You just don’t even wanna know
I told someone yesterday that if our life right now was a novel or a movie, I’d be rolling my eyes at how unrealistic it is, because NO ONE has luck that bad. It’s just not believable.
In other words: How was your weekend? Ours involved The Hunger Games, and then stomach flu. Yes. Because of course it did. And it’s not like the kid hasn’t missed a bazillion days of school already….
Anyway, because I suspect you’d rather not hear stories about rainbow gummy worm puke (see?), today you can go on over to Off Our Chests and read about flying, instead. What greater joy is available to the modern world, except possibly having an unmedicated root canal? Exactly.
It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Supernerd!
The last few days have kind of beaten me down, which you wouldn’t think would be possible, given that I keep (stupidly) thinking to myself, “Well, it’s not like things can get any WORSE.” HAHAHAHA. HA.
Chickadee just scored herself a sports medicine doc and some regular physical therapy, possibly because someone realized there was a doctor we hadn’t seen/needed yet. But I have to say I do like the concrete nature of this particular problem. (“You have iliotibial band syndrome and that is fixed via rest, ice, anti-inflammatories, and physical therapy.” It’s such a nice change from “We don’t really know what’s wrong with you exactly or if this will help.” Refreshing, really.)
And of course in the midst of this, she was gearing up for the final Reading Bowl competition today—State Championship, a.k.a. the end of the line in this particular event, or Bookworm Nirvana—and for some reason really not appreciating my jokes about how it was a good thing Reading Bowl doesn’t require a lot of running. (Whatever. I thought I was hilarious.) read more…
Fancy a spot of tea?
Monkey is back to school again, leaving a trail of sodden, wadded up Kleenex behind him where he goes. (Dear Hippie School: I’m sorry. I’ll send in some hand sanitizer.) Chickadee is also at school—inbetween the doctors’ appointments—though today we have to go see an orthopedist because something is inexplicably wrong with her hip, and also possibly because an orthopedist may be the only specialist we haven’t seen this year yet. (HAHAHAHAHA HA HA haaaaaaa ha *sob*.)
Whether it’s shared germs or stress or the ridiculous level of pollen going on here right now, I’m feeling the strong urge to curl up in bed with some tea for… oh, let’s say a week. Wouldn’t that be nice? Sadly, I don’t think it’s going to happen.
But! I can have that cup of tea. And over at Off Our Chests I’m thinking about the power of an impromptu tea party, especially now when things feel kind of crummy. Feel free to come on over. Just, uh, maybe bring some Kleenex.
Poor, poor little bunnies
I was feeling pretty good yesterday, which was surely my first mistake. Sure, the pollen count is SO HIGH (how high is it?) that no one can breathe, but whatever. Details.
Yesterday evening Chickadee commenced falling into giant chunks of woe and sickness, and the FANFUCKINGTABULOUS thing about the combination of 1) chronic illness and 2) TEH DRAMAAAAHZ is that it can be very difficult to suss out what is a real crisis and what is merely a teenage crisis. It took the threat of a trip to the ER and about an hour on the phone with various doctors to determine a course of action and decide she was okay for some watching and waiting, and eventually she was better and Otto and I were left to do some late-night adrenaline management (“I’m just going to CLEAN ALL THE THINGS before bed!”) once she was finally asleep.
We went to bed at about 12:30. At 2:00, one of our smoke detectors started beeping. Not a fire, thankfully, but even low batteries kind of suck when you’ve only been asleep for an hour. At 3:15, Monkey—the polar opposite of Chickie when it comes to illness—materialized at the side of the bed to say that he couldn’t sleep. He was directed to go back upstairs and lie down, and after a minute my mama-senses started to tingle and I went up to investigate further. Yep, burning up with fever. But “no, I feel fine, I just can’t sleep.”
Is it 2013 yet?
Well, here you go
In the continuing saga of My Oh My What Exactly IS Wrong With This Chickadee Kid, Anyway… a while back one of her doctors sent us to another doctor who sent us to a third doctor. And she told two friends, and they told two friends, and so on, and so on, and… oh, wait. That’s a shampoo commercial, not what happened to us with the doctor. My mistake. (But your hair really DOES smell terrific.)
Anyway, we met with this new doctor—we’ll call him Dr. Zebra, for reasons which will make no sense to anyone but me and Chickie, who leaned over to me the moment we left his office that first time and said, “IF YOU BLOG ABOUT HIM YOU MUST CALL HIM DR. ZEBRA”—about a month ago and sat in his office and Talked About The Situation while he took copious notes. I find that all good doctors start out with taking a lot of notes which you never end up getting to see, and I strongly suspect them to be a combination of “Kilroy was here” doodles and phrases like “Holy crap this kid is a medical mess but darned if I have any idea why.” He asked both of us a lot of questions about everything that had happened so far, and her symptoms, and her medications, and then he started asking all of the standard “history” questions, like if her birth was normal and such.
“And what do you do, Mom?” he finally asked, pen poised over his clipboard, while I briefly fantasized about answering “I’m a hooker,” just to see if it would break his easy composure. read more…
Mir and Otto’s big shopping adventure
You may perhaps remember that during the last few months of last year—having no idea how much 2012 was going to suck, and how much less I’d be working—we decided to give all of our spare moneys to our favorite contractor so that he and his guys could rip down our sagging deck and replace it, and then of course it ended up taking forever, including failing the first building inspection in January because the handrail on the stairs ends on the second-to-bottom step instead of the bottom step. (TRUE STORY!) (Know how you fix that? Your contractor comes over and attaches a piece of two-by-four to extend the railing, and uses a couple of pieces of scrap wood to anchor it to the existing railing structure, and then after the crabby building inspector signs off on it, the contractor takes it off again. VOILA!)
Anyway, that’s all been resolved for months, and the new deck is lovely, and the dog has decided that the $29 doggie door we installed so that she can let herself out of the screen porch to the great outdoors is the best thing in the whole wide world.
As the weather’s improved, we’ve spent more and more time out there, though we’re sitting on folding camp chairs and using a card table for when we need to play a rousing outdoor game of Balderdash, because it turns out that… we don’t really have any deck furniture. And we, you know, spent all our money on the deck construction. Whoops. read more…
My big girl panties look like running shorts
This week is Operation Rejoin The Human Race.
Oh, I know, you weren’t aware that I left. But I did! Every now and then my natural tendencies towards hermit-tude intersect with massive life suckage and then I go underground (metaphorically—the clay in Georgia is far too hard for actual tunneling) and the extent of what I say in public is limited to things like, “The sunlight! IT BURNS!”
At a certain point, my darling husband starts looking at me with a gaze tinged with equal parts pity and fear, and then I know it’s time to pull myself up by my bootstraps. Or shave my legs again. Whatever.
This week has been highly cooperative in that the weather has been gorgeous. So, step one of my plan: Licorice and I have gone for a long walk every day. This is especially exciting because there’s a dead squirrel along our regular route. I KNOW. read more…
I’m so vain…
… I bet you think my post over at Off Our Chests today is about me.
Oh, wait. It is. Heh.
The thing is, I feel I’ve reached something of a crossroads right now. I’m standing firmly at the intersection of “what I’ve always done” and “changed priorities” and I’m just… not entirely sure what comes next. What should come next, or what I want to have come next.
Naturally, it’s a post about my hair. Come on over and weigh in, because I have no idea what to do. And clearly this is the most crucial and pressing issue I’m facing right now. [Insert slightly-hysterical laughter here.]
A little bit of everything
Every now and then I realize that I’ve left you hanging on a variety of things—by accident, and because I’m disorganized (not on purpose)—and/or I think of a few minor things I want to share that aren’t entire-post-worthy. And then I throw them all together in a single mish-mash post and call it a day. Hooray!
First of all, I can’t stop watching this video:
(No, that has nothing to do with anything, I just love it. You’re welcome.) read more…
What happens when you pray for boring
I used to pray for patience, you know, because I figured that was what I needed. But it turns out that if you pray for patience you get a whole lot of “character building” experiences wherein your patience is “tested” and you want to say “lots of blasphemous and profane things” to whoever’s in charge. Go figure. (I swear to you I just typed “Fo gigure,” and almost left it like that, but after admitting to such poor behavior, I reasoned it was best not to further tempt fate just now.)
But hey, sometimes I learn things! Slowly, sure—always pretty slowly—but I am capable of learning and changing. So now I pray for boring. Boring is good. Boring is AWESOME. At least, I think it probably is. I don’t really remember. The first time Chickie was in the hospital, I prayed for her to come home. And then she came home and things were still scary and drama-filled and she ended up BACK in the hospital, so I started praying for boring. Now that she’s home again, any moment in which I am not actively caring for her or being screamed at by her (these two events coincide more often than you might imagine, incidentally) is one which is boring and therefore GOOD.
We’re still a long way from boring, but getting closer. read more…