Oh, The Burning!

While frying eggs yesterday morning, my husband decided he would be able to flip them a little easier if he braced a finger against the side of the skillet. He quickly realized that the blue gas flame not only heats the cooking surface of the pan, but the sides as well. It turns out that I really should have refrained from teasing him because a few hours later found me suffering from a burn wound myself.

In the act of removing my ceramic stone from the oven, atop which some lovely toasted bread sat, my left palm brushed against the wire rack which is supposed to make the stone safer and easier to remove from the oven. One wouldn’t think that gently brushing against blazing, sizzling metal could produce a glaring inch-long white sear. I had hoped that if I ran my open palm under cold water for a while any blisters would be deterred from forming.

Having a wound that renders one’s hand practically useless is very detrimental to a mother. Trying to change the diaper of a wriggling baby one-handed is a bit of a trick. In the eight hour span between when the accident occurred and bedtime I had to keep ice on the burn constantly, or the fiery pain would actually make my eyes water. Even after I fell asleep the pain woke me intermittently during the night. It caused me once again to consider the practice of cauterizing wounds. I believe if it were my choice I would prefer taking a bullet and being put out to pasture instead of biting a bullet and smelling my flesh cook.

Regardless, I did have to give my husband a lesson on “how the stove works” again. After hearing the tick-tick-tick followed by the whoooosh of the burner igniting no less than three times in six seconds, I hastened to his side with a cry of, “you’re going to kill us all!” just in time to watch him position the dial at a setting that doesn’t even exist.

He claims that it was the urgent sincerity in my voice coupled with the actual words that caused him to cackle uncontrollably, and he was hasty to reassure me that he was in no way endeavoring to fill up the entire house with gas fumes. I believe the root his inability to learn how the dials operate after repeated lessons, is that his man’s brain has a hard time grasping that the dial works in a counter-clockwise manner, as he seems to be intent on making it work in the more logical clockwise way.

If, at any time, I go for a week or more without posting a new blog please be advised that it might be due to the fact that I am lying on the kitchen floor choking on poisonous fumes. If such an event should occur I would ask that the proper authorities be notified and that take-out would be ordered for the duration of my recovery since my husband would henceforth be banned from playing with the stove.

Changes... Changes...

There are some changes that are good and don’t interfere with a person’s everyday life, like changing into clean underwear every day. While giving my kids lunch yesterday I looked out of the window and saw a vehicle with the words “Parking Enforcement” stuck to the side idling in the middle of the street while the driver alternately contemplated our car and looked down into his lap in the posture of someone writing out a violation.

Shortly before, the garbage men had hauled away our trash, so I decided to go outside and put our empty cans away while working up the courage to approach the gentleman and ask him what the problem was. Turns out I didn’t have to approach him at all; he watched me drag the garbage cans away from the curb before indicating that he wanted to speak with me.

When we first purchased our home fourteen months ago there was some confusion about how the parking on our street worked. Our house is on a corner lot and on the side of our home people park facing the “wrong” way because the wooded hill on the far side of the street negates people being able to park there at all; in front of the house cars parallel park on the opposite side of the street and angle park on the side our home sits on. We were mindful to watch how our neighbors parked their own vehicles and mirrored our own parking after theirs. We live in a city, so it isn’t unusual to see a police car cruise down the road. Never having gotten a parking ticket before we assumed that we had a solid grasp on the parking situation.

Well. Without going into boring details it would seem that our car was not twenty feet from the corner, nor was it parked at the appropriate angle. Even though there was nothing gracious about his attitude he graciously voided the ticket and made me solemnly swear to move my car twenty feet from the corner (about halfway down the block). I really don’t see what this new parking scheme is going to do other than lose us one parking spot on either side of the corner, I mean, there isn’t even a stop sign there! But I suppose rules are rules even when they don’t make sense. Being forced to take a whole different approach to parking in front of a person’s own home is the type of change that isn’t life changing, but it can seem like a huge nuisance initially.

I put my daughter in a long sleeved dress yesterday and she found it challenging to crawl on her hands and knees because her knee would pin down the dress and she was unable to move her arm forward. So for the whole day she had to change her crawling style from hands-and-knees to hands-and-tippy-toes. She looked like Spider-Man grasping the floor with her fingertips and toes while her rear-end stuck up in the air! I tried in vain to get a picture to post after we got home last night from a day at Nana’s, but she was cranky and in no mood to be tortured by the camera. Even after she was out of the dress and into her jammies she still crawled that way.

About once a year my husband decides to appease me and shave his beard off. He usually does this in the summer time so that his face can get a chance to breath. This year the whole face-shaving ritual came a little early. He came downstairs last night (after he had splashed water all over the bathroom and left a layer of tiny little hairs on the sink) without the beard.

The baby always cries when men she isn’t used to seeing all the time try and talk to her. She took one look at daddy and totally freaked. It took him a little while to convince her that he was indeed her very own daddy. The poor kid is already having some separation anxiety issues after being left with her auntie last weekend. Now I can’t even leave her in a room with her daddy, whom one would think looks like the man with a scar down the left side of his face and bald patches strewn throughout his otherwise long hair by the quality of the baby’s earsplitting scream.

Gate Crasher

My tough little girl got her first bloody lip the other night. I don’t know if this happens to all children, but both of my kids had their first bleeding boo-boo by injuring that tendon that runs from the top lip to the gums. I think that she is destined to get hurt just as much as or more often than her brother regardless of the fact that she is a girl.

I had placed the baby in the kids’ bedroom to play while I got my son and myself ready for bed. He was impatient to have access to his room and instead of waiting for me to lift him over the baby gate to deposit him safely on the other side he decided to stand in the hallway and give the gate a couple of good thumps.

The thing must not have been snug into the doorframe tightly enough because the next thing I knew the gate gave way and trapped my screaming infant beneath it. I suppose I have to take some responsibility for the mishap considering that I put the gate up. It is also possible that the gate is simply not meant to take the brute force of a twenty-nine pound toddler throwing himself at it like a battering ram. (That may be a bit of an exaggeration since I didn’t actually see him do it, but that’s sure what it sounded like.)

Two complications inevitably arise from this sort of situation. The first is the challenge of making a two-point-five year old understand the concept of cause and effect- you pushed on the gate and it fell causing the baby to fall over backward, hit her head and bleed from the mouth; the second difficulty is whether to clean the blood out of the baby’s mouth with a tissue or tip her head forward so she can stop gurgling and spit the moisture out of her mouth onto the carpet.

I opted for swabbing the blood out of her mouth, and her brother seemed to understand that he had hurt her because he was pretty anxious to give her kisses and say sorry. My little girl recovered rather quickly from her accident and was back to climbing over obstacles and throwing herself in harm’s way in no time at all. I’m starting to think that I should just bundle her in bubble wrap and be done with it. It would definitely reduce the number of gasp-and-run moments.

I Wanna Chocolate Cake!

The last few nights I have had some difficulty sleeping. One o’clock this morning found me putting a chocolate cake in the oven because I was stressed and in desperate need of a cocoa fix. By the time it was done cooking I could hardly keep my eyes open, but I managed to find the strength to eat a small piece before crawling into bed.

When there is a super-moist chocolate cake sitting on the countertop what is a person supposed to eat for breakfast? Chocolate cake, of course. If Bill Cosby can give his kids chocolate cake for breakfast I suppose it’s okay for me to do the same. Like Bill says there are wheat, eggs and milk in chocolate cake: just as healthy as toast, fried eggs and milk in a glass, right? Sadly the baby had to adhere to her diet of Cheerios and yogurt (life just isn’t fair sometimes).

I was pretty confident that feeding my toddler yummy dessert food for breakfast wasn’t too bad. It was after I gave in to his insistence that he repeat the meal for lunch that I began to worry that I may be committing some kind of mommy-sin. After that I lost total control and ate cake for lunch myself. Thankfully we had an impromptu get-together with our small group of bestest friends: it was a great opportunity to get some of the irresistible chocolate goodness out of our house and into somebody else’s. If not for that I’m fairly certain that we would have been eating it for breakfast and lunch tomorrow too.

Check, Please!

When I wake up in the middle of the night with a dry mouth I generally lie there for a while trying to go back to sleep. Some of the time I succeed and other times I know that the only way to fall back into a peaceful slumber is to get up and quench my dehydrated tongue. We don’t keep a cup in the upstairs bathroom because the water in our town is undrinkable without first being filtered so I drag my stumbling feet out of bed and lumber along the hall and down the stairs into the kitchen.

I don’t generally have a problem weaving my way through the obstacle course made up of toys and baby gear in the dark thanks to the streetlight on our corner. But then, in the almost pitch blackness of four a.m., I open the refrigerator door and blind myself with the bright and glaring light that comes on in order to allow me to see the jugs of milk, the grapefruits and last week’s spaghetti that has been shoved into the back recesses of the bottom shelf.

Once the door to the fridge is swung shut I’m left with that bright spot across my field of vision that renders me completely blind and incapable of returning to my bed in the darkness in which I left it. So I turn on the some lights along the way in order to return to my bedroom in relative safety, without fear for life and limb, and wonder why I didn’t just turn on a light in the first place. I climb under the covers and snuggle down into my still-warm spot on the bed and speculate about how long it will be before I’m awakened again by my body in an urgent plea to relieve myself of the liquid I just put into it.

My husband and I went out to dinner last night for the first time since the baby has been born; she has been left with Nana a few times during the day so that I could go to doctors’ appointments, but she has never been left with anyone during the evening. Of course she decided not to take her late afternoon nap, so by the time seven o’clock rolled around she was starting to get pretty tuckered and cranky.

My poor sister is a trooper. We were gone for a little over two hours and the baby cried hysterically and inconsolably for the second hour that we were gone; my son obviously thought that his auntie didn’t have her hands full enough and he decided it would be a good time to try out some new, previously unused vocabulary. When his auntie told him not to jump off the arm of the couch he spread his arms wide and asked, “why not?” Ugh. I’m sure the next time my husband and I want to go out my sister will be busy shampooing her cat.

Boys Will Be Boys

Some days a person just really needs a good laugh, or at least something funny to smile at. My husband put a broken bicycle at the curb for garbage men to haul away today. After the big blue truck turned our corner the driver stuck his head out of the cab to take a look at the shiny bike while another of the guys wheeled the bicycle out into the street. It must not have looked broken because one of the burlier, brightly vested men decided he would try to take it for a spin; he rode the bike about three wobbly inches before he decided that there was a good reason for its being relegated to the curb. With a shrug of his shoulders he chucked it into the back of the truck.

Have Cape, Will Still Unravel

Just about two months ago I had a birthday. My Daddy and Grammy (my mom’s mom) put their heads together and made me a cape in honor of my blog’s title. Really, it’s a cape/lap blanket, which makes it not only fun but functional as well. The cape is swell and I think that it was a very creative and thoughtful gift.

It would seem that merely being the possessor of a cape does not equip a person with super-hero powers. I’m looking into taking a class titled “Capes and How to Use Them.” After having ownership of said cape for less than twenty-four hours a great and terrible sickness overcame my son and quickly conquered and pulverized the rest of us. Since then things have broken that I have been unable to repair, and my son is sick again and has a horrible viral rash that looks to be taking over his soft baby skin and turning it into something akin to red cauliflower. It’s dreadful.

I’m not the most computer savvy person out there. I finally learned how to move pictures from the digital camera to the computer. Previously this had been my husband’s job, but I thought it would be useful to know how to do it myself. I managed to find the USB cable and plug the camera into it; I even handled moving the images from the memory card into the picture program. That was as far as I got before I ran into some problems and became utterly confused. Confusion is not something that my brain understands very well and I flew into a panic and had to call my Dad for help. He was able to fix all of my troubles (he’s good at that) although I think he got a good dose of psychotic babbling from me in the interim. Alas, my cape failed me again: I could really use an instruction manual. Maybe I need the stretchy pants too…