You know what is funny? Non bloggers don’t take photos of their food or of themselves in the restroom. The other women here at utterball-Bay are not bloggers and many of them are not internet savvy. I think they thought we were a little strange.
![DSC_0001[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3018/2962787290_9d1ac55460.jpg)
Scratch that, a LOT strange.
![DSC_0003[1]](http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3165/2962787312_b8f083f9a3.jpg)
But I ask you, what exactly are you supposed to do with a pretend plaster turkey?
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 6:44am
Subject: DENIAL
I am in denial that I am leaving in a few hours. House is a mess. No food. No gas in car. Laundry everywhere. Have to co-ordinate rides to football practice and print directions to all the various places the kids need to be this week.
Still don’t even have suitcase down from attic.
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 8:11am
Subject: Re: DENIAL
So stressed out. So much work to do.
I am thinking of going to have a manicure because at this point, WHO CARES?!?
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 8:14am
Subject: Re: Re:DENIAL
Yes, soooooo stressed.
Instead of manicure am heading out to buy son football gloves. Because clearly that is what is important at this moment.
From:Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 8:27am
Subject: Re:Re: Re:DENIAL
Mmmmmmm football gloves. I don’t even know what those are.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 8:44am
Subject: Re: Re:Re: Re:DENIAL
Stating the obvious here… they are GLOVES you wear to play FOOTBALL.
37 degrees here right now. Brrrrrrrr.
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 9:11am
Subject: Re:Re:Re:Re:Re: DENIAL
What are gloves?
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 2:29pm
In my car heading to the airport with large ass suitcase because I couldn’t decide what to pack. So I brought it all.
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 2:47pm
Waiting for the car and sweltering because it is like 90 degrees here.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 2:48
Packed two coats because…say it with me… I couldn’t decide. Also wearing a sweater coat. I cut the tag out of it because it is from JCP and apparently I am a snob.
Also, I need a manicure. Wonder if I can find time to get one in Chicago?
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 2:59pm
I bet we can swing that.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 4:00pm
I was frisked going through security. Do I look threatening? Everytime I come to this airport I am pulled aside for a “special” check. I think they secretly hope the security woman and I will start making out in the glass booth.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 4:35pm
Are you at the airport?
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 4:36pm
Yes. Thinking of getting a beer.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 4:37pm
Was considering go to the “Last Resort” bar, but I’d have to carry my stuff across the hall and lose my coveted electrical outlet. Why can’t they have a waitress who roams the airport?
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 4:38pm
I was smart and sat in the bar. Also, American wanted to charge me $15 to check my bag.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 4:58pm
I had to pay it. Stupid big bag. They took my money and then frisked me.
I feel so used. And cheap.
From: Susan Wagner
To: Chris Jordan
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 5:00pm
WHORE! I am dragging my bag and feeling all smug about getting my hair product through security. take that TSA.
From: Chris Jordan
To: Susan Wagner
Sent: Oct 20, 2008 5:01pm
Plane is here. Also phone is now dead. Guess where the charger is? In my packed bag.
The obligatory football photos.
Even with pneumonia , the boy plays football. One of his coaches remarked to me last week that he was a tough kid. I agreed. It doesn’t come from my gene pool. I pulled a muscle yesterday and have been bitching and moaning about it every chance I get.
He sat out a practice this past week and it just about killed him.
“I can still play!”
“You can hardly breathe. And when you run you cough uncontrollably. I think you can sit out ONE practice.”
“Well, I can still hit people!”
“That is too bad he is going to miss the game.”
“Oh,he isn’t going to miss it.”
“…”
“My God, I have turned into one of them, haven’t I?”
But really, does it look like I am forcing him against his will?
Presenting the injured and the overweight.
Four kids couldn’t play today. My son was the only one who couldn’t play because of a weight issue. He was two pounds over this morning. When we arrived at the field this morning it was 34 degrees outside, not counting the windchill.
We went inside to weigh him and he was two pounds over, even wearing the lightweight soccer cleats. The only extra thing he had on was his long sleeved underarmour. So we had him take it off and reweigh. Needless to say it didn’t weigh 2 pounds. Afterward my son told me that once he didn’t make weight wearing the underarmour he was glad that he didn’t make weight without it, because it was too damn cold out.
Tomorrow afternoon I leave for a working trip to Chicago. My sister-in-law is coming to watch the kids. Yes, she of the cleaning her windows with Q-Tips. My house is so not up to her standards. I am pretty sure that there are crumbs in my toaster. At least last time she babysat I only had to worry about cleaning the van.
I have a list a mile long of things I need to do before I leave, and yet I have managed to do none of them. I am not sure what to pack. I have a hard time deciding because I like to bring things for all possibilities. And I do mean ALL possibilities, even those that have virtually no chance of happening. But I also don’t like to check my bag. And the chargers alone for all the electronics need half the suitcase.
I know what you are thinking. My life, it is HARD.
At least I get to see some beautiful scenery as I drive to the pediatrician’s office today. Again. With two different kids.
They really should make antibiotics in a gallon sized jug, for ease of dispensing.
I hate it when my children are sick and usually they never get sick enough to require a visit to the doctor or antibiotics. I think this is only the second time most of them have had to take them.
*****
Last night around 4am I woke up to Miles coughing in bed next to me. He seemed so sick and fragile. He seemed much worse than he had been when he went to bed a few hours before. But that is the way things always seem in the middle of the night when the only thing illuminating the room is the moonlight. The quiet allows your mind to race wild with every fear, every what if.
I lay there watching him alternate between breathing and coughing.
When my 7 yr old son was 6 weeks old he stopped breathing and turned blue. It was the middle of the night and he had been laying on my chest. We both were sleeping. I awoke suddenly and realized he wasn’t breathing. I lifted him off my chest and he was limp. I gave him a shake, something the ER doctors would ask me about over and over and over again as if I had possibly shaken my baby too hard. I hadn’t.
I had put him into his carseat and strapped it into the front seat of the car. I poked him the entire way to the ER, trying to make him cry. Because if he were crying he wasn’t dead, right?
From our local ER we were transfered by ambulance to the children’s hospital.
I held it together until we were admitted to our room and the doctor on call looked at me and said,”Your baby is safe now. We will take care of him.”
Then I cried. We stayed there for a week. The poked and prodded him, ran all sorts of tests. I stood in the hallway. I smiled and nodded at other parents. After a couple days you all recognized each other. Parents who had children that probably weren’t going to be leaving the ICU. Parents of the bald kids. Parents who stood outside the hospital room doors and cried.
I knew even at that moment that I was lucky. We would be going home. This was just going to be a blip on the screen of his life, certainly not a defining moment for him. My child was going to be fine… at least from this.
But it changed me. Even now all these years later I can’t think back on it without a lump rising in my throat. What if I hadn’t woken up? What if he hadn’t been asleep on my chest? What if when I shook him he hadn’t started breathing again?
I have never slept the same since. Though I sleep better than I did when my children were babies, I still wake up in the middle of the night and the irrational fears take hold and refuse to leave until daylight breaks. And when they are sick it is even worse.
Miles is fine, by the way. He is eating and playing and smiling. The coughing is unsettling, but it doesn’t seem to be bothering him. At least not as much as it is bothering me.
Recipe over at Work It, Mom!
When I fall off of the wagon, I fall off hard.
Tonight I bought a bag of Jelly Belly jellybeans. I brought it home and my daughter and I proceeded to dump out the entire bag and divide up the 30 flavors into 30 different piles so that we could decide which ones we liked best. Guess what? We like them all. And then we had to taste again just to be sure. Next time we will just mainline our sugar.
It was either that or drink an entire case bottle of wine myself. I think a wine hangover would have been preferable to the nauseous headache I have now from too much sugar.
For those of you who don’t follow me on twitter*, my three youngest children were diagnosed today with pneumonia and ear infections. DOUBLE ear infections, which just seems like showing off.
That’ll teach me to say that my children’s coughing was annoying me. Just pass the Mother of the Year award over here.
Tonight I lined up the little shot glasses of medicine and it was like a frat house. Some lucky kids had more than one shot glass in front of them. I offered to give them a lime and some salt on the back of their hand to complete the mood, but no one took me up on it.
I also dropped and broke my Blackberry today. Unless dropping it isn’t covered by warranty, then it just, uh, spontaneously broke all by itself. I have the tracking ball taped back on with the tape my oldest son uses for his finger splint. It makes it very convenient to use. And ever so attractive.
*I pretty much stink at twitter so you aren’t missing much anyway. Mir said it was like communicating with me via smoke signals.
Yesterday was one of those day that by noon it felt like it should be 6pm. 6pm of the following day. My 9 and 7 yr old sons were sitting at the kitchen table doing their schoolwork. They had been there forever and were more intent on goofing off than doing any of their work. I was getting annoyed. Because how long can it possibly take to do a page of cursive handwriting.
They started elbowing each other and as I looked up to reprimand them again I caught a glimpse of the sunlight shining in the picture window casting their shadows on the wall behind them. It was an epiphanal moment. Why am I torturing all of us? Do I really care if my son is making the perfect cursive H today? Why not tomorrow? Why not next week? Why do I even care at all?
So I told them they had five minutes to wrap it up and anyone that was done with their schoolwork could come apple picking. Miraculously they all finished. Except for Miles who flung himself onto the floor and screamed that he didn’t HAVE any schoolwork to do. Can’t please everyone.
Apple picking season is coming to a close here. There was only one variety of apples that were still available for picking, luckily we don’t really care. And we were the only people who showed up to pick for the entire day. The orchard owners were so pleased to see all the kids, as older people often are when I show up anywhere with my brood.
There is something about picking your own fruit, the act of laying your hands on it and seeing where it came from. Just like with gardening, it makes it all so much more real. There is such a disconnect from nature with grabbing a bag at the grocery store. I want my children to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves.
The bumpy tractor ride is pretty fun too. I think I regurgitated a kidney somewhere on the back of the orchard.
We didn’t actually buy any of these pumpkins since it would have required me to take out a second mortgage to afford them. Maybe they are filled with liquid gold. In which case I will be kicking myself for not buying them when I had the opportunity.
I am really hoping that my daughter comes out of her shell one of these days. The poor child has no personality at all.
My oldest two children didn’t want to come apple picking with us. Teenagers certainly are lazy. Either that or they wanted to stay home and surf the internet for porn, who knows.
Do you think they got the silly faces and poses out of the way now before the annual Christmas card photo? Yeah, me neither.
Remember the photo from last year?
What about the year before? I ended up having to mail out TWO photos that year since I couldn’t get everyone to co-operate for a single photo.
Or the year before…
or all the way back to the year 2000…
Yeah, not holding out much hope for this year either.
I remember being a kid and sitting on the counter in my kitchen. For whatever reason it was always the best place to hang out and have a snack. Or to have phone conversations, because of course back then the telephone was attached to the wall by a long curly cord that I would wrap around my finger over and over again.
Now my daughter has discovered sitting on the counter. She climbs up there to talk to me while I am cooking. She tells me stories about princesses in her animated way. And tells me about all the shoes she wants to buy. She is my daughter.
She asks me questions about when I was a little girl. And I see the same look on her face that I used to have when my mother would talk about her childhood. It seemed so long ago. The photos were all so old looking pasted with black corners onto yellowing scrapbook pages. Friends that she had, that she no longer talked to. “But where are all those people now?” I wanted to know.
I see on my daughter’s face the same sort of disbelief that I could have ever been anything other than a grown-up. Anything other than what I am at this exact moment. A disbelief that the world itself could have existed without her in it.
A disbelief I share most days.
More times a day than I can count I have the following conversation:
“Mom, are the dishes in dishwasher dirty or clean?”
“I don’t know. Do you have eyes?”
“Can you come and look? I can’t tell.”
“Well, if you can’t tell I think that they are clean enough.”
“But are the really clean?”
“Clean enough.”
“Moooooooo-ooooom.”
*******
I have been completely off of sugar for about 6 months now. Maybe even longer. Tonight on the way home from my son’s football practice I stopped to buy the kids a little candy, their bribe for behaving for the babysitter, and I bought myself a bag of Skittles. Because sometimes you just need it. Then I came home and had a cup of coffee. I should be ready to go to sleep sometime next week.
*****
Speaking of next week, I will be in Chicago. I have spent the past two weeks buying and returning clothes. I hate using the dressing room. The thing about finally getting down to your pre-baby weight (four YEARS LATER) is that nothing you own fits. So now I have some random non matching pieces of clothing. It’ll have to do.
I have been pretty ruthless getting rid of my non fitting clothes. I have discovered that I am not at all sentimental about clothes. I haven’t gotten rid of my wedding dress yet, but I do look at it in the closet and wonder why I am hanging on to it. Before anyone suggests that my daughter might want to wear it, it is a casual maternity dress. So I kind of hope not. Though it is white because I was all about looking virginal on my wedding day. Just call me Mary.
*****
