Category Archives: Parenting

Sweet Summer Funtimes — And the Living is Mumblety Mumbelty

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Parenting, Surviving Summer Funtimes 
Wondering about the great life decisions I made to get to this point? Check out the last Sweet Summer Funtimes update here.

Day 25 – One son was up at 5:00 in the morning moaning and sniffling because his nose was stuffed up. Yet for some reason he refused to blow his nose, preferring to act as some sort of horrific alarm clock of misery for the rest of us. When I finally marched in there and forced him to blow his nose, he was fine. Not stuffy at all. For the rest of a day he enjoyed and I stumbled through, bleary-eyed.

It was Reptile Day at my daughter’s camp. Reptile. Day. Seeing this on the calendar sent her into fits of apoplexy. She envisioned slo-mo attacks from prehistoric critters like camp was suddenly going to be gladiator situation. She did not have fun that day. I’m sure some kids did. Kind of kids whose parents let them have reptiles in the house as or dinner.

Day 26– This morning the weather was a balmy 60 degrees and raining. The boys insisted on wearing shorts to camp. I think it’s some sort of warm light/macho/Braveheart thing. I’m just not sure how it’s those things. Meanwhile, I’m in a sweater.

They’ve taken it upon themselves to practice the piano for over five hours a day on and off. When they’re not playing “Clocks”,

they’re trying to figure out pieces with the hunt-and-peck method, which I do not recommend to anybody who has an eardrum. Occasionally they take a break from banging on two different pianos of the house so they can play Rock Band. My children have many gifts, but the gifts of Rock Band mastery and tone accuracy are not among them. (Un)fortunately, the ability not to get bored singing “R-O-C-K in the U.S.A” 100 times in a row is one of them. I know some of you are saying “Encourage them! It’s wonderful! I have to force my children to practice piano.” To which I say, after much twitching, there has to be a middle ground. I think we’re fighting on the same side this war. It’s a War on Sanity.

Day 27 – Camp drop-off can be a shit show. No matter how early we all get up, for some reason, it’s a race out the door. Once at the various camp drop-off points, it’s a demolition derby, aided and abetted by strollers 2 or 3 across (two separate moms), and dogs, and the crying kids, and the campers who all crowd the sidewalk, making my hasty escape rather difficult.

It’s ok, though. I’m perfectly delightful because of all that. Like, camp drop-off delightful.

Day 28 –  Took the youngest to gymnastics. We continued her classes to keep her skills up because God forbid she loses all momentum on her falling down every three seconds into a foam pit. I sit for an hour in a loud, smelly, hot gym and watch my daughter making sure I’m watching her every move. I made the mistake of looking down at some point because I thought perhaps I’d caught fire, and another kindly let me know that my daughter was trying to get my attention and didn’t she at least deserve that?

It’s like taking them to the pool without the trench foot.

Day 29 – No sleep because everyone in the house, including the dog, snores. I may have taken the kids swimming. I  don’t remember. Pretty sure they ate today because all over the house are wrappers from all the snacks I hid from them so I could eat them after bedtime.

Day 30 – no sleep again last night, mostly because I didn’t get any snacks yesterday. One child begged me to let him sleep in my bed insisting it would be “fun.” He sleeps like he lives – uneasily. Lots of tossing and turning. I honestly don’t know how dragging myself around but I’m feeling and looking and probably smell like a carcass at this point. Somehow my husband sleeps through it all. Fortunately, he took on the Costco responsibilities, because I’m pretty sure had I gone, the 20-pound container of peanut butter-filled pretzels would have seemed like a good idea.

Husband brought home a 5-pound bag of almonds wrapped in coconut, bathed in chocolate. He is a good and wise man.

Day 31 – Kids. They can’t just take the easily-accessed strawberries and wash them themselves. They prefer the strawberries to be decapitated and sliced and cored and butterflied or julienned or something that good parents probably do.

They’re not suffering, though. Today I went into the random kitchen appliance drawer, the one with all the measuring cups and potato peelers and the stuff I use once a year. I saw the ice cream scoop. Now, I don’t usually bother with the ice cream scoop, because (a) they don’t work that well and (b) I usually just eat it out a pint anyway. If I’m putting things in bowls because I’m feeding the children and I don’t want them to think that it’s appropriate to eat out of the pint. So, long story short, the ice cream scoop is more a placeholder, if you will. Something people have in their random appliance drawer and something non-heathens probably use. But there it lay, that scoop. And it was filthy. With ice cream. Melted chocolate to be exact. Probably Ben & Jerry’s. One of my kids tried to use the ice cream scoop to get him/herself ice cream, then in an effort to “clean up” and/or hide the evidence, put the scoop back in the drawer. The kicker is that the drawer is literally just a half spin away from the dishwasher, and I’m so tired these days if I’d noticed it at all, I just would have assumed I’d gone classy for awhile and didn’t remember. Anyway, cleaned out that whole drawer. All members of the house deny doing it.

Day 32 – July 4th, the original Brexit. If the amount of neck-dirt, chocolate on their faces (despite not eating any chocolate), and ability to narrate 32 minutes of fireworks nonstop is any measure, it was a success from which we may never quite recover.

 

For the Love of a Dog

For the love of a dog, Parenting, Writing 
We take a break in the Sweet Summer Funtimes for the Love of George.

Warning – this post is about our beloved dog who probably doesn’t have too much time left with us. But boy, is he loved.

 

Last week was a frenzy. I was gearing up for the BlogHer Conference, a dream trip that I much needed, and the prep was near Doomsday level. That’s how it works when a mom leaves home for a few days. I needed to leave early-ish Thursday morning, so Wednesday was a blur of cooking, cleaning, and strategic packing. Wednesday night, I went into the city to see a rough cut of the short film I wrote (more on that in a future post).

I came home inspired and happy, carrying an external drive with the culmination of a year’s worth of work on it, excited to share with my husband. I hadn’t even turned the car off before I realized something was terribly wrong.

My two boys stood on the front porch well past their bedtime, distraught. I opened the car door, and before I could say anything, my husband, visibly upset, pointed to the front steps which were slicked with water.

“George had an accident,” he said. I wasn’t sure why this merited a three-man report. Due to decreased mobility from a tumor on his leg, our dog has been having more accidents these days, mostly inside the house. I was happy he’d made it outside.

Middle Child unleashed a tearful explanation.

“Georgie couldn’t walk. He collapsed in the backyard. And he was running, and he was fine because we were all looking at the sunset and he came out with all of us and then he just stopped running and then he fell over and he’s been whimpering and crying. He can’t walk. He can’t move.”

It all came out in a jumble. He is the animal lover, the child closest to our dog. When we told the kids the other week that George’s tumor had grown back again, this time so entwined with the tissue and muscle that removal would be nearly impossible, that at best we could de-bulk the tumor and give him an extra three months, it was Middle Child who took it hardest.

This latest development was a little more real and happened sooner than we’d imagined. The dog’s tumor is complicated by the fact that he has arthritis. He’s been compensating for the tumor putting more and more weight on his front paws, but it seemed that he just could not handle both ailments anymore.

I went inside. They had moved the dog’s pillow from our bedroom out into the main room so that he didn’t have as far to go when he needed to go outside. George was panting hard and yet refusing the water we offered him. He was shaking. He tried to adjust his position when I came in, and he whimpered and yelped in pain.

That sorrowful noise told me everything, especially that there was little I could do make it better. It will forever be the sound of my heart breaking.

I sat down next to his dog bed, and he leaned up against me the way he does during a thunderstorm. Eventually, his breathing calmed, and we nuzzled one another. He rested with his head against my chest the way he did when I was pregnant and on bed rest. The boys sat on either side of us and gently stroked his back.

The kids began yawning, so we told them to go brush their teeth and hit the sack. Once they were out of earshot, I asked my husband if he wanted to take the dog to the emergency clinic right then. He shook his head, then asked me to take a taxi to the airport the next morning for my trip because he was going to take the dog as soon as we dropped the kids off at camp.

He looked at me steadily. “Just make sure you say goodbye to George before you go.”

Middle Son ran back in the room and asked if I still had all the pictures I’d taken of him and the dog (Of course.) He then asked if we would be burying George in the backyard. Then sweet Middle Child dissolved.

It was that moment I decided I would not be going on my trip. My husband started to argue, but Middle Child just said, quietly, “George is more important than a trip.”

I canceled my plans and informed those who needed to know.

We cried a lot.

My husband took the overnight shift with my dog, letting our crying, limping dog out at about 1AM. Then George came back to the bedroom. I think if he were able, he’d have been up on the bed with me. I just couldn’t lift him. My son asked if he could stay home from camp the next day, and I said yes.

It was tense as we waited. The dog jumped into the back of the car as soon as we said the magic words “Doggie Road Trip” and instantly knew he shouldn’t have done it. Both because it was a painful thing for him to do, and also because he remembered that most of our recent “doggie road trips” have been to the vet.

It was an excruciating wait for the update. Son and I sat and poorly distracted ourselves. I kept checking social media to see what was going on at the conference I was missing. My heart felt as though it had been shot with a thousand arrows and that all of them were being pulled simultaneously. Finally at 9:35 am: “All good. Rimadyl for arthritis and we’ll keep an eye on him.”

And that was that. Within half a day, George put weight back on his front leg. Within 24 hours, he was back to the dog he was 6 months ago. Middle Child spends lots of time checking in on George, who spends most of his day sleeping. They have long conversations, and it’s pretty hard to not peek in to see, but I want to respect the sanctity of that relationship. A boy and his dog. A dog and his boy.

We’re day-by-day now, keeping an eye on him. He’s certainly no puppy, but when he’s outside, he runs a bit, he’s happy, and during meals he begs for table scraps again (in a gentlemanly fashion, as is his way). When it’s time, it will be time. We love this dog too much to keep him in pain and misery just to make us feel better.

George will be 11 on July 4. It’s a holiday he detests due to all of the fireworks, but it is one we are glad he’ll be around for.

 

 

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A boy and his dog. A dog and his boy.

 

 

Sweet Summer Funtimes – The First Full Week

Creative non-fiction, Humor, Parenting, Surviving Summer Funtimes, , , , , , , 
Wondering about the great life decisions I made to get to this point? Check out last week's Sweet Summer Funtimes update here.

Day 4 – Feeding the children was a little sporty today. Scoured the depths of the pantry for lunches, because I haven’t grocery shopped out of fear of wrangling three kids in the cereal aisle. Told kids that Triscuits and cheese is too a continental lunch treat!

Kids started an art installation called Band-Aids A-plenty. It’s cool and magical because every day I find 6000 wrappers and used bandages that I pick up and throw away and then they reappear the next day. I think it’s a commentary about the fragility of life and how we also need to take care of our planet.

New word — bouleversé, which is apparently French for summer break.

 

Day 5 — Heard the children excitedly working together on something in hush-hush tones. This tends to set off warning systems in any mother’s head, so I peeked in to see them going under furniture and through bags searching for coins. I oh-so-casually mentioned that if they happened to find anything that needed to be thrown out/donated they should do that, because I’m hopeful and apparently never met a child before. YET — after thirty minutes they had made a donation pile and thrown away some nasty stuff that had been lodged in various crannies. I dub this day the Feast of the Under Bed Miracles.

 

Day 6 – For several hours, kids played catch with the Magic 8 Ball. In the middle of the playing field was a giant tom-tom drum that somebody who is no longer welcome in my house gifted to us. Constant drumming remniscent of an approaching army let me know that my children need lots of practice catching balls, Magic 8 or otherwise.

Added Excedrin to my shopping list, should I survive all this fun long enough to make it to the store.

 

Day 7 – Let the kids have some ice cream on the front porch/driveway. When I joined them about 10 minutes later with a spoon I notice there was some Vanilla Chocolate Chip that had melted on a plate they left in the sun. Fortunately my kids love me enough to stop me from eating what was actually quite accurately-deposited bird poop.

bouleverse-PixTeller-100402 (1)

Day 8  – Child saw hummingbird at the feeder and other two thundered over to the window like a herd of wildebeests. Many tears were then shed that the hummingbird flew away. I spend the afternoon writing bad poetry about being a hummingbird.

 

Day 9 – Took the family to the pool, an exercise in watching the kids flail about pointlessly in the water while screaming at me to watch. For some reason, all of the men and boys at the pool started competing to see who could do the stupidest splashiest jumps off the diving board to their own amusement and to the second-hand embarrassment of everyone else there. My husband stopped after he, and I quote, “broke his butt.” He limped over to a deck chair and we both watched in horror as our clumsiest child, who’s never met a surface he couldn’t impale himself on, slipped as he went down the length of the diving board, slicing a quarter-sized piece of skin off his thigh, thus ending the first pool visit of the season much like we ended the last pool visit of last season. Fortunately, it only took 45 minutes to get the kids from the pool to the car 100 feet away, as they were “freezing” and “so cold” on this 95-degree day. Injured child limped bravely and not-at-all dramatically toward the car. I asked if he wanted to see a doctor or if he wanted to go home and get a snack. Snacks won the day, as they usually do.

 

Day 10 – Waking up now means getting a medical report on accumulated bug bites, including size and itchiness level. Also got an update on the diving board wound, and a slide show presentation of how said wound had bled into the bandage and then started to scab up. You can all look forward to those photos in this year’s holiday card.

 

Day 11 – The kids entertained themselves by trying to figure out a song on the piano. I know that sounds great on the surface – they’re being creative and they’re problem-solving — but it’s a trial and error process that involves banging out the part they’ve already mastered, then hitting every wrong note until they finally arrive on the correct one, and then starting over and getting it wrong, and finally starting over again and getting it right but then having to figure out the next note.

Went to the library, which is a place I always called the amusement park until they learned how to read (which I suppose is my fault for taking them to the library). Shout out to the tween next to me at the new junior high fiction section who intently picked at a massive scab he had on his arm. At least I know my gag reflex is fine.