Another monkey wrench (Monkey wrench?)
First: A health update! Thank you so much to everyone who had such kind words and thoughts for my sweet mother-in-law; once again, she fooled us all. She’s out of the ICU and doing much better. This is good news because we love her, but excellent news because I don’t think Otto could’ve taken it if things had gone differently. (Although I didn’t mention this in the last post, while waiting on updates on my mother-in-law, we unfortunately lost two other magnificent folks—their deaths weren’t unexpected, but were still way too soon. “They” say bad things come in threes, and for once I was VERY VERY GLAD that they are dirty stinking liars.)
So. What could POSSIBLY be better than sickness and death? I MEAN REALLY? We started off the year with a real bang in the stressors department, and by any measure of stress and “life challenges” one would probably think this was enough, no? I certainly would’ve checked the “FULL UP ON ANGST, THANKS” box, had I been polled on the matter.
[Sidebar: I WAS NOT POLLED. Still bitter, frankly.]
Well, death and sickness was not to be the entire story for this, my VERY FAVORITE January. Nope! I picked Monkey and Mario up from Hippie School one day and Teresa asked me to call her “when I had a sec” after I got home. read more…
2013, man. Twenty. Thirteen.
In 2010, Monkey had a seizure, and I spent about three weeks completely convinced that he had a brain tumor. Otto and I lay in bed at night, holding hands, talking quietly about the “what if”s and sometimes about nothing very important, just because neither of us could sleep and it was comforting to whisper in the dark, together. Then the flu tore through the house the next month, causing us to cancel our holiday trip, and our battle cry became “2011!” As in, “2011 is gonna be our year!”
Well, 2011 was good in that we found out that Monkey didn’t have a tumor and wasn’t dying. That was VERY good. But he did stay out of school for about a month, before/during/after surgery, and then there was the whole ZOMG WHERE IS HE GOING TO SCHOOL NEXT YEAR thing, and other stuff happened, and blah blah blah, whatever; we changed the rallying cry to “2012! That’s going to be our year!”
We were about 5 days in to the new year when Otto changed it to “2013! 2013 FOR SURE!” And Otto is the optimist in this couple, as you know, so… things are Not Good. read more…
Yep, it’s another menstruation-themed post
But at least today I’m not putting it here. It’s actually over at Off Our Chests, because writing about our little saga this weekend got me thinking about various tampon-related issues from my youth.
Or, rather, the youth of those who honestly had no clue what was going on when they finally came of age.
C’mon over and join the conversation. I happen to know from yesterday’s post that y’all have PLENTY of stories to share.
PSA: Kotex Security tampons
“I would never blog this,” I told her, after.
“What? You HAVE to blog about it!” she said. “People should KNOW. It’s DANGEROUS.” I asked if she was sure, and she said yes. So please be mindful of the fact that my easily-mortified teenager gave me the green light on this one, and let’s acknowledge first and foremost that she 1) is a rockstar for overcoming possible embarrassment to let me share and 2) has delicate little feelings which I would ask you not to hurt if you feel the need to comment. Also, if you are male and ESPECIALLY if you are related to my teenager (Otto, my dad, and her dad who is pretending not to read my blog), maybe skip this one.
To begin our story, let us hearken back to the days of young teenage Mir. It was a different place, a different time. (Namely, it was the Stone Age.) When I got my first period I was ABSOLUTELY THRILLED (why? I don’t know), and I also used tampons right from the beginning and thought it was no big deal.
But my girl and I are a little different in this respect. read more…
The elephants on my chest
Oh, hello. You know what’s awesome? Being the sort of person who is prone to psychosomatic illness. Now, a lot of people think that “psychosomatic” means “faked,” but in fact it means real physical illness that just happens to be caused or aggravated by mental factors such as stress.
If they gave grades in psychosomatic maladies, I would get an A+, as well as comments like, “Really gives it her all!” and “Rarely do I see this sort of dedication.”
When I made it through our two-week-long tour of illness, stress, and family dysfunction over the holidays with nary a sniffle, I was set to declare myself champion of staying healthy. Then we came home, I did ten loads of laundry, and promptly came down with a miserable chest cold. Whoops.
Fortunately, the hits kept on coming, with several dreadful pieces of news arriving in the last week. I figure I should be on life support by February. read more…
Happy banana!
Because I am in desperate need of something cheerful this evening, I give you the intersection of my son’s delight and my husband’s penchant for documenting everything:
(It was a Most Excellent birthday, bananas and all.)
A dozen kinds of wonderful
My current earworm:
Because, yes, today my Monkey is (sing it with me!) 1 2 3 4 5, 6 7 8 9 10 11 12! (Remember when they only ever counted up to 12 on Sesame Street? It was like numbers higher than that just didn’t matter, or even exist.) read more…
Blah blah blah new year blah blah blah
Hey, let’s all pretend this is the first day of the rest of our lives in a somehow more important way than every other day is the first day of the rest of our lives. Okay? Okay!
(Probably we should’ve done this on Sunday—the Actual First Day Of The Brand New Yay Year—but I was busy sitting in the car all day, eating all of the potato chips in the world and asking Otto “Are we there yet?”)
I’m over at Off Our Chests, today, pondering new year’s resolutions, and whether they make any sense to me. Do they make sense to you? Come on over and let’s talk.
We lived to tell the tale
Is there anything better than arriving home after a trip and collapsing into your own bed? I contend that there is not. Especially if you’ve just driven 900+ miles in a single day and haven’t yet realized that following that delicious night of sleep in your own space you’ll be dealing with The Holiday That Threw Up All Over The House And Also Two Weeks Worth Of Mail And Packages And By The Way The Children Are Still Sick.
Needless to say, last night was delicious. It was around midnight by the time we’d arrived home, dispatched the children upstairs, and unloaded the clown-car-esque packing job my husband managed to do with our vehicle full of Christmas Cheer. We then drifted off in our own gigantic bed (I love my parents dearly, and the guest bed at their house is actually pretty comfy, but the difference between a King and a Full is… substantial), and my last thought before sleep overtook me was, “There’s no place like home.”
Of course, later I woke up to discover that Licorice was stealing all the covers, and as I tugged at the blanket in annoyance, THEN everything was back to normal. read more…
The continuing saga of pestilence
Thank you all for the well-wishes for my mother-in-law. She had surgery and they were able to insert a rod into the bone to repair it, and it is around about this point in the story when Monkey puts his hands over his ears and says “YOU CAN STOP TALKING ABOUT THIS NOW” because it weirds him out to think about operations and people being fitted with rods. Because we are excellent parents, we assured him that Grammy is just fine, and we will all love her just as much now that she’s a cyborg as we did before.
In the meantime, my poor brother-in-law Nearly Nickless wasn’t feeling so hot, and the LAST time we were at their house, you know, he got a stomach bug which I ended up getting (which landed me in the ER), so I immediately started spritzing myself with hand sanitizer and giving him an extremely wide berth.
It turned out that he had strep throat. Because of course he did! As the excellent house guests we are, we clucked sympathetically, asked him if we could get him anything, and then promptly packed up all of our stuff and left. read more…