I’m so tired I’m about to go to sleep before my kid does. These have been some crazy 24 hours.
See, the King of Everything went to the park with his grammie yesterday. They bought peaches at the farmer’s market. They played with the little kids. They had a great time.
He fell off the monkey bars. Only, he didn’t land on his feet. He landed on his elbow.
“Don’t call my mom, Grammie,” the King of Everything asked.
“Why not, sweetie?” my mother asked him.
“I don’t want her to be worried,” was his reply.
The emergency room isn’t yet filled to capacity with idjits who think they can go all Olympian on their own arses and come out anywhere but on the bottom of the heap, the hill, the pile. So it didn’t take too long to x-ray, splint, and send the boy home with instructions to see a specialist in the morning.
The doctor was a kind man, with a special way of talking to kids that wasn’t condescending, but wasn’t gruff, either. He took about thirty seconds, poking around on the kid’s elbow area, before he nodded and declared, “This is a pretty benign injury, as far as injuries go. Kids’ bones are much more flexible than adults’. They bend, instead of break. But your little guy’s going to be in a cast for two to three weeks.”
The KoE picked out a hot, red cast. This fiberglass stuff is amazing, and the surgeon who put it on was wonderful. The KoE took everything in stride, and never once complained about it. I’m sure the novelty will wear off in a few days when he realizes he can’t scratch under that thing until the 20th.
Poor King of Everything.
Be sure your caregivers, whether profession or family, have copies of your health insurance–if you’re lucky enough to HAVE health insurance–as well as doctor’s name and address and phone number.
The Missed Connections section of Craigslist is peppered with a mysterious string of letters: MILF.
MILF is always in the M seeking W section, never the W’s seeking M’s. It kept catching the corner of my eye, a small irritant waving and dancing for attention. It reminded me of a post-punk band name from the late 80’s, but I couldn’t wrap my brain around the puzzler. What on earth is a MILF?
Do you know? If you’re a single mother, you should.
Mother I’d Like to F…
Yup. There’s a subsection of masculinity that, it seems, is fantasizing about squeezing some real, organic canteloupes. Obviously, I should stop buying my groceries online and start shopping the produce aisles.
MILF. This makes me wonder about every smile a strange man has shot my way, while I toil down the street on the way to the park, schlepping a metric ton of toys and wondering if I’ll ever remember to brush my hair again. MILF. It raises a spectre of baby-stained tee shirts and bleary-eyed complicity. If the just got out of bed look is considered sexy, what on earth am I doing to men with my disheveled, desperate desire to be IN bed? Since when did being overworked, underpaid, and at the behest of a small tyrant become sexy? Desirable? Dare I say it? F-able?
Maybe I should stop admitting that sometimes, I like to read the Missed Connections and wonder if someone missed me…
I was poking around, wondering what other parents are stocking up on for back to school. Fatherhood over on about.com has a great top ten list. My favorite? Crayons that don’t roll. And the video about how to pack school lunches. That dad is adorable. I want to brush his hair.
What hot back-to-school stuff are your kids bugging you about, single moms? I’m lucky, my kid wears uniforms to school and doesn’t care that his clothes are hand-me-downs. Makes life easier on this solomother.
The active ingredient in this cool summer science experiment is sodium acetate, a relatively benign substance as far as chemicals go, but not one you want to mess with unneccessarily. I’d love to do this one with the King of Everything next summer, when he’s six. Interestingly enough, his favorite science experiment, combining vinegar and baking soda, is an initial step to producing sodium acetate in a lab. Go figure.
Recommended safety includes: gloves, goggles, and a mask. The Materials Safety Data Sheet is found here… None of this stuff is fatal in small doses, but if you want to teach your child good science, you should probably include good science safety in the lesson.
I’m poking around b5media this evening, to see what my compatriots in blogging and parenting are up to. Career and Kids is on about backpacks for back to school — and since the King of Everything’s uniform trousers, which my mother ordered from Land’s End last year, were like teflon, I’m sure this backpack is a good deal.
I check in at Weary Parent fairly often, and Charlene’s August 1st post had me laughing out loud. If you’ve always wondered what to do with that enormous pile of unmatched socks, Camp Weary Parent has a brilliant solution for you… a summer snowball fight!
And over at Simply Home Remedies, you’ll find some great advice on how to treat bee stings… did you know, you should scrape the stinger out, not pull it out? Well, now you do. There are several other great tips to take the sting out of a bee sting. Too bad there’s nothing we can do for the bee…
The days are already noticably shorter. I’m trying not to mourn the impending loss of summertime freedoms, or that I’m going to miss my son’s first day of Kindergarten (thank goodness, he’s been going to school since he was three, so this isn’t his first day of school ever, but still) due to work necessities. September looms, even in these first few days of August. I’m looking forward to autumn rituals. I’m dreading the holidays. I’m seeking a path that helps me always bend, rather than break.
