Random

Of all the lame titles, that one should be about at the top of the list, but there really is no better description for this sort of post. The last one should have been titled “Late Night Ideas from a Tired Woman who Doesn’t do Fancy Birthday Parties.” I reread it this morning and thought it really didn’t make sense, but I wasn’t sure which part didn’t make sense, and so I just left the whole bit as it was.

Then I thought, “What if my creative, artistic friends who love to do amazing parties straight out of Pinterest feel like I don’t approve of their efforts? When, in fact, I love to go to their houses and see their creativity. So then I guess I am just saying that for me, lazy equals simplicity???” Whatever. I wasn’t coming out ahead in any of it, so I decided not to think about it anymore. 🙂

Gabe is on the way to the Emergency Department with the little boy who never complains when he doesn’t feel well. So then when he does mention that something hurts, you really sit up and listen. When he had a concussion a few months ago, he seemed okay until he started crying because he couldn’t see. I nearly panicked but the doctor just jovially told us not to let him bump his head again for a while and he will  be fine.

Gregory has been limping for a few days, but didn’t complain of pain. This evening we spent time with our homeschool group, and I noticed that he wasn’t playing at all, just sitting on the sidelines kind of pale and peaked looking. Uh oh. When we inspected his knee, we found it hugely swollen and inflamed.  We tried to think back to when this started, and he said well, he thinks he twisted it when he was pole vaulting the other night. But it didn’t hurt much, so he didn’t tell us then. Sigh. Maybe the children who complain of every little spasm and want Berry well all the time are easier to keep healthy.

I just hate the feeling, as a parent, that the buck stops here and we have to decide what is best for this child.  Is this a severe sprain? Is it Lyme disease? What about torn ligaments? Just reading down through the list on google is not too comforting. The E. D. is not quite so scary anymore since my man works there, and he gets slightly partial treatment. It is kind of like a family, and they look out for each other. One of the perks of this career, I suppose.

So I find I have a little while to sit here and stay awake and post random stuff.

Alex just reviewed the rules for quotation marks recently. To my chagrin, I discovered that I was a bit mixed up whenever I wrote a sentence with a title at the end. I thought you did this: Last week I read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi”. I always put the end punctuation outside the end quotation mark because it was just a title. According to his Language textbook, it should be like this: Last week I read “Rikki-Tikki-Tavi.” I know it is a small technicality, but it bugs the tar out of me that I thought wrong all these years. Where was I during 5th grade Language class? Maybe they changed the rules. I looked it up on Wikipedia and came away feeling even more disillusioned. They have all kinds of directly spoken quotes where the comma is placed after the quotation marks, like this: “I think I should go hit the sack”, he yawned. I am affronted; I will not trust Wikipedia. Then I read this and saw that rule 2 affirms my original way when the sentence is a question but the quote is not. Now I am all confused. Are these rules really “that” fluid? (Some sources say it is not entirely correct, but all right to use quotes for “emphasis.”) Agghhh. Help me out, somebody!

I have a nagging feeling about my very free use of commas, too. And I like to start sentences with “and.” See, there I did it right, but it looks wrong to me. I feel like I did the time in school when we had a doozy of a spelling test with about a hundred words. I think there was a prize promised for all who got 100%. Being the only girl in a class of boys, I had some issues related to proving that I could keep up with the best of them. I took that spelling test extremely seriously, and I struck out on the word congratulations. Such an easy word and I spelled it with a “d” because that is how everybody says it. When I pled my case with my teacher, he said, “If you can find it in the dictionary, you get credit for it.” Of course, it wasn’t there, and I felt betrayed by all the people who ever said it wrong and mixed me up.

Gabe didn’t have to work today, so I took Olivia and Rita to the ladies’ sewing with me. I always enjoy the fun conversations with other women, the camaraderie around the potluck lunch, and the feeling of doing something grand with bits of cloth. I would guess that the ladies send between 50 to 100 comforts to Christian Aid Ministries every year. Nearly all of them are pieced out of scraps of fabric too small to use for anything else.

I was busy with my rotary cutter when I looked up just in time to see my little girl of three years old scaling a rack of stacked folding chairs. I heard her jauntily saying, “I always don’t get hurt when I climb up here.” Then she proceeded to let herself down carefully over the side, her dress stuck on the top, inching up and up. I was poised to run if she fell, but all she did was moon the entire room full of ladies before landing gracefully on her feet. Yup. I am that mom who took her little girl to the sewing without any underwear.

It bewilders me how these things happen. I used to think I would never let my child go through a day with crusty eyes or dirty fingernails or unkempt hair. I do try to keep up with them, but they keep slipping me these curve balls. Tonight it was snowing and blowing. We got to the homeschool meeting, hung up our winter coats, and took our seats. Alex was sitting up front for a trivia game when I noticed it. He was barefooted in sandals. Sometimes you just roll with it and laugh. What else could you do?