The Fish Pond

Metamorphosis

Choosing my best post assumes that I am capable of analyzing my own writing which I most assuredly am not. This one is simply my favorite. It was originally posted on September 16, 2006.

Metamorphosis

This week has been all about birth and rebirth at our house. Finnian, born on September 8th at 7 pounds, 5 ounces, joined the ranks of our troops and calmly took up his very special role as the little prince. I feel truly reborn with each passing day as the aftershocks of a very long and uncomfortable pregnancy fade into memory, and on Friday our own little butterfly emerged from its cocoon and flew into the world to face his own destiny in pure splendor.

After weeks of waiting and watching a Monarch caterpillar get fatter and fatter, the girls saw him create his glorious jade green chrysalis flecked with gold. Every day we checked and waited, waited and watched, as a metamorphosis unfolded within that little sack. On Friday morning Rowan and I noticed that the cocoon had turned black and was just transparent enough to see a hint of folded orange within. It was like a sliver of spectacular in waiting.

We spent most of our day watching the chrysalis become more and more transparent. By three o’clock both Rowan and I were fighting to keep our eyelids open and, after a Google search revealed this final stage could take 36 hours, we laid down for a nap. When Keira and Madigan came in from school an hour later I heard a piercing scream. They had run right to the chrysalis and found the most beautiful little creature clinging to the split open shell of the cocoon, drying its magnificent wings.

Life, birth, rebirth, whether human or insect, instills in me a deep faith in the divine. I can’t help but think how every lesson in life, every priority, every mystery, every struggle, problem and doubt, is revealed in the simple unfolding of these wings: the butterfly’s, Finn’s, these three remarkable little girls', and even my own. And I can’t help but feel scared and sad for how quickly life happens. If you turn away for even an instant, another milestone is passed, another memory is made, and you have to set free your butterfly.

Goodbye Friend!

A writer, editor, teacher, and mom to four little menches, Nutmeg takes life with a grain of salt and a little vodka. Tune into her cyber sitcom at Simply Nutmeg.

Pray for Us

A nurse just called from my grandfather's retirement community.  He fell in the bathroom and hit his head.  He may have a head injury, but his oxygen levels are extremely low again.  Like in the 70s%.  I'm headed up as soon as Uncle Orca gets here to watch the kids.

Sigh.

Update:  Well, head injury wise he is fine.  Not even a bump.  However, his heart keeps jumping into an irregular rhythm and he's running a fever, so they are keeping him there.  I, however, am going to bed.  Thanks for your thoughts and prayers.

Yellow! For Spring!

Last night I was moving laundry and as I opened my dryer to move Little Man's clothes through I immediately saw that it was yellow.  Bright Yellow.  As I pulled the clothes out I noticed lots of yellow spots and streaks on everything, but most noticably on his dress shirt for church.  I assume that among the various beads, legos, coins, rocks, plastic lizards, playmobil parts, and contraband little crap from school that Little Man loves to stash in his pockets was a yellow crayon, but other than the fantastic dye job on my dryer and his clothes I have yet to locate any evidence to support that conclusion.

I rewashed a bunch of the more noticable stuff, like the church shirt, with color safe bleach and oxyclean thrown in, to little avail.  It appears no more color is transfering from the dryer to the clothes, but how the heck am I going to get the stains out of Little Man's clothes?  Any suggestions?  We just bought most of them at the beginning of the month.

-------------------------------------------------

Some other bloggers have been interviewing each other, so when Redneck Mommy asked for victims interviewees, I figured she'd have funny questions for me, if nothing else.  So!  This is what I got.  Can't say I didn't ask for it.

You've decided to put yourself out on the market again.  What physical feature do you try your hardest to enhance? Hmmm, not really sure.  My guess is that with 4 kids under the age of 8 it would have to be something really dramatic, so as to distract from the pure chaos that is them, so I'd probably say my rack, not that it needs enhancing, per se, since it has its own zip code at this point, but maybe emphasizing.  Or making available.  Lord knows it's distracting as all hell at the moment.

Have you ever had a run in with the law?  If so, spill...  Frankly, not that I can recall real well.  I do remember once having an officer tap on the window when BigDaddyFish and I were sitting somewhere in the car talking, to find out if "The Lady" was being bothered.  The funny thing was we were just talking, and "The Lady" was "The Man's" wife, so I was no more bothered than wives typically are by their husbands.  I was caught by my mom shoplifting some gum when I was about 5 or 6; she marched me back to the store and made me not only return it but face the store manager and admit what I had done.  The man was stern but kind, and he scared me straight, but he didn't call the authorities.  Other than that, just the random pullovers for various moving violations.  I raise a ruckus in other ways less likely to land me in jail, like embarrassing myself and my neighbors with my stellar parenting Skillz.

Would you rather be a politician or a mortician? Why?  Hands down a mortician.  I would have to sacrifice too much of my integrity and privacy to be a successful politician.  And frankly, if the dead are insulted by my lack of dignified behavior, they aren't likely to publish it in the newspaper or have me removed from office or something. 

Describe the very worst dating experience you have ever had. Well, see, I didn't date much.  Really.  I just had boyfriends.  But I had a knack for getting myself into awkward situations, like taking a swimming class in college to get the PE credits out of the way and finding myself stuck with my ex-boyfriend at the time in the same class.  Plus being in band with same ex-boyfriend and current boyfriend at the same time (come to think of it, I did the whole band-with-ex-and-current thing at least 3 times, that I recall).  Or, um, did I ever tell you Uncle Orca introduced BigDaddyFish and me, and Uncle Orca and I dated for a few months before I started dating BDF (I didn't break up with Uncle Orca for BDF, though.  It ended of its own accord and I went back to college and got together with BDF later)?  Yeah, that was never awkward.  So no dating disasters per se.

But!  In college I studied with a girl in one of my english classes, and I guess to pay me back for helping her out she invited me to a party at her parents' farmette.  She was one of the "Cool" girls and I still proudly proclaim my Geek status, and I didn't know anyone else there, so I took my roommate at the time with me.  It was set up around a bonfire with tents and stuff; it was clear pretty quickly that people were going to spend the night, but of course, I didn't have that information, and was completely unprepared for that.  There was this guy there who bore a strong resemblance to a guy I'd had caught in my room on a band trip to Florida in HS with whom I'd had a brief fling.  After a large amount of beer, this guy and I ended up making out by firelight, and things got...intense.  My roommate left at some point, I think.  It's a bit hazy now, given the passage of more than a decade.  Anyway, at one point it became clear through my drunken fog that I was either going to have to sleep with this guy or find a way to get home, and I wasn't THAT easy.  I made the excuse of not having my stuff to sleep over and proceeded to DRIVE HOME.  Over 40 miles of winding, hilly country roads.  The stupidest thing I have ever done in my life, by far.  (Though, interestingly enough, the guy called up the girl who invited me to get my phone number so he could ask me out later, which I thought was sweet since I figured for sure it was just a hookup.  It WAS just a hookup, it just lasted about two months - yup.  I was a, um, easy woman.  At least, that spring.  The Spring of Love.  I had just had a nasty breakup with my third monogamous long-term relationship - nasty enough that furniture was flung - and I decided enough with relationships, men were scum and I was done with them.  Instead I got a dog.  Then I just had fun for a while, because the sex with myself just wasn't as satisfying.)

You meet God in an elevator. What is the one question you would ask Him?  Which direction is this elevator going?  Actually, since I have this problem with verbosity, I'd ask him What is the meaning of Life and to tell my mother I said I love her and miss her and hope not to see her too soon.

So there you have it!  Those were tough questions, T.  Anyone else want to put out put themselves on the spot?  Leave a comment to that effect and I'll email you with questions.  Then just answer them and post them on your blog.

Support Your Local Pharmacy

As I mentioned before, Nemo takes prilosec for his reflux, and we use the little independent pharmacy the next town over for his medication because the local Target refused to make a compound for him (if it weren't for the rest of my prescriptions and the fact that I do most of my non-perishable grocery shopping there, I'd totally break up with them.  I swear.).  He's been taking this stuff since about the middle of January, and we've had to make the run down there with one or more kids to go pick up the stuff that requires special care slightly less than every 30 days or so.  It costs the highest amount of all of our insurance co-pays, more per month than the copay for an office visit.  It's a damn shame the stuff works so well.

Anyway, last week I went with 3 of the four kids in the rain (this seems to be a pattern) to go get a new prescription filled, since they upped his dose at his 4 month checkup earlier this month when they discovered that he weighs in at a whopping 16 pounds and the previous dose wasn't doing much.  It's a small pharmacy; they only have about 3 shelves of token over the counter stuff, a rack of candy, a cooler with juices and sodas, and a downstairs area that houses their business in medical equipment - wheelchairs, crutches, bedside commodes, shower chairs, crutches, braces, that sort of thing.  The whole place is about the size of one floor of my townhouse, which while huge for a townhouse is rather small for a pharmacy.

They do, however, have a play area in the back with an assortment of books, fisher-price little people structures (though all of the people are gone), a couple of bean bags and small chairs, and a play kitchen.  I sent Little Man and Sunny there to play and went to stand in line to drop off the script.  They told me it would be 30 minutes and Nemo was getting fussy, so we left, drove across the street and got lunch, and went back.  When we went back in, I carried Nemo instead of using the stroller and just threw my debit card in my pocket since I knew we wouldn't be long and I didn't feel like taking the time to tie on my Babyhawk in the rain.

When we got to the counter to get the medicine, the pharmacist came walking out to talk to me.  He verified that we had gotten the previous prescription filled there the past two months, and I said yes.  He looked thoughtful for a second and then said:

"Well, we made a mistake.  Somehow the last two months when we ran it through your insurance we used the name brand prilosec, but we use the generic omeprazole in our preparation.  This time when I ran it through, it only came up with a $15 copay.  So, we owe you money.  I sure am sorry about that."

With that, he asked me how I wanted my money, if I needed $5s and $1s or if I wanted larger bills, and gave me what I wanted.  I left with a big, fat smile on my face and money in my pocket.

I'm not very confident that even if Target had noticed the mistake, they would have made any effort to fix it.  More than once I've tried to be honest and correct a mistake made in their favor and couldn't convince them to take my money because they couldn't understand why I wanted to be honest and wouldn't just keep the money in the first place.

Glad to know I'm not the only honest person out there.

Fun Mom

Oh, Hi!  Remember me?  I do still blog here.  I just needed some time off.

I am falling behind on a lot of my commitments due to the current situation with my grandfather, as well as a developing situation with my sister (panic attacks and doctors too quick to throw drugs at her, pat her head, and send her on her unhappy way without concurrent cognitive behavioral therapy) and my father (contract in Alabama extended for another year - yay!) and just a lot of other stuff I needed to get caught up on.  I'm still not caught up, but at least I made a huge dent in things.

Saturday I spent much of the day at a "playdate" with one of my oldest friends (not that we're old, we've just been friends a long time) who also happens to be the godmother of my oldest son and will be the godmother of my youngest son when he's baptized in a couple of months.  She has 4 kids approximately the same age as my 4 kids, so the big kids played and the babies cooed and smiled and drooled at each other, and she and I sat and talked and yawned and fed the babies.  It was great for my soul. 

Then we went to my grandfather's house on the way home and spent a couple of hours there visiting with him.  He maintains he needs to start driving again soon, but fortunately, his car keys are missing somewhere.  I don't have them, none of the other relatives will admit to knowing where they are, but they're gone.  This is a great thing.  He can't drive - it's not safe for anyone involved, but as I've mentioned before, he is a stubborn old goat, and he can't get it through his head that if he's having trouble getting up and walking then he can't drive safely.  He just sees it as us trying to take away his independence.  We've been in touch with the local live in help (frankly I think she hid the keys) and the social worker, and they are helping out, which is good because I don't want to have to call the state and have his license pulled.  Otherwise he is hanging in there - usually in good spirits, just lonely.

Sunday we spent much of the day doing a deep-clean-and-throw-out-a-thon in my family room.  We moved all of the furniture and vacuumed under and around it, put away all toys, moved some to storage, and threw out all of our videotapes, because DVDs are easier to store and anything we were really attached to is available on DVD.  Unfortunately, we found evidence that the rodents had been taking crumbs and cheerios and stuff off the floor and taking behind some tables and some of our storage bin racks and eating it there.  All of that has been cleaned up, vacuumed, and clorox wiped all over.  So if I drop dead in the next couple of months it's from the hantavirus I contracted from the mouse crap.  It was sooooo gross.  But it feels good to have that one room done, as it's the place we spend the most time when we aren't sleeping.  At least, it's done until the kids destroy it again.

Yesterday the kids were off school, and my SIL came up and we took our collective 6 kids to the indoor pool.  We had a blast.  Nemo tolerated it okay - I was worried because he hates his baths, but he managed without screaming until he got tired, at which point I wrapped him up in two towels and nursed and rocked him to sleep.  He napped about an hour at the pool.  We got all the kids bathed there at the pool, ate lunch, and went to a park.

This particular park is huge, a sprawling collection of a castle play area, a pirate ship play area, a maze, a rock climbing wall, a teeter totter that seats about 15, various animal sculptures that the kids can climb on, a musical area with a couple of xylophone bells, and various swings, small toy houses, and picnic tables scattered about.  It's a fully accessible park, which means some of the swings and play structures are appropriate for special needs kids, and it really is a fun place.  I won't take my kids there when I'm alone because the place is just too big and it's too easy to lose someone there.  Which happened yesterday.  We lost Trout, because she wandered off.

I had lectured all the kids before going into the park that they were to STAY TOGETHER AT ALL TIMES because it is too easy for someone to get lost there.  They knew that if they wanted to go someplace, say from the castle to the pirate ship, they needed to let me or my SIL know and we needed to move everyone together.  I had taken Little Man and Sunny to the bathroom, about a quarter mile away, and when I got back and we did a head count we couldn't find Trout.  Little Man had found a friend of his from his catechism class, and at one point we had her father and brother helping the rest of us search while her mother watched Sunny and Nemo.  I finally found her walking back across the maze to where we were.  She had decided she was much too hot and gone to the water fountain at the bathroom house a quarter mile away by herself, only to find the water fountain didn't work.  We left immediately and she was sent to her room the rest of the night.

I was glad because I got to go out and do something fun with the kids instead of work.  The dishes went undone, I'm behind at least 3 days in laundry, I let the bills sit til today, I didn't call my grandfather until evening, I didn't put together the latest two chairs that arrived yesterday - I just went out and had fun with my kids.  It was glorious until Trout wandered off, but even then she wasn't gone long enough for the full-on panic to set in.

I got the kids in bed early last night, got to watch all of American Idol uninterrupted, watched House with BDF, and went to bed early myself, only to toss and turn all night long because it was much too hot.  We put Sunny back in her bed a total of four times last night before giving up and letting her sleep at our feet.  Nemo slept between us and kept punching us in the heads, got up at 5 to nurse, puked hugely as soon as I put him down in the bassinet after nursing and burping, and then wanted to play when I got him changed and cleaned up.  I finally got a nap with a weird dream about sunrise.  In the middle of the night, Sunny woke up screaming that she saw a bear in the house.  She was shaking and just terrified.  It took a while for us to educate her about the fact that bears have their own houses and they don't want to come in ours. 

So!  I still have a bunch of real posts I want to write, like my reaction to the new child care behavior study that came out, and our manny, and other stuff, but I wanted to let you know I didn't fall in a black hole while I work on those things.  Just trying to get caught up and get a nap.

Edited to Add:  I'm over here today, so go check it out!

Take a Seat

BigDaddyFish and I got married young, and when you set up house when you are young you tend to be poor, so everything in your house is hand-me-down or cheap crap.  Slowly over the years we've been replacing some of our furniture as it wears out or we just get totally sick of it.  We have a few nice pieces, among them the dining room set given to us by my in-laws when we moved to this house, consisting of a killer hutch, table that can seat 8 comfortably, and the chairs that survived: one arm chair and three side chairs.

Well, the side chairs have decided that they aren't up to our large asses anymore, and the cheap windsor chairs from Target that we have been using for five years also decided to crap out beyond multiple repairs, last weekend.  Last Sunday we were down to three chairs - one windsor, one side chair that has Sunny's booster on it and Must. Not. Be. Disturbed, and the arm chair that we like to leave in our living room to make it easier for my MIL, who has Parkinsons, to get up.  That meant that for a family of 6 we had one functional chair at our dinner table.

Usually, this isn't a problem, because I have a Problem with Clutter, and the table tends to be buried a foot deep with random papers, bills, books, photos, toys, and other crap that I'm too lazy busy to deal with, but I've cleaned up my act a bit and we had been eating at the table of late.  By Wednesday I was sick of the lack of chairs, and late Wednesday night we ordered some chairs from Target.com.  Since we really didn't know what we wanted, we chose three different pairs of chairs to try them out.  We don't care if the furniture matches or not if it is functional and comfortable, and we don't want anything too nice until the children are old enough to keep from sticking Hello Kitty and Batman stickers all over it.  Plus, Target was offering 15% off all furniture purchases over $125, plus I had a 10% off coupon from them since I have a Target card. 

I checked my email this morning and noted that one of our pairs of chairs had shipped yesterday.  I was talking to BDF on the phone as I checked my email, and he said something to the effect of now we'll get our chairs early next week.  I said "Yeah, maybe, but maybe a miracle will happen and they'll show up today."  BDF scoffed at the possibility.

Not five minutes later, Sunny starts yelling "We got a package!  A big one!" and I thought for sure she was wrong because the doorbell didn't ring, but I went to the door to check and sure enough, there was a humongous box on our front steps.  Two chairs.  I was pissed that the UPS guy didn't ring the blasted doorbell, because of course he was gone by the time I got to the door, and I could have had him put the box in the house, but somehow Sunny and I wrangled the blasted thing in here.

Here's the math:

• 22 each of 2 different kind of washers
• 8 nuts
• 14 screws
• one mom
• three kids (Nemo didn't really help much)
• one pair of scissors
• two odd wrenches
• one screwdriver
• 1.5 hours

Equals two of these.  The better math is: shipping for 6 chairs, $124.  Discounts applied to order, $117.  Yup, we effectively get 6 chairs brought to our house for $7.  I can deal with that.

----------------------------------------

And because this wouldn't be a mommyblog without poop stories:

I was multitasking, talking to a friend on the phone trying to schedule a playdate while I was feeding Nemo his oatmeal and pears.  The bigs were out in the family room watching the TV -- some Nickelodeon show was blaring and I had the phone mashed into my ear so I could hear and the kids were shouting and I was trying desperately to ignore them when the words "Potty, carry, show, poopy, spill" managed to worm their way through the cacophony into my brain.

Sunny had used her little potty to do her business and tried to carry it into the kitchen to show me the results.  Somehow along the way she had tripped or something and spilled the contents onto the carpet in the middle of the family room.  She had been quite productive, if you know what I mean.

My jaw hung open, I hung up the phone with my friend, and tried to figure out how to deal with the mess.  We are getting rid of this carpet as soon as I can handle the nightmare of moving all our stuff off this level of the house (the most inhabited, of course) or when we move, whichever comes first, so I wasn't really worried about staining, but man, oh, man, what a fetid odor.  Now it just smells like Resolve, with just a hint of eau de crap underneath. 

Up next week: posts about The Manny, how Little Man likes to scare the crap out of me on a regular basis, a feel-good story about a small neighborhood pharmacy, and the complicated dysfunctional mess that is dealing with my family to care for my grandfather.  Remind me if I forget.

Fear of Flying

When I was seven years old, my grandfather took my sister and me down to Orlando to stay with my aunt and uncle, who were camping in Fort Wilderness in Disney.  My Aunt and Uncle drove down, I think, but my grandfather flew my sister and me, and the wonderful thing about being seven is that you are largely oblivious.  Blissfully, wonderfully oblivious.  I knew it took a while to get going, and about halfway through the flight I asked my grandfather to let me know once we'd taken off, because lacking the evidence to the contrary, I was fully convinced that all of the coloring and eating I was doing was while the plane was still sitting on the runway waiting to take off.

I didn't take another flight until I was 20 years old.  My college basketball team earned its way into the NCAA tourney, and the boosters flew the pep band out to support the team.  It was a fairly quick flight from Baltimore to Dayton, and while I was nervous I was largely distracted by my boyfriend at the time, who had stayed at the wild party that I made him take me home from and drank himself nearly to death the night before and who I was pretty sure was still drunk the next morning.  I was pissed at him and concerned for his welfare and knew he really should have been in a hospital rather than on a plane, but at that age I lacked the wherewithal to do anything about him.  But I digress.

In my former life as a technical writer for a large contractor working for government clients, I had to fly a few times for business.  The first set of flights was all the way across the country, from DC to Washington State, and I handled them just fine - I read mostly.  I was a bit nervous but it wasn't anything I couldn't handle.  About a year later I took a trip to San Francisco.  By this time I had "specialized" into supporting a group who did emergency planning.  The funny thing is that when you spend all day thinking about potential disasters it tends to skew your perception a bit, but you don't notice it until it interferes with how you live your life.

The trip out to San Francisco from DC was fine.  I sat next to the co-worker who was attending the meeting with me, an ex Army colonel who also had a master's degree, I think in physics or something, and who used to work for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.  He noticed my unease on the plane, so he kept me distracted by explaining to me what every single motion and noise and movement meant, what the plane was doing, and embellishing a bit by describing what would be done if a particular part failed.  While not really comforting, it worked for distraction purposes, and I made it out to the west coast if not happy about flying, then able to accept it as a necessary evil and able to cope.

The flight back to DC was in two legs - SF to Dallas/Ft. Worth, and there on to DC.  The flight from SF to DFW was fantastic.  The plane itself was only 3 weeks old, and we knew this because the captain was just tickled as all hell to be flying a brand spanking new plane and he told us so.  He also acted as a tour guide, getting on the intercom every few minutes, it seemed like, to tell us about a particular geographical feature, or the weather, or where we were.  It was fantastic.

We had to switch planes in DFW, and we switched that brand spanking new plane for Nasty Rusted Ready for the Scrap Heap plane.  It was awful - the thing had to have been 30 years old or more and I think it had its original upholstery.  Some of the seats had tears covered up with duct tape, and it was noisy as hell.  The captain never talked to us once.  DFW was experiencing windshear, so just taking off was a little hairy by itself.  The captain never turned off the seat belt signs, and we bounced around all over the place towards DC.

After quite a while of this, the flight attendant got on the intercom and told us that we were about 25 minutes outside of DC and that they "needed to advise you of a situation."  My first thought was that it was odd that we were 25 miles outside of the city because I hadn't felt the plane descending at all, and my second thought was "Wait -- a situation?  What kinda situation?  We don't need a situation.  OMG we're going to crash.  There's a bomb.  We're hostages.  What are we going to do?  We're going to die."  The flight attendant told us that a member of the crew heard a noise on takeoff and that they think it was just some cargo shifting, but to be on the safe side, emergency crews would be meeting us on the ground.

It was my first real understanding of the cliche about it being so quiet you could have heard a pin drop.  This was just a couple of months after the crash of a US Air 737 in Aliquippa, PA.  Everyone was understandably frightened.  A few people began softly praying in the front of the plane, a child started screaming, and I think I probably turned about six shades of white.  My thought process went something like this:

There was a crash last month.  The last thing they're going to do is tell us the truth about what they think is going on because they don't want us to panic.  They're going to minimize the problem.  We're going to crash.  And die.  It's going to hurt.  We're going to die.

I think I was gripping the armrests kinda tight - I had the window seat and there was an older gentleman with the aisle seat with his wife sitting across the aisle from him.  He started to tell me all about how they had travelled all over the world, into third-world airports, and this wasn't a big deal, that he had flown in all kinds of circumstances, and how "if you're going to crash, Dulles is a great airport for that, because it was built to handle that sort of thing."  WTF?  I think the stony glare I shot him told him he wasn't helping any.

One of the flight attendants noticed my duress and told me that they thought they might have blown a tire on the landing gear, but it was okay because we had three others on which to land.  That just reinforced my opinion that they were lying to us and that we WERE.  GOING.  TO.  DIE.

It was the weirdest landing ever.  It was very cloudy, so cloudy that I couldn't see the red light on the end of the wing that I was sitting over, and we never really did feel like we were descending much.  It was like we were up, up, up, up, then down.  No gradual descent.  Someone told me later that it sounded like it was an automated landing.  They had told us to brace for a bumpy landing.  We were enmeshed in this fog of white cloud - and then all of a sudden we were on the gound and there were bright lights everywhere, the flashing red and white orbs of the emergency equipment that was all over the place.  Nothing else was around.  It was surreal.  The landing was bumpy, but obviously successful.  I nearly peed myself with relief.

We never did find out what exactly the problem was.  As I was leaving the plane I saw the pilot still in the cockpit, bent over like he was looking under the dash of a car.  I was accustomed to the pilot greeting the passengers as they left the plane and shaking hands.  We never met the pilot.

I went home and went on with my life, and then I had to fly to San Antonio for another work conference.  Our entire group of 8 people was going on the same flight, at the ungodly hour of 5 am out of BWI.  My project leader picked me up at 3 am to get to the airport on time.  I was dreading the trip, but I thought it was more me not wanting to be away from BigDaddyFish than it was the trip itself.  I was oh, so wrong.

I was well prepared - I had plenty of books to keep me occupied, plenty of water to drink, and some dramamine to help me not feel queasy.  We went through security, got our passes, and when they called us to board I grabbed my carry on and followed my coworkers down the ramp to get on the plane, and promptly ran into an invisible wall.  My feet refused to function.  I could NOT force myself to step foot on the plane.  I had no idea why, but I couldn't.  Unfortunately, my co-workers noticed and yanked me on board - if I had been by myself I simply would have turned around and gone home.  I proceeded to have a meltdown instead.

I was the proverbial basket case.  I cried much of the time.  My project leader gripped my hand and tried to distract me, but I still startled at every movement and noise, and I left nail marks in her hand.  I said 5,836 Hail Marys.  I behaved like a terrified child.  It was awful.  I was embarrased.  Humiliated.  Mortified.

I was convinced that since our entire group was going on the same plane we were sure to crash, wiping out the whole group.  Stupid, huh?  Except that one of my co-workers missed the flight, supposedly because he forgot his ticket, but I had seen it and him in the boarding area.  We were a bunch of emergency planners - I'm absolutely certain to this day that he did it on purpose.  I wish I'd known because I think it would have made me feel a bit better.

Word about my distress got around at the conference, which meant everyone tried to help me by telling me all of their bad flight/turbulence/scary landing/near miss stories.  Just what my vivid imagination needed.  To this day I have no idea how I got back on the plane to come home - I've blocked it out.

My boss never did ask me to travel anywhere else that required a plane trip to get there.  I've taken all sorts of train trips and driven all up and down the east coast, but no planes.  Since September 11 it's been a lot easier to tell people I don't fly - most think it's because of 9-11, but for me, that just sealed the deal.

So why am I telling you this?  Because I'm trying to find a way to get Nemo and me to Chicago in July for BlogHer without flying. 

Quickie

Sex when you have four children under the age of 8 is almost non-existent for a variety of reasons.  First, when you're breastfeeding your libido is in the toilet, so it frequently just doesn't occur to you that sex might be something worth spending time on (on the other hand, your husband?  He'd be happy to remind you).  Second, you typically are just so worn out and touched out at the end of the day that all you can think about is spending quality time in bed....sleeping.  Snoring and drooling, if it's really really good.  Throw in the probability that one of the three mobile short two-footed creatures living in your house is going to need something/get their feelings hurt/smack someone/get mortally injured just when things get interesting, and you quickly learn that the most important characteristic of sex after four kids is necessarily speed.

Sunday morning I gave the kids gum chewing and bubble blowing lessons, thanks to some gum that Sunny got as part of one of her presents at her birthday party on Saturday (which was done at Michaels and I highly recommend it - cheap, easy, and fun).  The kids had never had gum before (I just KNOW it's going to end up in Trout's hair - doesn't matter who's chewing it) so they thought it was great fun, and it was new and exciting to them.  I then sent them off downstairs to watch a movie while BigDaddyFish and I had some Alone Time behind locked door (we recognize that it's only a matter of time before they figure out how to unlock the door so this option will be gone to us soon).  My apologies to those who know us in real life for the images that are about to be imprinted on your brains, but this was just too good not to share.

We have a mission style bed that has about a four inch ledge at the top of the headboard and footboard.  Bedside space is at a premium due to my proclivity for hoarding books and the shear volume of crap needed to care for small babies, so we have a variety of stuff kept on the headboard: a box of tissues, a box of baby wipes, a stack of diapers, the remote for the cd boom box, stuff like that.  It's a good solid bed, built by the Amish, so we've never worried about anything coming down off the headboard, because frankly we just don't have that many earthquakes in Maryland.  Sunday morning is a good time for us to have Alone Time because we are usually well rested, I'm not yet all touched out, and the kids are happy to occupy themselves tearing the house apart without bothering us too much, if we're quick, and we still have the rest of the day to put it back together.  Nemo will go back down for a nap after morning nursing, so we simply relocate the chair he typically falls asleep in to somewhere where we aren't. 

This Sunday after gum lessons BDF and I were having Alone Time, and it was Good.  It had finally stopped hurting (which is common after birth, even with a c-section), we were both in a good frame of mind and well rested, and apparently it was a bit more vigorous than usual, because just as things were getting to a climax, a three-quarters full water bottle came flying down off the headboard smacking me dead in the nose.  I gasped up at BDF, he looked down at me in shock, and then we cracked up, laughing hard enough that we cried.  I remember when I was young someone telling me something to the effect that it was important to keep your sense of humor about sex and I thought it was odd - what's funny about sex?  Now I know.  As we continued to chuckle while we cleaned up and got dressed BDF says "You know what?  This is blogworthy."

Indeed.

Sunny's Story

Sunny's birth story is probably the most mundane of them all - the issue with Sunny's birth was apprehension.  Since Little Man had been in the NICU, we were TERRIFIED of a repeat performance.  Plus there's the whole issue of the more you do this the more you know about what can go wrong. 

My pregnancy was fine - no sickness, no gestational diabetes, just the usual complaints, plus having to keep up with two preschoolers.  Monday, March 15 we went into the hospital around noon, I think, and went for our c-section.  Sunny was the only one of my kids that wasn't delivered by the glorious Dr. G., so it took a bit longer to get ready since there was a lot more to review with Dr. L.  I was a little surprised when she asked me if I was interested in a tubal, since that was the first time it had come up, but since we weren't certain yet if we were done, we said no (and we all know how that turned out).  I had arranged to have my friend J in the delivery room with us, since I knew from experience that BigDaddyFish isn't much help to me once the baby is out - he watches the surgery over the drape and then goes with the baby.  The anesthesiologist was the grumpiest of all the ones I had, but he kept me pain free and didn't kill me, so I guess he did a good enough job.  The surgery took a lot longer than all the others had, but Sunny came out crying lustily and was a perfect baby.  It seemed to take forever to sew me up, though.

In recovery, I got incredibly cold, so they put me in this sort of weird air blanket thing that pumps warm air around the body - I looked like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, only with a Virgin Mary sort of slant, since it was wrapped around my head like the Holy Mother's veil/habit thingy (I am sure it has a name, but since I am a Bad Catholic, I don't know what it is).  The nurse and my friend J helped me get turned on my side so I could nurse Sunny right away.  And nurse she did.  It was her favorite thing to do right from the start, so much so that I didn't think I'd ever get her weaned, and it took Mommy and Daddy going away on a trip just before she turned two to get it done.  My favorite picture from her birth is her nursing away all wrapped up against me inside this goofy air blanket.

And that was it.  We stayed in the hospital three days and came home.  Nothing special.  And everything special.

The remarkable thing about Sunny is that she's even here at all.  We weren't planning on any more kids.  We got rid of a lot of our baby stuff.  I had always had long, long, terribly long cycles, like 40 and more days, so we were using natural family planning as our form of birth control.  It had worked for a long time before so we had no reason to believe it wouldn't work again.  I had wanted to have another child, but BDF only wanted two, and we were in the process of discussing our family size when I smelled a pop tart.

Yes, I said I smelled a pop tart.  Someone in my office was making a pop tart in the toaster at work and it smelled - strong.  Not bad, just really really strong.  I asked the person what kind of pop tart it was, because my pop tarts never smelled like that.  She looked at me funny and said "Brown sugar and cinnamon?"  I thought it was odd - the only time my sense of smell was ever that sensitive was....hmmmmm.

At lunch that day I had a weird burping problem.  I just couldn't stop belching.  I thought it was odd - the only time I couldn't control my burps was......hmmmmm.

Then I realized I had been to the bathroom more that day than I did usually, and this made me think even more that something.  was.  weird.  So I put one, two, and three together, and went home and took a pregnancy test, certain it would be negative and I would be expecting my period any day.  It turned positive right away. 

The first emotion I had was confusion - when the hell did this happen?  I looked back at the calendar and the only way this possibly happened was on day 28 of my cycle.   I was flummoxed.  I had never had a 28 day cycle in my life.  Ever.  48, sure.  But never 28.

The next emotion was fear.  BigDaddyFish had not yet come on board with wanting a third child, so I was petrified that the pregnancy would cause a huge rift between us.  I called him on the phone at work crying my eyes out, saying "I'm pregnant!  What are we going to do?!?"

"Um, we're gonna have another baby" he said calmly.

"But you didn't want another one.  How are we going to do this?" I was absolutely freaked.

"It'll be fine.  We're going to have another baby."  Who is this mild-mannered reporter and what did he do with my husband?  He was the proverbial calm, cool, and collected, and I was the proverbial basket case.

Wow.

She was my easiest pregnancy, my easiest birth, my hardest recovery.  She is bright, happy, agreeable, funny, joyful, kind.  She fights like crazy with her big brother and loves him to pieces at the same time.  She loves to sing and dance and play dress up and dolls and family with her big sister.  She dotes on her little brother.  She's my little helper around the house.  She loves to color and read with her Daddy.  She is our Sunny girl and she is three today.  Happy birthday, baby girl.

The Kindness of Strangers and the Crazies of Husbands

Today I went to Trader Joe's and took Nemo with me.  Since he can't yet sit in the cart seat and sit up straight I had him in the Babyhawk and he slept the entire trip all snuggled up against me.  When I had pulled into my parking space I pulled through, so I pulled up to the very front of the space so I'd have enough room to open my liftgate to load up my groceries.  They don't allow the customers to take the carts out into the parking lot themselves, but they will gladly help you out to your car if you wish.  Since it was only five bags and I was parked in the front row, though, I grabbed the lightest bag when I came out and went to load Nemo in the car, then get the rest of the groceries.  When I got to my van, however, the person who parked behind me pulled up too far, over the line of the space, so I had barely 6 inches of clearance to open my lift gate.  I put the groceries down, stepped to the side to open the liftgate sideways, put my bag of groceries in, then walked around to the side of the van to get Nemo out of the babyhawk.  For some reason, I was having trouble untying the knots in the straps, and as I stood there and struggled, a woman walked up toward me with a bag of groceries, and I thought she was going to the car behind me.

"These are yours - I saw you there and thought you'd need some help."  With that, that wonderful angel woman put the bag of groceries in my car, and by the time I finally got myself all untangled from the babyhawk and got Nemo in the car, she had loaded all of my remaining bags in my car.

A total stranger helping out someone in need.  If you don't live around the DC burbs you may not understand just how rare a helping hand to this extent is - people hold doors, pick up dropped things, maybe, if you are very lucky, but I've lived here my whole life and never have I even witnessed someone helping someone out like this.  Any time I have attempted to help someone to this extent people act suspicious and get so defensive, so unfortunately I've learned that it usually isn't worth the risk to even offer to help.  I know what she risked to do so, and I responded as I would have wanted someone to respond to me.

I thanked her profusely, probably six times, strapped Nemo into his carseat, shut my lift gate, and grinned the whole way home.

If by some weird cosmic or divine coincidence you read this blog, dear wonderful person, thank you from the bottom of my heart.  You made my day.  I fully intend to pay it forward.

-------------------------------------------

And for some weird humor (and yes, I have his permission to post this):

Sunday morning I woke up to the phone ringing, and instead of the dreaded call about my grandfather it was my father freaking out about his taxes.  After calming him down I hung up and just sighed, still not even roused out of bed yet.

"I've got a disney sticker on my scrotum."

"What?"

"I've got a sticker stuck to my nuts.  In two pieces.  At first I thought it was some sort of weird growth on my testicles and I was laying here contemplating my impending death, but then I looked.  It's a princess sticker.  On my nuts.  In two pieces."

I just looked at him and blinked.  We hadn't even sat up in bed yet.  Then I cracked up.  It must have come off our clothes and ended up in the bed.

That's what he gets for sleeping naked.