Four Things

• If you are on Instagram, consider giving Merriam-Webster a follow.  Yes, as in the dictionary.  They post a Word of the Day that puts most of those desk calendars and toilet paper to shame.  Here's a recent one I'm still thinking about:

Can you imagine using this in a sentence around people?  "I don't know what it is about tulips, man- I just grok them."  They'd think you were crazy, throwing random nonsense syllables into what was a normal conversation.  

This, of course, means I'm going to try using it at the library today.

• If you happen to be at the national school nurse conference in San Diego next month, I recommend going to this session:

Why, yes, that is my mom presenting it, because who else has favorite pediatric infectious diseases?  Or refers to themselves as a "former 'Germ Wench'"?  I can promise the whole thing will be a hoot, and am currently taking bets on how many times she mentions hand-washing.  

Pre-test:  Who can tell me three things that are wrong with this combatant's hand-washing technique?  I am not even kidding, and I promise my sisters know.

• One Friday of every month, our library hosts a little thing called Soup and Sound, where the library staff makes a meal and a person or group comes in and performs.  Over the past year I've heard a presentation by the Iowa Honey Bee Queen, a contingent from our high school speech team came in, and last month, a local hammered dulcimer player shared his talents.  I pulled Adelaide out of school to attend, much to her delight.

I believe she enjoyed listening to Mr. Greenlaw play, and it was so generous of him to let everyone fiddle around with the instrument, but if I'm being honest, the carrot cake was probably her favorite part. 

• Derek's won a bunch more awards for his work over the past few months, but one is a doozy:

He won a Telly!  What's a Telly, you ask?  It's a big ol' honking international competition with thousands and thousands of entries and only the best win the good stuff.  I did not take that from their website.  

I believe I've shared his winning video before, but just in case, here it is again (and before you say, "Resource Recovery Plant?  No, thanks," well, this is actually interesting and will make you question what your own community does with their trash):

Congratulations, husband!

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P.S.  What do you think the past tense of "grok" is?  "Grokked"?  And why isn't it "grock"?  I can't think of any other English verb or noun that ends in "k" rather than "ck."  Mock, shock, lock, hock, chock, dock, why can't I let this go, knock, pock, sock... 

Somebody Make This Woman a Cape

Last week, my mom received the news that she was the Kansas State School Nurse of the Year.  This means that she is the best school nurse in the entire world.  Well, that's what I've decided, anyway.  And so that's what we're going to talk about today.

See, the more I talk to people, the more I read, the more I interact with the world at large, the more I find that many are still operating under the delusion that school nurses spend their days sitting in their offices, just waiting for a sick kid to wander in.  But the people who nominated Mom- fellow staff members, bless them- and the people who decided that she is The Best- fellow school nurses- all know better.  They know about all the vision and hearing and scoliosis screenings.  They know about endless blood sugar level checks (shout out to the diabetic kids), and finding someone who can speak an obscure language so you can communicate with a new family (shout out to the Chuukese), and finding some way to make CPR training entertaining for the tenth year in a row (shout out to anyone who's ever been the butt of one of my mom's jokes- it was for a good cause).

And that's not even getting into body parts being cut off because locker doors are surprisingly sharp and all the other astonishingly stupid ways middle schoolers can find to hurt themselves and each other.  It's also not getting into all the grant writing for health careers classes or AEDs or any of the other things schools need but don't get funding for (in Kansas?  That's basically everything.), or doing anything and everything to get parents and staff alike to make healthy choices for their kids, even if they're bound and determined to do the opposite.

Basically my mom's job.

Or hey, let's talk about some of the more glamorous aspects of her job.  Like nit picking!  I mean literal nit picking, as in picking head lice and nits out of kids' hair because apparently no one else is going to do it.  And what about that time she turned to my sisters and me and informed us that we were not allowed to answer the phone because there was a crazy, negligent, borderline abusive parent harassing her for doing her job?  Or if you really want to get scary- what about all the paperwork generated for everything I've just mentioned?  What about that?

Congratulations, Mom.  You're the best school nurse/obsessive hand washer/stand-up comedian specializing in blood-borne pathogens/mortifying sex educator/mom I've ever known.

"Lorri, someday you're going to be the Kansas State School Nurse of the Year.  All it will take to get there is swimming through an ocean of paperwork, ignorance, and disgusting bodily fluids."  "Super!  Sign me up!"  

Today We're Going to Talk About Gross Medical Stuff

After three weeks of on-again-off-again high fevers, achey-ness, headaches, and other fun, Adelaide is finally feeling better.

The fact that it took me three weeks to take her the doctor's office should probably cause me more mother-guilt, but the fact is, it takes a whole heck of a lot more to induce said mother-guilt than it did just two short years ago.  Whether this is because I've realized the best mothers I know also screw up constantly or because I've just become astonishingly good at shrugging my shoulders, I don't know.  What I do know is that when I realized Adelaide had been sick for three full weeks, I decided that, sure, I guess, I can take our only daughter in to the see a medical professional.  You know, for a lark.


The diagnosis was one bacterial infection that piggy-backed on top of the initial virus.  Antibiotic prescribed, prescription filled and picked up (say it with me, now:  $4 Rx's are the BEST), and 48 hours later, our daughter stopped her near constant litany of tears and moaning and I don't FEEL well's (what's that, you say?  Sounds like I should have taken her in earlier?  Please see the above paragraph and go ahead and imagine me shrugging my shoulders.  Also building character in our offspring and stuff), is back to constant chatter and charming interrogations.

One of the (many) reasons I didn't take her to the doc sooner is that, see, we were just there a couple weeks ago.  No, it wasn't for Adelaide, and no, it wasn't because someone was sick, but really, I had just been there.  No need to go back for quite some time.  (Please don't try to make sense of this.  There is none to be made.)  That initial trip was because Caedmon had gotten another giant splinter in the sole of his foot, and because this time he was gracious enough to do it on a weekday during our doctor's office's normal operating hours, I was able to take him in to have a medical professional perform the extraction, rather than me rooting around in his skin for an hour and a half while Derek held him down.  This way was much better, as it only took ten sweaty minutes of flesh-digging by the PA while the nurse held his leg and I held the rest of him (don't kid yourself, 4-year-olds are strong).  (Also, sorry to Derek's mom for the words "flesh-digging," I can just see her blanching now, as opposed to my mother, who is probably reading this going, "Mmm, flesh-digging, my favorite."  And now I've managed to further gross Becky out by typing "flesh-digging" four times and made my very nice, excellent nurse-mother sound like Nurse Ratched does Night of the Living Dead.  That one's my bad.)

(Oh, but a quick aside to Becky and anyone else squeamish who might ever be tempted to randomly scroll through the photos on my mom's phone or camera, hoping for cute grandchild photos:  Just Say No.  Well, unless you have a jonesing for pus and boils and inflamed skin and other head-scratchers more suited for a Victorian Oddities Museum.  Or if you're one of those people who continues to harbor the notion that school nurses sit in their offices reading books until some poor poppet stops by with an owie.  Then BY ALL MEANS, look at her phone.  Also ask her for the story about that time a kid sliced their finger off in a locker.  It's a doozy.)


Aaaanyway.  We're all more or less healthy now, although both the boys are now overdue for their yearly check-ups.  Whatever, shrugging my shoulders, I'll get to it when I get to it.  Probably.

 

Humans Should All Just Hibernate Through Middle School

Here I was, all set to write a post about the new levels of disgusting-ness I was forced to explore today via our children's illness when I stopped and said to myself the thing I most often want to say to random strangers:  Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.  (I feel bad about this.  As a Christian I should probably most want to carry around a sign that says "Free Hugs" or something- although I shuddered just writing that.  Instead I most want to say "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should."  I should re-think my life.  Some other time.)

Yes, even on the internet, just because you can, doesn't mean you should.  I thought about plunging on ahead anyway, but then realized that the only person who would have been able to bear to read it was my mom, because she's a middle school nurse.  Obviously as a nurse she's had to see all manner of vile human by-products, but I believe the true test of her mettle is her willingness to work with junior highers.  Have you seen those things?  I visited her office a couple years ago, which features a wide bank of windows looking out onto a main hallway.  Everything was going fine, just me, mom, and one of her co-workers chatting it up, when the bell rang, and then the Freak Parade began.  It was like being in a reverse kind of zoo, where all the frightening creatures are on the outside and you're afraid to tap on the glass lest you draw their attention.  A full third of them must have relied on sonar to navigate the hallway; there's no way they could have seen where they were going with all that greasy plumage hanging over the part of the face that I'm hoping contained human eyeballs.  And that was the "boys"!  (Those are intentional quotation marks, in case you were wondering.)

Look, I remember being a middle schooler.  It was awkward, and awful, and overall a little bit tragic.  I honestly don't know how my mom didn't flinch every time she saw me.  ("NGYAAAAH!  Oh.  Oh, it's just you, Kristy.  I thought one of the vet's experiments had escaped again."  At which point I snarled and cringed away from the sunlight.  Oh, how it burned!  And yes, we had a veterinarian who lived and practiced behind our house, but he never engaged in unlawful experimentation.  Not to my knowledge, at least.  It is a little curious how all our cats chose to end their lives right in front of his house.  Never mind that's where the highway is.)  But somehow time manages to distort even the most heinous of our memories, or you're like me and become awesome at compartmentalizing to a degree generally only shared by women named "Sybil."  Either way, memories of middle school are locked safely away, and you manage to convince yourself it wasn't so bad- until you visit a middle school as an adult and wonder why, with all our scientific advancements, we haven't figured out how to skip this whole stage of life entirely.

Sure, you have weirdos like my mom who talk about her subjects with amused affection, much the way this dog's owner likely speaks of her:

via

Pretty sure I saw this girl walking on two legs in that hallway.  She was sticking up for the really ugly ducklings.  (And I can make jokes like that because I would have loved to look this good in middle school.  If you knew me then, you know exactly what I'm talking about.  You have burned every photo of me from those years like we talked about, right?)

So even though years of working with cripplingly strange middle schoolers- oh, and sick people- may have inured my mother to stories like the one I was going to tell, I know that the rest of you would have had no choice but to leave this blog and never come back.

Good thing I found this supremely relevant tangent to write about, hmm?