Dental hygiene: Well, crap edition
Help, my face is numb.
Backing up: What better way to create a gentle reentry into normal life after a relaxing getaway than to visit the dentist?
Backing up even further: Once upon a time, we were Visit The Dentist Every Six Months Like Clockwork people. I believe in good oral health, truly. But… at some point I had to cancel a cleaning for Chickie because she was in the hospital (yes, this was years ago, I KNOW I SUCK THANKS) and then our dentist stopped taking our insurance and the rest of us stopped going and hadn’t found a new dentist, and somehow—presto, chango, lazy-o—years elapsed and none of us had been to the dentist. Whoops. It wasn’t intentional, it just sort of… happened. So the good news is that we finally got our crap together and Otto went to the dentist a couple of weeks ago and the kids and I went yesterday.
The bad news is that I had a cracked filling and Chickadee needs to have her wisdom teeth out and Monkey came back from his cleaning with a hearty, “Here, Mom, I brought you some gingivitis!”
They had a cancelation for today, so I got my filling fixed, but I am pretty sure my entire face was injected with novocaine. I can’t stop playing with my lower lip, because it’s just this flubby slab of numbness. Fun!
While I go continue to marvel at the never-ending entertainment that is proper dental attention, you could go over to Alpha Mom and read all about how I love Snapchat. No, really. I do. No numb lips required, even.
Vegas, baby
So. Kira and I went to Vegas and took the town by storm!
Hahahahaaaaaaaaaaaa. Not really. But we had a good time.
It started like this: Every summer for the past 10 (!!) years or so, Kira and I have conspired to see one another. As ours is one of those “fake Internet friendships” where we simply met online while both of us were freshly divorced and newly wrecked, we’re not REAL friends, of course, but somehow at that first meeting long ago it turned out that neither of us was a pedophile living in a basement, and our friendship turned into a real boy, Geppetto (a real girl?), and we have been soulmates ever since. This is slightly inconvenient for our husbands, but not, because as wonderful as both of our husbands are (and believe you me, each was assessed in full by the non-marrying friend for worthiness prior to the actual gettin’ hitched part), neither of them wants to hear the sheer volume of words that pour from our mouths when we are in one another’s company.
We’ve somehow managed to visit once a year for a decade, even during the leanest years. Because it’s important. I will forever owe a debt of gratitude to Joshilyn for hosting us for that first girls’ weekend in 2005, during a time when I was depressed and directionless and had forgotten that sometimes girlfriends make it all better. Also, that was my first visit to Georgia, and at the time I had NO IDEA I’d be moving here not too long after. After that first time, we took turns visiting each other’s houses, but—I don’t know if you know this—we have rather a lot of children between us, and so there were always many small people in our faces during each visit. This isn’t AWFUL, you understand, but we felt like after a decade, we deserved a trip just for us. So earlier this year we pulled out a map and said, Hey, what’s between us? Maybe we can meet in the middle…? And so we planned to fly to… Texas. read more…
Greetings from Sin City
I helped Otto put several large pieces of furniture (such as my giant L-shaped desk, which was serving as the world’s jankiest island in our kitchen during the floor install) back into my office once the floor was FINALLY completed at about 9:00 on Monday night.
[Aside: Apparently the installing parent company called with a “courtesy post-project satisfaction survey” and Otto shared that we had not expected installation in a small room to take… nearly 11 hours. He said that the woman on the phone was horrified.]
Was my darling husband hanging shelves and such at 10:00 that night? Yep. But eventually most of the big stuff was back in there and we said “good enough” and collapsed into bed. Then I left the next morning and I am now in Las Vegas with Kira, which is a whole ‘nother story I’ll tell you about soon, because it starts, of course, with me being insufferable during planning, and ends with me being insufferable while walking around our giant hotel and saying not-at-all weird things like “I THINK I SAW THAT RESTAURANT ON CSI ONCE” and “Do ALL the people in the casino look miserable or just the extremely sad people playing slots?” I’m super fun. Also? Otto was all “You should go see the Hoover Dam!” and we are all “Hey, they have alcoholic milkshakes here!” So.
Also please note that Kira’s and my love for one another is an enduring, beautiful thing, especially when our room reservation got screwed up and instead of the two queen beds we SHOULD’ve had, we were given a room with a king bed. “Do you want to be the big spoon or the little spoon?” I asked my longtime friend.
“Touch me while I’m sleeping and you’ll draw back a stump,” she replied, full of the sweetness and adoration I’ve come to enjoy over the years.
While I go figure out how to do Vegas exactly wrong (we are not gambling or sightseeing, but mostly just talking a lot, which I guess we could’ve done anywhere, but definitely nowhere as SHINY as this place), you can check out the latest installment of me blathering about teen driving over at Alpha Mom. Only this time, we tried to make it useful: I made up a driving contract you might find useful. I hope it helps. Also I hope we can figure out how to get out of the hotel today. (It’s good to have goals.)
Floors, fluffy-buddies, and filth
Hey, remember when I painted my office? Like, a million years ago? And I was all excited about it but then we decided to order new flooring and we’ve been living life with my entire professional life (contents of my office; whatever) strewn all over the dining room and kitchen? The new floor is going in RIGHT NOW as I type. Finally.
Of course, I’m leaving town tomorrow. So, uh, either I’ll reassemble my office tonight before I go or my family can enjoy having my desk in the middle of the kitchen for a few more days. No biggie, right? Right.
Normally I would’ve been terribly impatient about it all, but because life is never dull around here, I’ve been quite busy… cleaning up poop and worrying that Duncan is dying. (Does this seem like a recurring theme? Because wasn’t he just sick a few weeks ago??) Over the last week Duncan was once again kind of lethargic and off and he stopped jumping up on the furniture to be with us and then he started having accidents in the house… and of course it was a holiday weekend so the vet was closed. He didn’t really scare me until the night (on the weekend! of course!) when he refused to get up to come to bed, even, but slept in the crate in the family room all night because he didn’t want to move. I’m not going to lie; I went to bed that night wondering if he was a lot sicker than we thought and maybe the next day would bring a terrible discovery… but… he slept all night and was happy to see us in the morning. After a few bad days he rallied and now he seems to be fine. Stinker. read more…
Lessons learned (veggie/college edition)
We returned from our whirlwind campus touring trip with the realization that yes, Virginia, this college thing is truly right around the corner and Big Decisions need to be made. That is both exciting and unnerving. And every time I try to remind myself that everything will work out just fine, I remember that once we get Chickadee through this process I have to start it all over again with Monkey, like, immediately.
Needless to say, we came home and I said “Oh, we don’t have any food!” and went to the store and promptly purchased All The Ice Cream. I think that’s reasonable, under the circumstances.
Also while we were gone, it rained a ton (on the heels of it having been approximately a billion degrees), so my garden is… experiencing growing pains. Specifically, all of my beautiful nearly-ripe tomatoes proceeded to split and in many cases, fall right off the vine. Still, I’m not complaining. Even ugly tomatoes can be turned into delicious tomato sauce.
There was the matter of discovering HALF a tomato dangling from a vine, one day, and that was bizarre (my beds are in a fenced area), but then later that night we let Licorice out and she came back smelling VERY TOMATO-Y and the other half had vanished and, well, SOMEONE is now answering to “rotten tomato-faced thief.”
So clearly I’m no help on the gardening front, but if you’re curious about my take on questions to ask while touring colleges, I’ve got you covered over at Alpha Mom.
Still recovering, but…
… it’s a good day, y’know? I like rainbows and they seem to be everywhere.
So just a quickie redirect, today: I thought folks would be tired of hearing about teaching a kid to drive, but I got a question about it at Alpha Mom, so check it out if you’re in that stage of life. (Spoiler: No, holding the dashboard with one hand and your face with the other is not the proper driver training position.)
While we sweat into puddles
Greetings from… somewhere. I’m not sure where we are, right at this moment. We’ve stopped for lunch on a whirlwind Tour Of Campuses and so far we are still speaking to each other and cheerful, so things are going great. This is especially impressive when you consider that it’s currently 90-something and 70-something-percent humidity and we just spent hours tromping around a campus behind a VERY perky young thing who kept asking Chickadee, “Do ya like it? Huh?” (If there is anything Chickadee loves more than melting in the heat, it’s someone asking her repeatedly if she is happy and engaged. I had to stifle a snicker every time it happened. She kept answering, “… yes…?” which was pretty much Chickie-ese for “Please stop talking to me.”)
Anyway. We’ll keep hydrating and touring, and while we do that, you can go over to Alpha Mom and read about my summer rules for teenagers, if you like.
Hole in the bucket (once more with feeling)
Have I mentioned that I am slightly… er… underemployed at the moment? And how that’s just fine, because I haven’t had a slow period in over a decade, and it’s summer, and we are doing Fun Things and years and years of being completely mentally ill about money mean that I can slack for a little while and we won’t be in financial dire straits or anything? And it’s all good, no problems, what a lovely and much needed break, we just have to be a little more careful and it’s no problem?
Well. I have all this TIME on my hands, now. Time I don’t normally have. Wouldn’t a lull in work be the PERFECT time to paint my office finally? Plus Monkey was going to be away for a while and then Otto went off on a trip and it was just me and Chickadee and, yes, sure, Orange Is The New Black wasn’t going to watch itself, but we finished it in two days (it was the weekend! GIRLS’ WEEKEND with bonding and lesbian prisoners, DUH) and then the following Monday I picked up my special-order, made-from-unicorn-horn-and-fairy-dust paint, and it was time to get down to business. Surely this would be NOTHING like previous DIY projects of snowballing magnitude, right? Right!
Allow me to tell you in words how the pre-painting prep went: I discovered that I have a lot of crap in my office. A LOT OF CRAP. I had a weird giant shelf on the wall that ultimately had to be unbolted and then chiseled off, and I have a giant desk and a filing cabinet and endless bookshelves and a coat rack and and and AND. We emptied most of the office into the dining room, and moved the remaining few big things (desk, futon couch) into the center of the room. It was… not fun, but we got it done. Next up was spackling and sanding. Then I started taping trim while Chickadee removed outlet plates, and that’s when I realized two very important things. read more…
Making our own food and entertainment
Here in Georgia it was rainy, rainy, rainy for a while and now the temperature is hovering around 100 all this week. In other words: My garden is going bananas and it’s HOOOOOOOOOT (um, very hot, not hoot) out and I’m getting a little loopy.
Yesterday I went out first thing in the morning to water, and discovered that as soon as the soil was soft, several of my tomato plants wanted to fall over. (They have cages! and stakes! and twine! and yes, I spend more time/energy on those damn tomatoes than my children, but the tomatoes never tell me I’m ruining their lives.) There’s really nothing like wrestling plants into submission at 6:30 in the morning when it’s already 80 degrees and 5 billion percent humidity out, lemme tell you. While I was doing that, I discovered that one of my basil plants was about ready to take over Atlanta, so I cut it down and made a delicious pesto that afternoon.
Of course, while I was prepping the basil, we discovered several stowaways. Ants and weird beetles get smushed, sorry. But it turned out that we had two baby praying mantises (discovered at different times) and those required careful study and filming and transportation back out to nature. Maybe this is only funny to us (we have watched it at least a dozen times and it’s only getting funnier), but first I “ruined” Chickadee’s film, then the mantis did. Bear in mind that this fella is about half an inch long. Enjoy!
Baby Praying Mantis! from woulda on Vimeo.
Ain’t no party like a clearance sale party
First: THANK YOU to everyone who responded to yesterday’s post. I found it very helpful, and the girlchild read all your responses as well. I love having a collective brain-trust to draw on so that it’s not always just WELL MOM THAT WAS JUST YOU. Turns out that nearly every female I know has a story of Mean Girls Back In The Day, which is sad, but also somewhat validating. So thank you for sharing your stories.
Second: How many posts can I write about shopping at thrift stores? A bunch, it turns out. Especially when I’ve just scored huge at a ridiculous sale. You can check out my latest at Alpha Mom, though it’s less about shopping and more about what my kid teaches me while we do. She’s turning out pretty great, that girl of mine. (And that brand-new Elie Tahari blouse I got for a buck isn’t so bad, either.)