Dead Clumsy

Every once in a while I catch sight of someone's smooth, scar-free knees and I think, What, do you live in a bubble?  Where are your hard-earned battle wounds? but then I realize most likely they're just a person who doesn't fall down walking across a flat surface every other week and it's more like, Oh.  Okay.  What's that like?


This is what I'm doing today:

Around midnight last night I woke up fighting for air, an asthma attack catching me by surprise.  I managed to wheeze my way down to a hive-free, relatively open-airway existence about an hour and a half later, only to have Atticus scream his way through a night terror just as I was falling back asleep.

I had my alarm set for 5:02 am so I could go on an easy-paced four-mile run, and as I finally laid back down to hopefully get some sleep at who-knows-what-time (I never look at the clock if I'm awake in the middle of the night; I'll only torture myself calculating exactly how much time I have to sleep if I fall asleep RIGHTNOW, making rest even more elusive), I promised myself that if I got up and did the run, I could have a quick nap during Cade's nap time this afternoon rather than writing a blog post.  

I got up at 5:02, shrugged on my garb, and headed out the door, munching on toast during a walking warm-up.  

I'd been running for all of two minutes when, in the darkness between pools of light cast by street lights, I misjudged the placement of the sidewalk, my foot fell where the edge of the sidewalk meets grass, my ankle rolled and down goes Frazier.  (<----Just for yooouuuu, Derek!)

You probably don't remember that the last time I sprained my ankle was when, a couple months after Caedmon was born, I decided it was time to start running again.  I laced up my shoes, headed out the door, and fell down the front steps, badly spraining my ankle, forced to walk around in that crappy brace for a month.

This time, at least, I'm hoping it's just kind of, I don't know, wrenched or something, as it's hardly swollen, just hurts like a mother any time I try to do things like walk or go down stairs without the brace.  No big deal, right?  Right?

I wish I could blame the injury on the sleepless night, but most likely it's just a sad combination of lack of coordination, poor depth perception, inability to gauge little things like This is a sidewalk and This is grass- PICK ONE, NOT BOTH.  

I have sprained joints and broken bones just trying to walk from point A to point B on this earth, which, well, sucks, obviously, but the one good thing to come from all this chronic clumsiness is that I know how to fall.  I was set to fall hard right on the concrete this morning, but YEARS of practice have taught me to instinctively curl inward and roll upon impact with my inevitable opponent The Ground.  I should have a lot less skin than I do right now; instead I have a (PLEASE GOD hopefully fast-healing) wrenched ankle and sore knee, and that's it.  (Do me a favor and pretend to be terribly impressed that this is a skill of mine and not mildly horrified.  Thanks so much.)

I'd been hoping none of our children would exhibit any of these tendencies toward klutziness (the week before Adelaide started kindergarten I sternly warned her, "Do NOT try to jump rope off a curb," which was my virgin foray into the Land of Sprains, and it was a doozy), and so far, all has been more or less well. 

Then last week I got a call from the elementary school nurse.  Atticus ran face first into another kid in P.E.  The worst part about this was that when the nurse first called, she described the injury and told me he had an ice pack on it.  There was silence for several seconds and I said, "Okay, well, feel free to send him back to class when he's feeling better!" because I'm a terrible mother with a dwarf-sized sympathy organ, but then she said, "Um, you may want to take him to the doctor to get his nose x-rayed," and I was like, "Oh, you want me to come do something with this child who is, in fact, my very own son."  I went and got him and he was freaked out but holding it together, and yes, the bridge of his nose was swollen and bruised, but there was no way I was just going to take him to a physician who is well-versed in the healing arts; no, I instead called my mom who had me do a couple simple tests to make sure he didn't have a deviated septum- he didn't, so she said ice every other hour for 20 minutes and some Tylenol.  Boom.  No doctor required.  (He still has some bruising between his eyes and nose, so if any of you I know in the real world see him, that is apparently what happens when you high-five someone with your face.)

Aaaand today the nurse called again:  Atticus fell going up the steps to the slide and split open both lips.  There was blood.  Quite a bit, I gather.  (Like my mom cheerfully told me anytime my sisters and I sliced ourselves open above the neck:  "Head wounds bleed a lot!")  But he was pretty calm by the time she called, once again with an ice pack to his face, and she said she'd send him back to class soon.  

I'm not worried.  He'll learn how to properly fall soon enough, and I've had lots of practice treating injuries, in the meantime.  Silver linings, friends.

Family and Books and Apples

My house smells incredible right now.


The kids and I spent the holiday weekend shuttling from Iowa to Kansas and back again.  My family was celebrating my grandparents' 60th wedding anniversary, so we headed on down for fried chicken and farm visiting and chocolate cupcakes with buttercream frosting and multiple stops at my great-grandma's and my maternal and my paternal grandparents' houses.  Our boys had trouble keeping track of all the great's and which person was mother and grandfather to whom.  It was fun, nonetheless.

We spent our last night at my sister Kelli's house.  Kelli has an apple tree behind her house and a cranky neighbor next to it who has had the gall to passive-aggressively question just why my sister, a woman with an 8-month-old and a two-year-old and a job and a husband who's been working insane hours for the past couple weeks because the harvest has begun, why on earth she hasn't picked and peeled and processed and made delicious old-fashioned home-cooked delicacies out of those apples.

Because I couldn't go next door and beat up an old woman up for my little sister, I instead gathered as many apples as her husband Aaron and I could reach and carted them home to Iowa.  I'm selfless like that.


I woke up this morning and pulled on jeans and a jacket, because it's September and chilly in the mornings.  Now, I'm not usually one to help summer out the door, but today I felt my autumnal urge to go out and buy some books.  Falls arrives and I'm like Aesop's Ant, scurrying around and gathering, well, not food so much as books to surround myself with in the cold months to come.  This works out well because just the other day Derek looked around and said, "You know what this house needs?  MORE BOOKS."  (I may or may not have just savagely broken the ninth commandment.)

Although I dearly, dearly wanted to, I did not deviate from our grocery list, did not go to Firehouse Books so Caedmon could cozy into a bean bag chair and look at old Little Golden Books and I could find some worn paperback gem I couldn't live without, and I only cried about it a little bit, because I am a Real Live Adult.

When we got home I consoled myself by peeling all those apples and throwing them into my pretty red dutch oven with some water and brown sugar and red hots and making myself a big old vat of applesauce.  This allowed me to pretend I have my life together for one whole hour- I just made homemade cinnamon applesauce, for crying out loud!  Never mind that I forgot today is picture day at Adelaide's school and I put her on the bus looking like she's homeless.  Never mind that there's a dead mouse stuck in a trap in the bottom of the pantry.  Not my jurisdiction, Husband.  Never mind that my children decided to bid adieu to my sister and her girls yesterday morning by spending an hour acting like they'd been raised by the Lord of the Flies rather than an actual mother and father who believe in actual discipline.  (Guess who had to spend six full hours sitting silently in the back of a van, riding home to Iowa, with nary a movie in sight despite two functioning portable DVD players staring them in their hedonistic little faces?)

But right now, my house smells incredible, and that is enough for today.

And So It Begins

The good news:  I am one week into half marathon training and- so far as I know, at least- have not yet died.

The bad news:  I am extremely annoying to be around right now.


If you do not set precise boundaries around our conversation, it will eventually end up at the topic of running, racing, or half marathons vs 5k's vs marathons vs 10k's vs whatever.

I am like a very excitable and frantic puppy.  It's like when you're pregnant with your first baby, and you talk about every single tiny detail, both significant and insignificant, to anyone who will listen, then you learn American Sign Language because no one around you should be spared news of your magnificent, excruciatingly fascinating pregnancy.

Then you get pregnant with your second and people ask questions like, "When are you due?" and you have no idea both because you don't keep track of that kind of thing this time around and you can't quite seem to remember what the date is on any given day.

With your third pregnancy the question "When are you due?" provokes first confusion then astonishment because you are often caught off guard with the news that you are, indeed, pregnant.  I can't tell you how many times people started to talk to me about pregnancy and I thought, Man, this lady REALLY likes babies, followed closely by HOLY CRAP THAT'S RIGHT I'M PREGNANT.  I can only guess at what it's like with the fourth pregnancy on; I imagine you're making supper for your slavering horde of offspring (I don't mean to sound derogatory- this is in fact what our children resemble thirty minutes before supper), and you're stirring the marinara and telling Junior to Put the granola bar down, for heaven's sake, we're eating in 90 SECONDS, then you feel something shift in your abdomen and turn around and look at that!  There's another one!

This may or may not be why we don't have four children.

This is my first half marathon, so I am that first-pregnancy woman, both amusing and slightly irritating to veteran long-distance racers.  Thankfully I have a running guru-friend who dropped off her copy of the book Train Like a Mother (it's excellent, I'm starting my second read-through as soon as I finish this) two days after I got ahold of her and told her I'm maybe-possibly-kind of thinking about signing up for the Des Moines half marathon, then met Cade and me for coffee this morning so she could answer my 4 million questions, all while being very encouraging and not even close to patronizing, despite the fact that she's training for a 50k (that's five-zero, 50 kilometers, an over 30 MILE RACE).  I check the race website obsessively, have attacked my legs with a rolling pin (to roll out sore muscles and areas of potential injury, not beat them into submission, although that's sometimes tempting), and yakked Derek to death about the whole thing.

As a result, I'll probably be posting a bit more about running and training and such until race day (OCTOBER 19TH.  I'M NOT FREAKING OUT AT ALL ALREADY.), unless I get injured, in which case you won't hear from me at all, as I'll be curled up in a ball crying and binge-watching Doctor Who.

So:  Exhibiting higher amounts of irritating traits, even more anxious than usual, and courting injury on an almost-daily basis.  Running is obviously excellent for my health.

A List

We haven't done a list in quite some time and Mondays are prime list-making days.  Expect this one to be random and make no sense.

• Caedmon and I are re-adjusting to having the two big kids gone for much of the day.  He talks about Batman a lot.  A common refrain from him goes something like this:  "Mommy, Batman just texted me and we're going to work together at naptime," or "Mommy, I just texted Batman, and we're going to share our candy, 'cause sharing is nice."  

He does all this Batman-texting on this thing:

It's an old hand-held video game of Derek's, now Caedmon's "Batman Phone."  

• I cut these hydrangeas today.  I wanted to have some kind of flower in the house because I can't bring myself to spend any appreciable time outside in this heat and humidity.  People of the South:  How do you do it?  Because we're not even a week into the heat and I'm feeling sick, homicidal, or both when I spend too long out there in Satan's mouth.  

• One more thing I forgot to mention about Charleston:  Everyone is unfailingly polite, even on their street signs.

The end.

Wo wo woo woo wooooo

How's your week going?  Good?  Bad?  Hideously awful?

How about a little video of our Atticus to cheer you up?  How about I write this entire post in question format?

[You're going to want your volume up nice and loud for this.  Trust me.]

I have watched this video approximately thirty times.  I cannot help myself.  It's just so... Atticus.

"I'm SO excited." *Updated*

Today is the first day of another school year.

Adelaide's first day of Kindergarten, she was half excited, half anxious, wanted to stand at the very back of the line of kids at the bus stop, and would not allow me to leave her side as the other kids embarked and the line slowly moved forward.  When we reached the steps and it was her turn, she decided that Nope, Kindergarten wasn't for her, thanks anyway.  I had to go up the steps with her, and while the driver very kindly offered to let me sit with her while he looped around before dropping me back off, once Adelaide was on there and spotted an open seat, she was okay.  She sat down, I got off the bus, and away she went.

We watched the video Derek was shooting of this whole thing a couple weeks ago.  You can tell the exact moment she realizes this was a terrible, terrible idea, as she tries to awkwardly back away, looking more like a dog being dragged into a car on its way to the vet than anything else.

Over the past couple weeks Atticus has at random times quietly stated, "I'm scared about Kindergarten," into empty moments in our day.  Our elder son has a substantial streak of bravery running through him (years of attempting to survive night terrors?), so while I figured the whole thing would be easier than it was for Adelaide, I still worried a little about how he was going to feel on this first of many, many whole days away from me.

6:30 this morning, I woke the two A's up.  They tumbled out of bed, excited for the day, and were immediately drawn first to their bedroom windows.  There was a kind of diffused yellow, buttery pre-thunderstorm cast to the dawn, and it was beautiful.  It felt like a gift, a new mercy waiting for us, and the perfect beginning to this day of Beginnings.

Atticus has had trouble remembering his teacher's name over the past couple days, and spent his time getting dressed muttering, "Upah, Upah, Upah, Upah," under his breath.

This may have made me increasingly nervous for him except for the fact that he spent the next 45 minutes exclaiming "I'm SO excited," and eating breakfast and "I'm SO excited" and brushing his teeth and "I'm SO excited."

In the car on the way to the bus stop, and he's SO excited.  She's reading.

We were the first ones at the bus stop, Adelaide and Atticus were the first in line.  Well, and Caedmon, who probably would have marched right onto the bus, too, had we not kept a sharp eye on him.

You should click to embiggen this one:  Adelaide's reading has been interrupted and she's kind of over this whole school and picture thing; Atticus is SO excited, and Caedmon is just precious.  Derek is... tall.  Hard to tell what emotions were going on up there.

When the bus arrived, Atticus prodded-pushed-shoved his sister toward the bus and up the steps, quickly ascending right behind her, the extreme opposite of what she had done three Augusts ago.  Derek and I had both reminded Adelaide that she was to sit next to her brother on the bus, even if her friends wanted to sit beside her.  We watched her walk quickly down the aisle and sit in a seat, then we watched Atticus keep right on going and sit in a separate seat of his own, turning eagerly to wave and grin hugely at us out the window.  We grinned and waved right back.  I couldn't see Adelaide in her seat on the opposite side of the bus.  She was probably reading again already.

Then the bus drove on, carrying them away from us.

Derek looked down at our Caedmon and said, "I don't know, bud, I think Mommy may really cry when you go to Kindergarten."  Then he looked at my face, asked, "Are you crying?" and laughed at me.  I wasn't weeping in abject despair or anything, I just had something in my eye.  Like a tear.  Or two.

I mean, our five-year-old didn't have to be that excited to leave me, did he?

I am glad he was so pumped to start school, and satisfied with Adelaide's tolerance for school.  I'm hoping Atticus's enthusiasm doesn't wane anytime soon, and that Adelaide remembers learning is fun and dives into third grade.

42 minutes 'til we go get them from the bus stop.  Not that I'm counting, or anything.



UPDATE:  How did each of their first days go?

Atticus:

Adelaide:

Of Books and Beaches *Updated*

I find it ironic that it was our 10-year anniversary trip that really reinforced to me how different Derek and I are.  I guess that paragon of wisdom Paula Abdul was right:  Opposites really do attract.  (Aaaand now I'm cackling and refuse to feel guilty about it because she was dancing and being borderline inappropriate with an animated cat, for Pete's sake, and no, "It was the '80's" is not an acceptable excuse; Thriller came out a full five years before Opposites Attract.  And yes, I was raised on a steady diet of MTV as a young child.  Some of my earliest memories are learning the finer techniques of head banging from my Dad while watching Head Banger's Ball together.  WE WERE BONDING, OKAY?  Speaking of wisdom, who hears about a new musical/dance fad called HEAD BANGING and thinks "Man, I gotta try that!  Waaay too many properly functioning neurons up in here!")

Anyway.

At one point while in Charleston, Derek and I decided to visit a nearby beach. When we arrived, Derek carefully spread out his towel, wrapped his phone and glasses in his discarded t-shirt, and laid them ever so precisely next to his towel, then lowered himself onto his towel to wait 'til I got tired of the beach because he was only there because I wanted to go in the first place.  By the time he had finished his little Beach Arrival Ritual, I swear to you I did not see a single grain of sand on his towel or his person.

I promise you, I did all the same things he did.  I carefully wrapped my lip balm (I cannot be without lip balm, okay?  It's my standard deserted island answer) and my phone already in a sandwich bag (because I know myself) in my own t-shirt, and laid them veryvery carefully on the sand after only dropping all of it in that same sand twice.  I spread my towel out very exactly, laid down on it, and got my out my book.

Ten minutes later I got up from my towel to find a fine layer of sand over almost every inch of me.  My [library] book wouldn't close properly because of all the sand in between its pages and caked in its spine.  I spent the next two days scouring a layer of skin off my lips because there was so much sand in my lip balm.  Derek looked at me when we were wading in the surf and said, "Your face is covered in sand.  How do you have sand on your face?"  To which I could only say, "I DON'T KNOW."

Covered in sand

Entirely clean

I also found a crab burrowed in the sand, pulled Derek over to see it, then yelped and jumped back when it ATTACKED.  (And by "attacked" I mean suddenly sideways-skittered away.)  I did not know that crabs are like giant spiders with an exoskeleton and eye stalks.  Why are there not more crab-phobics out there?

Derek did not yelp or so much as flinch when the crab ATTACKED.  Actually what I think he said was, "What did you expect?"  I can only assume this is in reference to the fact that I kept getting closer and closer to the crab, leaning over it until I finally scared it away.  I am from KANSAS, husband.  What do I know about shellfish?


Our final day in South Carolina, we drove past a used bookstore while killing time before our flight.  I walked in and saw this:

Take this photo times about SEVEN because that's how big this bookstore was.  I immediately found a Garrison Keillor for one singular dollar, and was about to start frolicking and burrowing when Derek said, "I don't want to spend too much time here," to which I started doing this weird jogging in place thing in conjunction with a distressed, whimpering "HUH-H-H-H-H" sound until my somatic nervous system caught up with the autonomic and was like ohmygosh you are so embarrassing and I stopped.  I found a couple more books and may or may not have darted around corners anytime I saw Derek coming.  Then we left and went somewhere else I don't even remember because it wasn't this bookstore, but my husband took pity on me and suggested he drop me back off at the book palace while he gassed up the rental car.  

And that is how I left Charleston with six more books than I had upon arrival.

UPDATE:
This one's for you, Common Household Mom:

See the comments if you're experiencing (abnormal amounts of) confusion.