Pig Bites and Summer Vacation

"God. When I was your age, I flipped burgers all summer just to buy an eight-track." ~ American Beauty

Tick tock.

The time is winding down, and the clock is about ready to strike, bringing us to the majority of working moms' most stressful time of year...

Summer Vacation.

Throughout the years my anxiety levels have run the gamut, morphing into their own special concerns as my kids have gotten older.

When they were really small, like babies, the only time I ever had summers off was if I managed to coincide them with a maternity leave. Funny, four kids age 7 and under never left me as relaxed as I had thought. I usually had one on the boob, one on a hip, and two more dancing around me, teasingly out of reach. Never was I able to sit pool side, sipping a margarita while all four would miraculously nap at the same time. Nope, the closest I ever got to leisurely pool activities is the one time when I jumped in - fully clothed in jeans and a t-shirt - because two year old Chloe drove her scooter straight into the deep end of the pool. That was fun.

Then when I stopped having babies, summer vacations consisted of paying obscene amounts of daycare costs for three months.

Eventually the years passed and the kids were allowed to spend limited amounts of their summer vacation at home during the day. I'd come home to the central air on full blast, windows wide open and 17 cereal bowls in various stages of destruction on the counter top. When school would return in September, I'd practically weep with relief and offer freezy-pop sacrifices in the back yard.

Now they're older, and if I can get them to look up from their XBox, iPad, laptops and cell phones long enough to make eye contact with me, I'll consider it a miracle. Seriously, I told them they're going to have to get exposure to the sun this summer or they'll all come down with rickets if they don't get enough Vitamin D. I'll probably pull into the driveway after work some day in August and find them all bow-legged in the front yard, pointing at the sun and asking each other "What is that strange glowing orb in the sky? We have not seen it in many, many moons."

Now to be fair, it's not that the school year doesn't have its share of stresses either.

Just a few weeks ago I was taking a week long insurance class. During a break, I checked my voicemail. My first message was from my son's third grade teacher. As soon as I heard her voice, my stomach dropped.

Please don't let it be lice, please don't let it be lice...

"Hi Vanessa, could you call me please? It's about Wyatt..."

My initial fear immediately morphed into teeth clenching frustration. Good lord, if she tells me again that little turd didn't turn in his math homework, I am going to chuck his Xbox out of the window.

Her message continued. "There was an incident during Show & Tell. One of the kids brought in a pet pig and it, uh, bit Wyatt in the leg."

I immediately called her back because I was still a little confused. Who, or what bit him? And did he bite back? Who was more traumatized, Wyatt or the pig?

Now I love my kids' teachers. I have been seriously blessed with having these incredible role models teach and lead my children. I couldn't ask for better ones. So I could tell right away that his teacher felt horrible. As soon as she got on the phone she assured me my son was doing just fine, the bite didn't break the skin, and he was getting lots of TLC from the staff at the school. 

"And just so you know," she told me. "The pig is totally healthy and has had all its shots."

I paused.

To be honest, I wasn't even sure my kids were all up to date on their shots.

In all reality, the pig-biting incident will fade from my son's memory all too fast. Unless he's anything like his mother - and then he'll whip that gem out during a house party in college.

"Seriously dudes, one time I was ambushed by a wild boar in the wilderness. I fought it with my bare hands and fed my family pork chops and bacon for weeks. Nah...just kiddin'. I got bit by one during Show & Tell during 3rd grade." The girls at the party will think he's hilarious and every one's a winner.

So just as my kids are counting down the last remaining days of their school year, I'm making lists in my head during the day.

Daily Chores for Each Child

Time Allowed on Electronics

Charts and Expectations for Earning Money

Now that my two older girls are 14 and 16, I am hounding them almost daily. "Get a job, I am not kidding. You should be pounding the pavement and offering your babysitting services if nothing else. Do you know what I did for my first job? I got up at 4:30 every morning - "

"And milked cows at your grandparents farm, just so you could earn enough money to buy Guess jeans for the school year," they'll say in unison, rolling their eyes at my obviously oft-repeated speech.

"Well, it's true," I tell them. "I put up with manure all over me, just so I could earn my own money. We lived in the country, so I took whatever options were available. Now you kids live in town. Live in town, do you hear me? Your possibilities are endless."

And to be fair, my two older girls are lining up gigs in which they'll be paid. I'm proud of them. I know it's not easy to be one of my kids... in full disclosure they may very well be agreeing to summer jobs just to avoid my incessant meddling. Oh well. They can like me when they're adults, right? We can all go on a vacation together, and we'll be sitting poolside sipping margaritas (finally!) and we'll chuckle and laugh and they'll say, "Hey Mom...remember when you used to lose your shit and go nuts every June through September? And you'd rant and rave about us not making our beds, and spending too much time on our lap tops? And you'd embarrass us in front of our friends and hiss, 'Quit feeding every freakin' kid in this neighborhood during the day! Jesus Christ, I'm not made of money!' Remember when you would do that?"

And I'll smile and nod, and probably pop a well-needed Valium.

Ahhh, summer vacation....

The good ol' days.

Why, oh why, is there poop on my shower floor?

If your house is really a mess and a stranger comes to the door, greet him with "Who could have done this? We have no enemies." ~ Phyllis Diller


Most of yesterday was a really, really good day. It was my last day at my job, so my co-workers were especially nice to me. They brought me in cake, took me out to lunch and generally made a fuss over me. I like it when people make a fuss over me and bring me complex carbohydrates and don't expect me to work much. 
Afterward I went to a mall and met a friend for a smoothie. By the time I got home, I was feeling good.
I was feeling happy.
I was still basking in the newness of having my own place, decorated how I liked it.
I was feeling independent, smart, and dare I say it - slightly glamorous.
Then when I walked into my house, I went to drop off some bathroom products I had bought. I was thinking how happy I was that I found the perfect shower curtain to go in my bathroom. I was making a mental list of the products I was going to buy at Bath & Body when I got my next paycheck.
Then I got to the open door of the bathroom and dropped my bags, speechless.
Three pieces of poop were on my shower floor.
Oh for the love of all that is pure and holy... what is going on???
Seeing turds out of their natural habitat (say, a toilet bowl) is akin to seeing a zebra on its hind legs, pushing a grocery cart down an aisle. You recognize it, your brain tells you its a zebra, but at the same time you are wondering, "Now why in god's name am I seeing this? Here?"
The last couple days when I had taken a shower in that bathroom I had noticed that the drain was starting to back up, and it was taking longer for the water to go down the drain. It is technically a handicapped bathroom, so the shower is level with the rest of the floor, just dipped in the middle so the water stays in its little stall. Where it's supposed to. I figured it might be clogged with hair or something, so I just planned on checking it over the weekend when I had more time.
I certainly didn't expect to waltz in my bathroom and see poop lying on the shower floor, with black sludge and remnants of toilet paper strewn about. I couldn't even comprehend what I was seeing; what did it mean?
Did the poop back up from the pipes and come out the shower drain?
Did one of the kids overflow the toilet and just run away when things got out of control?
Where did the black sludge come from?
For god's sake, I just learned to use a stud finder this last weekend - I was light years away from understanding the intricacies of plumbing.
But what I did understand was that I couldn't ignore it.
The poop needed to be dealt with. And fast.
And there's nothing glamorous about dealing with poop. Especially mysterious poop. As a mom of 4, I have cleaned up more areas of crap off my body than one would think possible. 
I have cleaned it out of my hair.
Scrubbed it off my jeans.
Wiped it off my arms, and scrubbed it out of my fingernails.
I have gone an entire day, occasionally getting a whiff of something that smells like a diaper, and driving myself crazy thinking, "Where is that smell coming from?" It's a mother's aroma of reality.
But back to the present. Time to get shit done. I bagged up the runaway poop and got to work.
I stripped down the new glamorous shower curtain and liner and threw them in the wash. I took every towel and rug and threw them in the wash as well. Twice. I used a year's worth of cleaning products and scrubbed every damn inch of that shower. I scoured the grout in the stall and covered it in so much Mr Bubble that it looked like I was in a vertical foam coffin. I tested the toilet and nothing overflowed, but I scrubbed it clean again anyway.
When I was finally finished, I collapsed on the couch so I could watch 'Scandal.'
Hmmph, I told myself. Kerry Washington looks pretty glamorous. I bet her character never has to wrangle in some errant poop.
This morning I was taking my two youngest to school and began my investigation.
"Hey," I mentioned casually. "Did any of you happen to see the mess in the downstairs bathroom yesterday after school?"
"Oh my gosh, Mom!" Chloe said, turning to me. "I didn't know what that was! I couldn't figure it out. I brought Tanner over so he could see our new house and then I wanted to show him the bathroom and I opened the door and there was all this poop on the floor and I didn't know what to say so I just shut the door."
"Wait," I said, starting to grasp the situation. "You brought a friend over and he saw that?"
Great. Now we had witnesses to our poop shame.
But whatever...nothing we can do about it now. I just know I don't want surprises like that again. Just as I would prefer to see a zebra in the great outdoors, I don't want to see turds unless they're safely contained. And no rubber gloves or heavy industrial cleaning supplies are needed.
Is that so much to ask?

Nuthin a little WD-40 won't fix

"It's a great thing when you realize you still have the ability to surprise yourself. Makes you wonder what else you can do that you've forgotten about." ~Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999

 

 A year and a half ago I moved back in to my parents house, licking my wounds from a recent divorce and toting with me 4 kids and a dog. I'm sure that scenario wasn't exactly what my parents planned during their recent retirement, but I was welcomed back with open arms and my old bedroom.

Fast forward to the present, when I found a cute house in town to rent, close to my kids' schools and the park. The thought of moving in to my own place was exhilarating, and - to be honest - a bit terrifying. As I've mentioned before in previous posts, there are things I know I do well in life. And there are definitely things that I don't do well. For instance, anything that has to do with home maintenance and repair. Don't get me wrong, I can change a lightbulb and exchange a furnace filter with minor disruption. But if you ask me to mow the lawn or operate a weed whip, I'll start to twirl my hair absent mindedly and avoid eye contact. It's not that I would refuse to do it, it's just that I don't know how. Seriously. The first half of my life I had a dad that took care of the home stuff and outside work. The second half of my life I had a husband to do it. Now that I'm out on my own again, I realized I needed to learn to do these type of things. And fast.

Last weekend I went to Ikea with my parents, determined to buy a bedroom set. My dad waited in the loading area, while my mom and I picked out what I wanted. The sales person explained that I needed to pick up the furniture in the Self Serve warehouse, and told me where to grab a cart in which to load the boxes. After wandering around the disorientating Ikea maze, my mom and I finally ended up where we needed to be. I located a cart, checked my paper from the sales person, and headed toward Aisle 4. A moment later my mom asked, "When is someone going to come help us get the furniture?" "Mom," I said. "That's what Self Serve means. It means we have to get it ourselves."

"Oh," she replied. "I don't really like that."

"Me neither."

 

We finally tracked down the boxes we needed, and started loading the 10,000 pound pressed particle board furniture on to the cart. Attemting to navigate the cart toward the cashier was like trying to steer a semi truck on a go-kart course. I was all over the place and had very little control. But determined to do this like a functioning adult, I soldiered on.

Later on, I excitedly told my dad that I was sure I could put the furniture together myself. "Ikea is like every divorced woman's best friend," I told him.

"Who says that?" he asked. "Ikea?"

"No. My divorced friends."

A couple hours later he showed up at my new place with a handful of tools. "Happy housewarming! These will help when you work on the furniture."

"Yeah, about that..." I said warily. "I was looking at the instructions. There are no words in Ikea's instruction manuals, just pictures. And there is a picture of one person doing it all alone, with a sad face. And there is a big X over that picture. Next to it is a picture of two people working on it together, and they're both smiling. So I think that means you should maybe help me. You know, if you're not busy."

Luckily he agreed. Secretly I think he thought he better help me get set up so I didn't hurt myself and wind up back at his place indefinitely.

The next several hours were spent learning how to count pieces, operate tools, and figure out specifics of diagrams. I also learned why so many men swear when putting things together. It comes so natural. Like second nature. When I was doing battle with a screw driver and attempting to get a piece to line up, I couldn't help myself. The cursing flew out of my mouth like a symphony of my ancestors' mother tongue. "Get IN there, you dirty rotten bitch."

I think my dad was impressed.

And now I have a completed bedroom set that I can proudly say I helped put together. Well, most of it. I got bored with the hinges on the closet so I wandered into the kitchen and grabbed a Mike's Hard Lemonade, hoping my dad could finish without me.

He did.

All in all, I'm glad I tackled something that involved tools. It took the mystery and the unknown out of something I would have normally avoided. In the future, I can actually look at a screw driver and tell if it's a Phillips or not. Before this, the most recent useful advice I gave my daughters was in the shoe aisle at Target. "Seriously girls, don't buy high heels unless you know how to walk in them. It's a very unattractive look for a woman."

My 11 year old rolled her eyes. "Mom, I already YouTube'd it. You walk heel to toe, unless you're on steps and then it's toe only."

Well, so much for my much-imparted widsom.

So even though I feel like I've learned a lot of useful skills the last week, I know I have a lot more to learn. But the beauty of tackling one project gives you the confidence to tackle more. When my dad brought over a fully stocked tool kit the other night, I looked at it with a sense of possibility.

I've learned that WD-40 works wonders.

And how to work a stud finder and a leveler.

I've learned that if push comes to shove, I can do a lot of things by myself.

But it sure is nice to have help.