Tales from the Toddler Frontline

Look at this sweetie. Seriously, it looks like he was posed by a photographer. But no. The other day, while I was making lunch, I looked over and Trent was sitting like this. Patiently waiting for his lunch. So patient. So adorable.

My mom often tells people that we kids were so cute … and it was a good thing, because sometimes, that was the only thing that saved us.  :-D  I get that now. 

Last night, I had a toe-to-toe standoff with this little guy in the Burger King parking lot. He had been temporarily released from the strict confines of his car seat and he would not – would not – get back in. I tried all the tricks I knew – yes, I was shamelessly bargaining, bribing, nearly begging. In other words, totally throwing out all the strict parenting convictions I made before I had kids. Of course there were extenuating circumstances that parents with a little more experience know to take into consideration. It was late (past 10:00 – oops, don’t read this. Tee hee.), he had just spent 1.5 hours sitting pretty quietly on my lap at Rachel’s piano recital, another hour of driving back and dropping off cousins and a friend, and now he was just done with it all. I felt for him, but in the end, he had to get back into that seat for the 10-minute ride home. So, of course I had to end up manhandling him back into his carseat with him kicking and screaming all the while. He might have bested me if Rachel hadn’t been there to help hold his legs down. Strong little bugger! (Mick had driven separately and had already left, or else this probably would’ve been over in about 2.5 minutes.)  It was quite a lovely scene – straight out of Little House on the Prairie. ::eye roll::

What followed was several minutes of very loud protesting (read: shrieking and flailing) while I drove home as fast as I could, with many of the others plugging their ears. Suddenly, someone from the back of the van started singing “Happy Birthday to You.” Whoever that was deserves Sister/Daughter/Citizen of the Year awards. The others joined in immediately. This had an amazingly magical, gloriously quieting effect and there was an almost instant calm over the van. The girls sang all three verses and then jumped right into other toddler favorites. Peace was restored and everyone began relaxing … until Grant started crying because “Trent’s screaming scared me.” <sigh>

And then, I look back up at that sweet little face, and I’m in my happy place again.  :-)

Easter 2013????

So, what do you do when it’s 12:56 am and you’re wide awake – well past your usual 10:30 pm bedtime? This is the sort of thing that happens when I sleep until 9:00 in the morning. 9:00 in the morning?? But I never sleep that late! 8:00 is late for me! And on Easter morning, of all mornings! A major day like Easter usually has me getting just a few hours of sleep, due to late night preparations and early morning excitement, getting ready for church, etc. OK, so let’s back up a bit.

Last Wednesday night found Mick and I up with a very sick toddler – first time little Trent had the stomach flu in fact. (How cute does he look here? This was taken the next day, when he just wanted to sleep and be held. No problem, little guy.  ;-)

He was over the worst of it by Thursday morning and we were all looking forward to the big holiday weekend coming (Mick’s day off on Good Friday, lots of goodies to bake, 1st annual Easter breakfast at church, special time of worshipping the risen Lord with our church family, followed by the usual trip down to Mom and Dad’s, and finally some seasonal Spring weather as the icing on the cake). Naturally, there was a lot of excitement mixed with worry. Dr. Mom was getting barraged with questions: Was it something he ate? Do you think we’ve had it before? and the big one: Are we going to get to go to Grandma and Grandpa’s on Easter??? We tried to carry on as usual with our preparations and as the hours turned into the end of the day and on into the next, we were starting to get cautiously optimistic that we’d have the green light on Easter morning. I spent several hours on Friday working on the BIG grocery shopping list, which means I’m planning meals for about 3 weeks in advance, plus we had the special holiday recipes AND Rachel’s birthday meal to plan for. Erica and I headed to Aldi-Walmart-Kroger (our shopping trifecta) and about 2.5 hours into it (it ended up being 4 hours of shopping!), got a call from Rachel saying that Grant was getting sick. By the time we got home, Brooke had also gotten sick and Claire and Sarah weren’t feeling well.

So, all available, able-bodied family members (which at that point was 4 of us; Rachel was holding Trent who still wasn’t feeling good enough to run around) helped put away about 457 bags of groceries while we were intermittently interrupted by Grant’s & Brooke’s – ahem – illness needs. Once we got groceries put away, I inhaled a quick dinner and cleaned up the kitchen. In the meantime, it was becoming apparent that Sarah and Claire would be joining the “fun.” Later, when I finally sat down with Mick, I realized *I* wasn’t feeling too hot, which may nor may not mean something when you’ve been dealing with that sort of thing long enough. But unfortunately, I was joining the “fun” along with the others and before I knew it (actually, after many long hours) it was morning and Rachel and Courtney were down for the count, too. Mick came down a little before noon with the same grimace on his face that we all had. So, poor Erica spent a lonely day staying as far away from the rest of us as she could. I’m not really sure what she did, actually. I know she spent quite a bit of time outside (finally got that warm weather we were hoping for) and reading upstairs. This I do know: 1) she didn’t have much of an appetite that whole day; and 2) she washed her hands a lot. Late Saturday night, she finally came down with it, too, proving to us that she wasn’t in fact Super-Immune Girl. We decided we were glad she at least didn’t have to spend anymore time waiting and wondering whether she’d get sick or not. So, the day was spent sleeping in, recuperating, enjoying the 60-degree day, getting a little caught up on Mount Laundry, Facebookery, trying to teach Jack to fetch, making lots of toast, and watching an episode of Columbo (our Sunday-night ritual). In the evening, Mick read a children’s book about the first Easter and we sang “Christ the Lord is Risen Today.” And all that great, special food is packed into the refrigerator and pantry so we’re hoping to have a do-over for Easter next weekend!

Oh, and Rachel’s birthday? Well, being the planner that she is, she informed me right after Trent started getting sick that if anybody else got sick before Monday, she wanted to postpone her birthday. So now, we’re also planning on celebrating her 17th next weekend.  A most unusual weekend. “Mom, yesterday seemed like the longest day ever,” said Brooke, earlier today. Yes, the flu will do that. If you feel like life is moving at too fast of a pace and you wish it would all just slow down, well, be careful what you wish for! You may get a completely cleared off calendar for a couple of days, courtesy of gastroenteritis.

And because I don’t want to end my blog post with a word like “gastroenteritis,” I’ll instead end with a picture taken today of a beautiful rainbow that appeared in the early evening. There’s actually a slight double rainbow if you look closely.

 

Pencils

One of the challenges on a typical school day around here is finding a good, sharp pencil. An attached eraser would truly be the icing on the cake … a diamond in the rough. Yesterday I spent a considerable amount of time decluttering a couple of drawers where we keep writing utensils. My goal was to separate the pencils and pens from crayons, markers, coloring pencils, etc. thus cutting down on time wasted trying to find something decent to write with. There’s nothing like finding a good ol’ yellow #2 pencil, newly-sharpened with a smooth, pink eraser on the tip.  One of the attorneys at the law firm I work with has a can on his desk filled with a mixed assortment of pens.  But there is one single, irresistible pencil (eraser up) in the middle of all those pens. Once he showed me that the pencil has actually never been used because it has not been sharpened.  But he admits he can always tell when someone has been in his office looking for something to write with, because that pencil has been picked up and set back in the can with the unsharpened lead end up.

Yes, there are pencils like that attorney’s – lovely, yellow, handy eraser attached at the end.  These are the pencils of my dreams:

Let’s get a better look at those lovely erasers:

(P.S. Sadly, I didn’t actually find these pencils among our stash, they’re just images I found online).

And then there are Worley pencils.  (cue sad music)

After throwing out a good portion of quarter-inch long crayons and dried out markers, I eventually got things weeded out to the point that I was able to start the final leg of my organizing: sharpening the pencils I’d been able to round up.  It was quite a rag-tag collection of specimens, but one thing was consistent with practically every pencil:  teeth marks.  The Worleys have a long and undistinguished history of chewers.  Not just pencils, but pretty much anything that sits still long enough to be chewed.  Some of the kids have been more orally-inclined than others, but they’ve all done their share of chewing. 

Which brings me back to my sad set of pencils.  This is what I have to work with; a random set of pencils that I just grabbed out of the pile to sharpen:

If you look closely, you might notice that, yes, even the lead end of some of the pencils have teeth marks.  By now, pencils like this are so common around here that we only notice when they’re not chewed – you know, the first 5 seconds we take them out of the box.  What really breaks my heart is the erasers - or lack thereof.  This is typical:

<sigh>  Look at that one on the right end; even the metal surrounding the eraser has been chewed!  So, we buy those handy Pearl erasers and just make do.  I wonder if, when our kids are grown, our house will have only pencils that look like this:

But knowing me, I would be nostalgic for the good ol’ days of chewed pencils.  So, for now, perfect pencils exist only in my dreams, and on Bing images, and that one pencil on that attorney’s desk. 

Rainy days and Mondays …

… often result in fender-benders.   Or something like that.  Actually, today’s fender-bender can’t be blamed on the rain.  It was a really strange quirky thing.  We were travelling west on 38th Street after I picked Rachel up from her piano lesson at Butler University. There are 2 lanes of traffic that travel west on 38th Street and we were in the right lane with a pack of cars in both lanes.  Almost simultaneously, I noticed lots of brake lights in front of me, and a car stopped right in the middle of the left lane with a woman beside it closing the hood which had apparently flown open (it was actually laying against the windshield, so I think it must have been broken).  Both lanes of traffic stopped.  The left lane stopped because she had stopped.  Not sure why the cars in the right lane (aka my lane) stopped. It could’ve been some cars changing lanes at the last minute.  It all happened in a split second.  One second I was slowing to a stop and taking in the scene in front of me, the next minute I heard a squealing of tires, looked in my mirror and saw a pick-up truck bearing down on the car behind me.  The car behind me must have spotted the truck and was trying his best to turn his car, but since we were at a standstill, and the truck was coming up so fast, he could only move it partly out of the way.  I remember thinking “he’s going to hit that car” and then “he’s going to hit us.”  It was a very helpless feeling.  Despite the grim scenario, two things were in our favor:  1) since the car behind me was at a bit of an angle, the truck caught the back corner of his car, so he didn’t get the full force of the impact.  2) since the truck hit that car first, our van didn’t get nearly as bad of a hit.  Don’t get me wrong, it was still quite a jolt, and unfortunately, Grant (3) and Claire (5), who were also with us, had no idea what was coming, so it was even more shocking to them. 

After I calmed down Grant and Claire (and myself), I got out and talked to the other drivers, neither of whom was hurt.  Apparently, the woman whose hood flew up didn’t notice the squealing of tires and crunching of steel behind her, because she casually got back in her car and drove off. 

In spite of it all, there really is so much to be thankful for:

• first and foremost, no one was hurt;
• both of the other drivers were decent and fairly calm throughout the ordeal;
• both police officers I dealt with were very friendly;
• the pick-up truck driver had insurance;
• I had just paid our 6-month premium on the van last week;
• ours was the only one out of three cars not hauled away from the scene on a wrecker!

Our 12-seater Chevy Express van may not make the cover of Car and Driver magazine, but right now I wouldn’t trade it!