As the child of parents who warned us to stay away from wild zebras living in the crawlspace under our house, and who knew we’d just take it on faith that the blue laws prohibited them from buying us toys on weekends, there may be genes involved, but I’m pretty sure parental trolling is just part of the job.

Although most trolls in our household were invented for practical purposes – “Don’t wander off from us in the park or the mountain lions might get you.” Others have been accidental. It was a popular animated movie that taught my kids the meerkat is actually a “move-it move-it”; it will be school that informs them it isn’t. My 6-year-old likes to taste each ingredient we use in our cooking; he refuses to sample the baking soda as he’s used it to blow corks off bottles. Isn’t best for his safety that we not protest that one?

Trolls that take years for the victim to realize – like the fact that blue laws never covered toys, unbeknownst to me until college when I found out that no one else was held to that restriction – are the ones kids turn to therapists to sort out. These are the long trolls.

So, sure, it will likely be years before my children sort out that mary had a *lamb* not a lamp, extinction is *different* from stinkiness, or that baking soda is basically harmless, they really need to worry about mentos or pop rocks or alka seltzer. Meh. Those aren’t really fodder for therapists. There is one long troll I’m worried about. This one is probably most universal: the great Santa conspiracy. That one is big in our house. We’ve got Santa *on video*. Oh, yes. My kids will be *those* kids. And as I make preparations to ensure we carry out the ruse one more year – reserving an unopened distinctive roll of paper for *his* presents, digging out the reindeer fur and soot to dust on the presents, and readying that video camera, I feel a sharp twinge of guilt. Is this the long troll that sends my kids to therapy?

We’re in the market for good child sized safety glasses after child A almost blinded child B when child A, distracted from the bottle rocket construction momentarily, tried to find out what happens when you apply forced air to sibling’s eye-socket.

For the scientists in the room wondering just that – a lot of Homer Simpson style yelling, much crying by child B, a little squirt of blood Horney Toad style, frantic googling and consulting of emergency personnel, cold compress, dilation confirmation, vision confirmation (thank god for early readers!), and a little Tylenol for all parties involved.

The correct response was probably not, “Well didja punch them?”

I played on a co-ed soccer team from 1st grade until 5th grade, and though I could identify the three best players on the team, the classification stopped there. The rest of us were just on the team. Whether this was a gender thing, result of my personality (apparently *everyone* but me knows girl politics start in pre-school – OMG “heathers” wasn’t just a movie?), or related to the fact that on that co-ed team, “co-ed” never included more than 2 girls making the comparison like apples to bananas, I just never felt the need to calculate my place in the pecking order. This left me utterly unprepared for the first week of soccer angst that befell Will.

I’ve written about how soccer wasn’t high on his list of activities for the fall, but yeah, I signed him up anyway. Soccer is our insurance against depression, social angst, and lack of clarity. Probably more important than the fact that soccer offers Will an athletic outlet to burn through that boy energy, it also does wonders for his social life. Nothing bonds kids to each other like adversity, and sports teams made up mostly of classmates have one of the higher adversity per minute ratios of the legal options. No one survives a season without having the air knocked out of him with a rogue ball. Walk that off and go back to play? You gain the instant respect of your teammates. 90 minutes of ball-play on an unlighted pitch on a frigid autumn night tests anyone’s constitution. When they win, they win together. When they lose, they lose together. Such is soccer. So when Will sounded anxious about his first practice, trying to talk me out of taking him, I was nervous. What if he is “bookish”? Maybe boys worry about the pecking order in 1st grade? Maybe soccer was better on paper.

I did as any good parent does and spent the 15 minute drive to the field talking through Will’s fears. No, that kindergartener who is the best player of the k-3s would not be on his team. No, he would not be thrown onto the field into a kick-off against other kids. This would be practice where they’d dribble through cones, practice running and passing. He’d learn how to play soccer.

I threw him out onto the field and crossed my fingers.

Sure enough, 90 minutes later he ran off the pitch beaming from ear to ear going on and on about how much fun that practice had been. The following week the report changed to, “Mom! I’m the second best player after only two practices!” Oh, really! It turns out, he just felt he was. He had kicked the ball up into the air over the edge of the field and he and 4 other kids stood around contemplating how to retrieve it until one was coached to just climb down after it. In Will’s book, that was professional soccer, immediately catapulting him to 2nd in the pecking order. And hey, if he feels like #2, I’m going to let him be #2 until he realizes otherwise.

I can’t figure out if he’s already realized girls take yoga or if he really is still too cool to care what the other kids think. Either way, I’m quite amused.

An entirely different note, Justin Timberlake would just die if he saw this:

In recognition of the independence of our country, we spent Independence weekend in Colorado Springs at the Broadmoor. (The Bro More to those in the know)

Lovely hotel from the outside. The same characterless 5 star generic hotel room on the inside that I’ve stayed in around the world. Yawn. We’ll be camping or lodging in Manitou Springs our next visit.

We made the kids suffer through the 3 hours of ascent to and descent from Pikes Peak on the cog railway. The scenery was breathtaking. The train was a marvel of engineering, using a cog wheel to control the direct (straight up and down!) ascent and descent. And standing at the peak felt like standing on the top of the world. All of this lost on the kids, of course.

We visited the giraffes at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo.

Everyone had a dangerous looking photo taken at Garden of the Gods.

There was plenty of swimming, obligatory fireworks, a thunderstorm (just as exciting to the Northern California crew as the fireworks), and good quality family time.

Etched into our brains after all that quality time with little Taylor Swift (aka Sylvie) is our daughter’s take on one of Taylor’s songs:
You wear short skirts, I wear tshirts;
You’re cheer captain hook, I’m on the bleachers;
dreamin’ bout the day when you wake up and find
anda whatcha lookin for has been here whole time!

You are blonde to meeee!
You are blonde to me!

Here she is filming her music video at the Garden of the Gods.

Hope your 4th was wonderful, too.

Sylvie recently announced in her dinner table confession of the day that she loves Taylor Swift. Thinking perhaps the Kanye interruption at the VMAs made the playground, too, I filed this information in the back of my brain. In a moment of motherhood clairvoyance, I googled the most common lyrics of what I thought was an embellished version of a preschool song about clothing that Sylvie sings pretty much constantly, “She wears short skirts, I wear tshirts…” Whoa! Sylvie knows a Taylor Swift song! Who got my 3 year old hooked on Taylor Swift?

I’ve yet to piece the whole story together, but someone introduced my daughter to Miss Swift. Taught her the song. And she’s apparently watched the video on her favorite teacher’s phone. The secret lives of pre-teens (3-12)… For some reason I thought we’d reach this point much later.

At least it isn’t Brittany Spears or Lindsay Blow-han.