Note to self:

When your handsome and delightfully thoughtful husband surprises you with an unexpected over-the-top romantic gesture while you are sitting on the couch in a stained tee shirt, grubby sweats and your hair resembling something insects may call home, perhaps it is in your best interest to can the smart talk and look directly into your husband’s baby blues and tell him how much you love him.

This would be preferable to the route you chose, asking him if this is a make up present for some wild night with an unknown toothless stripper that he is harbouring oodles of regret and guilt over while picking the underwear out of your butt crack.

Dear self, instead of asking who he paid to wrap the ridiculously small package with the pretty ribbon and sparkly paper, it would serve your best interests if you just told him how lovely the wrapping job was. Instead of reminding him that he has over-sized man hands with fingers that resemble large beefy sausages and how he can barely manage to pick his own nose let alone fumble with a roll of tape for the woman he unwisely professed his love to a decade ago.

Self, it may behoove you to just keep your freaking yap shut as your carefully unwrap the pretty package under your husband’s loving gaze. Just accept the fact that your husband is obviously more thoughtful and romantic than you and enjoy the moment. There is no need to remind your lovely man that he married an asshat. I’m sure he knows this rather well by now.

And dear self, when you finally open the small velvet box to reveal a beautiful set of diamond solitaire earrings that sparkle as though a million suns were caught and trapped beneath their glassy exterior just for you, perhaps it is in your best interest to just remain silent for a moment and revel in the love your husband is so willingly bestowing upon your sorry ass you.

That would have been a much wiser course of action than opening the box and having your jaw gape open, only to quickly recover and look at him and ask him, “How the hell did you pay for these?” in a screechy shrewish manner.

Dear self, while you gazed admiringly upon your new sparkly earrings and mentally kissed the days of having to wear cheap fake replicas purchased from Wal-mart goodbye, perhaps you should have just humbly said thank you to your darling husband and kissed him for his wonderful generosity.

Surely that would have been much nicer better than examining the jewels and remarking on how small the earrings looked in the box. Did you really have to tease your husband and ask him why he didn’t get you bigger stones? I mean, really Self, sometimes even I want to kick your ass.

It would have been much more to your benefit if you had simply tried the earrings on and commented to your fabulous husband on how large the earrings look in your ears. Because, as I’m sure you know Self, all men like to be told how large their stones are.

Perhaps next time, if you heed my fine advice dear Self, you will simply be able to bask in the joy of knowing your man loves you enough to surprise you with shiny expensive baubles as you enjoy gloating and bragging showing off your new trinket to all your friends.

Maybe next time you won’t have to break out the knee pads and faux leather whip while prancing around in killer stilettos in a desperate effort to pry your feet out of your mouth and earn the jewels already bestowed upon you.

Maybe next time dear Self, when you ask your darling husband if you’ve been a naughty girl and ask if you need a spanking, he won’t look you square in the eyes and say, “Don’t tempt me Tanis.”

Learn from me Self. I’m the dumbass with the shiny new sparkly diamonds and the slightly annoyed husband.

As an adult, I have never been terribly fond of the telephone. Sure, it’s a handy invention to have, especially when I find my ass trapped in a snowbank and I’m literally spinning my tires, but more often than not I find the telephone rings when ever the husband and I are getting our romance on.

It’s usually his mother calling, wanting to know if I’m taking good care of her baby. (I was trying to, before you called. Sigh.

As a teenager, I couldn’t live without a phone permanently attached to my ear. I used to spend hours in my mom’s sewing room, hunched up on an uncomfortable stool with the phone pressed to my ear as I talked to my girlfriends or boyfriend about life and it’s great mysteries in the only room I could be sure my brother wasn’t eavesdropping on me.

Then I grew up. Suddenly life was not nearly as mysterious, especially around the supper hour when the telemarketers began harassing me at full force.

Like the other night while I had my best friend and her kids over for supper. I was trying to impart buckets of gossip wisdom to my friend when a telemarketer from Michigan decided to make my life miserable.

The first time the phone rang and the great state of Michigan proverbially knocked on my door, I graciously answered it with the polite intentions of turning down what ever carpet cleaning deal, free travel trip or long distance plan they were offering.

But there was no one on the other line. Not even a heavy breather. Damn you, telemarketers. If you are going to call during the supper hour you could at least have the decency to actually remain on the line so that I can rip you a new one.

No biggie, I just hung up and continued discussing politics fashion, religion celebrity gossip and the economy our husbands with my friend.

Then the phone rang again. It was Michigan trying anew. I let it go to voice mail and didn’t thing anything about it as I prattled on, only slightly annoyed about the persistent intrusion. A matter of moments later, the phone rang for the third time.

Maybe it was the wine and the liquid courage it had fostered, or maybe it was the simple fact that I was trying to import valuable life lessons to my best friend who was literally hanging on my every word, only to be interrupted by annoying telemarketers, but I lost it.

I picked up the phone and snarled in my meanest scariest voice, “FACK OFF AND DIE. TRY PHONING YOUR MOTHER. MAYBE SHE CARES.” And then I promptly hung up. My best friend screeched with laughter and gave me a high five.

Before I could launch back into my conversation, the phone rang for the fourth time. Laughing, my best friend grabbed for it to save the poor telemarketer from receiving the tongue lashing of his or her life.

“Hello?” She laughed sweetly into the phone while batting my hand away as I tried to grab the phone from her to snarl into it. All of her sudden her face dropped and then she doubled over laughing hysterically and wandered to the next room to escape from the children and me so she could actually hear the person on the other line.

She came back moments later wiping tears of laughter away from her eyes and placed the phone back on to the counter.

“My mother would like to know why you yelled at her to fack off and die,” she giggled. My face fell. Oh shit.

“Turns out that third caller wasn’t Michigan but my mother trying to find out if I still needed her to sit for me next week. She knew I was having supper with you so she called here.” She burst into laughter as she saw my ashen face. “She also wants me to say hello and remind you she will be at Easter supper on Sunday. She wants to talk with you,” she sniggered.

Great. Nothing like a lesson in phone manners administered by the most pious scary woman I know while I choke back my Easter ham. Fun.

You would have thought this would have served as a valuable teaching tool for me to remember phone technology is not infallible. Sometimes caller i.d. fails and you mistakenly tell your well respected best friend’s mother to take a flying leap instead of some asshat telemarketer.

But this is Tanis you are speaking about. I can be a bit of a slow learner. So yesterday, after a long day of shopping, I phoned my husband’s cell phone. By my estimation, he would have been off work and on his way home. I wanted to brag to him about all my great shopping conquests and maybe tell him I loved him. Maybe. Depends on my mood.

So after a few rings, my husband answered his cell phone. Before he could even mutter hello, I launched into a long winded diatribe about my day and then ended with, “Ya, and I haven’t pooped in five days and I’m starting to get uncomfortable.”

A moment of silence on the other end of the line as my husband digested this morsel and all the other’s I just hurled at him. Except it wasn’t my husband. It was his best friend.

“Really. Five days eh? Are you eating leafy greens?” he joked.

As soon as he opened his mouth I realized my mistake. “What are you doing answering Boo’s cell?” I screeched as my face went three shades red and I realized I just talked about my lack of shitting prowess with a man I haven’t seen naked.

“Um, Boo’s a bit busy right now so I’m holding his cell phone,” he laughed. “But I’ll have him call you back. And you can be sure I’ll pass along that bit about your bunged hole.” More laughter.

“Oh, and Tanis? Boo invited me to Easter supper, so I’ll see you on Sunday.”

Great. Now I’m going to be getting a lesson in phone manners from a woman I both admire and fear and a lesson in bowel maintenance from a man who survives strictly on whiskey, coke and cigarettes.

I hate telephones.

Have a happy Easter everyone. I’m not sure I will, but it will be informative.

As every day passes it is becoming more and more obvious that I am completely unprepared for the teenage trials and tribulations that lay before us.

My son recently sprouted two hollow legs, hoovering food and anything else not nailed down and all of his pants are starting to look like capris with inches of ankle bone showing. He sprang up over night. I am dreading the day I wake up to find all my hand lotion missing and a bunch of dirty socks stuffed under his bed.

My daughter has become obsessed with growing breasts, wearing makeup and styling her hair. She spends hours staring into the mirror trying to visualize what she will look like as a grown up and pondering her future as a famous singer/world class surgeon/supermodel all at once.

I’m still stuck in the lego and Barbie stage; offering them juice boxes and asking them if they want chicken fingers or mac n’ cheese for supper.

They are growing up faster than I am maturing as a parent and it’s starting to scare the hell out of me.

It doesn’t help they attend a school where grades five through 12 freely roam the halls. The almost adult kids try to avoid the wee ones like my Fric and Frac but inevitably, due to lack of square footage, their paths collide.

Fric and Frac learn all sorts of interesting life lessons while on the playgrounds of public school. And they are more than eager to share those lessons with their totally hip, rad wrinkled, worried mother.

Any day my pubic hair are going to start turning gray, people.

The other day Fric and Frac came home talking about boners and stiffies and they wanted to know what ‘wanking off’ meant. They haven’t really figured out what masturbation means and I’d like to keep it that way for a while.

Just to keep my sanity for a few more days.

But they persisted and kept gnawing at my ankles like rabid little rats and wanted to know why some of the boys on the bus were telling a kid to buy a melon, microwave it for a few seconds to warm up the middle and then cut a hole in it.

Was it some fancy new type of dessert? Have we been eating melon the wrong way for all of these years? Were they missing out on some magic formula to magically morph them into one of the cool kids?

And by the way, Mom, why does everyone keep teasing the boys about warm apple pie? What’s the joke?

I had several choices at this moment as I stopped, picked up my jaw and pushed my exploded eyeballs back into my head while inwardly cursing the fact that we live out in the sticks and my children are forced to ride the little yellow bus with a bunch of sex starved adolescent boys.

(Shit like this never happened when I lived in the city and had to walk to school. No sirree. It was all fairy princesses and sparkle dust. Heh.)

I could sit down and calmly and rationally explain the jokes and have an age appropriate conversation about sex or I could bury my head in the sand and let Satan’s spawn on the school bus corrupt my beautiful innocent children forever.

Hell no. If any one gets to corrupt my children it’s gonna be me. I didn’t spend eight hours in hard labour trying to push their fat heads out of my itty bitty pink parts just to allow someone else have all the fun. I’ve earned the right to be able to twist their little minds every darn time I had to wipe their poopy bums or kiss their booboos.

Still, this wasn’t a conversation to enter in to lightly so I did what any quick thinking momma would do. I told them to do their home work and we would talk about this after supper.

I needed time to collect my thoughts and figure out how not to scar myself for years to come to delicately word our conversation.

That and I wanted to call Boo. See if he had time to deal with it. Maybe we could conference call it, and he could do all the heavy lifting. (I’m thoughtful like that.) But Boo was actually working so I would have to face the firing squad alone without any back up.

I felt like an old gun slinger heading out to main street at the stroke of noon, aware that if I wasn’t the fastest draw I’d end up with a bullet in the head.

After supper my delightfully excited demon spawn sat down with me and we talked. About everything. Kinda. I still edited as much as I could. Had to save some of the good stuff for their dad. Heh. But in the end, Frac ran screeching from the room with his ears bleeding and my daughter just sat on the couch with a stunned look on her face, wishing she had never asked.

Mission accomplished.

Heh.

Later that night, Boo phoned and asked how our day went. When I told him his children wanted to know why boys spunk into fruit I heard the phone clatter to the floor and my husband having a small heart attack on the other end. When he sufficiently recovered he asked how I handled the situation.

“Why? Don’t you trust me? You think I will warp them don’t you?” I asked on the defensive.

“No, no, nothing like that,” he rushed to reassure me. “I know you would do the best you could. It’s just sometimes your best is a little, um, frank. Plus, this kinda came at me out of the blue,” he hurriedly added so I wouldn’t rip off his head, shit down his throat and then stuff his skull down the gaping wound that was once his neck.

“Came at YOU out of the blue???” I huffed. “Try being the one to explain what wanking off or tugging the one-eyed snake meant!”

“Well, how did you do it?” I could tell my beloved was wrestling simultaneously with fear and curiosity. While he dreaded my answer he needed to know. Kinda like rubber necking at an accident site. You just can’t stop yourself.

“I explained the whole self-gratification thing in a non-specific manner but I felt it was more important to focus on teen age sex. Especially since they are obviously hearing about it every day. I don’t want them to think it is cool or an activity to engage in lightly.” I took a deep breath before continuing.

“Because if I have grandbabies before I turn forty I’m ripping off your nuts and barbequing them. It will be all your fault for leaving me alone with these kids during their crucial development stage.”

“Fair enough,” Boo said. “So what did you say?”

“Well, not much to be honest. I sat them down and made them watch a music video and then explained the lyrics. That pretty much did all the work for me. I think we may be raising a future nun and a forty year old virgin. I’m okay with that,” I laughed.

“Cool,” Boo laughed. “But what video did you make them watch?”

“Oh, just an old Meatloaf video. What’s better than a little rock and roll to go with a sex talk?,” I giggled as I remembered my children’s horror filled faces as I explained to them the realities of teen age sex courtesy of 70′s rock.

What better than a video that explains the difference between boys and girls and sex and the harsh realities of what happens when you have sex when you aren’t ready.

Plus, I may have had a little fun rocking out to the video and remembering my own steamy teenage nights parked in a vehicle in the middle of no where.

Heh.

Ya. I so rock this parenting gig.