On a Break

We have just been overrun with illnesses at our place. Abby with the MRSA, both kids with stomach bug a few weeks ago and now Rob has one of those horrible sinus/cold combinations with headaches that last for days. I'll pop in to check on my favorite blogs, but don't be surprised not to hear from us for a bit. I'm up to my elbows in bleaching/bandaging! Quite literally.

Panic

We had to take Miss Abby to the ER Saturday night. Right in the middle of Rob's birthday supper. She had what we thought looked like an infected bug bite. A large, swollen, red lump on her inner thigh. It was painful and she was very clear that we weren't to touch it.

The doctor spent about 2 minutes with us (our of a 2 and a half hour stay) and told us, without benefit of a culture or any kind of test, that he suspected MRSA -
Methicillin Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus. She had a small abscess that would need to be drained, but it was too small for him to do then. We were told to wait until Monday to see our regular pediatrician and that the procedure could be done in the office. In the meantime, we were given a prescription for Bactrim, told to keep warm compresses on it and come back if it got worse.

Monday has arrived and we have a 3 p.m. appointment with our physician. Abby seems to feel good over all. She spent part of last night dancing around her room in her Happy Birthday tiara, wearing Dora pajamas and putting on garish blue eye shadow. I, however, am a wreck! Google is not your friend when your child is sick. Everything that pops up is worst-case scenario horrors. Not good for a worrywart like me. Good thing Rob can keep a level-head in these types of situations. It's the only thing keeping me from full-blown, nail-chewing, nausea-inducing PANIC!

Things You Don't Need/Want to Know about Me...

... unless I become J.K. Rowling famous someday and have my own category in Trivial Pursuit. The odds of that happening are right up there with us figuring out how to travel at light speed during my lifetime.

I can't dive. It looks so easy, but I can't make my top part fall ahead of my bottom parts.

People get my name wrong 90% of the time. Melissa, Melanie and Michelle are common substitutes. I find it weird. Melinda isn't a super common name, so it would seem to stick in the brain a little more easily than more common names, wouldn't it?

I have a thing for complicated sounding words; onomatopoeia (had to google the spelling), cockamamie, subterfuge, hyperbole, ambidextrous ...

I would LOVE to be good at artistic things: photography (no sense of proportion), baking (good taste, wonky decorating), sewing (the machine and I work against each other), and scrapbooking (looks like the dog made it).

My dancing is more enthusiastic than coordinated.

I can proofread something someone else writes, but not my own work. My brain always 'fixes' the mistakes in my head when I read over it.

I can't get into books on tape. There is something about reading at my own pace and using my own imagination for voices that I enjoy.

I just put away the last straggling bits of Christmas decoration. The box has yet to make it into storage though.

I'm a slacktart room Mom. J.T. and Abby came home with little hand-made valentines, neatly tied bags of candy, even homemade chocolates. Their schoolmates were lucky to get hastily done store-bought Transformer/Hannah Montana notes.

I love the way little kids don't quite get past tense verbs. He didded it, We swimmed yesterday, She taked my cookie. It is sweet reminder that they are indeed still little.

I abuse ... and ( ) too much. And I dangle my modifiers. And I start sentences with conjunctions. Which is a big no-no according to the English teachers who liked to bleed red ink all over my essays.

Funky music suits me right now. I am currently in love and playing incessantly: Gone, Gone, Gone and Stick with Me by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant, Sea of Love by Cat Power, You Know I'm No Good by Amy Winehouse and Love by Sugarland.

The Blurghs

I had just been mentally congratulating our family on avoiding the annual visit of the stomach flu, so of course Abby came home Monday and promptly deposited her afternoon snack on the driveway. 36 hours later her brother made it all the way to school before looking up at Dad and saying: "My stomach hurts." They turned around and came back home. Where he promptly repeated his sister's Monday afternoon experience.

Our poor washing machine has been running constantly and the bathroom has been bleached three times. So far, Rob and I have managed to avoid the blurghs. Which is a good thing as they reduce me to a tearful, wailing, "I want my motherrrrr" bit of uselessness.

J.T. spent two days at home and was shocked and dismayed to learn that Rob picked up his homework assignments on Thursday and he had to do homework on a sick day. He felt well enough to play legos, action figures and read comic books all day, but the sight of a stack of homework sheets brought the queasiness back. Funny, tax forms make me nauseous too!

The Rambling Mind

Boys with attention issues should never be taught to pee standing up.

Mothers with attention issues should never attempt a home mani/pedi when there is no fingernail polish remover in the house.

The bickering of young siblings is torture on a CIA-scale. Forget water-boarding. Let my kids fight over the guitar/dominoes/video game and the criminals will confess just to Make. It. STOP. It's like being pecked to death by a chicken.

Southerners don't like cold weather. We are thin-blooded.

Southerners don't like hot weather either.

Tracey was right. I do clean so the cleaning lady can come clean.

Michael Phelps just got dropped as an endorser by Kellogg's. I guess you could say he made a bong-headed mistake.

U-2's song The Sweetest Thing is underrated.

Common Sense is undervalued and scarce. $45 million for an executive jet while holding out your hand for government aid?

The U.S. tax code was written by a schizophrenic (spelled it wrong according tot he little red dots and way too lazy/sleepy to correct it) who was off his meds. Never mind. Rob fixed it. He says it may still be wrong.

If you clean it, they will dirty it rather quickly.

Sweet tea is sticky and hard to mop when it dries.

Hot cocoa with marshmallows is a lovely, lovely thing on a cold day. So is crab stew.

I think I have my contacts in the wrong eyes. Or my prescription is wrong.

If I were born before the age of corrective eye wear, I would have less than useless. Anything more six inches from my face is blurry.

Shutuplets

I have been watching the news about the nutjob who decided it would be great to go for in vitro and implant not one or two embryos, but EIGHT, despite the fact that she already had 6 children and was living with her parents. Not only was she apparently unconcerned about her health, the health of her children (8 babies in one uterus?) or her financial situation... NOW she's shopping her story around to publishers. You really, really should have to pass an intelligence test in order to be allowed to procreate.

Me: "So Rob. You wanna go for octuplets?"

Rob: (silence) and an evil look.

Me: "Septuplets?"

Rob: (more silene) and a more evil look.

Me: "Sextuplets? Quintuplets? Quadruplets?"

Rob: (more silence) and eyes that are no longer visible behind the most evil look of all.

then...
Rob: "How about shut-uplets?"

Say: "Cheese!"

I long for a decent picture of me. I'm hardly ever in any photos as I'm usually the one taking the photos. If, perchance there is a shot of me, it is one I inevitably don't like. Chin too wobbly, frizzy hair, weird facial expression or strange mark on my face. These are the latest attempt to capture a picture for my profile that a) doesn't look 'posed' b) is a reasonable facsimile of the real thing and c) is moderately flattering.

Yes.

They were taken in the car. My best lighting.

But I still look weird. Maybe it's not the camera after all!