A Boat

Where we used to live had bulk trash pickup 4 times a year.  Let me tell you about the awesome crap people throw away!  My brothers have enjoyed participating in my cruises through the neighborhood.  One time we found a Little Tikes boat.  It's either a kid pool or sand pit, unfortunately there's a hole in the bottom.  I've had the intention to repair it for some time, but that has yet to happen.  That doesn't stop the grandkids from playing on it every chance they get.

Easter 2016

I don't have any plans for getting my crew together for Easter, maybe I'll do it in a week or two.  Despite my slackassedness my daughter showed up after church with her son.  YAY!!!  So grandma whipped out her camera and followed him around the yard.  200 pictures later (not exaggerating)... I plucked a few key shots.

This guy is "GB3" GrandBaby3 (#3 out of 4).  He's the only child of my daughter, 20 months old and is SO sweet. 

Radom Picture of the Day

In August I shipped my youngest off to college.  How on earth was I going to keep in touch with this kid?  A weekly phone call like my mom established with me was not going to happen... ACK!  On his first day I begged for a picture, any picture, just so I knew he was still alive.

When a smartass raises children, they are bound to be strong in the smartass skills.

I can't even begin to tell you how happy this single picture made me.  Then I asked his siblings to do the same.  Unaware of this shot, his sister sent a similar picture as she sat in the airport waiting to go to Las Vegas.

And so it began.

We created a facebook chat group with the intent of sending a picture everyday.  Everyday turns out to be unrealistic but a few times a week we exchange random pictures and sometimes it prompts conversation.  In the last eight months I have had better communication with all three of my children than I have had in the past eight years.  We talk!  It's fabulous! 

And the pictures?  Well, they're random...

We finally let my daughter-in-law in the club and now I see updates on my grandbabies.

Oh yeah, since my last post I have gained a FOURTH grandchild, a beautiful little girl.

It IS different when it's your daughter

I had already been on baby watch twice with my son, but with my daughter I was going to be in the room. So I knew I was going to be more involved with the birth than just pacing the waiting room. Then we had the whole debacle that baby-daddy couldn't be present so her aunt (my ex's sister) stepped in to be the other person.

My attitude going in was that I was going to be holding her hand and wiping her forehead. I have NEVER had any interest seeing a baby emerge into the world. Sure as hell didn't want to see my own hoohoo in the mirror, but also not interested in seeing anyone else's even my own daughter.

Through the whole night when the nurse came in to check her we would give her privacy or turn away. That all changed when it came time to push. Aunt and I were to help pull her knees up to her chin. At that point all of her glory was out there for all to see. And as anyone who has given birth, we all remember by that point you don't really care who is there and what is on display. That's probably why she didn't care that the other grandma and my mom were also in the room getting a front row seat.

As the baby's head became visible I stayed in my position still not interested. Aunt did finally leave her post to check out what everyone was oohing and ahhing about. Nope, not me. Then the head got past the pubic bone and wasn't slipping back into the canal. The top of his conehead was actually hanging out! And yes, even from my position I could see it. OH MY GOD it was so cool! Her last two pushes were the hardest thing she ever did and we were holding her through the whole process then zip zap zam her little boy slipped right into the doctor's hands. Totally amazing.

Yes, it would have been amazing to see my daughter-in-law give birth, but it was truly magical to be so active in my own daughter doing it. I wasn't just holding her hand giving her words of encouragement but actually holding her, giving her feet the resistance needed to push, cradling her shoulders when she pulled up. I felt each and every surge.

They slid the slimy, screaming conehead baby with the purple body onto her chest. She burst into tears getting to see him for the first time. I kept wiping her tears away so she could focus. When they took him to get cleaned up I continued to hold her hand through the painful stitches. The doctor asked if I wanted to see where she ripped - NOPE, hell no.

It wasn't until the exhaustion swept over her that I finally left her side to check out my newest grandchild. His conehead hiding under a beanie, his skin clean and finally pink, and one eye darting around this bright new world.

Raising Boys

Is it sexist to say boys and girls are different? I mean beyond physical differences, aren't we all the same at our core?

No.

As soon as you bring home your little bundle wrapped in blue the realization starts to dawn.  All of those years staring at your partner wondering why his mother didn't do more?  Couldn't she tame that animal spirit?  Tone down the dust storm?  Yeah, it was hopeless from the beginning.  You probably owe her an apology.

The difference lies in how we express ourselves.  Girls use their heads, not so much thinking although that too, but they use their mouths with a stream of words that flow with every inhale and exhale.  Their eyes not only absorb but also flow.  Women can TALK with their eyes, not just "come hither" looks but mothers telling their children to pipe down or a full dialog between friends with a simple roll of eyes.

Boys use their other five limbs.  Yes, I am including the little dingle-hopper between their legs.  If they use their head, it will be as a sixth limb, usually to clobber something.  Using the head as a legit soccer move was most definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt, invented by a boy.

That's not to say girls aren't physical because they are.  That's not say girls can't be rambunctious because they are.  But there is an intensity to the physical nature of boys that make girls seem... delicate.  Being physical is the first option for a boy.  He will ram into, stomp, hit, jump, or run before anything else. 

(OMG, while writing this my husband just turned on The Andy Griffith Show which drives me INSANE.  The whistling theme song comes on, I look up, then look over to him with a KILL look.  He grins and without a word, changes the channel.  Yes, we women TALK with our eyes.  A smart man will learn to listen with his eyes.  Or die.)


You would think this physical boyness would hit sometime in the grade school years when other boys would have influence.  Or maybe as early as pre-school?  Or when his father displays his own boyishness?  Nope, right from the start, all on his own, without any other male influence.  There is something with those rapid leg thrusts or his deep, demanding squawk.  He is learning very early on how to use his body at its full physical maximum.

He will discover his penis about the time he can grab his toes.  His fascination with his toes will wane as soon as he can fully sit up, but not that other appendage.  That is a life-time fascination.  It will be up to you to teach him that it is not proper to display it, touch it, talk about it or in any other way wield that thing in public.  And good luck when he discovers peeing.  When I worked at a daycare center I once had to go into the boys bathroom to break up a Star Wars style pissing contest between four boys standing at the urinals.  They were gleefully crossing streams and making the WORST MESS EVER.

And gadgets.  Oh my God, the gadgets.  It starts with toys and ends with, well, toys.  Golf clubs,  cars, game adapters, cell phones, remote controls, lawn mowers, computers, or power tools.  These are all just extensions of their limbs.  Yes, again, women use, even collect all of these devices, but we just don't weild them with the same intention or intensity.  We use tools for an end, to accomplish a task.  For boys using the tool IS the task.

I think they see, hear, taste, and feel the world in a language us mothers cannot comprehend.  Like a dog whistle, it's something we simply can't hear.  My 2 year old grandson was playing at my house.  I finally halted his non-stop motion to change his diaper.  It was impossible to pull down his pants with his pockets jammed packed with something.  One by one I pulled out five big, white rocks.  I do not have any white rocks in my yard.  These rocks arrived with him.  I changed his diaper and redressed him and handed him his rocks which were promptly shoved back into his pockets.  Then he toddled over to my collection of pretty stones and started to pocket them as well!  When I tell women this story they laugh at the ridiculousness of it.  Men look blankly at me with, "well, of course he would."

Boys aren't all muscle and no feeling.  Their feelings, however, are usually expressed physically.  A girl will take her most cherished items and proudly display them on neatly dusted shelves, never touched, only to be admired.  Boys take their favorite items straight to the backyard, run them through the dirt, hang them from a tree, strap them on bicycles, splattered in mud.  The most egregious thing a mother could ever do is wash her son's favorite stuffed animal.  Through the muck and indiscernible stains we stitch the ear back into place and promptly sanitize our hands.

Boys are caught off-guard that not everyone sees the world through their curious little eyes.  A girl will wail for days on end about her poor decapitated doll.  Her brother amused the lawn mower can make such a precision cut is suddenly wrought with guilt not for the damage he caused to his sister's toy, I mean that's what you DO with toys, right?  No, he's sorry his actions hurt her.  He can't fix it, he can't make her stop feeling sad.  Years after she rebounded with new favorite toys, he will still ache for the pain he caused her.

Our little boys, in reality, are tender hearted creatures.

A year and a half ago, my ex-husband's father passed away.  He was a sweet man who loved his family, even those of us that married into and divorced out.  Love was his tool, and he wielded it expertly.  Losing Ralph rippled through the community, but shattered his family.  Everyone rallied around expressing the love they had so warmly received.

At his funeral I sat at the back of the church next to my mom, my brother, and his wife.  My father-in-law had touched many people and it was only right that my family came to pay their respects.  In the first pew my ex-husband, a big, lumbering biker, a former Marine crumbled, devastated and whimpering in his wife's arms.  At the other end my daughter still managing to dribble tears after days of non-stop crying was curled up next to her boyfriend.  Behind her sat my two sons, ages 15 and 23.  They sat stoically in a boyish silence unsure what to do with all of this grief around them.  They were used to seeing their sister cry but seeing their dad so dismantled was surely unnerving.

I don't remember what was said, but whatever it was it struck my sons simultaneously.  The bricks their physical boyishness had encased around each of them suddenly crumbled.  Tears rolled out, big sobbing tears out of both of them.  Grandpa Ralph was dead, and they hurt.  A lot.  Shaking and trembling they threw their arms around each other.  Maternal instinct thrust me out of my seat just short of climbing over all of those pews and I ran to them.  Suddenly I had my arms around my two little boys, devastated and hurting.  If they could have crawled up on my lap, they would. 

Having sons can be a challenge.  Boys jump and leap, run, and headbump, all with vigor.  Things will be broken and "clean" will be an eternal quest.   As you clean out pockets filled with mysterious white rocks from a bouncing little boy with smudges on his face, never forget underneath it all is the most fragile heart of any creature you will ever meet.  It is our jobs as mothers to protect that heart and make sure that it doesn't get buried and trapped under all of the toys and gadgets, bricks and stones they clutter around themselves as a shield. 

There is nothing on earth like a little boy.

I am still alive

Everyday I open my computer I think "I really should post something on my blog" and then catch up on Facebook and play a few games and before I know it time has slipped away from me.  Actually my TV and computer time have become grossly shortened.  I miss it, that's for sure, but life got busy.  Don't worry, though, I've had a camera capturing much of it.

Work has been crazy busy for me.  Last week was our annual auction which always sucks the life out of me.  The very next day I jumped into the finishing touches of our new website.  What should have been a couple of days worth of work has turned into over a week.  A lot of my progress has been hampered by my learning curve.  I'm having fun and definitely got the hang of it, but it's hard to stay on task when there are so many cool possibilities!

On the home front life is even crazier.  We have so much work that needs to be done for our house and only so much time and help to get it accomplished.  In March we had four trees dropped.  Instead of letting the cutter haul away the debris we kept it.  I wanted firewood and mulch.  The drawback is that the piles are moving very slowly.  My brother and his family descended on my house one weekend to haul the wood to one central location in the yard and run the limbs through the chipper/shredder.  Now it's May and the city has cited me for the bigass mess in my yard - not like I haven't been working on it since March, though.  I've been out there every weekend puttering away.  Half of my woodchip pile has been transferred to the front yard to kill the grass for a large flower garden.  The awesome part of that is the woody scent fills the air and is absolutely wonderful.  It's definitely much nicer than the nasty bagged crap the neighbor put out.  We were gagging on that for weeks.

My stacked wood pile wasn't far enough off the ground for the city's regulations so that has been torn down and raised.  I actually knocked that out in one day on my own.  There's still another pile of even larger logs that still need to be split.  They are too heavy for me to wrestle so I need my sons and a rented log splitter to converge at my house in the next couple of days.

There's light at the end of the tunnel and it will be great once it's all done.  This definitely took 3 times as long as expected.  Oh well.

We've also been wrestling my husband's worsening issues with his legs.  He has been suffering severe swelling and sores below the knees.  After several visits to the doctor I finally asked about compression socks.  We were sent to a medical supply/pharmacy who then sent us to an orthotic supplier.  The lady who met us there took one look at his legs and said, "lemphadema".  This was later confirmed and diagnosed by his doctor.  Basically he has had an injury to the lymph nodes behind his knees, his was years of wear and tear but for many people it comes from chemotherapy.  He requires wraps like ace bandages to bring down the swelling.  Finally it came down far enough that he was fitted for compression garments, not a sock, but a velcro locking system that goes up each leg. 

None of this is ideal and we have had to shift a lot in our lives to accommodate what is now a real disability.  His mom stayed with us for several weeks to drive him to and from appointments and treatment sessions.  He has lost nearly all ability to drive except short distances.  He needs help getting dressed and undressed, especially when wearing his compression garments.  It is time consuming but there is also light at the end of this tunnel.  He will never be cured of his lymphadema but now we know how to control it.  Our biggest hurdle is getting the gross ulcers on his legs to heal.  Last week I had the doctor prescribe silvadine and immediately, I mean within hours, we saw improvement.  That shit is MAGIC.  It's frustrating that I have to lead his doctor around by the nose but I haven't been wrong yet.  I learned from the lady at the orthic office that most doctors are uninformed about lymphadema.  Crazy but solutions are coming.

The happy part of my life is that I now live significantly closer to my grandchildren.  The daycare center is just around the corner from my house.  If it's even two miles away I would be surprised.  Later this week... well tomorrow... I will be picking up my two beautiful grandbabies to spend a few hours playing at my house.  In a few short months my daughter's baby (it's a boy!) will get to join the fun.  We are impatiently awaiting his arrival in mid-August. 

I have many many stories to share so maybe my hiatus will have been a good thing!



I wonder what I will post tomorrow?