A Bit of a Snark about Garbage

I hate garbage day. Actually, I enjoy getting rid of the garbage, but I hate all the politics surrounding my garbage. It used to be nice and easy, when all you had to do was drag your Heftys down to the bottom of the driveway. But now there is much sorting and breaking down of boxes and endless discussions about whether or not various items will be accepted by the Blue Box Men. For example, the BBM do not like the annoying, difficult to open plastic containers that the powdery donuts at the grocery store come in. If they see one in your blue box, they will chuck it unceremoniously onto your lawn.

I also don't like having limitations on my garbage disposal. What if I happen to have more than 4 bags? They only pick it up every other week, for crying out loud, and we quite often will have an extra bag or two. Fortunately, we have single people living on either side of us...let's just say we're often amazed at how much garbage Errol and Audrey can generate.

I was very proud of myself today because I managed to get rid of all nine bags that we had in the garage. Don't ask me how we generated all that. My guess is that it had something to do with the 5 extra bodies living in the house within the past 10 days. One bag alone had to be diapers. I'm sure I look like a lunatic, jogging up and down the driveway and dashing next door to stealthily drop bags of trash at my neighbours' in my stripey pajama pants. To make things even better, today I picked up a stick from my driveway, thinking that I would toss it up onto my lawn. However, the stick got caught on my mitten, and I wound up beaning myself in the head with it. To anyone watching, it would have looked as though I picked up the stick, held it out at arm's length to examine it and then deliberately clocked myself with it. Ahh...Poetry in motion.

Next week, Darren's on garbage duty.

Chainsaw Emma

What do you do for an almost 8-year-old who snores like a band saw? I’m not kidding. Emma has been rattling the windows lately, and I think I’m finally going to have to get off my can and do something about it. I’m notorious for dragging my feet about going to the doctor. Not for the serious, life-threatening things, but for these little nagging things that don’t just go away on their own. It’s just such a bother, you know? You have to call and listen to the 8 billion voice mail options and then finally leave a message telling them what you want, just so a real person can call you within the hour to set up an appointment. Then you have to take your kid out of school and rush to the doctor’s office to get there on time, only to sit for half an hour and have all the truly sick people breathe and hack all over you. Needless to say, we practically bathe in the hand sanitizer when we’re there.

I realize that this attitude makes me a lousy parent. Lauren could come and tell me that her leg was falling off, and I’d probably say “I’m sure it’s fine. Let’s just wait a few days and see if it gets any better”. My kids are so used to my automatic response to their sore stomach complaints (“you probably just have to poop”), that now they will say “MystomachhurtsanditsnotbecauseIhavetogotothebathroom”, just like that, all in one breath.

But I digress. The snoring.

It probably started about 6 weeks or so ago. I noticed it after I put the girls to bed and was sitting watching TV. I actually heard her OVER my TV show. She’d been a little stuffed up, so I figured that it was just a cold and it would pass. It has not. And now she sounds like she’s talking around a golf ball in her throat. So I googled it and it looks like it’s probably her adenoids. No surprise there. I’m nervous because I don’t want her to have the surgery. We’ve been down this road with Lauren, only in her case it was chronic ear infections (which led to some temporary hearing loss), a strange voice change that made her sound like Disney’s Stitch, and the aforementioned enormous tonsils. She had to have the tonsillectomy and adenoidectomy, and it was not a fun recovery at all. Plus, after Lauren had her surgery I did a medicolegal report for one of my doctors about a little boy whose tonsillectomy went bad, and now I have myself totally freaked out about the whole thing.

I’m probably panicking for nothing, right? They really don’t like to do tonsillectomies anymore unless they really have to, so maybe talking around a golf ball isn’t a good enough reason to operate. Sigh. I guess there’s only one way to know for sure. Break out the hand sanitizer.

Valentine's Day

Well, this is not turning out to be the Valentine's Day that I thought it would be. Earlier in the week, I figured that by Thursday, I would have finished off the work I needed to do, put the finishing touches on my almost spotless house, and then Darren and I would head out to The Keg for a nice dinner (courtesy of gift cards from the in-laws for Christmas). HA. You know what they say about the best laid plans... (truthfully, i'm not sure what they say, but i'm assuming it's something like "the best laid plans all go down the toilet because something always happens to poop all over them".

I've been fighting a losing battle with a cold all week, and yesterday i just felt wretched all day long. I didn't get much work done. I didn't get the laundry done. Nothing got vacuumed and my kids were writing in the dust on the TV. I promised myself that after dinner, i would take care of the work first, and then see how much i could get done around the house. Darren rushed out to a practice at the church, under strict instructions to bring home NyQuil and parchment paper (because i of course still had to bake cookies for the girls to take to school). About an hour later, he called to tell me that he was on his way to the ER because he was getting another attack with his kidney stones. Oy. Long story short, Darren spent the rest of the evening in the ER, and our wonderful pastor and friend kept him company, since i was nauseated and miserable (WHERE IS THAT PRESSURE POINT?) and had scrapped plans for doing anything other than lying on the coach and groaning. I called my SIL, and she dropped everything to come out to be at the hospital with Darren, in case they decided to keep him for a while. Fortunately, the morphine did its thing, and Donna brought Darren home sometime after 11.

So after all that, all plans for The Keg have been chucked. Darren is better today, but he still feels drained. I feel as though i've been dragged behind a bus. Ah, well. Valentine's Day is overrated anyhow. We'll snuggle up on the couch tonight (actually, i'll be on my couch and he'll be on his, but you know what i mean) and toast each other with a cup of hot tea, and maybe an Easter Cream Egg. Happy Valentine's Day!

The Whys and Wherefores

I've been thinking over my reasons for starting this blog, and I've decided that it's a creative outlet for me. I enjoyed creative writing in school, and even did a little in Teens Involved when I was in high school, but apart from keeping journals here and there over the years, it's not something I've pursued. Pursued isn't a great word; I don't have any big ambitions or anything, so maybe I should say kept up with or blundered along at. Ick. Too many dangling prepositions. But you know what I mean.

When my kids were really small, there was not a lot of time for creative pursuits. And really, there was no energy, either. Caring for a young family tends to suck the creative juices right out of you, at least some of the time. Interestingly though, old emails that I sent to my sisters at that time in my life almost read like a blog. They're full of cute and not-so-cute anecdotes about the kids, rants about things in general, and sometimes downright hilarious narratives of day-to-day happenings. There were also the terse, panicky emails that basically said something like "PRAY FOR ME TODAY...I FEEL LIKE THROTTLING SOMEONE!!".

For a while, any creative writing opportunities were generally seized while transcribing medical consultation notes, which is my part-time, home-based occupation. I'm a stickler for good grammar, and so I would correct improper tenses, over-use of commas, and just plain awkward/run-on sentences. Not a lot of opportunity to be terribly creative, however.

So here I am. I'm still emailing my sisters, still making my doctors sound better, and even trying to help my kids write better stuff for school projects. This blog isn't literature, by any stretch of the imagination, but that really isn't my goal. I'm enjoying the whole process of taking an idea and wrestling with it until I can put something on the page that I'm proud of. Or at least, something I won't barf over when I come back to read it later on. :)

Paging Dr. Will

Will has been a wealth of information recently, thanks to a book my sister gave him for Christmas. It's called The Encyclopedia of all Things Gross and Disgusting. Or something. He has warned us about cleaning out our ears, as we apparently need earwax for keeping our ears warm, among other things. He has also shown us a pressure point used to prevent vomiting (hmmm...I can see myself frantically trying that at some point). He has even started passing some of this useful information on to his friends. Oh dear.

Last night, Will asked me if i knew what an "uhlcar" was. When i said that i didn't, he went on to tell me that it's something you can have that affects the lining of your stomach. He said "I keep telling my friend Jordan at school that he has one of these, but he just doesn't believe me". Bring the brain dead individual that i am, i didn't immediately understand what he was talking about, and thought that he was suggesting that his friend had some sort of parasite or something. Then i noticed THE BOOK under his arm, and asked him to show me what he was talking about. Of course. An ulcer. I reassured Will that his friend very likely did NOT have an ulcer, but maybe was coughing up a little blood just because he had a bad cough.

So if you're looking for information on anything from Acne (To Squeeze or Not to Squeeze) to Vomit (aka Buying the Buick, Doing the Technicolour Yawn, and Running the Stew-Master), let me know. I'm sure we can help you out.

Denial

I've been in denial that my kids are getting bigger...I guess i mean denial that they're getting older. (I can't be in denial that my 12-year-old's feet are growing on what seems to be a daily basis. I've bought the shoes, after all.) I tend to still think of myself as the parent of young children, but when Darren and I are driving away somewhere on our own (gleefully, I might add), I'm faced with the realization that they really aren't that young anymore. Most of the time, I'm happy about that. I don't miss diapers and toilet training, continuous nose wiping and the bone weary tiredness that comes with looking after very small children. But sometimes I miss the other stuff. My kids were SO CUTE as babies and toddlers, they really were. They were such funny little people. I look at my little nephew, who's almost 2, and I can still totally remember mine at that age.

Will was completely a real person at 2. That sounds bizarre, but it's true. You could have a whole conversation with him, because he'd been talking in full sentences since well before his 2nd birthday. We thought that this was fairly standard for a baby that age, and were always a little confused when people would say "WOW! He talks so well! How old is he?". Then we had Lauren. She talked pretty well too, but she wasn't as clear. In fact, Lauren sounded like she was from Brooklyn. She had this funny, deep voice (and later a voice change after the removal of enormous tonsils and adenoids at age 6), and she would say the most hilarious things. Even now, no one makes Will laugh more than Lauren.

Poor Lauren. When you watch our home videos from when Emma was born (and Lauren was not quite 3), you will hear two things over and over again. You will hear Lauren in her deep, New Yorker accent saying "PITCHUR AT ME, MOMMY...PITCHUR AT ME!!" while she sticks her head into the lens of the video camera. Then you will hear my snarky voice (while trying to videotape a relatively vegetative Emma in her car seat) "Well, I'm sure we'd be able to see Emma a lot better if Lauren would move HER BIG HEAD out of the way". I mean, she did have kind of a big head, but still. Fortunately, she has forgiven me for being such a hag.

Emma was a pretty good talker too. She talked in funny little choppy sentences, like "Where shoes Emma?" (translation: where are my shoes). One of my personal favourites was when she was struggling to put on said shoes and I heard "OH MAN...what HECK?!". Emma still says some funny things, though. Recently she was telling me that she had had a lice check at school, and when i asked whether they'd found anything, she said "Nope. But they did tell me that I have a dry skulp". Ahh...of course. Skull + scalp = skulp. I think she's word efficient. She still says things like vengetables for vegetables (picture scary, out-for justice broccoli), or choomorrow for tomorrow, but Will and Lauren tend to correct her now, so pretty soon she'll just conform and say everything the way the rest of us do. Sigh.

Ah, well. Life with older kids is great, too. Everyone can wipe themselves (fore and aft), and there definitely is more time for other things...like reading, sewing, a minor Facebook obsession and even blogging, apparently. I guess we'll see!