin- Smooth on top, but totally cemented on the bottom. Now I'm going to google how many other people have encountered this problem.

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  12. Now Lisa, that IS interesting. well, it's a greasy substance right--not unlike peanut butter I s'pose.

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  13. Maybe you have come upon, and new skin grafting cure. Just use silly putty.

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  14. Seriously! That stuff was just weird--and how it fused itself onto his skin?!? Who can fathom it?

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  15. Kids say and do the darnedest things. I didn't have silly putty growing up but my on had it and it seemed to leave oil stains or marks on everything. So, I banned it from the walls and clothes...and any other object.

    CD

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  16. Clarissa, smart thinking. I got caught up in my own nostalgia. I like playdoh as well, but a week later, the tiny dried bits of the stuff get everywhere.

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