That Kind of Day

I was having THAT kind of day yesterday. You know the one. Where nothing goes right, though luckily, nothing is terrible. Just kind of blah.

TK was out for the evening at band practice, so I knew I was on solo kid duty through bed time. We had a zillion issues with the lawyers/house sale (STILL unresolved), so I was trapped all day at home waiting on phone calls and dealing with things. By the time dinner rolled around, I decided we needed some fun, so I took the kids for a walk to the Au Bon Pain about 1/4 mile away.

We got there, ordered, sat down. Everything's fine. We're having fun. Both boys wanted to sit next to me, so we were cuddled all on one side of a booth. It was pretty cute, and I was starting to relax. We wait for a while, the buzzer goes off, and I go get the food. Or I should say the boys' food. Turns out they're out of the chicken rice bowl I ordered. Again. How come every time I go there they're out of what I want to eat? And why can't they tell me when I order, or at least before I've waited with the boys for 10 minutes? It's not like they're busy in the evenings. There were only 2 or 3 other customers in the whole place while we were there!

Fine. I get something different (which for the record ended up being delicious!) I ate about half of it, but by then the boys had finished their drinks and were both complaining they were thirsty. Okay, easy enough to solve. I went up to the counter, got some little glasses, and got them some water.

I get back to the booth, and ask B-man to scoot out so that I can get back in between them. He puts his little hands on the table to push himself up to standing and....the whole booth tips over!

On to B-man and N-man.

And all our food falls off onto the seat.

Can you believe the entire table fell over because of my tiny little B-man? He wasn't doing anything crazy at all...I can't believe the table doesn't get knocked over ten times a day!

I picked the table up, and both boys were crying but seemed to be without serious injury. Both of them were more concerned about their food than anything else! Luckily, they had mac and cheese, and amazingly, both cups landed right side up and didn't spill a bit. So I moved them over to another table and that, combined with the awesome cups of water with ICE (their favorite!) in it calmed the boys right down.

But the tragedy is that my meal, my substitute dinner that ended up being delicious and that I'd only gotten to eat half of, had entirely spilled out of the bowl, all over the seat and floor.

Don't worry, I salvaged the situation. I went up and bought myself a huge chocolate pastry. Do I know how to solve a problem or what?

I knew all that cleaning was dangerous!

So, N-man got another concussion yesterday. He slipped on the wet kitchen floor and banged his head. We were getting ready for showing the house...one hour notice. On Father's Day. Right at dinner time. Convenient, right? Sorry, homemade Father's Day dinner was canceled!

We headed out to dinner instead. N-man wasn't in a great mood since his fall, but didn't seem too bad when we left the house. We got to the restaurant, and he broke down crying and grumping. TK walked around outside with him (in the rain!), but he didn't calm down, so we got our meals packed to go, drove around until the people were out of our house, and were going to eat at home. We finally got the call from our agent that they were done. N-man was whimpering in the backseat by then. We pulled into the garage and ACK! He vomited EVERYWHERE in the van.

I ran inside, called the emergency pediatrician line, and got new clothes for N-man. TK got everything vomit-related out of the van and onto the floor of the garage. (This is on Father's Day, remember? Do we know how to celebrate, or what?) We got N-man in clean clothes, threw the boys into TK's non-vomited on car, and headed to the ER.

Which was packed.

Full of sick people. Have I mentioned I have a touch of hypochondria? And germophobia? And there were sick people all around? I'm getting skeeved out just thinking of it. Last time we went to the ER, it was almost empty, giving us lots of space to stay away from other sickies. Not this time!

We waited, and waited, and waited, and weren't even being seen by the triage nurse or the check-in people. N-man was getting sleepy, I was getting really nervous. Then N-man threw up all over the floor and started shrieking.

Tip for getting seen immediately in the ER: throw up all over the floor and start shrieking.

My poor little guy! We were put back in a room pretty speedily after that. It was still a pretty long wait to see a doctor, but at least we were comfortable and away from all the sick people. And N-man finally started perking up and acting more like himself. By the time the doctor saw him, he was doing much better, and it had been over 4 hours since his head injury (the amount of time they usually like to observe them after a head bump). So they made him eat an ice pop, and since he could keep that down, we were released at 10pm.

The ER doctor wasn't even sure it was a concussion. He said it might have been a very coincidental virus or stomach upset that just happened to hit at exactly the same time as the head bump. That sounds crazy to me, except that N-man had been saying his tummy hurt even before the head bump. (I try not to spend too much time talking about potty stuff on my blog, but N-man has many issues with constipation so complaints about tummy pain are reasonably common here, which is why it didn't register as possibly related to the vomiting). I still suspect it was a concussion since it was so similar to what happened last time, but luckily it was minor enough that we can't even be sure that's what happened.

This morning N-man seems fine. He's eating, running around, playing normally. I'm worn out by the whole thing.

Two more house showings today. Of course right at dinner time. I'm NOT washing the kitchen floor.

You Gotta Protect the Noggin!

N-man, unfortunately, has inherited my coordination. Or more precisely, my complete lack of coordination. He's even improved upon my clumsiness, if that's possible. You know how in Twilight you go mad with the endless descriptions of Bella's clumsiness? Yeah, well multiply that by 100 and you've got N-man. He's always tripping or bumping or falling.

So last night right before dinner, he fell off the back of the couch, onto a tile floor.

This is not the first time this has happened.

While the kids are already 3.5, we only just took all the zillions of foam pads off the floors, and that was only because we had to make the house look nice to show it. It was really too soon, though, to un-pad the joint.

He screamed and cried, and calmed down while I held him. And fell asleep.

Darn it. Concussion sign number 1. With N-man as your child, believe me, you have concussion signs memorized.

But, having been through all this before, I know not to even start to worry yet. It's surprisingly common for kids to fall asleep after a head bump, and not cause for big concern. As long as you can wake them up. I poked him a bit, and he peeked open his little eyes. He seemed reluctant to wake up, so I broke out the big guns: "N-man, do you want an Oreo?" His eyes flew open and an excited "YES!" was given. He walked over, had his Oreo, and then just sat quietly on the couch until dinner time. If anyone knows the second major sign of a concussion, you'll know right now that an Oreo was a bad, bad idea. But we'll get there.

We started dinner, and N-man didn't want to eat anything. He just curled up in my arms. About halfway through dinner, he started to complain his head was hurting. Poor babe! TK got him some Tylenol. N-man started crying, I started worrying, then N-man threw up. All over ME! Oreo vomit, too, so it was grossly black and crumby. Ack! First, yuck. But second and more importantly, we can now check off "concussion sign number 2". Now it's time to worry.

I rip my clothes off, TK cleans up N-man, and I call the pedi's office. Yep, they're calling ahead to the ER, off we go.

N-man wants me to go, but I know that since I'm pregnant, I'm not going to be able to go in with him if he needs any x-rays done. B-man doesn't want to be left home without N-man. We bundle up the whole family.

By the time we got to the ER, N-man was acting completely fine. I mean, if I hadn't seen him fall and watched him the past hour, I never would have believed he bumped his head. He said nothing was hurting. But no way am I going home without him being checked!

We saw a triage nurse. When she asked N-man how he was feeling, he insisted "I feel PERFECT!" He really didn't want to be in the ER.

So we waited for about an hour before getting taken back to a room, and maybe a half hour in the room before seeing a doctor. Hey, I'm fine with that. I've said it before and I'll say it again: I'd much rather be the least important case in the ER than the case that needs to be seen ASAP!

The doctor agrees that N-man seems fine, but since he'd vomited, she wanted to keep him a few hours for observation. It was after 8 pm by then, but okay. So we just stayed in the ER for a few hours. The local ER is actually pretty nice and has a reasonably good pediatric section. Books, a few toys, and once you're in a room, there's a DVD player and a long list of kids DVDs you can borrow. We watched Aladdin, then approximately 97 hours of The "Best" of Thomas the Train. Okay, fine, it wasn't 97 hours. It just felt like 97 hours. And I added the quotes around "Best". I just have to say, though, that if that was the best, then the worst of Thomas must have been banned by the Geneva Convention as a form of torture.

Can you tell Thomas isn't my favorite? I can take an episode or two. They're thankfully short. But watching 1,000 episodes in a row far exceeds my tolerance level. Oh, did I mention that while they were long on kids entertainment, there was really nothing for parents besides an old issue of Parents Magazine that I'd already read? And I forgot to bring a book to read? (That's how you can tell how worried I was about N-man. I never go anywhere without a book!)

But we all made it. N-man continued to be just fine. Neither TK nor I went insane from Thomas. And B-man and N-man ended up having a great time, getting to stay up late and watch TV and eat ice pops. The boys were home and tucked into bed, snoozing, by 10:30 last night.

So that was our adventure. All's well that end's well, but I swear, that kid is going to give me grey hairs with all the falling on his head he does. Am I allowed to make him wear his bike helmet around the house?

_________________

One more quick N-man story from the ER adventure. He's so suspicious of everyone. When the lady in admissions wanted to put the ID bracelet on his arm, he wouldn't let her. She explained that he needed to wear it so everyone would know who he was.

With his arms still held firmly at his side, he said calmly, and with much authority and a tinge of disdain, "But I'm N-man!" There was very much a VIP tone in his voice, as if to say "those peons might need identification, but EVERYONE should know who I am!" We all burst out laughing!

Kitchen Adventures

Remember when I used to post lots of recipes here? Remember when I used to write about cooking with kids (mwah ha ha!)? Yeah, between the winter sicknesses and my pregnancy food aversions, that has fallen by the wayside. But I rallied the other day and decided to try something new with my kids. I had come across a new (to me) cooking blog the other day, and saw a recipe for pop-up baked pancakes. Sounded good and easy to me! So the boys and I got to work.

And they started fighting.

Quite honestly, they'd been fighting all day and it was wearing me out. We measured out the flour, each putting in half the amount, but when we got to the milk, all hell broke loose. B-man demanded to add the FULL amount of milk, but N-man wanted to add some, too. Adding half amounts just wasn't going to cut it as a compromise. But tough noogies, that's what we did. B-man was having a full-out tantrum, and I was just ignoring him, going to the fridge to get some eggs. But in the midst of their fighting, they knocked the blender. Which fell off the counter. And smashed into a zillion shards of glass.

So I stuck them on the counter so they'd be away from the glass, ran and got some shoes for myself so I wouldn't cut my feet up, and began the long and arduous task of cleaning up broken blender pieces. It took about half an hour, and by the time I'd gotten all the glass up, the milk and flour had dried into glue. That absolutely would not wash off the floor. Another fifteen minutes with a scrub brush finally loosened the "glue" enough to clean it up.

So after 10 minutes of cooking (and fighting) and 45 minutes of cleaning, we had soybean butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. Want the recipe??

I might not be quite ready to get back into the kitchen just yet. What do you think?

Whatever you do, DON'T LOOK BACK!

I think the universe is trying to teach me about the importance of looking to the future rather than the past.

Let me go back a bit. I know, looking to the past, but forgive me for a moment as I explain the back-story. See, our garage is narrow. I mean, just-inches-wider-than-the-car narrow. It takes a great driver (unfortunately, a better driver than me) to make it through without regularly dinging the bumper or catching just the very edge of the garage. Oh well, I can live with that. Our cars have a few paint streaks, our garage has a few dents. Nothing major.

Well, a few months ago my husband was backing out, and somehow managed to be so incredibly misaligned that he pulled his driver's side mirror right off. I didn't say a word, because I understand. Good thing! Because I was just pulling his car out of the garage, and guess what? Yep, smash. Although, this time it wasn't the edge of the garage. I actually knew the car was in kind of screwy so was being incredibly careful not to hit the side of the door. What I didn't realize is that I was aimed right at the snowblower. The handle impaled the driver's side window, popping it entirely out of its frame.

So, from this I conclude not that we're especially accident prone, or that our garage is too darn narrow, but instead that I'm pretty sure the universe is sending us a message to look to the future. Hey, Universe, I hear ya! You don't need to ruin anymore of our rear view mirrors, okay?

Speaking of rear views, Orlando Bloom's been staring at my butt. We've been nursing colds in the house, and of course with colds comes the requisite ran-out-of-tissues. So, TK was wonderful enough to run out to the store to buy some necessities, including tissues. He was even smart enough to realize that it would be a good idea to buy a three-pack. But, unfortunately, he didn't look closely enough to realize that one of the boxes in the three-pack is covered with Pirates of the Caribbean advertising. That box of tissues is sitting on the back of our toilet, and now every time I go to the bathroom, I have to face Orlando Bloom getting a good view of *my* pirate's booty. I guess it could be worse. It could have been Johnny Depp...


Unrelated thought of the day: Tomorrow my book group meets, and it's my turn to provide choices for next month's book. I always find it so hard to narrow my choice. I want to pick something interesting and different, but it's also tempting to pick something safe that people will probably enjoy. Well, I get three picks, and then the rest of the group narrows it down to just one, so maybe I'll pick two risky choices and one safe and let the rest make the call.