Jackadilloprincess.com

I apologize for all the quiet around these here parts, because I know you are all waiting with bated breath to hear more tales from my household.  I know it keeps you up at night, wondering what color vomit Robbie sent flying last night, and what unintentionally amusing thing Kaylee said this morning.

It’s just … well, I’m kind of spent.  There was so much build-up to that surgery, and we’re working on a minor home improvement project that cuts right into blog-writing time, and there’s the car stuff and the money stuff and the stress stuff and all the other STUFF, and even with all that happening I just can’t think of much to say.

All this blabbering basically boils down to a two-word update: I’m tired.

Since I can’t entertain you, here’s a video that might do the job for me.  (You’ve probably already seen this, but again, I’m too tired to find anything fresh.  But still, if you grew up in the same era as me, you’ll enjoy it.)

Yesterday was Kaylee’s surgery, and it went just fine.  The doctor ultimately decided to operate on both eyes so we wouldn’t end up back in this same position two or three months from now, and it only took about half an hour.  The worst part, by far, was the wait beforehand, during which Kaylee got progressively more frightened, especially after the medicine they gave her to calm her down kicked in.  Apparently, it’s difficult for a three-year-old to remain calm when she suddenly and inexplicably loses control of her limbs.

Afterward, she woke up in a bit of a panic to find that she had an IV taped to one arm, a patch taped over one eye and a pulse oximeter taped to her toe — and she tried to remove them all.  So she got more drugs, and there were more enraged tears.  She finally cried herself to sleep in my arms, and shortly after that we were able to go home.  In all, it was a successful but emotionally exhausting day.

The nurses did their best to keep Kaylee calm, pointing out the awesome socks she was getting to wear, encouraging her to watch cartoons, and helping her into the “funny hat” she had to wear to cover her hair.  They even treated Kaylee’s stuffed bear, Bubble Gum, as if she were a patient, too.

She had an ankle band and everything.

Kaylee wasn’t especially impressed.  I guess putting an ID bracelet on a bear doesn’t do much to make a kid feel better about losing the ability to speak coherently, but I appreciated their effort.

Kaylee discovered Legos a couple weeks ago, and she thinks they are A.W.E.S.O.M.E.  Part of the attraction may be that they are the tiny Legos, and her brother is absolutely forbidden to touch them for at least a couple more years and she knows I will never say, “But sweetie, can’t you just let Brother borrow that for a minute?” right before handing a Lego spaceship to Robbie and letting him get his baby drool all over it.

So she and Rob have been digging out his little Lego kits that he accumulated over the years, including three or four Star Wars and Harry Potter Lego sets I gave him at birthdays and Christmases over the years, and they have put them together in a private little daddy-daughter bonding ritual that is achingly cute.

On Sunday, I took Kaylee and Robbie to visit some good friends from high school, and Kaylee was excited to find a big box of Legos on the living room floor.  After she got over her fear of all the scary adults and their scary children, she decided to get down to business and build some shit.  Except that when she builds things, she actually just hands Legos to her daddy, and he puts them together. Since he wasn’t there, she settled for me.

Of course, every single piece she handed me was a large, flat, thin sheet that was obviously intended to form the base of some magnificent structure, but when combined with a bunch of other large, flat, thin sheets only creates one large, flat, slightly thicker sheet of Lego boringness.  She kept handing me stuff, but lost interest after I failed to produce a functional AT-AT.

Later, we picked Rob up at home and headed over to his mom’s house, and on the way Kaylee said earnestly, “Will you play Legos with me?  Mommy’s not very good at it.”

That little rat.

When we got to my mother-in-law’s house, Kaylee, Rob and Uncle Tim put together some Harry Potter Lego sets, and at one point Kaylee even declared that Uncle Tim wasn’t especially good at Legos, either.

“Is Mommy better at Legos than Uncle Tim?” someone asked.

“No.”

All day today, she carried around a complex Lego sea plane — bringing it with us to the grocery store and Target despite my best efforts to convince her that such things should remain at home.  Once in a while, she’d break off a wing or the tail section and hand it over so I could repair it.

“If I keep fixing this for you, will you start saying I’m good at Legos?” I asked after the eleven millionth time I stuck the wing back on her plane.

“No,” she said. Then she paused, reconsidered and decided to placate me — but only a little.  “But you’re good at fixing them.”

Thanks, kid.  Thanks a lot.

I had a bit of a day yesterday.  I sort of want to explain and I sort of don’t, so I guess I’ll just say it’s a money thing, where I feel like we’re being hit, and hit, and hit again.  And yesterday’s hit was a big one, followed by two bills in the mail – one unexpected and the other one simply bigger than expected – all with the knowledge that we have a surgery to pay for next week and a shit-ton of hail damage to pay for on our car.  (Too late to back out of that last one, as I filed the claim two days ago.)

There is surely a way out of our difficulties, but yesterday I was too caught up in the being distraught to be interested in forming any kind of plan.  I was distracted for a while by my pseudo-sister-in-law, who came over with beer and her own tale of woe, for life is kicking her a little bit at the moment, too.

It’s weird when this stuff happens and all you want to do is wallow in it, but you can’t because you still have kids, and they still need their dirty diapers changed and they still need their snacks and they still need you to give them hugs and keep them entertained.  Several times, I’d be lost in my thoughts, worried about credit cards and the mortgage and all the shit that comes with being a grown-up, and suddenly Kaylee would walk up to me and do something silly, reminding me that I have something more important than money.

But always, always, the money issues pop right back into my head, and at the end of the day I stood in the kitchen and hung my head, while Rob wrapped his arms around me and told me everything would be all right.  Then we went upstairs to get Kaylee ready for bed, and as usual she stalled by insisting on playing a game.

In the game she chose last night, she stood at the end of our bed and waited, and Rob’s and my roles were to surprise her by suddenly putting out a hand and shoving her down.  It sounds cruel, but it makes her laugh her head off.  She gets up, we (gently, carefully) push her down.  She laughs.  We laugh.  We do it again.

I love making my daughter laugh.

But also?  There’s something uniquely cathartic about knocking a toddler over.

I don’t know what that says about me, but it can’t be good.

The scene: Naptime. Kaylee is lying next to me in my bed, desperately stalling to avoid going to sleep.  This is about the time she always starts spouting random nonsense.  “Up” is playing on TV; it’s at the beginning, where the little boy is sitting in a movie theater.

KAYLEE: He’s in a movie theater!  We can go to the movie theater tomorrow.

ME: Oh yeah?

KAYLEE: Yeah!  We’re going to see “Spider-Man.”

(To my knowledge, Kaylee has never seen “Spider-Man.”  I wasn’t aware she even knew it was a movie.)

ME: We are?

KAYLEE: He’s angry.

ME: Spider-Man is angry? Why?

KAYLEE: Because Harry Potter is there, too.

ME: He doesn’t like Harry Potter?

KAYLEE: No, probably not.

End scene.

So, there you have it.  In case you wondered, Spider-Man and Harry Potter are NOT FRIENDS.

My birthday is three weeks away, so Rob and I went to Jake Jabs’ lair – despite our past difficulties with his superhuman powers, he does have good prices – last night to look for a chair to put in my office.

I’d picked one out a few weeks ago, but it’s apparently no longer available, so I had to take a few test-sits to choose a new one.  I found one that seemed just about perfect for kicking back with a book – or a Kindle, because we are gadget fiends – and relax for a while.

So we loaded it up in our SUV, which was exciting to me because we were finally using the car for something our old sedan couldn’t accomplish, thus justifying the expense.  Obviously.  We needed to spend $20,000 in order to move this $130 chair.  Duh.

Rob carried it up to my office and plopped it in its corner, and we set up a new lamp next to it to create a happy little reading nook.  And then I tried it out … and suddenly felt like a giant.

Do you see what’s wrong with this photo?  Because we didn’t realize until last night that this chair is supposed to have legs.  Because chairs?  They don’t normally sit flat on the floor like that.

But, um, where were the legs?

This chair was wrapped in some netting stuff and plastic wrap, so there was no box to dig through to find the requisite parts.  It took a bit of head scratching and searching before we finally noticed the secret zippered compartment on the underside of the chair.

Rob reached his arm elbow deep and fished around, pulling out a drawstring bag of chair legs hidden in the recesses of the chair.  But there was so much more space in there, Jake could have easily hidden a lot more.

“What else am I going to find in here?” Rob wondered as he fished around. “Doubloons?  A map to One-Eyed Willie’s treasure?”

Alas, there was only the bag of chair legs.  But why do I suddenly have the feeling that I’ll open that compartment 20 years from now and discover one of Kaylee’s stuffed animals and a half-eaten bag of moldy Cheetos?

Kaylee’s chalazion removal surgery is scheduled for next week, and guess what I noticed yesterday. Go on, guess.  Take a motherfucking guess.

I noticed a lump on the upper lid of her other eye.

I just … I … I don’t … but … wha …

Fuck.

I’m sitting in the cafe at my gym, slowly sipping a Diet Pepsi and tuning out all of the ambient noise around me.  People are chatting, a young woman is nervously wading through a job interview at the next table, someone is dribbling a basketball off in the distance, and once in a while the ice machine behind the counter clatters, but I’m not really listening to any of that.  Instead, I’m trying to appreciate the fact that it is the middle of the morning, and I am alone.

True, I am surrounded by people.  But none of them want anything from me, and I don’t want anything from them.  We are coexisting, and that is all.  It’s wonderful.

I’m trying to appreciate the next 45 minutes, because they are among the last minutes I will have the luxury of sipping a Diet Pepsi in the middle of the morning without my kids.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m trying to remind myself that my kids are fun, and our time together is a time to be enjoyed rather than endured.  What I neglected to mention is how imperative it is that I fully embrace that attitude, and soon, because this lovely gym membership ends on Saturday.  I’m going to miss this noisy little retreat from my responsibilities, but we simply can’t afford it anymore.

I’m not saying all this to garner sympathy from anyone, because that would just be stupid.  Poor me, not being able to shove my kids off on strangers while I ride a recumbent bike with a TV attached to it!  Oh woe is me!  How will I ever survive?  Yeah, no one is going to feel sorry for me there.  I know that.

I guess I’m saying it with a bit of wistfulness, because I’ll miss having the ability to take a breather from being a mommy a couple times a week.  But hopefully it will be motivation to go to the park, take walks around the neighborhood and visit our wonderful zoo.

And I feel like a horrible mother for admitting this, but I’m kind of nervous about all this TIME I’m going to have with my children now.  When I lost my job a year and a eight months ago — whoa, I can’t believe it’s been that long — I immediately joined Stroller Strides, and after I left that I immediately joined this gym.  So now I’m finally adrift, without any regularly scheduled activities to fall back on.

Now I have to come up with things to keep us all occupied, and Internet, I’m concerned.  The gym has been an excellent way for Kaylee to burn off some of that overflow of three-year-old energy, and I’ll have to come up with more ways for her to burn it off at home, instead.

If only she weren’t afraid of the vacuum cleaner, I could put her to work.  Isn’t three years old about the right age to start earning your keep?  Robbie already does his part by attempting to lick the floors clean, so surely she could make herself useful.  Are there rules against putting a preschooler on poop-scooping duty?

Um, an image just popped into my head what Kaylee might look like in the aftermath of poop-scooping chores.  Never mind.

We went to my parents’ apartment on Saturday to celebrate my dad’s birthday and swim in the pool — an activity that I usually both enjoy and kind of hate.

Because, see, while I do love to swim, these days it can be fraught with drama and enough toddler tears to make the damn pool overflow. When I go swimming, it is with my beautiful, wonderful, amazing children … who weep beautiful, wonderful, amazing tears every single time we go swimming.  (I’m not being fair.  Actually, it’s just Kaylee who cries, but I didn’t want to single her out.  Ruined that just now, didn’t I?)  Because, when we go swimming, I am not allowed to put Kaylee down for the teensiest fraction of a second.  Ever.

And that’s ok, because we have fun pacing back and forth along the rope that divides the shallow end from the deep end.  I have fun holding her in front of me, teaching her how to dog paddle to the stairs.  I have fun letting her leap from the concrete edge, into my arms.

But on Saturday, Rob was with us.  And Kaylee thinks her DADDY! IS! AWESOME!

The two of them had a fabulous time together, and after carrying Robbie around in the water for a while, I handed him off and found myself paddling around in a pool by myself, with no real adult responsibilities other than to help keep an eye on my adventurous niece when she wandered into the deep end.

Before long, my brother Jamie and I were doing cannonballs and racing each other back and forth from the edge to the rope, while the kids laughed.  I practiced somersaults in the water, and occasionally held my nose and sank to the bottom, just for the hell of it.

In short, I acted like a kid. And when I did return to Kaylee, holding her while her dad took flying leaps into the pool, I enjoyed holding her tiny little body in my arms as it shook with laughter.

I’m not sure at what point going swimming became a chore, rather than an event to giddily anticipate.  When did going down a slide lose its luster?  When did I become such a grumpy adult?

Oftentimes, when Rob and I are invited to join friends for this gathering or that evening out, we grumble about how much trouble it is to get someone to watch our kids, and how we don’t really want to go because we’re not very social beings and arglebargleblah.  After much bitching and complaining, we usually decide to force ourselves out the door anyway, and without fail we find that it was worth the effort.  We know this is going to happen, and that’s why we force ourselves out the door.

Um, I’ve lost track of my point.  I guess it’s that I need to get in touch with my inner child a bit — although pretend I said it in an eloquent way, rather than using the “inner child” cliche — because I think it will help me be a better parent.  I have to remind myself that my children are fun, and not just little dictators who do nothing but demand my attention.

I need to take the kids to the park more.

I need to take advantage of our zoo membership more often.

I need to color with Kaylee more often.

I need to play in the backyard with my kids more often.

I need to take them for walks around the neighborhood.

I need to have fun with them more.

Because we’re in for a long ride together, and we might as well spend it smiling.

Kaylee has recently become obsessed with the movie “Annie” for some reason, which I don’t mind because the soundtrack to that movie is the first record album I clearly remember owning, and I used to love to belt out the songs in my room. (Only as an adult have I finally noticed that the themes of many of those songs are awfully sad.)

Though many of the TV shows and movies Kaylee adores involve lots of singing, nothing has inspired her like “Annie” has, and today she spent hours singing made-up songs.  It’s really freaking adorable, unless you’re trying to hold a conversation with, um, anyone, and you can’t hear each other because there’s a three-year-old yelling out heartfelt songs about her sandbox.

Enjoy.

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(Oh, and apologies for the random and abrupt silence at the end.  Someone doesn’t know how to work Garage Band.)