But Seriously

Alyssa asked me last night if I take myself too seriously.

Ha. Hahahahaha. Oh, how I laughed.

Then, when I got myself back under control, I asked her who sat at the computer desk mere hours before caterwauling about being rubbed the right way?

Yes, I was singing a Christina Aguilera song. But I’d taken the sexual connotation out of it. My neck hurt and I just wanted someone, ANYONE, to rub it and make it feel a little better. Heck, even Liv’s weak little hands helped a little when she deigned to come up to me and nudge my neck with the back of her hand for three seconds.

By the time we sat down to dinner, everyone, including me was tired of my whining. I sat at the end of the table with my face in my hands, looking miserable and quite possibly insane. Alyssa asked, “What is wrong with you?”

Tom, from across the room, said, “She’s having a meltdown.”

Which, yes. I believe I was. And yet I was aware of how ridiculous it all was even in the middle of my meltdown. I managed to pull myself together enough to finish dinner and even do the dishes. But damn, I really wish someone in my family would take my requests for a neck rub seriously. I supposed if I were to just ask, you know, in a normal sort of voice, instead of wailing for all the world to hear, they might actually listen and react appropriately.

But back to Lyss’s question…no, I don’t think, most of the time, I take myself too seriously.

Where did this question come from, you ask? Why, let me tell you!

A few weeks ago she asked why I let her watch Z Nation, a zombie show that airs on the Sci-Fi network, but I won’t let her watch The Walking Dead or Fear the Walking Dead.

I tried to explain to her that I let her watch Z Nation because it’s a show that doesn’t take itself seriously. I mean, come on, it’s a show that has glow in the dark zombies, for Pete Sakes. And there’s a dude in trapped in the arctic circle with only a dog for a companion who talks to the survivors via police radio and other cobbled together devices. It’s all kinds of awesome.

On the other hand, the Walking Dead shows take themselves WAY too seriously, which is why they’re scarier and less likely to be approved by this mom for her twelve-year-old to watch. There is so much more psychological horror on those shows than zombie issues.

But I admit to enjoying all the shows mentioned above. I get a laugh out of Z Nation and I get delicious chills of terror from the Walking Dead shows. It’s sort of like Hannibal. That show was gruesome and so very serious and yet beautiful and artistic. It took itself way too seriously and it was awesome.

So okay, there may be times when I take myself too seriously (last Friday’s post about suffocating on monotony? Yes, a bit too serious.) but I’d like to think that I also make fun of myself on a regular basis, even in the middle of melting down. I mean, come on, anyone who sits around warbling about being a genie in a bottle can’t be taking themselves too seriously, right? Right.

When It Rains the Bees Sting

Olivia was out of school three days last week with Strep. She was diagnosed on Monday evening at Urgent Care, sent off with me to get a prescription for an antibiotic and then home to spend Tuesday through Thursday on the couch with her dad.

We sent her to school on Friday with soft foods in her lunch because this bout of strep messed up her poor mouth. She had a sore under her tongue, another on the upper left inside of her cheek; her gums were raw but never quite bloody. It was awful.

I had her rinse her mouth every evening with a mix of peroxide and Benadryl (a suggestion from the Urgent Care doctor) and then with salt water (a suggestion from Liv’s Gram.)

As of yesterday, the sores were mostly healed, thank goodness. Because, ugh! Mouth sores are gross. Oh, and they make it hard to eat because, yes, sores. She’s eating much better these days and not just cream of chicken soup and applesauce, so there’s that.

So I was happy as I went home last night thinking that I’d be greeted by a couple of happy, healthy girls.

Instead, as I pulled into the driveway, I found a sobbing Olivia. She was crying because she’d run from the barn to the garage to meet me and Orville, that silly cat, had run with her and he terrifies her. She was so upset at his mere presence that I had to hold her for ten minutes just to calm her pounding heart.

Once she’d settled a bit, she told me she’d been stung by a bee that day while at recess.

This is the second time this year she’s been stung during recess at school.

I would REALLY like it if the school would do something about the bees, obviously.

I mean, come on! We just got this kid over freaking strep throat and she comes home with a bee sting.

I put some baking soda on her hand, gave her a dose of Benadryl and we went about our evening.

This morning when she woke up, Olivia showed me her hand. It was swollen, red and hot. Yikes! We put some Benadryl cream on it and then I gave her some more Benadryl liquid in hopes of counteracting her reaction to the sting.

I also sent her teacher a note, letting her know that O’s hand was swollen from the bee sting (THAT SHE RECEIVED AT SCHOOL!) and she’d probably have trouble writing that day.

Sigh. My poor baby can’t seem to catch a break. First strep, then bees and finally, a terrifying encounter with Orville. She needs to be swaddled in bubble wrap and put on a high shelf where she’s out of danger of infection, bees and cats.

My Face Lies

There must have been something about my face last weekend that said, “Talk to me, I care!”

Because of this apparent sign on my forehead, the women manning the drive thru windows at our local Wendy’s chose to vent their troubles to me in the fifteen seconds I had to spend with each of them.

We’d stopped at Wendy’s because the girls wanted Frosties. I get them as we’re heading to the grocery store and they eat them while we shop.

When I first pulled up to the speaker at the drive thru, the voice said, “One moment please.”

Okay, no biggie. We waited. The voice came back and tried to interest us in a combo. I replied, “No thank you, we’d just like two small vanilla Frosties, please.”

She told me the total and asked me to drive up to the first window.

I did just that. When I got there, the woman inside the window hissed, “I have to take the orders AND the money today!”

“Oh,” I said, startled by the venom in her voice. “I’m sorry you’re having a tough day.”

“Yeah,” she went on. “It’s a bunch of shit! I don’t get to leave until five this afternoon. I was supposed to come in at ten but we had a morning meeting at nine thirty and so I’ve been here since seven thirty. And I haven’t even had a break.”

Okay then. Since I didn’t have any change coming, I put the car in gear and said, “Well, I hope your day gets better.”

Then I turned to Alyssa, who was in the front passenger seat and rolled my eyes.

We pulled up to the second window to get the Frosties. At that point, the woman in charge of giving out the food handed the Frosties out to me. She was slightly out of breath.

“Sorry!” she said as she gave me a couple of spoons. “I had to walk all the way over to the Frosty machine to get these for you.”

“Thank you!” I called out and then we drove away before she could tell me anything else.

Alyssa laughed. “What is it, like ten feet from the window to the Frosty machine?”

“I know!” I said, laughing too. “What was wrong with those women? And does my face say, ‘Talk to me, I care?’ Because if it does, my face LIES!”

This caused Alyssa to fall into a fit of laughter that almost made her drop her Frosty.

I’m all for caring about our fellow (wo)man but damn, those ladies needed an intervention. Or maybe a vacation.

Suffocating

I feel like I’ve settled into a sort of monotony that is overwhelming me.

Every single day feels exactly like the day before. I get up, go to work, come home, do the home work and go to bed. Repeat ad nauseum.

There is so much I need to do around the house but it doesn’t get done because I’m either tired or the girls need attention or I just don’t want to do anything that is on the to-do list.

The to-do list is so overwhelming that I just don’t even think about it most of the time. Which is obviously part of the problem. The longer I don’t do anything, the longer the list gets and it’s all a vicious cycle.

I need something. Something to motivate me to break out of this monotony, this feeling of suffocating every single day.

See, part of my problem is that I know I have nothing to complain about. My kids are awesome. They make every single day worth waking up. The stories they tell me, the love I feel for them when I glance across the room or down into my lap if one of them is laying on me is so enormous. I am filled with gratitude that they’re mine, that I get to be their mother.

It’s not them. It’s me. I’m at this weird place where I don’t know what to do next. Where am I going? What am I doing? How am I changing even my own little corner of the world? How can I make every single day feel a little less ordinary, a little more exciting, a little more productive?

I’ll figure it out. I always do. I just…I guess I just need to keep breathing until the answer comes.

High School Football...How I Loathe Thee

My high school was so small that when I was a freshman, the administration realized we simply didn’t have enough boys to go out for the football team. So they cancelled football. Yay? Well, yes, yay for me because I was in the band and that meant that when we had a football team, we had to play during the game.

So I only had to deal with one year of high school football before they did away with that particular torgure at my high school.

Alas, even though Alyssa’s school is almost as small as mine was, they grow those farm boys bigger and more aggressive twenty miles to the east of where I grew up. So yes, Lyss’s school has a football team.

Last weekend, the junior high band was invited to play with the high school band during the halftime of the football game.

Alyssa was excited for so many things. Of course she was excited to play with the high school band but she was also excited to spend an evening with her friends in the bleachers, to go to an actual football game. She’d never attended one before, because, duh, I didn’t want to go and Tom’s not a big fan of watching a game where he knows exactly no one on the team.

So seventh grade was the first year she attended a high school football game.

I drove her to the school at 5:00 because that’s when the band had to be there. I then went home, made dinner for Olivia, napped for fifteen minutes, because, um, I could. And then at 6:15, I headed back to the school.

See, I wanted to be there to watch Alyssa and the band play. Of course I did. My first born was playing in the marching band. It was a big deal. At least to me.

But this meant I had to endure the first half of the stinking football game before she’d take the field with her trusty flute.

I stood to the side of the bleachers and pretended to watch the game occasionally but mostly, I tried to stay out of the way of people who were obviously there to actually watch the game. It was so boring. It was also loud and the first half seemed to last for freaking ever.

With about five minutes left in the game, the elementary school secretary walked up to me. See, her mom and my mom are neighbors and they used to commute to work together before they both retired. So we have a vague connection outside of school. Let’s call her Mrs. A since her last name actually starts with an A. I’m clever like that, you know.

Mrs. A found me standing in my stupor of boredom and asked me, “Please tell me I’m not the only one who loathes things like this.”

It was as if I were Anne Shirley and had just caught of glimpse of Diana Berry across the lawn at the garden party. Mrs. A and I were instant bosom friends as we bonded of just how awful football is.

Actually, we bonded over how much we both hate almost every organized sport.

She was there for the same reason I was, her daughter is in the junior high band and yay, they were both playing that night.

The five minutes left in the first half took at least twenty minutes to pass and finally…FINALLY, the band took the field. We laughed over how H, Mrs. A’s daughter is probably smaller than the instrument she was playing and how flipping loud the piccolo was. We marveled over the dedication shown by the football players and cheerleaders who were also in the band. It was cool to see kids who didn’t choose between activities. Those kids were showing everyone that you can do it all if you want.

I didn’t want, though. I wanted to go home.

But, because I’m an awesome mom (in my head, please don’t burst my bubble) when they were all done and we’d told the kids how awesome they were, I asked Lyss if she wanted to stay and hang out with her friends or if she was ready to go home.

Bless her, she said, “Ugh, let’s go home. Football is so boring!”

That’s my girl.

Called It

Sunday afternoon, Olivia complained that her shoulders hurt. Later that evening, as she was eating her oatmeal, she told me the raisins the in the oatmeal were hurting her teeth.

I gave her a dose of ibuprofen before bed to stave off the aches and hoped for the best.

The next morning when I woke her up, she told me that her knees hurt. I kissed her forehead and noted no unusual warmth but still took her down to the kitchen to take her temperature. The thermometer stopped at a cool 98.1. Still, I gave her another dose of ibuprofen because of her achiness.

I then told Tom, “I’m calling it, she’s presick.”

He quoted the thermometer and basically told me I was worrying over nothing, that she probably hurt from playing too hard yesterday.

I replied, “Okay, but I’m still saying she’ll be sick by tomorrow at the latest.”

He didn’t roll his eyes but he might as well have.

We all went about our morning routines.

I kept my phone with me all day at work anticipating a call from the school asked that someone go pick up a sick Liv. That call didn’t come and so I went home at the usual time.

The second I walked in the door, I heard Tom and Livie in the living room. I couldn’t understand their mutterings so I went to find them. They were both cuddled under blankets and Tom looked up at me and said, “I think you’re going to want to take her to Urgent Care.”

He’d taken her temperature twenty minutes before I got home. It was 102.5 degrees. Firmly in the fever category. Firmly in the SICK category, if you will. And why yes, I will, thank you very much.

So I carried a sick Liv to the car, calling up to Alyssa that I was taking her sister to Urgent Care. She called back, asking if I would drop her off at Gram’s on the way. Tom started to tell her no when I asked, “Why not?” I mean, it’s on the way and really not a big deal.

And away we went.

We spent over an hour in the outer waiting room at Urgent Care. At one point, the only other people waiting was a mom and her two boys along with me and Olivia. The mom and her ruffigans had come in after we did but were called back first.

At that point, I did something I hardly ever do. I spoke up. I got up and asked the receptionist if it was weird that another patient had been called back before we had when we’d arrived first. She looked confused then went and checked the charts. She came back and reassured me, “You’re next!”

“Yeah,” I said, “That’s because we’re the last ones waiting.”

Snarky? Maybe, but damn it, I wondered if the mom with the two boys had been called back because her kids were being way more obnoxious than my kid.

The receptionist then tried to explain, “Well, sometimes it just depends on what you’re been seen for.”

Whatever.

We were finally called back, O was promptly diagnosed with strep and off we went to Walmart with a prescription for amoxicillin.

On the way to Walmart, though, we made a couple of stops. See, even with the strep and the achiness that goes along with it, Olivia was starving. During our endless wait at Urgent Care she asked constantly to stop at McD’s for a happy meal and then at Wendy’s for a frosty.

The kid has strep, who was I to tell her no? Okay, so yes, I could have but I figured she could eat while we waited for her medicine to be ready.

We got to Walmart, I parked near a cart return and I put the blanket we keep in the car down so she could sit in the back of the cart and eat her burger, fries and frosty in relative comfort while we waited for the ever-busy pharmacy at Walmart to do their job.

Twenty minutes later, my phone rang. It was a pharmacy tech, they were out of amoxicillin. I could come back to the pharmacy to get her prescription to take to another pharmacy. They were ever so sorry for the inconvenience and didn’t want me to have to wait any longer with a sick child.

Big sigh. Okay then. We put the twenty dollars or so worth of merchandise we were going to buy on a shelf near the pharmacy, got our slip back and headed to Meijer.

Thankfully, twenty minutes was just enough time for Olivia to finish her happy meal and her frosty.

At Meijer, there was no wait and, get this, no cost for the antibiotic. Amoxicillin is always free at Meijer. Can you even believe this? Holy crap, why have I been wasting so much freaking time and money at Walmart all these damned years?

We were in and out of there in ten minutes, medicine in hand and on our way to Gram’s to get Lyss.

We pulled into our garage at 8:35pm.

It was a long freaking day and there were a lot of words to say, “I called it! I knew she was sick.”

Yes, I wish she weren’t but sometimes it’s nice to say I told you so. Because, yeah, I totally did.

Mommy instinct for the win. The fact that she’s sick sucks but almost nine years into mothering Livie, I almost have this thing down.

When a Markers is More than a Marker

Tom and I have different parenting philosophies. We make it work but there have been countless times in the past almost thirteen years of us parenting together that I’ve felt run over, as if my thoughts and feelings and philosophies are wrong just because they might be different from this.

We’ve never sat down and talked about any of this. I’m a crier and so when I’m sad, frustrated, angry, happy, whatever, I cry and I hate that. I don’t want to have this conversation with him when it will end in tears for me and frustration for him. So usually, I clam up and shut down and by process of elimination, he ‘wins.’

But this weekend, I spoke up. And there were no tears from me, no anger from him. Just, you know, communication. Go figure.

Sunday found us doing our usual things. I’d started a load of laundry and was at the computer waiting for Alyssa to come home from the slumber party she’d attended the night before. Olivia had found an empty box by the garbage and turned it first into a helmet and then into a playhouse for her dolls. She asked me if she could draw on the box. I said sure.

She wanted to know what she could use to draw on it, I found her dry-erase markers and handed them to her. She went to work.

About ten minutes later, Tom came in from his work outside to wash his hands. As he passed where I was sitting and O was marker-ing, he said, “Those better not be dry-erase markers.”

Olivia looked up at me. I called out, “Why not?”

He didn’t answer for a few seconds and then finally said, “Aren’t they supposed to be for her dry-erase board?”

“Sure,” I replied calmly, “but she wanted to color on the box and I gave her the markers. What would you suggest she color on the box with?”

He suggested, “You could have given her crayons.”

“I could have,” I answered, “But the markers were more convenient.”

He finished the conversation with, “I don’t care if they dry out.”

I managed to not roll my eyes and told Olivia, “It’s okay, go ahead and keep using those markers.”

Tom went about his business, Olivia went about her marker-ing and Alyssa was home about fifteen minutes later.

Later in the afternoon, Tom suggested that he cook hotdogs over charcoal. Anything that leads to less cooking (even hotdogs) is okay with me.

As the girls and I sat at the table, eating our hotdogs and other things that yes, I cooked or at least heated up, Tom was rummaging through the refrigerator. He was trying to make space for leftovers and came across a container with one chicken leg. He’d baked drumsticks early last week.

He held it up and said, “Alyssa should have had this with dinner.”

I raised an eyebrow and said, “Why? She’s eating the hotdogs you just cooked for her.”

He laughed at that and put the chicken back in the fridge.

I decided it was a good opening and said, “You know, there are people in this world who don’t actually enjoy eating the same thing every single night for a week at a time.”

“You mean like me and my lentils and peas?” he asked.

“Exactly,” I said. I went on, “Some of us actually need variety to keep us from getting tired of certain foods. I think Livie is over the twice baked potatoes for a while and I know Lyss really does not want to eat that chicken after having it three times last week.”

All of this was said calmly, without tears and it was heard calmly without anger.

Later Lyssie actually thanked me for telling him that.

Sometimes, the stars align, there’s the perfect opening, everyone is in the right mood and conversations are had that lead to actual communication.

There is hope for us yet.