Month: February 2006

Public Service Announcement and More!

You should be thankful that I just deleted my original paragraph. I’ll just leave you with this link which details everything you might want to know about noroviruses. Did you know you are considered contagious from the moment you show signs of illness to at least three days later? And some people are still contagious two weeks later. (But my twins show no signs of illness. Yet.)

How did I get to be forty-one without knowing all that? Study carefully, Young Grasshopper. You may need this information sooner than you think.

So, my deadline still looms. I have three great ideas, but no actual words strung together like pearls or even like popcorn strands, the kind you hang on your tree at Christmas. I did send back a cheery email: “I’ll have everything to you by midnight!”

I’ve just made my daughter cry because she won’t stop asking me to blow up spit-slimed balloons. Pardon me while I go tend to the angst of a 3-year old.

Okay. I’m back. I am never going to earn my Mother of the Year tiara at this rate.

See you when I finish my assignment. Or when I get back from Tahiti, whichever comes first.

Photo courtesy webcam.

In Commemoration of Our Long Marriage

Utterly ridiculous, that’s what this is. It’s 11:22 p.m. and I’m wrapped in a somewhat hideous purple bathrobe that my in-laws sent one Christmas (what? now we send sleepwear to people we never even visit?) and the old navy blue velour Lands End pajamas I bought the year my son was born (1998) and I have work to do, actual important work with deadlines and everything and what am I doing? What? I’ll tell you!

I’m procrastinating and reading your blogs and listening to the local late-night news and occasionally hollering to my almost-teen boys, “BE QUIET! GO TO SLEEP!” My husband woke up early with the stomach virus I suffered through on Friday and now he’s exhausted from the rigors of trudging to the bathroom ten thousand times today. I said with barely restrained glee, “And now, do you feel sorry for me?!” because last Friday when I had the same virus, my daughter never left my side and for half the day, I was babysitting the 15-month old. Never mind the fact that my boys were entirely on their own and that my now-8-year old invited two friends over to play in the backyard without even telling me or the fact that I was up and at a birthday party the next morning by 10 a.m. Never mind that because having the stomach virus is not a time for healthy competition. Sick competition, perhaps.

For the record, he does feel sorry for me. And then he said, “Yes, I was neglecting you while visiting the dying in the hospital.” Which is entirely true and spotlights the life we lead. The dying in the hospital trump a stomach virus at home, unless of course, the roiling stomach belongs to the pastor, in which case, the youth pastor will have to do (as he did today when a church woman called for a pastor today–she was having an MRI on her head to see if she had a stroke). (And, wouldn’t you know it, a different woman, the one my husband has been visiting frequently the past weeks–she died last night at 1 a.m. And he couldn’t go and do his pastor-thing and sit with the family today. It’s such a tough time and he normally makes a point of being with the grieving family.)

Before my 8-year old left for school, I looked into his green-gray eyes and said, “Now, listen. If you get a stomach ache and if you have diarrhea, tell your teacher and I’ll come get you.” I wrote his teacher a note to inform her that we have a stomach virus here which is highly contagious and that if he showed signs, I’d come pick him up.

At 9:30 a.m., the call from his teacher came. My husband threw off the covers of his sick bed and came downstairs to sit with my daughter and the toddler while I drove three minutes away to the school. My son looked fine and I confess I didn’t believe he was sick. I confined him to his room, relegated him to playing the old Nintendo 64 system and for a long time, every time I checked, he seemed bored, but healthy. He insisted he’d had diarrhea and I gave him a little speech about being truthful, yada, yada, yada.

At 3:00 p.m., he threw up all over his bedroom carpet.
At 3:01 p.m., the doorbell rang.
At 3:02 p.m., the telephone rang.
At 3:03 p.m., the nice church couple who rang the doorbell sat at my kitchen table while I pretended not to be mortified by 1) my messy kitchen counter; 2) the toys scattered all over the family room; 3) the stacks of laundry, folded, but still; 4) my unmade-up face and humidity-induced crazy hair; and 5) my daughter’s nutty outfit (sundress and too-short wildly unmatched purple stretch pants).

And with great hilarity, I must tell you that we are replacing our van (aka, “The Deathtrap,” the 1991 Chevy Astro van which was given to us a couple of years back) with another van, a pretty, powder-blue Chevy Astro van which was manufactured the very same year we were married. That’s right! Bonus points for those of you who shouted out the correct answer. Nineteen eighty-seven!! Yes, people, that means our “new” van is four years older than our “old” van and; not only that, but it’s guaranteed not to break down within a twenty-mile radius.

No, really. We are so grateful for this donation to our sad, pitiful cause. Our old van quit running and the brakes were deemed unsafe by our mechanic friend. Our regular car, the 1993 Mercury Sable randomly stops running, despite the assurances by the mechanic (twice, now) that they’ve fixed it. (The last time, it cost $300.) So, driving that car very far feels unsafe.

Hopefully, next year, we’ll buy an actual vehicle manufactured in this century. Or decade, even.

So, they signed over the van. I cleaned up the vomit as best as I could. The telephone call was for my husband–his aunt died. As I knelt over the vomitous carpet, the toddler woke from his nap, screaming his little blond head off.

I did scurry around this afternoon, then, fueled by my mortification. Of course, now that it’s tidy, no one will stop by. That’s always how it works around here.

I expect my twins to be clutching their bellies and pushing their way to the toilet tomorrow. In a way, that would be great because then I could work on my work, the work with deadlines. Because, otherwise, it will interfere with “American Idol” and honestly, a girl has to have her priorities.

I said to my husband tonight, “Don’t you just love our life?” as I thought about the vomit and the old vans and the singing preschooler in the tub who wouldn’t stop calling out, “MOMMY! MOMMY!”

He said in a very serious voice, “Yes. I do, actually.”

The next time I came into the room (putting away laundry), he said, “Seriously, think of all the things we’ve been through. We’ve been poor. We were infertile. The unemployment. Your dad’s death. Our families’ divorces.”

Getting into the spirit of things, I said, “Don’t forget your cancer!”

His point, though, was not to dwell on the difficult stretches of our life together, but to remember that our pain helps us help others. Our pain has made us stronger. Our marriage has endured–and now we have a concrete reminder of just how long we’ve been together. What cracks me up is that the reminder isn’t a giant sparkly anniversary diamond ring, but has flaky powder-blue paint and is parked in the driveway.

A Note Before Sleep

I knew she was feeling better when she appeared in the kitchen wearing her powder-blue pajama shirt with the pink flowers, the navy blue striped with red swimsuit bottom from The Gap, and a red homemade knit cap with matching scarf wrapped around her neck and tossed jauntily over her shoulders.

She woke up last night, though, at 11:45 p.m., needing to use the bathroom. Then she woke up at 6:00 a.m., again needing to use the bathroom. I put her back to bed again, and she slept another hour, then had a bath and watched a video for awhile before crawling into bed with me and her daddy. We were all sleeping at 8:30 a.m., when my son, The Birthday Boy, quietly opened the door and asked if he should get dressed.

Since my daughter seemed better, my husband thought I should go to the birthday party and so I hurried to get the boys and myself ready to leave by 9:40 a.m. We had to stop to buy film and a gift bag, but managed to arrive on time. The party was “the best party I ever had!” according to The Birthday Boy.

I napped with my daughter this afternoon while the boys played and my husband ran errands. Though the symptoms of the virus subsided, both of us were so tired that we slept an hour and a half. (She’s napped already earlier.) So far, no one else shows signs of the stomach virus. Time will tell. (One commenter suggested it sounds like the “Norwalk Virus.” It sure does!)

Tomorrow is my son’s actual birthday which means that eight years ago tonight, I was awake, timing contractions, having no idea that the smart thing would be to sleep because I still had twenty-four hours to go before delivery!

What were you doing eight years ago?

Get Out the Disinfectant!

Warning: Don’t read this if you have a queasy stomach or a big bowl of split-pea soup by your keyboard.

I cancelled school today. I met baby boy’s mom at the door at lunch and asked her to please not bring him back after lunch. I did two emergency loads of laundry. I lolled around in my pajamas, startling my daughter by jumping up and darting to the bathroom every ten minutes for, oh, about six hours.

And that’s really all you need to know about that. Except that, just as I was putting dishes in the dishwasher, thinking I felt a bit better (at 4:30 p.m.), my poor curly-headed daughter did three things:

1) Whined that her stomach hurt;
2) Coughed;
3) Vomited all over the couch cushion, leaving herself in a puddle of puke.

Tomorrow morning is my son’s 8th birthday party at an arcade/laser tag place. He’s having a 2-in-1 party with his best friend who has the exact same birthday. My husband will have to go while I stay home with the ill child. I figure soon my husband will be clutching his stomach, felled by the same virus.

You might want to disinfect your keyboard now, lest you get what I had.

Awake Too Late

This reentry week has been difficult in many ways. The transition from the roar of the ocean to the roar of children arguing has made me squint and yell. I’ve been ignoring the increasing soreness in my throat. I can’t seem to keep the dishes all washed and the kitchen clean for even thirty minutes at a time.

Tonight, I am up too late, watching Olympic figure skating and cringing when Sasha Cohen fell on a couple of her jumps. She won the silver, but still. How devastating.

My daughter has been wearing old swimsuits for the past three days. She’s even wearing one to bed at night and switching into different ones throughout the day. I cannot understand this. Yesterday, she played in the backyard in this crazy outfit–a swimsuit and sneakers–no jacket, no coat, no hat in the nippy February air.

Oh! Tonight, my son told me he was a fun boy. I said, “Are you one hundred percent fun?” and he said, “No. Seventy-five percent.” Yesterday, when I begged him not to grow up (his 8th birthday is Sunday), he said, “Mom, it’s the law of physics!”

So it goes. The kids keep growing up and I can’t stand to lose them and I can’t wait to push them out the door.

Weekend Update

If I wait until I have a leisurely moment to write, I will never write again. So, I’m going to begin this, even though my daughter is whining because “Max & Ruby” ended and she wants to make cherry juice, just like Ruby, and my sons are making noodles for lunch and the dryer buzzer sounded long ago and in fifteen minutes the 15-month old baby will return from his lunch with his mommy.

* * *

So, now it’s 2:30 p.m. The boys finally finished their history assessments (on the Constitution) and math problems (Probability and Statistics, which they don’t get “get”). My daughter is upstairs “napping,” which mainly consists of watching PBS instead of sleeping and the 15-month old sleeps soundly, despite the boy noise coming through up the heating vents.

Last Friday, a huge, unexpected windstorm blew through our area. I was about to drag myself out of bed at 7:45 a.m. when the electricity shut off at 7:40 a.m. I drowsily thought I ought to get dressed, just in case a tree fell on our house (I’m often an alarmist), but first, I called my husband to see if he had power at the church. He did not. (As it turned out, some 50,000 customers were without power, some for days.) I joked, “I am going to be so mad if a tree falls on our house and ruins my trip!”

A few minutes later, after I dressed and ambled downstairs, I heard a noise outside, a noise besides the howling wind. I peeked out an upstairs window and saw a firetruck with lights flashing near the cul-de-sac, so I put on a jacket and went out to see what happened.

My next door neighbor was huddled with the middle-of-the-cul-de-sac neighbor (and friend) and her 7-year old and 5-year old. She clutched the leash to her dog in her free hand. The children had only socks on. I said, “Do you want to come to my house?” and they did, leaving behind their van with one door open and a large tree covering it. We put the dog in our fenced backyard because their fence was demolished.

This is what happened. First, a big tree uprooted and fell onto another neighbor’s house, actually sheering off a corner of the house and narrowly missing the home’s occupants who were in their car in the driveway. After that, my friend rushed her children out to their van so they could leave their home. She worried that another tree might fall on their house. (We have a lot of trees in our neighborhood, giant, stately Douglas Firs.) She put the kids in the van and as she stood in the driveway, about to climb in, she heard a terrifying sound and looked up to see an enormous tree falling toward the van. She didn’t know what to do. The kids were in the van. So, she got in, too.

The roof of the two-story house broke the fall of the tree and literally broke the tree, too, so only half the tree landed on the van, smashing the roof a little and breaking the back window. The repair will take six weeks.

So, I spent my Friday morning with my neighbor while her kids played with mine in our powerless house. Her husband eventually arrived and they made calls and before we knew it, guys with chainsaws were cutting up the fallen trees. The roof of the house was caved in a little, but all things considered, the damage is minor. You can still see into the bedroom of the other house through the lopped off corner. The neighbors departed about noon, I guess, and the power finally came on at 1:45 p.m., so I was able to shower. At that point, the temperature had dipped to sixty degrees in the house.

By 5:00 p.m., my friends arrived to pick me up. By 6:00 p.m., we were eating in the bar of a local restaurant, sharing appetizers and eating big salads. By 9:30 p.m., we’d arrived at the ocean cottage. By 10:30 p.m., our Hostess with the Mostess had figured out how to get the gas fireplace burning . . . she followed all the steps, yet the flame stayed small until her dad told her (via cell phone held in the driveway where she found a tenuous connection) to smack the thermostat on the wall. Of course! Forget logic and following directions and just give the thing a whack!

When we crawled into our individual beds around midnight, the sheets were so cold–and stayed cold even an hour later (I had to read before sleeping, of course). So I went to sleep huddled shivering and woke to warmth and sunshine.

I have a little anxiety–performance anxiety, you might say–and feel a little self-conscious about describing the weekend because my friend (The Hostess) raved about my blog to the other three women. And now they have the address, so “hi!” to them. Welcome to unvarnished world of Actual Unretouched Photo.

Let me just say that my worst fear came true and they were all beautiful and thin and sported lovely manicured fingernails and cute haircuts and jeans much smaller than I’ve ever worn in my life. None of this is fair, of course, but I did get more scrapbooking pages done because I do simpler layouts and they all had to be extravagantly creative and use embellishments and computer-generated fonts and digitized photos.

I walked on the shore a couple of times, soaking in the sunshine and trying to hypnotize the sun into setting slower and taking pictures which I can only hope capture a fraction of the beauty of the vast ocean. We went to “town,” where we bought more scrapbooking supplies and tacky souvenirs from a shop overflowing with kitschy junk I wouldn’t pay a dime for at a garage sale. (Well, maybe a dime.) We viewed the lighthouse up close, photographed it, posed by the chain-link fence (me thinking, if I stand behind her a little and turn sideways, I will look almost as narrow as these tall, thin women–I’ll let you know if that worked out for me).

We watched a terrible movie (Must Love Dogs.) “I saw that,” I said. “Was it good?” they said. “Uh, not really. But it should be. But it’s terrible. You’ll see.” Afterwards: “I can’t believe I watched that whole movie! It was awful!” (I only watched half of it and wandered back downstairs to scrapbook some more.)

We ate, we laughed, we talked (someone stop me, please–at least I didn’t tell the decapitated hamster story), we snipped, cropped, stuck pictures in scrapbooks, we read, we slept, we gazed at the ocean. I searched in vain for an unbroken sand dollar–I have such a fixation with them. Saturday night, I saw a bicyclist riding near the waves at low tide with a horse tethered to one hand and a dog leashed to the other. I hope that silhouette turns out.

Three nights, four days, two complete scrapbooks (almost). Good times. Our hostess encouraged us to make the best of our re-entry into the real world so our husbands would be inclined to send us away again for a long weekend.

What a glorious weekend!

And now the baby is crying, my son’s due home from school, my fingers are cold and I have to go.

Well, Blow Me Down!

I had my day completely planned, but strong winds blew my plans away! The trees fell on my neighbor’s homes (no joke) but not mine. Still, the weather disrupted everything today.

I’ll be gone for a few days, heading to Long Beach, Washington, again, with five other moms. My children have made it possible for me to not miss them one bit by being loud and messy and particularly annoying during the seven hours in which we had no electricity. Good times.

Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do. Be good. And if you can’t be good, be careful.

Girl Gone Wild!


While I sat here at my desk, my daughter crawled beneath it on a hunting expedition. She pulled up a plastic dolly she usually plays with in the bath, a Barbie from McDonald’s, a perfectly sharpened Ticonderoga pencil (the only brand worth buying), a piece of a wooden zucchini from the velcro set, a plastic hairbrush, my NIV Bible, a calendar, an old photograph, foil wrappers from Hershey’s kisses (how’d that get there?) and more. I really had no idea a hidden treasure trove existed under there.

My daughter started using the phrase “okey-dokey” yesterday. When I ask her or tell her something now, she sings, “Okey-dokey!” sometimes adding the rhyming “pokey” or “smokey.” I’ve been using this phrase with my kids for years and years and years and this is the first time anyone has caught on and played along.

Finally, I just remembered something from a few hours ago. My kids received Valentine cards from their out-of-town relatives. I had the boys immediately write thank-you notes because otherwise, it would never get done. I had my 3-year old daughter draw a picture of herself on her card. She scrawled a circle, added some eyes, eyeballs, legs, arms, a mess of hair and then finally, a “vul-va.”

I hope her grandparents don’t ask what “that” is. I’m not sure they’ve ever used that word out loud.