Knee-Pression

So my sister turned 30 on Sunday.  Happy 30th, Katie!  To celebrate, I was leaving the boys behind for a weekend of male bonding and heading to Colorado to spend a weekend with her.  It just happened to be when my parents were out for their annual ski trip, so we all decided to meet them in Steamboat, my brother would come up, and we would have a few days of skiing bliss.

I haven’t skied since early 2008 – I was just shy of three months pregnant with Austin (but it was still Lyndon and I’s secret!), and managed to complete Beaver Creek’s Talons Challenge.  In one day. It feels like a lifetime ago.

All of this fun is scheduled for next weekend.  And I’m sure it will indeed be a blast.  But I can’t go. Because I blew out my knee, again. 

For the third time, I’m waiting on MRI results and anxiously hoping I won’t need another surgery on my right knee.

Try as I might, I’m not very forgiving of my body right now.  I’m pissed at it.  I was walking – FRICKIN WALKING – and my knee just gave out.  Like, haven’t been able put any weight on it, can’t sleep because of the pain, can’t bend or straighten fully, knee the size of a balloon gave out.  I can’t work, I can’t drive, I can’t take care of my kids…and I can’t take a ski vacation with my family.

As much as this sucks for me, it probably sucks worse for Lyndon.  He has to do everything for the boys and the house and the family, while I lay on the couch and request ice and water and pain pills and for him to wash the diapers and pack the boys lunches and put the boys to bed…

I’m trying to have perspective.  It is just a knee.  More than likely they will be able to fix it.  We have health insurance.  Work is being very understanding and I’m doing what I can from home.  My parents are being amazing.

So…help a bored girl out. Suggestions for Netflix series? Movies? Books? Other fabulous activities for the couch-ridden?  Perhaps I can entertain my way out of knee-pression v.3.

& it was all Yewwow.

Wes was helping me clean up a color matching game we had the other day, when he randomly showed me the blue card and said “Boo.”  I thought he was just babbling – he is still a man of few words, but then he picked up the orange card, showed it to me, and said “owng.”  I was baffled.  He has never once responded to my request to “go put on your shoes,” points at the picture of the watermelon when I ask him where he beloved “nannie” is on the fruit page, and still won’t say “milk” or “drink” – insisting on signing it, accompanies by his signature “uh” wine.  But here he was showing me that he knows his colors?

He continued – picking up the yellow card and saying, clear as a bell, “Yewwow.” 

I was so impressed!  So I did what a typical proud mom does – tried to make him “show off” for everyone. 

Wes is not a show pony.

Ever since, everything is “Yewwow.”  Everything.  Green things.  Pink things. Brown things.  All Yewwow.

And I can’t get Coldplay out of my head.

Candy-tines?

Ok, I’m out of the loop.  Completely. I expect this in certain areas – for instance, I don’t expect to know the latest greatest movies – we don’t have cable.  I don’t expect to know the words to the latest pop song – we mostly listen to self-designed Pandora stations, or NPR.  (although I do love my young cousin’s interpretation of Gaga – “I’m on the bright track, baby, I was born this way”) 

But I wasn’t expecting to feel quite so out of it when it came time to bring in Valentines for Austin’s preschool class.

Per my childhood training, we set out to create homemade valentines.  Austin is somewhat limited in his writing abilities – he is three, after all, so we stuck with a basic plan.  We took his massive stack of finger paint, crayon, and marker creations, folded them in half, I traced half a heart, and he did his best to follow the line and cut out a valentine for each and every one of his 22 classmates. We then cut out their names on the class list and glued them to the heart, for an adorable-for-a-three-year-old homemade creation. 

Given this mentality, you can imagine my surprise when he came home with a massive stash of candy.  Suckers.  Three packages of fun dip. Lifesavers.  Gummies.  Huh?

Some of the “valentines” were just notes directly on the candy wrapper, cutting out the need for mini-cards filled with Disney platitudes and more efficiently (albeit, also more environmentally) delivering the message of “love.”

I’m OK with our family being a bit different.  Conformity is boring!  And my kid doesn’t need another sucker (let alone another 20!), and I’m guessing most of his classmates don’t either.  But I can’t help but think what good we could do if each family would instead spend their $5 on a slightly more worthwhile, less High Fructose Corn Syrup-laden cause.  Would Austin be deemed the class leper if he was sent to school with (homemade) Valentines proclaiming “Happy Valentines Day!  $.15 has been donated to the Muskegon Rescue Mission in your name.”?  Or “Happy Valentines Day! Here is a package of seeds – plant your own Swiss Chard!”

Don’t get me wrong – I love candy.  But isn’t that why we have Halloween?

Funky Cocoa

The other day Austin was begging me to put on the “Funky Cocoa” song.  I could not, for the life of me, figure out what in the heck he was talking about.  After a few fruitless conversations about it, we had to let it go.

A few days later we were in the car and a familiar song came on.  Wham!

Sing it with me now… “Wake me up, to Funky Cocoa….”

1.5 Months to a Trashed Car

As I admitted in December, we are now the  proud owners of a mom van.  A shiny new vehicle, complete with new car smell…and now, a nice dent above the left wheel well.

Not that any of this should surprise me.  On my internal list of priorities, a clean car hangs near the bottom, just above a clean mailbox but definitely below a clean bathroom.  I blame this on several things:

• Winter in Michigan is inherently muddy and sloppy, and thus my kids get into the van in a muddy and sloppy way. 
• I never, EVER get into, our out of, the van without holding a maximum amount of crap that needs to be schlepped from A to B, and thus I never have spare arm space to clean up the plastic baggies and straw wrappers and other miscellaneous junk that accumulates and multiplies like amoebas when not constantly attended to. 
• And, mostly, I don’t care enough.  Sure, a clean car is nice, but I spend most of my time in said care securely buckled into one set spot, and as long as I can see clearly and reach all of my necessary nobs and buttons, cleanliness is just a nice bonus.

Rest assured I don’t feel the same way about my personal hygiene or the status of my house, which gets considerably more attention. 

But, about that dent.  On Saturday, I needed to kill some time with Austin, so I decided to take us through the car wash. I thought it would be fun, and the car was in need of a good scrub, so we cued up outside a Marathon station and paid our money.

All was well till we were transitioning from the “wash” section to the “rinse” section.  The car started to rock a bit, and the next thing I know we’ve been lurched into the wall dividing the two sections.  And we’re stuck! I was honking the horn trying to get the attention of the poor teenage boys on duty, the wall we’ve hit is now at a funny angle, and in order to hear the kid, I had to roll down the window…which meant both my seat and I got a nice soaking.

They finally got me straightened out and out of there (offering me the chance to go through again because the car wasn’t all that clean – no thanks!) and I discovered the dent.  Not a huge deal, but the car doesn’t even have 2000 miles on it!

We’ll get it fixed (or rather, the Marathon station will get it fixed), all will be fine…but lessons learned: beware the automatic car wash!

(I was dreading sharing all of this with my husband, who tends to get worked up about this sort of stuff…but then I remembered that he got rear ended about a month after he got his new car.  Apparently this sort of stuff is a rite of passage for us.)