Techy Twins

So it seems that my children are WAY more technologically advanced than their mother.  In fact, when I got my first iPhone, they were the ones who taught me how to take pictures with the damn thing.  What can I say — gadgets are just REALLY not my strong suit.  And naturally, as is the case with pretty much everything in my nucking futty world, my lack of technological knowledge has come back to kick me in the pooper, a fact which I discovered after allowing my little whiz kids to play with an old iPhone of their dad’s.

Since my husband is an electronics whore (sorry, Honey, but you totally are), he has a deep-rooted desire to have to have the latest, greatest doohickey on the market.  So, needless to say, we just so happen to have a few extra outdated iPhones lying around our house.  Now, granted, they have no SIM cards in them, but they still have some jackass games and whatnot on them, making them oh-so-appealing to our high-tech hungry kids.  And, unfortunately for us, the feature they found most entertaining was the freaking clock app.

Now why in the hell Apple thought it was a good idea to have SUCH obnoxious frickin’ alarm tones available is beyond me, but wouldn’t ya know that my offspring managed to find every last flippin’ one of them.  And much to my surprise, they somehow figured out how to set these unbelievably annoying alarm tones to go off at all ungodly hours of the night.  Imagine waking up at 3 a.m. to the blaring sounds of a red alert.  I swear I thought aliens were attacking, and we were being forced to evacuate the mother ship.  Let me just tell ya, it was most certainly NOT a pleasant way to be yanked out of a peaceful slumber.  And would you believe that this happened not once but two times in a row??!!  Having the beejesus scared out of you on more than one occasion is just too much for one person to bear.  So I put the lockdown on any alarm settings from here on out.

And after doing some reflective thinking, I realize that clearly, I need to stop underestimating the power of seven-year-olds.  (Seriously, when the hell did kids get to be so smart?)  The next thing I know, they’re gonna be surfin’ porn and gambling with degenerates online.  I guess it’s time for me to really step up my game….

My Blogiversary

     

     Today is my blogiversary.  I can hardly believe it, but it was exactly one year ago today that I first started publishing all the tales from the Nucking Futs Family, 283 of them in all.  I’ve been pretty much an open book for the past twelve months, laying it all out there for the cyber world to read.  It has been an amazing journey thus far, one that I almost didn’t even take.  

     I’ve always had a passion for writing, but kids and all of life’s craziness have generally gotten in my way of forming a coherent thought to spew from my brain.  I resisted for quite a while, but my husband finally persuaded me to take the plunge and start a blog in January of 2009.  When it first began, I felt like an idiot putting something out there on the internet that surely nobody in their right mind would ever want to read.  I was certain that nobody gave two shits that my son likes to make his peeper dance or that my daughter calls my bras “boob covers” or that my thong flossed my lady bits at the gym.  But little by little, my followers grew over time, and people surprisingly WANTED to hear about all the jack-asinine things that tend to always happen to me. And now that I’m a year into this thing, I can happily say that I have built some really unique and special relationships with many of my readers.  It’s been both fun and incredibly therapeutic to share my life with all of you. 

     The blogosphere is FULL of incredibly talented writers who make me want to step up my game and improve my own site.  So, over the next year, I hope to do even bigger and better things with my blog.  I’m planning to switch over to my own URL, and a Nucking Futs Mama t-shirt is already in the works.  Who knows — maybe you’ll get a wild hair up your ass and decide to show the world that you’re a little nucking futty by wearing one of these bad boys in the carpool line at school or even to pick up a lil sum’n sum’n for yourself at the adult toy store.  Whatever the case, I hope I can continue to keep you laughing, continue to keep you thinking and continue to keep you coming back for more.  I promise to dish it all out if you promise to eat it all up.  :-)

Nightmare on my Street

     

     My husband truly means well, but he doesn’t always pick the best kids’ movies for our twins to watch. To his defense, though, I think a lot of parents get caught up in this same scenario.  All the commercials and all the marketing for some of these movies tend to make you think that because it’s animated, it’s perfectly suitable. However, as we have come to find out, it is impossible to know just exactly what might freak out your kids.

     A couple of years ago, my husband took a business trip to Paris and suggested that I watch “The Incredibles” with the kids on movie night.  I had seen about a bazillion commercials for the movie and thought it looked pretty funny myself.  My son, on the other hand, most definitely did NOT share that same humor toward the film.  I was hard at work popping some corn in the microwave, when I happened to glance over and see him huddled behind the sofa. Come to find out, the child was TERRIFIED of robots.  Who knew? I immediately turned off the movie and had a talk with him about the difference between real and make-believe.  Needless to say, my son was up half the night with robot nightmares, and I was pissed at my husband for suggesting the stupid movie in the first place. He got his payback, though, because when he returned from his business trip, complete with a kids’ Parisian t-shirt souvenir, my son immediately threw it down and burst into tears.  I picked it up to find a huge embroidered robot on the front of it!  I just laughed and thought about how much it served my husband right.

     Another example was earlier this year, when my husband took the kids to see “Coraline.”  Now, when I saw all of the previews for this particular movie, nothing whatsoever appealed to me.  It just looked dark and dreary and sure to bring about more unwanted stress in my parenting world. And, like usual, my gut was right, because my daughter still to this day has nightmares about this freaking movie. For some reason, she associates some kind of green pig with it and often wakes up crying because the pig is supposedly after her.  As ridiculous as it seems to me, I have repeatedly tried to explain to her that it’s a dream, so the pig isn’t real.  I’ve told her that the cool thing about dreams is that she can do anything she wants in them.  I’ve even described scenarios for her to try to concoct in her dream. The latest is that Mommy has wings and swoops down to pick her up, and we fly all the way up to a rainbow to chill out and laugh about the pig. I know, it sounds insane, not to mention ASININE, but it is a temporary fix, nonetheless. Hey, you do what you gotta do, especially when sleep is involved!

     So, what movies have given your kids the heebie jeebies?  How do you handle nightmares in your own house?  Do you have any special tricks or trades to calm down your freaked out little ones?