Tag: humor

Squirrel!

This is a Rocky Mountain Sheep I saw while hiking with my friend Celeste today. Squirrel!

Sometimes I wonder how I get anything done. Ever. I take the most circuitous routes when I begin a task. I guess I’m too easily distractible. I’m kind of like Dug, the dog in Up. I start out doing one thing and then somehow…SQUIRREL! So, that is what happened to me again tonight and that is why it is late in the evening and I am once again staring at my self-imposed deadline, which is less than an hour from right now, and shaking my head. The Squirrel effect seems to worsen at night and when I’m hungry and when I’m procrastinating and when I’m sleep-deprived and occasionally when I’m over caffeinated. Now that I think about it, it’s truly miraculous that I ever complete a task successfully. But, I digress.

Tonight I began researching airfare for our now decided upon Spring Break trip. We bid on and won a vacation rental last Saturday at the boys’ school auction. Now I have to figure out how to get us to our destination with the least expensive airfare. It’s all very exciting. And, while I should be focused on filling out paperwork so we can schedule all the testing we need to have done to get IEPs and/or 504s set up for the boys for next school year, researching vacation travel is a far less odious task so that has taken priority.

I began on Expedia, but as I was looking at the ludicrous cost of airfare for this trip the wind kicked up outside. We get a lot of high winds here in November and December so I immediately began wondering if tonight would be really windy. So, I buzzed on over to the site for the NBC news affiliate here in Denver to check our weather conditions. I was pleased to note that although we’re in for a cool down tomorrow, no high winds are predicted tonight. Dodged that bullet. But, while I was on the NBC site, I started wondering what the heck has been going on in the world since I’ve been checked out this week. Off to Fox News I went to figure out what is being reported on currently. I perused the headlines as I had planned but then, at the bottom of the front page in the Latest News section, a story caught my eye about some folks in the Florida panhandle who poached their neighbor’s pet turkey for their own Thanksgiving dinner. From that story, I noticed a link to the best and worst swimsuit photos from Hollywood. That seemed like an adequate distraction, so I went off to check those out. After deciding that most people over the age of 50 look sad and droopy at the beach (yes…I mean you David Hasselhoff and Ivana Trump), I was feeling discouraged about being just 5.5 years from that dreaded physical cliff (I can’t bring myself to care about the fiscal cliff because there’s nothing I can do about that cluster). In a desperate attempt to elevate my spirits, I texted with my friend Heather for a while. At which point, Heather reminded me that it won’t matter what I look like in a swimsuit at the beach in March because I’ll be at the beach in a swimsuit in MARCH. Well played, Heather. And, so I put my phone down and decided to get back to Expedia because I still have not booked any travel yet.

At some point in the next few weeks I will break down and actually commit to a flight itinerary…probably not without a massive mental meltdown as my shaking fingers attempt to input the credit card number I have memorized. But, I will do it because I have paperwork to fill out and I can’t get to that task until I have something really incredible to look forward to as a reward for all my hard work. And now, as I sit in bed and finish this blog, I’m wondering how I will be able to get the house cleaned, the table set, and the meal cooked for dinner at 4 p.m. because I am sure there will be myriad distractions tomorrow. Distractions are the thing that….wait…do we actually own enough napkin rings for 12 place settings?

Posted on by Me 3

Note To Self: Cows Don’t Care About Glory

The cows…they just don’t care.

I am a stay-at-home mom, which means that I don’t get paid and that I’m never home. I live in my car. Consequently, my car (a midsize, luxury SUV in name only) consistently looks as if it’s been plundered and pillaged by rogue Norsemen (which it has because my sons have a full quarter Norwegian ancestry). This morning after the boys had removed themselves from the back seat, I noticed that I could no longer see the black, leather seats back there at all. They were covered with Legos, food wrappers, various school papers, and sticky substances I have been ignoring for weeks. The floor was not much better. I knew there were floor mats down there somewhere. But where? As far as I could tell, the carpet had been replaced by shredded tissue, chewed on straws, and Star Wars action figures missing their heads. It was at that point that I seriously began to wonder if the mess back there was partially due to a rodent infestation.

I headed to the local, automatic car wash to vacuum out my filthy car and find the silver paint again. I immediately realized I had not enough quarters for the vacuum, so I sent the car through the wash and drove home to rescue the inside. I dragged out the wet/dry vacuum, a trash bag, a damp rag, a roll of paper towels, and about a gallon of Windex to begin my quest. I was mildly concerned that during my cleaning I might shove my hand under the backseat and pull out a rodent (something similar happened in our family before when hubby pulled up a seat cushion and uncovered Voldemouse in his FJ Cruiser). I tried not to think about it as I opened the back door and started digging through the rat’s nest where my children usually sit. In the first three minutes, I rescued five mangled Lego magazines, four pieces of foreign currency (not sure when my kids had time to vacation in England, France, Italy, and Denmark without me), about a gazillion Lego bricks and assorted Lego pieces, a super-high bouncing ball, an empty water bottle, some crude drawings of battles and dragons, and a spelling list. (I’d wondered where that had gotten to.) When I at last found the back seat and started working on the floor, I uncovered an interesting piece of paper. It was in Luke’s handwriting…neatly penned but with the kind of obvious errors only a child with dyslexia could make. It said: “Note to self. Cows don’t care about glory. Cows don’t care about you.” I stood there staring at that paper with my head cocked to one side. What the hell does that mean? I had no idea where to go with that information. It was funny, but what made it even funnier was that my darling son had flawlessly executed his b and d letter reversals in the most stereotypical dyslexic way. I love the way his mind works.

I finished cleaning the car to the best of my ability without uncovering any evidence of the Lost City of Mouselantis. But, I walked around for the entire rest of the day thinking about Luke’s note to self. Instead of mice occupying my thoughts, it was cows. And, not just any cows. Cows that don’t care about glory. I later was able to ask Luke about his cryptic message. He disclosed that he heard that quote on some Lego video on You Tube. Ah. It suddenly all made sense. Chalk the whole thing up to You Tube. And to think I’d been blaming the obscure cow mention to our trip to Chick-Fil-A last week. Silly me.

 

 

 

 

Posted on by Me 4

The End Of The Tunnel

No one was harmed in the making of this lunch. How incredibly awesome is that?

Since my sons were born, I’ve spent more of my waking hours caring for them than I’ve spent caring for myself. I don’t mention this as a complaint. It’s just what is. It is the nature of the beast of parenting. When you decide to bring another life into this world, you change the course of your own irrevocably. With our recent revelations about our sons and their learning difficulties, I’ve spent more time doing things for them than I have in a while. My life has been a blur of paperwork, interviews, conversations, and applications. Because my husband is already a full-time, paid, paper-pusher elsewhere, these tasks fall to me. While all the filling in blanks and checking off boxes is tedious work, it’s infinitely preferable to all the nose and butt wiping I’ve managed to leave behind as the boys have gotten older. I’m still doing things for my boys, but at least the things I’m doing are becoming less odious. I’ve always felt it was a parent’s duty to do all they can for their children to give them a leg up in this world. Tonight I realize I was at least partially wrong.

As the hours inched on toward bedtime, I realized I needed to make Luke’s lunch. I didn’t want to. I just did not feel like it. As a rule, not feeling like it is not ample enough excuse to avoid the task, so I suck it up. Tonight, I was happily lazing on the sofa researching spring break options and watching Sunday Night Football. Making lunches sounded like a dismal reason to get off my expanding hindquarters. So, at 9:15, when my son should have been headed up to bed, I made a lazy parent decision.

“Luke,” I bossed, “go make your lunch.” There. No longer my problem.

“You want me to do it?” he asked, surprised.

“Yep. You know how you like your sandwich. You will make it better than Dad or I could, anyway. Get busy.”

At this point, I was certain I would encounter verbal backlash or, at the very least, a small whimper or whine. But, none came. Luke simply marched into the kitchen and started gathering his materials. In five minutes he had assembled his lunch: a PB&J (crusts jettisoned, of course), a plastic sleeve filled with organic yogurt, a small container of Goldfish crackers, a “healthy” (read: no food coloring or high fructose corn syrup) fruit roll-up, and an organic vanilla milk. He shoved it carefully into his Star Wars: The Clone Wars lunch box and was about to flee the scene when I called him back and made him clean up the mess, which he also did without fuss. Then he headed upstairs to play a round of Draw Something with me on his brother’s iPad while I stood there, jaw hanging open and hand scratching my head.

Years back, I had allowed our sons to make their own lunches one time. It was only one time because they had assembled lunches filled with Halloween candy, cans of soda, and a measly sandwich. In the process, they had turned our kitchen into a replica of the food fight scene from Animal House, and I’d had to shoo them out and start over but with twice the amount of work. I chalked it up to immaturity and boyhood. I figured they weren’t ready. In fact, I wondered if they might never be ready. Tonight, though, our 9 year old son made his own lunch and it was no big deal. There was no whining. There was no colossal mess. I was tempted to look around for the hidden camera. He’d completed the entire task without drawing blood or destroying the kitchen. And….and…the best part was that I hadn’t even had to get off the sofa for it all to happen. Perhaps it wasn’t the best lunch in the history of lunches and yet it was because I hadn’t had to make it.

It got me to thinking. My boys might be a lot more capable than I’ve previously thought. I started to wonder if I’m doing too much for them. Perhaps they’re at the ages now when they are ready to take on greater responsibility. Not only would it save me some work, but it would also give them an opportunity to experience all they are capable of. It will build their esteem. It will increase their skill set. Holy cow! I’ve been robbing my children of the gift of self-sufficiency. Well, no more, I say. There are so many things I should not be doing for my boys. The possibilities are endless. Wait. Just ahead. Do you see it? That light? It must be the end of the tunnel.

 

Posted on by Me 3

The Babysitter Confession

Free babysitters everywhere!

We’ve never had to pay an actual sitter. Shocking, I know. Our sons are 9 and 11 and, for their entire childhoods, when we’ve needed a date night or decided to go away for a weekend, we’ve had family members available to watch them. This situation was partly by design and partly the result of fate. When we were in our early 30s and decided we might like to have children, we moved back to Denver to be closer to family. This wasn’t as much a babysitting ploy as a desire to have our children grow up near their relatives. Both Steve and I grew up at a distance from our aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins, and we knew we wanted something different for our children. In 1999, when we first moved to Denver, we had three sisters and one grandmother nearby for babysitting. After Joe was born, Steve’s parents did what they said they would never do; they bought a second home here so they could see their grandson more often. So, soon we were up to three aunts, a grandmother, and a set of grandparents. Five years later, my father moved back to Denver and we both had our entire families within 30 minutes of our home. And, as fate would have it, no one else in our family has children, so our boys are the only grandchildren and the only nephews. People actually want to spend time with them. Yeah. I don’t get it either.

Now, before you go off on how lucky we are to be in this situation, how lucky we are not to have to pay someone to watch our children, I need to tell you what it costs to have your family members watch your children. It’s not a monetary cost. But, trust me, there’s a price for their services. For example, when family members watch your children, your home is an open book. They have unlimited access to your dirty bathrooms and your unorganized pantry and they’re family and working for free. So they’re not afraid to help themselves and to snoop around. You come home from a relaxing evening out and are greeted with “You have more hair spray than Donald Trump” or “I’m going to borrow all three seasons of Arrested Development that you own on DVD.” And, you can’t mind because they just spent three hours with your boisterous, exhausting children with ADHD so you didn’t have to. As much as you’d like to protest, you’re powerless.

Another hidden cost is extracted through paybacks. Your sister comes over and spends eight hours with your kids so you can go on a long bike ride with some friends. You have a great time and find you are actually excited at the prospect of sitting around watching Madagascar for the 99th time with your kids now that you’re home. And, just as you’re thanking her for babysitting, she casually mentions that she could use some help with a little project she needs to complete at her house next weekend. Oh…and you might want to bring that steamer you own because the wallpaper you’ll be helping to remove is really stuck on there. Well, there is no getting out of that situation. She helped you out. She expects reciprocity. You must comply.

Tonight I discovered the highest cost of all. My sister and brother-in-law came to spend two and a half hours with Joe and Luke so we could grab some wine and tapas at a local wine bar. We had a magnificent time talking about our hobbies and many things other than our children. The boys were thrilled to show their uncle their new Skylanders characters and do battle. When we returned home, we discovered that our children had been loaded with candy and taught some new songs. Thanks for that, Uncle Chris. Tonight as I drift off to sleep I will be singing a never-ending tune about a moose that stood around with one hoof on the ground. Not sure exactly which second-rate summer camp taught you that ditty, but I’m ever so grateful. Could you please teach the boys the diarrhea song next? That would be awesome.

Oh. All right. I jest. Of course we’re eternally grateful for the years of dedicated service our families have put into being the best aunts, uncles, and grandparents in the world and caring for our boys with the same love and devotion we would. (Scratch that…they’ve probably cared for our sons with more love and devotion than we have…or at least more patience.) I can’t imagine how many thousands of dollars we’ve saved in childcare over the past 11 years, not to mention how fortunate we’ve been to know that our boys were actually safely engaged in play rather than placated by a television for four hours while we paid some random teenage girl to talk incessantly on her cell phone to her boyfriend. Still, when the boys are old enough to stay alone for a couple hours on occasion next year, I’m probably not going to miss the guilt I feel when I have to find someone, anyone, to hang with our boys so we can grab dinner. It will be nice to be free of that monkey. Come to think of it, I’m definitely not going to miss the moose from that song either.

 

 

Posted on by Me

Nobody Puts Joe In A Corner

Who stands in a corner voluntarily? Joe does.

I swear, I’d really like to believe my boys are exceptionally bright but sometimes they make me think I should set my expectations a wee bit lower. This evening I was sitting on the sofa helping Joe practice his words for his spelling test tomorrow. Spelling has never been an easy subject for Joe, but even as the words have increased in difficulty during his fifth grade year, he has been doing a bit better with spelling this year than he did last year. (Yes. I was, in fact, simultaneously knocking on wood and typing just then.) I’ve begun to see a light at the end of the tunnel, as if his hard work is paying off and things are finally starting to take root in his brain. He didn’t struggle at all with hemisphere and he breezed right through isthmus. He was even able to give me the correct spelling and a word-for-word definition for archipelago. Then, just when I was starting to get a bit cocky thinking that all the time and effort I’ve put into being a stay-at-home caregiver was at long last yielding measurable results, he said something that really confused me.

“Okay, Joe. Spell tributary.”

“Mom…wait. Wait. I have to tell you something first,” he pleaded.

All too familiar with his stall tactics, I pressed on.

“Spell tributary and then you can tell me,” I replied.

“T-r-i-b-u-t-a-r-y,” he spit out. Then, as quick as lightning without a pause for breath in between his words he spewed forth, “Mom-today-I-stuck-my-nose-in-the-corner-of-the-dining-room-by-the-magnetic-board.”

He said it so quickly that I didn’t have a chance to catch half the words. Still, he was looking at me expectantly as if he’d just divulged the magic fix-it solution for the holes in the ozone layer.

“What?” was all I could muster. Well…that and a quizzical scrunching of my eyebrows.

“I-stuck-my-nose-in-the-corner-of-the-dining-room-by-the-magnetic-board,” he said again, slightly more slowly but still in a barely intelligible way.

“Okay,” I said with brows still furrowed, “that time I got corner and magnetic board. What corner?”

“UGH!” he was getting frustrated with my slow-uptake skills. “The corner in the dining room by the magnetic board.”

“Yeah? What about it?” I asked.

“Today, I stuck my nose in the corner of the dining room over by the magnetic board,” he repeated, trying very hard to be kind to his old and clearly mentally impaired mother.

“What? When did you do this?”

“When I was working on my math homework,” he replied.

Okay. This was starting to make some sense. It’s not unusual for any child to seek a break from his math homework. It’s even less surprising when your ADHD child becomes distracted from the process of long division.

“The next question, I guess, is WHY?” I asked, drawing out the end of that interrogative word hoping it would help him to understand how truly bizarre what he had just disclosed was.

“Because I’ve never done that before. I’ve never seen the house from that angle,” he replied with a tone that told me he was making perfect sense and I was an idiot not to understand it without explanation.

“Wow, Joe,” I said, trying my best not to look concerned about his mental faculties. “That’s an interesting reason to subject yourself to voluntary time in the corner.”

“I was curious,” he said, shrugging his shoulders. Then, as quickly as the conversation started it was over. “What’s the next word?” he asked.

Later, I was retelling the story to hubby who had been out with his parents this evening. After laughing about it for a bit, we started thinking about how differently Joe views the world. We’ve never been able to enter into how his ADHD mind works. We continue to try, but without firsthand knowledge and experience, we’re befuddled. We began to wonder if perhaps Joe knows something we don’t about the world. Maybe there’s something we’re missing? Simultaneously, we went and stood in separate corners in the dining room to see for a moment the world through Joe’s filter.

“I’ve never done this before,” Steve said.

“Me either. Ten years in this house and I’ve never once had my nose in a corner,” I replied.

“Does your nose touch the actual corner of the wall?” Steve inquired from the other corner of the dining room.

“Well, the magnetic board is blocking me at my height, but if I scrunch down a bit let’s see. Yep. Yes it does. It fits right into the corner,” I told him.

“Huh,” he said.

“Why? Does yours?”

“Yeah,” he replied.

“Who knew?”

Now, you could think we’re a little nutty for sticking our noses into the corner the way our son did, but after 11 years of grasping at straws trying to find a passage into Joe’s ADHD brain we will try anything. We desperately want to understand him better. Any hints at all would be welcome. The funny thing is that I started out thinking my son was crazy for choosing to stick his nose into the corner of the dining room, but the more I thought about it the better I felt about it. While most people take things for granted, Joe investigates. He theorizes. He experiments. He doesn’t accept things at face value. He is deeply curious, and there are far worse things you can be in this world. So, I take it back. I am totally okay if my son, by conventional standards, doesn’t appear to be exceptionally bright. If some people choose to think he’s exceptionally weird, that’s okay by me too. The bottom line is that he’s exceptional, and that’s pretty freaking fantastic.

 

 

Posted on by Me 6

The King Of Doubt Marries The Queen Of Curiosity

The bottle that did not kill me and would not, apparently, make a good mixer for my vodka.

Two years ago I was very sick for Thanksgiving. Suffering from both bronchitis and a sinus infection, I had multiple prescriptions for antibiotics, decongestants, and cough syrups, and a doctor’s order for bed rest. As I was coughing the other night on Day Three of what is now a five (soon to be six) day cold, I heard a little click. Light bulb! I jumped out of bed and ran to the closet in my bathroom. After digging around for a few minutes, I found a half full bottle of codeine cough syrup, a remnant from my 2010 sickness. I ran downstairs to get a dosing spoon. Perhaps I would finally get some respite from this wretched cough and sleep! When I got back upstairs, hubby asked me what I was doing.

“I found this cough syrup. I’m going to take some and finally get some sleep,” I told him.

“How old is that stuff?” he asked.

“A couple years?” I shrugged. There was no expiration date on the bottle.

“Are you sure it’s okay to take that?”

“It’s not a dairy product. It’s not like it turned or anything. It’s gotta be chock full of preservatives. I’m not about to ingest two-year-old raw chicken I had sitting in the back of the closet. Don’t ruin this for me,” I said, trying to convince myself that he was not going to introduce any doubt into my resolved mind.

I was going to get some sleep, dammit. He would not deprive me of this with his overactive imagination and his wild visions of my dying prematurely and leaving him as a single father of two sons. Nope. I was going to live on the edge and take the stupid codeine. I deserved the sleep. He was not going to take this from me. I was going to take it. Yep. I definitely was. I shook the bottle lightly to mix the syrup and poured myself the recommended dose. Oh, okay. If you must know, I sniffed it too. Silly husband had me a bit curious. That’s all. It smelled fine. Just as I was about to drink it, he spoke up again.

“You sure you don’t want to verify that it’s okay to take that?” he asked.

“I’m sure it is fine. It smells fine. I saw a show once that said the worst that happens with most medications is that they lose their effectiveness with time. Most of them don’t become more dangerous. They become less dangerous,” I reassured him.

“Most of them don’t become more dangerous? How do you know this isn’t one of the ones that does become more dangerous?”

Seriously? He was egging me on. I knew it. I stalled for a few minutes. When he went in to sit with the boys as they were falling asleep, I decided that I might as well go ahead and conduct a Google search. Once I knew for sure that I was right I could show him the proof and then he’d have to leave me alone, right? I grabbed my laptop and did about fifteen minutes worth of reading, all of which supported my theory that it would be fine to take it. If anything, it had probably only lost some effectiveness, so the worst that could happen would be that I would take it and get none of the cough-free sleep I so desperately needed and deserved. While he was still out of the room, I hopped out of bed, drank the cough syrup, quickly recalled how icky it tastes, chased it with some water and a brushing of my teeth, and jumped back in bed just before he returned.

“So, did you take it?” he said.

“Yes. Yes I did,” I said confidently.

“How much did you take?” he inquired.

“Why do you want to know?” I asked.

“Well…if something goes horribly awry and I end up having to call 911 because you seem to be turning into a zombie, I just want to know what to tell to the physicians whose brains you’ll be trying to eat what you took.”

“Funny,” I said, rolling my eyes at him. “You’re a laugh riot. Just you wait. I’m going to sleep tonight, wake up fine tomorrow, and you’re going to owe me an apology for giving me such a load of grief,” I told him.

“Uh huh. Sure,” he said as he turned out the light on his side of the bed and went to sleep.

I’ll have you know that I slept like a baby that night. 9 hours straight. I did the same thing last night. And, I’m going to do it again tonight. No regrets about my decision. I am still, however, slightly disappointed in myself for letting him get into my head like that and making me think for a fraction of a second that I could be wrong. When am I ever wrong? The good news is that I have my browser set so that it doesn’t save any of my web site activity because I’m stealthy like that. He will never know that I did actually check up on the safety of the medication upon his recommendation. (Well…unless he reads this blog, I guess.) Men. You can’t let them know they can get to you. If they know that, it’s all over. You’ll never again have a moment’s peace.

 

 

Posted on by Me 1

There Goes The Neighborhood

Classy versus trashy

Well…what I suspected has become reality. We’ve become those neighbors. You know the ones I’m talking about. The ones you worry will ruin your property value by virtue of their sheer proximity to your home. We try to be good about taking care of our home and yard but, when given a choice between spending a weekend working on our lawn and garden or spending a weekend hanging with friends on a last-minute camping trip, we skip town. We’re always on the go. We’re not around much. As a result, we’re not the best about taking care of our property. We’d just rather be doing things other than home maintenance, and it shows.

I’ve long suspected that our next door neighbors wished they lived adjacent to a neater, tidier family. Instead, they got us. Their yard is immaculate. They have a beautiful patio with a built-in grill, a perfectly stained pergola, and a discreetly placed hot tub. Winter, spring, summer, and fall, their yard is perfectly maintained and their garden is appropriately appointed with seasonal plants. Their house is immaculate. I like to attribute their beautifully maintained home to the fact that their children are grown and out of the house. (Of course, it certainly helps that they actually work around their home fairly regularly too.)

Our house? Well, let’s just say that our house looks lived in. It’s not unusual for me to pull out of the garage in the morning and discover Nerf weapons strewn across the grass, a hockey stick leaning against the siding, and a bike helmet resting on the sidewalk. We’ve had parachute-laden plastic soldiers hanging from the ash tree while Lego minifigures fight battles in the lawn. But, as bad as we are about our front and back yard, the yard on the south side of our house that borders our neighbor’s beautiful home teeters on the edge of Sanford and Son. We don’t have enough room in our garage for two cars, much less all the many things that should neatly fit in there. So, our side yard has become a haven for all sorts of random things. It holds plastic planters, a wheelbarrow, empty propane tanks, patio furniture, kid toys, dog toys, and sawhorses. Truth be told, I won’t even walk in there. It’s fenced off from our backyard so I can pretend it doesn’t exist. And, while everything in there is hidden below the fence line and not visible from the front or the backyard, it’s still an embarrassing eyesore. I know it. Steve knows it. Our next door neighbors know it. It’s been the elephant in the room for years. In the ten years we’ve lived here we haven’t figured out what to do about it.

Well, a couple days ago our neighbors figured out what to do about it. They told Steve they would be erecting a trellis for vines on the north side of their home that overlooks our yard. They didn’t want us to think they were doing it because of our crappy side yard. They just decided they wanted something more pleasant to look at than our siding. I so do not blame them. I would do the same thing if I lived next door to us. It would be hard to enjoy a pleasant Thanksgiving dinner if when looking out of the dining room window you got to gaze upon our uncovered yard waste receptacle. We’ve talked about getting a storage unit for some of our extra crap. We would do it too if we could afford an extra $60 a month. The only way a storage unit would fit into our budget, however, is if I went to work part-time at Starbucks as a barista. As much as I truly like our neighbors, I can’t say I like them that much.

So, I am going to try to live with the shame of being that neighbor instead. If you hear me call one of our boys Lamont now, though, at least you’ll know why. Hold on, Elizabeth! I’m coming!

Posted on by Me

Want Something Cleaned? Pee On It

It’s clean and I didn’t have to do it!

Last night, our son Luke had a friend spend the night. His friend slept in the top bunk of the bed where Joe usually sleeps. Joe was displaced, so he slept on an air mattress in our room. This morning before sunrise, Joe woke up to use the bathroom. As soon as he was finished, Steve went to use the bathroom. The toilet flushed, the light turned on, and all hell broke loose.

“JOE!” Steve yelled with disgust.

“What, Dad?”

“There is pee everywhere in here. You have GOT to look where you’re peeing,” he said.

“It was dark,” Joe replied calmly.

“Well, then, TURN ON A LIGHT! Seriously! The floor is wet. There’s a puddle here. You are going to clean this mess up,” Steve barked.

“I didn’t mean to,” Joe complained.

“Yeah, hon. He didn’t mean to,” I said, hoping to diffuse Steve’s annoyance. It didn’t work.

“You should see the mess he made. Joe…did you get any pee in the toilet? Any at all?”

“I’ll clean it up, Dad,” Joe said as he grabbed some paper towels.

“We need more than paper towels, Joe. We need rags.”

Joe came in and did a little mopping up with paper towels while Steve railed on about the sheer amount of urine covering our bathroom floor. Joe apologized and sneaked out when he felt the coast was clear. I couldn’t blame him. This pee mess had really gotten to Steve. I waited for things to calm down, then I went to inspect. Steve was on his hands and knees with disinfectant and he was mopping the floor and wiping the walls. Our bathroom floor was spotless. (Not that I would eat off it or anything.)

“It was dark. How did you know he’d peed everywhere?” I asked.

“Because when I stood up I realized my butt was wet,” he replied, “and I knew that was not right so I flipped the light on.”

I muffled a giggle. At least now I could understand the vehemence of his response. As the only female in our house, maybe I’m just used to it. I don’t sit on a toilet seat here, or anywhere else for that matter, without expecting it first. Sit on someone else’s pee once, shame on you. Sit on someone else’s pee twice? Well, I’m just not that clueless. I’m used to messes. I own several pairs of yellow rubber gloves because of them. I also make my sons clean their own toilet. I won’t even touch that thing. And, you could not pay me to use the toilet in their bathroom. Donald Trump couldn’t even give me $5 million for my favorite charity to do it. Still, the mess was hearty enough to encourage Steve to clean our toilet and mop up the bathroom floor.

In the 10 years we’ve lived in this home, Steve has cleaned our bathroom floor once, maybe twice. (He says more, but I find that highly unlikely because I’ve never actually witnessed such an act and I’m home a lot.) As I’ve mentioned in previous blogs, Steve is wonderful about cleaning our stove, which I refuse to do because it’s one of those gas contraptions that take forever to clean. He’s also amazing at deep cleaning totally random, out-of-the-way spots in our home right before we have guests over. He has been verbally abused by me via blog twice for cleaning the laundry room and the cabinet under the kitchen sink just before company arrived…because we all know the first place house guests snoop is under the kitchen sink. It turns out that I am actually grateful to Joe for peeing all over our bathroom in his still-half-asleep, 11-year-old boy way. His pee mishap has left me with a shiny clean bathroom floor that I didn’t have to touch. Heck…if I had known that Steve would become so impassioned about cleaning after a little yellow accident, I never would have potty trained our boys. Imagine how clean my house could be!

 

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Hormones, Guns, And Astronaut Diapers

In September 2009, Celeste and I used our crazy hormonal rage to walk 50 miles and raise over $5k for MS research. Please note: no one was harmed during our MS Walk.

This afternoon I got to enjoy one of my favorite fall pastimes, holiday shopping at a craft and gift fair with friends. I very rarely start shopping for Christmas gifts before October. My mind is simply not in the game. Once the trees begin to lose their leaves, though, there’s no point in denying the obvious. Christmas is not far away. So, when Heather suggested we go to the Mile High Holiday Mart hosted by the Junior League of Denver, I had to acquiesce. I picked up Ana and we headed to the Inverness Hotel to meet Heather and get our shopping on. As we approached the hotel, the volume of traffic increased. I knew it would be packed with other women who had the same thought. My introverted self prepared for the exhausting task of elbowing my way through throngs of distracted ladies. If you’ve ever been to a holiday craft fair, you know the crowd is by and large comprised of women. The few men who are there lurk in corners and hold full shopping bags, praying their descent into the halls of estrogen ends soon.

After about a half hour of browsing separately, my friend Ana found me and told me she’d just received a text from her sister. There had been yet another shooting, this time in a shopping center area in her home state of Wisconsin. Ana’s sister lives not far from where the shooting had occurred. Coming not long after the theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, where a gunman shot and killed 14 people and wounded another 50, this was not welcome news. What is wrong with people?

I spent part of today reflecting on this shooting spree mentality. It’s not just an American phenomenon. In the past twenty years, armed gunmen have opened fire and killed hundreds of people in Britain, Germany, Finland, Norway, Australia, Belgium, and the Netherlands. Before I write another word, I want you to know this is not a blog about gun control. I’m not against the 2nd Amendment. I’m not anti-gun, and I’m not trying to take guns out of anyone’s hands. This is because I’ve decided that guns are not the problem. Testosterone is the problem.

Has anyone noticed that these mass shootings are carried out by Y-chromosone-enhanced persons? Women aren’t the ones opening fire in crowded theaters dressed as Batman. We’re not the ones shooting people in churches, schools, shopping malls, and political rallies. We’re not the ones who air our sadness, our disappointment, our anger, through a spray of bullets. Instead, we women are slightly more subtle. Take, for example, astronaut Lisa Nowak, who was so upset to find out her boyfriend had another woman that she wore an astronaut diaper so she could drive across country without stopping just to pepper spray her competition. She didn’t take anyone’s life. Heck. She didn’t even take anyone’s car. Her clearly hormonally driven, emotional attack didn’t land her in prison. Nope. She got two days in jail, a bunch of anger management classes, 50-hours of community service, and the embarrassing nickname “the astronaut diaper lady.” No one had to be buried. We women may act a wee bit crazy sometimes, but we’re not usually homicidal maniacs. We may occasionally run high on emotional drama, but we don’t often run high on murderous rampages.

And yet, the stereotype of the PMS-raging woman persists. We can’t have a woman president because a hormonal women is potentially dangerous. We wouldn’t want a woman in the throes of estrogen fluctuation to have access to nuclear weapons. Yep. I’m certain that this world is not going to end on 12/21 as the Mayans predicted. Instead, the world will end at the hands of an emotionally unstable woman in control of nuclear launch codes. (Yes. I am rolling my eyes as I write this.) You know, I spent a couple hours crammed into a small space with hundreds of other women and, although that’s not exactly my comfort zone, not once did it cross my mind that perhaps one of them might go postal and whip out an AK-47 because another woman got the scarf she’d had her eye on. You know why? Because estrogen doesn’t kill people. Maybe we should leave gun owners alone and start doing background checks on testicle owners instead? 😉

 

(PS…Before any of you testosterone-enhanced individuals gets your whiskers in a twist, this blog was meant as a tongue-in-cheek editorial based on an observation I made. I’m not really suggesting we deprive men of their most prized possessions. Well, not seriously, anyway.)

 

 

 

 

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Doing The Oblivious Backfloat While Swimming In Denial

You know how you know something is happening, but you don’t really see it until you have photographic proof? This happens to me a lot with weight gain. I feel okay about putting on that extra ten pounds until someone catches a shot of me at the dinner table at Christmas and suddenly I’m thinking, “Whoa…wait a minute. What happened here?” as if I am shocked and hadn’t actually noticed that my pants haven’t been fitting lately. Well, today, my sister took a family photo for us at the corn maze we were at with our boys. As I was going over the photos again just a few minutes ago, I was shocked to find that my oldest son is now tall enough that the top of his head reaches my shoulders. I looked at the photo a few times to verify this. Then I called for a second opinion.

“Steve…I think Joe has grown. He’s almost up to my shoulders,” I told him.

“Yep. He sure is,” was all he said. I’m sure he was thinking I was a complete numbskull for not having noticed this before.

“When did this happen?” I asked.

“It’s been happening,” he said. “You haven’t noticed?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I knew he was getting bigger but I guess I hadn’t realized how much bigger. Someday he might actually be taller than me,” I said.

“Let’s hope so,” he replied.

“Do you think he’ll get facial hair too,” I asked.

“If he’s lucky, he’ll even get more of it than me,” he quipped.

“You know…when I said I was okay that they were growing up, I wasn’t really focusing on this part of the actual growth process. I’m not prepared for them to go through puberty, start shaving, and lock themselves in their bedroom for private time. I don’t want their cute little voices to change. How will I know they’re still my babies when that happens?”

My darling husband looked at me as if I’m a loon which, let’s face it, I am.

“Let me see the photo,” he said. Then he peered at my laptop. “Huh. I don’t think I’m that much taller than you either,” he continued, clearly thinking something was amiss with the photo.

“You’re six inches taller than me,” I informed him. How can he not know this stuff?

“Are you sure you’re not standing in a hole?” he asked.

“What kind of crater-like hole I would I be standing in while in a flat corn maze? Maybe it wasn’t me at all? Maybe you were standing on a hill?” I shot back.

“I’m just saying that maybe he’s not really quite as tall as he looks in the photo,” he continued while ignoring my snarky attitude.

Me and the boys in 2009

Joe’s in bed right now, and he’s actually sleeping and not just watching My Little Pony on his iPad. (Oops. Wasn’t supposed to mention that my 11 year old son is currently enjoying watching that show on Netflix because that tidbit might embarrass him. Oh, paybacks. How I love thee.) It would be counter-productive to wake him up and ask him to stand next to me so we could measure his height. At his last physical, though, he was measured at just over 54″ tall. I like to say I’m 65″ tall, but I fudge that number by at least half an inch, maybe more. All of this means that it’s completely possible that he is shoulder height to me. When did this happen? Just three years ago, he was teeny.

It’s funny how sometimes it takes photographic evidence to convince us that time is marching on and our children are growing up despite our best wishes. We go from day to day in such a dizzying rush, trapped in the now of running here and there, and we truly can’t see the forest for the trees. My boys are growing up. And, although I know that as they inch higher and higher in grade school, it’s not the same as seeing them standing up to my shoulder in a photo. It’s not real until I try to pick up Joe and find it to be an incredible struggle now that he’s finally 70 pounds. I guess it’s easier to float along as a parent, just swimming in denial. Damn you, George Eastmann for pioneering celluloid film and the Brownie camera that led us down this slippery slope into a world where our images are continually being captured. It’s a lot more difficult to live in oblivion when you’re staring at the proof.

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