“Mama’s my heart!” It was very sincere, too. None of that sarcasm exhibited in other women in the family.
That’s what Tiller just said. Cute-o-rama. Also? She can get away with wearing carrots on her pants. Not all girls can get away with a look like that. . .
I attended my first PTA meeting last night. (Okay, not my first, because Todd and i have attended a few for other schools we considered sending our kids to, but the first for a school my child will definitely attend.) The Lakeside High school Jazz band played at the beginning. They had very fancy, meticulously-styled bedhead hair. They all looked about 12 to me. After that, the student council president (a 5th grader, I guess?) led us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Everyone stood and put the hands over their heart and it was at once strange, and yet a little comforting. It reminded me of being a kid, and having a sense that the place I lived was the best in the world, an assurance that nothing was wrong with the place i was from. Except at 36 and kind of conflicted about the state of my country, I just felt self-conscious, and a little dirty, and a lot proud at the same time.
But then, while i tuned out the droning Peanuts voice of the PTA president (who really likes to hear herself go on and on), I said the words of the Pledge over again in my head, and i thought, “okay, that isn’t so bad.” I pretty much agree with all of that. But I still see where people who didn’t believe in a Christian God would have a problem with it, or worry that they were having a particular God, or any God, forced on them at all.
Sigh. Things were a lot easier last time I was at a PTA meeting.
7:45 am
[Enter room and see Rollie watching The Jetsons on Boomerang.]
Rollie: Mama, you know what I’m watching?
Me: The Jetsons?
Rollie: Yeah. . . . You like Jetsons, Mama?
Me: Yeah, it was one of my faves when I was a girl. You kicking it old school, or what?
Rollie [staring at me like I am the dumbest person on earth:] No, I’m going to a new school.
Always the little literalist.
I’m not sure who this little guy Junior Isom is, but I love this picture of Todd’s grandma Ruth:
Meemaw, you will be missed.
Off to Louisville for T’s grandma’s funeral. Meemaw is gone. I have a lot of thoughts about her, and about how lucky I feel to have known her, but I need to digest the whole thing and will write when I get back. I figure going to ky will give me a little more perspective anyway.
If you pray, or just think good thoughts, make sure they go out to the Toddler family tonight. I love’em all. Even if they are all way too quiet and reserved and in comparison, I look like a loud-mouthed annoying daughter/sister in-law, who probably drinks a little too much and doesn’t know when to bite her tongue.
Did I ever click on this link? I mean, Scrabulous is fun, but now I am completely addicted to the Tetris of the word world. (Don’t tell T. He just thinks I have a slight problem, not that I’m a full-blown, cracked-out Babble whore.)
I don’t have time for this, but when did that ever stop me? (Reference: Myst during finals week debacle or Indiana Jones “This is Crab Central”/”Sophia, let’s talk brick wall” that took a week to figure out.) Thank God I don’t smoke any more, or I’d be huddled over the laptop, puffing away, playing Babble in a corner of the basement while the kids destroyed the house and it fell in on me, oblivious to everything but shrinking the number of words left.
Word nerds: Follow that link at your own peril.
Or at least fantasy nerds look at me derisively. Or both.
While I was watching The Chronicles of Narnia, and attempting to make a blasphemous Christ joke, I screwed up.
“Asrael is the resurrection and the life.”
Duh. Aslan.
Maybe I should lay off the Smurfs.
Like those other milestones, “First trip to the Emergency Room,” or “First Projectile Vomiting Episode,” they are so precious. This morning, it was “First Call to Poison Control.”
Rollie has a cold and cough. He often wakes up earlier than Todd and me, goes to the bathroom, and then plays in his room until the sun comes up. This morning, I could tell he wasn’t feeling good, and he was coughing like crazy, so I made the call to keep him home from school. He was laying on the couch, watching The Flintstones, and just feeling puny. Yes, Mom, his eyes were peaked, too.
It was my turn to get up with the kids, so Todd woke up later and i heard him jump in the shower. Then he came down with the news that someone had gotten into the cough medicine. Now, any parent knows that kids freakin’ love taking medicine. It always tastes like Cherry, Grape, or Bubblegum! It’s the best! Yes, i realize that kids are not supposed to take the cold and cough medicines anymore, but we never cleaned the old ones out of the medicine cabinet. I mean, who knows? Next month, they might come out with a study that shows children’s cough medicine prevents cancer.
We interrogated him for a few minutes, trying to find out how much he took. We had no idea how much was in the bottle in the first place (or how he managed to open a “childproof” bottle.) He kept repeating that he took “four.” Four sips? Four chugs? Four teaspoons? Four cupfuls? Sure, his liver might be experiencing irreparable damage, or his heart might be about to explode out of his chest, or he might be about to slip into a coma at any moment, but I still want to throttle him for not being able to express to me exactly how much he took. Mother of the Year!
I got on the phone with the pediatrician’s office. When you tell the doctor that your kid ingested poison or got into cough medicine, all you can think is that the nurse on the other end is thinking “why the hell do you still have that medicine in the house, and why weren’t you watching your kid? Just another dumbass, crappy parent.” They forwarded me to Poison Control. While I waited for them to answer, I looked at the bottle. There was no Tylenol in it. Phew. For Rollie’s size, he should have a teaspoon. A cup of it is four teaspoons. 98 pound kids are supposed to get four teaspoons. Rollie only weighs 40 pounds.
Fuck. What the hell is Dextromothorphan.
This is obviously some kind of karmic ass-biting the world is bringing upon me for all the times we shoplifted Robotussin in high school and then drank the whole bottle. I was a terrible kid and now I am the worst mother in the world. What the hell made me think i could be a parent? Just to get it out of the way, I should admit that there was also shoplifting and sniffing of Scotchguard and whipped cream. Maybe a confession here will be considered proactive good karma and the universe won’t require Tiller and Rollie to fulfill the “I hope you have one just like you” curse to its full potential.
Poison control guy gets on and asks me questions and then tells me to hold on while they crunch numbers. Seems like forever, and it is not encouraging that Georgia Poison Control is somehow affiliated with Grady Health Systems. I start Googling directions to Children’s from the new house.
Guy gets back on the line, and tells me Rollie will be fine. He should not have any other meds today. Drink plenty of fluids. He might be extremely excitable, or really drowsy. (Come on, drowsy!) He is definitely acting a little odd (he called me Tiller and keeps babbling nonsense) and his pupils look like saucers, but he seems okay.
I am so relieved. You forget how much you love the little shits, because you get so tired of the endless questions, and constant chatter, and neverending requests, and the fights, and crying, and messes they make. But when you have ten minutes wondering if you’ll be sitting in a hospital that day and if your little man is going to be okay, it puts it all into perspective. You think that sitting on the couch watching cartoons and cuddling with a sick, doped-up kid is pure heaven.
We are sitting here on the couch now, and he is definitely acting squirrely; he keeps repeating “I’m sorry, mama.” And I keep telling him that it is okay, that mama and Daddy got mad at him because it scared them, and he just can’t ever take medicine without us ever again. Then he says, “I’m sorry I took the medicine, mama.” We have been repeating this about every ten minutes for the last hour. I am reminded of the time Mike M. fell off the skateboard and got a concussion. He had no memory of the accident.
He kept asking: “What happened?”
Us: “You have a concussion.”
Mike: “How did I get it?”
Us: “You fell off a skateboard.”
Mike: “Who the hell let me on a skateboard!!??”
(For those that don’t know Mike, he is about 6’8″ and should never have been on a skateboard in the first place.) He would seem happy with our answers, and then five minutes later, forgot them and we went through the whole thing again. This happened so many times that da Crease finally wrote “Concussion” and “Skateboard” on his arm and just told Mike to look at his arm when he asked what happened. Still cracks me up to think about it.
The upside to this Robo episode? Rollie is so out of it that I am able to make him watch cartoons I like, rather than the Dora and Diego crap that we usually would have to watch. Right now we are watching The Perils of Penelope Pitstop. He keeps telling me he loves this show. It is his favorite.
Oh, and his cough is gone.
With goats. Todd makes fun of me, because I just love goats. I mean, first of all, they taste good. Second of all, they keep down weeds. I have loved them since I was a little girl, with their wispy, eccentric-looking beards. Those spindly legs. That funny, angry noise they make. They come in all colors.
I always tell Todd I want goats when we finally buy our big property (or what my friends James and Dana refer to as “the compound.” Yes, we were saddened when the Putnam County, Georgia Nuwaubian property was demolished and sold off to developers; We had our eyes on its faux-Egyptian majesty for a while.)
I think, though, that Todd secretly finds my goat amour cute. This belief was cemented when he sent me the following link. I mean, how could a man who wanted to dissuade me from goat ownership ever expect to achieve his goal by sending me this cuteness?
Get out the smelling salts. Fainting goats. I am so going to have fainting goats on my estate and then I’ll get rip-roaring drunk on tequila, and I will do goat fainting party tricks. It will be a dream come true. You are all invited.