Four Things

I haven't done a list post in a long time, have I?  And it's perfect for the discombobulated state of my brain today!

• Despite the whole toe situation (broken?  dislocated?  Whatever, it still hurts, although not as badly, and continues to appear a bit misshapen), I managed to run in last weekend's 10k, and did it fast enough to get second in my age group, which netted me a medal and guilt-free eating of our kids' candy they got from the parade we watched later that morning.  One of the best parts of the morning was my friends not only showing up at the beginning of the race to cheer me on, but also veering over to Mindy's driveway- which is on the race route- to holler encouraging things, complete with inspiring and hilarious poster- when I had one last grueling mile left, then they darted to the end to be there as I crossed the finish line/mat/thing.  It was a day that turned out pretty great, which I did not expect given the fact that I couldn't fit my injured foot into two different pairs of shoes when getting ready for the race, and instead had to opt for my least favorite pair that makes me feel like my feet are slapping the ground but boasts a pretty wide toe box.  The day was capped off by Caedmon demonstrating he still likes to hold my hand when we're on the couch together.

Yikes- anyone else bothered by poor posture?  I just wanna crank his neck and shoulders into proper form.  Gently, of course; he is still the one kid who will run into my arms after school.  Atticus still wants a hug but he saunters toward me, no doubt ever aware of watching kids still on the bus (seriously, the stories Adelaide tells of the attention that kid gets... I'm always like, "I don't know what to do with this information,") or daughter, who lets me know she wants post-school affection by staggering and then falling onto me.  They're subtle, these children of ours.

• Our elder two children have begun mowing.  It is awesome.

Now I can do just enough mowing to get my fix- because I really do enjoy it- then when I get tired tell our kids it's time to build character and contribute to the household and stuff.  

• I haven't read Fannie Flagg in quite some time, but after recently reading The All-Girl Filling Station's Last Reunion, I'm wondering why that is.

Fannie Flagg has this strange and wonderful ability to take a story that's full of pretty serious stuff but make it entertaining and lovely.  It's tough trying to recommend it to other people, because you inevitably end up saying something like, "Oh, it's so good, about this daughter and her elderly mother who's actually pretty awful and their not-so-great relationship and how all these women were pilots in World War II but got, like, no credit for it, and this filling station that, well, actually had to close... but no, I'm not saying it right!  Somehow it's not depressing or dark or anything, you won't want to put it down, and you'll love the characters, and- DON'T YOU WALK AWAY FROM ME!"

So, yeah.  You should read it.

• Adelaide bought some face paint a couple weeks ago, and has painted her own and her brothers' faces multiple times since.

I like that this is something creative that they can all do together, and that they somehow don't fight during their fairly long painting sessions.  What I don't like is when Adelaide paints her face for the fifth or sixth time, washes it off a couple hours after application, before bedtime, and wakes up the next morning with a swollen, itchy, rash-covered face.  

Her eyes were the worst.  I checked with her before posting this photo, too, and she okayed it.

She insisted on going to school, as they were socializing guinea pigs in one of her classes, and no paltry allergic reaction (on her face) was going to come between her and holding small, furry animals.  She made it two and a half hours before the school nurse called, asking that I come get our daughter.  First full week of school and we already had a kid taking a sick day.  I have a feeling it's going to be a banner year.

Drains, Push-Ups, and Harry Potter

A few days ago I noticed the drain in our kitchen sink acting up.  I chastised it by running the garbage disposal repeatedly, but with great gentleness, as the garbage disposal frightens me.  If whirling blades hidden in a dark, dirty cave that are somehow hooked up to both water and electricity don't scare you, well, I tip my hat to you.  You are made of sterner stuff than I.  Also, on a completely unrelated note, kindly make an appointment with your friendly neighborhood head shrinker at your earliest convenience.

Shockingly, running the disposal did not fix the problem, even when intermingled with prayer in varying doses, to the extent that by this morning there was standing water in the tub of the dishwasher and the sink drains were crankier than ever.

I had a counter-full of dirty dishes, but thankfully I also had three children sitting around, handily home for summer break.

I put on my Supervisor hat and loaded each kid down with two arms-worth of dishes and sent them upstairs to the bathroom.  (I had carefully scraped every last crumb of food into the trash, for any of you who are miraculously 1. still reading this, and 2. worried for the future of my bathroom drains.)

I used a bucket of soapy water to wash the dishes, the bathtub faucet to rinse, and my three favorite indentured servants to dry, cart downstairs, and put away, rotating assembly-line style.

Maybe halfway through, when my back started screaming at me from all the hunching over and twisting and I was unpleasantly reminded of pregnancy, as I am anytime my back throws a toddler-worthy tantrum, Caedmon chimed in, "Isn't this fun?"  The other two agreed:  "It's like an adventure!"  "I've never washed dishes upstairs before!"  I zipped my lips before any negative sentiments could fall out, skip gaily over to our children, and suction themselves to those sweet, naive, sheltered bodies.

By the time we were done, big crock pot put away and everything, the exotic chore had lost a bit of its luster even for the kids, although Adelaide remarked, "This all gives me a lot of sympathy for people who lived a long time ago.  We just did some dishes and it was so much work."  I agreed and then we all decided a break had been earned, being 21st century sloths, ourselves.

I, at least, have a semi-valid excuse for any slow movement today, as I had a severe asthma/allergy attack last night after supper.  It was very strange to experience one during daylight hours, as they usually strike in the middle of the night.  The perk to this was that two texts to Derek from the bathroom and he was rabbiting out of the house for liquid Benadryl, which is the fastest acting allergy med according to my doc, and a drug I should ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS have on hand, also according to my doc.  Ha, ha, whoops, sorry, Dr. T!  *laughs, gasps, wheezes, passes out because I can't manage to follow doctor's orders.*

The dross lining is that I scared the kids, to the extent that both the boys clutched me, crying, when it was clear I wasn't actually going to die.  I'm not sure what triggered the attack- the only two novel foods at supper were a barbecue sauce and the blackberry cobbler.  I had taste-tested the sauce at the grocery store, though, and I've had all the ingredients in the cobbler before, if not combined in that precise way.  Well, this was my first time with frozen blackberries as opposed to fresh, I guess.  Either way, boo.

Oh, but good stuff has been happening, too, because despite what I may have led you to believe over the course of this post, our lives are not a Greek tragedy.  Although if it were, our children would make a darling chorus.

Derek has been doing push-ups with a living, breathing, wriggling fifty-pound weight on his back.  This causes delight on the part of the weight, exhaustion on that of the pusher-upper.

Adelaide has been doing exactly what you're supposed to do when it's summer, which is read in a hammock.

But it's a falling-apart hammock, so she also earns the label "daredevil" with this practice.

Really, I think it's just a desperate desire to be away from her loud brothers for five seconds, especially whilst re-reading the Harry Potter series.  She's still impressed by my ability to finish most of the sentences she begins reading aloud from the HP books- tell me, when will she stop thinking the things I can do are fun or cool?  It feels inevitable, but I can't predict its arrival.  She is an accomplished eye-roller, if that helps.

Speaking of Harry Potter (I feel like I say that a lot), I just love Harry Potter jokes.

The end.

Sledding and Slow-Cooked Bananas and Wishful Thinking

Temperatures soared into the teens this week, which means Caedmon and I dragged our sleds to the bus stop to pick the kids up after school most days this week.  We then enjoyed going down the little hill there over and over and over and over and climbing up the little hill over and over and over and over, fulfilling my real motive of wearing the kids out a bit and burning off any post-school day crankiness before they even walked in the door of our house.  Raise your hand if you've ever asked God to enrich the evil genius residing within you in order to aid in your parenting.

Adelaide affirmed my belief that youngest siblings generally have it made, at least if your eldest sibling is an indulgent sister whose name rhymes with Shadelaide.

His Indian name is Cute But Heavy.  Hers is Dotes Upon Caedmon, which sounds more like the name of an English village, so never mind.


Then we all went home and did the only thing you can do after sledding, which is drink hot cocoa.

Yes, I'm still using my Christmas mug.  I'm also still listening to Christmas music, although only in our vehicle.  I took all those exhortations to "Never change!" inscribed in my yearbook seriously.

Last night I made banana ice cream for the kids after supper, which is always curious, as whipping frozen bananas in my food processor tap dances on just this side of triggering an allergic response in me, despite the fact that I'm not actually ingesting any of the allergen.  I noted this with interest, then got to further my mental notes when cleaning regurgitated banana off nearly every surface of the bathroom later that night.  Apparently seven years old is not the age when you're able to hit the toilet when sick- well, not the inside of it, anyway, or even within a few feet of its easily flushable inside.  Seriously, it was like an episode of NCIS: Vomit in there.  I'm sure if I had the training I'd be able to identify all kinds of things in the splatter patterns.  Good news, though!  Apparently stomach acid "cooks" the banana enough- thereby denaturing its proteins- that even skin contact doesn't elicit a response in this allergy sufferer.  Motherhood is teaching me so much!

After a night like that, I kept Atticus home from school, and although we enjoyed a lethargic morning, he now seems to be back to normal.

Please excuse the mess.  We actually live here.

Balloons have saved our bacon more than once during a long Iowa winter:  They're cheap, after a couple days they do a Roberta Flack and kill themselves softly, and the children lose their minds over them.  I don't know why tag/keep-away/ every single other game is so much more fun when played with balloons, but according to our progeny, this is a truth universally acknowledged.  

I'm going to copy a friend of mine now and attempt to visualize my preferred future:  A vomit-free weekend, laden with running, good food (I'm making a cheese ball!  And crockpot Maid-Rites!  And yes, this is exciting enough to warrant an exclamation point!  It's possible that my life is somewhat sad!  I don't even care because CHEESE BALL!), with a liberal dose of Jane Eyre and maybe some Mancala.  Amen.

Let's Talk About Weird Pseudo-Medical Practices

If, at any time in the future, you find your allergies acting up and you want to do something delightfully strange, I'd like to suggest you squirt water through one nostril, let it swish around your sinuses a bit, then run it out the opposite nostril.  It's a great trick for making your kids squeal, and I can only assume would be a hit at parties.

Here's what mine looks like, complete with picture of happy Dr. Mehta.

My mom was at one of her gatherings of people who delight in the suffering of others (she calls it a "nurse conference"), and a nurse from an allergist's office was lauding the benefits of nasal irrigation systems.  Mom then tried it to help ward off her standard post-mowing headache, and it worked.  Then, because she doesn't believe in hiding her medical light under a bushel, she bought one for me.  I was a little worried when she first told me about it, because instead of the above little squeeze bottle, I had previously only seen the Neti Pot, which makes it look less like you're rinsing pollen and dander and junk out of your system and more like you have a disturbing teapot fetish, like you'll stick that spout into just about any body orifice if these blasted people would go away.

To be honest, the first time I used it, it didn't go that great.  I mean, I managed to get it into one side of my nose and the water did run out the other, and I had the side perk of completely freaking Caedmon out, but it gave me a thumping sinus headache for the rest of the day.  It was immediately obvious what I'd done wrong:  I hadn't heated the water enough.  It turns out what feels lukewarm to the skin on the inside of my wrist feels pretty frigid when it's sluicing through my sinuses, akin to the feeling of getting pool water up your nose.  Not pleasant.

The second time, the pollen count had been high for days, my nose itched incessantly, and I'd spent a good portion of the day sneezing.  This time I made sure the water was nice and warm before squirting it into my face (there's really no getting around the fact that this whole thing is pretty weird), and sure enough:  No post-rinse headache and the itching and sneezing abated for the remainder of the day.  I've also found that, after each time I use Squeezy, I'm able to breathe much more easily through my nose.  I have chronically swollen nasal passages (Dear lifelong allergies:  I hate you), but for about thirty minutes after irrigation, I can inhale and exhale and even inhale again if I'm feeling extravagant, all through my nose, all the way I assume normal people can all the time.  Such luxury!

While the packaging does say "Daily Nasal Hygiene," this isn't something I'd do every day.  I don't even wash my hair every day, let alone the inside of my nose; I use it as needed, instead, when my nose is about to itch itself off my face, or after I've been breathing in mass amounts of pet dander, or when the demon ragweed is swirling through the air and making people miserable.  

Have any of you tried a Neti Pot?  Any kind of nasal irrigation system?  On a scale of 1 to 10, just how ridiculous did you feel the first time you used it?