Iowadrift

Surprise

So, how was your Thanksgiving?  I hope it was full of family and friends, and turkey and stuffing, and post-dinner games of touch football, and a genuine gladness about the people in your life.  Was it?  Oh, I hope so.

Mine was kind of grim, but the boys's vacation was excellent, so that's what counts.  In order to get Christmas off, I worked Wed-Sat over the holiday, ten-hour shifts, and because I was going to be gone so much the boys and TTD packed up and set off again for NW Iowa and the grandparental dairy farm.  They had a wonderful time.  Urp quit urping, and Rabbit ran, and TTD got to spend lots of time helping on his younger brother's farm, and everyone got to bask in the glow of really good Iowa meat, and lots of it.  I talked to them on the phone a few times, and Rabbit sort of yelled, "Hi Mama!  I miss you!  Got to go chase Big Cousin and Little Cousin now!" and gave the phone back to TTD.  And Urp said, "Hi Mama," with beautiful clarity, and walked away from the phone.  Clearly everyone was doing just fine.

I, however, felt forlorn, which I usually don't when I'm alone.  And I was glad: it seems to me it's a sign of health that I missed the boys when they were gone.  Oh sure, I enjoyed the sleep and silence, hugely, but I deep-down missed them, and that, in a perverse way, reassured me.  I want to miss them!  I want to want them to be here! 

On Saturday the boys stopped by the ER on their way home, and that was surreal, and a treat.  A surreal treat.  We were having a hideously busy day, just nuts, flat-out, and awful.  The thing with an ER is, there's no holds barred: people just keep arriving and arriving and there's no closing time, there's no clinic limit, there's no ER to send them to...you just have to deal.  Wheee!  So in the middle of my running around with six rooms full of patients and ten people waiting and more coming in (and 30 patients in the main ED, most of them really ill), I hear, "Hi Mama!" and these two glowing little boys in bright fleece coats come barrelling into my arms and stick there like burrs. 

Mmmmm.  One minute I'm freezing in my ugly blue scrubs, racing physically and mentally as fast as I can, stressed to the max, flooded with flourescent light and drowned in the smell of dirty feet, stale cigarette smoke, and rotavirus poops.  The next, I have my nose buried in two silky, little-boy-smelling necks and my arms full of warm, soft, squishy, lovely little boys who are murmuring, "Mama" contentedly and nestling happily.  I looked up at TTD, who was wearing a bright-orange fleece (and that's a lot of orange on a guy his size) and said, "Thank you."

They marched off a few minutes later to inspect the escalators (and, TTD reported later, ride them 29 times), and I returned to my nightmare night, which ended with an emergency surgical transfer to the university for my last patient, at midnight.  Happy Thanksgiving!

But you know, it was.  I was tired and stressed and overworked, and I missed my boys, but I was grateful, when I could get my head on straight, that my job is interesting (mostly), decently paid, and somewhat useful (sometimes).  I was grateful that I had two delicious boys, my Violent Viking and my Poetic Pirate, to squash in the midst of a wretched shift.  I was--I am--grateful that they traveled safely, and that we are all back together.  And I say again: I am grateful that I can miss them, and then welcome them home.

Now, if only Urp would SLEEP....

Urp, And How

It must follow as the night the day, must it not, that the week the kids go down (or come up, as it were) with a GI bug is the week the washing machine heaves a sigh and dies. 

Oh yes.  That classic rite of parental passage, the serial pediatric stomach flu, has hit our house.  With embellishments.  Poor Rabbit was the first to go down, on Thursday night, and I mean ALL NIGHT LONG.  The poor kid: dry heaves in a bucket every half an hour, with Mama holding his forehead; piteous requests for water, which I answered with ice chips; white-faced naps on crumpled towels; eventual dawn pass-out with Mama and boy curled around each other in a sleeping bag on the floor.  You know the drill.  Rabbit does too, now.  He was very brave and good, as kids so often are, and very uncomplaining.  Once, at 4 am, he paused mid-barf to announce, "This is serious!" and I had to agree.

Then we had a day of peace, followed by a Saturday's worth of pale Urp and a Saturday night's worth of urping Urp, and boy, did he ever.  He went down harder than Rabbit, and dry-heaved literally every fifteen minutes for eight hours straight before collapsing in his bed (before that he'd been collapsing on Daddy's chest in the rocking chair).  I went in to check on them every two hours or so, and at three a.m. found them both asleep in the rocking chair, Urp naked except for red socks.  He awoke and croaked, "Bottle?" in the most heart-breaking tones possible, then resignedly went back to sleep. 

He still hasn't really bounced back; he's been intermittently feverish for the last two days, and just threw up his bottle of soy milk after dinner tonight.  Even when he's not barfing, he's liable to lie down on the kitchen floor and look pale and chew on his thumb.  His neck has gotten skinny, and he has a lamentable tendency to want Daddy 24 hours a day.  Well, not lamentable as far as I'm concerned, but it's hard on Daddy.

Who can tell what excitement tonight will bring?  I wouldn't dare guess.  Instead, I'll make pronouncements about what has already occurred; in fact, I'll make broad, sweeping generalizations and you can chime in and tell me if they're true.

1. Beware that first barf, the one for which their tummies are full and you are unprepared.  A cough or two, an innocent hiccup, and WHOOSH, your upholstered sofa, your rug, your towels, your child and yourself are soaked in barf.  And it will always be spaghetti-with-marinara-sauce barf, or spinach-soup barf or chocolate-sundae barf.  Nothing innocuous like vanilla ice cream.

2.  As I mentioned, if your washing machine is going to bite the dust, it's going to do it mid-epidemic.  We have discovered this week that every time we come in the door with five loads of freshly-washed sheets, towels, pajamas, mattress-covers, and slip-covers, depend upon it: our appearance will trigger another round of looking for Ralph.

3.  It is easier to deal with a vomiting almost-four-year-old, because he can understand, "No water now, but you can have some after your tummy's been OK for a few hours."  A 21-month-old, not so much.

4. We live in an age of videos, and sometimes that is a good thing.  Except now the baby gets up in the morning, looks at me, and proclaims, "Watch Thomas!"

5.  Professionally and personally, I have yet to meet a child who will drink Pedialyte.

So, how was YOUR week?  Oh, and I loved your comments on the last post; it's so much fun when you de-lurk!

Five

So, the Motel Manager has tagged me with a meme, which I'm only too happy to do.  You know, because it does the thinking for me, and anyway, who can resist a list?  Or making a rhyme at the end of a sentence?  Evidently not me.  So, called upon to list five things about me you may not already know, I offer the following.

1. I rode horses competitively until I was twenty-two.  I started with hunter-jumpers and moved on to Three-Day Eventing, also known as Combined Training, which has you doing dressage, cross-country jumping, and show jumping within one competition.  I had a pony of my own for a while, but mostly I scammed rides on other people's horses, or leased horses for a season.  I was never very good, but oh, how I loved it.  I still do.  My definition of perfect happiness will always involve galloping through the woods on a good horse and jumping everything in sight.

2. I have a tattoo on my right shoulder.  I know, I know.  But cut me some slack: I got it before every Chi Omega had one.  Also, I'd just gotten divorced and was in that cut-off-all-your-hair, buy-a-new-wardrobe, change-your-look stage of self-reinvention (in my case, I morphed from long-haired, big-earringed, tie-dyed, barefoot hippie to indefinable creature with cropped hair, J. Crew basics, and too-dark lipstick, a mix I wouldn't, even now, try to dignify with a name).  Also, I was living in South Dakota, on a reservation in the Badlands.  So, you know, Sturgis, bikers, tattoo parlors, the whole vibe was there.  I went with it.  Don't regret it, either: I still like my tat.  I was careful to get it in a place which won't sag or wrinkle or stretch out with childbearing, and it only shows when I want it to.  Or when I go swimming.  Which I did when I first met TTD's family, whereupon my dairy-farmer FIL very sweetly and politely asked, "When did you get your, um, brand?"

3.  Today I let Rabbit and Urp eat mini-marshmellows for breakfast.  Just because they asked.

4.  I play the guitar and piano very badly, but with great enthusiasm.  For the last few years the boys have done a little music class at Rabbit's preschool, and for every session they get a CD of the music and a book with guitar chords and the music for each song.  When I'm feeling really Maria Von Trapp, I'll pull out the guitar--or sometimes they instigate the whole thing by dragging the guitar disastrously through several rooms to me--and go through all the books, singing loudly and badly and playing even worse.  We all have a very good time, until Urp gets one foot trapped in the guitar or Bunny sits on it or the cat decides he needs to be in my lap and to hell with this large, silly musical instrument which is in his way.  I don't have a tuner right now, so I just keep tuning the whole thing to what used to be the E string and is now probably a B or something.  I think I'm playing everything in E Flat Minor 7 these days.

5.  I run for exercise, but I wish I had time to swim instead, because I am moderately decent at swimming but a total disaster in running shoes, despite having finished two marathons back in the day.  I run like a mallard flies: flapflapflapflapflap, with a maximum of graceless effort and a minimum of forward momentum.  Amusing to watch, though.  If you ever want a good laugh to get you going in the morning, perch beside the IMU bridge over the Iowa River on a Tuesday, Thursday or Saturday morning, around 7 a.m. and watch for the waddling middle-aged woman.

Now, since you know all about me but I don't know about you, I am tagging TLB of Illiterati , The Deadbeat , and Elswhere of Travels in Booland.  And actually, you know what?  I'm tagging the rest of you too.  If you're reading this, would you please put something about you in the comments?  I'm serious.  I'd like to get to know you better, my friends inside the computer.  Also, after three funerals in two weeks and a rash of child-abuse cases at work, I am feeling the need for a little companionship.  And y'all frequently have such good and wise and funny comments.  Please, tell me more.

There And Back Again

So, we're back.  It's been a long ten days, what with the funeral-after-funeral scenario, and the driving back and forth across Iowa--because we did, in fact, drive across Iowa for TTD's grandmother's funeral.  His folks live six hours away, in the very northwesternmost (is that a word?) corner of the state, so we loaded Da Boyz into the van, along with the usual assortment of clothes, books, snacks, sippy cups, diapers, wipes, and small plastic objects which are supposed to be toys but are actually weapons for poking out your brother's eye, and Went West.

The drive itself was totally tolerable; it always is on the way out.  We leave at a reasonable hour (i.e. noon), Urp naps for a while, everyone can get out and run around in daylight when we find a playground mid-trip, everyone eats an early supper, and we arrive at our destination before fatigue, irritability, and general disaster set in.  We stopped in Ft. Dodge (I know: where?) and got subs, which the boys didn't really know what to do with, and Urp chased Rabbit all around a churchyard in the unseasonable but blissful seventy degree sunshine. 

The trick, really, is what goes on after the arrival at the grandparents' house.  I love them, they love us, they are wonderful grandparents, and it couldn't be a better place for the boys--lots of cousins, lots of love, and just down the road, the farm where TTD grew up and where his brother still has eighty (you heard me) cows and a bunch of crops.  But on holidays, or at times like this, EVERYONE in TTD's family stays in the same house.  Everyone.  That meant that for two days we had TTD's older sister (1), the TTD family (4), Younger Sister # 1 and family (6), Younger Sister #2 and family (9), Younger Sister #3 (4), and MIL/FIL (2).  That's 26 people in a house with two bathrooms and four bedrooms.  Then, at mealtimes, MIL's four sisters and their spouses and offspring arrived, plus TTD's brother, the one who lives down the road, and his six offspring and the older two offspring's spouses and children.  I think I counted 56 people at one meal.  Fifty-six.  People. 

And it was all meals, or at least that's what it felt like.  Mad-scramble breakfasts as we all tried to get our respective children ready for church; enormous lunches served in the basement, where about eight folding tables were set up; endless dinners in same, with tired children shrieking and stampeding in the living room overhead, or falling down the steep cellar stairs.  And the food was beautifully midwestern, too.  I counted five jello salads, three topped with Cool Whip, at one meal.  Then I counted them again at the next meal, because they just kept coming back out until they were gone.  Ditto the potatoes with cheese, the ham, and the bowl of lettuce which someone had shaken out of a bag.  Ditto the brownies, the cake, and the pies.  It was odd, in the midst of such bounty, to feel sort of starving after a while, because I am here to report that Vegetarian Girl cannot live on chocolate cake and jello alone.  Oh, and carrot sticks.  There were carrot sticks.

And there were Occasions.  When we weren't eating, or preparing to eat, or cleaning up after same, we were dressing the children up, fastening them into the van, and driving off to church, to the wake, to the funeral, to the interment, to the funeral lunch.  All of which involved me wrangling small children and trying to keep them quiet (their cousins are much better behaved than they are; what am I doing wrong?) during 25 minute sermons, or else supervising bunches of children playing tag outside the funeral home during the THREE HOUR visitation, or doling out buttered buns with turkey slices and potato chips to hungry children during the funeral lunch (on card tables in the church basement.  With jello.  And lemonade.).  After three days I began to feel as though I had never done anything but stand around in my suit and heels, fighting off a migraine and trying to finesse maintaining some kind of schedule for my kids in the midst of the larger schedule (?) going on around me.  Oh, and make conversation with distant in-laws.

Have you ever read The Secret History?  There's a scene with a funeral weekend which pretty much sums it up.  Go read it and get back to me.

Of course, there were some very good things too.  There was an open casket, and TTD's grandmother looked pretty, and the kids crowded around and touched her and asked questions, which to me seemed just as it should be.  I have a picture of Rabbit and his adopted Quechua cousin looking at the casket; small children, dead great-grandmother, there it is.  The weather was glorious and the kids got to run around outside a fair amount.  They had an uproarious time on the farm, with the calves and the cows and the cats and chickens and tractors and dogs and trampoline.  They had a great time with their cousins.  I do enjoy my SILs, actually, a lot.  And it's always good to see a big family who love each other gathered together.  So, that.

The drive home was...the drive home.  From 3pm to 9pm is a little rougher, but the boys were angels and held themselves together, and everyone collapsed into bed by ten.  Then TTD's sister and family stayed that night too.  Then another sister and family stayed the next night.  THEN, yesterday, we were on our own.

I am tired.  But I am glad that my boys have a really big, loving extended family.  I am glad it's a family which doesn't shy away from death and reality.  I am glad I am back at work now, having a Grown-Up Moment or two when I can actually complete a sentence and think a thought.  And I am glad that I am not, repeat not, driving out there for Thanksgiving.  I just can't do that flooded shower with other people's hair floating in it again any time too soon.

Enough With the Shuffling, Already!

First of all, thank you all for your thoughts and prayers for Bill and his family.  I went to the wake and funeral this week, and oh, so sad.  His three beautiful children and his wife sat in the front pew at the funeral.  Everyone in the packed church was in tears.  Fifty-two is just way too young to die.

Unfortunately--no, that's not really the word; what's the word I want here?--anyway, badly, we are continuing the theme this week--the shuffling-off-this-mortal-coil theme, that is.  TTD's grandmother died on Wednesday, at 97.  This was a very different death of course; she's been ill and ailing and miserable for years, riddled with anxiety and dementia, and all her friends are, of course, long dead.  This isn't a sad death, really, except that, of course, it is, because mortality is just...sad.  And it's the end of an era as well.

And wait, there's more!  The wonderful man who used to cut my hair, the bubbly and irrepressible Blond Guy, who'd been living with a malignant brain tumor for eight years, which was about seven and three quarter years longer than predicted, died this week too.  He died at home, with hospice, and he was ready, but damn, he was 38.  THIRTY-EIGHT.  I repeat: mortality sucks.  You hear that, mortality?  Your mother wears army boots!  Your mother was a hamster!  She was a hampster in army boots! 

I of course don't have anything useful to say about any of this.  There's nothing useful to say about death.  It sucks all the oxygen out of a room, or a blog. 

Except that it doesn't.  We're still here.  We're here, and we have memories.  We're here, and we can tell stories.  We're here, and we can still see the sun.