On the glider with my feet tucked up under me, I sat watching my little baby, now a full blown walking (mostly running), talking toddler, play before bed.
He ran back and forth in his fire truck zip up pjs that are almost too short, his toes pushing the limit of the footies. He ran to one side of the room to retrieve his ball, ran back to the other side, and crouched down, hugging the ball to his chest. He bounced, half in his crouched stance, half anticipating his big move. “Eddie. Et. DOE!” Holding the ball just above his head and tipping it over the rim of his plastic hoop he then shouted “shoot!” and “oooooh!!!” when he made it in! And again, he ran back to get the ball and start the process all over.
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How is it that 8 people ended up in my kitchen at 8:00 AM today? (Keep in mind that’s really 7:00 considering the time change with daylight savings.)
That was the question I was asking myself around 8:01. My sister-in-law lives in Iowa, finishing her residency at the hospital there. She does come to town periodically but her schedule is always jam packed with friends to catch up with, weddings, parties, trips to visit out-of-state friends, etc. Sometimes we have to just savor that few minutes we can get whenever we can. So this morning we got up and threw a frozen quiche and a tube of cinnamon rolls in the oven, made a big pot of coffee, and welcomed her for a short time before we had to rush out to our next event. She brought with her a friend from Iowa and her mom, my mother-in-law. But who else showed up? Well, we currently rent a house that is owned by my husband’s aunt. So she stopped by to move some things, and brought her son-in-law to help her. We all gathered in the small kitchen, which has no table, standing and drinking coffee, catching up in the 20 spare minutes we all had. At first I thought of this as a stressful way to start my Sunday, “entertaining.” But really, it was a welcome chance to chat with family, and catch up before rushing off to our respective commitments. Since my sushi extravaganza on Tuesday went terribly wrong, I decided that today would be the day I’d get my sushi.
I learned my lesson, though, and instead of using a delivery service or an app, I did things the old fashioned way. I called and ordered and actually went to pick it up. It was, in fact, everything I dreamed of! While playing in the living room, my husband suddenly held up his hand with a confused look on his face and a drop of blood on his finger.
“I think he’s bleeding.” He concluded, referring to our 15 month old. I looked at his mouth first, then saw the drop of blood on his sock. So I pulled it off and looked all over his little foot. Nothing. Somehow both of us missed the blood ALL OVER the toy he was playing with and the floor around it. It was truly a shocking amount of blood considering Kellan didn’t make a single complaint or whine. Though it took a moment, we saw that his whole right hand was bloody, and actually dripping on the floor. I quicky picked him up and rushed him to the sink to clean it up and figure out the source. Initially it appeared that he had several cuts on his fingers, but after some time it was clear that the tip of his middle finger was the source of the blood. It was a fairly deep cut, but I figured if I could keep pressure on it (which ended up something like wrestling an alligator) it would stop bleeding. It wasn’t going to be that easy though. After several minutes, which felt much longer I removed the towel to see it was still bleeding. My husband grabbed a cotton pad and a bandaid and we tried our best to wrap it tightly around his tiny finger. Although Kellan didn’t even seem to notice he had cut his finger, at this point he was screaming and kicking and demanding the bandaid come “OFF!” We did everything we could think of to distract him, and he left it alone for a few minutes. I figured everything had settled down so I left the room to make dinner and Kellan played while his dad cleaned up the blood on the floor. “Oh man!” I heard my husband yell. “He got it off!” I rushed over to see Kellan still happily playing, and bleeding again. A regular band aid kept it in place a while longer, but about half and hour later, at bed time, the band aid was soaked through. The next 30 minutes were full of tears, screaming, holding his arm as still as possible, and trying numerous times to wrap a band aid around his finger. Luckily as I sit here writing this, I can say we were finally successful. It appeared that the cut had mostly stopped bleeding, and after Kellan was thoroughly distracted, he seemed to forget about it. I watched him on the monitor, laying unmoving except for his right hand, continuing to flex his fingers as he fell asleep. And now, finally, he is still. When you’ve been a dog mom for so long, and dedicated your life to rescue, deciding to add small humans to the family comes with a lot of questions.
Will the dogs like the baby? Will the baby like the dogs? Will the dogs get upset and jealous? Will we still be able to give enough time to keep rescuing and fostering? And I will be the first to tell you, it is a hard thing to balance. When I first found out I was pregnant, we had 3 dogs- 2 of our own and a foster, Atlas. Atlas found a home, and then we got another foster, Matilda. Then we lost our girl Sami and we made a permanent member out of Matilda. When Kellan was born we had just our 2 and decided to take a little break to adjust. Since then, our Rudy passed and we are left with sweet Matilda. We have not had only one dog in so, so long. It used to feel like the house was empty. But now, with a toddler, we are kept plenty busy. So much so that poor Matilda doesn’t always get the attention she probably should. My mother in law came over to visit tonight since she just got home from vacation. She brought Kellan a couple of small animal figurines, an owl and a puma. Kellan took them out of the bag and threw them on the floor, continuing to enjoy the bag for the majority of the night. But unfortunately Matilda found, and quite enjoyed, the owl. Now it only has one wing. He’s quite a special, unique owl now. Sorry, Matilda. You’re right, we need to pay more attention to you. I’m taking an online class right now about being a positive educator. The class meets on a group chat platform once a week from 7-9 PM.
When I signed up for the class, my thought was, “Oh that’s perfect, the same night as my husband goes to play basketball so we won’t ever have plans anyway.” What I should have thought was “Oh, there’s no way that can work, I can’t be in a live class and entertain, then put to bed a loud, energetic toddler.” For some reason none of this occurred to me. So tonight, again, I virtually attended half of my class with a toddler in the background- yelling, playing, running, and wanting desperately to bang on my keyboard. Last week this stressed me out beyond belief. This week I was ready for it. I took out some toys he hasn’t seen in a while, set my computer higher up, out of reach, and was prepared to just roll with it. One of the things about being a teacher, and being a mom, is I’m never not multitasking. My husband and I decided we would “celebrate” Fat Tuesday today by ordering out for dinner. I had a promo for DoorDash and we could order half an hour before baby’s bedtime to have it delivered just in time to enjoy on the couch with some TV.
We combed through the options on the menu of a local sushi place, where we’ve eaten and ordered a few times before, and after adding $47.00 worth of sushi to the cart on the DoorDash app, it froze. Several times we tried to refresh it. Over and over we got the same spinning red wheel threatening to take away our opportunity for sushi. After over half an hour it finally loaded, but the cart was empty. So we started over. Every item we chose wouldn’t load. Then the free delivery promo code was erased. $47.00 went up to $54.00. For delivery sushi... on a Tuesday. We decided, after all, to forget it. Logically we probably should have given up long ago. But now it is 8PM. And I am hungry. And I guess I’ll warm up leftovers. Today my students were doing some silent independent work and I was desperately trying to get my papers together to finish my grading tonight (grades are due in the morning).
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a student approaching me holding a tissue. Immediately I thought oh gosh, he got a bloody nose and he’s going to show it to me. I kind of waved him away and said “Go ahead to the office.” hoping I’d spare myself the sight of his bloody tissue. Instead he looked at me bewildered and shook his head. “No,” he replied, “where should I put this ant?” “Oh, did you squish it?” “No he’s still alive, see?” And he unfolded the tissue slightly to reveal a tiny, wiggling insect cradled inside. My heart just beamed and so did my face, so proud of him for the compassion he showed this tiny creature. Those who know me, know how important it is to me to appreciate and honor all life. And no doubt, you’ve seen me collect a spider or two to release outdoors. “Go ahead and run ‘him’ outside!” I copied his identification of the little guy as male. I’m not going to say that on this day, the day before grades are due, that every student got the absolute most out of every moment and every lesson I taught. But when you are least expecting it, the students show you they are learning. We looked at yet another house today, about 8 months deep into our search.
Granted we only sold our house 4 months ago, but it still feels like a lifetime. We decided this time to be really picky, to not let any of our “must haves” fall through the cracks. Since we only lived at our last house for just over a year, and the one before that, about 3 years, we aren’t interested in choosing another house that’s almost what we want when we move in, and soon after, not what we want. So for now we are renting month-to-month and trying to take our time. A coworker of mine joked the other day that I must be pretty used to temporary living, and partially that is true. But I’m also really, really tired of it. A large portion of my belongings are in storage, and a lot of what isn’t is still packed, thinking optimistically that I’ll be moving it all soon anyway. I think the hard part is that most of the houses we see, I start to build up in my head, thinking about where Kellan will go to school, which grocery store we will shop at, which room will we use for toys, etc. And again today, I pictured in my head that I could be living just 5 minutes from my teaching partner, having a 20 minute commute, stopping at that great local restaurant for their vegetarian Ruben on my way home some night... but again, it wasn’t the one. Is it really an endless winter, or does it just feel that way, being my first winter with an active, adventurous, toddler?
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Author5th grade teacher, wife, mama to my 3 magical babies, ally, advocate, doggy foster mom... just stumbling on. Archives
March 2022
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