Undiscovered gems.

Posted on May 26, 2012 by

“And now here is my secret, a very simple secret.  It is only with the heart that one can see rightly.  What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

The Little Prince Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Tonight when all my offspring were forced against their will to come inside for the evening, my youngest child ran over to me.  ”Look Mom!” she panted, dumping something into my lap, “Look at all these wonderful gems!”

In my lap were a pile of extremely dirty and dusty rocks.  Common, ordinary rocks.

“Just think how beautiful they could be someday!” Eden whispered as she lovingly fingered her rocks.  ”They only need some polish.”

Where I see clutter, ugliness, and mess, my daughter sees potential and possibilities.

Oh, this child teaches me so much.   She teaches me to hope and imagine.  She teaches me to see things differently.  She teaches me that there is no such thing as ordinary.

“A rock pile ceases to be a rock pile the moment a single man contemplates it, bearing within him the image of a cathedral.”

The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery

Posted in musings, The Little Girl | 1 Comment

Why I will forever and always be a cat person. And hate poison ivy.

Posted on May 24, 2012 by

Trinity has poison ivy.  AGAIN.

My daughter knows after last year’s infestation, she shouldn’t be at the edge of our property along the fence line because that’s where the poison ivy hangs out.  But the lure of ripe mulberries was too much for her to bear and in her quest for fresh fruit she ventured into the danger zone.

(Now if you are me, this is where you start humming the Top Gun theme song “Danger Zone” by Kenny Logins.  But this isn’t a post about Top Gun or Kenny Logins so just. stop.  it.)

Yesterday Trinity’s rash didn’t look so bad.  Last night I put her to bed with plenty of calamine lotion and a good dose of antihistamine thinking everything would be fine.  When I went to check on her, she was sleeping peacefully as our family cat kept watch over her.

This morning, however, the rash has gone all “Incredible Hulk” over her entire face, neck, and arms.  In fact, her face is so swollen she couldn’t even open her eyes.  So I packed everyone up and went to the doctor’s office where they prescribed a nice dose of steroids.

(I also bought her a box of Toaster Pastries, because if you have poison ivy this bad you deserve a little treat.)

This afternoon she is passed out on the couch as the steroids, calamine lotion, and antihistamines do their job.  And once again the family cat is watching over her.

Look how his eyes seem to be saying, “Don’t you wake up my patient, woman.”

This is the same cat that would curl protectively over my huge baby belly when I was put on modified bed-rest with two of my pregnancies.  This is the same cat who good-naturedly endured my children’s clumsy attempts at love when they were toddlers.  And it is the same cat who lets the children carry him everywhere despite the fact that he is as old as dirt and his bones are brittle.

I am a cat person.  I’ve had a cat (or two) my entire life and so I’ve had several I’ve loved with all my heart.  But this cat is different because not only do I love him, but so do my children.  Best of all, he seems to love them back.

And that makes him forever special.

Posted in Child Rearing, The Big Girl | 3 Comments

Stephen King motivates me to be a better gardener.

Posted on May 22, 2012 by

My spring garden has hit maximum overload this week.  (Notice how it is the week when I am juggling a million items and my husband is hospitalized overnight for pneumonia.  This is always my life.)

The lettuce and spinach are spiraling out of control in a delicious way.

There is not much harvest time left with these items because the weather is warming up fast.  So I am frantically eating lettuce and freezing the spinach all the live long day.  (Actually only in the morning, because if you pick greens during the heat of the day, they wilt faster than you can say “Yuck!  Wilted lettuce!”  See, I’m just full of helpful hints.)

Someone once asked me why I garden so much.  The real, honest-t0-goodness, number one answer is:  I’m cheap.  I hate spending dollars on food I can grow for pennies that taste even better than their expensive counterpart.

But there is a second reason to my gardening obsession:  Stephen King.

Yes, gentle reader, you read that correctly.  The master of horror on the printed page inspires me to greater heights in self-suffiency and gardening every season.  And it’s all because of his book The Stand.

The Stand is an epic, grand scale novel that tells the story of a government created super virus that ends up wiping out 99% of the population.  The remaining 1% of the human race end up struggling to survive in a world without electricity, computers, modern medicine, or grocery stores.  The characters end up having to relearn how to wash clothes by hand, grow their own food, create their own transportation, and other various household tasks, all while battling an evil, demonic, bad guy (of course.)

Frankly the book scares the crap out of me.  Not so much the demonic bad guy part, but how quickly the characters turned on each other.  People with life skills were the new upper class, while clueless individuals without this knowledge were expendable.

I don’t want to be expendable.  I don’t want to be dependent on a system that might not be around one day.  I don’t want to be helpless.

Do I really think some super-virus is going to wipe out the human population?  No (and if it did, with my immune system I would be one of the first to succumb.)

But with the economy as shaky as it is and with natural disasters as prevalent as they are, and with the direction the world is going, anything could happen.  I would like to have a skill set that would serve me well during turbulent times.

And that is my rationale for gardening.  (And reading fictional books.)

Posted in books, gardening | 5 Comments

Pneumonia update.

Posted on May 20, 2012 by

Whew.  May has been a whirlwind of craziness and we only halfway through this month.  I’m decidedly nervous for what the rest of May holds for me and my family.

First things first, thank you so much for the thoughts, prayers, and kind words that you poured down on us.  I feel truly and wonderfully blessed that I am surrounded by so much love.

My husband is home from the hospital.  The antibiotics are working and he now believes that  one day he might actually feel good.  Someday, years from now.  I tell you, pneumonia is a beast.

We lucked out and the hubster didn’t have any blood clots in his lungs, despite earlier suspicions.  However.  (There’s always a however at my house.)  However, a few separate doctors indicated that they were concerned with certain aspects of his lungs.  So he will need to have another CT scan in four to six weeks, after the pneumonia clears up, to rule out anything serious.

Just for the record, learning that there is possibly something wrong with your husband’s lungs less than a year after your father passes away from lung cancer is a good way to LOSE YOUR FREAKIN’ MIND.

Ahem.

So I am doing my own rendition of whistling in the dark and pretending that everything is great (which, odds are, is probably the case.)  I do a great job at acting all jovial until someone is very kind to me.  And then I am reduced to blubbering like an idiot.  Therefore, please don’t be nice to me for the next four to six weeks.

But, focusing on the positive, my husband is home and feeling better.  I have started getting caught up on all the laundry, dirty dishes, school work, and the obscene amounts of clutter than seem to have multiplied ten fold over the past three days.  Additionally, the children have been spoiled rotten by their grandmother and aunt.

Best of all, we all have a renewed sense of what is truly important in life.  (Nothing like a serious illness to remind you of what matters most.)  Despite running around like a chicken with its head chopped off, I find myself pausing to hug, touch, and squeeze the people I love a little more often.

The kids feel the same way.  Last night all of us ended up sleeping in the same bedroom just so we could be a little closer to each other.  Until, that is, the five year old shoved her brother from her blanket cocoon on the floor, yelling “You’re breathing all my AIR.  I’m out of here.”  After which she stomped off to her own bed.

Five year olds are really, really good at keeping it real.

Posted in musings, my husband | 6 Comments

The same and different.

Posted on May 16, 2012 by

I drove my husband to the hospital today and he ended up being admitted.  He has pneumonia, which isn’t a life threatening condition for a normally healthy man like my husband.

But I’m still scared.

A little over a year ago, my father was in the hospital with pneumonia.  That visit signaled the beginning of the end for my sweet daddy.

I keep telling myself that this time it’s so much different.  My husband doesn’t have lung cancer.  He only caught a bad bug that resulted in pneumonia, the antibiotics are going to do their job and fix everything.

But he has the same gut wrenching cough and pained expression that my dad did.  He keeps wincing and saying how badly his back hurts, just like my dad did.

It’s different this time, I know it is.  I say this over and over has I tuck the covers around my shivering husband, just like I did for my dad.  I say that everything’s going to be okay as I stroke my husband’s clammy forehead, just like I used to stroke my father’s forehead.

It’s different this time.  Everything’s going to be okay.  I know this.

But it feels so much the same.

Posted in My Dad, my husband | 12 Comments

This is how phobias are born.

Posted on May 15, 2012 by

The other day I opened my front door to find a turtle on my doorstep.

Seriously.  A freaking turtle the size of a football was just hanging out and seeing the sights over here at Bunkersdown.

As you can imagine, all of my offspring exploded with great joy and celebration because there was a turtle at their house.  The older two children tried to convince me that letting them go outside to watch the shelled reptile for hours on end (while neglecting their chores and school work) would be a learning experience. “It’s science!” they pleaded.

I wasn’t completely convinced.  There was something a little shifty in that turtle’s eye.  Plus, he seemed to be saying, “Good hell woman!  Would it kill you to sweep your front porch occasionally?  Sheesh.”  And I have no patience for Judgy Judgertons like that.

(Honestly, doesn’t it feel as if his reptilian eye of red fury is staring directly into your soul?  Don’t you get the feeling that he’s a carnivorous beast that only wants to chomp your fingers into small, bloody stumps?

You don’t?  It’s only me?  Hmmm….weird.)

However, in the name of education and in a vain attempt at squelching my new budding fear of turtles, I did compromise with my children and let them peek and check on the turtle every twenty minutes or so.

I received detailed updates on the turtle’s activities for the next two hours.  ”He’s still here” alternated with “He’s not doing much right now.”  Occasionally, one of my children would say, “He acts like he wants to come inside.”  To which I replied immediately and emphatically, “Over my dead body.” (Which is probably, now that I think about it, just what the turtle had in mind).

The kids even came up with a name for him–Mr. Snappy.

Then suddenly, the children went to check on the Mr. Snappy only to find him missing.

We searched high and low for that wretched creature and he was nowhere to be found.  Now, I am no genius, but I do know that turtles aren’t the fastest creatures in the land, nor are they ninjas, disappearing into thin air.  That turtle had to be somewhere, close by.

And yet we couldn’t find him.

Now whenever I go out my front door to check on my flowers or pick my strawberries I get the unshakeable feeling that I am being watched, stalked if you will.  There is a tingly spot on the back of my neck that tells me I am not alone.

And I know someday when I am least expecting it, Mr. Snappy’s going to jump out of the peony bushes and give me a heart attack.  And while I’m lying unconscious on the front porch, he is going to gnaw my fingers into little nubs.  I know it with every fiber of my being.

Chelonaphobia:  the completely irrational fear of turtles despite being infinitely bigger, taller, and quicker than them.

Posted in musings | 6 Comments

American history, as it should have been.

Posted on May 14, 2012 by

Gentle reader, you know how sometimes you get a thought in your head and while you know it is not possible nor feasible the thought stays in your head, tantalizing you ever so slyly because you want to believe it’s possible and feasible?

I really, really, ever so much want Abraham Lincoln to be a vampire hunter.

There, I’ve said it.  And, just for the record,  I want our 16th president to be a slayer of vampires just like Seth Grahame-Smith protrayed in his book Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

(I’m pretty sure at least one of you are dialing 1-8oo-find-your-friend-a-psychiatrist right about now.  But try not to stress about my mental state too much.  I certainly don’t.)

I cannot rave enough about Grahame-Smith’s novel.  Was it a perfect book?  No, of course not.  But it was perfectly entertaining.  And that is worth quite a bit in my estimation.

Abraham Lincoln:  Vampire Hunter is written as a grandly epic biography, seamlessly weaving Lincoln’s actual life story with fantastical supernatural elements.  In the novel Abraham Lincoln’s mother dies at the hand of vampires, thus earning the eternal hatred of the future president.  What follows is Lincoln’s gripping story of revenge that propels him to fight against slavery and eventually run for President of the United States.

While the book is a tad bit gruesome (Lincoln evidently used his axe for things other than splitting fence rails if you catch my drift) I don’t think that the story is overly gory because the vampire hunt is not the focus, the man behind it is.

(I will warn you that my children found the front and back hardcover to be grimly fascinating.  My son kept saying, “I can’t wait until I’m old enough to read that thing!” while I kept assuaging my parental guilt over exposing him to such scenes by weakly rationalizing “Well….at least it inspires him to read.”  If you’re worried, rest assured that the paperback cover is much more tame.)

Do you need more persuading to pick up this book?  My husband stayed up until 4:30 a.m. one night just so that he could finish it.  I can give no higher praise than that.

Posted in books | 2 Comments