Outnumbered Two to One

Sadly, this is what’s left of my husband’s recent Girl Scout Cookie purchase. I should be grateful that the temptation to binge on chocolate covered minty goodness and coconut caramel heaven has been eliminated, but the sad fact is I didn’t even get a single, pathetic lick of a cookie, much less an entire serving, before my children completely devoured our cookie ration.

I like to feel I’m doing my part to help the Girl Scouts out. Not by participating in any way, shape, or form, but by buying and eating and savoring their products in a carefully managed allotment, so that my yearly purchase can last me as long as humanly possible. This strategy helps me feel that I’m contributing in some small way to the Girl Scouts’ courage, confidence, and character building.

When my kids join forces to rob me of that experience, well that’s like mutiny…or something. It’s like a revolt, I mean it’s certainly revolting to me that I didn’t get a taste of a single Samoa. I’m not a perfect mom, but I’ve taught my kids the basics - don’t bite people, don’t eat your boogers, brush your teeth sometimes, share your toys. That last one applies to cookies too, dammit.

Did I have to spell it out for them? Did I have to be that specific? Maybe the right strategy would’ve been stashing the cookies in an undisclosed location then doling them out one at a time at my discretion…which would be never…muhuhuhahahaa (that’s my evil laugh, in case you’re not familiar).

Do as I say not as I do and all that…I’ll share the regular cookies with them - Chips Ahoy, Oreos - the special ones are mine next year…all mine.

For more Wordful Wednesday visit:

Cause some people don’t want to keep it Wordless apparently.

Exercise, thy name is HASAY . If that doesn’t ring a bell, go here .

No, no. Don’t get too close.

I think I have a sinus infection and possibly an ear infection.

I’m also pretty sure the cartoon rendition you see above is a very close facsimile of the appalling bacteria I’m harboring in my nasal cavities. It’s aggravating. I don’t even remember the last time I was able to breathe comfortably through my nose. I’ve become on of those annoying mouth breathers whose Ms sound like Bs and whose Ns sound like Ds.

(I’b sorry id advadce to all you bouth breathers out there. Do offedse.)

What does it all mean to my fitness goals?

It means I didn’t exercise…uhm…again.

I’m sure there are plenty of you die hard workout types out there in blogoland that will hop on to your treadmills even if you’ve just lost a limb. You strap on a tourniquet with your teeth and push through the pain.

I’m not one of those. When my head feels like it’s going to explode and my ears are ringing and nothing tastes right because it feels like there are two corks in my nostrils, I am just not doing it. The panting, the elevated heart rate, the sweating. Just getting out of bed in the morning is taking some concentrated effort.

What I need right now, isn’t a pep talk. It’s antibiotics.

What I need right now is a bubble I can put around my kids when they go to school, so they can stop bringing their diseases home to me.

What I need right now is a little sympathy.

Or not. Either way I still feel like crap.

Try me again next week.

I don’t know about the rest of you, but I have a picture of myself in my head. Now, this self portrait is a blend of several different images - how I wish I looked, how I looked ten years ago, and how I might appear in a mirror if I glance for just a nanosecond or squint really tight.

So today, as I was out and about tending to various duties and chores, I crossed paths with a woman and had the following exchange.

She: “He’s so cute.” Gesturing at my two year old who is in fact adorable.

Me: “Thank you.” She was stating the obvious, but I wasn’t raised in a barn, you know?

She: “How old is he?”

Me: “Two.”

She: “Do you know what you’re having?”

Me: Looking perplexed, wondering if she’s talking about my lunch options even though we’re not in a restaurant, when suddenly it dawns on me…”Excuse me?”

She: “Aren’t you pregnant?” Maybe my gaping jaw was a hint that possibly I was not withchild.

Uncomfortable silence.

Me: “Uhm, no.”

End of conversation.

So here I was walking around, feeling confident when this smirking pencil pusher in smart looking career shoes, sucker punches me in my decidedly un-pregnant gut. It’s just not nice. As a rule, I never assume anyone is pregnant unless I see their round bellies stretching and protruding like there’s actually something alive in there, and even then it could be an alien inhabiting their abdomen and not likely to be something said person would want to talk about.

For future reference, folks, this is what a pregnant belly looks like:

And generally speaking, a belly like that doesn’t EVER go back to being completely flat without some reconstructive surgery.

Yeah, reality can be so inconvenient.

If I had a puke umbrella, it would have seen quite a bit of use the past few days.

Saturday, my five-year-old son, who I had assumed was over the worst of his (0ur) flu, began throwing up. He was lethargic on and off all day between bouts of vomiting. I was sure he would be too sick to attend school (thus successfully ruining my dreams of a mostly empty house) but by Monday, he was absolutely fine despite his assurances that *koff, koff, groan, groan* he was still very ill.

I can spot a faker when I see one…he is number three in a family of quite dramatically gifted children.

But yesterday the other shoe fell, and my toddler, my sweet hellion of a child, proceeded to throw up on or near my person a whopping total of five times. There’s only so much barf a mother can get on herself before she starts to take it personally, before she begins to think it’s some sort of gross conspiracy designed with the sole purpose of breaking her spirit…

So of course, it being a weekday, we whisked our sick little cherub to the pediatrician’s where he quickly diagnosed him with nothing other than some irritating bug that will eventually run its course.

Well, duh.

Also, we should not feed our baby dairy, or soy, or anything that he normally eats.

In case you have never met a toddler, let me fill you in. There is no reasoning with a two-year-old. Their language is limited, their patience is nil, and their capacity for shrieking is otherworldly.

Now, say a sibling pulls out a bag of Cheetos and starts munching away in said toddler’s vicinity. The results, my friends, are EXPLOSIVE. Perhaps not nuclear, but pretty darn destructive in their own right. I won’t even touch the powdered donut fiasco.

Another down-side…and you responsible parents might want to cover your ears eyes for this next segment. My toddler, my two-year-old child, falls asleep every night happily sucking on a bottle of soy milk. Without the bottle, there is no bedtime routine, he will not put his sweet little head on his pillow without that silicone nipple propped in his mouth.

This is going to require some improvisation, as well as creativity I doubt I can muster after the night we had. Let’s just say said throw-uppy baby ended up in his parent’s bed, his little boy feet pressed alternately against his mother’s ribs, her spine and her neck. I’ve got muscle aches places I didn’t even know there was muscle tissue.

Hopefully we’re seeing the tail end of this thing, this ongoing plague. Even still, I think that puke umbrella is a good investment.

You’d buy one, wouldn’t  you?

It never fails.

When mom is sick and in dire need of some TLC, 24 hours of uninterrupted sleep, and perhaps a near lethal dose of Nyquil, the crap will inevitably hit the fan.

Currently our household is afflicted with the plague. At some point our borders were breached by some kind of uber-virus camouflaged as a runny nose. In a house with four kids, the cross-contamination is a given. That runny nose was passed on from one child to another, from that child to their mother, mother to father and back again, until everyone, everyone was seeping mucous. Harmless enough, right? What’s a little cold among family members?

Except instead of clearing up, it’s getting worse.

Yay!

Think puke, think ear infections, think orange tinged drainage. I’m coughing up solid chunks of something that could possibly be lung. Trust me when I tell you, it’s hard to sleep when you’re hacking up organs, when the offspring are waking up covered in last night’s dinner.

Is it no wonder I’m so anxious to leave 2008 behind?

I’m ready to hit that big reset button. Start fresh in 09 minus the infections and whining and drama.  That’s an option right, to shed the grossness and wake up cleansed, rejuvenated, ready to tackle anything except more of the same phlegm covered same?

Please tell me that’s an option.

To all of you healthy people out there, bring in the New Year with a delicious bang.

For the rest of us, just think reset button.

Never again.

I will never ever again have a yard sale in this lifetime. Never ever again. Ever.

On a good day, I would not characterize myself as a people person. After our yard sale flop today, I am completely ready to dig a moat around the perimeter of the house, populate it with hungry gators, and proceed to live the life of a reclusive novelist…minus the novel part since I haven’t as of yet been able to throw one together.

The husband and I spent all last night gathering items, clearing them of dust, and setting them aside for our yard sale today. We advertised on Craigslist as we planned, we made signs, we got change. I’d been apprehensive since the idea first gleamed in my husband’s eye, but I got on board with his logic. A few dollars for an item we were just going to give away, is better than no dollars at all.

I’ve since changed my mind.

Coincidentally so has my husband.

I think the first ambush set the pace for the entire afternoon. When I say ambush, I mean a car load of people sped in to my driveway and without ever making eye contact proceeded to grab as many items as they could carry then offered me $3 for the entire bundle. When I disagreed, they argued loudly amongst themselves over the audacity of the price and began to cite inaccurate examples about how they could get a brand new “X” for next to nothing at the store. They also used a variety of diversionary tactics to confuse and intimidate me, before settling on $8 for their armloads and then taking off.

I am pleased to report I only went inside to cry once.

Honestly, what we were selling was run-of-the-mill yard sale fare, nothing fancy but everything clean and in one piece. I also had several toys still in their original packaging. I was expecting people to barter, but I wasn’t expecting so many folks to just walk over without greeting us, pick through everything on display as if it were covered in fecal matter, and then act like we would have been lucky to have them take the stuff off our hands.

It was frustrating and humiliating and so not worth the $97 we collected in mostly dollar bills.

Afterward my husband whisked away all the clothing, baby items, and toys to the Goodwill. So if anything positive came out of the entire thing, it was that I can now actually see the carpet at the bottom of my closet.

We start work on the moat tomorrow. Hopefully $97 is enough to buy me a really surly alligator.

Yesterday afternoon I received a call from the Kindergarten around lunch time, actually it was more like toddler nap time, which as you know is a very inconvenient hour. It seemed a certain five year old boy was running a fever and sporting a frightening rash on his face. The lady who called, the nurse I’m guessing, sounded pretty spooked, like my son had some sort of devastating plague and I needed to remove him from the premises ASAP.

I immediately called the pediatrician, set up an appointment for both boys (since my toddler was suddenly looking like he’d been in a slap fight with a teenage girl), boarded the minivan, and headed out to the school.

The boy, my son, was apparently being quarantined next to the soda machine in the teacher’s lounge. When I got there, he emerged grinning ear to ear. A school day cut short is always a treat, duh. Problem was when I put my hand to his forehead, he wasn’t even a little warm, maybe room temperature, possibly tepid, but not fever by a stretch. Whatever. He was looking a little flushed in the face, so we headed to our doctor’s appointment as planned.

It didn’t help that I hit possibly every red light on the way there and ended up driving below the speed limit as I tailed every single elderly chauffeur in south Florida.

Luckily we got to the doctor’s on time. I dutifully payed my $40 co-payment to get the educated opinion of a certified medical doctor. Luckily there was no line, no waiting. Seriously, there was nobody waiting, maybe people are self diagnosing to save themselves a few bucks during the holidays, but apparently pediatrics is seeing a slump. The office is usually wall to wall people.

We walk in, get weighed, get registered, get put in an exam room. Two minutes later the doctor walks in. The exam goes something like this.

“Mmm, hmm, mmm, hmm, mmm, hmm. Yes, it’s definitely Fifth Disease.”

Heh? I was thinking it was an allergic reaction, personally.

“It’s a common viral infection caused by parvo. It’s benign, there’s really no treatment for it and there’s no vaccine for it. It should clear up on it’s own.”

Hand shake, hand shake. “Have a great holiday.”

Seriously? I paid $40 for this? We weren’t even there twenty minutes.

He then hands each of the boys a shiny gold token and walks out. They were not for Chuck E. Cheese as I originally thought, but a prize given so they could retrieve a bauble from the mini toy machine in the lobby.

The boys were delighted. They each got a 20 dollar one inch green plastic alien toy in a clear plastic egg.

Apparently 20 bucks will not get you as much as it used to, either that or my doctor is saving up his co-payments for a ski trip to the Swiss Alps.

On the bright side, it only cost me $25 to fill my gas tank. At least it was less than a pointless trip to the pediatrician’s.

Fer sure.

—–

Update: After some research last night I did discover the boys are no longer contagious after the rash breaks out. They were probably spreading it around about a week ago when they had no symptoms other than maybe a runny nose. The bad news is we car pool to school with my pregnant neighbor and her little girl. While normally the virus is harmless, it could pose complications to her unborn baby, so she’s going to have to get a series of shots from her OB I believe, from what she told me this morning. I felt terrible, but then again there really isn’t much we could have done. Since the kids have been sick on or off since starting Kindergarten, it was impossible to know what they were incubating until the rash finally broke out. Bummer.

I don’t know how they did it, I just know that it happened.

This morning I sent off three well behaved, bright eyed, neatly groomed offspring to their respective schools. I kissed their ruddy cheeks, wished them a beautiful day, and watched them skip off toward the steel reinforced double doors of their public school education.

At some point during the day, something must have gone terribly, horribly wrong, because what was returned to me after dismissal were not the cherubic darlings I’d dispatched that morning, but some angry, gritty, whiny, mouthy replacements that looked and smelled like my kids but were possibly hardened ex-convicts or perhaps mental ward patients.

Seriously.

We had such an uneventful weekend. It was quiet, it was easy, it was unexpected. Maybe it was our approach - no responsibilities, no obligations, no expectations. We lazed, we ate, we joked, we watched TV. Now suddenly it’s Monday again and everyone is supposed to snap back in to submission, acquiesce to the strict constraints of time and authority. I guess it’s enough to make anyone hostile. They had their brief taste of freedom and of course they’re thirsty for more.

Who bears the brunt of their rebellion?

Why that’s Mom of course.

Because Dad is conveniently at work, and I am left with the chore of beating everyone in to submission. I’m sure he did it on purpose.

Should it take until almost 11 o’clock for a certain brood to finish the day’s homework assignments?

No, it shouldn’t.

I blame the school. For all their guidelines and curriculum and discipline…all that boring stuff that makes school such a drag.

Like my darling teen says, “I’d love school if it weren’t for all the learning.”

Yep, it’s gotta be the public schools.

Life would be like really hard. Cause I’d have to like constantly pause mid-sentence just to like squeeze the word “like” in it at least like twenty times.

I’d have to obsess non-stop about boys noticing me in my skin tight school pants.

The muscles behind my eyeballs would hurt so bad from all the rolling they’d have to do on any given day that I’d need some kind of eyeball therapy just to get them back in rolling condition.

I’d be easily distracted by things like boys or music or music that’s made by boys in really tight pants.

I’d have to take my mom’s camera without asking so I could take weirdo pictures of myself in the bathroom I’m supposed to share with my sister, except it’s totally mine.

I’d have to pretend to be on the toilet a lot, just to get some privacy.

I would be annoyed by everyone on the planet because they’re all stupid, unlike me who is so NOT stupid.

I’d have to slam a lot of doors.

I’d live on a diet of Hot Fries and Coke and Cosmic Brownies.

I’d totally need a cell phone with a texting plan so I could send indecipherable messages to all my friends at any given time of the day or night, then I’d snicker at really inappropriate moments and when someone asked what I was laughing at, I could just roll my overstressed eyeballs and say “nothing” with a smirk.

I’d have to complain a lot about how unfair life is because I never get sick enough to stay home from school or because I don’t have my own room.

I would loathe math.

I’d have to contradict myself at least fifteen times a day on any given topic, then pretend I didn’t.

I would be completely oblivious to the time space continuum, making my perception of a two hour shower seem like just fifteen minutes.

I’d squeal for no apparent reason and say random things in the middle of other people’s conversations, like if someone is talking about the economy, I could volunteer that I love cheese.

Did someone say boys?

boysboysboysboysboysboysboys

Personally I think it’s an ingenious ploy by my pediatrician to drum up more business.

The well baby visit. A trip to the doctors for a child who isn’t sick. So the doctor can see how perfectly healthy my baby is. So he can pat me on my back and tell me what a great mom I am for feeding my baby and keeping him out of traffic. These visits are crucial. How would I know if my baby was well, if a trained professional didn’t tell me so himself?

At least I’m sure my toddler was healthy when we walked in.

Babies generally don’t like to wait. Toddlers (who are mostly just mobile sassier versions of their infant selves) rebel violently against the strained civility of a physician’s waiting room. The lined up chairs, the glassy eyed moms, the occasional shriek from a tortured victim erupting from one of the exam rooms.

It doesn’t help that our particular pediatrician’s office does not have a single distraction to offer. Not a toy, not a book, not a soothing DVD. No. It has one empty fish tank with a sign taped to it that says “Do Not Touch The Glass” beneath a picture of a group of children touching the glass at a fancy aquarium. Now if I couldn’t read the words, I might assume putting my hands on the fish tank was the way to go. I’d be wrong and likely someone would be yelling at me.

But because I can read, I have to be the mom chasing her little bundle down telling him in a calm slightly uneven tone, not to touch the glass. Or the garbage can. Or the front door that leads out into traffic. And to stop laying down on the dirty germ laden floor and also not to lick the filthy butt germy seats or the toxic greasy armrests and to please please stop touching the door knob to the rest room. All the while sick children are being led or carried in and I’m thinking, why can’t they just cover everything in the room with that sterile disposable parchment paper? Or maybe provide some sort of body condom healthy children could wear to protect them from the aggresive viral strains that linger on every visible surface.

Even armed with two full bottles of antibacterial handwash and a fresh box of wipies, how would I ever win that battle?

That doctor, he knows all this. I know he knows, and maybe he even knows I know he knows. He wants my copayments, he wants me to come back in 7 - 10 days with a congested baby, looking forlorn. It gives him purpose. Or maybe it’s funding his next vacation to Maui or the Swiss Alps.

Yeah, I’ve got him pegged. He can’t fool me.