A Weekend of Firsts?

In less than a week, I will be flying for the first time ever.

I once worked an aircraft maintenance facility and my coworkers, recognizing the novelty that I’d never seen the inside of an airplane, would occasionally take me up to look around the cabin and cockpit while it was parked in the hangar. I was never really impressed. It looked just like it did in the movies. Also it wasn’t hurtling through the air, suspended by nothing but science, like the aerodynamic flying brick the mechanics joked that it was, so there was little to be apprehensive about.

I’m not scared to fly, mind you. I’ve just never had the opportunity. But for a while I believed that perhaps since I’d never flown, maybe it was a sign that I never should. There’s a song somewhere about that, isn’t there?

I’m not married to that superstition though. So next Thursday, I will ditch my family and board a plane by myself, with a note pinned to my tee-shirt, and pray to God we land safely in New York.

This is another first.

Gawrsh. I’ve never been to the big city.

Okay, I lie. I live in a big city. This is just a different big city.

Also, I’m leaving my family for an entire weekend. I don’t know how they’ll get along without me.

Actually, I suspect they will get along without me just fine. They will live and get fed and fight and play and sleep, just all without me. I will miss it and they will forget all about me and possibly adopt a new mother in the time that I’m hurtling through the air to a big, scary city where angry strangers with unhinging jaws are just waiting to swallow me up whole.

Sigh.

It’s going to be my first time at BlogHer too. This is perhaps the scariest of all. Because me? I am not anything resembling a social butterfly, I’m more of a clumsy wall clinging moth. Also, meeting people causes the lining of my stomach to attack itself. The neurosis kicks in to overtime as I nitpick and harangue myself over a slew of features and flaws I have no control over. “Gah! What were you thinking leaving the house with that face, for the love of Jeezus, why have you not eliminated that doozy of a gut that is completely impossible to camouflage? Also, your personality, you should do something about that! Oh God, your feet are disturbingly small. Go home, freak!”

I’ll be okay. Luckily I can fake normal pretty well. But sometimes, just so you know, my brain is screaming.

Already, my brain is screaming.

I’m going though.

I’m going.

—–

The Spin Cycle is back.

Booya.

 

I Know These Things Are True and Random Tuesday Thoughts

• Real things my teen believed to be theatrical props and inventions:
  

1. Tumbleweeds were created to accentuate deserted locations, much like crickets were created to denote a lack of audience.
   

1. Multicolored light up dance floors are part of the elaborate scene used to brighten up the sets of 70s and 80s disco movies, not something real people “boogied” on.
   

• We took the kids to see Despicable Me on Saturday. It was good. Really good. Even the teen was prompted to say it was the best movie ever…although she’s pretty fickle, I’d venture to say it was the best movie she’s watched this summer. Aside from the indigestion we got consuming massive amounts of oily popcorn and cherry flavored Icees, my only complaint was about the previews. Before the actual previews began they had pre-previews with the lights still up. One being for the sequel to Nanny McPhee. After the pre-preview they gave the audience a summary of what we’d just seen literally seconds before, highlighting Nanny McPhee. Then the lights were turned down and the theatrical previews began, including the one for…Nanny McPhee Returns! Seriously? I know we were a captive audience, but shoving the same movie down my throat repetitively kind of has the opposite effect. Did anyone even watch the first Nanny McPhee? Did it really need to be followed up with a second?
  

   

• I have one flapping avocado on my tree. One sad dangling avocado after a spring boasting oodles of blossoms. It makes me sad. It better be the best damn avocado on the face of the planet.
  

   

• A couple of weeks back one of our neighbors on the opposite side of the block was robbed. My husband just happened to drive past the burglary in process as he was coming home from the dump. As a reward he had to fill out paperwork, try to identify the suspect, and get subpoenaed by the state attorney’s office. From what we’ve heard, the perpetrators are believed to be part of a larger burglary ring. It made all of us a little paranoid. A few nights later, while my husband was on shift, my daughter swore she could hear someone walking around in flip-flops outside her bathroom door. I was a little too chicken to investigate, so I locked it and let her use our toilet. I justified it by telling myself it was just leaves rustling. A thief would be smart enough to wear shoes he could run in, right? Although a crazed axe wielding lunatic might be a little more unpredictable. So far none of those have been spotted.
  

   

• I received my *gulp* business blogger cards in the mail yesterday. It’s going to be hard not feeling like a huge dork when I whip those out.
  

   

• Eek.
  

   

—–

I hear it is Tuesday. I have no way to confirm this.

Stop Drowning on My Watch, Dammit

My youngest wears water wings to the pool, a pair of giant Speedo arm bands that keep him comfortably above the surface of the water, moving around the perimeter of the pool at something akin to a slow underwater jog. They’re incredibly useful and have given him a certain amount of confidence in the water…they’ve also made me a little complacent.

Recently we’ve started spending late afternoons at a friend’s community pool, killing the latter part of the day with a nice cool dip that serves the dual purpose of burning that last surge of kid energy before dinner and bed.

Me, the four kids, my friend, and her one.

I’m a head counter by nature, having four children of varying swimming abilities, I like to make sure none of them have sunk to the pool floor like the little stones they are. So I count as we chat, routinely scanning the pool for every single head.

Blah blah blah, onetwothreefour.

Blah blah blah, onetwothreefour.

The difficulty arises when the kids (and the friend) all want my attention at the same time. “Look at me!” they cry. “Listen to this!” she insists. I thought I could manage both pretty well. I was wrong.

Last Wednesday, as we did the usual, my youngest and her son who are very close in age, were playing on the steps that led down in to the water in the shallow end. My son had his floaties on and was safely bobbing along right around the time my seven year old begged me to toss him overhead in to the water. I obliged, my friend gabbed on. This all occurred in a span of maybe 30 seconds. When I looked back to my youngest for a head count, I realized that I couldn’t see him anymore, he wasn’t on the stairs. Instead he was just off of them, which would’ve been fine because his arm bands keep him afloat, except my friend’s son (we’ll call him, Bruiser) had gripped my son around the shoulders and was pushing/pulling him under. All I could make out of my baby was the top of his head and his two TERRIFIED eyeballs, rolling around in their sockets, while his open mouth and nose were beneath the water.

“He’s drowning! Bruiser is drowning him!” I shouted, launching myself the two feet across to the boys and lifting my son up out of the water, at which point the open mouth screaming he’d been doing under the surface became an ear piercing shriek of panic and horror, punctuated by coughing and the occasional water logged burp.

I don’t think anything has ever made me feel more inept at parenting than knowing my son was terrified and drowning while I had my back turned. A close second would be when I accidentally slammed the car door on my daughter’s hand. As I held my three-year-old to my chest, I felt on the verge of tears myself.

“It’s okay,” I tried to tell him, as he clung to me, “you’re okay.”

“He’s fine,” I assured my friend, “it was an accident.”

I honestly wasn’t okay or fine. I was a little rattled. Minutes earlier the boys had been fighting over a pair of goggles. Bruiser had put my son in a headlock just outside of the pool and I’d had to pry them apart. Only minutes before that, I’d gone to the bathroom and left them all in the water with my less than attentive friend and her high-spirited son.

I felt like an idiot. I should’ve been watching. It could’ve been so much worse.

Days later I dropped the boys off at swim class with my husband who has been taking the parent/child aquatics with our youngest. Usually I stay and observe poolside, but we had family coming over and I needed foodstuffs from the grocery store. As I drove away I had a twinge of fear, something could happen while I wasn’t there, robbed of my vigilance the potential for tragedy seemed exponentially greater. It was irrational but compelling, a ballooning fear that threatened to send me racing back to the pool, possibly launching me in to the water fully clothed, purse and car keys in hand.

Instead I bit the inside of my cheek and pushed on, did groceries, filled the gas tank, dropped the perishables off at the house, and returned to the pool almost an hour later.

“Hey,” the instructor called out to me, “you missed it, your youngest jumped off the diving board like five times!”

As I stood at the fence, my baby did a last hop in for my benefit, right in to his father’s arms.

I whooped from across the pool, clapping.

“And I taught your seven year old the back stroke,” the instructor continued. He called out to my older son, who had been jumping in to the 9 ft end of the pool from the diving board all morning, and told him to demonstrate his newfound skill.

My son, brave and confident, jumped in at 5 ft and pushed off on his back, kicking and using his arms until he was in the middle of the pool, then rolled over on to his stomach…and lost his bearings completely. I could see him struggle as he tried to remember what to do, he couldn’t reach the bottom, but as the panic swept over him, he couldn’t remember to put his face in the water and kick to make his way to the edge.

“Swim!” I called out to him. “Face in the water and swim!”

His response as he flailed – “HELP!”

The instructor and the other life guards hesitated for a fraction of a moment before they sprung in to action, diving in like they were trained with their sweats, shoes and sunglasses still on, to rescue my son from the far end of the pool.

He was trembling by the time they pulled him to the edge.

“You’re alright, man, you just panicked.”

I’d been close to diving in myself. He’d had that same look of terror and dismay his younger brother had worn only days before. It made me nauseous. Yes, my children were fine. Yes, every safety measure in place had insured that. No, a little pool water never hurt anyone. But those little scares come too close to the very real fears that bury their claws in to every parent’s psyche, these terrible, awful things that we worry about, and metaphorically wring our hands over, and pray that we’ll never ever know what it’s like.

Those things happen in a blink.

In those moments when you think everything is fine.

Usually everything is.

I’m glad everything is.

Yet I think this week, maybe we’ll take a break from the pool and I’ll set up the Slip n’ Slide instead.

Although I suppose the chances for a head injury or internal bleeding are significantly higher.

I hope they don’t mind being duct taped to the sofa, while I smother my anxiety in chocolate ice-cream. We’ll play the quiet game, it’ll be great.

The T Stands for Twelve or Maybe TMI

Today, daughter number two went from being 11 to 12 – a milestone. No longer stuck in the purgatory of tween-ness, she is now officially a pre-teen and soon to be seventh grader.

Which means what exactly?

It means she has almost perfected the sneer, the eye-roll, and the vacant stare that are to be hallmarks of her upcoming teenage experience. She is clearly ahead of her time.

As a reward, the universe sent her tropical storm force winds and sheeting rain to commemorate the day of her birth – a miraculous delivery that left me with burst vessels in my left eye and nether regions so catastrophically damaged that my OB invited nearly all the interns on site in to the room to witness the carnage.

I was a little enthusiastic on that final, agonizing push.

Luckily, she is a sweetheart of a kid and I forgave her for destroying my privates (eventually).

So this year, for being a spectacular student and successfully learning to play the trumpet, she got a mini-computer and a cake that came out of a box.

The cake is mostly for me though, since I was an active participant during the process that brought her in to the world…and I was forced to go several months without any feeling whatsoever in my bladder…a couple of hefty chunks of Duncan Hines Moist Deluxe seems like a small fee to demand, no?

Because This Started Off Being About Clutter

We tend to get roaches during the summer months, particularly after a heavy rain. I find them occasionally, crawling at a leisurely pace while they examine the snack food remains strewn about the house like a fantastic buggy smorgasbord.

Last week there was one lounging in the kids’ bathroom shower on a day my husband was on shift, which meant I alone was responsible for its execution. The process was further complicated by its sudden flight as it unfurled its delicate wings and hurled itself toward my head. MY HEAD! Because clearly that cockroach had developed a taste for human flesh and my face meat was on the menu. After fifteen minutes of shrieking and ten more of spraying the offending critter with kill-on-contact murder juice (which coincidentally doesn’t as much kill on contact as it does kill after many repeated applications), I finally summoned the courage to crush it underfoot, flush it, then lay down on the floor until my heart could resume its normal tempo.

Days later we detected roach feces in our kitchen cabinets.

Of course.

Because if you see one brazen roach sauntering through your living room in broad daylight, that can only mean that hoards of his wizened kin are lurking in every darkened recess your home has to offer.

So we resolved to empty all our cabinets, discard some of the clutter, and spray poison in every accessible nook and cranny.

I don’t personally consider myself a hoarder. I’m more of a squirrel. I don’t like to see piles of things obstructing surfaces. I like to tuck things away in drawers, closets, and on shelves, where I promptly forget about them. Once they start to spill over in to common areas, I know I have to take stock and throw stuff away but it’s not a chore I particularly enjoy.

It creates a certain amount of anxiety, peering in to a crowded drawer and knowing I have to make decisions. Some are easy. Functional things like screwdrivers and working flashlights, scissors and batteries. I know I need these things. They have a purpose.

Others are more ambiguous. Clothes pins can be used to clip pretzel bags shut, but if I never see them and never use them, do they even technically exist.

The worst of it was my nightstand. Clearing aside a stack of graphic novels and scanning that low, rarely examined shelf, I realized that I do hoard something. I hoard writing books.

I have seventeen different titles altogether, expounding on the creative writing process, offering an abundance of exercises, providing tips to jumpstart creativity, advice on polishing your manuscript, guidelines for getting published.

I’ve never read a single one of them all the way through.

Each represents a very specific spark of hope that I am clearly addicted to. I purchase these books because they are accompanied by the possibility that this publication will change my life. This book might be the one to finally inspire me to write the staggering literary masterpiece which will at last elevate me from my stay-at-home mom, college drop-out, sporadic blogger status to that of acclaimed published author.

Take that absentee dad who predicted I’d end up an unwed teenage mom.

Take that high school peers who think your Masters degree makes you better than me.

Take that unrelenting insecurities and defeatist mentality.

I beat you all.

Except I never even begin. I barely make it out of the gate because the reality is too daunting, the risk of failure far too high. Those unrelenting insecurities inevitably adopt the voice of my absentee father and high school peers then proceed to beat me about the face and neck with their stacks of post secondary degree certificates.

It makes it difficult to focus.

Also, I think I might need therapy.

Because this post started out being about cockroaches and junk drawers and suddenly I have the overwhelming urge to log on to Amazon and run a search for “1,001 Writing Prompts to Help You Overcome Your Neurosis and Draw From the Untapped Well of Your Literary Genius”.

Someone should write that book.

Day Trips Through Crazy Town and Random Tuesday Thoughts

• So…you know how sometimes you have a rough day and your sunny disposition gradually erodes in to something barely above functioning, until you get that final two handed shove that sends you reeling over that precarious ledge in to Crazy Town? Me neither.
  
• While I was driving through Crazy Town though, I did manage to put a rather obvious dent in our stainless steel garbage can with my bare foot. I fixed it…with a hammer…no other trash receptacles were harmed in the making of this thought.
  
• We cleaned behind our refrigerator last week. Among the debris were magnets, pencils, children’s drawings, an unidentified rather large spill, and several unopened single serving boxes of Raisin Bran, all coated by a good two inches of dust. Spying something amiss, the nosiest of my children, my darling tween sidled up to inspect the wreckage. “EW!” she said, horrified. “That’s disgusting! I HATE Raisin Bran!” Apparently something about fiber and regularity really grosses her out.
  
• I recently received a wrong number call for someone going by the name of Tea Cup, or possibly Tee Cup, or maybe just T Cup. I’m thinking with a moniker like that, your employability options are rather limited. I’m guessing he’s not an accountant or say an HR manager. “Ah, you want to file a harassment complaint, you’ll have to talk to T Cup and fill out a form.”
  
• On Saturday, after a busy morning of not drowning in our local swimming pool, we decided to take our chances and hit the mall because it’s air conditioned and they have free parking. We left our car by Sears because it anchors the west side of the mall and it has two things our kids find endlessly amusing – escalators and Sealy Posturpedic floor models.
  

  
  

• Really, who needs the zoo when you can fake sleep on a row of pillow top mattresses that may or may not be ridden with body lice?
  
• Also, Sears has an overflowing bin of discount video games in the back corner of their electronics department. So, obscured by their aisle shelves and fixtures we dug elbow deep through the random offerings, hoping to find some overlooked treasure slashed to bargain basement prices. We got nothing, although my teenager, the compassionate doll that she is, wondered aloud, “I kind of feel like a hobo rooting through a dumpster.”
  
• Guess what we had for dinner? Mall food. Which is almost like rooting through a dumpster, no?
  
• While on the toilet reading a back issue of Popular Mechanics, my husband learned that scientists have already developed mosquito killing lasers that differentiate between the blood sucking female and the harmless male by measuring wing beats. Who doesn’t need one of these? Especially with encephalitis and dengue fever floating around and making me contemplate a bulk purchase of sterile, non-mosquito-invading protective bubbles for the family. Or perhaps an underground bomb shelter.
  

At a recent free art museum trip, this piece of art:

Reminded me of this, bit of movie genius:

Neither of which I’d want to stumble in to while preoccupied answering a text message.

—–

Avoid being eaten by toothy orifices and go here instead.

Absence Makes the Brain Grow Moldy

Things I have NOT done during the two weeks I’ve been absent from the world wide blogosphere:

• Accidentally fallen off the edge of the planet during a routine bicycle ride.
  
• Been abducted by space aliens while I took the recycling out to the curb.
  
• Spontaneously combusted as I walked to my car in the stifling midday heat.
  
• Been detained indefinitely by the FBI due to a case of mistaken identity.
  
• Suffered a head injury that left me with amnesia and the ability to speak only in French.
  
• Abandoned the kids for the remainder of the summer while I traveled with the carnival and ran the Tilt-a-Whirl.
  

Things I HAVE done during the two weeks I’ve ignored the universe’s bloggy happenings:

• Obsessed about ignoring my dusty blog and the lovely people who are kind enough to visit it.
  
• Cleaned out my drawers and cabinets and discarded a wide amount of things I did not know I still had.
  
• Submitted to my yearly gynecological exam, along with the awkwardness and discomfort that accompanies it.
  
• Embarked on a variety of child centered activities during which one or all children complained of boredom, hunger, and/or tiredness.
  
• Lit loud flying explosives and ate charred meat in observance of our country’s birthday.
  
• Celebrated fifteen years married to the same person by purchasing reptile substrate and rolls of twine.
  

I have also spent quite a bit of time watching or listening to Nickelodeon which means I know the following theme songs by heart:

• iCarly
  
• Victorious
  
• Big Time Rush
  
• Fan Boy and Chum Chum
  

I promise to firm up my pudding brain and be a better bloggy citizen.

At least until apathy strikes again. It happens.

Thank you for still showing up.

Kindly Leave Your Unpredictable Three-Year-Old at the Door

Thursdays afternoons are arts and crafts at our local library.

I started bringing the kids because the scheduling is really convenient. At 3:30 it gives me time to feed them all lunch, drop my oldest off at summer school, then kill some time before I have to pick her up again. It is air conditioned and gives me a reason to pry the kids away from the television and each other’s throats in order to create some glorious art. The librarian who leads the activity is young and enthusiastic and she knows all of the kids’ names by heart. Materials are provided, the kids all have a good time and afterward every participant is brought up in front of the group for an ooh-and-ahh session followed by a photo.

It’s as good as free activities get without complimentary snacks.

Because my youngest is three and generally needs assistance with projects requiring coordination and prolonged focus, I hovered nearby the first couple of times to guide him and keep him from getting glue in his eyebrows. He ignored me for the most part, covering everything in reach with brown squiggles and regaling the older kids with tales of his legendary Spiderman battles.

Other parents lingered on the fringes as well, either chatting or directing their kids as I was.

The smart moms though, scurried off to read far away from the creative bustle or better yet, logged in to the library PCs that lined the far wall.

It slowly dawned on me that I had an untapped resource at my disposal – an eleven year old daughter. Sitting there, breezing effortlessly through the activities generally geared toward the younger kids, even the librarian could see that she had more to offer. She was quickly drafted to assist the budding artists and manage their crayon supply, a job she excelled at.

If she could successfully help a roomful of small people, surely she could help her youngest brother stick some buttons on construction paper. Surely she could keep him from popping one of his own eyeballs out with the safety scissors. Surely.

So on our most recent visit, I sat them all together and delegated responsibility.

“You, help your brother, okay?”

“You, ask your sister if you need help, okay?”

“OKAY?”

Then I made my way to the computer terminals, set my phone on silent and attempted to catch up on my widely ignored blogging duties. I was dizzy with the prospect of uninterrupted writing. In the middle of the day, no less, when the possibility of exhaustion doubling my vision was still at least six hours away.

I logged on and sat back, smug and grinning and mentally high-fiving my own ingenuity. I would be here every Thursday, perhaps I’d bring my laptop next time and sit in the back, immersed while the din of active school kids faded in to the distant borders of my perception.

Except my mom brain isn’t exactly wired that way.

As the librarian explained the day’s activities to a mostly silent audience, my three-year-old’s voice cut clearly through her speech, overtaking her soothing tones with its shrill timbre.

“Who here knows what soccer is, boys and girls?”

“AND THEN I HIT HIM WITH MY WEBS LIKE THIS THWIP THWIP THWAP”

“And what body part do we use to play soccer?”

“HAHAHA WHEN I FIGHT LIKE THIS BAMBAMBAM”

“So after we color the sheet, we’re going to decorate our hacky sack balls with the markers.”

“AFTER I SHOOT MY WEB THEN I HIT HIM IN THE NUTS”

I watched him wide eyed, trying to gesture to my oblivious daughter to quiet him down a bit. The librarian glanced at me and smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said, walking over to me, “he’s fine, he’s having fun.”

I tried to relax the muscles bunched in my shoulders and turned back to the monitor.

Five minutes in.

“WAAAAAAAAAAH!”

When I ventured a look, he was already barreling toward me.

“WAAAAAAAAAAH! MY SISTER IS BEING MEAN TO ME!”

Sigh.

Pat, pat, console, console. “But, you’re not supposed to draw on the other children’s paper, honey.”

“Don’t you want to color your ball?” the librarian asked, coaxing him with the fabric bean bag.

Sniffle, sniffle. “Yes.”

Three minutes later.

“WAAAAAAAAAAH! I DON’T WANT TO COLOR MY BALL! I WANT MOOOOOOOM!”

Frakk!

While other moms either smiled tightly or avoided eye contact altogether, he scampered up in to my lap and buried his face in my chest.

“I WANT TO GO HOME! I AM TIRED! I WANT TO GO TO SLEEP! WAAAAAAAAAAH!”

Oh. The. Drama.

Pat, pat, console, console.

“Stop crying, honey. We’re not leaving yet. Let’s find something else to do.”

Still sobbing, he turned to face the monitor.

“I WANT TO PLAY ON THE COMPUTER!”

The kids who hadn’t lost their minds were tossing their painted balls in to a decorated cardboard box.

“Don’t you want to play with the kids? Don’t you want to throw your ball?”

“NOOOOOOO!”

My threshold for wailing and public humiliation isn’t very high.

Which is how I spent the remainder of my afternoon playing computer games at the library with a manic three-year-old vibrating in my lap, instead of completely ignoring the existence of my own children like I’d initially planned.

I’m thinking maybe next time I’ll bring my MP3 player…and maybe leave my own kids at home and drive to a library in another state.