A smashing end to the holiday weekend

Literally, a smashing end to it.

Let me give you the highlights of the previous days first. Emma has reactive airway disease and as of today, she's still trying to hack up a lung.

We found out the hard way that our dogs get car sick, or one of them does. Hard to say. But there was poop and puke galore 3 times, as we had 3 car trips to make with them.

Other than those two things, the weekend was just grand. Much turkey and dressing and family and all was good.

We got started dragging out the Xmas stuff today, got the tree up. Then we decided to take a break. I wanted to go to yoga and Bill and the kids wanted to swim.

After yoga I went to tell them it was time to get out of the pool. Sam went to jump in one more time and did this odd spin while he was in the air that had him facing the side of the pool. And he smashed his chin on the side as he went in the water.

I yanked him out before it started bleeding, but before the lifeguards could get the first aid kit, he was covered neck to toes in blood, with a trail of drips around the edge of the pool. Got it staunched and slapped a butterfly and a bandaid on it, but the lifeguard could see that it wasn't closed. So off to the ER we went.

3.5 hours later, he has 5 stitches in his chin. It is about 1.5 in long and it was open nearly 1/4 of an inch. I'm pretty sure I could see the fatty tissue layer. Ew.

It took three people to hold him down for the lidocaine and the stitching. The only good thing is that he completely exhausted himself and he conked out shortly after we got home.

I need a drink.

A new holiday tradition

I swear this is not a tradition I want to keep going. Last year, Ellie and Sam both had pneumonia right around the holidays. They were sick right before Xmas, though.

This morning, I took Emma to the doctor for a cough that wasn't going away, and while she doesn't have pneumonia, she is wheezing. Two breathing treatments later, she's kind of wired, but breathing better. We have more albuterol for later.

And while we were there, Sam fell (well, Ellie pushed the stool causing him to fall) and hit his head on the floor so hard that the nurse and doctor both heard if from other rooms. He's fine, but I'm feeling the need for alcohol and chocolate. Too bad I have to drive.

Optimism vs pessimism

I've been pondering this lately. I am a pretty optimistic person. The glass is half full, things will work out, bad times don't last, etc.
I know people who are the exact opposite. Glass is half empty, things will always go wrong. You know the type. Maybe you are the type.

So, what I'm pondering is what makes some people inherently optimistic and some pessimistic? Is it nature? Nurture? Upbringing or genetics?

Confusing my thoughts on that issue is the fact that my brother is on the pessimist side of things. Same genetics. Same upbringing. What made us so different?

My husband and his sister are also opposites, with him being the more optimistic one. Now, he's not a perfect optimist. He still will assume that things will go wrong, places of business will not be open on holidays without checking, things like that. I'm not sure his sister ever sees anything good in life. Again, same parents, same upbringing.

What's the difference? What makes on person from a family be happy and optimistic and the other be pessimistic and unhappy?

I personally can't remember ever being a pessimistic person, except when I was a teenager. And any teenager worth her salt is angst ridden, downtrodden and pessimistic. Even then, I was still mostly cheerful. I just had my moments. So clearly I was either born with this personality trait or learned it very early on.

I've had the thought that even pessimistic people can learn to be more upbeat, but I don't know that for sure.

So, my deep thoughts for this week, what makes some people pessimistic and others optimistic?

Thankfulness and forgiveness

Before I dive into the deep thoughts, I want to say that we walked out of Target at 9:30 last night and holy crapdamn, it was snowing! It's too early for that shit. No accumulation or anything, but it was shocking, nonetheless.

Now on to the deep thoughts.

I have gotten back into my yoga routine, going 2x a week most weeks. I can't believe how much I missed it, and how much yoga improves my attitude. Now I'm generally a fairly happy person anyway, but regular yoga helps to smooth out the tendency to get snapish, because I do also have a tendency to get snapish.

Last night at the end, she had us sit with our hands in a bowl shape. This lets us fill up with blessings. I get a little sentimental this time of year anyway, because I freaking love the holidays, but it just hit me really hard last night in yoga class how blessed I really am and I was fighting tears. This came in the wake of having a crappy day on Wed, so it was especially profound.

But, I am so thankful for my life.

I am thankful for my family. For my children that love me and are healthy and bright. For my husband that loves me for who I am, unconditionally. He likes my off kilter sense of humor, he doesn't care when the house isn't spotlessly clean. He is supportive of my writing, has made it possible for me to do things and have things (neigh!) that I thought were years away.

I am thankful for our house and the piles of kid clutter. I'm thankful for two cars that run well. The dogs that chew everything up, the cats that puke on the floor.

I am beyond thankful that my parents are still healthy and have many years still with us, and so does my grandmother.

I'm thankful that my husband has had to work late this week, because he has a well paying job with a company that is stable.

Things are just very, very good for me, for us right now. The economy is in the shitter, but we are ok. Better than ok, I think.

The only dark spot in my life this year has been with my in-laws. I've bitched about them on this blog, complained about them in real life to some people. They hurt me and Bill both quite extensively and you don't get over that kind of hurt over night. I'm sure they were hurt, too, but I felt like we apologized to the point where we were apologizing for being who we are and not just for a thoughtless action.

My father-in-law has never apologized for his part in all of this, and honestly, I don't think he ever will. And that has been a bone of contention with me, especially since one of the things he said about me was that I am self-centered. Egocentric people don't recognize that their actions have an impact on other people and never feel the need to apologize for them.

Anyway, it has been a long, hard year in dealing with them, with my own feelings. Bill and I have had some of our biggest fights because of this. This situation has been a black cloud hanging over an otherwise pretty much perfect year. Quite frankly, if it weren't for Bill, I would have washed my hands of them. I could have walked away and never laid eyes on his parents again and not batted an eye. I also probably would have held a grudge against them for the rest of my life.

But, they are my husband's parents and while he has been hurt enormously, too, he still loves them and wants to give things a chance. So, I've had to deal with them and everytime that has stirred up the hurt all over again and I have been unwilling to forgive them.

Well, I am letting go. The wounds are not healed, but holding onto the hurt was simply keeping them fresh. Things will never be the same between us, I don't think. But I refuse to keep hurting myself and Bill by holding onto the grudge. They are who they are, and while my inlaws may never be people whom I consider "my cup of tea" they did manage to birth and raise the man who is the other half of me. Clearly they cannot be all bad. So, I am forgiving them for the hurt they have caused me. Not for them, but for myeslf and my relationship with Bill and for my children who have remained blessedly unaware of all of this and still love them them with open hearts.

'Tis the season, after all. And I'm going to embrace it with both arms.

Oh, hi Mom, I'm just fine.

Words to put fear into the heart of any parent. If you aren't a parent you are probably thinking WTF? If you are a parent, you're probably nodding. If not, you kid(s) are probably still pretty young.

Why would that innocent little phrase strike terror into my heart? Paired with the "I'm not guilty" look I know it means Sam has been up to something. Paired with a lack of pants and I'm running for the bathrooms to see which toilet is clogged with toilet paper. This time, he apparently kept trying to flush what looked like 95% of a roll of TP. I had to slog through toilet water. I had to clean up toilet water out of the floor. There is toilet water in my bedroom carpet because apparently the bathroom floor slopes slightly.

Oh well, at least the bathroom floor is clean now.

Ohhhhhmmmmmm.....OW!

There is nothing like ending a yoga class with someone having to call 911. Not me, and not one of my classmates, though. There is a running track that passes around the outside of the Y and beside the classroom. We were finishing up class on Sun when we heard kids running (which was fine, it is a track to run on) then WHAM! THUD! AHHHHH! OOOWWWW!!! So, our instructor jumps up and runs to see what happened. She forgot her mic was still on and said "Oh my god! Oh my god!" which of course came through the speakers loud and clear.

Well, that got the entire class to jump and run. I happened to be closest to the door and got there first. There was a boy, abotu 10 or so, who had lost it in the curve and busted it face first into the wall, right on a corner over a balcony. Actually, when Sandi yelled "Oh my god!" I thought someone had gone over the balcony.

The kid wasn't over the balcony, but he had hit, bounced, spun, hit the floor and was all contorted on the floor. We rolled him over and the first thing I did was to kneel by his head and hold his head still. Fuck if I know how he could have broken his neck, but you never know.

Apparently I looked like I knew what I was doing because another lady from the class sat down and asked if I was a nurse. Nope. Just cool in a crisis unless it is my kid. But she was a nurse, so I just held his head while she checked him out.

I did have to tell Sandi to go call 911, though, just to let the EMTs check him out.

The kid walked out of the Y under his own steam and was probably sore and had a hellacious headache yesterday. I do hope that his babysitter (mom was out of town) took him on the the ER to get him checked just in case. He hit his head pretty damned hard, not once but twice.

Poor kid.

Wow, I'm going to be doing some letter writing

Well, email probably.

And clearly I need to make it a point to watch the news and read the local papers more often. We got a letter home from school yesterday from the principal apologizing for the "humor" column he wrote last week in the paper for the next town over.

Here, go read it:
http://www.murfreesboropost.com/news.php?viewStory=13866

When I went and Googled the paper's webite, the link to that article was the 2nd hit to come up. Clearly he has stirred up people in the community with his lame attempt at humor.

Let me say first that I am always for freedom of speech and freedom of thought. I could care less who the man voted for. But he is a position of authority over my children and even if he doesn't consider himself a racist asshole, that is clearly how he comes across in his column.

And not only that, he looks like an idiot, too.

Points to consider:

1. If you go outside of the 2 "metro" areas of our county, it is pretty much nothing but farmland.

2. There are kids from immigrant families in our school. Kids whose parents struggle to speak English at all, much less with an accent. Besides that, why would you mock a man for his accent if you thought his ideas for running the government were good?

3. It doesn't matter how black or how white Obama's parents are. He is the only person that hasn't been a pasty white rich old man (barring Kennedy who wasn't old) to have been elected President of the U.S. That is historic.

4. And that song at the end is just over the top.

Yep, I may be late to this bandwagon, but he'll be hearing from me sometime today after I calm down enough not to use words like asshole, dickwad, fuckhead and just plain ingnorant.

Update, Part Deux

So, the tooth is broken to below the gumline. It would take a root canal plus the crown to try and save the tooth. So, since it is a baby tooth, the dentist's advice is to pull it. Mama is not thrilled with our first tooth fairy visit being a pulled tooth.

But, they will sedate her to do it, so it won't be traumatic for her. Just for me. Her appointment is Dec 10. I'm sure I'll be posting closer to then and freaking out.

Edited to add: They called to tell me how much arm and how much leg. We have a $50 deductible for having the tooth yanked, and then $150 for the sedation that my fuckerbutt insurance won't pay a penny towards. Fucking fuckers.

Quick tooth update

The dentist man looked at the tooth. There is actually more of it missing than I thought. More like 2/3 of it, instead of the 1/3 I thought. And, the nerve is exposed just a hair on the back of it, so he is sending us to a pediatric dentist at 8:30 AM tomorrow to see about having a crown put on it. Dentist man said he can do adult crowns all day long, but he won't do them on kids.

Wish us luck, and I'm beginning to fear I may be giving them an arm, leg and my first born to pay for this. Of course, my first born is Ellie of the broken tooth, so maybe they'll just keep her.

A chip off the old block

Or, in this case, a chip off the young tooth. Ellie somehow hit her mouth on the side of the pool last Thur night and chipped about 1/3 of one of her incisors off. It's a baby tooth, but still, it's a pretty dramatic chip. She kept claiming that it didn't hurt. Not really. She can just eat on the other side of her mouth. Uh-huh. Doesn't hurt? Yeah right. But last night she actually asked for some advil.

Since our dentist isn't open on Friday, I called this AM to see if they could get Ellie in to look at the tooth. We have an appointment at 3PM. I don't even know what they can do for her, but since it's hurting, we'll go see.

Dentists are notorious for charging an arm and a leg and insurance not covering crap. So, cross your fingers that maybe they'll only charge us an arm.

So, who did you vote for?

Did you vote for a black man? Because I sure as hell didn't.

I voted for the American people. I voted for the 17 million working Americans who don't have health care.

I voted for our planet, for our environment, for the push towards a greener future.

I voted for our economy because trickle down economics (thanks Ronnie Reagan!) doesn't work. I voted for the poor who are getting poorer.

I voted for the servicemen and women who are involved in a war that was based on lies, that are being killed in a country where they aren't wanted. I voted for them to come home, to live to fight another day for a cause that is just, a cause that is actually worth dying for, not for a battle that has been being fought between desert tribes for hundreds of years.

I voted for my children and their future. I voted for their educations, their health, their planet, their security.

I voted for hope, because for the first time in my adult life, I have actually been afraid. Afraid of unemployment and of losing my home, of not being able to afford health care.

I voted because I think that a woman's health care decisions are between her and her doctor, not her and the voters (and because I know that the GOP has no intentions of actually doing anything about Roe v. Wade, its just rhetoric.)

I voted because I don't give a rat's ass if you worship god, Buddha, Zoroaster, Mother Nature or the Flying Spaghetti Monster and no one should have the right to tell anyone what is moral or not.

I voted for change because I was truly afraid where this country is going.

I did not vote for a Muslim. I did not vote for a person who is not a citizen. I did not vote for a person who refuses to say the Pledge. I did not vote for a person who won't produce a birth certificate. I did not vote for a person who's education was paid for by terrorists. (Seriously, haven't you people heard of Snopes.com?)

I voted for Barack Hussein Obama, not because he is a black man, but because he is a man that I can believe in. Because the hope on the faces of children who can look and him and believe that they, too, can grow up to do great things for their country gave me hope.

History was going to be made either way this election went. I am simply glad that history was made in a way that I am proud of, in a way that I believe in. Because yes, we can make history in America still!

Yes we can!

Oh my God, yes we did! We did it! I am so proud of my country. We have made history. Tonight, people of every color came together to vote for hope, for change, for the ultimate ideal of democracy. Tonight, in this the greatest country in the world, a man that 150 yrs ago would have been a slave, a man that 40 yrs ago would have sat in the back of the bus, a man that grew up with FoodStamps, tonight America has elected a black man, a man with a "funny" name, Barack Obama as our next President.

Yes we fucking can!

I have a secret!

Neener neener neener! I'm not telling until after Xmas!

It's over!

The last soccer game is played, the trophies are handed out (except for the two that didn't show up at the party wtf?). No more practices at 6pm. No more hunting for shoes and shin guards every Sat morning. No more whining kids (or me) about having to go. Yay! It's over!

And honestly, they aren't playing again for a long, long time. At least a year, maybe two. We have other things to do with our time now.