Wednesday, June 30, 2010

The dangling pigs

I recently realized my babies are growing up.
Okay, the passage of time, the purchase of bigger clothes and shoes clued me in.
The fact that Bug now stands tall enough his head provides a nice support for my sagging orangutan titties was another.
But my final clue was a stab to the heart.
I held my baby on my lap and realized she didn't fit perfectly anymore.
I"m getting used to it with the boys, the big feet and knobby knees and suffocating weight of sweaty boy. I know there will be legs over the sides of chairs and elbows in my ribs and a freshly shampooed head on my breast.
But my baby girl fit, so I was okay.
This weekend, she wouldn't sleep. So I bundled her onto my lap in the recliner, assuming a position we had assumed many times during her 14 month breastfeeding tenure. One chubby hand rested right on my breast, kneading slightly as she had always done. Her little mouth pursed and frowned and smiled, just like it had when she was teeny weenie.
But her legs dangled over my side, her feet hanging in the air.
And I found myself staring at hr little chubby pigs and realizing she is no longer a baby.
She is a toddler, racing on increasing steady steps towards becoming a three year old and then a preschooler, a college graduate, a bride, a mother.
And although I will always have room for her on my lap--for all of my kids even though I know, in time, my boys will shun that simple comfort--I stared at those dangling feet and knew my baby was truly gone.
And that my lap would never know the feel of my own baby, nestled there and content with the world, again.

Monday, June 28, 2010

Home stretch

We are in the home stretch of our construction adventure.
Now, for me, the home stretch is the installation of my french doors and some sheet rock hitting my walls.
We still have to run the electrical, the plumbing, the insulation, the remaining sheet rock, flooring, and buy a new heating and air unit.
And then we still have to sign the divorce papers, but that's another story altogether.
Amazingly, we are still married--thus far!--and I haven't shoved him off the roof in a fit of rage.
Mostly because I will not climb up the scaffolding to get on the roof and shuffle over the parts of my roof I'm instructed not to step ion to shove him.
So I've stood on eh ground, looking up and fantasizing.
Saturday, I got in my car with the intent of draining our bank accounts and heading to Mexico. I was resolved to be the elusive hermit who sits on the beach drinking margaritas all day.
But I forgot the book I was reading and had to turn back.
So I decided to play smart, not hard.
I opted to let him finish the addition, then kick hi out, not divorcing him in the process. I will not turn The man lose to find joy with some other woman. I still want him at my beck and booty call.
But the allure of a brand new bedroom, bathroom, and closet with no man funk is too much to resist.
It's virgin territory and I intend to pop that cherry myself.
So we trudge along, The Man with his dreams of a room away from the kids, a bathroom sink of his own, and an unchristened toilet. And me with my dreams of a stinky male free zone.

The Call

Yesterday, I made the call.
I called our pediatrician and scheduled Bug for a behavior/developmental evaluation to find out why my oldest views the world so differently than the rest of us.
I have gathered his school testing and girded my loins and laid pen to paper to list our many concerns.
I have explained to The Man why it is imperative we have a diagnosis, a platform to stand on, to fight from for Bug.
And he asked me a question I hadn't considered.
He said it sounded like I wanted something to be wrong with our son.
After a moment's thought, I replied, yes, I did.
No, I don't want Bug to struggle to make friends and behave in a fashion normal for a six year old.
No, I don't want him to struggle every day to fit in, a round peg trying to wedge himself in a square hole.
No, I don't want to have this knot of fear in my stomach every day we send him to school that he's going to go berserk and I'll get the call.
I want him to have an easy time of it, to make friends, to go through the day without worrying about him every second.
And while nothing is wrong with my Bug a boo, Bug marches to his own, slightly off beat drummer in a world where most other people are in step.
I just want the name and rythm to his song so that I can march along.
I feel a diagnosis would give me that.
I understand, as a parent, that Bug will require more of my effort, more of my time, more of my protection than my other two children. And when marching into battle, I want to know what banner to raise and what tactics to employ to keep Bug as unscathed as possible.
A diagnosis won't fix anything, but it will give me firmer ground to stand on instead of the quicksand I've been mired down in for almost six years.

Wednesday, June 23, 2010

An update on the chaos that is my life

The construction project is still staggering along like a half dead opossum on an Oklahoma road--slowly, painfully, and very smelly.
We are at the point where we are trying to roof the original house. To tie into the addition. So it will stop flooding my house when it rains.
And The Man has just realized that our home, built over seventy years ago, was constructed by a one eyed builder suffering from vertigo.
Nothing is straight or plumb or flush or level or logical.
Which makes perfect sense to me, but seems to confuse him.
Last night, standing on a scaffold that bricklayers love but which makes my sheet rockers daughter's heart go thump and "damn, that's a long ways down to be standing on two boards not attached to a blasted thing," he was giving me a lecture on what he couldn't do.
Once again.
While I am certainly not a Pollyanna, I don't believe it does anyone any good to run up against a problem and belly up. The purpose of a roof on a house is prevent water from getting into the house when it rains.
Do I expect the roof to be the next masterpiece, rivaling the works of Monet and Picasso? Nope. I expect it to keep my ass and my assets dry when Oklahoma weather turns to hail, rain, and flying cows an chickens.
Never once will I contemplate my roof and declare it ugly.
Roofs are pretty ugly without me saying so.
So my response of slap the sucker up there and give me a damned nail to hammer met with lectures and a call to my BIL, who declared himself flummoxed as well.
I've decided it must be a man thing.
I have never seen so much time spent using a tape measure, a chalk line, and a level in my life.
Let's do like our forefathers did.
Close one eye, spin around in a circle ten times, and lean a bit to the left and it will all make sense.

Tuesday, June 8, 2010

I feel . . .like a six year old

Last week, I got tonsillitis.
Nasty, pus filled, swollen golfballs of broken glass lodged in my throat, robbing me of speech and turning me into a drool monkey.
Seriously. I do not spit. I find it disgusting, even in the dentists chair, to spit. (Now take your minds OUT of the gutter please.)
Last week, I spit.
I spit in the front yard, the trash can, the toilet, the cup in my car. I spit because it hurt too much to swallow.
And for all you Deep Throat pervs out there, I repeat, TAKE YOUR MINDS OUT OF THE GUTTER.
I was smacked upside the tonsils with an illness that belongs to children.
And I wanted to crawl into a hole and die.
Add to that the fact that day two involved eightteen long hours of dry heaving on a fiendishly sore throat and it was just peaches for me!
While I knew I was sick and I knew it was the pus or the meds or just the gods smiting me down, I still had that moment.
Even knowing that Aunt Flo was visting, I still had that moment.
Because, in my world, vomitting = pregnancy.
I resisted the urge to give The Man a heart attack and send him out for a pee on a stick test, but just barely.
And I'm glad I did.
Because evidently the puking pustules have passed to the patriarch in our family.
And I know he's not preggers.
At least, not by me.