Me: Good morning, everyone, time to get up!
Kids: Yes! Let’s jump on the bed!
Me: It’s almost time for school – please put your socks and shoes on.
Kids: But first, we will jump on the bed!
Me: It’s time to eat – please wash your hands and come to the table.
Kids: Quick! We must jump on the bed!
Me: It’s shower time – please get undressed, put your clothes in the laundry and get into the shower.
Kids: Of course, but after we’re undressed but before we get into the shower, we must jump on the bed!
Me: The shower is over. Here are your towels.
Kids: Whee! Jumping on the bed with wet towels is fun!
Me: It’s bed time. Go get in bed.
Kids: But I don’t want to go to bed!
…
And people wonder why I say I’m slowly going insane…
So that’s it. This is the part where I usually reminisce about some St Paddy’s Day memory (like my lucious leprechaun polyester suit or the St Paddy’s Day celebrations in New Orleans), but truth be told, I find myself just staring at the blank screen with an enormous amount of writer’s block. Every morning, it’s the same. Get up, look at the screen, get discouraged, close the screen.
In case you haven’t guessed, I’ve been feeling less inclined towards the personal posts on the blog lately. Interviews, product reviews, random ‘kids say the darndest things’ posts, I feel like they give me something to write about, but I had intended for this blog to be a personal one, and preferably with a sense of humor. Perhaps that’s the problem.
There’s so much going on over in the House of Riley and most/all of it is too personal to broadcast to the world wide web.
There’s also all the work I’ve been doing with my non-blog writing. I’ve been trying to get more paid writing gigs and when you’re writing for work, writing for fun has less fun in it. They warned me this would happen. (They talk a lot, don’t they?)
Then there was the Twilight Saga incident of last week, during which I just HAD to find out what would happen with Edward and his Bella, love. Sigh. I never did read my book club book, but I realized that Husband had invited someone over for dinner the night of book club (tonight), so I won’t be attending anyway.
This past weekend also marked the one year anniversary of the death of my grandmother. It came and went without much ado, but I wonder if it emotionally drained me involuntarily.
I find I just don’t want to think about anything these days. Is that possible? To just turn your brain off for a while – a long while – and stop thinking? I bet there are a number of insults I could throw in at this moment, directed mainly at Mariah Carey and/or fans of Jean Claude Van Damme movies, but even that is too much effort. So you tell me: have any of you ever just wanted to turn your brain off and how did it go? Because I’ve already read the Twilight Saga and watched Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. I clearly need something stronger. Any suggestions? Reality TV? 90210 marathon? Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals? Hmmm. I think I’ll stick with the Monty Python Philosopher’ Song.
First, a little news – there is an interview with me on Scribbit today. Stop by and say hello! And to anyone who is here because they clicked over from there, welcome!
***
I’m sitting in my kitchen window seat and looking at my car parked outside. There is a line in my window, the big black line that divides the pane, and because of it, there is a line dividing my car in half. It’s like I’m looking at a car commercial, you know the kind where one half of the car looks like the car they want you to buy, with all the bells and whistles, and the other half is the car they are comparing it to, the car they are telling you is no good. It may even be suggested that it is the car you currently drive and need to ditch. Which side would they choose for which? Which side of the car is the better side to be on – the driver side or the passenger side?
Did you remember the movie Garden State when Zach Braff is looking at himself in the bathroom mirror and his face is divided? Looking at my car divided is that movie scene for my life. Sometimes I am the driver and sometimes the passenger.
When I am in driver’s seat, I am in charge. I’m going places, doing things, coming home. I may need directions sometimes, I may have to slow down and speed up because of things going on around me – an accident, someone cuts me off, a red light, a traffic cop hiding behind a billboard. In the driver’s seat, it’s all up to me. I have to pay attention to everything around me, and even if I’m driving down a scenic highway, I do not have the luxury to admire the snow-capped mountains or ocean sunset, because I am the one moving – moving fast or moving slow, I am still moving, and to take my eyes off the road or the action around me could result in an accident.
When I am the passenger, it’s much easier. I am coasting. I can be enthralled by the scenery and amused by bad billboards. I can criticize the driver and tell them turn here, turn there, go faster, slow down. I don’t need to worry about other drivers or factors of the road. I only need to be aware of the path. And we all know the path is easier to view than to walk. There are those times in the passenger seat where it’s a little scary, if the driver doesn’t know where they’re going or what they’re doing – we’ve all been there, right? Where we’re clutching the door handle and stomping on the imaginary brake? It’s at moments like those when it’s time to stop watching and start doing. But I can’t always say, “Let’s pull over. I’ll drive for a while.” Sometimes I just have to ride it out.
Of late, I think I’m unbalanced towards the driver’s side. I’m going to try to apply the brakes more often, to slow down, stop, and take a breather. To look out my window and enjoy the world passing me by instead of the other way around.
The clavicle is a little bone in the shoulder area. It’s also called the collar bone.
The clavicle is the easiest bone in your whole body to break.
The clavicle comes from the Latin clavicula for “little key.”
The clavicle in the Boy’s body is fractured.
***
“Mommy!”
No one likes to hear this cry in the middle of the night. I stumbled into his bedroom and discovered that somewhere between sweet dreams and good morning, The Boy had rolled off his bed. He was crying rather fiercely, but I attributed the cries more to the confused arousal from sleep than actual physical pain. I swept him off the floor, gave him a kiss, and told him to go back to sleep. He did.
The next morning, he complained of pain in his neck/shoulder area. I figured stiff neck or some type of muscle spasm and gave him a hot wrap until he left for school. I sent an email to the teacher and asked that she not let him participate in PE. She told me after school that he was so uncomfortable, she wound up telling him to lie down and rest for the latter half of the school day.
He spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in mild discomfort. I patiently administered kisses and hugs and all the frozen blueberries his heart desired instead of accomplishing anything on my To Do list (but hey, I usually ignore it for lesser reasons than this) and hoped he would be fine by morning.
Morning arrived, and pain was clearly still in-house. He cried to move, he cried to change, he cried in the bath. Husband, the man who never wants to go to the doctor, suggested we take The Boy in for a visit.
***
I take The Boy into the examination room where we have been so many times for eczema outbreaks he knows immediately that I will be reading Curious George to him. That George, calling the fire department, escaping from prison, and flying away with balloons. He so crazy.
Good Doc comes in, I brief her on the situation, and she says, “I bet he fractured his clavicle.” She touches him here and there until her prodding produces the six-year-old exclamation she’s looking for: “Ouch!”
She nods again. “Yeah, the clavicle.”
She puts him in a sling and sends me to the imaging center, where I excite The Boy with the idea of “cameras that take pictures of bones!”
The X-rays are taken and the doctors concur: yes, a clavicle fracture. The Boy is so awed by the X-rays they make photocopies for him as a parting gift.
I hold the black and white paper in my hands, these pictures of his bones. I have another stack of black and white copied pictures of him. His sonograms. Over six years ago, I spent hours gazing at blurred images of a head, a heart, a footprint. Whenever I looked at them, I felt incredibly aware of his life inside me, his movements, his kicks. I look at his x-rays now, and six years later, I’m still aware of that kick in my side, that extra flutter in my heart. He’s grown so much, but he’s still so fragile. Just like me.
We show up to school late, and I walk him to class. Just before we reach it, he lets go of my hand and says he doesn’t need to hold it. “You don’t need to come in,” he says, but he does give me a big hug. I watch from the doorway and he enters his classroom, arm in a sling, brandishing the x-ray copies, saying “these are my bones.” There are oohs and aahs.
He goes to class with a fractured clavicle and gets himself some street cred.
I go home with a fractured heart and get myself some mom cred.
The other day, the kids were folding the laundry in the bedroom and ran to me in the kitchen, laughing hysterically, holding my underwear. They asked me, “Who’s big underwear is this?”
In other news, I’m adding squats to my exercise regimen.
Oh. And I’m also creating an exercise regimen.
***
Little No Limit and I were cooking scrambled eggs this morning. She enjoys most of the egg-cooking responsibilties, “Me crack the eggs!” “Me stir the eggs!” “Me pour the eggs!”
I stand around and supervise, and when the eggs are poured into the pan, I hover about anxiously saying “Watch the fire!” and “Don’t touch the pan!”
Today, she was demanding more responsiblity, saying she wanted to scoop the cooked eggs off the pan and onto the plate, but the problem with her doing this is that she is more likely to miss the plate and scoop the eggs onto the range top, which is, by most people’s standards, not clean. When I did not allow her to scoop off the cooked eggs, and instead performed the action myself, she declared, “Mommy, I said ME do that — and you’re NOT me!”
Thanks for the clarification.
***
The Boy’s 100th day of school is tomorrow and his teacher sent home a note saying he needed to bring in a collection of 100 things. I asked him what he would like to bring a hundred of to school, and he said, “Can I have one hundred dollars?”
You and me both, Buddy. Now take your box of 100 paper clips and be happy.
It is the early evening and I’m sitting in a lit kitchen while the rest of the house is dark. Everyone is napping. There is little noise except the occasional dog scratch (they’re suffering from a frustrating round of flea bites). This sound of the quiet house unnerves me. I feel restless and unreal, like the part in Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime” when he says “And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”
I’ve taken to walking the dogs at night (because I run into fewer small dogs who bark thereby causing my dogs to yank on the leash – one of these days, I swear they’re going to dislocate my shoulder or something). I always bring along my trusty little SanDisk clip and listen to music while I walk because without music, every little sound startles me on dark corners. This particular Talking Heads song came on the other night and I found myself grooving to it, which is probably why it is popping into my head right now.
I’m thinking of the lines “And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house / And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful wife” and I feel like calling up David Byrne and saying, “Yeah.”
Did you ever find yourself thinking you live too blessed a life? Some people might look at my life and say, girl, you SO don’t have it too good, because, yeah, we’ve got our share of financial woes going on right now. But there’s also some really exciting things going on (I still can’t bring myself to talk about it), and then there’s the fact that Husband and I have each other, we have amazing, thriving children, we have wonderful [albeit crazy and food-thieving] dogs, and we have friends and family out the wazoo. And to me, that’s having things good. Today being Valentine’s Day and all, I think I’ll just bask in this moment of a quiet empty, house and appreciate everything there is to love about my life.
I hear roller skates in the hallway. The Boy is up. He is in the kitchen now asking for water. Little No Limit just followed him into the kitchen rubbing her eyes. Little No Limit just reached down and bear hugged Her Name is Rio causing a scurrying of paws on the tile. I guess I’d better stop typing. Life in the house of Riley is noisy again, full of life… same as it ever was… same as it ever was…
I was eight years old when my mom got her first bike. My father bought her a beach cruiser as a present, and my brothers and sister and I and a couple neighbors watched her try to ride it for the first time.
It was the neighborhood I lived until I was eight, the kind of neighborhood where we knew everyone. There was Julie across the street and Fawn next door to the right. Ray and Daniel in other houses. The old guy on the bike who always gave us candy. The bully kid down the street who called me a show off when I rode my bike without holding the handlebars. We would all get together and play Kick the Can and make up obstacle courses in our yards that often involved dodging pine cones and scaling the 6×6 orange-painted brick wall that was attached to my house.
The house next door on the left was where Nice Family lived. Nice Family kept their Christmas tree up one year until July. I thought it was funny, and only found out years later that the reason they did that was because their son went into the hospital for cancer at the beginning of December and they promised to keep the tree up until he came home. Their son did come home to that Christmas in July, but eventually died from said cancer. I don’t remember his exact age at death, but I believe it was before he even reached 20. It’s hard to make sense of ages when you’re a kid. I just knew he was much older than me and that it was sad.
But what’s really sad is what else happened to Nice Family.
They had a daughter who was close to my sister’s age. She used to play with us, participating in the aforementioned pine cone dodging. She often rescued me from too much teasing at the mouths of my older siblings, and she joined us for trick or treating on Halloween. When I was thirteen, my mom woke me up and told me that Nice Family’s daughter had died. She was 17. She did not die from cancer, like her brother, but at the hands of a serial killer who has since been executed by lethal injection for hers and four others’ deaths and mutilations. It was huge news at the time.
I don’t talk to Nice Family anymore. I don’t know if Mr. Nice Family remembers teasing me about my pink T-shirt that said, “Why Yes I Am A Beauty Queen” or if Mrs. Nice Family remembers the time my brothers and I watched in awe as their cat took on major battle with a locust and won (you would think this would have been a quick battle, but that was one feisty locust).
I do wonder, though, if Nice Family remembers watching me watch my mom learn how to ride a bike. They chided me for laughing when she fell. They didn’t chide me in a mean way, but with the same gentleness with which they always spoke to me. “Don’t laugh at your mom. She doesn’t know how to ride a bike.”
What they don’t know is that I didn’t know that. I just thought my mom kept losing balance. I didn’t know that she’d never actually learned how to ride a bike. Whatever, I was eight. The thought of someone not having learned how to ride a bike was foreign to me. And that was when – watching my mom fall off her bike, and keep getting back on – that I realized that she didn’t know how to do everything.
A couple years later, with the news of Nice Family’s daughter, I thought of that lesson they’d taught me, that my mom didn’t know everything.
And now, years and years later, I think of the two lessons I’ve since learned from Nice Family – that moms don’t know everything and bad things can happen to good people.
And no matter how often I fall at the fate of those two lessons, I keep getting back on the bike.
***
So, do you have a First Bike story?
Write a post about the topic First Bike, enter it to Scribbit’s Monthly Write Away, and you just might win yourself a $200 credit towards a sweet new ride—bike ride, that is.
My friends, the parents of triplets, put their dog on a diet.
Some time later…
“Your dog’s weight looks great,” the vet said.
My friends, the parents of triplets, celebrated.
Some time later…
“Hmm, you need to bring him to a specialist,” the vet said, when friends, the parents of triplets, brought in their still-losing-weight, now-not-eating-and-throwing-up-a-lot dog.
Immediately thereafter…
“We need to operate on your dog – there’s a blockage and the X-ray doesn’t indicate what it is.”
My friends, the parents of triplets, awaited the results.
And do you even want to guess what the doctors discovered to be the blockage?
Guess.
Seriously, guess.
***
***
Twenty-seven pacifiers. TWENTY-SEVEN PACIFIERS.
Snap!
Wow. Fully intact, no less. Which means, if they wanted, they could just wash them off and start using them again, no?
(P.S. I know I still have to announce the winner of my previous post’s contest - I’m behind on things — big things afoot in the house of Riley -more later)
(P.P.S. I’m not really a Steelers fan, but I give credit where credit is due — awesome game!)
(EDITED TO ADD: The dog has recovered and is doing fine; he may possibly be snacking on some feeding spoons now…)
Hi, I’m Junior the Fearless Robot. I’m a 5.9oz hand-carved (by Husband) boxcar that was painted and decorated by The Boy (see other handcrafted works by children at Magic Marker Monday). Over the weekend, I raced down this track in THE PINEWOOD DERBY:
Allow me to tell you about the magic that is THE PINEWOOD DERBY as we meander through the many categories of this week’s carnival.
Education
The Pinewood Derby is a boxcar race wherein men and their sons put together what they hope is the fastest car. Knowledge of physics, aerodynamics, and gravitational pull help, while the ability to answer the question ‘how do you get the wheels on just so in order to make the car roll in a straight line?’ is imperative.
At the Pinewood Derby, you might be able to snack upon burgers and french fries from the In-n-Out van parked outside. It’s a swell way to comfort sad little boys (and sometimes sadder fathers) when their cars don’t win.
Other cooking posts:
Cyndi Lavin presents Vegetable vindaloo posted at Busy Family Meal Planning. “Vindaloo sauce can be used to flavor meats,” Cyndi writes, “but we like it best as a vegetarian delight!”
Preparation for the boxcar derby includes wood-carving, painting, drawing, then realizing the paint wasn’t dry enough, then fretting over smeared graphite, then repainting and waiting several days for the new paint to dry, then accepting that, in the end, dry paint is overrated. Then attending the event where everyone else’s car had no problem getting their paint to dry?
The Pinewood Derby is a realtively inexpensive way to have a good time with your children. To put it in a MasterCard ad:
$20 - supplies to make boxcar
$10 - In-n-Out food at Pinewood Derby
$1 — band-aids applied to children’s bodies after a little too much exertion in the bounce houses
$3 — vending machine waters
Free - comforting hugs to the fathers and sons whose cars didn’t advance on to the finals
David presents Citi PremierPass Elite Review posted at Credit Card Offers IQ. “My family and I recently took a trip to Guatemala and saved thousands using a travel rewards credit card,” David explains. :The Citi PremierPass Elite is one of the best travel cards available for family travel.”
A healthy family is a happy family and it’s good for the family to do things together, like check out the competition together and analyze how to sabotage them:
I’m definitely worried about that one on the left.
Other posts about family health and wellness–
Matthew presents Home Safety Information for Alzheimer’s Disease posted at Fast Medical Information. “If you are caring for someone with Alzheimer’s disease, you face many challenges everyday life,” Matthew observes. “These tips will help keep your loved one safe and free you from worry.”
I suspect that if the dogs had been allowed to participate in the Pinewood Derby, they would have carved a boxcar of the animal services truck and made sure it went extra s-l-o-w, so that they could laughingly outrun it.
Y Guides is a great way for Husband and The Boy to spend one-on-one time together sans ladies. They camp, they carve, they sing, they howl (or so I’ve heard). I hope The Boy always has fond memories of spending this time with his Dad.
Isaac Yassar presents How To Realize Happiness posted at Isaac Yassar’s Overture. “People study and work to achieve success. Is happiness achieved by amassing money and massive personal consciousness?”
And since this is Y-Guides and all, the Pinewood Derby began with a man wearing a headdress reading an invocation to the Great Spirit. All the kids go by special Y-Guides names, like Howling and Growling Wolf Who Carved The Winning Boxcar.
Jason Isbell presents Interview with D. Barkley Briggs posted at Tired Garden. In this interview, Dean Barkley Briggs talks about his life as a pastor, husband, father and widower and how he has forged a career as a writer.
Family Travel
The Pinewood Derby didn’t take place too far away from my house, but attending it and seeing how happy it made The Boy was otherwordly.
In the event should you ever attend your own Pinewood Derby, make sure you are *very* clear that the fact that your car won a heat DOES NOT mean you’re taking home a trophy. Much sadness upon this realization… I cheered The Boy up by reminding him that he would receive a patch to put on his vest.
Hope you enjoyed learning about my little Pinewood Derby excursion over the weekend! Thank you for participating in and supporting this edition of the Carnival!
Next week, the Carnival will be making a stopover at The Expanding Life! Susan will be hosting for the first time, so click here to submit the link to and relevant information about your post. Should you have questions, be sure to review the Carnival guidelines before submitting your post.
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