Counting Down

Fun fact:  Adelaide is not a morning person.

Another fun fact:  Caedmon adores Adelaide.  Put these two facts together and you get Caedmon skipping up to Adelaide for a hug as soon as she emerges from her cave in the morning, and getting a snarl for his efforts.  This results in Caedmon cowering behind me, peeking out to see when Mr. Hyde has gone, and in Adelaide retreating to a world populated by fake people, who are far less bothersome than real ones over breakfast.

Really, though.

This is the last week we'll be doing our breakfast dance, however; school starts next week.  My brain has done an admirable job of not freaking out about the fact that all three (giant) babies of ours will be in school, full time, five days from now.  Every once in a while I will torture myself with a mental image of Caedmon looking forlornly out the window of the school bus as he is driven away from me, but other than that, things are fine!  Totally good!

Thankfully, the same day I send my children out into the cruel world (aka to very nice schools with wonderful teachers) I will be going to work, as I have somehow managed to convince a library to hire me.  It's part-time, while the kids are in school, and I start next week.

In other, less dance-y news, I seem to have broken a toe.  Of all the things to break, this is obviously quite minor, but not to worry!  I have still used it as an opportunity to feel sorry for myself.

How did I break it?  Why, making the bed, of course!  I'm taking it as a sign from God that I should no longer do such things.

Really what happened is I stubbed my toe (while making the bed), heard a crack, saw the toe was at a slightly odd angle, and I've been icing and elevating and buddy wrapping ever since.  The worst part is I haven't been able to run for going on three days now.  THREE. DAYS.  Never mind that I have a race next weekend.  My new goal for that race is simply to be able to stagger across the finish line.  How fun!

Aww, this guy and I look exactly the same when we throw tantrums!

Now we have to go buy multiple pairs of shoes because our children jump a shoe size an average of once every three months.  This is not hyperbole.  Also on the docket is hugging those same kids just long and tightly enough to alarm them.  Parenting is so fun.

Who Could Have Seen This Coming?

The first week of summer vacation is always interesting, isn't it?

I feel like I've just gone through some re-training.  I mean, yes, I usually spend quite a bit of time with our children, but it's nothing to compared to summer vacation, where with the exception of my daily run, we're together constantly, world without end, amen.

One of the things I had somehow forgotten is just how physical kids are.  Do you know how many times our children have gotten hurt in the past seven days?  A million.  Kidding, it's the only in the low hundreds.  Per child.  Just tonight, at the playground, Atticus came to me crying because he'd scraped up his back.  I lifted up his shirt, and sure enough, there were abrasions up and down his spine.  He explained to me what had happened, and I scratched my head.  You did what, now?  So we went over and he recreated the scene for me, Unsolved Mysteries-style.  I still have no idea how it happened.  I can only think he did a weird spasm and somehow forced his trunk through a narrow space of wire mesh... or something.  Five minutes later Caedmon came to me crying, because it hurts when you drop from the frighteningly tall monkey bars and your ankle gives out because you've forced your exhausted body through that obstacle course eight times in a row.

The skin on Adelaide's stomach is a mess of scrapes and scratches, because that's what happens when you get stuck up a tree.  This is especially true when, once you realize you're stuck, you climb higher up into the branches.  Reads at a twelfth grade reading level; can't navigate herself out of a tree.  This kid is going places.  Like trees, I guess.

In the interest of full disclosure and run-of-the-mill honesty, when I told Derek this story and showed him this photo, his question was, "Wow- how did she get up there?"  I was forced to admit that, um, I had, you know, maybe given her a leg up, then proceeded to help tremendously by staring helplessly up at her and shrugging when she pronounced herself to be stuck.

If this week is a fair indicator of the coming months, I'm thinking "Who could have seen this coming?" might just be the mantra of our summer break.

Laddies

Monday morning, I woke up, slid out of bed, and was immediately cold.

We have our thermostat set so that, from 8 PM to 6 AM, the heat doesn't kick on until it gets down to sixty degrees in our house.  By the time I get up, the heat has been on for thirty minutes, and it's usually several degrees warmer than sixty.  Monday morning it seemed significantly colder than usual, but it wasn't until I went downstairs and inspected the Nest only to find that it was dead that I used my amazing powers of deductive reasoning to puzzle out that something was wrong with our heating system.

Derek and I tinkered with the thermostat and the furnace in the basement for quite some time Monday night- well, Derek tinkered and I held a flashlight like a boss, and by "like a boss" I mean my right shoulder was sore the next day from holding a small, lightweight object up for so long.  That is how sad my upper body strength is.  I also flipped a number of switches back and forth in the circuit breaker- fuse box- thingy.  I feel like I need to make a t-shirt that has "Big Helper" written on it in childlike crayon.

Derek and his Big Helper determined that it wasn't the thermostat, so it must be a problem with the furnace.

I called a furnace... guy... (heating service technician?  I have no idea what the proper terminology is for this kind of thing.  Indoor temperature journeyman?  I bet that's it.) and he came out and did stuff to the furnace (or renegotiated the basement elves' contract, for all I know), had it working again in thirty minutes.  Hallelujah!  Two cold mornings were more than enough for me.

Ah, but do you know what we think caused the whole problem with the furnace?  Our boys.  Naturally.

Sunday afternoon the boys were desperate to play basketball, but it was too cold for my bones outside, and I was tired, and [insert whatever excuse sounds good to you here], so I was not about to walk them to park for some sportsing.  I just wasn't.  Then they began begging to play with the small hoop we currently have stored in our basement.  I said no.  They begged.  I said no.  They begged some more.  I finally caved, and sat on the basement stairs watching them toss a small, soft ball through a hoop over and over.  

At one point, when I went upstairs for mere minutes to check on the welfare of our other child, our two dear sons managed to knock something over into the furnace.  I heard the crash, asked what had happened, and told them to get upstairs, basement playtime was done.  Forever.

Two chilly days and a service fee later, I have learned my lesson.  I'm just thankful it's March, not January, when a hiccupping heater could have been dangerous, and that the furnace is the only thing the boys managed to break, not, say, our entire house.  

Now, when they were babies, I did not expect a future replete with the wanton destruction these boys seem hell-bent on, but I likewise couldn't have predicted the crazy, excessive, lovely, lovely affection they shower on us.  They are the first to give hugs and dart forward to help out and rub my back if I seem even the least bit tired.  Monday Caedmon asked if he could use my phone to send his Daddy a text message.  It took him a good twenty minutes to very seriously peck out and send the following.

And he was thrilled to get a response.  Yesterday's was

No one has ever been as happy to get a text message as Caedmon is when there's a message for him from Derek on my phone.  He stares at the screen raptly for far longer than it takes to actually read it.  I don't know if he's memorizing the emojis, or meditating, or what.  

Then there's Atticus, who completes a "Would You Rather..." worksheet at school every week, most of which I have kept because his responses are priceless.  ("I would rather be a rock star than president.  Because I would sing to everyone.  I would not take naps.")  This one was quintessentially Atticus.

"I would Rather Be big.  Because you would win lots of Badlls [battles].  Because your King would be God.  That is why I would Rather Be big."  Somehow the kid who, yes, loves battles and God is also the most tender-hearted of our children, sensitive but emotionally in tune to those around him.  He's also the one who is so single-minded when playing backyard soccer with the family that he pays no attention to the jerk tree he's run into/ is clearly out to get him. 

Also Sunday night.

That thing extends down onto to his neck.  To answer your questions, 1) Yes, he's already much better, as he is seven years old, and when you are seven you enjoy almost magical healing powers; 2) Yes, Derek and I have been calling him Scarface, but privately, as remember?  He's kind of a sensitive kid; and 3) Yes, I did say a superduper fervent prayer of thanksgiving that it wasn't a couple inches to the right, although that would have made Halloween costume decisions relatively easy for the rest of his life.  "Hmm, which pirate do I want to be this year?"

Teno-Syno-Dino-Rhino-Vitis

About a week ago, I decided that as long as I have an opposable thumb on my right hand, I might as well be able to use it.  I'm greedy like that.

I therefore got myself to the doctor- a good month after my wrist/hand/useless flipper started to trouble me- and good news!  It turns out I do not, in fact, have a stress fracture!  Instead I have a condition that makes me sound like I'm making things up when I try and explain what's wrong with me.

Yeah, that.

She put me on a week's worth of some anti-inflammatory magic pills that made me realize just how bad things had gotten, along with instructions on a series of physical therapy-type exercises to do with my hand and wrist.  At the beginning of the week, I could hardly do any of them because of the pain and tightness.  Now, not only can I do them (mostly-ish), I do them all with the same type and amount of pride most commonly seen among preschoolers after painting their newest Pollock-esque masterpiece.

Really, this whole episode seems to have caused regression to about the age of four.  Extreme concentration required to do the smallest of tasks because it's all with my left hand?  Check.  Mind-bending slowness needed for tasks like chopping vegetables, getting dressed, and doing the dishes, because again, all done with my non-dominant left hand?  Check.  Yelling things like, "Watch me stretch this rubber band!" as I do PT to re-condition my now-puny right hand?  Check.  It's very humbling, and very frustrating.

Last night I took the last of my magic pills, so I'm a little nervous about the next couple days, because if the pain comes back with the ferocity I'm fearing (it was never wiped out completely, just subdued), I'll have to go see a specialist who will need to inject something into my wrist (yaaaaay!) or sharpen his knives and start hacking away at the tendons in my wrist (yaaaaaay!).  That's not exactly how the doctor put it, but I'm able to read between the lines and I have a healthy imagination, although she specifically asked me not to use it in cases like this.  (For real.  She did.  I really love my doctor.)

For now, though, I'm going to keep doing exciting things like using my fancy rehab tool (a can of Ro-Tel) with my right hand in various ways, doing ice massage, and trying to figure out how the heck this happened in the first place.  (Doc to me:  "Do you play the organ?"  "No."  "You're not a hairdresser, right?  Do you spend lots of time fixing your hair every day?"  "Definitely not.")  The activities that are the most painful and exacerbate my symptoms the most are writing by hand (sorry, Christmas thank-you's, I have a legitimate excuse for your tardiness this year), and the chopping and dicing of food.

The problem with the food thing is that although I make 90% of our meals at home, I'm not exactly a sous chef, responsible for dicing mountains of ingredients every day.  This makes me wonder if perhaps my chopping form is off?  Is anyone an expert on this?  And could I use it as an excuse to get fancier, sharper knives?  Thoughts?

My left hand almost started crying sad hand-tears when it realized that all these needed to be diced for my favorite soup.  It only took me thirty minutes!

Grating cheese also hurts like crazy.  My left hand officially SUCKS at it.  But favorite soup is favorite soup!