Screw it

Tonight I took Lunchbox up for a stinky diaper change. He is a jovial little fellow, always smiling on the changing table. In our new house, we keep the wipes and diapers on a shelf above the table. I was mid-diaper change tonight when I was reminded — in the most horrifying way possible — that I had thrown a couple extra screws up on that shelf when I hung a curtain in the boys room this weekend. They were right in front of the wipe box, and when I was scrambling to get a wipe out while trying to avoid the classic poop smear all over the changing table situation, I pulled the box forward and knocked one of the screws off the shelf. Directly into my baby’s open, smiling mouth. He immediately began gagging and choking, and I immediately sat him up and then turned him completely upside down. He’s not big enough for the Heimlich, and I remembered how to rescue a choking infant from the CPR certifications I take every two years. But usually you’re worried about a chunk of food, not a sharp pointy screw. I didn’t feel that I had the benefit of time to go look up a best practice, so I just went with instinct. Lunchbox started screaming, which I actually took as a good sign (he could breathe at least), so I righted him. One look in his terrified face had me wondering if he was more upset about the screw or about Mommy whipping him off the changing table and upside down while smacking his back. All I knew was that the screw was still in there. I turned him over once more, gave him one more tap, and — thank Heavens — the screw came out. I’ve read plenty of stories about kids passing these things, but he’s pretty little still and this was a biggish screw. Very pointy. Very… well, dammit, it was a screw. Not made to be swallowed by an 18 month old.

Anyway, I watched him like a hawk all night for any crying, difficulty swallowing, choking, etc. I think he’s fine. I am reminded how easily things can go wrong and how delicate these tiny lives that I’m responsible for can really be. Hug your kids tonight and revow to keep them safe.

100 Years…

This is where I give you some good excuses for being totally silent for the past two weeks. Besides a hurricane and it’s long and drawn out aftermath, I have none. I’m a West coast girl, and I was not prepared for the likes of Irene — even if she wasn’t a “real” hurricane, as I’m told by all the veterans out this way. Nonetheless, she was a bitch and I’m glad to be finally done with her. Kids are back in school, the yard is starting to look normal again, and I may even be back in the office soon if they get that sorted out. But this is not a hurricane post.

I don’t know if its the rainy weather today, or the fact that I’ve had more than a week at home with my kiddos with their school shut down for repairs, but I’m feeling a little sentimental. The one thing that I work on a lot — in the personal realm — is trying to enjoy the moment, especially with my kids. I spend a lot of time moving around, cleaning up, organizing, and it eats up many of the precious moments when they’re busy being little boys. It eats into the time when I could be just sitting and hanging out with my husband, too. That guy who lives here. Sometimes I spend so much time doing these “important” things, that I feel like I am missing everything really important. Afterall, on my deathbed, will I recall that on September 5th I did a really thorough job of cleaning the kitchen sink — that it smelled clean and shone like new? No. Definitely not. But I might remember the fact that this was the day that Lunchbox said his first “sentence” — “I eat.” (Appropriate, no?) And I almost missed it. I’m lucky he said it in the kitchen while I was scrubbing the sink. What else am I missing while I’m off doing busywork and my kids are growing up?

My grandmother has Alzheimer’s disease. My mother is her only child, and I’ve watched for the past five or six years while this has torn her apart. Grandma was doing okay for a while — she grew up in a world that dictated that women should always be polite and put on a good face in front of strangers, and her professional life dictated that she be always proper. That served her well in covering the fact that she didn’t remember meeting my husband before and wasn’t sure who my kids were. Sometimes she wasn’t sure who I was, but usually she knew me and just subtracted a few years from my age and had me back in college. But now she doesn’t know me. And she sometimes doesn’t know my mom, which I know is killing my mom. Mom says that she said goodbye to Grandma years ago, and that this woman is not her mother. Nonetheless, she feels obligated (is obligated, I guess) to visit her weekly, make sure she is safe and as happy as is possible. She takes her to lunch and doctor’s appointments, to get her hair done… and Grandma always went happily. Until recently. Lately she’s forgotten to be proper and polite, and she has been mean. So things have been tough for Mom.

And last week Grandma fell and broke her hip. She had surgery to relieve some of the pain, but odds seem good that a full recovery is not in the tea leaves. Mom believes that since she has basically stopped eating, won’t take her medicine and refuses physical therapy, that the end is in sight. And that will be a blessing and a great loss.

I look at what is happening to my grandmother and feel devastatingly guilty for not appreciating every single second that I’m living this life with these amazing little people to keep it interesting. I feel guilty for ever being in a bad mood or not being 100% present for my husband or my kids. What else is there? In the end, what are we but the sum of the relationships we’ve had and the memories we’ve created?

I heard that song by Five for Fighting on the radio this morning — 100 years. And I thought about the message — maybe I do have 100 years to live. My great-grandparents demonstrated some longevity. But I wonder how much of it I might be aware of, if Alzheimers really does run in families? I’m at 38. That’s less than half. I could turn it around and live in a way that I can be proud of every day for most of my life if I start right now. I’m going to try. I don’t think I’m quite old enough to join the Red Hat Society, but that’s what I’m angling for…

Dinner — almost how it’s supposed to be…

Life is good. I think I can officially say that the move is over. We still have a few boxes around, and things are not hung on the walls, but the pressure to get it all done is off. (Which most likely means that we’ll still have things that need to be hung at this time next year…)

Last night I picked up those little boys from school, and we had a really nice afternoon (minimal yelling from anyone involved.) At about 5, I had a glass of wine and fired up the barbeque. Once the Major came home, he had a glass of wine with me and we had dinner outside at Turbo’s request. Of course, Turbo suggested that we eat outside and then as soon as the table was set, he began throwing a fit — “Why are we eating out here? I want to eat inside….” Agh!

For once, I just enjoyed dinner. I didn’t harangue the boys about eating two bites of this or four bites of that… we had artichokes, so they were both very into pulling the leaves off and eating them. Turbo would scrape all the flesh off with his teeth over and over and then tell me, “I can’t do it! I’m not getting any…” While Lunchbox, following his brother’s example, would dip the leaves in mayo and then just suck the mayo off and show me the untouched leaf, looking quite proud. Regardless, it was so nice. I didn’t worry about food on the floor/chairs/table (part of this may have been the 2 glasses of wine), and I just enjoyed the perfect weather, the company, and the beauty of our new home. More than that, I was finally able to just sit and revel in the wonder of having a family to call my own. It felt wonderful.

The Major took care of baths while I cleaned up, and then we put the little guys to bed and had a nice evening together. Most nights, we kind of go our separate ways after bedtime, doing our own things. But last night we talked, watched an episode of Mad Men (my new addiction) and even went to bed at the same time! (I am usually in bed by about 9:30 and the Major tends to stay up late.) It was really nice.

This morning I got a real treat. I got up at my usual ungodly hour, but instead of getting ready for work, I…wait for it… got to go to the gym! That’s right! This is the week that the Major and I begin our gym rotation. I am going to go on Tuesday and Thursday, and he’s going to handle little boy responsibilities on those mornings! He’s going to go on M, W, F. It was really freeing to walk out of the house, just me, and drive away to do something good for myself. Of course, I spent most of the time wondering how things were going at home, and hoping that the Major wouldn’t forget anything or end up really late or anything. Despite the fact that I usually manage responsibilities for three people every day of my life, I suffer from tremendous guilt on the days when I rely on the Major to do it. I feel like I’m asking him for some huge favor, and I worry constantly that he’s going to be annoyed or put out. I’m not sure why, since I know he doesn’t worry at all about whether I’m annoyed about being the “default parent.”

This is probably a whole other topic — but I talk about it with some friends regularly. Why is it that the man in the marriage can basically do what he wants to do, while the woman takes on most of the responsibility for day to day management of children? One good example of this was one that a friend gave me the other day. She was downstairs herding small children all afternoon, and her husband walked through the room where she was peeling her youngest off of his shrieking brother. Sure that he’d come back any second to help, she found herself searching for him a few minutes later when he didn’t reappear. Where did he go? Upstairs to close the door to the master bedroom and take a 2 hour nap. Could she (or I or any other ‘default parent’) just decide to go nap? Definitely not. If I want a nap on a Sunday afternoon, I basically have to ask permission. I have to make arrangements for the care of the TLAs. If the Major wants a nap, he just says, “hey, I’m going to go take a nap.” And I get to say, “oh, okay.”

Is this always the case? Why? I’m not really complaining — like I said, I had a great night with the Major and am in a happy place at the moment. But I do wonder why moms are the auto-parents and dads have to be asked to step in…

Pass the Duct Tape, Please

You know how when you were in college, you slept on a mattress on the floor and most of your furniture came from IKEA and had to be assembled with those crazy hex wrenches? Well, we haven’t moved on from that phase yet. A lot of my furniture is from IKEA. I actually really like the whole Swedish minimalist aesthetic, but in reality, the stuff looks pretty good and is cheap enough that you don’t get too upset when the moving guys (who visit us military spouse types every 2-3 years) bang it up, sweat all over it, break the legs off, etc. Or at least you’re supposed to not get too upset. But, dammit, I’m upset.

If you’ve ever put together IKEA furniture, you know that it revolves around “locking cams” and bolts, right? And if you decide to, say, take this furniture apart because you are a government-hired moving person getting minimum wage to manhandle the beloved goods and household belongings of a family that includes at least one person who puts his or her ass on the line to protect your freedom, you might want to make careful note of where those all-important locking cams and bolts end up! Like, you might want to, say, put them all in a baggy and make sure that they get attached to the actual piece of furniture that they belong to. Maybe. Just a thought.

But not everyone can come up with ideas as brillant and original as that one that I just shared with you.

It seems that OUR particular government moving people have not ever experienced the frustration of having all the pieces of their furniture laid out in front of them, with NO WAY to put them together to form a useable object. Like, say, a CRIB. Or my damned BED. Or the GUEST BED on which I have actual guests planning to sleep this weekend!! Currently, the guest bed is fully assembled, reliant totally on the small wooden dowels that go between the parts to hold them in place politely while those big bolts and cams do all the dirty work of making sure things actually STAY put together securely. I even put the boxframe and mattress on the bed, and dressed it up in all it’s pretty sheets and pillows. The Major came in surprised, “oh! you found the hardware!” When I told him no, he looked at me quite skeptically. I explained that I thought that if our friends laid in the bed carefully, the distribution of their weight over the surface area of the mattress would prevent any one tenuous joint from having to bear too much of a load, thereby ensuring that they did not actually find the bed collapsing on top of them. Or under them, to be specific. Do you think it is rude to ask your houseguests to please refrain from performing any variety of the horizontal limbo in your guestbed to ensure their own safety?

Don’t worry. I’m going to come up with a solution before they arrive.

The solution for the lack of hardware for the crib was to buy a whole new friggin crib at Walmart. I was the most angry crib-buying mommy they’ve probably ever had in that Walmart baby department. “Give me the cheapest crib you’ve got!” When the pimply adolescent Walmart employee pulled the giant box out of the shelf for me, looking somewhat frightened, I eyed it skeptically and then proceeded to pick it up and drag it BY MYSELF up to the register, abandoning my shopping cart and ordering my 4 year old to WALK. NOW. I can’t believe I had to buy a whole new crib. But Lunchbox doesn’t deserve to sleep in a pack and play for the rest of his babyhood when there’s a bunch of perfectly good crib pieces leaning against the wall in his room, right?

The last piece of the no-hardware puzzle that needs solving is my bed. I loved that bed. It had a built in bookshelf in the headboard. Which is totally obsolete now that I read everything on my iPad, but it’s still a nice idea.

And do NOT suggest that I go to the hardware store to pick up replacements. I tried that. These are special secret-squirrel IKEA-specific Swedish metric system parts that are not available in your neighborhood Lowe’s. IKEA is only helpful if the parts weren’t included in your original purchase. I haven’t yet tried duct tape. Maybe that will work.

It’s a fort! It’s a doghouse! It’s a spaceship! And look, we have four thousand of them!

No, Turbo, it’s a box. And yes, we still have four thousand of them. Only they have been flattened and placed strategically in that pile in front of the front door because Mommy is desperately trying to get them broken down and out of the house so that I can figure out what kind of floor our new rental house actually has. Cuz I haven’t seen it yet.

Turbo and Lunchbox have spent the last week proving the old idiom that the best toy you can give your kid is the box it came in. They spend their evenings smashing and crashing around the living room and play room in their newly received kid-sized boxes, screaming like banshees and giving me a chronic nervous headache. They spend their mornings whining and crying because their spaceships/doghouses/forts have mysteriously vanished overnight, though the back of the truck holds a boatload of cardboard that looks suspiciously familiar to their tiny eyes.

We’re close, though. I think there are four more boxes upstairs and maybe four downstairs. And there’s a crapload of crap in the hall. Both halls. That’s because the Major’s organizational strategy seems to consist largely of taking things that don’t belong in one place and deciding that he isn’t sure where they belong. So they end up in the hall. And I think they’re all slated for the attic. And I’m so tired of looking at it all that I think I might actually haul it up there into the 125 degree sweatbath myself.

Turbo is turning four this weekend. And we’re having houseguests. If that isn’t motivation, I don’t know what is! I know this blog has been less than scintillating lately… and I would like to tell you that I’ve got all kinds of gems saved up for you. But I’d be lying. For now I’m just trying to maintain my sanity and sobriety — turns out unpacking is easier if you’re just a teensy bit tipsy because you no longer care where things go. Makes it tougher the next day though:

“Major, why did I think it would be a good idea to put my curlers in the pantry?”

“I dunno. You said something about the stairs being tall and not wanting a workout, and then something else about curlers and coffee and killing two birds with one stone in the morning. I’m not sure. I don’t really listen when you talk.”

“Oh, ok. Thanks.”