A Rough Week

Thursday, April 28th…I pick the kids up from school and Iris has tears in her eyes.  She claims she has had a stomach ache ALL DAY.  She mentions that at one point she was on the floor, resting her head on the seat of her chair.  I asked why the school nurse didn’t contact me?  She insists that the nurse touched her head with “a thing” and told her there was nothing wrong with her.  This was a bit disheartening simply because Iris loves school and she isn’t a huge faker…and I wondered how the nurse and teacher aren’t also aware of this.  We went home and she missed her piano practice and passed out on the couch.

Friday, April 29th…4AM…I am awakened by Max, screaming through the upstairs.  I go to him, bring him back to bed and nurse him.  Within 10 minutes he is back in his crib.  I lay down on my pillow, that I thought was my friend.  My eyes are closed when I hear Owen ask if he can climb in bed with us.  Chris is extremely talented at NOT LETTING OWEN IN OUR BED.  I, however…am not.  I imagine, like our 3 older children…soon enough he will not be interested in crawling in our warm blankets and finding comfort from the long night.  He is permitted.

Friday, April 29th…6AM…Iris has entered the room and walked to Chris’ side of the bed to audibly cry that her belly hurts.  I am uncomfortably positioned as close to the edge of the bed as I can be while still remaining in the bed.  I attempt to sit up to assist the crying child, but it feels as though my neck just might be broken.  Pain.  Pain in the neck…literally.  I cannot sit up.  This is a familiar pain that has plagued me a few other times in my life.  Most likely my pillow was not supporting my neck properly for those last two hours of slumber…and now I’m experiencing a pinched nerve or something.  With my head still laying on the pillow like a pile of bricks, I turn the rest of my body and pseudo spin off the bed and I am then able to drag my head, while it is fully bent forward (the only position that doesn’t hurt) and I rise to my feet.  I alert Chris that we have a code red and that he needs to get up…immediately.  Iris climbs into our bed and now two people who are not the owners of our bed…are sleeping in our bed.  I barely muscle to my phone to call my chiropractor…out of the office till Monday.  The last time this happened, it was so tense the first day of the injury that he couldn’t help anyway.  A day of belly aches and ADVIL and icy hot were in my future.  Iris slept most of the morning and watched an old 80″s movie (per Chris’ suggestion) the rest of the day.

Saturday, April 30th…Chris is home in the morning but will be leaving shortly to go bid 3 drywall jobs.  He is scouting out the bacon and I must be understanding, for I too like bacon and he happens to be better at finding it than me.  I am not, however, excited to be navigating the unnavigatable ship that holds 5 of the most unruly shipmates one could ask for.  Our friends who own a piece of recreational camp land are hosting a “work day at camp”.  Even with my immobile neck, I am aware that if I simply make it to camp…my kids will find tasks and adventures to keep them busy.  While cleaning up flood debris and “camping out” under a bridge, Iris steps on a rusty nail.

Perfect.  No we don’t have Tetanus shots, because I’m one of those idiots who imagines their babies eyes rolling back in their head while their body seizes and frankly the cocktail of Diphtheria, pertussis and tetanus all swirled together makes me a little nervous. AND Chris had a bad reaction to the shot when he was young so I was basically waiting for something like this to happen that would force me into getting the shot for the kids.   Naturally, because Iris has never received a shot before, she immediately starts softly crying to herself while she eavesdrops on my conversation with her dad on the phone.  In all my reading, I learned that its usually within 3-20 days after the infection that Tetanus sets in.  Since the family doc was closed for the weekend we monitored the wound closely.

Sunday, May 1st…we go to church, then to our favorite Indian food buffet and then home, to putz around and hold my neck very still.  I am looking forward to going to my chiropractor as soon as the sun comes up on Monday morning.

Monday May 2nd…I drop the children off at school and drive around with Max in his carseat until he falls asleep and I head to my chiropractor’s office for a 9:30 appointment.  I lug the gigantic forward facing carseat into the waiting room with me in an attempt to keep Max asleep.  Unfortunately, two extremely enthusiastic grandparents were shout-talking and sharing pictures of their grandchildren.  I felt half tempted to ask if they would like an extra grandchild to care for while I had may neck adjusted, for it was only moments later that Max woke up.  I kept him detained while my neck was placed back where it belonged.  He sat like an angel, a gift that I am exceedingly thankful for, as I have trouble having my neck cracked while someone in the room is screaming.  That tiny 20 minute nap just so happened to mess up the rest of the day for Max and I.  If you have a 14 month old or have ever had one, you know that the nap schedule can be very delicate.  He only went to sleep at 1 that afternoon and when 3:15 rolled around, I found myself standing on the sidewalk, looking in all directions for a warm body to stand guard at my home while I picked up the other 4 kids from school.  No dice.  Neighbors weren’t home and it felt too “bad parenty” to ask the person sitting in their parked car to “watch my house” while I picked up my other kids.  So I woke him up and he wasn’t happy and he was even less happy at Flynn’s baseball game that evening.  I didn’t imagine that my family could get on people’s nerves at a baseball game, where you assume its ok to take kids, but we were successful at receiving more than 2 or 3 nasty glares from people who just didn’t want to listen to our toddler cry or our 7 year old son and his 10 year old sister wrestle on a blanket and they definitely weren’t crazy about the fort our five year old was building on the bleachers…all while the parents tried to be interested in their OTHER son’s baseball game.  Extra circular activities don’t feel meant for large families.  Homeward bound…and exhausted as hell.

Tuesday May 3rd…the tiny puncture where the nail went into Iris’ foot is looking red.  I waste no time, we are scheduled for 11:30 Mother/Daughter Tetanus Shots!  She was so terrified that I told her I would go first (I haven’t had one since college, so why not?!)  Of course when we arrive the receptionist tells me there is something wrong with some words printed on our insurance cards.  They insist that unless their practice is listed as the Primary Care Physician…they can’t see us.  This was a mistake, we had just received new insurance cards and they chose our PCP for us and I didn’t even notice.  I insisted that we have never gone to any other doctor’s office EVER and I wasn’t sure how this happened.  I proceed to call our insurance and wait while they change the information in their system and then hand my phone to the receptionist so they can be like “BLAH BLAH BLAH”…”OK…BLAH BLAH BLAH.”  We are taken into the exam room, where they begin prepping Iris for her “VACCINATION!!!”

I mention, “Actually, I was going to get mine first, just so she could see that it isn’t a big deal..”  The nurse responds, “Oh, didn’t they tell you…yours was cancelled.  You can’t just ‘get a tetanus shot’…I mean, when was your last one?”  I’m confused…how else do you get a Tetanus shot than to “just get one”.  “My last one was in college, maybe 12 years ago…”   She goes on, “Well I’ll ask, but I don’t think it will be approved.”  WHATEVER.  The nurse returns a few moments later and says the Nurse Practitioner is running behind and they are going to go ahead and give us our shots.  Maybe that’s how you “just get a Tetanus shot”…come when they’re running behind schedule and they’ll just DO IT!  Iris watched while I held Max with one arm and they stabbed me in the other.  I didn’t even feel it.  Her turn.  She turns her head away from the prepared needle and dramatically places her hand over her eyes to hide her tears.  By the time she was done with this swift, expressive motion, so also was the shot.  She couldn’t believe it.  We were outta there and eating some horrible Wendy’s fries in no time.

Wednesday May 4th…Nothing considerable to report on, aside from endlessly dismal weather.  The kind of weather that you don’t even think is bothering you until your five year old says, “I miss the sun.”  So did I.  Where did the sun go?  The largest positive to the horrible weather was that baseball practices and games kept being cancelled, taking otherwise stressful evenings of trying to feed people by 5 O’clock and bundle up for long evenings outdoors and instead placed us all inside, to draw and play games and ALMOST MURDER ONE ANOTHER!  The winter was too long.  We all want to be outside.

Thursday May 5th…Aside from the bum out forecasts, another thing that had been deeply effecting my mood was the consistent smell of heating oil in our home.  Since last fall when our rusty heating oil tank decided to finally fail us and leak fuel all over the basement floor, we have been dealing with a light aroma of the fowl stench here and there as Chris would have to transfer some into the tank, only up to the rusted point, to keep the hot water flowing.  This week he decided to unhook all the fittings in preparation to hook up the new tank.  The smell gave me this depressed feeling about cleaning my house.  Why bother cleaning a house that stinks like heating oil?  It made me want to evacuate with Max everyday.  I mentioned a few times how much the smell bothered me, and that maybe it was even giving me a headache but I’ve found that sometimes the people in my life need me to get out “My Megaphone”…or else I’m just not taken seriously.  Chris set up a vent fan to draw some of the smell out of the basement until he could get around to closing everything back up. That was nice.  I expressed my appreciation.

Friday May 6th…My sister in law is an exceedingly talented massage therapist and she had caught wind of my recent neck injury and she sent me a text wherein she offered to help me out in the stiff neck department.  I responded to her that she was welcome to stop by, but that I really needed to stay home and get some stuff done.  I had been away from the house everyday that week, messing up Max’s delicate nap schedule and I was suffering the repercussions.  Around lunch time, I got a call from the school nurse that Iris had fallen on the roller skating field trip and she thought that her wrist needed to be looked at by a doctor.  (So much for spending a day at home.)  Chris was working locally so he picked her up while I called the family doctor.  A 1:30 appointment.  I couldn’t imagine that her wrist was broken because she was handling it like a champ, and she could move her fingers pretty well.  I asked if there was anyway Chris could stay home while Max napped and then possibly pick the other kids up if this took a long time.  “Sorry hun, I just can’t.”  Join the club.  This is where I will briefly mention that being a mother can feel quite lonely at times.  You have created a person or GROUP of people and at times all their needs run together.  Meeting their needs is a job that I only feel comfortable asking my husband and maybe a relative or two to help with.  Call it a defect of mine, but it is just how I am.  This is going to change soon.  Soon I will be posting a Facebook announcement about how badly I would like to go on a date with my husband for his birthday and I will be asking for any and all qualified babysitters to come out of the woodwork.  This is what normal people do, I think.  So Iris and Max and I head for the doctor’s office.  “WE’RE BACK!” I jovially exclaim as the same nurse practitioner who saw us on Tuesday steps into the room.

 We are sent for X-Rays across the hall and then given a disc with her images on it.  I have come to realize that when you are “given the disc” it is because something is wrong and you shall take that disc with you on your future medical journeys.  We are taken back into the original exam room where we are told the wrist is broken.  I was incredibly surprised, as I looked at Iris, balancing the wrist on an old tablet from her dad’s work truck.  They were out of slings so we were sent away with the same grubby tablet we came with, holding the hand steady upon it.  I was asked to sit down with the referral department, but unfortunately the other 3 kids needed picked up very shortly and there just wasn’t time.  They told me they would call me.  (Insert down pouring rain while I attempt to get the freshly maimed Iris and her baby brother into the vehicle…the normal things I rely on Iris for, buckling herself, closing her door, she cannot perform.  I finish running all around the vehicle, securing everyone and turn to load the stroller…it has blown to the end of the parking lot in the downpour.  Insert also, me not loving any of this.) Around five that evening I am told to take Iris to an urgent care facility to have the wrist splinted for the weekend until we can have it casted on Monday. That night we ordered pizza and listened to our kids complain that they would have rather had Chinese.

Saturday May 7th…I get up and make waffles and Chris leaves to complete a few hours of local work.  I take the kids to the park where we bask in the partly cloudy skies, teasing us with the occasional ray of sunshine.

When Chris returns I take 2 of the boys to the thrift store to get some bike helmets.  Flynn finds a pair of those God forsaken sneakers with wheels in the heels that are basically another broken wrist waiting to happen.  We spend the afternoon in the parking lot…that we live in…on our bicycles and end the night with Uncle Ben and Aunt Mare roasting hotdogs in the back yard.  The neighbor girl sleeps over and aside from a super messy house, I feel thankful at the end of the day.

Sunday May 8th…Mother’s Day.  I’ve started telling people that I don’t recognize the holiday.  It is fully man made, like most (ALL) holidays and I used to feel entitled to some type of honor or homage and then Chris said to me, “You aren’t my mother…”  True.  And my relationship with my own mother has proven to be quite rocky over the past few Mother’s Days.  So I’ve found that expecting nothing is a much better approach to these types of things.  I much prefer to act as if it isn’t even happening.  My kids definitely pull through in the hand made cards and pictures department EVERYDAY OF THE YEAR, so if nothing is produced on Mother’s Day, its never been a big deal.  Iris did make me a super sloppy drawing of a heart that read “Sorry, I’m right handed”

 That really made my day.  I will say though, that I like to use this made up holiday as an excuse to not change a diaper occasionally.  So I wake up like any other day, cuddle Max, holler at people to get ready for church.  I sat at my little desk in our room to jot something down when Chris presented me with a small envelope.  I am astonished.  I open it.  A gift card for a massage and facial at a local Brazilian Spa.  WHAT?!  It says “From Max”…I knew that fat little baby would be my PAYDAY!

This is quite pleasing, especially because I expected nothing…I’m telling you, its the way to GO!  We go to church, go eat Indian food (I know, we have to skip a week or they are going to ask us to stop coming) and then we went to a Lancaster Barnstormers game with the kids + a friend of Iris’ (what’s one more?)  Chris and I took turns sitting with Flynn near the first base line while he desperately waited to catch a foul ball

and manning the other 5 at the play area that is a blessing to any parent who has ever tried to take little children to a baseball game.  The sun was so sunny and the breeze was so refreshing.  This was a perfect day.  If I did celebrate Mother’s Day, this was a good one.  We were about to leave the ball field when I received word that my 92 1/2 year old grandfather had died…on this, the Mother’s Day that I don’t even celebrate.  It was his time, he had lived a long life…but more than the actual passing of the old man, it stirs up so much emotion about how things change.  They never stop changing.  I spent my life going to visit he and my Grandmother in Connecticut, several times a year.  We would roughhouse in his carpeted basement until someone surely got hurt and I combed his hair for money and he let us eat colorful cereal that we never saw any other time. In November we went to visit for Thanksgiving.  He spoke with my kids about his time serving in the navy and shared pictures with us and it felt really special.

I sensed that we might not ever see him again.  My own father died in my Grampa’s basement, tragically and much too young…three years ago at the age of 60.  My Grandfather has buried almost ever person near to him, his two sons and his wife, survived now by his daughter, my aunt and his grandkids (8) and his great grandkids (14).  His passing will be the end of an integral part of who I am.  Another piece of my life, my childhood, my foundation…gone forever…left with only bits to tell stories of and photos to share.  Nothing can stay as it is.  Nature will not have it, and so we must not be foolish and take for granted what we have right before us…for someday it will be as distant as the sun.

Hindsight being 20/20, I can honestly say that my last week felt a lot like a shitty diaper.  Some diapers that you change are surprisingly pleasant, a nice solid bowel movement with very little clean up.  And some are what I like to call “Up the back, down the legs” kinda diapers.  This week was an  “Up the back, down the legs”.  You know there are things to be thankful for, like “At least I’m not wearing white pants.” Or “I’m so glad my baby’s systems are all functioning.” And you know that you will get things cleaned up, even if it takes rubber gloves and a power washer and a box of OxyClean.  Things are going to be OK.  They have to be.  But sometimes it’s nice to write a lengthy blog post about how shitty life can feel.

And thankfully, broken bones heal.