I’m beginning to wonder if a few days with me makes my family sick. Every other time we go out of town or spend a long weekend together we all end up sick. I mean, I get it – I make myself a little sick on a regular basis, but it would be great to spend some time together without having to worry which one of them is going to start throwing up first. I would like to say I am not the cause of it, but I seem to always be the last one to catch whatever plague takes down our house. I spend the first few days after vacation taking care of the other two and then my mom has to take over babysitting while I barf for a day uninterrupted. I attribute this to me having a higher tolerance for myself than my other family members.
The last few times we have gone away for a short weekend have both been to water parks. I know those pools are giant petri dishes so I can’t say I am surprised by our illnesses. What does shock me a little is that my husband always gets it the worst. I would think my daughter would be the one to ingest the most pee from the water slides. Go figure.
The worst part about the illness that wiped us out this time around was that it struck on my daughter’s eighth birthday almost to the hour in which she was born. We returned home from our mini-vaca and went out to dinner with her grandparents to celebrate this monumental milestone. Mini-me decided against getting a cake which should have been a clue that something was amiss. This kid loves cake like Charlie Sheen loves cocaine and hookers.
By the time my 8.01 year old was getting into bed, she was complaining about a stomach ache. She lasted about 15 minutes before she started throwing up. I don’t think anyone in our house slept more than a half hour at a time the entire night. For me it was similar to the night I gave birth to her, and many nights after. Luckily, the wee one recovers quickly like her mom and was done barfing within 24 hours. Her father on the other hand has been down for the count for several days. He ended up at urgent care having bags upon bags of fluid pumped into his veins. I attribute this to his inability to properly process vitamin JEN since he hasn’t had a four day dose in awhile.
I’m trying not to take this too personally since I know there are tons of people who encounter me daily who don’t get sick. I guess I am like good chocolate – a little is awesome, but too much may make you hurl for a day or two. Maybe I should get a little consumer warning sign to carry around with me, or better yet a tattoo of the side effects of my sparkling personality. Until then my family is going to have to learn to toughen up or take me in smaller doses.
I wrote this blog while convalescing and listening to the Queers!!
Apparently my house now has communal socks. A month ago I bought myself new gym socks, but several pair have disappeared. A few weeks ago I found a pair on my daughter’s feet. The best part was she just thought I bought her new socks since she found them in her drawer. This is what happens when my husband folds the clothes. He has no idea what undergarments belong to who either. I found a pair of Wonder Woman underpants in my drawer awhile ago. They were a size 8, as in made for an 8 year old child.
One of the problems is that I buy cool socks. I bought a set of Harry Potter themed socks that have slowly migrated to my daughter’s drawer. The only ones she has not tried to swipe are the Slytherin pair. Anything that is Slytherin themed clearly belong to me, but the rest are apparently up for grabs.
It’s bad enough that my kid steals my socks, but now my husband is stealing them too. He met me at the gym the other day and promptly said “I think i’m wearing your socks.” I told him to pull up his pant leg so I could see and sure enough, I recognized them. He proceeded to tell me how soft and comfortable they were to which I responded “I should hope so. They’re cashmere!” I’m glad he was able to spend his last day at the gym in total comfort, but I don’t know if I even want the socks back now that they spent six miles on his sweaty feet. When he got home, he reached in his drawer and handed me another pair of the same socks. He had managed to confiscate two pair of my favorite socks without me even noticing.
I knew I would one day have to start keeping tabs on my clothing, but I thought it wouldn’t be until my kid was a teenager. I didn’t think I would be needing a lock on my sock drawer. And I certainly didn’t think I would be protecting my socks from my husband. Somehow I have a feeling I will be viewing him in one of my socks in a reenactment of a Red Hot Chili Peppers show circa 1988 soon.
If I have learned one thing as a parent it is that anything I say that I do not want repeated will be repeated, and probably in public. Having a child is a lot like having a parrot. A very drunk parrot. Since I am usually the parent listening in horror as my child talks about the lazy neighbor who never brings in his recycling bin in front of said neighbor, I am always amused to hear other people’s children do the same thing.
Luckily I get to hear all kinds of amusing bits of information from kids every week. I tutor first through sixth graders one day a week for an hour, and I am pretty sure I learn more from them than they do from me. Unfortunately, most of the things I learn from them are embarrassing stories about their parents or siblings. I know all about the mom who farted in the grocery store and the sibling who broke a window and blamed it on his friend. Sometimes I cringe at the stories as I think about what my daughter is probably telling one of her teachers about me. Then I remember that most of the stories my daughter is sharing I have probably already written about. I have no shame.
Yesterday, while tutoring, my 2nd grade student told me about how some boys are mean to her in school. She said one pushed her and another kissed her ear. I was thinking to myself how much her thinking would probably change about the ear kisser by the time she reaches high school. Today, however, she was thoroughly disgusted by a boy’s lips on her ear. She told me she had to go home and wash her ear. The kissing bandit had her pretty agitated. She looked me right in the eye when she said “Boys are gross. They all have HERPES!” I almost fell right out of my chair before I asked if she meant cooties. Her reply was “that’s it. I always say that word wrong.”
I’m not so sure I am qualified to teach sex education, but this guy is:
We took a little trip with my parents this weekend. My mom decided it would be fun for Riley to have an adventure every month, so we started out the year with a quick trip to Splash Village. It’s only about an hour away, so we can all pile into the car and get there quickly. My family is all about adventure, but the less time we have to spend getting there is always good. My daughter asks “how much longer until we are there?” within 5 minutes of us being in the car and when we haven’t even made it to the airport yet that question can make for a long trip. I have told her often how much I loved family trips as a kid and how being in the car with my parents was half of the fun, but she isn’t buying it. She was born into a world of instant gratification, where everything she wants to do or see is at her fingertips, so she wants everything right now. I’m trying not to take it personally, because honestly, I think my husband and I are just lovely to travel with.
I love that my parents are always ready to do anything with her. They are the kind of grandparents that loved being parents, even when it wasn’t easy, so I think part of their joy comes from watching me try to share the same kind of childhood with my daughter that I had. It let’s them know that they did a pretty good job raising me. Even better is that I married a man who likes to have them around as much as I do. The five of us have a lot of fun together.
We had never been to this hotel/water park before and really didn’t know what to expect. I loved the fairy decor from the stained glass windows in the front to the fairy paintings above the beds in the room. Even the water park had flowers and toad stools around the lazy river. My mom got to take her place in a good lounge chair and read a book while we all ran around like little kids going down water slides and getting buckets of water dumped on our heads. She often comments that she watches two kids in the afternoon, my daughter and my dad, but on vacation it’s more like four kids. She always says she wanted to have a big family and it didn’t work out that way, but it kind of did.
As a family, we have been to a lot of water parks because that’s what the littlest one wants to do. We have gone down slides into a shark tank, tubes in the dark and ones that gave us wedgies. We love them all. This park had a slide none of us would touch. It required you to stand at the top in a box and the floor dropped out from under you and dropped you down a shoot. This slide did not mess around. We watched a handful of people get on as we stood in line for the giant family tube we were waiting for and my daughter looked fascinated by it for a little bit but ran back to us after seeing the faces of the people dropping down. I give her three years before she’ll be begging me to do it with her. I think just watching the other people was giving her anxiety though. She is usually pretty excited as we stand in line and all of a sudden she was getting really scared and clinging to me like a scared cat. I’m pretty sure I still have some claw marks in my neck. By the time we were ready to climb on the raft I had to shake her off me into her seat.
The guy putting us on the raft must have been able to read our personality types by looking at us because my dad and I were facing backward and my husband and daughter were facing forward mostly on the way down. My dad and I are more the type to leap without looking and be surprised by what we get whereas my daughter and husband want to see every little bit. It was about the perfect ride for all of us. The next few times we went on were not so great for my husband who ended up backwards and motion sick by the bottom of the ride. He ended up having to sit down for 15 minutes while my dad and I went back up again with the little and down a few other slides in between. The kid can really wear you out if you aren’t careful. We ended up getting dinner, taking a second trip to the water park and blowing a weeks pay at the arcade before the night was over.
Of course when bedtime rolled around we all had a sugar buzz from the ice cream we just had to have before bed so nobody could sleep and we all played musical beds since Riley wants to make sure everyone gets their fair share of getting kicked in the head and kneed in the back while sleeping. We of course woke up to a foot of snow on the ground and all prayed for our life on the extended tip home. That’s pretty much par for the course when we travel. It takes about twice as long to get home just so we can hear the question “are we there yet?” twice as many times. Now we just need to wait for whatever adventure my mom plans for us in February. I’m sure whatever it is will have me ready to spend a few hours in the gym upon returning home and ready for a nap.
As I was driving my daughter to a sleepover at her Grandparents’ house the other day she asked “Why are there so many songs about Santa at Christmas and not that many about Jesus? It’s His birthday and there aren’t even that many songs about him”. Part of me wanted to tell her that people are selfish and songs about Santa are popular because people want to hear songs about what the fat man may bring them this year. I wanted to tell her that people want to focus on all of the “stuff” that comes along with Christmas. I wanted to get on my high horse and preach, but I didn’t. I told her that there are a lot of songs about Jesus, they just aren’t on satellite radio. I explained that just like my punk rock, songs about Jesus had been banished to the stations people can only get on their computers at home.
This of course expanded into a larger conversation about why people are more comfortable celebrating Santa than Jesus. We talked about her Advent calendar and the season of Advent. We talked about Advent being the season of celebrating Jesus’s birth and that for us the best way to celebrate is to try to behave more like Jesus would. We do this by giving ourselves to others. We donate to charities, we make gifts for people, we spend time together as a family.
We have a beautiful advent calendar that we use every year. My husband and I wake up in the middle of the night panicking that the pocket for the following morning is not filled. We are hardcore Adventers. When we first started this tradition, our daughter was young so the pockets were filled with goodies for her, small toys and chocolate mostly. When she was old enough to understand what Advent is really all about we started putting little homemade tags in the pockets. Now the gift in the pocket is either a charitable act or something to do together as a family. The problem with this is it is a lot of work for us to keep track of everyone’s schedules and coordinate who is driving over to give the bell ringer money or what craft we might be starting. There are some scheduled events but mostly it is me moving around the “watch a Christmas movie” tag just in case we forget a night.
We are over halfway through the pockets this year and I think I have reused the same tag three times now, but that’s okay. My daughter understands what this season means to us and that is a gift. Our conversation diverted to Santa being more like the three wise men bringing gifts to Jesus at his birth. I’m just hoping this doesn’t lead me on a quest to find myrrh at 3 am one night next week.
I’m beginning to wonder if a few days with me makes my family sick. Every other time we go out of town or spend a long weekend together we all end up sick. I mean, I get it – I make myself a little sick on a regular basis, but it would be great to spend some time together without having to worry which one of them is going to start throwing up first. I would like to say I am not the cause of it, but I seem to always be the last one to catch whatever plague takes down our house. I spend the first few days after vacation taking care of the other two and then my mom has to take over babysitting while I barf for a day uninterrupted. I attribute this to me having a higher tolerance for myself than my other family members.
By the time my 8.01 year old was getting into bed, she was complaining about a stomach ache. She lasted about 15 minutes before she started throwing up. I don’t think anyone in our house slept more than a half hour at a time the entire night. For me it was similar to the night I gave birth to her, and many nights after. Luckily, the wee one recovers quickly like her mom and was done barfing within 24 hours. Her father on the other hand has been down for the count for several days. He ended up at urgent care having bags upon bags of fluid pumped into his veins. I attribute this to his inability to properly process vitamin JEN since he hasn’t had a four day dose in awhile.
Apparently my house now has communal socks. A month ago I bought myself new gym socks, but several pair have disappeared. A few weeks ago I found a pair on my daughter’s feet. The best part was she just thought I bought her new socks since she found them in her drawer. This is what happens when my husband folds the clothes. He has no idea what undergarments belong to who either. I found a pair of Wonder Woman underpants in my drawer awhile ago. They were a size 8, as in made for an 8 year old child.
It’s bad enough that my kid steals my socks, but now my husband is stealing them too. He met me at the gym the other day and promptly said “I think i’m wearing your socks.” I told him to pull up his pant leg so I could see and sure enough, I recognized them. He proceeded to tell me how soft and comfortable they were to which I responded “I should hope so. They’re cashmere!” I’m glad he was able to spend his last day at the gym in total comfort, but I don’t know if I even want the socks back now that they spent six miles on his sweaty feet. When he got home, he reached in his drawer and handed me another pair of the same socks. He had managed to confiscate two pair of my favorite socks without me even noticing.
If I have learned one thing as a parent it is that anything I say that I do not want repeated will be repeated, and probably in public. Having a child is a lot like having a parrot. A very drunk parrot. Since I am usually the parent listening in horror as my child talks about the lazy neighbor who never brings in his recycling bin in front of said neighbor, I am always amused to hear other people’s children do the same thing.
We took a little trip with my parents this weekend. My mom decided it would be fun for Riley to have an adventure every month, so we started out the year with a quick trip to 
We had never been to this hotel/water park before and really didn’t know what to expect. I loved the fairy decor from the stained glass windows in the front to the fairy paintings above the beds in the room. Even the water park had flowers and toad stools around the lazy river. My mom got to take her place in a good lounge chair and read a book while we all ran around like little kids going down water slides and getting buckets of water dumped on our heads. She often comments that she watches two kids in the afternoon, my daughter and my dad, but on vacation it’s more like four kids. She always says she wanted to have a big family and it didn’t work out that way, but it kind of did.
The guy putting us on the raft must have been able to read our personality types by looking at us because my dad and I were facing backward and my husband and daughter were facing forward mostly on the way down. My dad and I are more the type to leap without looking and be surprised by what we get whereas my daughter and husband want to see every little bit. It was about the perfect ride for all of us. The next few times we went on were not so great for my husband who ended up backwards and motion sick by the bottom of the ride. He ended up having to sit down for 15 minutes while my dad and I went back up again with the little and down a few other slides in between. The kid can really wear you out if you aren’t careful. We ended up getting dinner, taking a second trip to the water park and blowing a weeks pay at the arcade before the night was over.
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