Pertinent to my Interests

We began fall clean-up at the cabin this past weekend. I raked and piled leaves into a wheelbarrow and then pushed it up the hill and to the back of the property where we dump yard waste. I did this about three billion times. I mowed every blade of grass, and ran the mower out of gas for the season. I emptied the mower bag about six billion times, and had to drag all that up the hill too.

It was hours of moving, bending, lifting, sweating, grousing, and pushing.

I felt fine. I felt strong.

I am grateful that even as a stout person I am strong and healthy and able to do these things. My strength is a privilege just as my good health is a privilege. I am trying to not take it for granted.

My husband took a picture of me this weekend with the kids. This was significant for two reasons:

1. There are not a lot of pictures of me with my kids and he took it without me asking.
2. I hadn’t seen a picture of myself in a while and I was pretty horrified at what I saw.

Guys, I am no longer just adorable and fat, I now qualify as stout. Jeez. (And I am trying to use “fat” and “stout” as neutral terms here. I did not say I was a bad or unworthy or ugly person. So I don’t want to receive any emails or comments being like “But you aren’t fat!” because that will just piss me off.)

But I don’t feel stout! Sure my clothes all fit the same, I definitely haven’t lost weight, but I’ve been hitting the gym hard and I’ve been working on my sugar consumption and vegetable consumption. My arms are jiggly, my belly is jiggly, but I run up and down the stairs in my house with laundry baskets and vacuums all day and don’t feel out of breath. If someone asked me if I was in good shape, I would say yes, right now I am in pretty good shape.

And yet this picture shows a stout, middle-aged lady!

I’m not surprised about the middle-aged part. I’ve heard this is a thing: people look in the mirror and are astounded to see an old person looking back at them. This hasn’t happened to me quite yet although I suppose it will eventually. Although I don’t tend to feel younger than I am; forty feels about right.

Anyway, it’s weird how the way a person feels and the way a person looks can be such a mismatch. I suppose it happens the other way too: someone can look amazing on the outside but feel like absolute shit on the inside. I’m glad that’s not me for now!

But at least now I can brace myself for when our professional family photos come back in a couple weeks.

A memory bubbled up from the depths last week, I can’t figure out why.

Kindergarten. 1990. I had a necklace of rainbow plastic beads with a pink plastic heart in the middle. It seems out of character for me now, but I loved that necklace and wore it to school frequently. The necklace broke one day during recess, an accident.

The beads were tearfully gathered. Mrs. France (“Mrs. France, do the boogie dance!”), the teaching assistant who must have been in her sixties, put the necklace back together for me, but–despite asking me several times if she was doing it correctly–she strung the beads on in the wrong order.

This was not her fault. I told her it was right even though it wasn’t because I was in that long stage of my life during which I could not tell an adult that they were wrong about something. This was the same year that my teacher called me “Cassie” for several months because I could not correct her. The necklace was never quite right after that, but I still wore it.

This sounds like a sad memory, but it’s actually very sweet. What I remember most is how patient Mrs. France was about the whole thing. There’s a tenderness about fixing a small child’s beloved plastic junk jewelry in the middle of your workday. She retired not long after that, and is surely gone by now, but that moment lives on in my mind.

I have probably ten memories total from Kindergarten, and that is one of the clearest.

I was thinking about childhood memories a lot when we went to Disney World earlier this year. I went to Disney World for the first time with my dad in 1994 when I was ten years old, and my clearest memories from that trip are as follows:

1. Picking out a ceramic orca to purchase at Sea World
2. Sitting in front of the TV in the hotel room doing a lice treatment (because my best friend had been diagnosed with lice right after I left on this trip) and eating a massive amount of Hershey’s Kisses
3. My first McDonald’s breakfast experience
4. Haunted Mansion, which was the coolest thing I had ever seen

With the exception of memory number four, these are probably not the memories my dad expected me to collect on that trip.

I spent a lot of time at Disney World this year wondering what exactly my ten-year-old and eight-year-old would remember. We work so hard as parents to provide meaningful traditions and plan amazing trips in hopes that our kids will cherish these core memories for the rest of their lives. But I suspect that instead of remembering the first magical time that they went on Peter Pan’s Flight they actually remember stupid shit like trying to catch lizards at the resort.

We don’t get to curate our kids’ memories the way we might want to, and I hate that. I wish I could go in at night and surgically remove all the memories my children carry of the times I yelled and screamed and was a terrible parent. I wish I could surgically remove my own memories of these occasions as well. In the end, I can only hope that they will have their own Mrs. France in their head, sorting and stringing beads and smiling kindly the whole time.

I spent several hours this morning cleaning out the sink drain in our upstairs bathroom. I just unclogged the bathtub drain last week, and I thought that was a disgusting job but the sink was much worse. There was gunk in there that was at least a decade old. I almost died from the smell.

I am kind of a snob about older houses. Our house was built in 1938, which doesn’t really count as old in our city, but the walls are plaster and the doors are not hollow and I love that. The oak floors have been around long enough to be covered in beige carpeting and then back to wood, and they have the scars to prove it.

But the plumbing. The plumbing. There are days (like today) when brand new plumbing sounds really, really nice.

As I mentioned in my previous post, my youngest has strep throat right now. In an effort to avoid germs, my oldest has been avoiding the youngest as much as possible.

In a surprising gesture of kindness last night, the youngest volunteered to eat dinner alone on the patio and spare his brother the germ exposure of sitting together at the table.

It. Was. Awesome.

My youngest is the messiest eater I have ever met. Despite years of begging him to eat over his plate and use his fork he still leaves the table sticky and the floor full of crumbs after every meal. Cleaning up last night was so much easier! I didn’t even have to sweep or vacuum, and I definitely didn’t have to wipe down his chair!

This might have to be the new dinner strategy. At least until the end of the month.

My youngest has strep throat for the fourth time this year. Due to various poor decisions on my part, he only just got his first dose of antibiotics an hour ago even though he was diagnosed with strep yesterday. He’s been miserable off and on, but mostly he’s been curled up in the basement diligently chugging Gatorade and watching TV.

This seems like a good moment to share the story of his first word.

He was just a baby, almost eight months old, and he had his first ear infection, although we did not know this at the time. Both kids had been sick, both got better, but then the poor baby got worse with horrible fevers around the clock and what must have been a very painful ear. We hadn’t dealt with an ear infection before, so we thought he was just fighting a new virus and decided to let it run its course.

We all lived in misery for about three days before I dragged him to the doctor and got the ear infection diagnosis. About a day later we were back at the doctor with a very rashy baby and a new diagnosis: amoxicillin allergy. A day or two later we were back again, this time with an azithromycin allergy added to his chart.

Keep in mind that in addition to packing us all up for these doctor visits, we also had to wait at the pharmacy for about a billion hours each time we needed new antibiotics. I was absolutely exhausted from caring for the sick baby for days, the baby was miserable even with huge doses of Tylenol and Advil, and my two-year-old was… well, he was two years old! He was a very busy two-year-old with a lot to do and a lot to say, and he was not good at self-entertaining or waiting (although he is good at both of those things now!).

I turned to the tablet for support, and I turned hard. My oldest had constant tablet time for about three days straight: at home, at the doctor’s office, in the car, at the pharmacy, at meals. And what was the only show he would watch at that point in his life?

Bob the Builder.

I can still sing the whole theme song. Bob couldn’t fix how tired I was, but he could make my life a little easier during the day and he did. God bless Bob the Builder.

Near the end of this small odyssey, my youngest was finally starting to feel better; his rash was clearing up and he was cruising around the living room. I was sitting with my coffee watching my two-year-old on his tablet and wondering if I could get away with this parenting style forever when the baby cruised up to the two-year-old, looked at the tablet screen, and proclaimed, “Bob! Bob! Bob!”

“Good job, little baby!” my oldest said.

“Shit,” I said, and I took the tablet away not long after that.

One thing you should know about me is that I don’t use warm milk to make anything. Instant oatmeal? Hot water. Hot cocoa? Hot water. It’s water, it’s always water, it will never be milk. Who has time to warm milk when water is so damn cheap and easy?

I bought this color-changing hot cocoa mix for the kids this weekend, and the directions called for warm milk. Normally I would ignore directions like that, but the color-changing aspect gave me pause: what if it needs lactose in order to change color?

“How do I even warm milk?!” I called to my husband from the kitchen. He was sitting on the couch looking at his phone, enjoying a well-deserved break after removing the air conditioning units from the windows.

“Put it in the microwave,” he said, not looking up from his phone.

“But like… how long? In what container?” I responded as I struggled to find a microwave-safe container.

“Just heat it and stir it until it seems warm,” he said, now looking up from the couch with some concern. “Use the big Pyrex measuring glass.”

“But how can I tell if it’s warm? And what power level should I use?” I asked, spilling milk all over the Pyrex glass and countertop. “How long does it take to burn?”

“Just… ” my husband appeared at my side. “I’ll do it.”

Men aren’t the only ones who can weaponize incompetence.

We had pet rabbits when I was a kid. They lived in a backyard hutch, and they really weren’t good pets, but I, at seven years old, knew exactly what would improve our situation: baby bunnies. So I did what any intelligent child raised in a religious household would do and I started praying for baby bunnies every night. I think I did this for at least a year.

I did not realize it would take more than thirty years for this particular prayer to be answered.

We had professional landscaping done this year; both of our yards were completely ripped up and redone, and when the workmen pulled the deck off the back of the house they uncovered a nest of five baby bunnies who were just starting to open their eyes.

Have you ever seen baby bunnies up close? They are the most precious little things. Even more precious than kittens who you know will grow up to become sock murderers.

With workmen and machinery crisscrossing our backyard the babies could not stay where they were. I wrapped the pile of babies in a dish towel, snuggled them up in a mixing bowl, and put them in the downstairs bathroom shower. Perhaps an odd choice, but the downstairs bathroom is dark and quiet, and the cats are unable to get into the shower through the big glass door. They were safe for now, but what next?

I called the local wildlife rehab place and we developed a strategy, Operation Bunny Daycare. It turns out that mother rabbits do not visit their babies during the day; they only come around the nest at night to feed and clean the little ones. So in the evenings we would head outside, dig a hole as near to the original nest site as possible, and carefully place the babies inside. Every morning before the workmen arrived we would go back outside to gather up the babies and their nesting material and bring them into the safety of daycare.

It worked beautifully. Mama Bunny returned every night to feed her little ones. I hung up a sign on the shower door that read “Casey’s Daycare for Exceptional Bunnies.” Our house was ground zero for cuteness.

The cats had no clue what was going on.

Of course, no bunny daycare is without its heartache. One of the babies escaped the outside nest overnight and didn’t survive the cold. We found him the nest morning and I think we all cried. Every night we worried if Mama Bunny would return. I even packed up the babies one day and brought them to the wildlife rehab place for a wellness check, just to make sure they had been fed.

Despite my many warnings to my children that this project was probably going to end in tragedy, it didn’t. About a week into our bunny daycare the babies mysteriously disappeared from the nest, and over the next couple evenings we spotted them outside with Mama Bunny, frolicking in our backyard dirt.

That bunny daycare sign is still hanging in our basement bathroom. And I still love going back to my cameral roll and looking at the pictures of the sweet little babies who were under our care for just a short while. Seven-year-old Casey was not wrong: baby bunnies really did improve my life.

Now I’m praying for kittens. If I get started now, I’ll get kittens around the time I’m seventy.

School picture day was this week, which means in about a month we’ll receive an overpriced packet of photos and I’ll take down the old photos hanging in the kitchen and put up the new ones.

I don’t want to take down last year’s school pictures in which my oldest has a cowlick, and an ugly shirt. My youngest’s hair looks good but he’s wearing an old fleece that proclaims OLD NAVY in giant letters.

I was gone for school picture day last year. My grandma had just received a terminal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, and as soon as I heard the news I knew I needed to go see her immediately.

I did not get to say goodbye to my grandpa; he died in the hospital before I could get out to Washington to see him. I did say goodbye to my dad, and was there for the last, awful forty-eight hours with him. I am glad I was there at the end–it was the right thing to be there–but those are hours of his life that I would rather forget.

I didn’t want to miss my grandma, but also didn’t want to come out when she was not herself. I think I booked plane tickets within two days of her diagnosis, and was playing board games with her at assisted living within four days.

My husband stepped up to the plate at home, didn’t hesitate at all when I said I wanted to visit my grandma right now. He’s the one who works full-time, he’s the one who is busy, but he never complained about being left holding all the household responsibilities with about two days of notice.

But he did forget it was picture day, and I don’t think either of us even realized until the pictures came back weeks later and I started laughing at the sight of my oldest’s cowlick. My husband was horrified.

“Ugh, these are terrible!” he said. “I’m so mad I forgot about picture day; we’ll have to do retakes.”

“No!” I pleaded. “No, we can’t do retakes! I love these! Every time I walk by them I’ll remember that I got to visit my grandma when she was still well and that my husband stepped in and took over everything without complaining!”

I begged, and the kids whined, and we managed to convince him to skip retakes. So for almost a year now I have been walking by these school photos and feeling both amusement at the cowlick and gratitude for that last game of Quiddler with my grandma.

I don’t want to take these pictures down.