This is what comes of idle time, too many demands and a very tired mommy.

Sixteen years ago today I had spent about 48 hours with no sleep due to the fact that 38 of those hours were spent trying to expel a 7 1/2 pound baby out of a space simply not meant for that kind of action. On this day all those years ago I had my wee baby boy in my arms and thought to myself, “Crap, what the hell am I supposed to do now? Where is the manual for this thing?” And so the events of my misguided motherhood adventure began. In all honesty, those hours were the turning point in my life. I had never given parenting a single thought until I found myself still in college and seriously pregnant. And even then it wasn’t truly real until I was drying off from a shower one night and found myself peeing down my leg, except it was really my waters. And then? Holy fuck! I realized I had to get a baby out of my body. And no matter how it happened it wasn’t going to be pretty. And it wasn’t. It was grueling, touch and go at one point and fucking scary. But at the end when the nurses put him in my arms I was gripped with the most powerful feeling of earnestness I had ever had, to him I said, “No matter what happens to us I will always take care of you. You are the light in my soul.” He was and still is. There are two more of them now and they too are lights in my soul. But he was the first. The first reason to wake up in the mornings and attempt to be a better person because he existed and was the essence of beauty. He is my Loren. My Lo-Lo. Little Lou. Lorenzo. I am blessed with his otter soul and not a day goes by, even with the current teen drama, when I don’t give thanks for him. Happy Birthday, Lo! I love you to the end of it all!

Hello Caloden Fans. Not Heather again. Actually, I promised Heather that I would post for her tonight because Heather has been super busy being a Really Great Mom and needed a night off to spend with her spawn. Besides, I took my youngster to Vacation Bible School this morning (and then volunteered in the toddler room) and I thought FOR SURE I would be loaded down with fun stuff to share. No. Instead I am barely able to lift my fingers to type these words. My VBS’ser is up watching Caillou on You Tube and will likely be up until the wee hours. He is energized by outings that involve clapping (as often Jesus songs are wont to do) and finger painting with OTHER KIDS.

So this is all I have. Feeling a little sentimental tonight. So here you have it.

Alison Krauss & Union Station

And because I told Heather that Boyce Avenue covers Coldplay better than Coldplay I have to prove it so here you have this as well.

Viva la Vida

Kelly Lynn

Devon is quite possibly one of the sweetest creatures on the face of the earth, he is loving, interested and devoted. He is also talkative. Chatty to the point where he sometimes looks at me and says, “Hellooooooo? I was saying this to you and you are not even using your ears, Mai-Mai! Duh”  Sort of scary for a four year-old. At this point I often realize that for some span of time all I have heard is the sort of “Wha-wha-wha-wha” that the Peanuts cartoons used to use when a parent was on the phone with Charlie Brown or Lucy. Tonight it is 9:30 and Devon has been talking for fourteen hours. Straight. From the time he opened his angel blue eyes all the way through dinner. In Mass this morning he wanted to talk about the cross and that fellow hanging up there with nails in his feet. Later the topic was why did Underdog have brown hair on his arms while Devon only has white. Lunch brought about the topic of the need for a Hulk costume in his wardrobe. And on and on and on.  One of the high point in my 38 years will be in just about 15 minutes when I put him to bed and close his door. Love him I do, but I just want a little peace right now.

I don’t take myself too seriously; most of the time I realize I go through many of the days bumbling or stumbling, but one thing I do fairly well is drive a car. Yes, just like Rainman I am a good driver. Or so I thought. Today as I was returning home from swimming laps I spied a couple of my former preschool students selling lemonade by the side of our road. They recognized my wee blue beetle bug and waved me down for a quick drink. As I pulled over to the side of the road I realized I was sticking out just a bit and pulled up another few feet when all of a sudden the horizon turned all diagonal and my head hit the steering wheel. For a moment I couldn’t figure out what the hell had happened but when I looked at the car door nearly above my head I realized that somehow something had swallowed the right front end of my car. One moment I was all parallel and the next very much not. So I pushed up and out of my car, a hard thing because bug doors are super heavy, and then hopped down to the ground to see that the opposite back end of the car was way up in the air and nowhere near the road where it was obviously supposed to be. And then I spied the faces of my former students, their eyes huge and their mouths open in large O’s. One of them yelled, “Mommy! Miss Heather’s car disappeared in our ditch! Come quick.”

And yes, that is exactly what had happened. I had somehow managed to find the one giant hole concealed in the long grasses in which to sink my wee car. The mom and another driver at the lemonade stand tried to push me out but I eventually ended up getting pulled out by a strapping youngish dude in a giant wheeled Jeep who happened to have a long chord with a bug rescuing hook at the end. Clever fellow to carry a thing like that. At one point there were about eight cars stopped in the rode while we blocked all access.

This is after the women tried to push the car out of the hole. At one point one of them suggested getting a couple of guys to just lift it out because of its smallness. I might have to hide this picture from Loren because the next time he asks me for a driving practice I can no longer pretend my record is sparkling clean.

This week I have decided to forgo any sort of household responsibilites whatsoever and just spend time with the children. Yes, I have been keeping current on dishes and clean underwear, but as far as the nit picky details? Nuh-uh. Don’t care. It’s summer, man! This means Cassidy and I can get up in the mornings, don our swimsuits and go swim laps, where we meet semi-inappropriate fellows named Del (with one L)  who teach The Art of the Breast Stroke. Devon and I can spend the afternoons in my hopeless garden and then play on his sand hill. And Loren and I can stay up late watching the Notorious B.I.G. So it’s all good ~unless you actually give a hoot and want some details, in which case you are simply S.O.L. ’cause I don’t have any. Not today. Happy weekend!

Yesterday the children and few friends and I went to visit an old high school friend who was in town for the weekend with her own small brood. Devon decided to roll in the dirt, Cass took control and I stood on the banks of the pond. Nothing new here at all.

Duh. Back tomorrow.

After about eight weeks I am starting to get the hang of this no wheat/no gluten thing. Well, mostly. This afternoon I paid Cassidy to watch Devon while I went out for a decent bike ride. I figured two hours was too long to ask her for a freebie and it gave the added bonus of knowing her money grubbing heart would kick in after about 20 minutes and insure a kind treatment of her younger brother. Turns out she was super inspired by it because instead of popping in a movie she asked him if he wanted to make cookies for me. Devon is no fool, it’s not often the offer of unlimited dough eating comes his way, and so he eagerly accepted. So after riding my ass off I came home to a kitchen buried in about an inch of flour, ingredients strewn across the counters and two very eager children twitching with sugar rushes and the excitement of my taste test. I couldn’t bring myself to inform them that their baking endeavors were pointless, that no wheat could pass my lips. When they offered up the muffin pan overflowing with what appeared to be enormous cookie-muffins I dutifully spooned up a bite. Then they wanted me to take another, and yet another. I knew it was a bad decision but what could I say?

We cleaned up the kitchen and sat down to dinner. That is when the shakes began. Here I should insert that one of the best things about not consuming wheat products has been the lack of shaking in my life. I used to get sick after every meal or snack, wake up almost every morning feeling as though I was horribly hungover. I thought it was stress, that it would just go away and so I ate more in an attempt to rid myself of what I thought was hunger. Usually the additional snacks included wheat based foods. It was a vicious cycle. Tonight the same feelings came back and by a few bites into my dinner I could take no more. Cassidy helped me get Devon ready for bed and by the time he was in his PJ’s I was curled up in a moaning ball and fervently wishing he would stop moving so much because all his motion was causing the house to tilt in a most scary manner. After Cass tucked him in I finally oozed in to the bathroom and snuggled myself around the toilet. Another thing to insert is the fact that I have a teen age boy and a five year-old boy, both with fairly bad aim; if I wasn’t sick before, the reality of coming face to face with the smells of my boys’ lousy toilet skills and my equally lousy cleaning efforts would have expelled anything at all from my body. Needless to say the entire thing was not at all pretty.

As of this moment I vow to never again let any morsel of food containing wheat pass my lips. The experience of the toilet, the shakes and the aftermath of feeling as if my entire body has been pressed through a pasta maker is not really a good one at all. If the kids make me cookies I will explain to them that unless they want to first scrub the toilets there is no way in hell I will eat their presentations. And even then I’ll secretly toss it to the dogs.

Cassidy has an ongoing prediction that Devon will grow up to be a professional ice skater. It’s sometimes hard to debate this  when I gaze upon his white locks and his sky blue eyes, though I think his career opportunities might also embrace professional chess player or some sort of romance language expert. I am completely open to letting him explore his options but Cass is already prepping him for his days on the ice. Poor kid doesn’t stand a chance against the likes of Her.

It’s fairly obvious that I am at most times a walking mess of neurosis. Sometimes it gets to me but most of the time I just figure everybody has some sort of cross on their shoulders, some are just a bit more open about it than others. And really, it’s the ones who are all private and steeped in denial that we should be worried about, not those of us who wear are baggage with pride. Most recently I have been battling my finger nails. Yup. See, I can’t bare for anything to touch my finger tips. It likely stems from a cat food can incident when I was about ten and I ended up slicing my thumb tip almost all the way through the bone. To this day I have no feeling in the end of my right opposing digit. But despite the lack of neural senses, or perhaps because of it, I don’t like things lingering on or near my fingertips. Finger pads, that usually works, but stay the hell away from my tips, dammit. In turn this means my nails must always be super short so as not to attract any dust underneath or create that small crevice between nail and tip where there could likely be the remote possibility of some kind of sensation at the end of my digits. Just the thought of it makes me want to climb the walls.

As a result of all this drama I keep a minimum of five nail clippers in the house at all times, this ensures that I can clip my cumbersome nails anytime and anywhere. But somehow mid to late last week they all went missing. I tore the house apart looking for them. I even took to interrogating the older children, perhaps going so far as outright accusing them of contributing to my phobias in an effort to drive me over the edge for good. Yes, I get the solution to this situation would be to make a trip tot he store. I did. many. Unfortunately I also suffer from a horrendous lack of short term memory. Anyhoo, by today things had reached an all time boiler situation in my nail department. It had gotten so bad that I was only able to function with my hands rolled up in fists as I constantly questioned/berated the household members about the damn clippers when finally tonight I searched a drawer I had previously emptied. Lo and behold, there they were. So happy was I that I crumpled to the ground and trimmed all the offensive growths from both my hands and feet. The relief is simply overwhelming. I deeply suspect one of the children, if not all three of them in a group effort, hid the clippers just to see how far I would go before I cracked. And here’s the answer to that one, if the clippers didn’t show by tomorrow I was planning to sell them off in reverse order of their ages.