Category Archives: I’m turning into Howard Hughes

Mousetastrophe

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Friday afternoon, the kids were at a birthday party and I was basking in the glory of having crossed every item off my to-do list. I was feeling pretty good about myself; maybe even a bit smug. I was wiping off the kitchen countertop and opened the cupboard underneath the sink to throw something in the garbage, when I saw something strange. At first I thought I had spilled coffee grounds, but no. No, I always take the little compost bucket out of the cupboard when I throw the coffee grounds away. I moved the compost bucket, and saw more strange black things. My stomach gave a lurch and I googled “mouse droppings.”

That smug, happy feeling dissipated instantly. I took everything out of the cupboard, grabbed the bleach, and started cleaning. I had only a few minutes before picking up the children from the party, so I piled the garbage bags, rags, sponges, garbage pail and compost back under the now bleachy-clean sink cupboard. After returning home, I called my husband in a semi-panic, and as I did so I opened up the lazy susan where I keep the flour, oatmeal, and other baking needs. “OH MY GOD” I screamed into the phone. “THEY’RE IN HERE TOO!” I immediately hung up the phone, threw out the open bag of oatmeal, and bleached that cupboard as well. My husband was working on something “more major” than a “mouse” and so it would be a while before he was home. 

Now, I’m a feminist. I shovel snow in the winter, I have been known to clean the gutters, a few weeks ago I even got on a ladder and pulled the decorative scarecrows out of the garage loft. But mice? No. I did what any girl would do in my situation: I called my parents. My dad answered the phone, and in response to his normal salutation I began shrieking that there was a MOUSE in the HOUSE and it was in the CUPBOARD and AIEEEEEEEE. My dad listened for a few minutes, then said what all dads say when faced with hysterical daughters: “Here, I’ll let you talk to your mother.” Within thirty minutes my dad was at my house, setting up traps under the sink and in the lazy susan: two snap traps and one “mouse inn”.

At this point I felt like burning the whole house to the ground, or maybe having a stroke, but on the advice of my husband I poured myself a glass of wine, ready to prepare dinner. SHAKY, but ready to make dinner. Then, I heard it. I looked under the sink and the little door to the “mouse inn” was closed. AIEEEEEE. Mice mice MICE. Not two minutes after that, I heard a loud bang against the front window. A large smear, studded with feathers, was on the glass, and a bird lay motionless in the front garden. Mouse under the sink. Dead bird in the front garden. Possibly more mice in the house – who knows? I am not a catastrophizer. Normally, I can roll with the punches. But at this point I basically felt I was being overrun by vermin and there was a dead bird in the front yard and I couldn’t take it anymore. THE MICE COULD BE ANYWHERE, I thought. At that point, I broke. I started sobbing. I sobbed while making dinner. I sobbed while the children ate – I couldn’t eat. I cried so much that Mark begged me to please stop being so sad and Jake said Mom, we can get the mice, the mice are small, it’s okay, Mom. I just cried and cried while cleaning up the children’s dinner. The children fled downstairs to the safety of their video games while I cried. Two hours of crying later, my husband came home.

Husband: You have GOT to pull yourself together.

Me: *ceaseless sobbing*

Husband: It’s just a MOUSE. Look, I stopped at Canadian Tire. I bought all these traps.

Me: *hysteria*

Husband: You’re letting yourself get all worked up. You need to pull yourself together!

Me: *gulping, choking, sobbing* I think there’s a mouse under the sink.

At that point, my husband threw the “mouse inn” directly into the garbage, along with the dead bird. I hardly slept at all on Friday night. I kept hearing things. My husband kept telling me that I was “letting myself” get “all worked up” but it turns out I was right. Because Saturday morning I slowly opened the cupboard to find all the bait gone but no mice in the traps. There was apparently a mouse party, with droppings on top of the compost container, and in the lazy susan, a similarly stripped mouse trap, holes in the bags of chia and quinoa, and NO DEAD MICE.

Later my mother commented that maybe the mice were vegan, and my friend Lyn thought that next thing you know they would be into the nutritional yeast. FORTUNATELY the nutritional yeast is kept in a glass mason jar, so that was safe, but as for the rest, well.

It turns out the traps my dad had brought over were not working – obviously – and so my husband started setting up the variety of traps that he had bought: old fashioned snap traps, poisonous bait ones, and the humane catch-and-release kind. Just as a foreshadowing, I will inform you that the humane traps were also the least effective.

While he was setting traps, I went out and bought mason jars and stainless steel containers, and the rest of my day was spent putting all foodstuffs into such containers. The upside of this gross event is that I have super clean and organized cupboards now.

My husband went back to the office, leaving me to take the kids to karate. At this point I was nearly insane with lack of sleep, fretting about the Hanta virus, and the (probably ridiculous) thought that I would one day open up my sweater drawer to find a horde of mice nesting there. After karate I gingerly opened the cupboard to discover that the only thing grosser than no mouse in the trap is to find a mouse in the trap. My husband was a good three hours from coming home and so after I heaved for a few minutes I called my parents – again – and my dad came over with his thick leather gloves to deal with the aftermath. Dads and their daughters, am I right? I was awash in gratitude as my dad reset the trap, and it wasn’t five minutes after he left when I heard a snap. And I use this as a cautionary tale for those of you sensitive people, like me. If you hear a snap, don’t think that the trap just “went off” “by itself”. I opened the cupboard to see a writhing, twitching mouse. At that point I just went to lie down, feeling like I was having a nervous breakdown.

I’m happy to say that after my husband came home, there were a few more “snaps”, and he sealed around the dryer vent where we think the problem originated. There haven’t been any more issues since Saturday; the cupboards are still clean and smelling festively of bleach and peppermint oil – the latter of which is apparently a mouse deterrent.

So, that was my weekend. Well, not all of it was misery and desperation. There was also this:

The boys got their yellow belts! They’re so proud and so am I. A bright (yellow) spot in an otherwise vermin-ridden weekend.

One Week

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The first week of January is gone, and I’m completely scattered, so here are some random things going on in the Boyhouse:

1) The boys go back to school tomorrow, and I am having my usual last-day-of-vacation mixed feelings: happiness about the return to routine, and melancholy about the fleeting nature of time, and what city will the kids go to university in, and will it be close, and god, I sure hope my future daughters-in-law like me.  Physically this manifests itself as me cheerfully filling in my calendar for the week with errands and appointments that are unpleasant or impossible to do with the children, and also me randomly grabbing and hugging the nearest child, or screaming “I LOVE YOU!” down the stairs where the children very patiently say “Thanks, Mom.”  THANKS MOM.  It’s like my life is a weird sitcom episode. 

2) My appetite, which has been absent all week, has returned with a vengeance, so in between my week planning and my melancholy, I am also thinking near-constantly about FOOD.  Let’s see, I should go to Costco on Thursday, and maybe make quesadillas tonight, I have to remember to make up the School Council agenda, should I maybe make some of that eggplant dip right now, hmmm…do I have any crackers?  Because the kids were disappointed that I baked brownies to take to a baby shower yesterday rather than for their own consumption, I baked another pan of them this morning, combining my food obsession with my over-indulgence due to the aforementioned fleeting nature of time.

3) Yesterday I actually got teary eyed watching Ray Lewis come onto the Ravens’ field for the last time.  I would blame hormones but I can’t really, which reminds me of the evening not long ago when I was lying on the couch, tearful with hip pain, with a heating pad on my back, washing down Tylenol for Body Pain with red wine and Christmas chocolate, crying to my husband about being sad, so very sad, since my incredible back and hip pain indicated that I would now have to spend the rest of my life in a chiropractor’s office.  I became annoyed with my husband for not being more sympathetic to my plight as a cripple.  Then I started googling chiropractors, acupuncturists, and scoliosis.  Maybe 2013 will be the year where I finally recognize ladies’ holiday symptoms rather than concluding that life as I know it is over and the rest of my life will be all about pain management and sadness.

4) Speaking of Dr. Google, I fell down the rabbit hole last night by looking up “rashes and stomach virus” since Jake had developed a rash on his stomach and chest.  Instead of concluding reasonably that Jake, being prone to rashes, simply had a bumpy red manifestation of the virus that we had – probably Norwalk – I started clicking links that were, frankly, terrifying.  Consulting Dr. Google is never a good idea.  I blame my undernourished brain.

5) If there is a bright side to contracting a virulent stomach virus such as Norwalk, it is that a post-Christmas cleanse becomes completely unnecessary.  Not that I was really contemplating a cleanse; I did the Wild Rose cleanse back in 1999 and although that is now nearly fourteen years ago, I still get the shivers thinking about it.  That cleanse was the reason why, whenver anyone tells me that they are doing a similar detox, all I can think is exploding intestines, and I hope you have a nice bathroom.  But in any case, being sick has made post-Christmas weight-loss plans unnecessary, which is a minor upside to a deplorable week.

How was the first week of January for you?

COME ON DOWN!

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Yesterday I optimistically cleaned the house, sanitizing all the surfaces and disinfecting doorknobs.  I baked muffins and indulged in such self-care rituals as applying moisturizer, blow-drying my hair, and shaving my legs for the first time in many days.  I just finished reading How To Be A Woman, and while I enjoyed it, and felt a strong and hearty agreement with it, I also feel that there are many nice things in life, and having smooth legs, underarms, and bikini line after days of achieving yeti-like status is one of them.  Relatedly, I realized as I plucked them that my eyebrows would, if left unchecked, morph into a blend of Frida Kahlo and Martin Scorcese’s on my face.  There’s nothing like a few days of stomach flu and no sleep to make normal daytime rituals seem like the epitome of luxury.

Oh!  But I was too optimistic too soon, because my remaining healthy child took a turn for the worse last night, causing me to pull a very gross all-nighter with him.  I’m doing a lot of laundry, is what I’m saying.  My husband is also feeling nervous, like there is ominous music playing just for him.  If you hear a strange noise, do not leave the campfire.  Do not go into the dark woods.

The funny thing about kids is how quickly they bounce back, eating freezies and playing video games.  Even while sick, in the middle of the night, Mark both maintained his polite manners – “Please may I have a tissue?” – and his incredulity about the whole situation.  “I think I have the barfing flu” he said after heaving into the toilet for the seventh time in two hours.  Yeah, maybe.  Jake, on the other hand, maintained sunny optimism: “Every time I barf I feel a little better!” he said after the tenth bathroom visit.  “I think I’ll probably feel better tomorrow!”

And he seems to be correct.  Yesterday, while attempting to find a suitable children’s show on television, I came across The Price Is Right!  I was so excited.  The kids enjoyed the show in the same way I did when I was a kid.  The prizes and games were all so exciting!  A barbeque in the shape of an egg!  A new car!  A trip to New York!  A freestanding sauna!  I was kind of disappointed that there were no dinette sets to be won, as in my youth, but maybe I need to watch more.

When I was a kid, I loved that show.  I used to want to be a Barker’s Beauty, and this wish also coincided with my idea that I would, one day, be crowned Miss Canada.  My mother even made a Halloween costume to that effect, complete with red gown, crown, and sash proclaiming MISS CANADA 1982.  But the idea that a whole career – such as it was – could be built out of being pretty, wearing stilettos, and showcasing RV’s and sectional couches was fascinating.  I didn’t know about sexual harrassment, obviously, so it seemed pretty prime to me.

Of course, the Price is Right that my kids are now happily being exposed to has 100% less sexual harrassment – I THINK – and also has a male, um, Barker’s Beauty.  I guess they aren’t called that anymore but I cannot imagine what they might be called.  Anyway, this guy is disappointingly modestly dressed and also, it appears, in charge of driving the New! Cars! to be won.  What’s up with THAT?  The women can still drive cars in the presence of a man, thank you very much.

In any case, I’d like to thank The Price Is Right for the much-needed entertainment for me and my recovering children.  One episode had almost every single audience member in blocks of colour-matched t-shirts, which made Mark think that the audience was made up of “teams”.  “Oh, the red team is up.”  I guess it’s kind of true.  We also saw a woman win $1000 spinning the big wheel, whereas she promptly fell on the floor and rolled around.  “Wow, she’s REALLY happy.” Mark said.  “What would happen if she won one million dollars?”  I’m guessing she would probably die, but die happy, I suppose.

One of the best parts of watching The Price is Right is the commercials.  You have to hand it to the TV executives; they know their prime audience, and it isn’t me and my kids.  In one hour we saw two separate commercials for motorized scooters, several for Ensure, laxatives, and other supplements for Colon Health, and one featuring Henry Winkler advocating for reverse mortgages.  FONZIE.  Have we learned nothing?  Reverse mortgages are a very, very bad idea.  NOT COOL.  Stick with the Colace.

Pajama Jeans, Moose Mugs, and Strange Viruses

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Probably because I had So Much To Do and Remember with regards to Christmas, various school spirit days, the casino fundraiser, and other random things happening this week, I got terribly sick on Sunday.  That will teach me!  I had a strange virus that presented as severe abdominal pain and a fever, and also narcolepsy.  I was awake for perhaps four hours total on Sunday, and those “awake” hours had me lying on the couch, dozing, or crying.  My sole accomplishment was showering and putting on fresh pajamas.  Yesterday, with my husband going to work and me becoming, as usual, the Sole Responsible Adult in the house, I woke up with the hopes of just being able to do the bare minimum, i.e., making sure the kids got to school and back, and making sure they had food. 

It turns out when you set the bar really, really low, you will be amazed at even the minutest accomplishments.  I was so impressed with myself for showering and putting on what Lululemon euphemistically calls “Dance Pants”, but what are actually sweatpants, rather than pajamas that I felt like maybe I could conquor the world.  Sweatpants, or dance pants, are a step up from pajamas, even if they don’t feel any different.  I combined the sweatpants with fuzzy slippers, a long sleeved thermal t-shirt, and an enormous sweater my mother-in-law knitted for me twelve years ago.  What I lacked in style and attractiveness I gained in coziness.  Fueled by my immense accomplishment of showering and dressing, I further roused myself to do a load of laundry, and on investigation of the freezer and its lack of frozen meals, I even made my super-simple pasta sauce.  I’M KING OF THE WORLD!  Then I lay down on the couch to rest, and here’s a question: have you ever tried to watch television during the day?  It’s terrible.  I hoped for at least an episode of The Price Is Right, but no such luck.  No Plinko for me.  Thanks to my husband, who is a sports fan and so Needs Access To Many Different Stations, we have a couple hundred channels, all of which are completely useless to me.  I ended up watching an episode of MASH and falling asleep.  That BJ Honeycutt sure is dreamy.

Today I feel almost totally normal.  I even donned jeans today, albeit my oldest, softest, most broken in pair of boot cuts.  A huge step up from “dance pants”.  On days like today, I kind of wished I had Pajama Jeans, though.  Have you seen the advertisements for Pajama Jeans?  About a month ago, my husband was out of town and I was on the couch, alone with my wine.  I saw this commercial for Pajama Jeans and I became somewhat fascinated with the concept.  Jeans…that feel like pajamas!  Actually, I think they already have those: they are called maternity jeans.  I had a pair of maternity jeans that saw me through massive weight fluctuations, and that I continued to wear for a few months post partum.  They were below-the-belly style, with a giant elastic waistband, and I loved them dearly.  Here I am wearing them, and let’s just keep in mind that this is a full three months before I was actually due with Mark:

 

Three months!  I actually wore those jeans to the hospital three months later:


Not only did they last me through that pregnancy, but I wore them while pregnant and postpartum with Jake as well:

 
 
Those were some amazing jeans.  It makes me think that the Pajama Jean concept is just a rip-off of maternity jeans because hoo boy, those babies were comfortable. 
 
Anyway.  I’m feeling much better, at this rate maybe I’ll even step up to skinny jeans tomorrow.  On the bright side, it’s not the worst thing in the world to lose a few pounds before Christmas, right?  One week to go before I gorge on my mom’s chocolate Yule log.  Heh.  Yule log.  That reminds me of Christmas Vacation: “I don’t have a log.”  Which brings me to this brilliant website, featuring MOOSE MUGS:
 
 
I would buy an entire set of these for my sister-in-law if they weren’t so expensive.  $151 for a set of eight, plus shipping?  Robbery!  The thought is there, though, and that’s what counts, right? 

I’m singing! And I’m in the post office. And I’m SINGING!

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Hey, what has two thumbs and just made it in and out of the post office in less than five minutes?  THIS GIRL.  I had to mail a package to my in-laws – because I’m such a fabulous daughter-in-law – and I was psyching myself up for total mayhem and trauma.  I was even ready to start singing Christmas carols loudly, in the manner of Buddy the Elf, in order to make the post office much less of a “go postal” kind of place.  But – and share this with your friends! – it appears that 1:00 pm is the greatest time to mail things.  I guess the elderly are all having their lunches and/or naps at that time.  There was only me and one other person, a younger fellow who I witnessed almost being run over by a car in the parking lot as the driver backed out of his spot with considerable, and inappropriate, speed.  The whole thing vaguely reminded me of a story my mother-in-law once told me about her beauty parlor; an elderly woman drove at full speed right into the beauty parlor, her Lincoln and the accompanying driven-through wall debris surrounded by screaming old ladies sitting with their curlers in those old-fashioned hair dryers.  When questioned about the accident, the elderly woman said that she thought she had put the car in reverse, which didn’t quite explain why she had the pedal to the metal, but in any case no one was seriously injured, by some kind of beauty parlor miracle.

But!  Parcels are mailed, no one actually got run over in the parking lot (cue music: Grandma got run over by a reindeer), a miss is as good as a mile, and here it is, only two weeks until Christmas Eve.  Squee!  The kids had a three day weekend since parent/teacher interviews were on Friday, and so we spent a great deal of time with gingerbread and icing.

I decorated the vast majority of gingerbread people myself, because it took the kids forever just to decorate one single cookie.  What they lacked in speed and efficiency they made up for in creativity and detail.  Here are Jake’s cookies:

The rest were promptly eaten. 


Hey, it takes a lot of strength to put icing on half an inch thick, am I right?  Here are Mark’s:

 
 
 
Once the gingerbread people were made, it was high time to get them a home, and so began our annual fugly gingerbread house creation.     
 
 
He’s so excited.  He just can’t hide it.  He’s about to lose control and I think he likes it.  As always, our gingerbread house is just the right mix of whimsy and what-the-fuck-happened-here? 
 
 
A melted Frosty the Snowman!  A gargantuan purple window!  Random candies mixed with “Merry Christmas” messages!
 
 
 
So, it was a lovely weekend, marred only a little by the vast number of people calling me to cancel or change their shifts at our giant casino fundraiser next week (please pass the sedatives) and the fact that Jake’s seatmate had the stomach flu yesterday and is IN SCHOOL TODAY (pass the booze to wash those sedatives down with, and also some sanitizer).  Hoo boy, I had to take some deep breaths just from writing that.  Focus on the gingerbread, Nicole.  Focus on the gingerbread. 

Sorry, but I’m not a bodybuilder

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I am in a MOOD.



I was in a very chipper mood this morning, even though it was snowing and gusty and freezing. Part of this chipper-ness had to do with the fact that my husband is now at home and I am not the sole responsible adult around here, and part of the chipper-ness had to do with the fact that I can now breathe through my nose without sounding like I am a cocaine addict. Which is a win, as far as I can tell. But oh! That chipper mood has evaporated like a bucketful of tears left out on a hot, dry day. Not that I remember what hot, dry days feel like since it’s snowing and my dog rolled in the snow and is now soggy and filling the house with wet-dog odour.



My sour mood could have something to do with the fact that I just spent the last ninety minutes photocopying, cutting, and sorting papers for various school events and fundraisers. NINETY MINUTES. I started to lose the will to live after the first half hour. Sorting 1200 little pieces of paper into classrooms is really, really dull. At least I got to use the large-armed paper cutter, which spiced things up a little. For this I have a Master’s degree.



I am pleased my cold is nearly gone, and if I had to guess, I would say that yesterday’s Vitamin C overdose may have helped. I get sick so rarely that when I do I get hurt feelings about it; like my immune system has let me down. How could you do this to me, immunity? I give you everything you ask for. Some of this emotion may have to do with the minor high I get from cold medication. Some of that stuff, I wonder if it should be legal. Or perhaps I shouldn’t take it and then drink six cups of coffee, I don’t know. In any case, I actually slept (passed out?) yesterday morning. I walked the dog, came home, and climbed into bed.  This is so unusual I seem to have to make a note of it. 



I realized that the amount of supplements I now consume is bordering on the insane.  It started off normally, with a daily multivitamin, and now it’s just crazy.  So yesterday, with this cold, I realized that I had taken a LOT of additional vitamins, and I was eating those lozenges that are fortified with Vitamin C, so I thought I should actually read the package, lest I somehow overdose myself. The package informed me that I should limit my lozenge intake to no more than thirty a day. Thirty! Two things: a) if I am consuming thirty lozenges a day, I have larger issues than Vitamin C overdoses, and b) how much Vitamin C could possibly be in one of those lozenges if the daily maximum is thirty? I felt a little bit disappointed in the lozenge manufacturers; like how those sugar-ific “fruit” snacks say “contains real fruit!”, but the reality is that the fruit content is the equivalent of a grain of sand on a vast beach.



As a rule, I never answer the door during the day, or in the evening if I’m home alone.  I have a fear of being murdered.  I realize that might sound extreme, but something like that did actually happen not long ago.  A woman answered her door one evening, and a crazed man killed her!  In front of her children!  This is something I would like to avoid.  And so I never answer the door, unless I know for certain it isn’t some mur-diddly-urdler.  There is no downside to this, really, because mostly the only people that ring my doorbell are door-to-door salespeople, politicians, and occasionally my neighbour, looking for Beeps.  So I’m really not missing much.  However, yesterday I had to answer the door TWICE, which, along with my drippy cocaine-addict noise, was putting me in a bad mood.  First, the water-meter-reader rang my doorbell to complain that the city had not installed the kind of water-meter that can be easily read via, I don’t know, satellite, from the back alley.  The water-meter-reader, apparently, has to come INTO MY YARD to read my water-meter, which is completely inconvenient for him and ruins his day.  What I am supposed to do about this state of affairs, I am unsure.  I guess that my ownership of a bloodthirsty squirrel-bird-possibly-Beeps-killer of a dog is noted in my file and hence my wrong kind of water-meter is a danger to society, or at least to the water-meter-reader.  Keep in mind that while listening to this man, I had the boys home for lunch, the dog was frantically barking at the appearance of an unknown person at the door, and I was high on Advil Cold and Sinus.  And I had just woken up from my morning nap.  JUST TELL ME WHAT YOU WANT ME TO DO, BUDDY.  Do I need to call someone?  Stop with the long explanation already.  I do not understand your water-meter language.

Because of my excessive vitamin supplement consumption, I order all my vitamins online.  It’s way cheaper that way, and generally the box arrives the very next day.  This leads me to the second reason I had to answer the door: I could see the Canada Post man standing there.  I very reasonably thought he was unlikely to be a murderer – and he wasn’t, I’m still here to tell this tale, never fear – but you never know.  We are all, I think, familiar with the term going postal.  But in any case, the Canada Post man was very nice and I opened my giant box of online-ordered supplements.  Inside was a piece of paper informing me that my gigantic order qualified me for a free gift.  The free gift consisted of the following items:

– a cheap plastic water bottle
– a lidded cup that is apparently intended for vigourous on-the-go mixing of various bodybuilding protein shakes
– an orange-scented car air freshener in the shape of Popeye
– a “performance pill” box, also emblazoned with an image of Popeye
– a Popeye-themed lanyard
– a Popeye key chain
– a sample of a high-dose protein shake
– something called anabolic energy muscular endurance muscle fiber activation workout fuel (two servings!  Blue raspberry flavour!)
– a sample of something that promises to get me “beyond ripped” and is a subcutaneous fat-incinerator
– an enormous t-shirt with a maple leaf on it

What a generous free gift!  What to do with this?  I feel completely deflated, environmentally.  Also I am puzzled; my order was Women’s Multivitamins, Vitamin D, and Women 50+ Calcium supplements.  My order does not match this free gift.  However, if any of you want to start a new bodybuilding regimen, let me know.  I have some things for you.

Back in business, baby.

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“I’m back in business” Mark said the night before school started.  You know how sometimes, just sometimes, you get a feeling about what your child will be when he grows up?  I feel quite sure that Mark is going to be an engineer.  If you know any engineers, or if you are an engineer yourself, then you know that there is a certain “engineer personality type” and Mark fits that type exactly. 

It’s funny, isn’t it, how people like to speculate what children’s lives will be like when they are adults.  It’s amusing.  A kid plays with blocks, and we think “architect”, or they play with cars and they think “mechanic”.  Personally, I thought I was going to grow up to be a concert pianist, which is funny, considering I became an economist.  When Jake was a baby, my husband turned to me and said “I think Jake’s going to grow up to be an investment banker.  Because he’s kind of a dick.”  That makes me smile every time.  Jake is kind of a dick, but in a good way. 

I know I’m supposed to say that I just want my kids to be happy, and of course I do, but I kind of feel like nurturing the attitude that it’s easier to be happy when pursuing a career with good financial returns.   

The kids were very excited to go back to school.  The first day was kind of chaotic, what with confusion about last minute out-of-area enrollments, ensuing large class sizes, and the specter of another class being formed to take the pressure off of said large classes.  Things will settle down later this week, but for right now things are all up in the air.  I’m feeling fairly calm about it, with the attitude that things are going to work out fine.

I was less calm yesterday after school when I went to pick the boys up.  I shielded my eyes against the sun, looking for them.  Yes, there was Jake’s bright orange hat, and yes, that’s Jake, but what is he wearing?  He had a different shirt on.  When asked, he told me cheerfully that a classmate had barfed all over the back of his shirt, and that shirt was wrapped up in a plastic bag, in his backpack.  OH. 

You know when you hear the word “barf” and you get that feeling like “maybe I should strip the child down and burn all his clothes right there in the playground”?  I had that feeling.  I kind of froze, then started asking leading questions about where he was sitting and how much contact had he had with the barfer, and how often he had washed his hands.  I asked the questions carefully, trying not to seem crazy, and then I vigorously rubbed hand sanitizer into his and Mark’s hands, and my own.  I thought about the shirt, and I thought that I had probably got my money’s worth from it, as I dropped it in the garbage.  Of course, this led to sadness later – “I loved that shirt!” – but yet, I could not fathom washing someone else’s kid’s barf.

There was also an unpleasant story from the boys about the children finding a dead cat in the field at recess time, which became more dramatic when it was discovered that the dead cat belonged to a friend.  There were other dramatic events, which I won’t relate here, but suffice it to say it was a very exciting first day of school.  I’m looking forward to less excitement, and hopefully less barf, for the second day.