it’s not about you

There.

I said it.

If you are not bleeding, dismembered, and if no body parts are broken, please:

DO NOT INTERRUPT MY MORNING COFFEE.

Be advised that if you do, consequences could include, but are not limited to, the following: bleeding, dismemberment, or broken bones.

You have been so warned.

We had big plans for this weekend, what with the extra day off and all. Everything started off with a bang on Friday night. I was reading a book to Judah and Joshua and Killian were chasing each other in the back. I heard Killian fall and then heard him scream. He apparently went face first onto the floor and busted his lip pretty bad. I got some ice for him and Joshua held him while I applied ice to his mouth. He didn’t like that at all.

After a few moments, I got a look inside his mouth and noticed that not only was he bleeding from the lip, but that he was bleeding from the gums right where one of his upper teeth was. I also noticed that it looked like the tooth had been pushed back - it wasn’t lined up with the other one - and I wiggled it. It felt loose.

I called the kids’ dentist, who’s a really nice man and as far as I can tell, a good dentist. He told me to take my thumb and push his tooth back into place for a good ten seconds, and that Killian wasn’t going to like it one bit. He said the tooth would either be fine or it could discolor and/or die and then we would have to take steps depending on the severity of the injury. We’re supposed to monitor his tooth over the next month to see it turns a brown or grey color and if it looks like there is any infection in the root. He told us what to look for. So that was that. Killian woke up Saturday morning, looking like he’d had a bout with Rocky around the mouth. Despite pushing on his tooth - and he wasn’t thrilled about that - it remains further back that the other one.

We also decided to switch rooms with the kids since we had the bigger room and they had the smaller one. We never use our room during the day, but I am constantly in the kids’ room all day, as that’s where they spend most of their time playing. Once a few buckets of toys are spilled out, it gets kind of cramped.

We had thought about using the whole three days to slowly transfer everything over, but once we got started, we had everything moved by the time the kids went to bed on Saturday. We’re still tweaking the arrangement of the furniture, but so far, this is going to work out much better.

Having all the major furniture switched on Saturday turned out to be a huge blessing, because Judah woke us up, and by “us” I mean Joshua, at 1:30 Sunday morning with a 102 degree fever and spent the rest of the night and the next day in our bed. She was feeling pretty wimpy. I stayed home from church and took care of her.

Joshua decided to sleep with Killian last night to give Judah and me more room in the bed. I wanted her close by in case she got sicker during the night. I was awakened at 2 a.m. by Joshua calling for help because Killian had thrown up all over himself, Joshua, and the bed. I sat with Killian in the bathroom, stripping him of his puke-covered clothes, while Joshua stripped and changed the bed and got himself new pajamas. No sooner than they got settled back down in bed together, than Killian threw up again, hitting not only the towel Joshua had laid down, but Joshua and the sheets and himself again. So we got up again and stripped everything and changed everything.

Judah decided to take that moment to fully wake up and say she was hungry. She kept puppy-dogging me and I had to keep sending her back to bed. I took her temperature, which was spiking, and gave her a dose of Tylenol. Everyone crawled back into their beds. There’s something about sleeping with a feverish preschooler - she wants to sleep ON TOP OF YOU. Then, when she rolls over, she takes all that great heat with her, so you’re left shivering from the difference. Judah didn’t sleep much after all of that, and about an hour later, woke up from a half-doze and suddenly popped off the bed, announcing, “I’m going to get some breakfast!” she was halfway out the bedroom door before I could get her to crawl back in bed.

Killian came toddling in at five a.m., and crawled in bed with me, laying his head down on my chest. I thought it was sweet, until he started lifting up my shirt, looking for a snack. I refused to nurse him, due to the vomiting, and he screamed bloody murder for a while as Joshua padded in and extracted him, taking him back to their room. Of course, Judah thought this meant she could get up and declared, “I want a hot dog for breakfast!” I made her lie back down.

We managed to keep the kids in their rooms until about 8:15 this morning, when I told Judah she could go play quietly in her room for a little while. Shortly after, Killian came toddling into our room again and I decided to see if he could nurse and keep it down. Joshua headed off to the kitchen to make some breakfast and to START THE COFFEE, and as soon as he turned the corner, I heard him holler.

Apparently, ants had found their way into the kitchen through a crack along the window and a thick black line of ants was snaking its way down the frame, across the backsplash and across the counter, and swarming all over the compost bowl, which we had forgotten to take out the night before.

While Joshua was wiping ants and trying to deal the with compost, I was standing next to him, holding Killian in my arms and watching, when - you guessed it - Killian hurled all over me. So there’s Joshua, his hands thick with ants, trying vainly to contain them as they are quickly spreading across the counter, and me, covered in vomit from shoulders to feet, trying vainly to catch everything with my hands.

After the ants had been vanquished and Killian had been bathed, and I had changed clothes and we both stood there with a cup of coffee in our hands and two full loads of vomit-soaked laundry in the hall, while Joshua made oatmeal, I asked him “Aren’t you glad you have this three day weekend, so you can kick back, take it easy, and just relax a little bit?”

Sometimes you just have to make a choice to laugh.

Judah slept in this morning and Joshua, after kissing her sleeping head goodbye on his way to work, told me I needed to go in and look at her. I did, and she was passed OUT, her mouth and eyes half-open, and sniffling slightly. I told Joshua she must be getting a cold or something and he nodded in sympathy with me.

Judah woke up a short time later and toddled into the kitchen in her bunny slippers to say good morning. I sent her to the bathroom to go pee-pee. After a few minutes I went to check on her. She was finished and was trying to clean out one of her nostrils with a square of toilet paper. I asked her if she was stuffy and sniffly this morning, and she said:

“No, I’m just trying to get the paper out of my nose.”

Oh, okay.

Wait.

What?

What paper?

I had her tilt her head back and I peeked up her nostril. Sure enough, there was a very soggy white thing stuck up her nose. She was trying to sniff it back and forth. I grabbed a tissue, closed her other nostril and told her to blow hard. Thankfully, the little puppy came right out. Apparently, she shoved that in there before she went to sleep last night.

We had a little discussion about how she shouldn’t put things up her nose and how dangerous it is to do so. I asked her if there was any more paper in her nose and she said no. We went into the kitchen to fix her breakfast and I called Joshua to tell him all about it. By the time we hung up the phone, Judah was messing with her nose again. I asked her what was going on, and she said there was paper in the OTHER nostril, too.

So we went back to the bathroom to blow that one out as well. Luckily, that one also came out easily.

I thought when my kids left toddlerhood, they would quit doing things to try to kill themselves. I suppose it just changes - from accidentals to doing things ON PURPOSE.

I’m adding a “death wish” category. I figure Killian - and Judah, for that matter - is going to get into enough things and do enough things that this should warrant its own criteria.

For example, yesterday morning, I was sitting at my mom’s make-up table, getting ready, and Joshua was in our bathroom brushing his teeth, when we heard Judah yell from the dining room, “He’s sitting on the table!”

Joshua runs down the hall to see what’s going on, finds Killian, sitting on his knees, content as can be, in the exact middle of the dining room table, and quickly plucks him off.

Constant vigilance, my friends. Constant vigilance.

And I’m mostly better. And on the bright side, I’ve lost eight pounds. While it’s not my diet of choice, hey. It’s the new year. I’ll take it. I’m now back down to my pre-pregnancy weight. And also on the bright side, after taking off two days of work and quarantining me in the bedroom for four days, and accidentally dropping the entire pot of tortellini into the sink, knocking over the strainer and watching ALL but a few pieces of the tortellini go right down the drain, Joshua will never again come home and wonder what I’ve been doing all day.

“How do you do this?” he asked me. “Every day?”

I just laughed. Maniacally, I laughed. At him, too. I hear the tortellini was good.

And in Death Wish news, while closing the door to the flat this morning on my way to take Judah to preschool, Killian fell down the first set of brick stairs in our stairwell. He walked right off - didn’t even pause. I tried to grab him, but my fingers only grazed his hoodie. The kid totally flipped head over heels. He went down face first, his head hitting about the middle step and his body cartwheeled right over him, landing legs-and-butt-first on the landing, before the rest of him came to a stop. Amazingly enough, I think his momentum kept his head from hitting too hard. And as far as I call tell, his only injuries are three bloodied knuckles.

I’ve checked him over, head to toe, and while he’s clingy and quiet, I think he’s OK. He didn’t get dragged down any of the steps and I don’t see any bumps or bruises. He cried more out of shock and fear than from injury. Of course, Judah completely freaked out and started crying, too. The girl loves her brother.

That must be one of the worst feelings in life: watching your baby take a bad fall and only being able to watch helplessly from the sidelines. Brent, am I a bad parent if I deny him a skateboard??? I mean, he hasn’t even ASKED yet.

Also, today’s is my mom’s birthday. She would have been 57 years old. Happy Birthday, Momma.

Yesterday evening, right before Joshua got home, I had nursed Killian on the couch, and when he was done, he got down and toddled off toward the kids’ room where Judah was playing. I took a moment to drop and close all the mini-blinds in the two front rooms and then followed him back. Guess where he was when I got there?

IN THE TOP BUNK. PLAYING WITH JUDAH.

I totally freaked out. I asked Judah if he got up there by himself and she said no, that she had HELPED him! She knows he’s not allowed to climb the ladder and usually, she lets me know if he’s ever making a break for it. We don’t even allow her to be in the top bunk when he’s around so he won’t want up there as well and be tempted to try. I’m wondering if she went up behind him or pulled him up to the bunk once she was already up (freaky thought for both of them, that way), though I don’t think I can bring myself to ask. I made them both get down and then Judah and I had a talk about how dangerous it is for him to be up there and that if he fell he could get seriously hurt, and that he could even die. To make it worse, the entire floor was strewn with every block they own. That’s not exactly a soft landing pad.

Scary!

We have got to be vigilant with that one, Killian. During the Christmas break, I went to get a haircut and while I was gone, with our entire family at our house, Killian dragged a dining chair over to the Christmas tree, got on it, leaned over to mess with the tree and fell headfirst through the tree to the floor. Once, strapped into his booster seat in the kitchen, while I was cooking dinner, Judah opened the fridge to get something out, and Killian grabbed the handle. When Judah closed the fridge, Killian refused to let go of the handle, and fell over, in his booster in the chair, sideways. Thankfully, his arm that was holding the handle, dragged down the side of the fridge, and in doing so, prevented his head from smacking the floor. We have since put his booster into a sturdier chair.

He’s the climber, and the getting-into-everything boy, the one who sticks his hands in the toilet and tries to breathe his bathwater and climbs on the windows and the bookcase and the dresser and the coffee table and the open dishwasher and stands on the rocking chair and sticks his fingers in the outlets and things in his mouth and boy are we ever in trouble with that one.

Every day that goes by that doesn’t send us to the ER, I’m going to consider a good day.