Sam and I have colds and are feeling a bit under the weather. Lydia is wandering around the house wearing her “cleaning gloves” and refusing to take them off even to eat her cheese. Then there’s Renton, recently drunk from a vet visit, rolling around on the floor and trying unsuccessfully to jump onto the couch.
All of this is very loud.
I am just thankful it is a Saturday.
I have been writing a lot, it’s just all been on the kids’ site. You can go over there to check out the story of Samuel’s arrival, from the countdown to the liftoff and the ascent. There will be an orbit as well.
Not only have I been getting Sam used to the camera, we also had Breanna Fogg — who took such awesome shots of Lydia last year — to come by and get portraits of both children. They’re wonderful, of course.
Soon I shall tell you a side tale of the food people at Brookwood and how they delighted in trying to kill me.
It feels good to say, “my children.”
Last night the three of us were sitting at the dinner table together. This is actually a rare event since Lydia insists on eating right when we walk in the door after work and school, but this time she was content to sit with Steven and me while we ate our food.
Lydia amused herself by swirling around a water droplet on the table with the spout of her sippy cup while Steven and I talked about the day.
“Lydia’s the oldest one in her room now,” I told Steven, “They tell me that she is running the class and is telling all the other kids what to do.” He laughed.
I looked over at Lydia. “Lydia, are you the boss in your class?”
She didn’t look up from her water droplet, but replied, “Uh huh.”
“Are you going to be the boss of Samuel when he gets here?”
“Uh huh,” she said, still smearing the water.
“Are you the boss of Mommy and Daddy?”
“Uh huh,” she chirped, still messing with her water.
“Do we let you do too much?”
She finally looked up for a moment and replied, “Nnnnnooooooooooo.”
Later she ate a bunch of steamed broccoli without any seasoning whatsoever on it. This one never ceases to amaze.
Lydia has taken up a new addiction recently — the kids’ show Yo Gabba Gabba. Oh, how enthralled she is!
Thankfully, it’s a pretty snazzy show and both Steven and I are able to sit through it. In fact, it can be rather entertaining. Thank God our child was not born during the Age of Barney the Dinosaur.
Saturday morning found the three of us parked on the sofa watching Lydia’s newest video and learning about Greetings, with the Daddy’s Girl parked in Steven’s lap.
As the characters began a song about “goodbye,” my mind began to travel as it does and I found myself upon a horribly sweet and simultaneously morbid thought. This song, with its words of, “Goodbye, see ya later, we had fun,” would be a good pick for a kids’ funeral.
Why why why do I think of stuff like this? I think a lot of women, especially moms, inadvertently come up with these torturous mind trails. When your kid takes a tumble down the stairs; before you’ve reached the bottom after them your mind has already gone through an entire worst-case scenario that ends up with you having to call everyone in your contact list . . . . only to reach the bottom of that long staircase and your child pops right up, saying,”Uh oh.” And my sister says I don’t plan ahead. Hrmmph.
So there I am watching Yo Gabba Gabba with my husband and daughter, trying with my utmost effort not to burst into tears as they sing goodbye.
I give you The Tree, 2009:
Lights: 2600 total, tied for last year
Lydia: surprisingly has shown a healthy respect for the tree thus far; she knows not to touch it — she just gets a kick out of naming what all the ornaments are
Cats: had been at their BEST behavior until the first presents went under the tree; I caught Renton in the act of chewing ribbon not ten minutes after I finished wrapping
Ever since my laptop had a brief stint in an exercise class, it has been tethered to an old CRT screen (and, more recently, a sweet flatscreen monitor Steven scored from work) in the third bedroom that has always been dubbed ‘the office.’ Thus, I have also been relegated to the office whenever I have been on the computer. Ahh, to remember the glory days of cruising the web or blogging from the dining room, couch or the comfy bed. C’est la vie.
So here I am in the office. It’s cold in here right now, pretty boring, and CHOCK FULL OF STUFF. We filled it with Stuff when we first moved in, then when we had to make a bedroom for the impending Lydia we filled it with more Stuff from her room.
It’s amazing what we have in here. I see a laptop bag I can’t use right now since my computer is essentially grounded, a small filing cabinet we definitely use, a larger filing cabinet we’d love to use but can’t find the damn key to unlock the thing, a box of pictures, a huge shelf of books, Lydia’s excersaucer, the old CRT screen that should really be in the basement, Lydia’s infant carrier, a buttload of books . . . and that’s just a sample of what I see in the room itself. The closet is much more fascinating — it’s where we keep our DVD collection, games, and my My Little Ponies, among other things.
What in the world will we do with all this Stuff? It’s all important Stuff that I don’t want to be banished to the basement, but it can’t stay here anymore. We need room at the Inn, so to speak, and I don’t think Lydia will be willing to share her crib come next June.
Another kid? Yeah.
But what shall we do with the Stuff?
Happy First Birthday, Elizabeth!
This time last year, I was fretting about Renton and his constipation, wondering who was going to take him to the vet — unaware of your mother’s caterwauling. 
Most families have a story like this. The story that you tell at every get-together or low point in the conversation since it’s guaranteed to liven things up. Our story has now been told to so many people in our circle of friends most everyone knows what I’m talking about when I utter the fateful word . . . Wendy’s.
But for y’all that don’t know, here’s our family’s greatest tale . . .
This was way back in the day, like Elementary School days, and Cathy and I were involved in many after-school activities like dance and piano. We tended to go out to dinner after these things and on this evening the four of us somehow ended up at Wendy’s.
This was also back when Wendy’s had this getup called the Superbar, a mini-smorgasbord that had an array of foods on it that was all-you-could-eat. As an aside, isn’t ‘smorgasbord’ a FANTASTIC word? I’ve never actually had the chance to use it before outside of quoting the Charlotte’s Web movie!
So, enter in my tired parents along with their two hyper girls who are oh-so-glad that piano/dance/school is done for the day and it’s time to eat. Cathy and I get Kids’ Meals to score the awesome toys but Dad is feeling adventurous so he goes for the Superbar.
Over the course of the dinner Dad went up to the bar multiple times to try out all the different foods, some at our behest. This was before the days of extreme germaphobia so the same plate went up every time. He had some spaghetti, some tacos, salad; I wanted to try some horrible concoction of strawberries and banana (ick!) so by the end of dinner that plate had a little bit of everything on it.
Near the end of dinner we were all slowing down, digesting, and discussing our day. Cathy, as usual, had wandered off to the bathroom. Dad was fiddling with her toy from her Kid’s Meal. One of the pieces fell on the floor and he bent down to get it.
The following sequence of events happened in slow motion for Mom and I.
In bending down to get the toy, Dad’s elbow hit the edge of his Superbar plate encrusted with foods from around the world, sending it flipping high into the air, up, up, up . . .
. . . then down, down, down, landing precisely on Dad’s head.
As the food oozed down his eyes and over his ears, the entire restaurant, which was full of patrons, became deathly quiet. All eyes were on our table, looking at this woman, child, and well-dressed man with a button-down shirt and tie sitting there with a mix of spaghetti, tacos, and strawberry gook all over his face. Mom always suspected other people thought she dumped the plate on him.
After a few seconds, a single sound began to emerge in the restaurant. A giggle quickly rising to a chuckle that immediately escalated to an all-out guffaw. It was me, falling to the floor, laughing so hard in a room of completely stunned people. I could barely breathe.
Perhaps my sputtering helped to break the ice. People around the restaurant slowly went back to their own meals over covert looks. Mom reached over and pulled a spaghetti noodle off of Dad’s ear. I finally came to my senses and realized Cathy was still in the bathroom and had missed the whole thing — I ran to get her. I peeped under the stall and said, “You have GOT TO COME SEE DAD!”
By that time Mom was helping him clean up enough so he could at least open his eyes. He cleaned up as best we could and slunk out of that Wendy’s. Mom had to throw away Dad’s shirt — the strawberry stuff just would not come out.
We didn’t eat there again for YEARS.
As most everyone who reads this site knows, we did lose my mom this past Sunday. The past few days have really been a blur. Apologies in advance for droning on about sad things; I promise I will be back to writing tales of tear-inducing laughter in no time.
I did want to post here something I wrote for Mom’s funeral. It was read during the service though not by me. I’m not a good orator.
After the service, the funeral director was manhandling the flowers into the flower arrangement-toting mobile and managed to create a floral domino effect with one stand of flowers knocking down the others until a floor lamp became the ultimate casualty, keeling over and smashing into smithereens. I could hear Mom giggling.
Of course, I kept a piece of the lamp. My sister and I have fond memories of that lamp, actually.
_______________________________
This is not how it was supposed to be. None of us are supposed to be here today. My mother should be on the phone with her Peeps making plans for where they will be going for their Thursday lunch. All of this is a very hard thing to grasp.
I would need a lifetime to even begin to sum up what my mother is to me. How do you convey such a love in just words? I don’t know how to accomplish such a feat. What can you say about the woman who bore you and your sister, raised you both along with a loving father, and was always just a phone call away with the right words at the ever-ready?
I have found myself during these past few days’ events beginning to reach for that very phone and ring her up. She would know what to do. She would definitely tell me if the shoes I am contemplating are hideous. We have had half a lifetime of conversations together but the other half have been left unsaid.
I will be able to reconcile with all that has come to pass, but today . . . today all I can feel is a profound sadness that her two granddaughters will never get to know their Nana. However, I find joy beyond measure that she herself did get to know and love them. They are my mother’s treasures.
