Lesson learned: never enter into parenting without first defining a clear exit strategy. 

Okay, that never works. 

Some days, though, we just toss in the towel of tradition and let our wild boys get their freak on.  We call this Wild Thing Day, which always starts with the reading of Maurice Sendak’s classic book Where the Wild Things Are/Wo die wilden Kerlen Wohnen/Donde Viven los Monstruos/ Ubi feri sunt  (yes, we have this particular story in English, German, Spanish & Latin—it’s a top shelf fave, what can I say?). Toe , the original wild thing, knows all the words by heart and roars his terrible roar.  His love for naughty Max is true.  Roo stomps his feet and bares his terrible fangs a lot—he is lost in the promise of the rumpus.

Things that typically occur in the course of any given WTD:

--Reckless disregard for the sanctity of Mommy’s bed (yah, sorry, but since birth the lads have both been of the opinion that not a damn thing inside the home actually belongs to Daddy—Daddy does get credit for ownership of the trampoline, mower, power tools (handtools, however=Mommy’s), LEGOS, vehicles, the backyard maple tree and poopy shovel).  Anyhoo, this trespass into the sacred zone of the Mommy Bed usually manifests itself in wild jumping, rooting, wallering, snuggling, tickling, mosh pit style piling, dozing, and impromptu pillow fights. 

--Playing Stella the guitar with feet

--Upside down time (doing the opposite of what you say, saying the opposite of what you do)

--Hub remixing classic kids’ songs and nursery rhymes in a slightly gallows manner, such as the following:

One more monkey jumping on the bed
He fell off and…now he’s dead
Mommy called the doctor and the doctor said
Can’t you see his brain fell out of his head?

--Pink Floyd Psychedelic “FauxLaser” Light Show : this is where we all cram into a dark bathroom with our flashlights and flip on our makeshift ASD therapy bubble light.  The real deals costs thousands of dollars, but for $17 you can get a wild light-projecting orb for swimming pools with tons of settings that turns any the walls & ceiling of any room into Xanadu on acid.

---Flash mobs (for example, we all put on lighted spelunker helmets and show up in the toy storage area of the basement for “cellar shopping”).

Staring contests, poetry slams, break-dancing, spontaneous picnics, beagle rodeos…these may all also be part of Wild Thing Day.

OMG, remember ELO? ROFLMAO! LOSER!

Whatever, ELO was horrible, but they certainly marked a moment in childhood (my childhood, not yours--you're either too young or too old to remember ELO since all the people my exact age are in their prime productive years and busy busy at work too busy to read blogs and OTHER NON-WORK RELATED INTERNET SHENANIGANS).

So, back to work.  Where was I?  Oh, yah...

When I was a tyke, the St. Paul Public Schools had this pilot elementary school program called "outsource enrichment."  It was basically a plan to load us all on a bus and ship us off to poorly supervised venues where we could dabble in thinly veiled vo-tech type activities at the ripe old work-ready age of seven (while our regular teachers sipped coffee and gobbled migraine meds back at our wall-less 70's experimental "leaning environments"). Kind of like OJT or apprenticeship for kiddies.  I mean, who needs to sit in a "school" and learn "subjects" from a "teacher" all day, right?

Anyway, for OE, you could pick from three programs: the arts, earth science, and something disappointingly packaged as "careers."  Always pick science, that was my rule, and also a rumor I spread.  Therefore, by the 3rd round of "enrichment," science was sold out before I signed up (always always pick science!) and I was carted off to "careers" against my will, like a veal in a boxcar.  Boo.

Here's what I did during my (what seemed interminable) days at "careers":

1.  Fiddled around in a mock beauty shop, equipped with giant barbie heads of synthetic hair and real, real hot curling irons.  No supervision.  Hot irons.  Synthetic hair.  Wanna see the scars from the blisters?  Wanna know the haunting smell of melted rayon tinged with seared human flesh?

2.  Mucked around in a mock restaurant (okay, restaurant is too fancy a word--it was more like a mock taco truck interior) making all sorts things of absolutely no appeal nor food value with real ingredients on authentic stoves and in working blenders.  No supervision.  Real stoves.  Whirring blenders.  I won't go on, but I can tell you there were EMTs at OE at least 4 times that session (not for me).  Mostly I just sat and ate carob chips and watched other children blend their fingers.

3.  Hung out in the "Mellow Station."  This was a dimly lit alcove under a stairway, furnished with beanbag chairs, a stack of putridly pop LPs and phonographs (huh, yah, remember those? FO-NO-GRAF), complete with giant muffin headphones and "secluded" by a curtain of seashell and bead streamers.  No supervision.  Bean bag chairs.  Music.  Even bad music was better than the pointless and degrading blood, gore and mayhem of "careers," and typically that is where you would find me: mellowing for hours on end. If it comes up in cocktail party conversation, just remember: this is why I know so much about ELO, and all the words to Olivia Newton John's Xanadu album and the lyrics to the soundtrack from the movie Grease, and why I can also talk coherently about the real Xanadu in literature and the finer points of Grease the original broadway show (well, that and because I took a lot of American Studies courses in college). 

So, of course they shut down the program.  No more "outsource enrichment."
What else can I say but...

Summer came and passed away,
Hardly seemed to last a day
But it's over and what can I do?
Music playin in the ai,r
Silence on a darkened stair
Cos it's over and what can I do?

(Yeah, thanks SPPS.  That's about 60 hours of my tender childhood right there!) Always choose science.