Gah. New week again? Already?

• So I have probably mentioned about a billion times that I am a walking advertisement for why high-level athletes should take physiotherapy seriously. Because when I went to university back in sport’s Dark Ages (the 80s), there was really no such thing. Physio was for basketball players and football players and certainly not for women, WOMEN ARE NOT ATHLETES DON’T BE SILLY. Also, there was this ridiculous belief that if there was no pain there was no gain and also if you were hurt you should just PLAY THROUGH THE PAIN DON’T BE A WUSS. So my various and sundry injuries were left unattended, and in the intervening years I didn’t realize that sports medicine advanced enough that some of them could have been fixed. And now my body is falling apart from abuse and neglect. Anyway, now, any time I try to exercise to any extent that it might make a difference in my life (like walking faster than a granny with a walker, for example, or maybe even riding a bike OMG ARE YOU NUTS) I exacerbate one of these injuries and end up in great pain and with ever declining fitness. Like now, for example. My left knee is hurt, and it gets worse when I am inactive. This means that, after I go to bed, I am woken up every 30 – 45 minutes with OMG TERRIBLE PAIN. And the only way to get rid of it is to get up and walk around, get the joint moving and lubricated again. The strongest over the counter pain meds do not help. So every night, every 45 minutes or so, I have to wake up and do some pacing around the bedroom. Sometimes I do a little dance. Mostly I am so tired I lean over with my face on the bed and my legs marching. It is horrible. I am exhausted. I am so tired, I am beyond tired. I am so tired I am frazzled and touchy and could bust out into crying for absolutely anything. The good news is that I am booked in to see a physiotherapist. The bad news is, it’s a full week before they can see me. Can I not sleep for a week? We’ll have to see.

• I am trying to get my daughter into nursery school come September, which means she needs to be on a waiting list… like, last year sometime. I found the nursery school we want — it comes highly recommended by everyone, not least of which is Stinkerbelle’s developmental worker who has nothing but praise for the program. The one weird thing is that the school is religiously affiliated, and I am SO NOT. I have not been struck down by the fist of an angry god when I walked through the door when I have been there to visit, so that’s got to be a good sign, right? So I started to get the forms together in November, and it took me until February to find somebody in town who I felt I knew well enough to ask to be an emergency contact. That’s sad and pathetic. Anyway. I got the forms in, and the wait list was to be filtered TODAY, so now we are just waiting on word. Like, I am going to JUMP OUT OF MY SKIN if the phone rings and the caller ID says it’s the school. That’s how bad I want her to go there. Anyway, I got an email from them today — one of the requirements is parental participation in washing toys and other teacher assistant jobs during the year, which I am fine with, but which requires a police check before we can participate, and there’s a piece of information missing on the form. So, on the one hand, OMG HOW WEIRD to get an email from a CHURCH asking me for a POLICE RECORDS CHECK. But also… OMG SQUEE MAYBE THIS IS A GOOD SIGN. I hope so. But I will be on tenterhooks until we get word.

• My daughter has returned to her Little Gym class for one more session of general gym time. She’s in a class where she appears to be the oldest kid in class — certainly, the most mature — so I fear she will get bored easily. However, her birthday falling in April as it does, it’s smack in the middle of a gym semester, so I could probably have argued to move her up into a 3-4 year olds class. But I thought it might be good from a developmental perspective to keep her in a general class until she was well and truly old enough to start something else, like dance or sports or gymnastics, rather than push her ahead and have her fail. However, today, we came out of her class, and she saw several little girls going into the 3-4 year olds Dance class. And suddenly, in the doorway to the dance class, Stinkerbelle hit the floor in the doorway of the classroom and did this cat trick of OMG GRAVITY IS PULLIN ME SO HARD RITE NOW I ARE TOO HEVVY YOU CANT PICK ME UP. (Our cat Opus used to do that all the time when you tried to move her from a spot where she wanted to be. OMG I AM SO HEVVY GRAVITY IS SO HARD.) And there was Stinkerbelle, pulling for the floor, and I had to FORCIBLY REMOVE HER FROM THE DOOR. She was ALL about just joining the class RIGHT NOW OMG DANCING CLASS NAO PLZ OR I WILL DIE. So now I am waffling again. I still think, in the long run, she will be more ready in the fall, as her language skills catch up with her age, to be able to follow directions and participate fully. But to see her so desperate to join makes me second guess, just a little bit. And hopefully we don’t have to endure another 3 months of lying in the doorway of the dance class pretending we’re under the gravitational pull of a black hole.

It’s bright. It’s sunny. It’s cold. It’s Tuesday. Randomness abounds. Even on Tova’s blog. I like that. I like feeling like I’m not the only one who goes OMGWTFJUSTHAPPENED OH YEAH ITS TUESDAY. But Tova’s random is slightly more… *ahem* ACTIVE *ahem*… than mine. Do not go there without a supply of brain bleach.

• So we’re getting over the EMERGENCY SATURDAY WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP! business. (I can’t talk about going to Emergency without hearing the WHOOP WHOOP WHOOP in my head. Or the BLART BLURT BLAAAAART tones that used to announce an emergency on the TV show Emergency. It’s from the 70s, before most of you were born. Hey you kids get off my lawn.) Anyhow. I would be considerably the worse for wear if it were not for a supply of Sexy Tasty Coffee. I’ve been downing those babies at every chance I get. On the way home from the hospital Sunday morning, we stopped in at the local Williams Coffee Pub so I could get a coffee. I went up to the barista and said, “Hullo, I’ve just come from spending the night in Emerg with my 2 1/2 year old and I need a treat. Something decadent. A SEXY COFFEE.” And she said, “Oho, a SEXY coffee. Would that also be a sexy TASTY coffee?” To which I said, “YES! I would like a SEXY TASTY COFFEE.” And she said, “Well, then I would say you want the CARAMEL LATTE”. So I did. And it was sexy AND tasty. And they put a heart and a smile on the lid in grease pencil which I thought was very sweet. And then today, after Stinkerbelle’s doctor’s appointment, at which we got 3 different prescriptions, which we then took to the pharmacist who said they’d take 45 minutes to fill, I said, “Okay. C’mon Stinkerbelle. Mama needs a SEXY TASTY COFFEE”. And we walked out into the cold and the sunshine and went and got me another sexy tasty coffee. AND a muffin. Now that is what I call soul food.

• There’s something about going to the doctor that brings out Mommy Guilt. I mean, Stinkerbelle has an awesome doctor. He really is great, even if he does come into a room like Cosmo Kramer and is almost but not quite rude in his abruptness. But he’s exceedingly competent and I have the utmost faith in him, and that’s all that counts. It’s just sometimes, when doctors begin to question you about your child and their symptoms and what has happened prior to coming in, and you begin to think “Argh. You’re totally right. I SHOULD have done X. I suck.” It could be an innocuous question and still you second guess your care of your kid. Only with That Baby’s doctor, his abruptness sometimes makes me feel a bit accused, or like he’s pointing out my incompetence. NOTE: HE IS NOT. He just cares, but his delivery is sometimes flawed. Today he asked, “Why didn’t you come in sooner?” And immediately in my head the conversation begins about “well, all kids get nagging coughs” and “I don’t want to be one of those moms who comes in at every sniffle” and “when do we have the time between our busy schedule and your busy office?” When really, all he’s asking is how we got to this point, and what her symptoms have been like during the previous couple weeks. He knows we’re doing our best, and I know that. It is just part and parcel of the whole OMG MY KID IS SICK YOU’RE RIGHT I SUCK Mommy Guilt.

• Today, I was making THE WORLDS MOST AWESOME SPLIT PEA SOUP soup in the crock pot for tonight’s dinner. So while I did this, I put Sesame Street on the tube, and let Stinkerbelle faff about and play and do whatever while I did my prep work in the kitchen. She generally will play in her playroom, but today she opted to be with me in the kitchen, as she will do on occasion. Sometimes, this involves the cupboard full of ziploc containers; other times, it’s the pots and pans. Today was a pots and pans kind of day. So, she’s banging and clanging behind me while I got things prepared. And I turn around to find she is SITTING IN A STEW POT WITH A LID ON HE HEAD. I took pictures. Of course.

• BDH is on his way home, with a cold coming on. It’s true what they say: kids really are just large mobile petri dishes. It’s inevitable I get it, too, but I am holding off as long as possible.

• We have been in need of some hilarity these past couple of days. So when the clip below showed up in BDH’s Twitter feed courtesy of Adam Savage, I just DIED from the laughter. And now we walk around the house hollering “ALAN! ALAN! ALAN! ALAN! AL! ALAN! ALAN!”
  

It is startlingly bright and sunny and cold today. It is, in fact, a beautiful day out today. But don’t let that fool you. It is still Tuesday, and therefore, it is still there, lying in wait, ready to pounce in a random fashion all over your unsuspecting ass.

• Bread hates me. This is nothing new. Everybody knows by now how the baking of bread only works if you have the full complement of hormones coursing through your veins; and I, as we all know, most definitely do NOT. And yet, I still try to bake bread. It is a compulsion, like lemmings running off a cliff. I have no explanation for Squamish. So, you can see where this is going: yesterday, I got it into my head to bake some bread. The reason was that we are on our last loaf of sliced bread due to an excess of grilled cheese sandwiches and peanut butter toast over the last little while, and I don’t want to have to face the grocery store more than once a week these days if I can at all avoid it. So I got it into my pea brain to bake bread. I still have the L (as in Lazy) so I followed my bread maker recipe and let it do the mixing for me. And it seemed to be okay, as I dumped the dough out and began to shape it into loaves to rise. Maybe a little small, but okay. So I popped the loaves into the oven, a warm spot, to rise. And I waited. And waited. And waited. Like, TWO HOURS I waited. And the damn things did not rise. AT. ALL. Well, maybe a smidge. But I thought, well, maybe they’ll puff up a little in the oven. And I am here to tell you, not surprisingly, that they did NOT. They came out of the oven two small, round, dense lumps. Which is a shame, because they smelled lovely and the bread therein, had it risen, was lovely and stretchy and all you’d want in bread. Except, you know, RISEN. So I cut those bad boys up and dumped them in the garbage. Le sigh. I blame dead yeast, which happens to me quite frequently, actually. And so today, do you know what I am doing? YEP THATS RIGHT BAKING MORE BREAD DONT YOU JUDGE ME. With a new, unopened jar of yeast. Fingers crossed, peeps.

• I have had a hate/hate relationship with our vacuum for years now. I hate it for being a useless and expensive lump of ineffective machinery, and it hates me because I curse at it so frequently and expect it to combat the disaster that is the carpeting in our (formerly four, now) three-cat, one preschooler, two adult-slob household. But we have been trying to be better housekeepers, and I have been trying to be nicer to our vacuum, and it has tried to respond in kind. And failed. Anyway. BDH has been saying for weeks that our vacuum has not been sounding the healthiest, but I haven’t honestly been able to notice a difference in the crap-ass piece of junk. So he was vacuuming on Saturday, upstairs, when I heard him hollering that “I think we might need a new vacuum”. So he came downstairs, and as it transpired, he was vacuuming when suddenly there was a not-normal noise, and the vacuum began to release the Mysterious Blue Smoke. And, as we all know from Mythbusters, once a machine releases the Mysterious Blue Smoke, it tends to stop working. So, we needed a new vacuum. And, I confess, inside, I was doing a little happy cheer. But then, DO YOU KNOW WHAT HAPPENED? Well, fellow babies, I am MORE than happy to tell you — WE BOUGHT A DYSON. Yes. You heard me. A DYSON. A DYSON ANIMAL. The best vacuum on the market is, right now, SITTING IN MY HOUSE LOOKING ALL SLEEK AND SEXY. Yes, we had to go into a little debt to do it, but we had to buy a new one, and I am a firm believer in “you get what you pay for” with technology. Plus, with cats and allergies and asthma, we needed something good. And oh my doG, peeps, I AM IN LOVE. It is the BEST. The thing damn near sucked up our entire carpet in one go. It is AMAZING. I may never stop vacuuming again.

• Today was the start of a new semester at Little Gym. Yeah, it was up and down for a while there last semester, but we bit the bullet and re-enrolled Stinkerbelle for another semester. Come the fall, we’ll start her in dancing, but she is still a little too young, so we kept her in the same class. So today, I went in, full of trepidation and the thought that some of the kids and moms we’ve gotten to know would not be there. All morning long, Stinkerbelle was shouting “SEE MIBBY!!!!” which was her way of saying she was excited to go to class to see her best pal Libby. But Libby’s mom did not re-enroll her, so we were alone. My first indication that this class was going to be a bust was the fact that there were no fewer than FIVE PREGNANT MOMS in the class. So right off, in introductions, they’re all talking about being pregnant and due dates and shit — not the best thing to endure when you are an infertile woman, I can tell you. But I figured I’d just ignore it, and class started, and I noticed that things were just… off. There was the dad, substituting for the pregnant mom, who was COMPLETELY UNABLE TO CLAP ON BEAT IN ANY SONG. Seriously. The class is full of singing and clapping along to little songs, and this guy could NOT clap on the beat. It was making me INSANE. I wanted to shake him and shout HOW HARD CAN IT BE WE ARE ALL DOING IT WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU??? But I did not. This same guy was letting his kid PULL STINKERBELLE’S HAIR AND TRY TO TAKE HER HAIR CLIPS/BOBBLES OUT. I may yet kill him. I have not decided. And then there was the fact that none of the parents seemed to be able to grasp the concept of directing their child so that nobody gets hurt. Kids were butting in line, and climbing over each other onto apparatuses, and getting underneath children who were on bars or climbing walls… and none of these dopes could grasp that if they didn’t start to intervene and teach and guide their kids to participate safely and take turns, somebody was going to get hurt. The biggest problem was that all the other children are CLEARLY younger than Stinkerbelle, so she was either well advanced in anything they asked her to do, or very bored. And that may be the significant issue right there. I am not going to pay that much for her to be bored for four months. So we’ll give it a few weeks, and see if it improves, and if not, we’ll try to switch classes.

• This week, my kid is scheduled to start speech therapy. I am not looking forward to it. I have heard good things about Wee Talk, but the woman who works the phones lacks telephone social skills and already I have a bad impression of the place. It may turn out fine, as these things often do. But I am no longer convinced, after waiting since July of last year, that my kid even NEEDS  speech therapy. Yeah, she WAS behind, but thanks to the ineffective organization doling out therapy appointments, A FULL 20% OF HER LIFE HAS GONE BY and quite honestly, she’s catching up in leaps and bounds. Kid never shuts up, and that is down to our hard work here at home. So I am tempted to say “screw you” to the whole deal. But not before I tell them how I feel they have dropped the ball. And, oh yeah, what a bitch their admin person is. Because I am helpful like that.

It continues to be random.

• I was taking Stinkerbelle to her gym class this morning. Our house, and our street, backs onto a conservation/watershed area in town. It’s large and wooded and home to many creatures, including the deer who do the Charleston. So, it was not altogether surprising, but still quite unusual, to pull up to the end of my street and prepare to turn out onto the main drag, and see police and cars stopped about 100 yards off. And there, between the cars, was a man, hunched down, petting and comforting a COYOTE who was lying on the road. Possibly a WOLF. Apparently, one of the cars had hit the animal as it tried to cross the road. I didn’t get close enough to tell what it was, likely a coyote since they are more common at the south end here than wolves, but hey. Either one. Anyway, the Humane Society/Animal Control people were there, and the coyote was all chillin’ and lying there sort of half-sitting up like dogs do, doing that whole doggie pant-pant-pant thing and looking around, and the man with him was petting him and giving him scritches, so my guess is the accident had happened a while earlier and they had sedated the big old boy (or girl) until they could get him to a vet. And, after I called BDH to let him know it was not ME, in case he saw it on his Twitter feed… I suddenly felt all warm and happy inside. Because THIS? Is the town I have grown to know and love, wherein people get out of their cars in traffic in the worst weather of the winter to help and comfort a wounded animal, and where animal control people are capable of handling a situation like this, and where just 5 minutes down the road we have the best veterinary school in the world where this animal will be cared for and rehabilitated and, if at all possible, released back into the wild again. This is a town where I can take a wounded bird in any time of the day or night to be taken care of (and have done). This is a city where two wounded turkey vultures become much-beloved residents at a local conservation area, and get all the city’s roadkill to eat. This is a town that is home to a Donkey Sanctuary. This is a place where you can see deer milling about behind your back fence. This is a city where the police are called to hunt down and kill a three-legged coyote because people are afraid and too stupid to keep their cats indoors, and the sharpshooters purposefully MISS, and say, “Whoops. Sorry. NOW KEEP YOUR DAMN PETS INDOORS.”  THIS is why I love this city so much. This is why I love living here.