Excommunicated

I'm not proud to say it, but, I would be lying if I said we go to church every weekend. And, it isn't because we aren't religious; we tell our kids about God and Jesus and try to raise them to be good Christians. It's because we can't seem to survive a 60 minute mass without disrupting everyone else.

I can hear the doubt. And, I don't blame you. "She's just exaggerating. . . how bad can it be?"

It always starts out well enough. Let's take this weekend. We showed up at church early and were pleased to see a band complete with drums and electric guitar setting up. Huge for our little congregation in rural Massachusetts. Hannah was swaying to the music. Mikie was standing, maybe not reverently, but, still. We made it through the readings to the homily, at which point the deacon called all the kids up to the front. Mikie was reluctant, but, knowing that Hannah wanted to go, played the Big Brother and guided her up to the front. He even participated, volunteering that you needed to eat "Peanut Butter on Toast" in response to Deacon Frank's question, "What do we need to eat to be healthy?"

By the time my two cherubs returned to our pew, I admit I was thinking, "This isn't so bad. We should do this every week."

FAMOUS. LAST. WORDS.

We probably COULD go every week if we found a parish where mass lasted 30 minutes. Alas, I haven't found a Catholic Church that finishes a mass in less that 45 minutes. During that second 30 minutes, which are arguably the more SOLEMN 30 minutes of mass, all hell broke loose. Hannah started screaming, kicking and flailing in that way that makes me look like I am trying to abduct her. We walked out to the vestibule three times that I can consciously remember. The last time, we breezed back into our pew just in time to say the "Our Father". As Mikie pushed my hand away like I had cooties, demanding to know when we could leave, my lips were praying the "Our Father", but my head was praying, "Dear God, grant me patience to get through mass without killing my children."

And, when I thought it couldn't get worse, my lowest parenting moment to date. As the priest says, "Deliver us Lord from every evil. . . ", Hannah looks at me with a big grin, thumps her chest with her little fist and proudly shouts, "I EVIL." As if to say, "hey, he's talking about ME!"

Trying desperately to recover, I said, in a loud whisper, "No, Hannah, you're not evil. You can be a good girl." But, while she may be trouble, she wasn't dumb. And, by this point my body and mind were so depleted that I couldn't muster enough energy to sound convincing.

The rest of the mass was a blur. I managed to juggle Hannah up the aisle for communion, found a few minutes of relative peace to take a break from praying for sanity and pray for other's intentions, and, head bowed, corralled my brood out of church during the closing recessional as quickly as possible. As we left, one of the deacons unconvincingly commented that Hannah "wasn't so bad" and offered her a high five. Hannah's response: she left him hanging, with nothing more to remember her by then her signature scowl.

We sat in the parking lot for a few minutes, two kids sedated with "Tom & Jerry" cartoons and air conditioning blasting, trying to recover. Before I end, I feel it only appropriate to explain why Hannah referred to herself as "evil". While I admit to calling her "Trouble #2", I was not the one to come up with the moniker "evil". We owe our thanks to Disney and Mikie. He has become an avid fan of "Phineas and Ferb". Dr. Doofenshmirtz refers to everything as evil. So, Mikie will occasionally refer to Hannah as "evil Dr. Hannah" and "The Evil Midi" (I have no explanation as to why he calls her Midi). I do accept guilt for not breaking him of this habit.

Rest assured, eight years of Catholic school has worked well at instilling guilt. I am confident we will return to church again this year. I just need to find a better way of instilling fear and submissiveness in the hearts of my kids before we do.

Love, The (evil) Trahans

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to my husband, without whom there would be no Trouble or Super Nibbles. And, while I sometimes think back fondly to the time "before children" (every day I see the college students wandering lazily to class, every Saturday morning that someone wakes us up at 6am, okay, FREQUENTLY might be more apt) I know that life would be far less entertaining without them.
sigh Looking back at these photos, I do have to remind myself that, while it was nicer when they couldn't move or talk back, they didn't sleep and cried a lot.

Happy Father's Day.

Love, The Trahans

Gone With The Golf Ball

One of Mikie's favorite things to do at age 2 1/2 as play "mini goofballs" (also known to others as miniature golf). We continued to call it mini goofballs to denote the difference in playing style over miniature golf. Mini golf is somewhat polite, with people taking turns hitting their ball until the succeed in sinking the ball into the hole. In contrast, mini goofballs is very fast paced, with play similar to street hockey if you got rid of the goalie (and all other players) and shrunk the goal down to the size of an 8-oz party cup. As an added bonus, faster play means you get to enjoy the celebratory, post game ice cream much sooner.So, with the weather nice on Memorial Day, we decided to take Hannah to play her first round of miniature golf. She was pleased to have her own "hockey stick" (her words, not ours. . . I tried to tell her it was a golf club). But, try as I might, she didn't even attempt to hit the ball with the puck. In fact, when I tried to show her how to swing the club, she just got mad and, taking a page from Elin Nordegren, started swinging her club wildly in my direction.So, while the rest of us played, Hannah (aka, Scarlet Trahan) enjoyed people watching and running after our balls to retrieve them. Unfortunately, this was while we were trying to play, making it next to impossible to keep score. Not really a problem for Mikie (who finishes a hole in under 30 seconds), but a big problem for me, who finished the back nine by "teeing off" and letting Hannah chase them. It solved two problems: 1) keeping Hannah happy (relatively speaking) and entertained and 2) keeping Hannah from retrieving other people's golf balls from other parts of the course.The hat is a hoot, right? As a teaser, she has a matching lady bug bathing suit to match. If the weather warms up again, I promise to take pictures. In the meantime, Hannah is doing her best to emulate Scarlet O'Hara's headwear as well as her attitude.It is also important to note, although Hannah may look like me, Hannah was clearly switched at birth. Mikie, like his mother, loves ice cream. He would eat it multiple times a day, and always has room for ice cream, no matter how much (or little) he just ate. Hannah? I can't tell you how many ice creams this kid wastes. Luckily, most ice cream comes free with her dinner at Friendly's. And, even when we pay for ice cream for her (like after our golf outing), Mikie is MORE than happy to eat hers for her (after he inhales his own).

Love, The Trahans

Hockey is the Best Sport EVER!

Mike has joined Toastmasters, a group which helps its members build their public speaking skills by holding meetings where you give speeches. A few months back, he wrote a speech about why hockey is better than all other sports combined. Seeing as the Bruins have just tied up the Stanley Cup Finals, it seemed a fitting tribute to post his speech here:

Hockey Is Better Than Soccer, Basketball, and Football Combined – and I Can Prove It!

by Michael Trahan

Hockey is better than soccer, basketball, and football combined. This is an irrefutable fact and I can prove it! That’s not to say that the other 3 sports aren’t any good; it’s just that they pale in comparison to hockey.

To put this in context, let me start with the story of how I came to love hockey. Growing up I really enjoyed floor hockey in gym class. Once in-line skates became popular I started playing roller hockey after school with my friends. And then, when I was a freshman in high school a friend of mine brought me to see a Bruins-Whalers game in Hartford. Seeing that game in person, I realized just how awesome hockey is. Seeing the speed of the game, the bone-crushing hits, and the awesome goals in person had me hooked by the end of the first shift.

So now let’s get back to explaining why hockey is better than soccer, basketball, and football. Each of these three sports has good points, but hockey combines the best parts of each in a way that makes it better than the three sports combined.

Let’s first look at soccer. The best part of soccer is the suspense. Soccer is a low-scoring game that you have to watch from start to finish to make sure you don’t miss anything. Hockey is very much the same as soccer in this way. Hockey games are usually low scoring and if you turn your back for 5 seconds you could miss the deciding play of the whole game. Where soccer goes wrong is that the field is so large, the games are so long, and the substitution rules mean that the players don’t have the energy to go full speed for the entire 90 minute game. Unfortunately, that means that at times a soccer game really seems to crawl along at snail’s pace and can at times be boring.

Next, let’s look at basketball. The best part of basketball is the fast break. The point of the fast break is to go as fast as you can to try and catch the defense out of position. In hockey, every play is a fast break. Players crisscross their way up and down the ice using crisp precise passing to try and get a scoring chance. The difference being, that in basketball, teams usually score on the fast break. In fact, in basketball scoring is so frequent that the important plays are not really when you score but when you prevent the other team from scoring. Because of this you could easily skip the first 40 minutes of a basketball game and still catch all of the exciting plays.

And then there is football. The best part of football is the physical play. Watching the defense crush the other team’s quarterback has to be why instant replay was invented. Much the same way, watching Milan Lucic line up someone from the Canadians in the corner and crush them into the boards and skate away with the puck as the other player melts into a puddle on the ice is something that I could watch over and over again. The difference between these two is that after every 5 or 10 second play in football the teams get 40 seconds to figure out what to do next. Unfortunately, those 40 seconds of strategizing take away from the excitement of the last play.

Finally, there are other distinguishing characteristics. Both basketball and football have an inordinate number of timeouts that can drag the last 2 minutes of the game out to closer to a half hour. While this adds to the suspense of the end of the game, it also kills the flow of the game. On top of that, substitutions are made exclusively during the multitude of stoppages in play. Hockey, on the other hand, is designed to maintain the flow of the game. Each team gets one time out – one - that they rarely use and on the fly substitutions are a critical part of the game that are designed into the flow of the game. Add to this the fact that the game is played on ice and that the players carry sticks that the TSA would be unwilling to allow you to carry onto your next flight and you have a recipe for success.

I don’t think I need to say anything more. Hockey is clearly better than soccer, basketball, and football. Hockey is better because it combines the best parts of these 3 sports: the suspense of soccer, the fast break speed of basketball, and the physical play of football, in a way that engages and excites the crowd. As soon as I started watching hockey it was clear to me why hockey is so awesome. Hopefully you now understand too but if you don’t, I suggest you go to a game.

Go B's!

Love, The Trahans

How Can You Be Mad At This Face?

Hard to believe my youngest child could get any cuter. And yet, her little red curls are now long enough to put up in pigtails, or "pony hairs" as Hannah refers to them. In her latest antics, Hannah, who is two going on sixteen, is doing her best to make me feel like Joan Crawford in "Mommie Dearest". This weekend, while Mike was outside working in the yard, I attempted to clean the house. While Mikie was content to entertain himself (aka play his Nintendo DS) and avoid being recruited into service, Hannah insisted on following me around like a puppy dog. No, on second thought, puppy dog is not the write phrase. . . whirling tornado of destruction is a more apt descriptor.

Our routine went something like this: I would start cleaning something. . . Hannah would start to make a mess. . . I would ask her to stop doing whatever she was doing. . . she would ignore me. . . I would ask her to stop AGAIN. . . no response. I would finally raise my voice and threaten time out if she didn't stop, at which point she would look up innocently and say, "OKAY, Mommy. No yell at Hannah!" With this tone of pure exasperation like, "Jeez, Mom, you don't need to overreact."

We repeated this process at least a dozen times before lunch. At one point, I was sooo frustrated with the implication that I was overreacting that I told her, "STOP SAYING THAT! I wouldn't need to yell if you would listen to me the first time."

At this point in my story, I know everyone is thinking, "How bad can she be? Look at her, she's so cute!" Look at all the seemingly cute things that can wreak havoc: Jerry Mouse from "Tom & Jerry". Small, innocent looking. And then, out comes the stick of dynamite, or the door slammed in Tom's face. I'm not saying Tom was innocent by any means, but Jerry could definitely hold his own. . .

Let's look at Hannah's headline's in the last few days:

Hannah received a peep on a stick at her cousin's birthday party this weekend. On the drive home, she and Mikie sat in the backseat, eating their peeps, watching cartoons. When we arrived home 45 minutes later, I open her door and realize that Hannah bit the ears off her peep and proceeded to smear moist marshmallow goo all over the door of my car.

I turned my back on her to clean up food she spit on the floor, only to find that she poured milk all over herself and her chair.

I think she is playing nicely in one room, only to find that she has removed her diaper and is running around naked. I turn to grab a diaper, only to find that she has peed a thimble size of pee in the toilet, has used four Huggies wipes to clean herself, and has now clogged the toilet because she insisted on flushing the wipes, not realizing that the box clearly states "do not flush".

On the upside, she can't write yet, so I can at least document my side of the story before she attempts to publish a tell all book about me.

Love, The Trahans