Here we go...

It really only makes sense that on a Friday when I have to go to a PTA meeting, take 15 Girls Scouts on a hike, host mother-daughter book club, and, oh pack for five days in Brazil, that my son would vomit all over me.

Fuck you, Universe.  Fuck. You.

Dear Universe,

I am begging, no, pleading with you, to work with me here.  I have received these three pieces of information in the last two days:

- There is a fever virus going around
- There is a five-day-long stomach bug going around
- There are lice in the second grade

Thankfully, Little Man got the first out of the way, and while this hampered my sandal shopping and pedicure getting, I did not complain because I did not want to tempt you into smiting me.  But I have been walking around with a nervous tick, so wound up am I with fear of impending doom.

Please, please prevent any of these things affecting my children or the grandparents caring for them,  before we leave for Brazil, or while we are there.  I need to get on that plane with my eight books and T's iPad full of movies*, without the fresh memory of my children puking, and I need to return without my mother in-law having had to shave my children's heads and throw out all her sheets.

Once we hit the tarmac back in New York, all bets are off.  Send the plague.  I'm sure I'll be too hungover to care.

*Should we be separated, and I wind up in steerage, I mean coach, I will not have access to on-demand movies.  I'll be damned if I'm going to be forced to sit through The Vow or One for the Money against my will.

Blame It on Rio

I have the hat....*

I have the sunglasses....

I have the bathing suit....**

That's right, dear readers.....

I AM GOING TO RIO!!!!

Sorry, let me collect myself.  But, finally, FINALLY, after more than a year of being a single parent one week out of every six, I get to accompany H on his next trip to Brazil.  I get to fly first class.  OK, I might have to sit in H's first class seat after we reach cruising altitude since I didn't want to spend a mortgage payment on a plane ticket.  We are attempting to use miles to upgrade, but there's a wait list.  I will wait.  Until I get to the airport and find myself either a female of gay service person and tell them my sob story.  I'll be damned if I'm not drinking champagne in a fully-reclining sleeper seat upon takeoff.

And here's where we'll be staying....

Oh, and guess who has also stayed there?

For five whole days I will be a free woman!  My days will be free to sleep late, take long runs and read.  Work events at night will require I wear my swankiest dresses and fiercest heels.  My reoccurring mental image of this trip is of relaxing in the infinity pool, drinking wine, as waves gently wash over me.  What waves? It's a pool.  Oh, wait.  Waves of guilt.  Did you think, dear readers, I would be getting off scott free? Did you think this would be un-complicated?  Ha!  The universe farts in your general direction.

When the idea for this trip was floated by H's boss, since our fourteenth wedding anniversary falls during it, we were both elated.  Somehow, my in-laws agreed to take the kids during a week when they will have to schelp everyone to school and do homework (shhh...don't remind them, maybe they were drunk and forgot), but activities would be over and the weather would be good for kicking them outside in the afternoons.  Everybody wins!

Then, just as I began to get really, truly excited and pictured my self wearing a bathing suit that's main attributes were not coverage and sturdy ties, and a glamorous sun hat that does not need to actually be attached to my head should I need to run after a child, ala the Yankee hat...there it was.  On our calendar.  Smack in the middle of our trip.

Little Man's pre-school graduation.

"Buh, buh...first class flight...infinity pool...Puff Daddy...", I muttered to the universe.  The universe, again, proved to me it had beans for dinner.  This was the ultimate in "me time" choices.  What the hell was I going to do?  Was I really going to miss my last child's graduation from pre-school?  The pre-school I had been paying exorbitant fees continuously for seven years?  The graduation that was also going to be my graduation into complete big-kid-dom?  And my poor last child.  The child who already has a pathetically small number of photographs of his life's milestones.  Was he now to be the child who, when discussing his pre-school graduations with his sisters, would be told, "Mommy and Daddy were on vacation"?

I had to ask myself, what kind of example would I be setting for my children should I make this choice and go to Brazil?

I'd be showing them that I count.

Every single mother I told my sad tale looked at me like I asked them whether I should have a drug-free breech birth or a massage.  The choice was that obvious.  Besides pre-school graduation being another "celebration of mediocrity"***, years from now, he wouldn't even remember I wasn't there.  Shit, with the hoopla my in-laws are sure to create, he won't even realize that same day.  Some perspective supported the fact that I couldn't give up five days in paradise for twenty minutes of four year-olds sticking their fingers up their noses to "Pomp and Circumstance".  By doing this, I'd be showing my kids that, sometimes, despite my life revolving around theirs, very, very rarely, my needs trump theirs.  And I think that's healthy.

So call it justification, call it selfish, call it whatever you want, but I'm going.  This is my boondoggle, my sales award, my prize, and, dammit, I'm taking it.  And if I get to dress like Sofia Vergara in a Diet Pepsi ad while doing it, even better.

*Weird, hammy arm included for perspective.  This hat be huge - and from the Kardashian collection at Sears.  I have shame...
**Bottom not shown out of mercy.
***Thank you, The Incredibles.

"It's gonna be a piece of cake...Bren."

Oh boy, dear readers.  Today at 9:30 I go for my first MRI.  Relax.  It's nothing serious.  At least I hope.  I've been having some pain in my hip, making it impossible for me to full rotate my leg out at a ninety degree angle, or sit "like a pretzel"* and my ortho wants to be sure it's not a cartilage tear.  So do I since if I have to stop running, I am going to make some childcare  plans for my inevitable institutionalization.

Other than my big fear of needing surgery and having to be still for several weeks with no way to shake my sillies out, I am a little nervous about the test as well.  In addition to becoming a cripple, another side effect of my aging is increasing claustrophobia.  While younger, I was only freaked out by buried alive movies, now when I'm in an airplane, I have to actively fight my brain from thinking about the fact that I can't get out, sending me shrieking down the aisles.  So being faced with an hour inside an enclosed tube is not exactly on my to do list.

As soon as this test was brought up, I immediately asked my doc for some medication, knowing this was the only way i was going to make it through.  So here I am, test morning, with a single Xanax in my purse with H ready to drive me to and from the test.

And now I have another fear.  What if the drugs make me babble inappropriately, snapping my fingers in fromt of my own face, fascinated, ala Ginny Baker?

I have heard taking these drugs is similar to, although mot exactly like, being drunk. That you just don't care about things that normally bother you.  Like being enclosed in a tube...or saying inappropriate things?  What if the tech has weird body art, or a good song comes on the radio everyone tells me they have playing in the machine?  I can just see myself creaming the lyrics to the new Nicki Minaj song.

I've written before, I was too much of a goody-two-shoes to try any drugs whatsoever in college and this is exactly why.  I couldn't handle the unknown effects in an environment that encouraged jackassery.  Now I get to do it in a suburban hospital.

So wish me luck, dear readers.  Let's hope H doesn't wind up having to carry me out of the facility over his shoulder while strangers watch.  At least there won't be a photographer.

*Or "Indian style" for those of us old enough to remember the pre-PC days.  Those were the same days when you described your Asian friends as "Oriental", and we called our enemies "retarded" with abandon.

Growing Pains

The look of confusion and fear in his eyes was so pathetic, I wished I could've taken his place.  Sitting sideways on H's lap, Little Man, simply openend his mouth and puked.  Not knowing to lean forward, the vomit ran down his chest, like lava from a Hot Wheels-loving volcano, until he was done.  He looked up at H and wailed, "I THROWED UP!!!!"

Up until now, this phenomenon was unknown to LM.  He had somehow survived almost five years in a house with school-aged siblings without once contracting a stomach virus.  While his sisters lay on the couch puking in Tupperware containers, he looked on mildly intrigued. But now he knew well the discomfort of having waffles exit the wrong way. That got me thinking about all the other physical maladies that are indescribable until your first childhood experience and how you are completely convinced you are going to die.

Throwing up is pretty intense, with all the involuntary spasms and such, but what about getting the wind knocked out of you?  I remember being on the school bus on the way home from kindergarten when it happened to me the first time.  My cousins and I were the last ones on the bus and, knowing there was a significant pothole the driver ran over every day, we ran to the back to sit over the bus's rear tires.  Oh, no seat belts for us!  They didn't even exist on the school buses of the 70's.  I'm surprised the driver wasn't smoking with all the windows closed.  And as we hit the pothole (I might even remember us convincing the driver to speed up before going over it), I was tossed in the air like a rag doll and landed on the top edge of the padded set, right on my solar plexus.  My ten year-old male cousins were no comfort as I tried to shriek with no oxygen.  Unti it occurred to them their crazy Aunt Rita was meeting them at the bus stop, and there was going to be hell to pay if her kid was, you know, dead.  I still remember them gingerly helping me down the stairs, all sympathetic clucking, the hypocritical assholes.  But can you really describe that feeling?  You really, truly think the end is nigh.

And what about splinters?  It's not so much the getting of splinters as it is the removal of them that is like something out of a slasher film.  There are those nice ones that are tiny, and only go in half-way, leaving a nice solid tip to be pinched by the tweezers and swiftly removed.  But then there are the real mother fuckers.  The deep ones, that leave no reachable end, lurking deep below the surface, where your mother's only recourse is the dreaded...SAFETY PIN!!!!  Nothing struck deep, sickening dread in my heart than my mother cracking out the safety pins and the Mecuricome - a bright orange anti-septic that actually contained mercury that stung like a bitch.  H swears it was like I was raised in a third world country sometimes, so out of date was my Irish mother's home remedies, and it's a miracle I don't have heavy metal poisoning.  My telling him about her disinfecting the needle by holding it over a lit match resulted in his laughing himself sick and asking is she gave me a leather strap to bite down on.

Now having my own kids, and using, relatively painless, hydrogen peroxide, my children scream just as loudly when I say, "I don't think the tweezers are going to work, sweetie".  How awful must it be as a child to have the person you love most in the world come at you with a sharp object intent on digging into your flesh with it?  Last summer, LM had his first splinter, and instead of whimpering meekly, like the girls did as I stuck a pin into his foot, we had a full on wrestling match where my gentle It's-going-to-be-OK-honey-s devolved into my screaming "JUST STAY STILL!!!" and we both wound up sweaty and crying.  But damn, that thing was almost an inch long.

And the coup de gras, in my opinion, of horrifying childhood firsts is Your First Charlie Horse.  It's not just the pain that makes them so bad, but the fact that they happen most often in the middle of the night. What a terror-filled few moments when you are innocently stretching you little legs, half asleep, and you are hit with  this intense pain.  You are all alone, without your parents to tell you what the hell is happening and you're thinking, "This is it.  I'm dying.  And I never even got that Farrah Fawcett haircut." Even as an adult it's no joke.  Charlie horses are the closest thing I can describe to labor pains, just all over your stomach and privates.  Good times.

There are so many things that happen to our bodies, and it's so strange to think our kids have no idea how any of them feel.  Describing them is often useless to little people who's only comparison is scraped knees and paper cuts.  I guess pain is just a part of life and we learn as we experience it, some sooner than others.  I got stung by a bee for the first time at the age of 38 and expected, from the playground theatrics I witnessed as child, to be in agony.  Maybe it's the fact I've had three babies, but, seriously, what the hell were you all complaining about?