I just got an e-mail from Grace's teacher. It reads as follows:

"Hi Mom! Grace doing great. Next week will be a load. She is a very student."

Does there seem to be a couple of words missing from those sentences, or is it just me? Now I'm going to be wondering all day long exactly what kind of student my child is. So many adjectives, so little time!

Maybe we should just build an ark.

Ugh.

I have blogger's block. I know that I should write something, but when I sit down and try I have an uncontrollable urge to poke myself in the eye with a fork. Or eat something chocolate, which is usually the urge that I follow and is why my weight-loss efforts have gone the path of leg warmers and high-top tennis shoes. (Or are those back now? I'll have to consult my nine-year-old.)

Anway. Here's an Owen story. It's all I've got, folks.

A couple of weeks ago I was sitting here not blogging, when I heard a scream from upstairs. Seconds later, Owen came running down the stairs yelling at the top of his lungs, "Help! I flushed a yellow paper thingy down the toilet and now it's flooding the bathroom and I think it's going to flood everything and I can't find my goggles! Can we buy a new house?"

Now, charmed as I was by the idea of him floating around in toilet water wearing spiderman goggles, (not to mention getting a new house out of the deal. Sweet!) I decided that there was not enough anti-bacterial soap in the house to placate my germiphobe children, so I called for Josie to turn off the water to the toilet. She did, the toilet was unstopped, and all was right with the world. Well, my world anyway.

That is, until the next time that Owen had to use the bathroom. Then a hysteria erupted that I'm quite sure was heard in the outer regions of Siberia (how about it, Siberian folks? It was intense, was it not?) He is now convinced that the toilet is going to over-flow and send us all to a watery grave, and no amount of parental assurance can convince him otherwise. He has vowed to never poop again, which thankfully only lasted until the next time he had to poop, but still. He is, shall we say....fixated? Paranoid? Constipated? Weird?

Yesterday, I caught him heading to the bathroom wearing floaties. At least now he has a plan.

But can I point out, friends, that he starts kindergarten on Monday? How exactly does that fit into our new little phobia? Do I warn his teacher? Send him to school wearing an inflatable life-jacket just in case he can't wait until he gets home to "do a number two"? I've tried talking to him, and ....oh, you just have to know this child. The phrase "he has a mind of his own" doesn't even begin to do him justice. I think the phrase that fits better is "once he has made his mind up about something, you cannot change it until he moves on to his next obsession," but I think I just made that one up.

So. That's where we are right now. Getting ready for school to start, and worrying that we will all be up to our necks in toilet water at any moment. It's a thrilling life we lead around here, y'all. A flash flood warning is in effect until further notice.

I'm thinking of putting on some goggles and floaties, too. At least if he's going to be weird, he can have the comfort of knowing that it's genetic.

Wordless....Thursday?

And look! It's not wordless, after all! This is a picture of my nieces from their vacation last week, and I stole it off of my sister-in-laws facebook. So now I am a picture thief and a procrastinator for not getting it up on Wednesday, and a liar for not making it wordless. There is much guilt to be had from this blog post.

Oh! While I'm here...guess what I found in my hubby's lunch box yesterday?

Do you give up? You should. You'll never guess. I found.....





Dora the Explorer gummies! We do not buy Dora the Explorer gummies. So that means that he had to get them from work.

The man is a construction worker.

I've been contemplating this all day. Now you can join me.

Wordless Wednesday~Owen, who was so "incited" to turn five that he could hardly contain himself.

When Ben and I were in college, he kept getting involved in all the musical theater productions, and I felt compelled to attend every single show...because I was just THAT besotted with him. He always had these little bit parts, because he never actually auditioned. He just hung around with the theater folk and would somehow get roped into being "oddly dressed man #2" or some other such nonsense. Once he was the dude that opened and closed the curtain, and I was
STILL there for every show. Such devotion is rare, and I remind him of this every time he tries to get me to cut his toenails. Even the most devoted person has their limits.

Anyway. In one of the productions (I cannot for the life of me remember which one. They all blur together.) one of the main characters had to come out of their house and into a courtyard for the opening scene right after a fifteen minute intermission. In every other show it had gone like clockwork, but this time intermission ended and we all sat back down and stared at the stage...and nothing happened. I don't know how many minutes went by, but it was enough so that the audience was getting very uncomfortable, and I was busy being embarassed for my friend that should have been on stage. I couldn't imagine how he was going to pull off this scene now, when everyone would know that he had totally missed his cue. Suddenly, he RAN onto the stage and stopped dead still in the middle, completely out of breath. He looked right at the audience and, in a moment of sheer genius, asked, "What? It's a big house!" I think the audience laughed for five minutes. I left wishing he would do that every night.

Why am I telling you this? I honestly don't know, except that I left you way back in April about to have surgery, and some of you have apparently been waiting to hear from me. It is as if I disappeared into the vastness of the internet and forgot my cue to come out. But somehow, writing a blog post all out of breath, and asking "What? It's a big internet!" just isn't as funny. So really, that whole introduction was pointless, but hey...it was better than "So, um....I kind of forgot that I had a blog after my surgery and became slightly addicted to finding old high-school friends on facebook instead." Maybe you feel less abandoned with the first excuse? I don't know. Go examine your feelings and get back to me.

So. I am minus one kidney stone now, and the surgery was...oh dear. I do not feel that I can adequately do it justice with mere words. Let's just say that if I ever get another monster kidney stone? It had better just build itself a modest one-bedroom abode and prepare to hang out for all eternity.

The only amusement that I found in the whole experience was the one night in the hospital when, in an effort to get comfortable with that horrendous tube coming out of my back, I tried to sleep in the recliner by my bed. After a couple of hours of dosing, I tried to get up, and realized that somehow all of my tubes and IVs and such had gotten tangled together and I was not getting out of that chair without professional assistance. So I hit the nurse call button, and told her my situation in it's most basic terms. "Help! The reliner is trying to eat me!" I cannot be sure, but I think I heard snickering in the background, and then no less than three nurses were in my room in about 1.2 seconds (a fact that I later resented when my pleas of "Help! My remote has fallen behind my bed and I am being forced to endure "Miami Ink". Also, I have to pee." were largely ignored.)

So, to recap: Surgery, a success. Recliner, did not win against the efforts of the nursing staff. Blog, probably lost all of it's readers, but since it has a repentent writer now, has hopes of being read again someday. Maybe. If I offer bribes.

The End.