We finally watched Gravity last night!
So, now I am suffering from PTSD.
I spent the entire movie sweating and holding my breath. Sandra Bullock and I nearly passed out simultaneously.
Forget about sequestration. If NASA wanted to end their space program they could’ve just shown aspiring astronauts that movie.
After spending 91 minutes pumped up on adrenaline all I wanted to do was go to sleep.
I am reading my book, about to drift off to peaceful images of Palisades Park in the 50’s when I hear Huck screaming.
I ignore it.
His cries become more plaintive.
They get louder.
Finally, I go to his room and find him wrapped up in his blanket like a cocoon, his hair soaked in sweat.
My first guess is he just had a nightmare about being in a full nelson with a cuddly dude in a fuzzy blanket covered in choo choo trains.
Like this….
… inside this.
I rub his back and remain half-asleep, hoping he’ll soon join me.
But, the crying won’t stop.
I offer him water.
No reaction, wailing louder.
At this point, I start trying to find the little marble he went to bed with. He uses it like a security blanket. (I’m telling you, the kid is OBSESSED with balls)
I nearly have a panic attack considering the possibility that this ball is at the bottom of his stomach instead of just stuck under the mattress.
I say this to my husband who stomps groggily into the room and says grumpily, “I’ll take care of him.”
I repeat my concern about the missing marble and and am greeted with a cranky glare.
So, I go back to bed to keep reading. It will take me another 20 minutes to fall asleep again.
As I finally feel my eyes getting dry from the tired, I hear a loud thud followed by a high-pitched whinnying cry.
Artax is not dying in the swamp of sadness in Alma’s room.
Alma has fallen off the bed again. I get her tucked back in.
Sleep eludes me for the next hour, like my brain is preparing for the possibility that I will have to rush to save my shrieking children from a burning building ANY SECOND.
My husband found our daughter sleeping on the floor of her bedroom this morning. I guess those pool noodles really aren’t effective “guard rails.”
My daughter uses them like hurdles.
Weakened by the horrors of my night, I spilled raw sugar all over the counter, floor and Alma while making coffee.
I spilled refried beans on my shirt.
As I scramble to get out of the door, Alma says, “I have to go poo poo.”
ARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHH
I kiss my son goodbye, him ducking to see Tom and Jerry around my head.
I kiss my husband who looks miserable. (or maybe it’s the mustache)
I kiss my daughter, who smiles sweetly but doesn’t even say goodbye.
Then I hit traffic on the way to work and arrive with an extra dose of PTSD to start the day.
(My apologies to anyone who actually suffers from PTSD. Clearly, I am exaggerating and it is a serious disorder which I do not suffer from)
(Warning: If you read my posts to have a chuckle or bond over the fact that little kids suck, you may want to skip this one.)
Ever find yourself trying to hide the tears streaming down your face at work because you’re overwhelmed by all of the tragedy in the world?
I do.
But, that probably has something to do with the fact that my job is reading and writing about all of the tragedy in the world.
Being a news producer, I try very hard to make stories more meaningful. When I am tasked with writing a dinky 45 second story on an art gallery and scholarship program in honor of two teens murdered 3 years ago by their own mother, I put real effort into it.
I find good pictures of the victims, check out their father’s Facebook page… and then I cry.
Because the two teenagers were once babies.
Because this is what their father wrote on their birthdays:
Beau,
On your 16th birthday, I should be sharing some football and Krispy Kremes with you and laughing at your jokes until our stomachs hurt. Instead I find myself struggling to find adequate words to express the joy you continue to bring to me and to the lives of so many. I am so proud to be your Daddio. I miss you more with each passing day.
Love you forever …+1 with Beau Schenecker and Calyx Schenecker
Calyx, missing you is the hardest part. Celebrating you is the easy part. So on the eve of your 19th birthday, I join thousands who rejoice in having your presence in their lives. From your first day on this Earth, you set out to make the world a better place…Oh my, how you have greatly exceeded expectations! I love you forever + 1, Daddio with Calyx Schenecker and Beau Schenecker
Then, I move on from that story to a 20 second update on the Washington mudslides.
We’ve been updating the death toll for weeks. There’s only so many ways to talk about the search for the missing.
But, they named the latest victim.
Billy Spillers.
I could leave it at that.
Or, I could go look up more information about him and find his wife’s Facebook page.
Their 4 year old son was rescued by helicopter, the mud so thick it ripped his pants off as they hoisted him to safety.
Their 2 year old daughter is still missing and presumed dead.
Their other two children are confirmed dead.
This is a woman who has lost her husband and three children and yet she still refers to the rescue of her son as a miracle.
Time to take a break and check in on my Facebook feed… where I get updates on a friend of a friend’s daughter who has been diagnosed with a brain tumor.
She posts pictures like this and somehow remains upbeat. Her strength blows my effing mind.
Pre-hydration went well-much better than last time! First chemo was started about an hour ago and the second will be going up soon. Chloe didn’t want to nap earlier so, of course, when the nurses started her Benadryl at 5:15 to pre-medicate her she passed out cold. It may be a very long night or very early morning!
I try to keep my posts upbeat, sarcastic and brutally honest.
Some days I can’t keep up the charade.
Some days are just heartbreaking.
The only benefit of spending my days writing and reading about such heart wrenching, soul crushing things is that I love my kids more than you do.
Kidding, of course.
But, it does put things in healthy (or unhealthy) perspective.
It is the reason why every single stupid-cute thing my kids do makes me worship the ground they walk on.
It’s why I post pictures of them obsessively and daydream about being a stay-at-home-mom.
I want to spend every second loving my children, because you never know when you could end up being the story someone is hunting for more details about to make it more “meaningful.”
Oh, and one more thing.
Damn you Viral Nova for being a perpetual buzz kill.
Maybe this was just one long excuse for why I’m not gonna workout today. Who can go to the gym after that?
My daughter tried Cracker Jack for the first time yesterday while I took her on a bike ride.
I told her that there was a surprise at the bottom.
She responded, “Probably a lot of peanuts.”
Smartass.
Today at work someone was asking for suggestions of a musical instrument for their young daughter to take up.
I am the wrong person to ask.
I am a chronic quitter, always have been.
When I was in elementary school I took gymnastics classes. Within weeks I was told I was “too tall” to be in the tumbling class and “not advanced enough” for the next class.
What I did instead of gymnastics.
So, I quit.
I took up the flute, but learning how to read music gave me the same kind of panic attack as those timed multiplication charts.
So, I quit.
I took Jazz dance with a friend of mine from the ‘hood and couldn’t memorize the steps to save my life. Not to mention that I resembled a knock-kneed skeleton on crack.
So, I quit.
I was an aspiring artist for awhile, until I had a teacher who was a tad too touchy feely in middle school. I figured if I started drawing like a kindergartener, he’d keep his man paws off my bony shoulders.
That is one crappy dolphin.
So, I quit.
In 6th grade, I was forced by my mother to audition for a play. (there were tears, refusals… much drama, how apropos) I screwed up my lines the very first night of the run and… wanted to quit.
But, the lure of the stage was too great. The chance to be someone else, so that even if you DID mess up, it was almost like it wasn’t you anyway, so who cares?
Theatre DORK.
No groping theatre teachers either, for obvious reasons.
In retrospect, I would’ve excelled at soccer or swimming. But, those weren’t given as options back then.
Everything was clearly delineated by gender.
My big brothers played football, soccer, did karate, track and even golf.
Relegated to soccer spectator.
I… played in the backyard pool and read a lot of books with my door shut.
Now, I am at a loss when it comes to how to go about getting my children involved in extracurricular activities.
I tried to offer my daughter every possible sports option, even the clearly masculine ones like football. (I did forget about wrestling, but I don’t even want to watch my son wrestle. I don’t want to watch anyone wrestle)
She immediately expressed an interest in dancing (which I’ve mentioned is not going to be her strong suit) and horse back riding. (which could kill her)
My son’s obsession with balls and in particular kicking them will make soccer the likely choice.
But, how does a quitter teach their children not to quit?
How does someone with zero aptitude or athleticism ensure that their children lead healthy, well-rounded little lives?
I see other parents generally pushing their kids toward their favorite activities.
The hockey dad puts his son in hockey.
The Capoeira mom puts the kids in Capoeira. (Hi, Lissette!)
So, what does the mom who writes news, reads and drags herself to the Y to workout put her kids in?
“Honey, I am signing you up for boredom on Saturdays and Mediocrity on Sundays. Wednesday nights are for slovenly laziness and if the spirit moves you, perhaps a vigorous stroll.”
My kids will excel at chilling.
Last night I was cutting Alma’s nails and discovered there was black stuff deep underneath them.
I asked her what it was.
She said, “Dirt. I dig and dig and dig at school.”
I asked, “Why?”
She responded, “I dig for worms and snakes.” “I dig for worms and snakes.” “I dig for worms and snakes.”
Seriously, she said it three times while looking zoned out. Sounded just like Rain Man.
I don’t know what weirds me out more: her sounding like she’s going to start counting toothpicks any second or that she’s literally hunting for snakes.
Yet, I find my daughter’s bizarre eccentricities endearing.
Occasionally while I’m putting her to sleep, she launches into rapid-fire monologues, complete non sequiturs.
Last night, she randomly said, “Jimmy James (boy from school) can’t find my house. It’s way too far away. We can’t find his house either. It’s way, way, way, way far away.”
So, I’m wondering if they plot escape from the playground at daycare together. Then I picture them bumping into the enormous gator that lives in the lake nearby. (Reason #465 why I wish I was a stay-at-home mom.)
This is actually the smaller of the 2 gators.
As I’m reading her Mother Goose, she starts twirling my hair with her finger and says, “I like your hair growing long like mine.”
Then she says, “Ha! You cut my hair outside at our old house!” (Holy crap, that was at least a year and a half ago. I don’t even remember it.)
Then she gets obsessed with the fact that there is no actual Mother Goose inside the Mother Goose book, so I have to go find the other Mother Goose book we have so she can flip through the entire thing to find said gander.
As I walk out to leave, she tells me it makes her happy that daddy helped her put on her sneakers and that I let her wear them to bed. She explains that she likes sneakers with dresses now.
She’s random, weird and perhaps slightly unhinged and I adore her.
Everyone knows that what people post on social media sites isn’t actually an accurate snapshot of your life.
You put your best foot forward, your best pic posted.
It’s all smoke and mirrors.
This is never more true than for parents of toddlers.
Here are pictures of my husband and I on daycare date night.
It might look like we’re having a lovely evening, but we actually spent the entire dinner try to hail our waitress. We watched other diners arrive, be served and finish dinner and we couldn’t even get a second round of Sake.
That b*&ch interrupted our Sake cycle.
Instead of riveting conversation, we were busy glowering at the staff, pleading with our eyes for assistance from the hostess. (who was equally oblivious to our plight)
I considered luring her by dangling our food because she was all skin and bones, but my husband noted that she clearly wasn’t interested in eating. Maybe Meth would’ve worked?
The next morning, here’s a picture of my precious daughter hugging my dog. (Yes, he looks terrified. He’s old, partially blind and has Addison’s Disease. He’s always terrified.)
What you don’t see is my son screaming in the background because he’s sick. Our punishment for a miserable night on the town was waking up early to face a feverish toddler.
My son is a real jerk when he’s sick.
I feel bad that he doesn’t feel well, but I don’t exactly feel like babying him when he’s constantly trying to throw heavy objects at my head and screaming “NO WAY” when I’m not even touching him or talking to him.
A fun day at the park? I think not.
It poured the night before so the whole playground was a soggy, mulchy mess.
We had to cut it short when my son decided to run full speed through a mud puddle in canvas shoes.
I did find it amusing that Alma wouldn’t stop berating an older girl who was playing barefoot in the mud.
“She’s gonna get her pants wet! She doesn’t have shoes on! She can’t go in the puddles!”
Her mom was nearby.
I just said, “That’s up to her and her mommy or daddy to decide honey.” (as I continued to yell at my kids to stay out of the puddles… awkward, awkward, awkward)
Here’s what else there AREN’T pictures of:
1) Our kids both instantly falling asleep as we drive off for lunch, so we have to drive around for an hour being quiet.
2) My son crying when we have to wake him up because we HAVE TO EAT.
3) My son demanding to walk outside while we’re trying to eat at Chilis, throwing all food offered to him across the room. (even slimy segments of mandarin oranges)
4) Mommy downing two margaritas.
5) Daddy saying he needs to work on the computer and mommy nearly having a nervous breakdown considering time alone with the kids.
So, I took Alma to buy white poster board to draw on with markers outside.
Look how adorable she was playing with the neighborhood kids.
What you don’t see:
1) Huck stealing all balls from the neighbor’s garage. Bouncy balls, plastic softballs, a football.
2) Huck repeatedly kicking said balls toward the road.
3) Alma looking shocked and appalled when the neighbor’s little girl wouldn’t let her have a turn at basketball. (awkward, awkward, awkward)
So, we go back inside and I serve up the kids an enviable spread of fresh fruit, Gouda and ham.
We watch Monsters Inc. for the 30th time.
I give the kids a bath, which means I get soaked from head to toe, chase around a naked maniac who refuses to put on a diaper and occasionally pisses on the carpet and manhandle my cranky daughter who screams at me to get her into her PJ’s and then screams even louder that she CAN DO IT HERSELF!
At this point, my husband is still on the effing computer and I shout downstairs, “Are you DONE YET?”
He storms up and says no, but takes over. So, then I feel like a shitty wife.
My husband can’t get his work done and I am already trying to figure out if enough time has passed since lunch for me to start drinking alcohol again.
Let’s just say the night ended with me breaking my diet to eat a Lean Cuisine and my husband telling me I had purple teeth. Wine drinkers feel me.
No pictures of that folks.
Smoke and mirrors friends.
The most commonly heard phrase in our household used to be “I love you.”
Now, it’s “Go to bed.”
Our children are trying to slowly destroy us with interrupted sleep.
In the middle of the night my daughter started horror movie shrieking from her bedroom. I rushed in to find her placidly playing with crayons. She calmly asked, “Can I have a glass of water please?”
Her screaming disturbed Huck, so within a few minutes as I am just about to drift off to sleep, he strolls into our room and says in an outside voice, “Daddy? Daddy? Daddy?”
For absolutely no reason.
My husband and I shout nearly in unison, “GO TO BED!”
I can only think of two things worse than being awoken by my children: A fire alarm or being waterboarded.
I love sleep. Why don’t my kids? Or maybe the better question is WHY DO OUR CHILDREN HATE US?
Why else would they refuse to sleep through the night when they are so far beyond infancy?
You know how in movies sometimes, it seems so sweet when the parents rushes to their child’s bedroom to calm their fears after a nightmare?
It’s not cute. It IS the nightmare.
And now my husband is harboring not so secret resentment toward me because I am a sound sleeper.
Oh, I am fully aware that the mumbled f-bombs and sh-bombs are for me.
Hey, if I were wearing ear plugs I’d be a bad parent. But, it’s not my fault that after 3 years of not getting enough sleep my subconscious has tuned out MEANINGLESS SHRIEKING.
Even if I do wake up, it takes me infinitely longer to get the kids back to sleep. I guess something about mommy screams “party time!”
But, I can’t just tell my husband at 4 a.m. “Honey, you’re so much BETTER at putting them back to sleep.”
Heaven forbid there is ever an actual emergency involving my kids. I will shoot out of bed like a zombie and shout, “GO TO BED!”
For the first time in my life, we are paying someone to clean our house.
I am terribly conflicted about this stunning development.
Part of me stands by the long list of reasons why I have always cleaned up after myself.
1) My mama raised me that way.
2) Nobody else should have to deal with my filth.
3) Maids are for rich folk.
Then, there is the part of me that thinks I will sleep more soundly knowing mysterious kid goop will disappear, nail clippings will be sucked from the carpet like an alien abduction and we might finally be able to see through the glass doors of the shower.
We were still so uncomfortable with the concept that we totally spent an hour last night “pre-cleaning.” Which begs the question, why are we paying someone else to do it?
My husband swept and vacuumed up all the dog hair. (and then told the kids the resulting tumbleweed was a Guinea pig. I swear my son’s eyes lit up with excitement for a second)
The kids “helping Daddy” by yanking the cord around.
I wiped down all of the counters and tidied up all the random marbles, rubber bands and dirty socks that migrate around the house like gypsies. (no offense to any Gypsies out there)
I’m just hoping the woman who cleans sees that there’s no food goo on the kitchen counters and forgives the strange pink mold on the floor of our shower.
The last time we had someone clean for us we were moving out of our bungalow and letting the renters move in.
When the woman said, “Man, these people probably never cleaned the house before. The dog hair is unbelievable,” my husband straight up lied and pretended it was the previous renters. (who didn’t exist… we were the ones living in a house of filth)
We aren’t disgusting people. We are just full-time professionals with two messy rugrats, two mush-faced old dogs and ZERO TIME.
We are just scraping by.
It’s a choice between laundry or cleaning.
Bath time or cleaning.
Eating or cleaning.
Sleeping or cleaning.
At some point, you’re just like SCREW CLEANING.
Unless there is Vodka. Then, I would consider drinking and cleaning.
I didn’t realize that as a parent I would unintentionally terrify my children on a regular basis.
Last night, I’m reading Alma a picture book and we were on the sea creatures page. I pointed at the lobster and said, “I loooove to eat lobster.”
She looked horrified and said, “You can’t eat that!”
Guess I shouldn’t tell her about where her chicken nuggets and fish sticks come from. I mean, they are called “chicken” nuggets and “fish” sticks. Guess she hasn’t made the connection yet.
The other book I chose to read her last night was all about the tooth fairy.
Yes, honey. Part of your body will fall off within a handful of years and some creepy little person will sneak in while you’re sleeping to steal it and leave you with some money.
It’s no wonder we all have nightmares as adults about our teeth falling out. It’s some latent PTSD from learning about the tooth fairy as toddlers.
This past weekend we took the kids to the Tampa Bay Airfest. We were trapped in bumper to bumper traffic in the seedy neighborhood near the Air Force Base for at least an hour. We got to spend several minutes inspecting each haunted house and shanty. At least I got a picture of this gem.
Super proud of our Glamour Shots from ’89?
By the time we got to the base, Alma was “pissing her pantalones” as my husband would say.
It was the perfect opportunity to introduce my daughter to the terrors of the Porta-Potty.
I’m holding her over an enormous hole filled with neon blue water, used tampons and other people’s crap.
She’s chanting repeatedly, “I can’t go. I can’t go.”
After it’s over, I can tell she’s never going to go in another public restroom again.
Then, we sit around and watch F-16 fighter jets (Alma calls them “Fire Jets”) nearly collide and crash into the crowd, bursting our ear drums.
Yay! Our little aviation enthusiast is now going to be more inclined to take the Greyhound.
Our son had a blast. Our daughter was too scared to even eat a cheeseburger.
I recently made the mistake of watching Goonies with the kids. Within minutes, I realize that showing toddlers a movie that revolves around murderous Mafia-linked jailbirds with a deformed sibling chained in a basement was probably not the best call. (I turned it off before we really got to know the Fratellis)
So, I think I am going to try to do a better job of not traumatizing my children.
“No, baby, you will never have lumps of fat that sprout on your chest, or bleed profusely once a month.”
“Farmers raise chickens and goats because they’re just so darn cute!”
“The lobster I eat has absolutely nothing to do with Sebastian from The Little Mermaid. This one is fake, like tofu.” (Which Alma calls “Toe Food.” Sounds about right.)
“The tooth fairy is me. Me and dad. We determine how much money you’ll get while you’re sleeping. Those old teeth? Garbage can little friend.”
Living The American Scream 