Miniature party animal
My mystery Weird Back Pain got much worse and then it got better—I think that chiropractors are trained to make it happen that way, because if they just instantly cured you, you might feel like their job was too easy. No, first they work on you and you spend the rest of the day wondering if it might just be easier to lay down and die, and then you wake up the next morning going, “Huh. I think I feel better.” Not that I’m complaining, mind you. I am definitely FOR the “I think I feel better” part. (In this particular case I suspect the chiro merely scared my injury into submission. She said she was concerned I might have pleurisy given the location and behavior of the pain. But then I Googled it and decided I was definitely not okay with having that, and POOF, I got better. Woo!)
So, given that yesterday 1) I decided to LIIIIIIVE and 2) the kids were off with their dad, Otto and I decided to spend the day Doing Things. I found myself uncharacteristically concerned about the dog, because in the seven months we’ve had her (wow, I can’t believe we’ve had her for seven months) she’s not been left home alone for more than a few hours at a time. I’m here with her all day during the week, and on the weekends we tend not to be out for too long, and yesterday, well, we planned to be out the entire day. read more…
Love through gritted teeth
So yesterday I woke up—after a night of half-awake pain and restlessness—with a stabbing pain just below my shoulder blade that only hurts when I move. Or breathe. So really, it’s no biggie at all, except of course that it is.
Now, I’ve certainly been known to Mess Up My Back through nothing more than foolishly existing or picking up something heavy, but I know EXACTLY what happened to my back two nights ago, and it is this: I went to bed stressed out and overwrought and through the miracle of psychosomatic neuroses I woke up with some bullshit injury. It seems like it would make more sense for my body to just politely jot off a note—perhaps, say, “Dear Mir, This is too much stress and soon it will make us hurt, so maybe have some ice cream and chill out, instead? Love, Your Body”—but that’s not what happened.
So I crept through yesterday holding myself as still as possible, enjoying a hearty diet of Advil and Tylenol and even an expired Vicodin I found in my bathroom. (It didn’t help. It did, however, make me nauseous. So that was super.) I grumped my way through the day and wasn’t much better by evening. read more…
With $3 in my wallet
So today has been completely awesome so far. I knew that first thing this morning Chickadee had a pediatrician appointment, and I’d carefully arranged my day so that it wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, right around dinner last night I was feeling pretty proud of myself for having worked ahead and such so as to have a couple of hours to spare this morning without any difficulty. Yay, me!
Of course—as is typical the moment I’m feeling on top of things—hubris decided to smack me back down, hard. It started at bedtime last night. “Mom. Mooooooom!” Monkey dragged his way down the stairs, eyes dark hollows, nose running faster than he could chase it with a fistful of Kleenex. “I need some snuffly medicine. Please.” I gave him a decongestant and remarked on how allergy season has been really rough this Spring, but after three more trips downstairs and the grand finale of “Myyyy eeeeeeeeear!” and associated sobbing at 10:00 or so, I had to admit he was likely more sick than allergic.
Well, we were going to the ped, anyway. No problem! read more…
Risen, indeed
If you ask me which holiday is my favorite, I will never answer Easter, and I really don’t know why. I mean, Easter has a lot to recommend it: There’s generally an abundance of pork fat and a low Family Obligation Quotient, plus the candy is plentiful. And really, while I’m as excited to celebrate babies being born as much as the next person, it’s quite a bit flashier when the dead rise, no? Me, I’ve given birth to babies. I have never—not once!—resurrected myself or anyone else from the grave. As miracles go, Easter is the clear winner.
Miracles and pork fat; two great tastes that taste great together. [Oh, that’s so sacrilegious. I apologize. But you know the game where you add “… in bed” to every fortune cookie fortune? On Easter we play a similar game where we prepend “Christ is risen” to each and every declarative for similar fun. “Christ is risen, let’s eat!” “Christ is risen, have some chocolate!” “Christ is risen, make Him some coffee already!” etc. We’re serious about our sacrilege around here.]
Anyway, the point is that our Easter was lovely. read more…
Sometimes boring is good
It’s Friday, and THANK GOD it’s Friday, because it means I can direct you elsewhere. And some Fridays I think, “This is kind of a cop-out, writing about what I ate this week or how much I hate my elliptical or how many closets I’ve cleaned, because nobody cares about that,” but this Friday is different.
This Friday, the alternative to directing you to my scintillating Five Full Plates post about switching to cloth napkins and such is to relive the horror of Monkey’s retelling of the “you and your body” talks they’ve been having at school this week, or to share the “anti-drug education” that’s happening at the middle school at the same time.
[Hint: “Someone asked if you can have sex with a doorknob. I’M NOT KIDDING.” Another hint: “Someone on the bus had something that looked like dried grass rolled up in a little tube of white paper. Why is that?” It’s almost like public school is just daring me now, I swear.]
So. Napkins! Napkins are nice and boring. And don’t make my head explode. Hooray!
Love is where you see it
I have a young friend who’s going through a difficult time, right now. And so I counseled her—feeling impossibly old and insensitive and Terribly “Adult Who Doesn’t Get It”—to try finding one thing every day that makes her happy, for a week, and to focus on that. “It will help,” I told her, knowing that she was probably rolling her eyes (internally if not externally) and thinking about how I just don’t understand.
The thing is, I totally DO understand. I mean, it may have been a long time since my first heartbreak, but hello, here is my six-year-long shrine to Things I Obsess Over Sometimes When I Probably Should Just Move On, and what I really wanted to say was, “Oh, honey, I understand the impulse to wallow, heck, I may have INVENTED the impulse to wallow, and no one loves a good wallow more than me, sister. But then, sometimes, you have to force yourself up out of the mud and remember that life is still worth living.”
Of course, I also must acknowledge that someone basically tried to tell me exactly that when I was around her age, and do you know what I thought? I thought that no one had ever hurt as badly as I was hurting, certainly not the advice-giver, and she just didn’t UNDERSTAND and the only way to cope with my pain was clearly to 1) mope relentlessly and 2) write bad poetry. read more…
I am not a southern lady
Three years after moving to Georgia, I am still learning the lingo. I am still learning that there is a segment of the population here that is always going to believe that 1) I talk too fast and 2) I am blunt to the point of rudeness. Me, I don’t think I speak particularly fast, nor do I think of myself as rude (though I’ll agree with blunt), but this is a dixie/yankee thing, I guess.
One of the things I’ve learned since moving here is that it’s “polite” to let other people be wrong and/or assholes rather than to stand your ground. That goes over with my personal stance on life (give me honesty or give me death!) about as well as you might imagine. And I’m not even talking about handling a situation with a soft smile and polite words vs. getting angry, I am talking about the flat-out expectation that it is only polite to concede no matter what flavor of bullshit someone is trying to feed you.
This is why I will never be a proper southerner, I guess. read more…
My math comes up short
If you know anything about me, you know that I am frugal. It’s sort of a calling, really, in that I am incapable of just spending money without thinking about it. I must get the best deal. The most value for my dollar! It must all be LOGICAL and allow me to say BUT LOOK HOW MUCH I SAVED.
There are certain areas of life where the opportunity to save a few pennies is either very complicated or non-existent. Groceries, for example—I was just chatting with someone this morning about how that whole “hardcore couponing” thing really only works if you’re buying stuff that for the most part isn’t actually food. I’ve yet to see a coupon on organic carrots or local strawberries. And sometimes I create a logic circle that works out in my mind, like, “Well, I cannot possibly cut my own hair. And getting it cut somewhere cheap always turns out badly. So I will pay for a good cut, but then I will train myself to cut everyone ELSE’s hair in the house, and then the money that I’m saving THERE means I’m not spending much on MY hair, at all.” It works for me. Mostly.
But sometimes, I get caught up in the numbers and fail to factor in other stuff. Like, say, stupidity. read more…
How to torment your fruitaholic
Most dogs will go completely berserk for meat, and while Licorice is perfectly happy to eat that meat out of your hand (or off your plate, or the floor, or whatever), her very favorite thing appears to be fruit. You cannot sit down with an apple or a banana without her pouncing on top of you and sitting there with pleading, velvet-painting-esque sad eyes that speak of years of sorrow and starvation. And a few days ago when I was scooping a cantaloupe in the kitchen I thought she was going to stroke out with all of the prancing she was doing to get my attention. (“Hey! Down here! See me? Me, the starving yet adorable one? So! HUNGRY!”)
Of course, if you have a little dog who loves fruit, and you are us, you see this not so much as an opportunity to be a hero as a chance to have some fun at the poor pooch’s expense. Because it turns out that half a cantaloupe rind is larger than her head, and that it’s really, really funny to drop banana strings across her snout so you can watch her try to slurp them down into her mouth. (No one ever accused us of being kind. Or hard to entertain, for that matter.)
Good thing my husband always has a camera ready. read more…
1,000 words about my closet
Today is Friday, and that means I have the luxury of directing you elsewhere, which is good because otherwise I would have to tell you about the letter I got in the mail yesterday. That letter included a handy chart that had drawings and statistics and the body of it said:
Dear parents of Chickadee Lastname,
Your child participated in our school scoliosis screening program and ZOMG! How have you never noticed that her spine is bent? SHE FLUNKED! TOTAL FLUNKAGE! TAKE HER TO YOUR DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY!
And because we totally don’t trust you to have the crap scared out of you by this letter, you also need to have your doctor sign this form and send it back by this date, because we don’t want any crippled hunchbacks at our school.
Sincerely,
Random Public Heath NurseP.S. YOU ARE A CRAPPY PARENT.
Okay, maybe that’s not an exact transcript, but you get the gist. Thank goodness I’m not the sort of person who overreacts, right?
Anyway, nevermind that. I shall reserve my full freak-out for after the doctor checks her out. In the meantime, why not head on over to Five Full Plates to read my second installment in our Spring Cleaning series—it’s all about my closet. And the rest of my bedroom. Fascinating, I know. But much less anxiety-provoking than that stupid letter.