Ready for some football

Once, we lived in a castle at the top of a beanstalk. Another time, we were overrun by dinosaurs. We were slaves to Pixar in the “World above Cars.” We drifted in and out of staterooms on the Titanic, miles below the surface. We built a place on the outskirts of Lego City. We lived long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away.  You see, at the Fun Apartment, we don’t just like things. We LIVE them. These kids drill down deep.

And now, we live at Lambeau Field.

The latest Fun Apartment obsession is Green Bay Packers football. (Really, is there any other kind? I’ve not heard of it.)

That’s right, these boys bred in our tiny matchbox live, eat, breathe, and (occasionally) sleep a sport that requires 120  yards to play it properly.

To be fair, I opened the door to this by letting them watch Packer games with me and teaching them what I could about the game. But it didn’t take long before my admittedly casual knowledge was outstripped and they were explaining things to me. Really, how was I to know about the “no forward passing past the line of scrimmage” rule?

And this new love of football incorporates other favorite activities: wrestling! and tackling! And because we live in New York City and it is winter, most of these games happen indoors. Happily, being knocked to the ground can only improve most of our possessions. Or we play in short spurts in our neighborhood playground. That was where I earned my five game suspension for chop blocking. (I did feel very badly about the fat lip. But it went away in a few days.)

It’s changed our discipline game around here, as well. Now transgressions like using our bodies to hurt or not being a kind brother earn the accused received a ten yard penalty and it’s an automatic first down for the injured party. Oddly, this is way more effective than the traditional time out in the bathroom. I just have to carry around a yellow flag.

That’s right folks, it is football all the time around here. They are never off the field. Many games occur on the sidewalks of 8^th avenue—which is way better than those corporate dome stadiums. And the beer is cheaper.

Because we never bothered with cable or any other complicated TV business, we often end up watching the game in our local watering hole around the corner, where these guys have become regulars. Once a Buccaneers fan offered to watch them while I ran across the street to switch the laundry. It takes a village, people.

When it’s not game on, it’s still go time. Yesterday I caught the Quarterback standing in the middle of the living room, well middle of the whole apartment, really, with one arm raised in the air. “Umm, what are you doing?” I asked. “Practicing holding the Vince Lombardi trophy,” he answered as if it were the most obvious of answers. Such thoroughness is to be admired.

Another favorite part of these games: instant replay. That is when they decide that something about the play has gone wrong, so they must play it out again. So they do it again. r . . e . . a . . l . . l . . y     s . .l . . o . . w . . l . . y. This is how they do it in the NFL, right?

There is also commentary, which, though influenced by game announcers is still very kid-like: “Here’s the snap and pass is caught by my brother in the most best play ever!”

One side effect of watching too much football is that these kids can now pretty much recite ads for trucks they are too young to drive, insurance they don’t need, food they won’t eat, beer they can’t drink, shows they aren’t allowed to watch and internet service that they don’t understand. Way to hit the demographic sweet spot, advertisers. Money well spent, I’m sure.

There’s an awful lot more testosterone around here, too. I mean I know I’m surrounded, but it hasn’t been quite so locker room-like before. Now, when these yahoos celebrate anything, say correctly identifying their own socks, they throw out their skinny chests and thump them.

However, this was not the ideal year to embrace fandom. Aaron Rodgers’ broken collarbone stunned us all. And the meager offerings the rest of the season gave some insight into what being a Packer Fan in the 1980s must have been like. Still, the future quarterback and wide receiver remain undaunted. And the weekly requests to relocate to Titletown persist.

(Hey, I bet we could get a huge place there. After the Fun Apartment, any average-sized Wisconsin home would feel like Lambeau Field to us.)

What’s funny about this latest obsession is that our entire apartment, including all the fun, would fit inside the area on a field between the zero and one yard line. And yet, this has not affected the scope or scale of these kids’ ambitions. To them, every pass is a hail mary, every run is 80 yards, every kick is into the wind, and every game is the super bowl.

You are all welcome to join us at the Fun Apartment’s Super Bowl party. But you have to sit on our bed to watch the game. And our tv screen is a whopping 14 inches wide.

And after the game is over, we won’t be mourning the end of the season. We’re still playing. There’s no offseason at the Fun Apartment.

Containment

With all of the holiday bounty comes another uniquely Fun Apartment moment: finding places to actually put away the new toys, all of which seem to be enormously larger than last year’s toys.

So, first comes the purge. I have been sneaking old stuff out of the fun apartment all week (hey, I’m basically unsupervised all day, what did they think was going to happen?) I have a sort of de-cluttering quirk that allows me to give away basically anything we own, as long as I know it is going to a good home. (The flip-side of this quirk is that I have a lot of stuff we are hanging onto because I just know there is a good home for it out there somewhere. Wow, do I hope my knocked up sister has a boy, because that would clear out half of our basement storage closet in a single shipment!)

Because things can really pile up around here. And I seem to be the only one who raises even one eyebrow at the piles. Sure, we live in a small place, there’s going to be stuff around, but sometimes a girl might want to see some flat unoccupied space, like a table top, without waiting for the accompanying unicorn or blood moon. We heard this study on the radio a few days ago (my bit is at the end) and I was basically jumping up and down pointing at the radio, while the man of my dreams shrugged charmingly at me. But science has proven: I am being neuro-chemically altered–in fact, poisoned!–by all this crap around here! Thank you Science! I am vindicated! Now, I have to go to the Salvation Army carrying these large plastic bags. And, no, I don’t know what happened to your magazines from 1998. Or Thomas the &*$#ing Tank Engine, but whatever happened to him, I’m sure he totally had it coming.

After the purge, more bins. Today I spent $35 on Lego storage. And I thought I was the one getting the bargain. I admit, I have a complicated relationship with this temple of organizational commerce. But it is the only place where I could remotely be considered a pop star. The clerk seemed to have his world-view shaken when I asked for “under-couch” storage bins. “Santa brought me several Lego storage problems,” I explained.

“Lego storage opportunities,” he corrected. They should give that guy a raise.

That’s what we have at the fun apartment: opportunities. Lots of opportunities.

Workshoppy

Now that the holiday craziness is over, I have time to write everything I have been thinking about holiday craziness. So, guess what happened here at the Fun Apartment in Decmber? It was projects! A. Lot. of Projects! We were very busy in Santa’s Sweatshop.

I have no idea why your hammer smells minty. I think you are imagining things.

For instance, there are the Christmas cookies. The fourteen kinds I made this December, and then forbade my household to eat. And now I have lots of leftover, slightly stale cookies. That was bad planning on my part, especially for my new January theme: “cleanliness is next to Momliness.”

White chocolate. Peanut butter. Marshmallows. Grandma was right.

But Midwesterners often express their love through butter. And one thing I love about the holidays, among the bajazillion other things I love about the holidays, is that it is one thousand percent acceptable to invite people over and ply them with cookies and drinks and call it dinner! Cheers!

There is also this job I invented for myself: making embroidered felt ornaments for everyone. I love making them, but I have to make rather a lot, and I am running out of holiday themed items that can be reproduced in felt. Somehow I have a sad feeling that next year’s ornaments will be a mini felt Christmas potholder and roll of scotch tape. (Suggestions gleefully accepted!)

And let’s not forget these dudes. Apparently all the dinosaurs at the Fun Apartment never heard about that whole K/T barrier business. Or I am running some sort of dinosaur safe house in the Mesozoic extinction level event witness protection program.

Also, if I ever hear the words “shutter” and “fly” together, I will start to throw knives around.

But, really, I love all the doing. Because, for us, or well me at any rate, Christmas is just a lot of projects! In fact, the lads and I spent most of Christmas Eve engaged in one sort of holiday craft or another, largely because I needed them to be occupied while I was madly embroidering, and because the YMCA insisted that I spend the day with the boys, rather than dumping them in childcare while I went to kickboxing. But it was fun, because, well, they’re my kids after all, so they love complicated projects.

Because of this tremendous project list, however, I have very little energy to disguise my handwriting to fake correspondence from Elf on the Shelf. I wish he were back in Africa. One wise woman told me recently, “Don’t you know? All magical creatures type!” She’s right. They do (now).

However, we encountered one major holiday problem here at the Fun Apartment: the deplorable lack of good hiding places for presents. In a normal household, people just hide their presents in some secret, out-of-the-way spot. But at the Fun Apartment, those secret out-of-the-way spots were colonized long ago by summer clothes or sea monkeys and therefore cannot possibly accommodate a large Lego set. Mommy had to get creative. Sometimes, I had to rely on the fact that they are not overly curious about the piles of random crap err detritus that seem to form all over the place without any encouragement from me and at a rate that would alarm the CDC. So, I just arranged these piles more artfully around holiday gifts shrouded in many layers of plastic shopping bags. I’m a little discouraged to say that this approach worked pretty well. Perhaps they are a little too accustomed to living cheek by jowl with those random piles. But I spent the whole week leading up to Christmas cringing inside whenever the boys gasped or said “Mommy! Look!” Luckily, though, none  of my stash houses were raided.

But this was also a problem when, at 11:30 on Christmas morning, my older son looked at his payload curiously. “Hey!” he said, poking through his Legos and whiskey for a gift he had already glimpsed bringing it home from school (Damn you Scholastic and your ridiculous packaging, too !) “Where’s my weather station?”

I stopped mid-coffee swig. I had hidden the weather station, and its co-presents, the oft-requested remote control monster trucks, somewhere so secret that I had forgotten its location entirely. But, of course, I couldn’t exactly go on a room to- um, well, a room search anyway, because then I would be revealing all my hiding places and expressly destroying my children’s belief in Santa.

Happily, the lad seemed to accept my snorting coffee out of my nose as an answer to this query, and I was able at last to locate these stray items by surreptitiously searching the one cupboard that I can reach without a ladder. And Santa trotted them at the next Christmas celebration we attended (We had five. Check the Shutterfly calendar: It’s a big family.)

We also made wrapping paper. Every year it gets a little more recognizable as such.

Actually, one of my favorite holiday moments was sitting at Fika with a cup of coffee and a candy cane while I wrote out my holiday cards. Never mind that this cozy “holiday” moment happened on January 6. It still had that feel.

And, your holiday card is (finally) in the mail!