Cosmic Questions

So when one is hovering on the edge of insanity, one should not be left alone to watch preschool television as one starts asking questions that are better left not asked.  What I take comfort in right now is that I could sit down with just about any group of mothers of preschool aged children and they will all have the same ponderings that I have.  Most of the time we are too busy to really notice or pay attention to these programs that give us a few stolen moments alone in the bathroom or 20 minutes to lose ourselves on the internet.  What I have noticed is that children go through these phases where they insist that we sit and watch this nonsense with them…not that there is anything wrong with preschool television, I am quite fond of Nick Jr.  As a matter of fact it was the reason that we dropped Directv and went to FIOS instead…there was about a day and a half of chaos in my home when Nick Jr wasn’t being shown on Directv. 

Anyway, most of the shows I love!  They are adorable and teach kids a lot, far more than I can teach when I have a house to clean and other things to care for.  There are even some I love to sit down and watch with the kids because I find them entertaining as well.  But there are some that I am left wondering why my preschooler is being forced to watch…like Dino Dan.  I hate Dino Dan and love the DVR so that I can let my boy watch something far more informative and entertaining for him.  Moving on…recently my son has entered the “you must sit and watch this with me” phase and I am left with some very real questions about these shows.  I call these cosmic questions because I really don’t think there are answers for them…but every time you see the show you ask yourself the same questions and eventually you want to write to the creators to find out.  I told you that stress does funny things to me.

The first of my questions involves Max & Ruby…now I love Max & Ruby; they are very cute and once you get past the urge to go “mmmmm, chocolate bunnies” they are highly amusing.  I understand Max perfectly, mostly because I have a son that is just like him…unfortunately he also has an older sister who can be very Ruby-like.  But every time I watch this show I ask the same question:  Where are their parents?  They have a grandmother who lives very nearby, but they have no parents!  Ruby does everything, and although she is a great bunny scout, she is not the mother…so where is their mother?  Speaking as a mother this upsets me greatly!  I mean there is a Mr and Mrs Huffington who care for Baby Huffington…clearly other bunnies have parents, why not Max & Ruby?

Then there are The Backyardagins…Pablo is a penguin, Tyrone is a moose, Tasha is a hippo, and Austin is a kangaroo.  But the all-encompassing question:  What is Uniqua?  This has been irritating the crap out of me for years, and the best that we have ever been able to come up with is some type of insect; perhaps a ladybug.  But you can’t really tell cause she is pink with pink polk-a-dots all over…the only thing you really have to go on is the antennae of sorts on her head, which leaves an insect or an alien.  My other question:  Why are 3 of their houses connected with the same backyard and the other 2 have to come through doors in the fences?  They can’t be related given that they are all different animals, so why is this?

There are some new shows in the past couple of years on Nick Jr…one of these is Team Umizoomi.  While this show is most educational and informative, I see a huge problem:  How big is a “unit”?  The reason I ask is that they measured the depth of the lake and it was 10 units deep…then they measured how big a leaf was that Millie was floating on, it was 5 units long.  According to my logic that is either a really small lake or a really big leaf!  Then I saw that Dr Bot needed to know how hot soup was, and one bowl was 4 units hot.  I’m not a teacher or educator, but I can see how this could potentially confuse children in school…it confuses me!  My daughter came to me the other day and said that she was 5 units tall…Yeah…I had no idea what to say.  It was explained to me that they use “unit” so that it will easily translate into other countries…but shouldn’t your “units” all be the same size to have any idea what you are doing?  Not to mention that weight is measured differently than length, and temperature is measured differently than depth.  When they get in school they can’t say that it is 80 inches hot outside, or that will earn them a poor grade.  Then one day I was half awake and I heard Geo say something about looking for a heptagon…I had myself convinced for weeks that I just heard it wrong, but no I didn’t.  He wanted to find a 7 sided shape, called a heptagon.  When did we start having heptagons?  I went through math in college and never heard of a heptagon until I watched Team Umizoomi!  And decahedrons too…do our children need to know what a decahedron is before Kindergarten?  These are things that cause me much consternation and make my eyebrows get scrunchy.

Another new show, which I find highly amusing, is Bubble Guppies…I just love Mr Grouper.  Did you know that he can make himself both green and zebra stripped?  He is amazing, but I am left wondering if the Bubble Guppies are orphans.  I know they go to school each day, but they also do everything with Mr Grouper…like camping and he gets them a dog and he takes them to Big Bubble City.  So I wonder if it is like an old fashioned orphanage where the “head master” is both their caretaker and their teacher.  I don’t know about anyone else, but as a mom if my kid came home from school with a dog I would be slightly upset…so they must be orphans and all live together, right?

They recently started playing Toot and Puddle in the mornings again and don’t get me wrong, the artwork in that show is incredible, but I have one main nagging question.  How is it that these 2 very fashionable friend pigs who live in a tiny cottage in the woods afford to jet off to China to see the Great Wall, or to Spain to take part in the running of the bulls?  Are they independently wealthy?  Did they inherit the money?  Where did this fundage come from? 

These are the questions that keep slightly insane mothers up at night, and why we should limit our time in front of these programs.  A few years ago when Casey went through this very same phase I took up cross stitching because I could do it while sitting on the couch with her and I could listen to my ipod to prevent these trips into insanity.  I tried this with my son, but he won’t have it, he must sit on my lap…thus preventing me from staving off the insanity.  So I guess this is how I will deal with it with him…I will blog about it, cause really, who reads this crap anyway!?

 
So here’s to insanity induced blogs…Here’s to coping strategies…and (Oh Hell, why not?) Here’s to preschool television, because we’re all mad here!!

Slightly Insane

First I should probably state that stress has caused me to become slightly insane…not like raving lunatic, but not quite all there either.  Trust me, I know a thing or two about insanity.  I had been considering for some time that I wanted to once again be blonde…I was blonde once, before children.  After much stress I suddenly decided I was doing it, so I got my sister and we went shopping…we came home with bleach and pink dye.  My mother was wandering about muttering things to herself while making sure dad wasn’t reaching behind himself.  A few hours later I had bleach blonde hair…and I looked at myself in the mirror and went “holy crap!  What did you do…and do we like it?”.  After a few weeks it has been determined that I do like it, and I am contemplating where to put the pink.  Remember I said that I was slightly insane.

 All this came before my husband’s car had to be towed home, the “whatever the problem” was has failed, the problem comes because we never knew what the problem was to begin with.  2 mechanics gave it back to us and said to bring it back when it fails…well it has failed and we don’t have money to take it to the mechanics.  Then my car suddenly ate a spark plug and spit off the fancy air filter that Jasone had put on who knows how long ago…yes, that would be 2 cars not running.  So, new air filter and spark plug…my husband takes it to class while I drive his mother’s car to Ryan’s therapy.  I was walking out the door to get gas in her car after the kids were in bed and my husband calls to tell me that the battery is dead in my car…he can’t get home…come rescue him.  Jumper cables in hand I get into my mother-in-law’s car…a Ford Focus…4 banger…to try and jump my 8 cylinder Thunderbird.  Yes I know, I should have thought that through further…after coming back to the house to get my parents truck for MORE power we finally get it jumped even though I discover that the truck has a battery that looks like it shrunk in the wash. 

Meanwhile we got a letter from the City of San Jacinto telling us that our front yard is in serious disrepair and that we will be fined if it doesn’t improve by the 22^nd of October.  After screaming a lot about the reason the yard is in disrepair and the fact that you can’t plant anything right now, I spent time cleaning the house most violently before I called them to explain the situation…getting absolutely nowhere!  We are now attempting to make the front weeds green by watering again, this meant we have to turn the sprinklers on.  We discover that the dipsticks that live next door, who probably complained to the city about us, broke our sprinkler line when they put their stupid wall in and didn’t tell us.  My husband dug it out and capped it, then he tells me to stand over the hole and make sure it isn’t leaking while he turns it on…needless to say it wasn’t leaking and the sprinklers came on fine, and made me wet.  Next time he tries that I am going to just walk right back into the house!

Also, the fuzzy turd of a cat has discovered that he can jump to the top of the fence and can therefore get out of the back yard.  Despite our attempts and lectures to the contrary, he still goes out front to sit upon the porch.  This is stressing the old man a lot!  And the last thing we want is for the fuzzy turd to go missing, because someone will find it necessary to bring the old man a new one, and I will end up divorced.  I love my husband, and would rather not lose him.

Oh, and did I mention that I got a parking ticket in the parking garage at St Bernadine’s while I took my kids to see their Grandpa who just had open heart surgery?!  Yeah, well I did…for not displaying the current tags…that I hadn’t gotten in the mail yet to display.  I sent a letter to them requesting compassion and understanding given the current situation that my family was in…and I didn’t say anything about the fact that it was in very poor taste for a cop to be trolling a hospital parking structure looking for people to give tickets too.  Is the city so hard up for money that they go looking for people who are already feeling horrible and are under a large amount of stress?  “Let’s look to give parking citations to people parked in the hospital parking lot because they are already feeling like crap.”  Anyway I just got the response to my request to review the ticket…apparently your father almost dying is NOT good enough reason to not have the tags on your car when you haven’t yet received them in the mail…and they tacked a $35 fee on it because I asked.  I can’t afford to pay the ticket right now so I am sure they will issue a warrant and by the time I can get it paid I will already be in jail…yay for me!

I am pretty sure that I am just not going to catch a break this year!  We even had to cancel our trip to Universal Studios for our anniversary this year…so what do we get to do?  Stay home and take care of the children who are part of the reason that I am slightly insane right now.  Yay for us!  So here’s to getting pelted with lemons.  Here’s to NOT catching a break.  And here’s to not drinking myself silly!

Of Straws and Memories

Last month was heinous at best…ants, hearts, and terrible memories…ending in open heart surgery and oxygen.  At the beginning of last month my dad had a “cardiac incident”, meaning that he had chest pain and pain running down his arm.  His doctor did an EKG and noticed an abnormality and his heart rate was WAY too high…off to a Cardiologist for him and nitro to go in his pocket.  When on the stress test for the Cardiologist some weird things started happening and off he came after only 2 minutes, and in came the doctor to tell him that they needed to do an Angiogram and most likely a stent.  In one week he was to admit himself into St Bernadine’s Hospital in San Bernardino.  Needless to say, the stress increased exponentially in our lives…but we had no idea then what was coming…oh, if we had only known then.

Meanwhile I had a crown prep done on one of my teeth that had needed it for a while and I had started grinding my teeth…oh the pain!  I was fitted for a mouth piece to prevent the grinding and force my jaw muscles to relax, which came in the day before dad had to be at the hospital.  After much debate, it was decided that I was to drive him up to the hospital at 4:30 in the morning. 

As I was driving them up that morning in the dark, I was reminded of a time in my life when my father would pick me up out of bed at some God-forsaken hour of the morning and load me in the car and drive somewhere.  When my father was a High Councilor in the north woods I was only about 11 years old, when he was sent to speak my mother (who was the Stake Primary President) and I would accompany him.  Of course we were both enlisted to speak too, but because our stake was spread over such a great distance we left very early on those Sunday mornings.  I remember waking up in the car and Mom would give me my clothes, and I would dress in the car on the way to wherever we were going.  All these memories came flooding back to me that Tuesday morning while I was driving my father somewhere in the dark…I thought about how at some point we do for our parents what they spent 20 years doing for us.

After about an hour and half we heard that dad was to be admitted to the hospital and would be having surgery the next morning.  The doctor explained that one vein in his heart was completely blocked and 3 others were 90% or more blocked…this would be a quadruple bypass.  When we got to his room, the surgeon told us that he had a heart attack at some point, but that his chances were above 95%.  My father is 74 years old, this is not generally something they do on a man his age.  My mother and I brought the images home and Matt came and told us what they would do…It was bad, really bad.  We cried and prayed, as our faith was tested once again.

As the surgery was being performed I was at home with my son after having that stupid crown glued in place.  I wandered around the house cleaning everything I could find…until I had nothing left to clean and all I was left to do was to sit and wait as my father’s body was being violated by a power tool.  I was crying while sitting next to my son on the futon and the next thing I knew my son was putting a pacifier in my mouth…I guess he thought that I needed the comfort that only a paci can bring.  He sat with me while he watched his show until I got word that the surgery was over and that the surgeon was pleased with the way it went. 

During the time he was in the hospital I had a lot to deal with in my mind; this was the 3^rd time I have had to see my father in a hospital bed in bad shape.  I was 9 years old when he had a bleeding ulcer and had to have a transfusion to save his life.  2 weeks before my wedding he had a stroke and I had to drive him to the hospital.  Now this, a quadruple bypass…I was not sleeping or eating, and I had a fear in me that I couldn’t shake.  I am the youngest of my parents’ children, and I will be caring for them for the rest of their lives…but for the first time the realization hit me that someday they will leave this earth.  I have hope that before this happens I will be able to make peace with the concept that I have to give them up.

 

By Labor Day we got to bring him home with his traveling oxygen tank…then a generator was delivered to the house with a really long tube.  So now we have a very alive and grateful Grandpa wandering around the house trailing his tube behind him.  He has a really big scar and a heart pillow that he is fondly attached to, but his color is coming back and we are glad to have him home!  I made him a new fuzzy pillow so that his other can be washed, I check on them several times a day, and once again I am the last person in this house to go to bed. 

 It’s not the big things that throw us over the edge, it is the little things.  The straws that break the camel’s back aren’t bypass surgeries or strokes, it’s the crowns and ants that hit us at the same time.  It is the silly work schedules and not seeing each other that lead to losing your mind because of stress.  So here’s to memories and straws, may they not be so heavy that we collapse under the weight.  And may we learn early how to cope with life’s lemons that are thrown at our heads when we least expect it.

World Suicide Prevention Day

I have had a hard month; that is no secret, but today is a day of remembering for me…last year our family lost 2 people to suicide.  Jasone, my husband’s younger brother, killed himself about a year and a half ago.  And a little over a year ago my uncle shot himself.  This day has great meaning for me, but not just because of them…because of me too.

Many years have passed since I made the decision to live, after much debate in my mind.  I was in the midst of a trip down the road of insanity, and it was winning.  I fought every day to stay on this earth, it was a daily wrestle within my mind and heart.  Until late one night I sat with a knife in my hands and the image I saw was my mother standing over my grave, I never picked up a knife that way again.  I decided in one small moment of clarity that I could never put my mother through that kind of pain, suddenly my selfishness was erased and I remembered my mother.  The fight with insanity trudged on for quite some time, but my desire for death had been erased and replaced with a desire to know why I felt this way.  I wanted to understand myself, and eventually help other’s to understand them as well.  I turned what focus I had toward education and understanding, and becoming a well person.

My trip to getting well was long and extremely painful…there was medication and therapy…there were tears and pain…and then there was discovery and resolution.  I had been beat down by others and I had a disorder that would prove to be life-long.  I had also made decisions in the midst of insanity that I could not take back…decisions that, in combination with other things, would haunt me for years.  I learned to live with the nightmares, and I coped with the difficult times in the ways I was taught.  Eventually I began making progress toward recovery; and now, many years later, I can honestly say I am a well person.  I have my bad days and I still take meds every day, and despite the judgment of others, I would like to say that I am an advocate for the mentally ill.

In the years that I have been dealing with my disorder, I have noticed a growing trend where people think that if you have to take meds then you are weak, and in the church are “not exercising faith”.  There is also the all-encompassing belief that if you are depressed then you must be doing something wrong in your life.  Then there is the knee-jerk reaction that suicide is shameful, that we should be ashamed if someone close to us committed suicide.  All of these things are false and nothing but judgments by the un-educated, un-feeling people of this world.  The reasons why a person choses suicide are their reasons, and if we are going to begin helping people then we have to put our own stupidity aside.  People who are saved from suicide talk about someone who listened, not who talked.

Maybe if Jasone hadn’t isolated himself from everyone who loved him…maybe if he had had someone to talk to…there are so many maybes in that situation that you can’t even begin to count them all.  I know one thing for sure, that his mother misses him terribly.  My heart sank when the policeman handed me the note he left, because I knew what it would do to his mother when she saw it.  As I have seen her stand over his grave I am reminded of what stopped me…I know I made the right choice in staying here to finish my life.  I am grateful to my mother for the principles that she taught me, but most of all I am grateful for her love that she gave freely. 

 

I mourn Jasone, not because I knew him and I miss him, but because it was a life that was lost un-necessarily.  May we all take this time to think of someone other than ourselves, is there someone who could use a listening ear and an understanding heart?  Suicide is preventable, but only if we are paying attention to those around us.  I read a quote recently that was attributed to Mother Teresa that said “If you judge people, you have no time to love them.”  I love this because it puts simply that you can’t be helpful to someone if you are judging them.  How about if we all put our judgments aside this week so that we can love people, because I really believe that love is what prevents suicide.  Complete, all-encompassing, un-conditional love…the way that God loves us.  Here’s to love, may we all take it for a spin and watch the miracles that it can produce. 

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