Catching Up

"Let me explain.

[pause] 

No, there is too much. Let me sum up."

A cookie for anyone who recognizes those lines.

It's been a long week.  A LONG one, full of errands and paperwork and meetings and kids-go-here-kids-go-there and furniture shopping for kitchen and family room and cleaning-out and Freecycling and all sorts of other not very exciting but timesucking things.  I meant to write a post last night touching on some of the craziness and also mentioning my trip to the really awesome orchard across the river, where I told the owner that I wanted to can some peach jam on Sunday and she personally put together a half-bushel box of three varieties for me and told me that all of them would be perfectly ripe by Sunday.  Took her a good ten minutes to do this.

(By the way, this is the river in question.  Picture taken today.

  
And these are the peaches.  They made the whole car smell of fruit and sunshine all the way from the trunk.)

However, that post-writing didn't quite happen.  Took the kids to the gym for their taekwondo classes in the early evening, came home, then let them go swimming.  Sent them upstairs to get their pjs on afterward, and thirty seconds later heard a bloodcurdling scream and ran upstairs to find a scene of carnage: blood gushing from Petunia's head and all over her comforter and her clothes.  There had been some sort of scuffle in which her head accidentally connected with the corner of a bookcase, and the remainder of the evening was spent in the Emergency Department...didn't get home till 11:15.  Lovely.

Three hours, four lidocaine shots, twelve stitches.   Hellfire and damnation.  This kid has four times as many ED visits as her brothers PUT TOGETHER (literally--four to their combined one) and is personally responsible for a lot of my gray hair.  Good thing she's cute, and thankfully she's doing very well today...except for the big bandage you'd never know she'd been hurt.

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In brighter news, today happens to be Thing Two's ninth birthday.  If he had a skateboard, I'm sure he would try this, and then we would end up in the ED again, so let's all be glad that he doesn't.

Himself has been reflecting all day about Thing Two's day of birth.  He remembers the details of that day much better than I do, mostly because he was less physically *involved* (ahem) with the actual birth.  In retrospect, it's funny that we found parenting Thing One to be challenging...our parental challenges didn't even really start until Thing Two was born!  And the day he was born, we had no idea that he would have the language issues, either...all we saw then was the "spot" on his head (which turned out to be aplasia cutis congenita) and that scared us badly enough, thank you ill-informed jerkball Peds resident on call and bless you L&D nurse for finding the answers for us in the middle of the night, after your shift ended.

My sweet Thing Two: it's truly been a roller coaster ride since the instant of your birth.  Being your mother is the biggest challenge I've ever faced, because you've had so many hurdles to overcome and you didn't come with a manual--good God, how we needed one, especially early on.  You've thrown us curveball after curveball, and sometimes you and I butt heads like a pair of rhinoceroses (rhinoceri?), but you will always be my precious and beloved baby.  Happy birthday to my little boy, who is rapidly becoming big!

~Mama