Carleen and Mike

Unless somebody dear to me decides to die in the near future, this month is going down as the worst month of 2008 (and we’re only two months in). In addition to the local corruption and headbanging going on, our city is also currently experiencing a full blown flu epidemic. I would find you the article that supports these claims but our newspapers’ online archive sucks (I distinctly remember flu or maybe health epidemic in the article title…I’ve tried both and neither pick of squat).

Although I’m fully recovered from my flu (for now), everyone around me is sick. I mean real sick. Co-workers, friends and family. Mike has been down with the full blown stuff, chest, cough, fever since Wednesday night. I’m here at my parents again trying to keep Liam and myself quarantined since I currently have no sick days left and don’t want to catch anything that will force me to have to go to work sick or stay at home with unpaid leave. I was supposed to go to Tulsa today for a workshop but my poor mom, who has already had the tummy flu twice, has now caught the other kind of flu or something of its kind we don’t really know yet, all we know is that she’s not well. We spent a frantic fifteen minutes this morning right before I was supposed to leave trying to figure out whether I should use my last family sick leave to stay at home since I really hated the thought of her taking care of Liam all day feeling the way she did. I felt guilty no matter what decision I came close to choosing. Staying home might make me look bad at work. Going would leave my mom under strain. Me staying would then make my mom feel guilty for being in a condition that would warrant me missing work. So then she would back out insisting she’d be fine. One look at her expression would tell me the exact opposite. Round and round we go. My dad, bless him, insisted that he could handle it, which I’m sure he could, but I know my mom and I know that if I wasn’t around and dad was left alone with Liam she wouldn’t rest like a good patient, she would be up and about helping.

So, I stayed at home, which turned out to be the right choice in the end since I just put Liam to bed with a 101 degree fever. He’s been out of sorts ever since he woke up this morning and went through several crying fits throughout the day. I’m hoping his symptoms are of the simple teething pain/bubbles in the tummy sort of stuff because Mike and I have worked very hard to try and keep him away from all the flu people so he doesn’t have to go through that kind of discomfort. I don’t know. We should probably just give up and hope that as one family member begins to feel bad, another will begin to feel better and somewhere out there they’ll be somebody to take care of our son in the meantime.

It never occurred to me until today how lost I’d be without my parents. It really got me thinking. For one thing, I’m not aware of my dad ever staying home from work to take care of Mitch and I when my mom got sick. She didn’t get “sick leave” from being a stay-at-home mom. So, as the working person in the house, imagining myself in a situation where I didn’t have my parents close by like this, do I get to say “Eeek, Mike, fever of 102. Man. That must suck. And that cough sounds horrible, hope you don’t end up with bronchitis again. Well. I’m off to work.”

Yeah, right. I mean, this is precisely the reason I did stay at home today. Parenting is changing for the better in someways at least. I’d be willing to bet if the tables were turned, Mike would stay home for me. I was faced with a situation where I could either leave my son at home with sick people, making things hard on them and risking the health of my child or stay at home and take responsibility for my child (no stranger or non-family member will be babysitting Liam until he’s able to talk…so alternative childcare is not an option…you should hear some of the horror stories I’ve heard). Yes, it was my last family sick. Oh well. We’ll just have to hope that March will bring with it a fresh breeze that will wipe away all the sickness in this town. As for all the headbanging at city hall? Who knows how long that will go on.

Liam has this semi-creepy way of sneaking up behind the dogs and trying to poke his finger into their butts. I try not to get either of the dogs too excited whenever Liam and them are together, lest I risk needing to yell the phrase “No Butts!” one more time to my son. The other day reached the peak of his obsession, as I’ve seen it. He was chasing Chani around the house, index finger pointed and ready, laughing maniacally in his best evil/devil laugh. I think he’s catching on that if he can get ahold of the tail, he can control it to some extent, and was trying to get at her tail that way. When that didn’t work, he got down on the ground, facing up; he looked like he was inspecting the under-carriage of a car. Now, I’ve had to tell Liam not to sit on the dogs, I really hope I never have to tell the dogs not to sit on Liam.

Here’s a cute video we took of Liam walking. He’s been taking steps for awhile but it wasn’t until about Wednesday of last week that he started really walking.

The cutest thing about this video is Mike getting annoyed with the camcorder. You have to start with this video first.

It appeared that the video in the camcorder was full so we switched it out. But then the damn thing wouldn’t stop beeping so Mike got annoyed and I took over. I don’t usually have the “magic touch” when it comes to technical devices but for some reason on this day the Camcorder Gods took pity on us and I managed to press record and somehow it started working. Suffice it to say, I think Mike and I might be investing in a digital camcorder some time soon.

Also, don’t miss Liam in his adorable bat costume. Mike did one hell of a job putting it together. We had our little Halloween get together last night and had an absolute blast.

The last few days have been a little brutal for Mike and I. Yesterday was our five year anniversary. After paying for our car insurance ($300), paying to fix our car ($500), our plane ticket to New York in October ($500) and various other medical bills ($150, give or take), we have practically no money other than what we need for food right now so we weren’t able to celebrate in the way we had planned. This will likely be the last anniversary we have in Oklahoma so we had planned to spend the night at Jarret Farm, the same ranch hotel we we stayed at the night of our wedding. No way we could afford that now. Instead we were just going to do a casual dinner and a movie thing. I took Liam over to my parents house while Mike worked on installing our new tub in the guest bathroom (a topic which requires a entire post for itself). We were to meet up around dinner and finish watching Rome series 2, only nothing seemed to be going right for either one of us yesterday. Liam seems to be teething all of his teeth at once and has some sort of strange allergy/cold thing, probably cold since it would appear that I’m coming down with it too. His moods alternate from wild and happy to cranky, hold me/don’t hold me go away wait don’t move, I don’t know what the hell I want. Mike had his own issues with the bathroom. We ended up being too exhausted by the end of the day to even care that we had made it to our fifth year of marriage. With a cold coming on I decided to sleep in a seperate bed last night. I downed some Benedryl and Tylenol and fell into a coma like sleep only to be startled by Mike at around 4am in the morning. “@*#%! We’re flooding!” We were in the middle of a major thunder/rain storm and water had seeped in through the bathroom wall into Liams’ room, down the hall into our bedroom, soaking the carpet (not a big deal) and our new laminate floors (very bid deal). Our sunroom roof was also leaking, which it does persistantly no matter how often we try to fix it.

I think Mike is about fed up with house stuff and I don’t blame him. If you’re on his Facebook you’ll note his status has been updated to “Mike is cursing his house to Hades”. When I was home for lunch he expressed the hope our house would catch on fire and burn down so we could collect on the insurance and be done with it, but then he realized how bloated the house was and that it would likely not even stay lit. So goes his luck.

This would be my husband at his wits end. If you know and care about my darling Mike, please send him some positive karma in the comments below or give him a sympathetic smile when you see him. My efforts are appreciated but I think he could do with a couple of more “hang in there’s” from friends. Meanwhile, I’m going to fantasize about living in a yurt and cross my fingers that my cold is gone by Monday.

So a strange, quiet little transformation has been happening with our little boy. Actually, it’s just that: he’s becoming a little boy. The past few weeks have been nightmarish trying to get him to eat anything we spoon fed him. We tried various tactics of distraction, from handing him his own spoon to jingling keys in front of his face. It’s ok, though. I’m a parent, I’m slow and dim-witted. What he’s been trying to tell us is, “Quit this mushy crap I got these damn teeth I wanna bite something!” Our biggest concern, however, has always been vegetables and meat. He’s always spit both vegetables and meat out. Fruit he loves, he’ll eat any amount of fruit you put in front of him; bread, cheese - loves ‘em.

Well, the other day, in a fit of desperation over needing to find something ANYTHING for the poor kid to eat, I whipped him up a veritable smorgasbord of food: a Pluot (it’s the cross between a Plum and an Apricot), bread and butter, chunks of cheese, and tucked away in the corner (just in case) some steamed carrots and broccoli. I offered the bread an cheese first, of course, he loves ‘em, right? He takes a few bites and tosses the rest overboard. The Pluot he went for, but I was running out of food. I grabbed the sorry, sad little bowl of vegetables. I looked down at them, I felt like the island Natives offering up Margaret Thatcher rather than Naomi Watts to King Kong. But lo! The carrots went in the mouth and did not return. Surely, though, the broccoli will be tossed overboard. One bite…in the mouth…an ugly face, oh no!…but wait! *chew, chew*, and a swallow!! Now I can’t put broccoli pieces down fast enough - he’s literally popping them into his mouth as I set them down - I even had Carleen cook another bit so would have enough.

My world is upside down. My son…is a vegetarian.

My friend Diama just sent me a really funny blog written by a stay at home dad. I really cracked up when I read his post called My Daughter, the Nazi. It was definitely the kind of laugh I needed today.

When Emmeline did a Nazi salute in the middle of the Jewish Community Center and then strode goose-stepping under a wall-sized quote by Anne Frank, I sensed my penchant for teaching her random, silly parlor tricks had taken a turn for the worse. The alphabet, numbers, real animal sounds — I think we’ll be doing a lot more of those from now on.

I guess this just proves that you can have the best of intentions as a parent and things will still go awry.

I brought Mike back a book called Daddy Needs Drink after he emailed me at work with another frustrating experience trying to get Liam down for his afternoon nap. He’s reading it as I write this and I’m relieved to hear him chuckle every once and awhile. There is something cathartic about reading blogs/books about parents who are having similar experiences with their kids, especially when they manage to put a humorous twist to things.