I saw a man that I know from the children’s school the other day. He was pushing one of those un-maneuverable racecar shopping carts with his two little boys gleefully air driving in the front.

When I commented on how sweet they looked he retorted, “Yeah, they can be sweet sometimes,” and I couldn’t relate more.

He continued to say what everybody says, “boys are high energy when they are young but girls give you hell when they become teenagers.”

“Really,” I said. “My sister’s and I were relatively easy on our parents,” right Melanie, Mommy and Tutti? (If you haven’t noticed yet, my family often comments on my posts)

He went on to say, “Boys just try to kill themselves by being reckless with their bodies, girls don’t listen and do things that can be life altering,” and that made me feel oh so much better.

The other night, Brevitt and I were wrestling together, he in his red footsie pajamas, a popular trend at school. We lay on top of each other laughing as he smooshed my face into “hilarious” positions and a memory of my sister, Michele, flashed into my head. Her now fourteen year old was five and he was lying on top of her soaking in all of her love and it reminded me that I must hold on to this moment for as long as possible because soon, real soon, Brevitt will not feel comfortable with feeling me so close to him. We lay there forever wrapped in each others arms as he told me a whole lot of insightful information about his friends, school and life in general.

The next day I went to my friends house to pick up my boys. They were playing their favorite sport, dodgeball, down in her basement with her two sons. It sounded as if a sacrifice was being performed. When I went down to check on them a speeding ball whizzed by and landed smack into Axel’s face, which didn’t seem to phase him.

I walked upstairs and asked horrified, “Is this how people feel when they visit my house? Stunned and psychologically disturbed by all of the noise and energy? It is no wonder why I don’t have many visitors anymore.”

As she sat there calmly reading the newspaper, she replied, “I love it….or at least, I have learned to embrace it.”

It is true that quite often I reach a breaking point with my boys and need to tell them that, “mommy is closed”. It is my dysfunctional way of getting a brief respite from all of the chaos.

But I will say this, when I am outside with the boys, or when we are indoors and they are being sweet and calm, they are my entertainment and my companions, filling the house with laughter and there is nobody in the world who I would rather be with.

In two to five years from now they will transform into different beings and I will have to connect with them on a different scale. For now though, I’ll embrace them and all of their energy and wrap them into my arms as much as they will allow, when I’m not reprimanding them for riding their bikes down the enormous ski ramp that Wade built in our backyard. Anybody care to share their Xanax with me????

Ooohhh baby are we in for the long haul with Brevitt being a tween, en force. He is giving us a run for our money or maybe that is the wrong expression since we don’t have any money at the moment.

As you know I have been dying to get away, anywhere so when Wade told me that he was going to wake up early Saturday morning to drive down to Rifle to pick up his trailer I informed him that we were all coming with him. Rifle is about as exciting as it sounds but there are a few attractions there that we have never seen, so off we went.

I got a sense of what it would be like to kidnap a child as we picked Brevitt up from his sleepover and demanded that he sit his bottom down in the truck and damn well enjoy this family outing that we were taking.

He lay down in the back seat leaving barely any room for his brothers and moaned and groaned about how dull it was going to be to drive to Rifle when he could be mountain biking with his friend. Finally I turned around and told him how lucky he was that he had a family that wanted him to be with them and that if he was going to be a good traveler he needed to learn that traveling was all about the journey and not always the end result.

Well the journey turned out to not be so grand as our rambunctious kids made a whole lot of unbearable noises in the back seat. When Wade wasn’t air slapping them as he drove he was tuning all of us out absent-mindedly playing air guitar to Pat Benatar, his mode of escape. “Isn’t this great?” I asked facetiously.

I should have let Wade linger in his flashback from his teenage years because bringing him back to reality only gave him credence to yell at the kids and issue two strikes out for bad behavior.  “One more strike and no ice cream for you”, Baddy menacingly warned.

His no tolerance rules were a hell of a lot more affective than my new age counseling, telling them to count to ten whenever they felt angry before they let a word loose that they would regret.

We parked the truck and ate a depressing picnic in the freezing cold weather. In the first ten minutes Axel cried twice and Brevitt got reprimanded both times. The sun peaked out and the walk began putting us all in better spirits. We skipped and sang to The Wizard of Oz until we reached the water falls, which exceeded my expectations. I closed my eyes and was transported to our trip to Hawaii where Wade and I frolicked about Blue Lagoon style. The spell was broken when I heard Wade shouting at the boys to stop throwing rocks down the water fall and possibly knocking somebody out below. That’s all we needed was to be responsible for some innocent tourists concussion.

We explored the calcite caves around the falls with our headlamps and I couldn’t help but think of Gollum from The Hobbit living in a cave like these. I was also transported to Mexico where Wade and I swam in a Cenote in a cave in Mexico. I tried to stay present but I am a dreamer and can’t help myself.

Brevitt, in the end, had a marvelous time exploring and admitted that it was a good day, until he had his enormous ice cream and was transformed into a sugared up beast. The kid lives for the one thing that will destroy him one day.

I wasn’t happy with his piggish behavior as he lunged for his brother’s cones after finishing his. All I had to do was look at him with my disappointed glare and he crumbled into a sniveling mess and ran out the door.

Brevitt cannot recover from these tirades until he feels the love from me again and so I ran after him. “You, my little friend, cannot handle sugar”, I yelled to him as he ran away from me. The cars were passing by wondering why a grown up women would be chasing an insane beast down the sidewalk but I had been through this before. “This is my life”, I wanted to yell at them. “I’m sure yours is no better”!!!

Brevitt was taking photographs of his mum leaping through the air after skipping with the little ones.

When your children reach a certain age, the fears that you have when they are little mutate into new fears. The chances of their getting lost are less but the chances of their getting hurt by their own volition are greater. Parents can never let their guard down with their children, regardless of the ages, but some children are easier than others to manage.

All my boys, including Tucker, always stuck close to me like little ducklings. I was never one of those moms that had to leave abruptly to chase after a toddler who was escaping mock force. This is why Wade and I were completely baffled when Tucker disappeared yesterday at the football field .

It didn’t help any that Brevitt, who was the most concerned of all, told me that he saw Tucker with his head down like he was sad and some adult man was helping him.

Taking a deep breath, I raced off on my bike and looped around the surrounding streets, no Tucker. It is difficult to methodically plan out your search when you are on the verge of panicking. I was breathing hard and my heart was racing but for some instinctual reason I managed to keep my panic at bay.

The most difficult decision to make is when to call the police. If Tucker had been kidnapped than immediacy would have been essential and I never would have forgiven myself for waiting to make the call.

Racing to the nearby park something told me to keep going down the path to my friend’s house where Tucker always has play dates, this was the last place I was going to check before dialing 911. I knew that the family was gone in the desert and as I suspected their house was all locked up. I walked to their back patio to check if any doors were unlocked thinking that if Tucker did indeed walk all the way over there he might scout out the place to get inside and play with their toys.

Like a ghost, Tucker appeared inside in front of the window with his secret smile on his face. How did he get in there with all the doors locked? A wash of “what if’s” enveloped me in a thin reality veil. What if I hadn’t walked around the back? What would he have done after getting bored of playing? Would he have walked back to the football field in the dark or sat in the house all alone crying until somebody came home or would he have turned on the television and helped himself to popsicles? What if he really had been kidnapped?

I breathed an incredible sigh of relief and moved on to stage two. I wasn’t sure how to scare him to his senses without permanently causing damage. I decided to tell him the story of how my mother did call the police when I was a child because she forgot that I had told her that I was going to my friend’s house for lunch. I have never forgotten seeing the police car in the distance and as I got closer hearing the police asking the children if they had seen Jillian Wernick. I froze with fear when I realized it was I who was in trouble.

A few months ago I heard about a four year old disappearing from an ice cream shop located adjacent to a river. I couldn’t help but accuse the parents of being negligent with their child, how could they not have noticed that their little boy had wandered away?

My family reflected on how none of us noticed Tucker walking away, I was taking pictures of the team and Wade was busy packing up the car to leave. Last we saw Tucker he was playing football with all of the other kids. Apparently, he got bored and decided to walk over to his friend’s house to play.

Sometimes we need these warnings to keep us on our toes, I’m just extremely thankful that we were lucky this time.