It's a Glamorous Life

File this under the cover of "families with special needs - they're just like everyone else!"

(Otherwise known as a cheater post)

This morning the odd little old lady with whom I'd had an appointment last night called and scolded me for forgetting it.  Then I learned my laid back boss is leaving and my work load will be doubling.  I got home an hour after I was supposed to tonight and my adorable father in law didn't say anything but he looked tired and quickly left.  The hamburger was still frozen so I popped in a pizza except The Girl doesn't like pizza any more (insert wildly inappropriate genetic joke about falling too far from the tree) and she asked for spaghetti via Proloquo instead.  I am powerless to resist when she uses Proloquo spontaneously.  Except we don't have spaghetti and given the choice between poop-brown Extra Fiber! Penne and nuclear-orange mac&cheese she picked the latter.  In my head I start calling it Italian night because nothing screams Venice like frozen pizza and boxed macaroni.  I find salad in the back of the fridge which is surprisingly not gross despite being from last weekend but I snacked on all the toppings last night so I just add dressing except there's no spout on the dressing and I drown the salad.  

Then the dog ate half the pizza.

Pity my children if you must, but let's agree the only genetic flaw in their lives may be their mother and her poor domestic skills.


Grab This Button

Monday, Monday

We had a lovely low key weekend - Matt returned from a 5 day business trip (!), which we survived without any ER visits, all family meals involved fresh produce, which is my new minimalistic parenting goal, and I binge watched Orange is the New Black while folding 354 loads of laundry.  I am happy to have neither committed any felonies, nor to have grown up in foster care.  Perspective, yo.

Other things that are making me happy:

• I ran 2.5 miles on Friday & another 2 this morning.
• It finally cooled off, making my morning runs less sauna-like, and more crisp fall, damn-I'm-glad-to-be-alive-like. 
• That self congratulatory feeling I get when I get my ass out of bed and go running before work. 
• The Boy and his friend finally tired of Minecraft during Saturday's sleepover… and pulled out a chess set.
• Bedtime stories and sibling pix.

Things I'm not loving, just to keep it real:

• That I haven't had the cash to chip in (yet) to the 6 fundraisers for people I actually know & like.  Real people, real friends, not random faceless organizations.  
• Nor have I bought that shower gift, my brother's birthday/graduation gift, or sent flowers to the 5 people to whom I should send flowers.  
• That after Friday's whopping 2.5 miles I spent all weekend hobbling around, cursing my feet & middle age.
• The aforementioned ass.  

The Old Man and the Sea

Almost immediately after his mom (Gigi) died, my dad left for the sea.  He'd bought an older sailboat about a year & half ago but family shenanigans ensued so it's sat in various shipyards across Europe ever since, getting cobbled back together as time & money allowed, and while on breaks from taking care of Gigi.

But then she died and he sailed from somewhere in Spain to the Canary Islands, to Cape Verde, and then finally west across the great blue ocean.  He was supposed to be emailing coordinates daily (Technology!) but one day Matt pointed out that we hadn't heard from him in a while.  We proceeded, as people under stress are wont to do, to argue about whether we should, in fact, be worried.  Really argue.  Which was asinine because either one is or one isn't, much as my dad was either afloat or not, and there wasn't a whole hell of a lot we could do about it ten thousand or so miles away.

Cape Verde

I confirmed he'd actually left his last port and wasn't languishing in a Cape Verdian hospital or ditch, then decided he'd either lost the damn phone overboard or was just being uncommunicative.  A day or so later he emailed and was fine.  Technology glitch.

Oh.  OK, then.

The very same day he wrote, a friend of mine called - she knew my sister went to Purdue and had I been watching the news?  Noooo, I was home with the kids on one of the 256 snow days they've called this winter.  There was a shooting.  Another damn shooting.  I called my sister, the phone picked up, and there was crackling - like little firecrackers (or gunshots).  Then the line went dead.

I died.

No, actually, that's not true - in one of those surreal, slow pan, rising music moments I actually thought that there was no fucking way THAT just happened, so I texted her.  She wrote back immediately - and the world kept spinning - she was in class and couldn't talk because even though the building was on lock down her professor was plowing forward.  Linear algebra is important, yo.

Oh.  OK, then.

Exactly one week later my brother received a clearly auto-generated text with coordinates and this mysterious line, "Accuracy Horiz: +/- 8 m Vert: +/- 32 m".  Thirty two meters, for products of this great American school system, is about 105'.  A hundred foot wave would be…. something.  But even if they weren't Perfect Storm big, a 210 foot "accuracy" swing certainly suggested rough seas, right?  And why the auto-text?  One island couldn't be reached, we assumed because of the storm that had just passed thru.  My brother swung into action, various nations' Coast Guards were notified and a pleasure cruiser was even diverting.  I spent all morning at work trying to figure out how to confirm his Epirb had, actually, gone off.  This time I thought it was real and I tried to imagine what a little boat might do in 100' seas.  So this is how it happens.  

And then he called.  Guess what he just figured out his sat phone can do!  Auto-texting!!

Oh.  OK, then.

And these are just the highlights.  There has also been car drama, the aforementioned 256 snow days, the resulting employer dissatisfaction, plumbing trouble (and not the fresh-water-from-the-shower kind), and GI upsets. There has been too much eating, not enough running, not enough pictures, and not enough wine.  Never enough wine.  (There was quite definitely too much coffee.)  There has obviously been no writing.  I'm not unhappy but I am so, so very tired.  Tired of the cold, the angst, and of my pathological inability to balance family, work, and me.

But there have been lots of snowy PJ days, movie nights, and hugs.  There have been stars rendered in Play-Doh.  And, at one point after we were washing the dog and the carpet and the child, who had all intersected in a Bermuda Triangle of Poop, I started to laugh.  What else can you do, right?  

You can go sailing.

31 for 21: 17 syllables

October arrives

31 for 21

Again, still, my heart.

It's that time of year again!  And I'm already cheating with a haiku 'cause I'm awesome like that.  I have to warm my typing fingers back up after taking such a long break... Or maybe this will be a month of haikus?  In a weird parallel, I have to summarize sometimes 1000s of pages of medical records in a single paragraph at work so you'd think I'd have learned how to be succinct.  

To share the sheer awesomeness of my life, in addition to posting a picture of my very-much-NOT-always-happy child, these were the best bits of my day:

~ I wore a knee length skirt and HAD shaved my shins in recent memory, but half way thru the day realized I hadn't touched my knees in what appeared to be several decades.  Fuzzy knees - it's the newest thing.  

~ I fell out of my chair at work & was laughing too hard to get up off the floor till people gathered.  I'm pretty sure my coworkers thought I'd been drinking.  

~ Somebody tried to flush their new glasses down the toilet. 

~ Other things that should have been flushed were... not.  

~ The dog is trying to vomit right now.  On the carpet.  I am too tired to care.

~ I think my fancy babied sourdough starter died.  Any parallels between the lump of cold wet flour downstairs and this post or my very glamorous life are purely unintentional.  

~ In keeping with the lump of wet flour theme, I'm going to bed. 

Goodnight!

NDSC x2, Saturday

After the bloggers' session on Friday, we visited with friends for a bit but everyone was toast so we called it early.  Early for the adults, at least.  You know what happens when you push a toddler past the point of exhaustion?  They get a taste of adrenaline and decide sleep is for schmucks.  Mix well with one non-child proofed hotel room and the boys' late night arrival from Chicago and you get me sleeping in till 8:15, a mere 15 minutes before the first of the sessions for which we'd flown halfway across the country.  Whoops!

But I was super mom (super disheveled, that is) and ended up only 5ish minutes late for Brian Skotko & Susan Levine's talk - "What Your Other Children without DS are Thinking".   IT WAS FABULOUS.  They have been talking to siblings, running surveys and presentations for years, and had lots of reassuring statistics:  94-96% of kids reported they felt affection & pride whereas less than 5% of respondents wanted to trade in their brother or sister with Ds.  They rightly pointed out, to much laughter, that most kids want to swap out their siblings occasionally, typical or not, and 5% might be even be lower than the average.

A lot of their talk was just good parental advice - keep the lines of communication open, ask clarifying questions, spend one on one time with each kid, be fair, acknowledge feelings - even the negative ones, & be willing to talk about the hard stuff.  And, boy, did they talk about the hard stuff.  They threw out some gut wrenchers, asked by actual children:
"Why does her face look odd?"
"Will she be ugly?"
"Is she going to die?"

Gah.

When my girl was younger I heard a few times how great my son was going to turn out because of his sister.  I hate this.  We weren't getting a dog so The Boy could feed it every night and learn about responsibility.  His sister is an individual, not an object lesson, and she has every right to live her life free of pedestals & angel wings.  That said, he IS a neat kid.  I'd like to think that's a result of the fabulous parenting job we're doing but who knows?

Earlier this summer a bunch of neighborhood kids were over.  They'd been playing nicely for hours but late in the afternoon I walked back into the living room to see my never violent son pushing the other kid and yelling, "Don't you call my sister that!"

The kid had said something mean and my son had stepped up to the plate at the ripe ol' age of 7.  I sent everyone home (they were already at the "ten more minutes" mark), had myself a good cry, and then we sat down and had A Talk.  I told him it was going to take his sister longer to learn things, that she might look a little bit different, and that some people wouldn't know how to act around her.  As they got to know her, they'd learn she was just like most kids but no one is ever allowed to be mean to her, especially not in our own house.

Then I told him he was a really awesome big brother and I made chocolate chip pancakes for dinner, by request.

[And, HELL NO, I didn't mention the pushing]

But my son isn't angelic either.  Not too long after, during my birthday weekend at the Lake of the Ozarks, we went on a tour of Bridal Cave.  The girl was hollering and the cave amplified her noise, drowning out the tour guide.  The Boy looked pained and kept trying to shush her.  Then he just walked away and shadowed a random family of strangers till we were done.  What are the odds he was in that 5% during those ten minutes?  Funny stuff.

I googled and found a version of Dr Skotko/Susan Levine's sibling presentation here.  It's long, but if you have other kids, I'd recommend it.

The Good, The Bad, & The Ugly: My Morning

The Ugly:

Two, no THREE hour drive!

Sticky suffocating snow - 

All one inch of it. 

The Bad:
Schools're closed. Horror
for working moms.  Kids learn to
engineer snow balls.

The Good:
Parked on the highway.
What to do?  Pretty newly
painted nails, haikus