Rubber Ducky, You’re the One!

We were able to trick-or-treat, which is really the only reason to get out of bed on Halloween, isn’t it? It was touch and go with her exhaustion, malaise and (shocker) crabbiness, but with a diagnosis that fell somewhere between mundane and OMG (and an appointment for more catheters and needles and X-ray machines later this month), we thought she deserved the chance to dress up and get sugar.

And she loved every minute of it, especially the suckers. And I limited myself to just two Reese’s peanut butter cups. Let’s not talk about the eight-pack of Butterfingers that my husband bought me. You don’t need to know about that. And if I don’t tell you, it’s not real, right?

She was a champion trick-or-treater, even if I did have to carry her most of the way. She even said “Thank you” like a big girl, which is more than I can say for most of the ungrateful jackasses that came to our door tonight (especially the group that came AFTER I had turned out the porch light an the scary Halloween lights and put the toddler to sleep, I hope their teeth rot out from the twizzlers).

Another Halloween complaint, and then I’m done for the night – why turn on your porch light if you’re not going to hand out candy? Isn’t that the universal bat signal for trick-or-treaters? At least I thought so…

I hate catheters

Friday morning, when I was frantically rubbing a cold, wet washcloth over my 22-month-old daughter’s burning skin as she sat in a tepid bath, I began to realize how fragile this whole mommy-thing is.

Yes, I am a mommy. I have the most wonderful, funny, smart, cheerful little girl in the world. But that could be taken away like that (snaps fingers), with the numbers of a digital thermometer reading 105.8 and the threat of seizures hanging around like the smell of the sour cream that’s molding in our refrigerator.

Now, three days later, we are waiting for test results from the various bodily fluids that were stolen from my child in various forms of torturous, painful ways, and while the possibilities of what could be wrong with her range from the mundane to the OMG, I am thankful.

It could be so much worse. As my husband and I wept together over the pain our little girl was in, as she begged us to save her from another needle or tube and we could not, we said a silent prayer for all the parents and children that have to endure these needles and tubes on a regular basis.

How do parents of children with long illnesses, with life-threatening medical issues, explain to their children that all the prodding and poking and pain is for their own good? How do they drag screaming toddlers into the hospital for another round of exams?

On our second day of visits to the doctor’s office and lab this weekend, she lost her mind when we walked in the door. The screams of “Mommy! Mommy! Daddy! Daddy!” and a death grip on my neck made me want to reach into my chest and pull my heart out still beating. She was in pain. She was frightened. And I couldn’t explain to her that I was trying to help her the best way I knew how.

I hope to remember every day that I am so lucky to have that little girl.

Not quite Venice

I live in Indianapolis, and I work downtown. In Downtown Indianapolis we have this lovely thing called The Canal. The Canal is man-made, and it is basically a 1.5-mile-long concrete moat with sidewalks on both sides so people can walk along and admire the putrid water and over-abundant algae. 

And they do. Once, I saw a guy on a unicycle. Moms pushing strollers (of the jogging, double, umbrella or travel system variety) are a common site. Joggers  and jugglers and dog-walkers and bicyclists and field-tripping-middle-schoolers are all frequent visitors. In the summer, they offer actual gondola rides on The Canal. And you can rent a paddle boat or a kayak and paddle right into one of the many fountains designed to keep some sort of current. People do that a lot. Once, I even saw a runner pee into one of the planters.  

How have I seen all this? My office window looks out over The Canal, so I can spend several minutes every hour gazing out into The Canal and keeping watch over it. You know, from terrorists and bush-peers and other malfeasant types. It helps with productivity. Really. 

Now, from up here, it actually looks pretty. Mostly they keep the fountain in the corner running, so the algae doesn’t accumulate too badly outside my window. I can see some dead leaves pushed up along the side, and the water has a bit of a green cast to it, but overall, it’s actually pleasant and a little soothing to have something nice to look out on in times of great frustration. Or when I should be transcribing a recorded interview or summarizing a committee meeting. 

Up close, though, The Canal is … gross. It smells bad. The plant life along the bottom is out of control. There are supposedly piranhas that irresponsible pet owners have loosed on the native Indiana fish stocked in The Canal. The city has been fighting a battle against The Canal almost since it was constructed about eight years ago.  

So, next month, they are Draining The Canal. The entire 1.5 mile stretch will be emptied of all water. The fish will be transported to the White River and the entire thing is going to be cleaned. Will this help? I don’t think they know. But I’ll be interested to see how absolutely disgusting the bottom of The Canal is when the drain actually happens.  And whether or not my tax dollars – which are paying for this experiment, and the full-time employee whose job it’s been to keep The Canal looking spiffy for the last year – are going to waste.

Don’t mess with me

Rima’s post about the guy sleeping at the symphony got me thinking about etiquette and manners and generally respecting your fellow humans. I wanted to share a story about something I once did that was so totally and completely out of character for me that it’s hilarious even to this day. But you probably have to know me to think it’s funny. So sorry, this post is probably going to suck for most of you. 

I’ve written before about the first vacation Dave and I ever took together, in the context of all the annoying whiny little children ruining my romantic vacation experience at… Walt Disney World. The vacation actually holds a wealth of “isn’t-Michelle-an-idiot” funny stories (including one in which my head, arms and entire upper torso ended up inside a trash can outside the Aerosmith Rockin’ Roller Coaster), but I’ll just share this one. 

First, it was June 2000. If you can at all help it, don’t go to Disney World in June (or July or August, I’d imagine), especially if you are dating/married to a man who gets hot when it’s 65 degrees out and wears shorts into Midwestern December. It’s hot, and the entire place is covered in heat-attracting black asphalt, and there are literally hundreds of thousands of people, likely all trying to get on the Hollywood Tower of Terror at the same time you are. 

Anyhow, we were exiting the Rockin’ Roller Coaster, and were waiting in the big crush of people who wanted to see the pictures of themselves screaming their heads off (or flipping off the camera or holding on for dear life). I had no desire to see another crappy picture of myself, but was forced to wait along with everybody else until the crowd started to move. Apparently, the approximately 6’5” guy directly to my right didn’t feel a need to wait, and started throwing elbows. Directly into my face. Hard enough to cause a serious bruise within a few hours.  

I waited the appropriate amount of time for an apology. Even an “excuse me” would have placated me. Nothing.  

So. 

I pulled my right fist back as far as it would go in the crowd and I slugged him in the shoulder with all my might. 

I know Dave’s heart plummeted to his shoes at that point. We’d been dating for nearly a year, and here I was hauling off and punching some random guy at the Happiest Place On Earth. He was certain I was getting him into a fight that would not have a good resolution. Also, he was shocked, because I am generally a quiet person who avoids any and all confrontation, sometimes at great personal expense. 

But there were no repercussions. Tall Dude didn’t even turn to look my way, just continued on his merry path toward certain hellfire. Maybe Rima should have punched that guy at the symphony. But I have a feeling that crowd is a bit more refined than the riff raff they let into theme parks these days. Or those days. Whatever.

Let old acquaintance be forgot

So I went out for cocktails after work last night, the “date” that I wrote about a few weeks ago (for those interested, I had a raspberry-lemon martini and a mojito, and we split an appetizer platter).

The conversation never lulled, which can be killer when you’re auditioning for a friendship. Before I knew it, we’d been there more than two hours. We talked about our families and where we grew up and how we met our spouses and our weddings. We each shared some intensely personal and painful information.

I think it will be a good friendship.

It’s been so long since I made a “friend” that wasn’t pushed on me because she was the girlfriend or spouse of one of my husband’s friends, I’m not sure what the feeling should be like. I remember in college, the last time I met a woman I truly connected with, the feeling was intense, almost like with a boyfriend.

Heather and I did everything together – studied, drank on Thursday nights, double-dated on the weekends, attended hockey parties, went on road trips… She helped me through a terrible time, when I finally split with an abusive boyfriend. When I discovered she was sleeping with him after I left for grad school, I was heartbroken. I tried mightily to forgive her, but I didn’t have it in me. (There were other factors in the demise of the relationship, but that was the proverbial straw.)

Since then, I’ve had a hard time with the friend business. I’ve never felt that “soul connection” like what I had with Heather. But maybe, like with a good marriage, a good friendship isn’t all about the butterflies and the angels singing. Maybe you need to build a good friendship, maybe it takes time.

As wives and mothers, maybe my friend and I won’t be dancing on the bar at the White Horse Inn or playing Cups with the hockey team. But I think we can still have fun. I think we can still connect. It will just be different. And different can be better.

I studied the classics in college

I first saw this meme on Zoot’s site, and I thought it would be interesting to see where I fell on the reading-list spectrum. As a former English lit major, I think I did pretty well. However, I wish they had a designation for “one of the most awful, excruciating books I’ve ever read” because several on this list earned that characterization. I’m looking at you, Anything-by-James-Joyce. Like Zoot, I only underlined books I actually own and have true intentions of reading. There are others on the list I’d like to read, but I’m not going to get crazy here.

Here is how this works…

Bold those you’ve read.
Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish.
Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once.
Underline those on your To Be Read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights*
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice*
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveller’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables*
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter*
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Wipe out

I remember the first time I changed a diaper in front of my dad. Maybe it was the first poopie diaper I changed in front of him, but what I know for sure is Angel Face was very small and I was very green.Look at these statistics for proof: 

December 27, 2005 – # of Diapers Michelle has changed: 0 

December 30, 2005 – # of Diapers Michelle has changed: A Lot More Than Zero (see, they don’t let you out of bed for the first 24 hours or so after a C-section, otherwise I would have likely begun changing diapers earlier than two days after birth). 

October 15, 2007 – I prefer not to think about the # of Diapers Michelle has changed. 

Anyhow, I remember changing the diaper and using wipe after wipe after wipe after wipe. Dad didn’t really say anything at first. Then he said something funny, like the wipes I used probably weighed more than Angel Face. And he was right.I’ve learned to use the diaper to clean up residual #2, and, even in really desperate cases, usually can get away with just 2-3 wipes. But mostly it takes just one. And while I’m not using cloth diapers and I bought pre-packaged baby food, I have started to do my one little part for the environment. Take that, landfills! 

This post was brought to you in honor of Blog Action Day. Find out more here. 

Crunch

A few years ago, when we first moved to Indianapolis and were living in a one-bedroom apartment with a dog and belongings that had filled a three-bedroom house, I was unemployed. Sure, I freelanced for the local newspaper’s publication aimed at Gen-X and Y-ers (God, I hated that kind of work), but I was bringing in grocery money, not a real paycheck. Having an unemployed person in a marriage that is used to having two gainfully employed people can be… stressful. We argued a lot. One Saturday morning, we got into an argument, and I went to pull my car out from our carport. The next thing I heard was SMASH. And my front bumper, headlights, corner panel and door were crushed by the pole. 

Of course, because of the aforementioned unemployment issue and the fact that my car was paid off, we had dropped down to liability coverage only, and the resulting many-thousands-of-dollars of damage was financed from our savings account.  That bit the big one, but eventually my husband recovered enough to make jokes about the whole incident. 

Yesterday, I met him for lunch, an unexpected and awesome treat because we work on totally different sides of town. He had a job interview around the corner from my workplace (keepyourfingerscrossedohpleaseohpleaseohplease), and we met at a sports bar/burger joint before he had to head back to his workplace. After an enjoyable meal, we headed down to my car in the parking garage so I could drive him to his car in a different garage and then back to my workplace parking garage. 

As I was pulling out of the parking spot, he made a joke about not hitting any poles, and I immediately took offense. A person makes one mistake, I said with outrage, and she’s branded for life. 

I should have opened my mouth a little wide to accommodate my foot. Because less than five minutes later, as I was pulling into my own parking garage, a little gray Honda piloted by a young woman careened around a corner, forcing me to choose between hitting her head on or sideswiping a pole. 

I chose the pole. And crunched up the side of my new car. Thankfully, a co-worker suggested nail polish remover, which made the crunchiness look a lot better but also forced me to realize that there was, in fact, crunchiness and not just a scratch. The other driver? Did Not Stop. Sarcastic thanks to her. Real thanks go to to my little girl who held the cotton balls and handed me new ones to dip in nail polish remover as I tried to minimize the damage. You rock, Angel Face! (Still no decision on the name, though I’m closer!) 

If I hadn’t had the past history with poles, I think I could have gotten away with just telling my husband, reporting it to insurance and that would be that. But the previous experience means he’s pretty angry with me.  

I think it’s punishment for spending 15 minutes yesterday morning figuring out what our new combined income would be if he got this job and speculating whether or not I could drop down to part time or whether we could have another baby right away. Karma does not like it when you count those chickens first. 

If you enjoy the vehicle mishap stories, visit Jennie… though her mishap was totally not her own fault.

Brisk is back

Finally, Mother Nature got the memo that it’s October and by God, I spent $45 on Children’s Place sale items thanks to Swistle and my girl hadn’t been able to wear any of the clothes yet because it was 90-freaking-degrees outside and we went swimming in her kiddie pool all weekend.

But seriously, folks, I love fall. It’s my favorite time. I was always a dork who liked going back to school. Because my birthday is in a cold-weather month (that also happens to be NEXT MONTH) I always had way more cool-weather clothes than warm weather clothes, so fall marked the time I got to bring out the awesome clothes.

Fall brings so many cool things – the way the late afternoon sunlight looks through the changing leaves in my backyard, the mulled cider (occasionally spiked with a tumbler of rum), the raking of leaves and subsequent building of leaf houses, football of all varieties, sweatshirts and jeans that cover a multitude of eating sins and fires in the fireplace.

And now that she is getting older, we can share a lot of fun stuff with her. Last year, we took her to the Stonycreek Pumpkin Festival and while her dad and I had a lot of fun, she really couldn’t have cared less, I don’t think. We plopped her in the hay to take her picture, plopped her in front of some pumpkins to take her picture, and plopped her behind one of those fake photo fronts with the head cut out for a picture. She couldn’t even crawl yet, much less walk.

This year, I think, will be a little different. I see train rides and pony rides and glee on the hayride in our future. And finally, the weather is starting to cooperate and she can wear the cute pumpkin sweater I got at the second hand shop. One must be properly attired for the pumpkin festival.

On a side note, I’m kind of tired of calling my kid “Angel Face.” I haven’t worked all the way through my full feelings on the subject, and I know I started it for security reasons. But should I come up with something different? Should I use her initial like Rose does? Should I just tell you her actual name? I’m really not sure what to do. Thoughts?

Feminist redux

I’ve been thinking about this again. It’s pointless and useless and all kinds of futile, I know. But Mondays are the hardest of them all. And not just for me.Thankfully, I am preserved from the horror show that is The Dropoff  97.975643 percent of the time. That task of infinite joy and wonder falls to Hubby.

I especially pity him on Mondays, because The Dropoff becomes THE DROPOFF, not with just tears and clinging, but with blood-curdling shrieks and “No Daddy”-s on replay and a refusaltoloosenhergriponhisneckherblankieorhersippiecup.

This morning, in those minutes I lay in bed waiting for the alarm to sound, I contemplated what life would be like if I were to quit my job. It wasn’t pretty. We would have to move, doubtless, to a small apartment. We would definitely qualify for state assistance of several varieties. Goodbye to $37 duck costumes for Halloween and $100 kitchen sets for Christmas. No more trips to the zoo. No more children’s museum. No more new clothes (even if they come from the Children’s Place sales of the 30-percent-off racks at Target). No more pumpkin-picking festivals. No more carnivals. No more circus. Is that really what’s best for her?

But is it really best for her to be dropped off most weekday mornings? Is it best for her to see her mother two hours a day during the week? Am I really asking if it’s best for ME?

I am making it out to be worse than it is, I know. She has made friends, friends she asks about on the weekends and in the evenings. She has learned things I never would have thought to teach her. She hates to leave when I get there to pick her up.

Every day with her is more fun, more enlightening and more challenging. I embrace it (and her) with a fervor that sometimes scares me. I want the best of everything for her – including the best of me. And I just want MORE of her. I think that’s normal.

Every so often, Hubby will look at me over her head and say, “We get to keep her” with a smile of pure contentment. Thank God for that. Thank God we have 16 more years before she goes to college. And I don’t even know if that will be enough.