Laugh 2 Times And Call Me In The Morning

All right, I'm the first to admit that I look for the humor in any given situation; and I appreciate anything that makes me laugh about the current state of politics here in the USofA. Laughter is the best medicine, and all that...

But I hadn't realized I'd been, shall we say, overdosing on this skit until I heard 3-year-old Susie saying proudly to anyone who would listen, "I can see Russia from my house!" I'm just relieved she didn't pick up Hillary's line - "Grow a pair!" - instead.

Health news - the doctor called to say that, according to the lab tests she ordered, there is nothing wrong with me - no gallstones, no gangrene, nada. She was about to hang up, but I managed to delay her by saying, "Wait a sec - there is something wrong - I get sick when I eat fatty foods."

"Well, then you should continue to avoid them," she advised. (8 years of medical school for that?)

"But isn't something causing this problem?" I persisted.

"Oh, it's probably just age," she said airily before signing off.

So, it's not just my teenage son who thinks I've got one foot in the grave....

In Which I Feel Sarcastic

I just came back from having a cavity filled, and I am proud to report that I conducted myself with dignity. I even refrained from grabbing the dentist's arm while he wielded his drill. Of course, the valium probably helped.

And this just in - my blog is cute and endearing. At least, that's what some of the reviewers over at humor blogs said, and I don't think they meant that in a good way. They were probably just feeling cranky because they had to read a mommy blog. Apparently, we mommy bloggers are serious anathema to the, uh, serious humorists in the blogosphere. They only let us mommies hang around their site so that they'll have someone to laugh at their jokes. Girls are good for that.

Cute and endearing...I guess that beats "bitter, bored, and long-winded," which is how MadMad's blog was categorized. Maybe I should try to get sponsorship from Hallmark - or, even better, My Little Pony.

Now I'm trying to think of something cute to write. My toddler has had these long, ropey boogers hanging out of her nose all day. That's sort of cute, especially when they run into her mouth. Endearing, even. And the 5-year-old has been rubbing her boogers on her sleeve, and then licking it. Awww.....isn't that sweet? I should get a picture, I guess.

My novocaine is wearing off, which isn't doing much for my typically endearing disposition. Time to go...

She Loves Me (Not!)

What Anna (my chronically alienated teenage daughter who used to be the sweetest girl in the whole world and still is deep down inside somewhere) deems to be my fault:

1. When she's tired because she stayed up way too late and then had to get up before the crack of noon
2. Any day that her neighborhood friend is not around to hang out with
3. When she has to go to the doctor because she has given herself a puncture wound while doing dishes
4. Her beloved flute teacher's falling ill and cancelling a lesson
5. That life doesn't consist of doing whatever she wants, when she wants.

I have to work on all that, I guess.

She did like us briefly a few nights ago when she was scared silly by a bat that somehow got down our chimney and was zooming around our living room. Though I must say that her shriek (which woke us up) should have been enough to turn my hair white. Larry took care of the problem, while Anna and I barricaded ourselves in the bedroom. You know, if it's retro to feel that the guy has to take care of all bugs, rodents (flying and otherwise), and any other type of household intruder, then just call me old-fashioned, all right? I sat up in that room and listened to Larry chasing the bat all over the main floor of the house and thanked my lucky stars that I'm of the female persuasion. (And he did get rid of it - he managed to chase it out of the house with a laundry basket. See? I never would have thought of that.)

Starvation, American Style

Had a slight crisis with Brian last night - he came down after bedtime, crying that he was hungry, but he was too full to eat. Go figure, right? It took me a while, but I finally realized that he had noticed as he was lying in bed that he could feel his ribs. From that, he deduced that he must not be eating enough. And if he wasn't eating enough, he must be hungry. Got it?

And believe me, this kid eats enough.

I think he's going into an anxiety stage here - today he came up to me (with that scared, worried look kids get when they think they have something fatal) and told me he could feel something, right here, in his chest. I explained to him that that was his heart beating and that that particular symptom had been going on since before he was born. He looked only partly relieved. I don't think he trusts me. Maybe because I laughed at him about the starvation thing. Poor guy.

Another Day at the Beach

Larry and I, in one of those lapses of sound judgment for which we are reknowned (can't remember how to spell that), decided to take the kids on another day trip to the beach. I even dragged myself out of bed at 6:30 to ensure an early start, which was very difficult, as I am still trying (after 4 months) to acclimate myself to Daylight Savings Time. Anyway, we actually had the car loaded with all our gear (no mean feat) and everyone had just gotten buckled in and Larry was just about to sit himself in the driver's seat when Brian announced that his stomach felt funny. Being seasoned parents, we took him inside and told him to hurry up and vomit, because we had to get going. Boy, is that kid going to have a lot to tell his therapist someday. 20 minutes and no puke later, we deposited him back in the car with his very own plastic bag to vomit into, if necessary. And we refused to feed him. So he arrived at the beach a very traumatized little kid. And Larry and I had a not-so-relaxing ride ourselves, listening to him whimper and waiting for him to blow, so to speak. But he didn't.

It just occurred to me that I have reset my theoretical vomit-counter-widget back to zero again. Darn.

We left Anna at home, because for some reason she had no desire to sit in a car with all of her detested siblings for 3 hours just to watch them frolic at the beach. Boy - you can just feel that love, can't you? We don't mind - that way we didn't have to take 2 vans. Though I think I will opt to take 2 vans next time anyway - Brian and Rachel and David bickered in the back seat most of the way home, to the point where I would have knocked all their heads together if I just could have reached them.

But it was fun - really. The weather was good, the beach wasn't too crowded, and I only spent about half the time worrying about rip tides. The other half I spent protecting Susie from some very hungry seagulls. One of them snatched a sandwich out of Theo's hand. I didn't even know that seagulls liked salami. As an added bonus, we were able to get some kite-flying in. To understand kite-flying in our family, you have to think back to Charlie Brown trying, year after sorry year, to kick that football without Lucy pulling it away from him at the last minute. Well, with Larry, this will be the year that we actually get the kite aloft for more than, say, 15 seconds. It wasn't, of course. Larry blames the kite. Luckily, the kids don't seem to notice this pattern and are always willing to give it another go. They are so sweet and trusting. Or stupid, maybe.

Now was that a nice thing to say about my own children? It's just that, sometimes, you just gotta wonder.

The ride home was blessedly uneventful, aside from the aforementioned constant bickering from the back row. And even that served its purpose - it made me glad to get home.

Summer Burnout

You know, after a summer spent incarcerated with 4 children and one angry teenager (the other, non-angry, teenager having been smart enough to get himself the heck out of here for the summer), I'm beginning to think that the joys of family togetherness are vastly overrated. June was fun (even with moving and all), but since then we've had approximately 60 days of temps in the 90's, humidity ditto; we've done 6 (count them, 6) jigsaw puzzles, eaten around 16 gazillion popsicles, celebrated about 15 "special" lemonade days, went to the pool so much that even the kids begged not to go again, and got absolutely nowhere on renovating/painting/cleaning up this house. In other words, we're in a rut. I think I'll go tell Larry that we need to take a cross-country trip, just to liven things up. He looks like he needs a vacation, anyway. And I've developed a strange hankering to see the Great Lakes.

I'd would like to point out (with a certain sense of pride) that I have not written about vomit for over a week. If I were just a bit more computer-savvy, I'd figure out how to put one of those widgets(?) on the side of my blog that would proclaim "This blog puke-free for (fill in the blank) days." Of course, I would have reset the counter to zero with this paragraph, I suppose.