Injurious

It's front porch season.  Hallelujah.

While I love how this kind of weather beckons each member of our family outdoors, it also means that our children are finding new and inspired ways to wage war against one another.  

I got a call from Derek while on a run recently.  He wasted no time in saying an incident had occurred, please come home.  Thankfully I was less than a mile from our house, so I was able to dart right home, up the stairs, and into the bathroom, where Atticus was bent over the tub, face covered in blood.

I quickly looked him over, saw the giant goose egg on his head, found the source of the bleeding, and overall decided that the actual wounds were much less concerning than their cause:  Knitting needles, thrown at him by his sister in a fit of pique.  

By the time I got there, she was more upset than he was, yet still managed to inform me between sobs that yes, she had thrown her knitting needles at her brother, but that she never thought they would actually hit him; she had no idea her aim was that good!

Caedmon didn't have much to say about the whole thing, but still maintains that "Atticus deserved it," as he has informed a number of people.

At this point Atticus the Injured has mostly healed, although he had two relatively deep holes in his scalp for days.  No telling on any emotional injuries.  

Speaking of running (were we?), I've found the perfect design for asthmatic runners:

Ideal t-shirt design would also include a little pocket for our inhalers, of course.  

My peonies had a short season this year, and one bush didn't bloom at all.  I still managed to bring a few indoors.

The kaleidoscope container planting at Reiman Gardens has been changed again:

Succulents!

Kaleidoscopic succulents!  

And last but not least, I have finally found the most perfectly thoughtful gift for my sister who, when we were children, couldn't sleep for terror of her china doll, even after it had been removed from her room, her closet, anywhere within crawling-up-onto-her-bed distance.

Baby is angry.

Gracious Goodness

Here is my excuse for my lack of posts lately:  "........"

I have none.

Mostly it's just that I've been so busy enjoying the embarrassment of riches this time of year brings, I haven't made time to write about it.  Which is a shame, so I've made an internal deal with myself to post with a certain frequency throughout the summer.  I'm not going to tell you how often that is, because the end of spring/ beginning of summer always turns me into a foolish optimist ("We're going to do a craft every week!  And go on many educational excursions!  And do two separate library summer reading programs!  And volunteer this many hours!  And blog every day!" whoops); not to worry, come mid-July, the children will have whined/bickered/ground me down into submission, and I will be back to my somewhat cranky self.

Still, it's not July yet!  It's spring, and it's Atticus and Adelaide's last day of school- as a matter of fact, they'll be home for lunch- and my mom and Mark are coming for a visit, and we're eating at Zombie Burger tonight, and I have so many things blooming in my yard!  Exclamation points!!!!!!

So, what haven't I told you about that May brought to us in all her glory?  First off, these gorgeous petunias, courtesy of Derek's mom:

Adelaide was with her grandma when they walked by these at a nursery, and Daughter was immediately besotted, saying they looked like a starry night.  And wouldn't you know?  

Becky then generously got them for us.  Thank you, Becky/Grandma/Mom/Flower Enabler!

The rhubarb has been plentiful, but because my rhubarb is somehow always very green with little lovely, traditional red coloring, the desserts I make with it end up tasting delicious but appearing very questionable indeed.

That rhubarb cheesecake bar is topped with rhubarb sauce, not salsa verde, as it might appear.  Señor Google informs me that my rhubarb is most likely green because of the cultivar I have, and that if I want red rhubarb, I will need to plant a different type, which means I need to get that in this year, as we all know of the cruel constraint that requires you to keep your dirty gardener's mitts off of rhubarb until the second year after you've planted it.

Other May happenings:  Adelaide turned 10.  TEN.  DOUBLE DIGITS.

That is the long bow Caedmon made as a gift for his sister out of a tree branch, twine, and kebob skewers.  More on Adelaide and sharp objects soon.

Speaking of Adelaide, Caedmon was organizing our art cabinet (Caedmon loves to organize spaces- drawers, corners, whatever, if you have a mess, he will have a blast organizing it for you.  I can only think he gets this from Derek, because it sure as heck isn't from me.), and found some old coloring and activity books.  One was Adelaide's that she filled in when she was four, maybe five years old, and it sure brought me back to that fun-yet-always-morbid stage went she through.

It reads, "Pinkalicious Likes to Sing- Can you make up a song?  Write the words here."  (Adelaide's words edited for clarity.)  "I love Jesus I pray the Lord God to keep me safe when I'm scared and when I think my family's dead."  

If I had a time machine, it would behoove past Me to go back a few years and tell myself, "DON'T WORRY.  She grows out of this."  Except according to Back to the Future and Albus Dumbledore, those time-traveling sages, one should never meet up with oneself.  Paradox!

And speaking of our resident Organizer, he graduated from preschool.

Cute as a dang button, both of them.  Adelaide there in the background, well, she's also cute, but in a ferret-y kind of way, at least in this shot.

We do still have an Atticus.  He's been lying the grass, responding to my queries of, "What shapes do you see in the clouds, Bud?" with answers like, "Mostly cirrus.  Wait, there's a nimbus cloud!"  So much for sweetness and whimsy.

He's also getting ganglier and bigger-footed by the minute, I swear.  

In other good news, apparently today is National Doughnut Day, a made-up holiday I can actually get behind.  Here's to grossly unhealthy rings of doughy goodness I plan on consuming with wanton abandon!

Bilbo?

Yesterday afternoon I had my act together, and had had it together for hours, when I had the thought, "This can't last.  Something's bound to go wrong."

And I was right.  After one of the children had been grounded, I had lectured all three of them, and I found my hands in my hair, getting ready to pull hanks of it out by the roots, I got out the bubbles, because bubbles fix everything.

Well, maybe not everything, but they do seem to act as a magical reset button for children.  I don't know why this is, I just know that it's true.  Why is that piece of information not in every parenting book?  Instead they drone on and on about potty training and how This is the Only Proper Way to Discipline Your Children and how if you let your baby cry it out you're a terrible parent and deserve to die and how if you pick up your baby when she cries you're a terrible parent and deserve to die.

I'm not big on parenting books.  Give me a real live fellow parent with actual conversation any day.  Them I will listen to.


Aside from bubble meditation, we've been taking family forays to the driving range.

This involves all three male Crislers hitting small balls with metal sticks, and yours truly sitting on benches that I can only assume are there for people like me.  I like these benches.  They provide a perch for me where I can do all my golf course activities, like taking pictures and reading books and not golfing.  Adelaide was absent for this particular outing.  She spent zero hours grieving.

We have a new resident in our backyard.

This started as a regular ol' brush pile.  It has been shaped and molded into a domicile complete with a tunnel running straight through it featuring front and back entrances.  Our children swear they did not do this.  Am I freaked out by this?  YES.  Yes, I am.  The best possible answer to "Who built a house made out of weeds in our backyard?" is "Hobbits," but it's more likely "Grass demon who sneaks out of its creeping Charlie igloo and sits on the chests of our children at night and sucks the breath from their lips."

You know- something like this:

Um, Grandma?  Why did we watch this movie at your house so often?

But seriously- what is living in our backyard?

She Should Have Been a Mole or a Bat Instead

Some time ago, my mother sent me a photo of herself, her sisters, and a couple other girls, all dressed up for Halloween in the sixties.

Now, all of her accompanying text within that email contained useful information, but the one thing I haven't been able to get over is her final statement:  "I don't have any glasses on, this must have been before the school nurse figured I was half blind at school."

I mean

First of all, just for today, we're going to ignore the girl in the nightmarish mask- we'll have to address that on a separate day, when I have emotionally prepared myself to do so.

For now, I'd like to focus on the girl in the cheetah costume:  My mother.

Seriously, though.

Does it really take a brilliant diagnostician to realize that the girl smiling thirty degrees to the left of the camera can't see a dang thing?


Every other person looks as if they've gone through the requisite party ritual of, "Okay, everybody, say, 'Cheese!'"  All look at the camera and parrot, "Cheese!"  Unless you're poor, blind Lorri, however; in that case you're wearing a vacant smile and staring at nothing.

Now, you could argue that the object of her gaze is merely out of range, that I have no way of knowing what she's looking at.  As a terribly, terribly near-sighted person myself (thanks, mom), I heartily and vociferously disagree, as I have pasted this facial expression on my own visage many times, when the contacts are safely soaking in their case, my glasses are on my nightstand, and Derek says something to me that requires a reply.  I have to wait for him to move in order to know where to turn my head and aim my voice at; otherwise, no idea.  None.  Just a blind smile, staring forty paces to the left of the person attempting to interact with me.

Kinda like this, actually.

I wonder how many walls she offered to "Trick or treat" that night.  Bless her heart.  Still, things could have been worse.

What the heck, 1967?

Running and Food and Illness and Gardening. Oh, my?

It's that time of year again, where early Saturday mornings are dedicated to a long run, prepping for some fall race or other.  It's not yet hot or humid enough to be a slog and I'm not yet burnt out or fighting injury as I surely will be late in the summer.  In short, because I gave up any aspirations of a spring distance race, I'm in a sweet spot of my running season.

Good morning, forest preserve entrance.  I wish I could wake up looking that good.

But come, let us speak of more important matters.  Like cheese.

My mom gives first-aid kits and fire extinguishers as wedding gifts.  I give box graters.


Much of our week was spent in this fashion, because apparently that's just what we do now:

Thankfully we somehow managed to keep Atticus from infecting the rest of the family, so he was the only one with the fever and vomiting and extreme lethargy.  Oh, and congestion, leading me to look around one morning and say, "What is that noise?" thinking it was some kind of machinery outdoors.  I used my Indian tracking skills to chase down its source.

Then I took a video and laughed at my sick kid who, for four straight days, kept dropping off to sleep within seconds anytime he went horizontal, because I am a compassionate, nurturing, decorous mother.  Don't forget to turn the volume up on that video.

Other ways I am a delight to live with:

I eat the edges of any brownie pan, because the edges are the best part:  Chewy in the middle, with a nice, crunchy crust on the edge.  Perfection.  I've thought about getting one of these

but first of all, those pans are expensive, and more importantly, I would no longer be able to blithely say, "I left you a big piece of brownie," to Derek, knowing full well it's only the inferior middle of the dessert.  There would be no pieces left to offer Derek with a pan like that.  I do not need a dessert enabler like that in our house, however brilliant a concept it may be.

I spent more time in the garden, and emerged with its usual offerings.

Clockwise from the upper left, that's a piece of glass, a rubber tube with very sharp pokey wires inside, a dirty piece of porcelain, a nail, a screw, and a hunk of metal there in the center.  All marvelous things to find whilst digging around in the soil with your bare hands.  I've heard that in some biker gangs you get a tough nickname; what with all the metal and glass I've encountered, I feel like I've earned the right to the same with my dangerous forays under the surface of our yard.  It's, like, extreme gardening.  What kind of nicknames would an extreme gardening club/gang even have, though?  "Thornbush"?  "Poison sumac"?  "Spade"?  

Tell me now:  Are you a pre-packaged shredded cheese sort, or dyed-in-the-wool grater?  How do you feel about the geography of a brownie?  What would your gardening nickname be?

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!"  

My First Scary Bulb Sale

Yesterday morning, the nearby public garden had its first ever Bag'O'Bulbs sale, where, if you showed up at a certain gate with grocery bags, you could get freshly dug tulip bulbs for $10 a bag.

The whole shebang began at 8 AM, which means I was there promptly at 8, eagerly clutching a bag and a Hamilton (maybe in a few years it will be a Hamilton/Mott/Truth/Anthony/Stanton/Paul, because apparently it's just too much to actually put a woman on the front of the bill, so instead they'll try to appease us with five women on the back, where they belong, amIright, fellas?) and wearing multiple layers of clothing, because it's May, so of course it's 30 degrees outside!

Gracious, that was a mess of a paragraph, wasn't it?  Ah, well.  I meant every word.  I really was there at 8.

I was joined by a host of fellow gardeners, and I, along with one other family from my church, probably brought the average age down by four decades.  This made me think, not for the first time, that I was made to be an old person; I mean, I love to garden and talk about birds, I am always cold, and I can pinch a penny until it screams for mercy.

Now that my stereotyping is done for the day, I can tell you about the actual event, which was a little bit of a fiasco.  I felt bad for the director of the whole thing, as he seemed to realize that it was not going that well and even went so far as to say multiple times, "Keep in mind this is our first year, and the first year of any event is always a learning experience, so this will only get better and better each year."

Their method in this inaugural year was to have us pay our money, shuffle into a small area just inside the gate, and wait for twenty minutes.  Then, an employee would drive up in a gator with a trailer attached, which was piled high with freshly-dug tulips.  At that point, The Frenzy would ensue.

You know those photos and videos you've seen of Black Friday hordes swarming through stores, hunting for marked down electronics they probably won't even use in a year?  It was kind of like that.  Or maybe sharks circling prey.  I like that analogy better, as it tickles me to think of these gardeners as predators.

I watched two big, full trailers come, be mobbed by grasping tulip junkies, and five minutes later go, depleted.  The third trailer just happened to pull up and stop right in front of me, so I filled my bag as quickly as I could lest someone cut me with their AARP card, and left.

In addition to his pseudo-apology, the director had some other interesting information, such as his suggestion to perhaps come later in the morning next year:  "I've been to these bulb sales at other gardens, and everyone lines up as soon as it opens, thinking that if they come later, they won't get any.  Well, folks, we have 47,000 tulips bulbs we're digging up today, so I promise, there will be bulbs for you to buy, even if you walk in at 10 AM."

I asked him what they've done with the bulbs in years past, since this was the sale's first year, and he told me they've always been composted, to which I audibly gasped and clutched my heart.  He also said that they can't simply give the bulbs away, but have to charge money because they're a public institution.  He was also very careful to instruct everyone there to plant their bulbs that weekend, NOT to store them over the summer until fall planting, and explained why.  Feel free to google this, because I'm sure not explaining it to you.


It really didn't feel like I'd gotten that many bulbs, but when I opened up the bag that afternoon, I counted out 65 BULBS.  For $10!

Atticus got to help me plant all 65 late yesterday because of some choices he made earlier in the week.  There's just nothing like manual labor for behavioral adjustment, is there?

I have no idea what colors these will be next spring, only that they'll be a mix, like what we saw when we were at the garden two weeks ago.  I'm sure by then I'll have completely forgotten any of this ever happened, so what a pleasant surprise it will all be!  I do have plans on being at next year's bulb sale, except next year I'll arrive later, and wear more armor.  I can't wait!