Happy 6th Birthday, Tess!

“Is Tess turning 7 this year?”

It was a text from my brother. 

But nope, she’s only six. Though it does feel like she’s been around forever, doesn’t it? 

Not only because she’s spent her whole life getting dragged around in carpools, to basketball games, soccer games, lacrosse games, football games, rugby games, birthday parties, karate classes, playdates, swim lessons, camps and clinics, and tournaments, and all the other places we go.

But also because she’s kind of an old soul. She’s spent five years—six now—staring at faces, studying people, learning, observing, judging. 

If you haven’t been on the receiving end of one of her death stares, then you haven’t spent enough time around her. 

More than one person has compared her to Wednesday Addams. A very blond Wednesday Addams.

Ask her any question, any question at all, and you won’t get an immediate response. She’ll think about it first. I don’t know what she’s thinking about because sometimes the questions are simple yes-or-no’s, like “do you want milk?” “do you have to pee before we leave?” “did you brush your teeth?” “did you get a new library book today?”

She gives you a skeptical, ‘why do you want to know’ look, gazing at you with no smile, no expression at all actually, while she assesses your motives for asking. And then I imagine she weighs the answer carefully in her head, checking off all potential replies and what information would be revealed with each one.

She lives her whole life on a need to know basis, and most people don’t need to know. Snitches get stitches and such.

At one of Nate’s basketball games recently, another dad asked me if Tess was mad at him. And he was serious. 

“I don’t even think she knows who you are,” I thought to myself. But I guess she had given him her infamous Tess glare, and he internalized it for some reason. A grown man. 

I assured him that no, she was not in fact mad at him. If she was mad at anyone, which I don’t think she was, it was at Tighe for failing to give her a dollar for the concession stand before he was called over to help at the scorer’s table. Heaven forbid she suffer through 24-minutes of basketball, plus clock stoppage and halftime, without a ring pop.

But her stoicism, her chill demeanor, her seeming dispassionate deadpan, does not necessarily reflect her mood or her friendliness. 

At school pick-up recently, I sat in my car listening to a podcast and periodically glancing in the side view mirror to watch for the kindergartners—Tess’s class is always the first one to the parking lot. I don’t know if that’s a matter of dismissal procedure or if it’s just the natural inclination of kindergarten teachers to end the day as soon as possible. Those poor, ragged souls must be desperate to get out by 3:30. I know the kids are. 

Either way, Tess always reaches my car first. 

I watched the line of kindergartners reach the parking lot, each one breaking free as they spotted their grown-up’s car. They jump up to high-five the teacher and then tear towards their parents at top speed. One overly gregarious little boy, a chatty little fellow who talks with loads of passion and energy and hand gestures, sprinted to his mom’s car, already yelling updates about his day to her from about thirty yards out.

Tess, meanwhile, parted from her teacher with a simple, poker faced head nod. She stalked across the parking lot, head slightly down, her eyes cast firmly to her right, as though she was casting a spell on one of the parents eagerly awaiting their children. As she approached the car, her eyes met mine in the side view mirror and I braced myself for what could only be a gloomy, perhaps irritated, mood.

“How was your day?” I asked as she pulled open the door behind me. 

“Good,” she said. 

I was surprised to hear a note of cheer in her voice. She shared a few details about her day, about who went home sick, the pictures she colored at rest time, that her class was rewarded because everyone remembered their library books. 

Soon Sam arrived and her report was drowned out by his daily bickering with our 7th grade neighbor we carpool with. When Nate, always the last to the car, arrived, he immediately launched into whatever drama ignited his fire that day—who won the football game at recess, demerit injustices, his academic progress (or lack thereof), or his plans for after school.

So her lack of sharing has been conditioned by a lack of opportunity. 

But, please, don’t feel sorry for her. She gets plenty of attention at home and is plenty spoiled. And she doesn’t want your sympathy anyway. 

She’s too busy. 

Our most self-sufficient child by far, Tess has been voted “Most Enjoyable to Have Home Sick.” By both parents.

Even if she’s actually faking sick. Which she’s admitted to doing. 

Tighe and I can pretty much go about our day as planned—Tighe working on… plumbing parts, I guess, and me tapping away on my laptop—certain that Tess will fend for herself. 

She’ll fetch her own snacks. She’ll prepare her own lunch. She can plan and carry out her own activities. From puzzles to coloring to painting to jewelry-making to reading practice, she’s got it covered. 

And though I’ll admit that clean-up is still a developing skill, I have hope. Her teacher reports that, at school, Tess is usually a step or two ahead of the rest. Not that she’s particularly fast or academically superior, but she’s already seen what needs to be done and taken care of it.

She’s cleaned up her desk. She’s put away her materials. She’s washed her hands. She’s ready and waiting for whatever bullshit a formal kindergarten curriculum is going to throw at her next. 

And one of my favorite Tess qualities is that she’s an amazing big sister. I’m not wishing we’d had more kids after Lou or anything crazy like that, but Tess does a really good job of taking care of him, keeping him safe, fed, and entertained. She plays Paw Patrol, she shares snacks and markers and Legos, she teaches him how to play games or get dressed, she queues up a show for him, she does it all.

So yes, Tess is only six this year. But in so many ways, she’s older than all of us.

Snow Day Serenity

“Today might be a good day to start macrodosing. Microdosing won’t be enough.” 

Tighe and I had both gone down to the basement to look for painter’s tape for an art project that Tess was begging to start, but also for some quiet. The three boys were stomping around upstairs in their wet snow boots and sopping wet snow pants, dripping little puddles of water across the hardwoods on the first floor. 

“I’m trying really hard to be chill here, but they’re just making such a mess, and it’s only 9:30,” I continued.

It was a snow day. Semi-justified, I guess. More snow than last time, but because the weather was warmer, it was mostly slush again.

I don’t mind a snow day for the most part. A random day mid-week when we can all sleep in and have nowhere to go. No carpools, no after-school playdates, no basketball practices, and as long as we played our cards right the night before, no homework.

Because it was a wet snow and not a good sledding snow, Nate and Sam realized it was ripe for making snow cones. With all the thick, sugary, sticky flavored syrups Nate had gotten for Christmas to go with his snow cone maker. So it was 9:30 in the morning and they were upstairs getting high on sugar and making a colossal mess. 

Lou’s lips were already stained grape purple. Plus a little Greek yogurt from his breakfast less than an hour earlier. 

Serenity now. 

My goal on days like this is always to let whatever happens happen. They’ll all be in school tomorrow, I told myself. We can clean up the mess at the end of the day, before we sit down for dinner. It’s one day. Just one day. 

Serenity now. 

An hour later, Tess was still working diligently with her painter’s tape. Her birthday party was on Friday afternoon, at our house. Fourteen girls. I had gotten canvases and paints for each of them, but with absolutely zero plan otherwise. 

Fortunately, Tess and I had done a little DIY googling and decided to tape the first initial of each girl’s name on the canvas. Each girl can paint the rest of the canvas and, when the paint dries, remove the tape to reveal a monogrammed masterpiece. Or something like that.

So Tess was busy taping each girl’s initial on the canvases. Thus, she was quiet. Aside from an occasional frustrated squeal when the tape would get twisted or stuck to itself, as tape does. But I was able to be largely hands-off

Naturally, I had purchased an extra canvas for Sam because he’s Sam, so he was busy setting up his workspace, gathering the right paints and paintbrushes and gazing at his blank canvas envisioning his own potential show-stopping masterpiece. He had a plan, so I was able to be largely hands-off again, though I intervened to lay down a layer of cardboard before he got started. 

I also helicoptered in to lift the paint-soaked 4-inch paintbrush he had nonchalantly set down on the table—NOT on the protective cardboard. He was quiet, but not mess-free. 

Serenity now.

Nate and Lou, meanwhile, were playing some sort of sadism game, where older brother would stuff younger brother into the large plastic storage bin that had earlier held boots and snow pants and drag it around the foyer at a high speed until it toppled over and younger brother spilled out. They were engaged, I was able to be hands-off yet again. Though Lou’s shrieks were shattering and mind-numbing. Each time, I was jarred into a brief, yet torturous, migraine.

Serenity. 

Now. 

Tighe had retreated to his office and locked the door. 

I have a desk tucked into a dormer window in our master bedroom, but with the amount of open paint jars floating around and the number of shrieks piercing the otherwise quiet winter air, I didn’t feel totally comfortable disappearing just yet. Plus, Tighe had a really stressful afternoon at work the day before and was anticipating another such day today, so I had resolved to keep everyone out of his way. I’d do my best!

A short time later, Tess and Sam were still hard at work, Nate was busy not doing the homework that it turns out he hadn’t done the day before, and Lou, donning oversized ski goggles for some reason, was requesting a frozen waffle. And when Lou requests a frozen waffle, he means he wants a frozen waffle.

Like, he actually eats it while it’s still frozen.

Without syrup. 

Just gliding around the house on his Strider bike, waffle thawing in one hand, steering with the other hand, ski goggles propped up on his forehead. Like a WWI fighter pilot. Or Kenny from Can’t Hardly Wait.

Fast-forward another hour and Tess and Lou were eating bowls of mac and cheese at the dining room table where I was simultaneously scraping at specks of acrylic paint with my finger nail. Nate and Tess had also experimented with the spare canvases and despite their best efforts—truly, they were sincerely trying not to be messy—paint was everywhere. 

Nate had been attempting a starry night imitation, so he was flicking the paintbrush across the canvas, but of course, the paint speckles weren’t restricted to his target area. The result actually looked pretty good, as did Sam’s painting of a sunset with a silhouette of a tree and cabin cast in the foreground.

“I’ll probably wait until tomorrow to try and sell this,” he had said, propping it up on a cardboard box to dry.

One of his friends had appeared at the front door just before lunchtime and they immediately retreated up to the third floor to fiddle with Legos and listen to gangster rap. I think there are some parental controls on whatever device they’re using, but at the rate Lou’s dropping F-bombs lately, maybe not.

Serenity now.

I strolled through the foyer and my legs nearly gave out beneath me because of the mess. I only have four kids, so there should not be 145 pairs of boots, yet there they were, all strewn about carelessly on the rug. I had told the kids to loosely drape their snow pants and coats on the banister and steps so that they would dry. They did so, but they were all inside out and somehow, like the boots, there were definitely more clothes than there are kids. 

Not to mention gloves, scarves and hats. Lou and Nate had come in to change out wet gloves for dry ones at one point. And Sam had come in for an extra scarf. Plus Sam’s friend is here. So that accounts for some of the excess, but not all. 

Serenity. 

I straightened a bit of the apparel, at least creating a walkway, and by the time I returned to the dining room, Tess had spread out some origami paper and queued up some how-to videos on YouTube. 

Origami seems like a good hobby for Tess. Quiet, mess-free. As soon as she took an interest in it, I ordered her 300 sheets of origami paper, thrilled that she’d have a nice rainy day activity.

Except that Tess gets easily frustrated with the process, both because of her still developing fine-motor skills and because some of the videos she finds are just really treacherous. Like, when I try to help her, I get confused, too. And I have pretty good spatial reasoning skills. 

Her frustration leads to anger. Which leads to gut-wrenching shrieks that make you wonder whether someone’s being brutally stabbed to death in the other room or whether Tess is just having trouble aligning some of the corners of her origami owl.

Serenity now.

She stomped her feet and tossed her head back. 

“Mom!” she wailed. 

No answer. 

Because I was in the bathroom and since none of my kids were in peril, I felt like I deserved two minutes to myself. Maybe even three.

By the time I emerged, she was in a full-blown tantrum that she couldn’t back down from.

“What is it, Tess?”

But she was already sulking. She had tossed her crumpled origami attempt onto the floor and  flipped the tablet upside down, irrationally enraged at the faceless fingers that were folding with ease on the screen. 

She stared straight ahead in a heated rage, arms crossed across her chest, refusing to look at me or respond in any way.

“Can I help you?”

Silence.

“If you use your words to tell me what the problem is, I can try to help you.”

More silence. 

“If you just cry and whine and just say “Mom!” over and over again, I don’t know what the issue is.”

WIth theatrical force, she shoved the tablet across the table, stood up, and stomped up the steps to her room to reset. 

Which doesn’t totally solve the problem, but it helps me in the short-term. The boys were all up on the third floor and Tess was sequestered in her room. 

True serenity, right now.

At one o’clock, Tighe had an important conference call, so we needed relative quiet in the house. Which means only one thing: screen time. 

Tess and Lou watched the most recent animated Addams family movie, which is a lot less nightmare-inducing than the new Wednesday series they were watching on Netflix. Though they LOVED that. 

Nate, Sam, and two friends went to hide out in the basement so they could play video games and collectively procrastinate Nate’s homework assignment from the night before. 

And that bought me some more serenity until about 3pm when there was a sudden, yet urgent, run on snacks. At which point Tess and Lou asked to do dinosaur mad libs—an activity which, for some reason, generates a lot of giggling and shrieking and obscenities from Lou. Some of them aren’t even real obscenities, they’re just nonsense words that he bellows out in a tourettes-like frenzy. 

By the end of the day, I counted no fewer than 17 fruit snacks wrappers and 12 empty Cheez-it bags on the top of the trashcan. How do they survive an entire day at school without that steady drip of snacks? 

So we survived another day, another snow day at that. But will we survive Tess’s birthday party tomorrow afternoon? Stay tuned…

A Reboot: TMNT

**Trigger warning: This blog may induce flashbacks of childhood Ninja Turtle viewing.** 

“Mom, when I get home from school, I want to watch the ninja turtles that I was watchin’ yesterday.”

Believe it or not, that request was from Lou.

Not Nate. Not Sam. But Lou.

And honestly, if it means we’re finished with Paw Patrol and PJ Masks and Blaze and Blippi and the other crappy toddler shows, I’m all for it. Though I do have to admit that the design of those shows usually aims at education—some interactive watching, with questions that prompt counting, verbal recall, color identification and more. But it’s all so irritating.    

So I’ll take a little Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, even though it’s my third time through it. The first time was my own childhood, the second time was Nate’s and Sam’s toddler and preschool years, and this... this will be my third. 

Though admittedly, there are at least two different animated series and, off the top of my head, five different movies. Maybe more?

And of course, each one is just different enough that it all feels new to me. I’ve seen April as an up and coming TV news reporter and April as the teenage daughter of a brilliant scientist. I’ve seen Shredder as a ruthless, cunning criminal mastermind. And I’ve seen Shredder as a bumbling, lower level gangster who gets reprimanded by a despotic, evil Kraang, who’s essentially a rogue brain tucked inside the torso of a WWE-wrestler-looking robot. And who could forget Beebop and Rocksteady? 

My brothers and I watched the first series when we were kids, where every episode had nearly the exact same plot, the same music at the same minute marks, and the only distinction between each episode would be the rotating cast of bad guys. We loved it.

And naturally, we watched all the movies. The one where the turtles have to hide out in April’s apartment. Where they have to rescue Danny, the petty crime-dabbling teenage son of April’s boss. Where they have to retreat to an upstate farm to nurse somebody—was it Raph? Leo? Splinter?— back to health. Where Raph travels back in time to Imperial Japan.

Were those all different movies? Or the same?

The first series was a lot of saving the city, then celebrating with a pizza party and one of Mikey’s cheesy jokes. The newer series involved space travel, I think. And more diverse groups of aliens and mutants. And for some reason, April is a teenager..

And then the newer movies—were there two or three? I don’t remember a single thing except that Meghan Fox played April. And Sam was obsessed with the Shell Shocked music video. Wiz Khalifa, I think? We had to watch it again and again and again. And again. And Sam would just stare at the TV, in a trance, headbanging his little toddler head to the beat of the bass. 

And now, nearly six years later, they still occasionally request the song for their morning wake-up call on their Google Home tablet. 

Nate was Raph for Halloween three consecutive years. And Sam was Leo for two. But they wore the oversized costumes regularly, the stretchy cloth feet dragging on the ground. One round of costumes featured cloth headbands with eyeholes cut into them and the newer ones had hard plastic masks—neither option was small enough for Sam’s tiny toddler head, but he sure looked ferocious when he wore them. Though he couldn’t see and often ran into walls.

I crafted some ninja throwing stars out of duct tape and cardboard while Tighe used toilet paper rolls and excess string from a weed-whacker in the garage to make nunchucks. 

At one point, Nate had a talking sai that said things “rude but cool,” just like Raph. And red glasses that he wore when he watched the show and whenever he was feeling particularly “teenage,” “mutant,” “ninja,” or “turtle-y.” When donning said glasses, he assumed full Raph character, speaking in a gravelly voice, super-serious, and rude voice.   

And if I reprimanded him for his insulting, bad-mannered replies, he’d remind me, “No, Mom! It’s okay, I’m just bein Raph!”

Nate had a bright orange, long-sleeved TMNT t-shirt with a black hood that featured all four turtles and some written onomatopoeia words like “wham” or “cowabunga.” He had other ninja turtle shirts, mostly green, and so did Sam, but this shirt was a particular favorite. One day at school, he got a tear in it. I think it got caught on a screw on the playground, resulting in a perfect L-shaped rip.

“I told him you could sew it,” his teacher reported to me cheerfully when I picked him up that afternoon. 

Oh, great, I thought. Sewing is not one of my skills, but because Nate nagged me about repairing the shirt for many weeks, I eventually dug out a sewing kit and wove a shoddy little needle with thin black thread in and out of the orange fabric, pricking my finger repeatedly and pulling and bunching the shirt so that the tear is actually more noticeable now.

But Nate was happy. And he wore that shirt at least once a week until his little buddha belly pushed out of it and we passed it down to Sam’s scrawny little body. Who also wore it until it was too small. 

Do we still have it? Will Lou be able to wear it if he becomes obsessed?

Honestly, I have no idea. I went through a Kondo-inspired purging period, after my second miscarriage and before I got pregnant with Lou, when I unceremoniously took loads and loads of toys and clothing to goodwill. I’m not a sentimental person, so I wasn’t sad to say goodbye to so many of their favorite shirts. 

At the moment, Lou’s really into a black Puma hoodie. He loves the hood and he loves pockets. So the shirt would be perfect for him. 

Will the obsession stick? Will it be as addicting for Lou as it was for Nate and Sam? Will he start checking sewers for signs of mutant turtles? Will he ask for pizza every single day? Will he adopt one of the turtle personalities? Will he start parkour ninja training on the sofa and coffee table? Will he become consumed with fighting bad guys and pepper some Japanese samurai language into his everyday vocabulary? Will he also end up in a karate class, hoping to somehow mutate into a turtle? 

Only time—and a little TV—will tell. But for now, Tighe and I will love sitting on the couch with him when he gets home from school, catching up on all the turtles’ adventures and dreaming of a teenage metabolism that allows one to consume nothing but greasy pizza.

Happy 9th Birthday, Sam

Well, here we are on the 9th anniversary of the day of Sam’s birth. Not quite a decade, but he’s getting there. 

Our only kid to visit the emergency room—not once, but twice. Recall the chin incident of 2019.

*knocking on wood, of course*

But now, at nine years old, Sam is officially halfway to legal adulthood. Whatever that means. 

I read a quote by Marianne Richmond just yesterday: 

“If I could keep you little

I’d keep you close to me

But then I’d miss you growing 

Into who you are meant to me”

I actually teared up reading that to Sam as I was preparing his birthday dinner.

Because I don’t exactly know how, but somehow that rings truer of Sam than any of the other three kids. What is Sam, if not unconventional? Who is he meant to be?

According to my mother-in-law, he’s a second-born living among first-borns.

Which is true, of course, and I do think birth order plays a big role in Sam’s Samness.

He was born into my type-A neuroticism, Tighe’s bullying lectures, and Nate’s incessant talking and age-appropriate egomania. 

So Sam started to forge his own identity, almost covertly. 

Quirky. Idiosyncratic. Funny, with impeccable comedic timing. Selectively anti-social. And more than anything, stubborn. 

I liken Sam to Poland, a nation squeezed in between Germany and Mother Russia, and clutching his own traits and peculiarities with a white knuckle grip. Despite centuries of oppressive rule by the countries (and cultures) that flanked it, Poland stood strong. In the face of Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Lutheran Protestantism, Poland became one of the most Catholic countries in the world. Poles claim to have invented vodka, and they’re very insistent that they’re not part of Eastern Europe—they’re the eastern part of Central Europe.

Likewise, in the face of our bossy, domineering situations, Sam has grown into one of the smart-assiest 9 year-olds the world has ever seen. 

And though Poland never developed into a global superpower, the strength of their traditions, religion, and culture has served them well.

Though Sam’s personal culture is still developing, it’s serving him well. People are fascinated by him, and Tighe and I, along with all three of his siblings, can’t wait to see what he does or says next. Kinda like Poland.

For his birthday dessert, he requested cupcakes. Without icing. For his birthday treat to share at school, he insisted on jars of icing for each person.

He stains pretty much all his clothing with art projects, ice sculptures, eating habits, and outdoor endeavors. 

His uniform pants pockets are crammed with candy wrappers. Always.

He wears nail polish sometimes. 

He likes to hide in impossibly tight spaces. 

Somehow, he has an entire ream’s worth of paper crumbled at the bottom of his backpack.

He’s fiercely loyal to his friends, and his friends are loyal in return.

Ever since he first started solid foods as a baby, he claps his hands every time he takes a satisfying bite.

He likes to snuggle.

He never does his homework.

He soaks just about everything in hot sauce. The spicier, the better.

From March 2021 until October 2022, he sported a mullet. With pride. Though it was a clear violation of his school’s uniform policy—boys’ hair cannot touch the back of the shirt collar—he evaded capture for more than a year and a half. Most of the faculty seemed amused by it. 

He rotates the same three or four kelly green Visitation Football t-shirts, each with a different number on the back. 

He only leaves the house voluntarily to shop for Lego sets at Target or to go to one of his beloved friend’s houses. Otherwise, convincing him to go anywhere is like convincing Lou to put down a knife or other equally dangerous item.

Last week at the end of mass, when the priest made an announcement about a meeting for confirmation sponsors, Sam cheered loudly. And unexpectedly. “Whooo!” *And then three audible claps.* The guy behind us nearly busted a gut laughing.

He’s obsessed with Legos. Obsessed. He told me once that his ideal day would be completing a never ending series of Lego sets. As soon as he finishes one, the next is ready and waiting.

He once played an entire 60 minute basketball practice running in reverse. As in, backwards. 

He was a Taki for Halloween last year. And this year, he was a third grade boy.

He only reads non-fiction. National Geographic is a particular favorite.

I bought trick candles for his birthday cupcakes, but almost as though Sam knew that, as his the big day approached, he switched his dessert request to milkshakes. Hmm, the joke was on me. Can’t put candles, trick or otherwise, in milkshakes. Well played, Sam. 

He hates talking on the phone. On his birthday, he took, reluctantly, five consecutive phone calls from various family members. And it nearly killed him. At one point, I overheard Tighe’s dad say to him, “We had snow here today, but it didn’t stick to the ground.” Sam replied, flatly, “Yeah, that happens sometimes.”

Whatever he decides to do and whoever he decides to be, he’ll be as strong-willed, tenacious, relentless, and determined as Poland. 

The Night of the Twice-Burnt Chicken

It had to be a snow day, did it?

Well, a snow day for Lou, anyway. 

Which is the worst kind of snow day there is.

The Others had a two-hour delay. And it was all somewhat bogus. Just some slush on the roads that was pretty much gone by the end of rush hour. Most of our driveway didn’t have any snow on it. But I digress. Allow me to get back to living with Lou.

[And yes, I’m well aware that had this exact weather event taken place back in the day when I was a teacher or student, I’d be complaining about principals sending us to school in treacherous driving conditions.]

After dropping The Others off around 10am, we detoured over to the grocery store for a few odd necessities. I had prioritized cooking pancakes and tidying the house for the cleaning ladies and forgotten to drink my coffee. 

Plus, I was feeling a head cold setting in. 

I had also just yelled at The Others for trudging around the backyard in their tennis shoes and school uniforms, through snow and dog poop, while they waited for me to get myself together.

And then some idiot parents were blocking the kindergarten drop-off line.

So, I’ll admit that I wasn’t in the best of moods as Lou and I meandered through the store.

“Lou,” I leaned in and whispered to him, “you’re killing me.”

“Well,” he jutted out his chin as he peered up at me. “You’re killing me.”

Hmm. That doesn’t really seem fair given what he put me through the night before. Or, more accurately, what I put myself through in response to Lou’s actions.

Tighe had gone to pick up Nate from basketball practice and I was just about to slide a large pan of nachos into the oven for dinner. 

It wasn’t supposed to be nachos. It was actually supposed to be a big pot of white chicken chili, but it burnt on the stove on Sunday when we were at Sam’s basketball game. Tighe was home but couldn’t smell the charring beans and chicken, thanks to his head cold.

I salvaged what hadn’t been on the verge of combustion and declared that we’d feast on nachos later in the week. So I could burn this very same combination of chicken and beans a second time. 

As I was assembling the nachos, Lou was climbing on and off the kitchen countertop. Multiple times, he pushed the knife set aside and began fiddling with the dials and buttons on the toaster oven. And multiple times I told him to get down and to stop trying to burn the house down. In fact, I actually physically removed him from the counter multiple times. 

At which point he started pulling the sports water jugs out of the cabinet and tossing them like frisbees across the kitchen. Most of them still had water in them, so in a few short minutes, there were three or four puddles of water spread out across the floor. And because the lids had opened in the process, the puddles were growing in size as water just poured from the spouts. While Lou, quite pleased with himself, sat and watched. 

“Get out of here!” I screamed at him, picking him up under both armpits and plopped him down on the dining room floor. He crawled under the buffet and turned to glare at me.

From the dining room table, Tess and Sam looked up with curiosity for just a quick moment before returning their attention to the dinosaur puzzle they were working on.

I threw some wads of paper towels onto each of the puddles and then finished up with my Instagram-worthy nachos.

“Look,” I said to Lou as I called him into the kitchen, “I’m sorry I yelled at you, but you made a mess even after I told you not to make a mess. Now I need you to help me clean it up.”

I fetched some dish towels that were hanging on the oven, and he dutifully, almost eagerly, pushed the towels and water puddles around the floor with great sweeping motions. It was actually just increasing the scope of the mess, but whatever. Just trying to hold him accountable. And he loves the attention and praise. Like the rest of us.

I had been ignoring him, he caused a ruckus, which required my attention, now he’s getting the attention. He wins. Again.

But in his attempt to clean, he got wet. So we took off his shirt. And then he announced, with urgency, that he had to pee. We left the tea towels on the floor and I flipped on the bathroom light for him and retreated five or six paces to the stove to put in my world-famous nachos. 

Since the chicken had already been burnt and was rather dry, I decided to simply broil the nachos at the highest setting. Just for a few minutes.

And for some reason, immediately after peeing, he took off his pants and underwear. I heard the toilet flush and then the sink turn on as he washed his hands. As I pulled some salad ingredients from the fridge, I heard porcelain rattling. I craned my neck and said, “Lou, please don’t do that!”

It’s becoming my mantra.

For some reason—I guess because he’s a boy and boys’ brains are wired to either break stuff or figure out how things work—he’s been lifting the lid from the tank and peering in after he flushes to watch the stopper and the water refill in the tank. Plumbing is in his genes, I guess. 

I don’t really like when he does it because the porcelain lid is pretty heavy and I assume he’d likely break it, as with most things he touches. 

“Oops, sorry,” is becoming his mantra. 

And what happened next I’m not exactly sure. All I heard was a crash! A shatter. Almost like breaking glass. Or breaking porcelain.

“Lou! Did you break the toilet?”

I rushed in and found the lid inside the tank, vertically, which is not even close to how it’s supposed to be. I lifted it out and set it in its rightful place.

“I dropped it,” he said, not the slightest bit remorseful. 

“Okay, well, I’ve asked you not to do that! You could break the lid!” 

“Okay, I’m sorry,” he hung his head in mock shame as he skulked into the dining room to help Sam and Tess with their puzzle.  

It seemed like a non-event in the life of Lou until, a few minutes later, as I was slicing cucumbers and mushrooms in relative peace, I heard water trickling. I stepped into the bathroom to check to see if Lou had shut off the faucet all the way.

He had. 

But still, I heard the water. 

I glanced down at the floor next to the toilet, and a giant puddle, larger than all four of Lou’s earlier puddles could not escape my eyes. It was most definitely growing, pooling up towards the top of the baseboards and fanning out around the base of the toilet itself. 

“What the—”

I removed the tank lid, expecting to see a large crack or hole, but there was none. But when I crouched down on the floor, water was in fact dripping quite rapidly from the bottom of the tank. I peered in again and ran my finger along the bottom of the tank.

Yep, sure enough, I could feel a very tiny hairline fracture on the bottom—small, but very problematic. 

Recalling the time when I was a kid when our second floor bathroom leaked through the floor into the kitchen ceiling, I panicked.

“Oh my God, this is bad! Sam, Tess, I need your help!” 

I scurried back into the kitchen and grabbed a very large mason jar and sprinted back to the bathroom floor to hold it in place under the drip.

“Towels! We need towels!”

“Where do we keep towels?” 

Sam and Tess had heeded my request for help, but stood there uselessly, watching me attempt to problem solve on an empty stomach.

“Sam, how do you not know where we keep towels? We’ve lived here for five years!”

But there was no time to muse at Sam’s cluelessness. 

“Never mind, there are a few beach towels in the laundry room—grab them! Quick!”

Still crouched down holding the mason jar, I was snarling under my breath.

“This is bad, this is going to be an expensive fix,” I was glancing down at the floorboards that already seemed to be curling up with wetness. Then louder, “We don’t have the money to redo a bathroom right now, Lou!”

I didn’t see where he went, but I wanted him to feel some remorse. 

I frantically grabbed the two beach towels Sam had brought down, one Fortnite and one Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and thrust them on top of the ocean of water. The jar was already full, so I emptied it into the sink before nestling it among the towels, propping it at an angle to catch the constant dripping.

And I preached about what a catastrophe this was the entire time. 

“Sam! Bring me a plastic cup!” I called, realizing I could outsmart the toilet.

I dipped the cup into the tank and dumped its contents into the sink, hoping to empty the tank so it would stop leaking. I had forgotten that the tank automatically refills when the water level drops to a certain point.

“Oh, no! We’re just going to have to keep emptying this jar for an eternity.” 

Finally, Sam and Tess recognized that my negativity was kind of a downer, and since they weren’t really useful anyway, slinked away, back to their puzzle.

“Lou! This is really bad!” I called out to his undisclosed location, hopefully still somewhere in the house.

Suddenly I remembered the nachos!

“Sam, Tess! Quick, turn off the oven!”

“How?”

“Press ‘cancel!’ It’s a red button!”

“What? Where?”

They both stood there, gazing like blind men at the buttons on the oven. 

“There’s no button that says ‘cancel.’”

“Yes, there is! It’s red!”

Not trusting the stability of the jar, I didn’t want to leave my squat position on the bathroom floor, but I had to save the nachos!

The jar would be fine for just a second, the once-burnt chicken would not.

I practically threw my body at the oven, slamming my fingers at the red button that read “clear”—dammit, Sam was right—ceasing the broiling process. I peaked into the oven door and spied the crisp, blackened chips and brown bubbly cheese. 

Burnt. 

I reached for the towels that hang on the oven, but they were missing—still heaped on Lou’s ponds of water on the kitchen floor. Shoot, where do we keep the oven mits? How do I not know where the oven mits are? We’ve lived here for five years. 

I pulled open random drawers until I found them—in the drawer right next to the oven.

“The chicken burned again! This is terrible!” 

I was incredulous. Not only that the chicken had burnt for a second time, but also that our toilet was just spewing water onto these very ancient hardwood floor planks. Who knew kids would be so expensive? Tuitions and clothes and food and sports equipment, yes, but toilets?

Back to the squat position on the bathroom floor—the cramping in my hips was breeding resentment. 

What was taking Tighe so long?

I pictured Tighe at the school gym laughing it up with the other dads, offering rides to all the other boys, and taking the longest route possible home. Probably listening to my favorite podcast or something, too. 

Tighe walked through the door a minute or so later, to a chorus of “Lou broke the toilet!” from Sam and Tess. 

“And the nachos are burnt!” I chimed in, practically in tears. “I’m so sorry!”

I spent the next two minutes or so trying to show Tighe the tiny hairline fracture in the bottom of the toilet tank. He has bad eyes, so finally, he just had to take my word for it. 

“So why don’t you just drain the tank and turn the water off, so it doesn’t keep filling.”

Ten seconds later, the entire crisis was fixed. 

Well, not the entire crisis. Tighe had to remove the old toilet and buy and install a new one—all covered by Home Depot gift cards from my mom, by the way. So for about twenty-four hours, when nature called, we had to use one of our remaining four toilets elsewhere in the house. It was tragic.

Oh, and Lou’s whereabouts? He was hiding and not very well. He was actually totally naked in the dining room, under the buffet. Correction: not totally naked. His socks were still on. And he wasn’t exactly remorseful, he was smirking.

And the nachos? They were pretty good, actually. We broke off the charred edges and topped with some guacamole and everyone persevered. 

Until the next morning when I checked my phone to discover that Lou had a snow day. An entire day with Lou. My supervision would need to be more vigilant. More on that to come…

The Importance of Sleep

“Mom, I love the color of your bed.”

“What? Lou, you need to go to bed.”

It was 11:20. PM.

That’s right, PM.

On a Tuesday.

A solid three hours past his bedtime. Nate, Sam, and Tess were all fast asleep in their own beds. Tighe was out of town. This was just me versus Lou. 

I was already tucked into bed, exhausted. 

Lou was not.

He was standing in my doorway, chatting away, half amused at my bedtime routine and half amused at himself for being wide awake when he knew everyone else was in bed.

But I believe that he was genuinely not tired. Which was my own fault, of course. 

Tighe and I have been talking a lot about resentment lately, and I have to admit that mostly, I just resent myself. 

Why did I let him nap for so long this afternoon? Why didn’t I make him go to school this morning? 

Though, looking back, I still think I made the right call there.

He was feverish the day before, and with everything going around—covid, RSV, stomach bug, flu, chlamydia, all of it—I worried he was coming down with something. Tess was sent home with a very legitimate fever the week before and Nate slept through all of Martin Luther King Day. Which was a shame because I had a video on peaceful protests all queued up, ready for some teachable moments with my kids. 

And of course, like any good mom, I was planning to hit on all the good conspiracy theories about who really killed MLK. The CIA? The FBI? There’s no way James Earl Ray was acting alone. 

In retrospect, perhaps Nate was faking that nap? 

No, that was a legit nap. He had spent the night, Sunday night, at a friend’s house and I suspected they didn’t get much sleep. He was dropped off at home around 9:30 that morning, said “good” when I asked him how it was, and immediately dragged his weary body up to the third floor to nap. It was very much Charlie Brown’s depression posture. 

Obviously, I let him do it. A tired Nate is a dangerous Nate. Grumpy and irritable, he lets his mood infect the entire household.

But after an hour, I went up to check on him. I mean, I carried my own tired self all the way up to the third floor—that’s how worried I was. 

I always reach back to feel my hamstrings working and give them a little assist when I get to that second set of steps. Those are steep!

I found him sound asleep. He had turned on his fan, directly on his face, and his noisemaker, full volume, and looked so peaceful under his giant sherpa blanket.

So I went back downstairs. Back to the noisy chaos of Lou, Tess, and Sam. And several of Sam’s friends who are always in and out of our house. They get a tad dramatic with hurt feelings and injuries—there’s always an injury—that cause them to break up and get back together several times during the day.

And Tess was scheduled for a birthday party at 1, so after I fed them lunch and sent her to fetch her coat, I went up to check on Nate again. Still sound asleep, though in a different position. 

“He must be sick,” I thought to myself as I crept around the Lego bins forever on the floor to reach out and feel his forehead. Normal. Though the fan on his face would surely blow away any sign of a fever. 

The afternoon dragged on. Sam retreated to the basement, Lou to the couch for some Paw Patrol, and I checked on Nate at least every thirty minutes. Each time, he was in a slightly different position and fever-free, at least as far as I could tell.

Two of his friends stopped by—one to snag him for a bike ride to CVS and the other, an hour or so later, to snag him for a pickup football game. I shooed them away, telling them he was napping.

“Why?” they asked, incredulous, peering around me to see inside the house, perhaps hoping for a glimpse of him. As though I was lying.

“I don’t know,” I told one of them, “maybe he’s sick?”

Eventually, one of his friend’s moms called me.

“I heard Nate’s sick?”

“He is?” I asked, as though somehow she’d know better than I did. But I guess the rumor had circulated through the 5th grade boys and some of their moms.

“Honestly, I don’t know,” I told her. “He’s been sleeping all day! Maybe they drank last night?”

I was kind of kidding, but it is weird for Nate to nap at all, let alone all day. Usually, even when he’s sick or exhausted from a sleepover, he still prefers to be around people, so he’ll lie on the sofa in the living room and shout judgmental abuse at everyone. 

That’s why I say a tired Nate is a dangerous Nate. He gets self-righteous, vindictive, snippy, scornful. Tess and Sam usually end up in tears over something he says. It’s miserable.

Which is why I didn’t wake him. Plus the Ravens lost the night before, doubling down on his bad mood.

Sleep on, Nate. Sleep off this imperceptible virus and whatever microscopic germs your body is fighting.

Finally, around 3:30, towards the tail end of Lou’s Paw Patrol marathon, I heard slow, heavy thudding down the steps. Quite different from Nate’s usual very urgent crashing down the steps from the third floor. Like he’s missing some really fun event or has his day all mapped out and can’t afford to miss a single second.

I curled around to the bottom of the steps. 

“Nate? Ya dead, man?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, dragging out the only syllable in ‘know’ for what felt like an eternity. He was rubbing his squinty eyes, which were still heavy from sleep. Sliding his hands into the kangaroo pocket of his hoodie, he hobbled around the couch and plopped down beside Lou.

“Are you sick?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did you sleep last night?”

“Uh, I don’t recall.”

Hmm, what a politician.

“Maybe I slept for an hour?”

“An hour? A single hour? Yikes.”

“Yeah,” he grunted.

“You hungry?”

“Yeah,” he sighed, pulling himself up from the couch and trudging into the kitchen.

He poured himself a bowl of cereal while I lectured about the virtues of good sleep, maintaining a regular sleep schedule, and how important sleep is to fortifying the immune system. He nodded in agreement while munching on his Special K and then I reminded him about his basketball practice that night.

“I don’t know if I can go,” he mumbled, putting his empty bowl in the sink and dropping two slices of bread in the toaster. 

His appetite was rather astounding. Is this what it’s like to have a teenager? Ew. But an appetite is a good sign.

“Oh, you’re going,” I said. “Unless you have a legitimate fever, you’re going.”

“I just don’t have any energy,” he replied, again slurring the last few syllables of his sentence. 

“Sorry, Nate, natural consequences. You stayed up too late, now you have to pay the price.”

I proceeded to lecture—good thing I have all these lectures stored away in my back pocket—about the benefits of moving your body, sweating out toxins, and sticking to your regular routine, even when you’re hungover.

A sleep hangover, I mean, not a real hangover.

I made him the best hangover dinner I could think of—a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich—and when he got dropped off from basketball practice a few hours later, he was feeling good. Energized, cheery, recharged. He showered and went to bed and he’s been a joyful, productive member of society ever since.

But back to Lou. The current bane of my existence. 

I’m just kidding, he’s still a joy to be around. He’s just exhausting. And, like Roger Murtaugh, I’m getting too old for this shit. 

I chose to keep Lou home from school on Tuesday morning because he slept late, he still seemed feverish and lethargic, and he whined a lot.

“Fine,” I had said to him, “you can stay home, but you have to nap today.”

I was convinced that his body needed it, as Nate’s did. To fight off the imperceptible virus and microscopic germs. And more than that I need regular, frequent breaks from Lou’s non-stop energy and enthusiasm.

So I napped him. Naps are increasingly rare for this three year-old. He doesn’t really need them anymore. He’s a big kid.

“But you need to nap when you’re sick,” I reminded him.

He woke up just before The Others got home from school, still a little groggy, but that’s not unusual. We charged through the rest of our evening: homework, dinner, another basketball practice, showers, books, and bedtime. Pretty standard. 

I watched a show by myself, sipped some tea, locked up the house, and went upstairs around 10. 

PM.

Again, pretty standard. Tighe called, we caught up, I brushed my teeth, and I took a hot shower as I always do right before bedtime.

But as soon as I shut off the water, I heard a rapping. I listened. Sometimes Rocket scratches himself and thumps on the floor. But no, this was lighter. And more insistent.

Definitely a child knocking on my bedroom door. Ugh.

Still sopping wet and wrapped in a towel, I opened it. 

Lou smiled up at me in his Paw Patrol pajamas. 

“Go to bed,” I said sternly.

“What? Why did you shower?”

“I always shower before I go to bed.”

“You do?”

“Yes, go back to bed.”

“But I have to pee.”

“Then pee. The bathroom is right there.”

“But I need the light on.”

“Then turn it on.”

He can definitely reach the light switch. And he often uses the bathroom in the middle of the night without bothering Tighe and I. I would know because the sound of the toilet seat slamming down wakes me up every time.

He finished peeing, flushed the toilet, washed his hands and smiled up at me, like he was expecting me to do something exciting with him.

I realized this would be a battle.

“Hold on, let me dry off and then I’ll put you to bed.”

He followed me into the bathroom where he watched me put on lotions and serums and eye cream and everything else weird that I do before bed. And he talked the whole time. Questions. And stories. So many stories.

“Why do you do that lotion? I need some. I love this toilet. Mom, one time, five years ago, I was sitting on this toilet fighting bad guys. And I killed two of them.”

“Huh.” I was dabbing at the fine lines around my eyes with great care, so I let him go on. And he did. 

“...and when I grow up and be Nate, I will shower, too. And then I will go to basketball practice with my new basketball shoes and I will get married.”

I was starting to wear out, of both wakefulness and patience, so it was time for bed. I took his hand, led him to his room, coerced his head onto his pillow, and tucked in the left side of his comforter, which always comes undone for some reason.

He immediately sat up, slid out of bed, and hopped—literally—over to his train table where he began arranging dinosaurs and cars and an airplane with a missing wing. 

“Nope, it’s bedtime,” I whispered, careful not to wake Tess, his roommate. I forced him back under his covers, whispered that I loved him, and moved to slip out of his room, pulling the door shut behind me.

“I love you, too!” he whispered back, with sincerity and enthusiasm. “And I love Tighe! And Tess! And Nate! And… uh, Sam! And Rocket and Wally. But Wally’s dead. So is Papa. But they’re probably in heaven, playing together. Why did that lady take Wally’s body—”

“Okay, go to sleep.”

I curled up under my covers and closed my eyes, fueled by just the tiniest sliver of hope that he’d stay in bed. He seemed wide awake, though, and deep down, I knew that.

A few moments later, he was in the doorway again. Asking about the impressionist paintings on the wall.

“...prints from my grandmother—I don’t know. Go to bed!” 

“Okay, but can you put this glove on my hand?” He was holding a red and white football receiving glove.

“Why?”

“It was in my book basket,” he said with the sweetest innocence. “Should we put it on my left hand or my right hand?”

“Left,” I said, as he held out his right hand. Obviously.

We wrestled putting the glove on for a moment and then I told him to go back to bed now.

“But where’s Tighe sleeping?”

“He’s in Miami, he’ll be home tomorrow.”

“So, in a hotel? What kind of hotel?”

“I don’t know! Please go back to bed!” I was so tired, on the verge of tears, wondering when I get to travel to Miami by myself. 

“Okay!” He was just so agreeable.

“But should I shut the door?”

“You can leave it open,” I instructed him. I usually leave it ajar when Tighe’s away.

“Okay! But do you want it open a little bit? Or a lot?” he asked, walking the door all the way back to the wall, in its wide open positon. 

“I don’t care, I’m so tired, just go to bed.”

“Okay!” He stood in the doorway, huge smile on his face, and pushed the door open with great force, enough so that it slammed against the wall behind it. Which irritated me.

“GO. TO. BED!”

“Okay!”

He sprinted back across the hall while I switched off my bedside lamp and wondered whether I had to go in there to regulate or he’d just get in bed and go to sleep on his own.

It was quiet, so I assumed the latter. 

Until I heard sirens. 

I held my breath to listen for the source. We live in a city, it’s not uncommon to hear sirens late at night. But no, these sirens were coming from Lou’s room.

Dammit. One of those stupid children’s books where you press a button and it makes noise. He has two truck books, one farm animal book, and one dinosaur book in that format. I resented myself for buying them for him, though they seemed like great educational opportunities at the time. Sure enough, in a few short minutes, I heard dinosaurs roaring faintly from down the hall. 

But aside from the distant din of dinosaur roars, he wasn’t actually bothering me. And the other kids are pretty heavy sleepers, so I let him do his thing and I drifted off to sleep.

Around 4AM, I stirred to use the bathroom and pondered for a brief moment whether I should go in there and see how he ended up. Under his covers? On the plush, white rug? Or maybe he was still awake, churning through books and teaching himself a trade.

Nah. I decided against it and got back in bed, grateful for a few more hours of sleep before we all had to get ready for school.

When I dropped off Lou the next morning, I warned his teacher that he was up late last night so he’ll probably be ready for an early nap. 

But at home, I had decided, I’ll never let him nap again. Until he’s a teenager. Like Nate.

Trying to Control the Universe

Or Why Southwest Airlines is the Worst Airline in the World

Life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans.

Or, if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. 

Or something like that.

Some such quote that reminds us all how little control we have over the universe.

That about sums up the circumstances of the second half of our Christmas break.

The first half was decent. Christmas happened. Kids got presents. We cleaned up a lot of wrapping paper. Recycled a lot of empty boxes.

And then we packed our suitcases to head to Florida. The kids, even Nate and Sam, actually packed two days ahead of time. Tess always packs well in advance. She loves a good beach vacation, and as always, Lou follows her example. But Nate and Sam are procrastinators, so I practically had to pick my jaw up off the floor when they wheeled their full suitcases in and lined them up next to Tess’s and Lou’s. 

I didn't check either one—Sam’s pretty notorious for forgetting something critical, like underwear—but since we also managed to squeeze in the wrapped gifts for my nephew and nieces, I wasn’t planning on making a single edit. We were ready!

And then, that evening, we got a cryptic email from Southwest Airlines. Many of you probably got the same one. Something about how they were expecting travel irregularities or some such nonsense that I’m still furious about. 

We had already known that there were delays and cancellations on Christmas Day. Two of my brothers, along with their wives and kids, had flights that morning, and it was quite hairy. My youngest brother got bumped from his flight—but not his wife and baby—so he ended up spending 12 hours on Christmas at BWI airport, watching Southwest implode all around him. 

So although we prayed that our direct flight from Kansas City to Ft. Myers would happen as scheduled on Wednesday morning, we weren’t too shocked to discover on Tuesday that our flight was now canceled. Not delayed, but canceled. 

Yes, it was weird that they canceled it a day in advance though.

Weirder still was the fact that every other Southwest flight out of Kansas City was also canceled FOR THE NEXT THREE DAYS.

Tighe scrambled to find other arrangements. Every other airline out of KC, to just about anywhere, was booked. If you wanted to fly out of KC and didn’t already have a ticket, you were pretty much screwed.

We couldn’t get anywhere! We started exploring other options. Driving. Driving to St. Louis, to Nashville, to Atlanta, then hopefully hopping on a plane for the remainder of the trip. No flights were available. Renting a car to drive to Ft. Myers, then hopefully flying home as scheduled at the end of the week. 

I was desperate to get to my parent’s house in Florida. Desperate! 

I’ll admit: there were tears. My tears. Which, I discovered, are drops of wet saltiness that emit from the eyeballs.

It would be the first time my kids had met their newest cousin and the first time my whole family had been together since covid started. I was beyond excited for this trip. 

Aside from driving the twenty-two hours to Ft. Myers, there were no options. 

Driving.

With four kids.

One of whom is Lou. Who’s only 3, wild as hell, and still rather unreliably potty-trained. I mean, he’s pretty good, but if I asked him to pee in a bottle while strapped in his car seat… well, I just don’t know that he has the motor skills to keep from peeing on me or any other object in that car.

So, hesitant to drive, we wavered, still deciding, still hoping that maybe, just maybe, Southwest would get their act together and resume normal flight operations. 

Still semi-optimistic, I didn’t unpack the kids’ suitcases.

In the meantime, Tighe stopped in to see his grandparents who live only a few blocks away. His grandfather didn’t get out of bed at all on Christmas Eve, the last time we had seen him, and it was being reported around Tighe’s very large family that he hadn’t gotten out of bed in more than three days. 

Nor had he eaten. And aside from a few utterances of “I love you” to some very select people, he hadn’t really spoken either.

“It’s going to be soon,” Tighe reported to me when he got home an hour or so later. “He didn’t even know who I was. He kept calling me ‘the new guy.’”

“Yes, but I still refer to you as ‘the new guy,’” I said, trying to minimize his deathbed status. He was 88, plagued by COPD and early onset Alzheimer’s, along with a myriad of other geriatric issues. But remembering my 100 year-old grandfather’s long, seemingly endless runway to death, I was hopeful, honestly believing that Tighe’s grandfather still had several more months. 

My grandfather was given last rites several times before finally passing away in 2017. In fact, at one point after he hadn’t woken in almost 24 hours, my uncle and mom were with him, praying the rosary and saying goodbyes, when he shot up in his bed and asked for coffee. He lasted another month or so after that.

But Tighe’s grandfather was not as stubborn. Which is ironic because I knew him to be a very stubborn man. Much more stubborn than my good-natured, jovial, Polish grandfather. 

So while I did a deep-dive into the fall of Southwest Airlines and all their many issues, Tighe was doing a deep-dive into communications with his family—aunts and uncles, cousins, siblings, and his parents. 

We shared periodic updates with one another, over the chaos of our fighting, screaming children.

“Tighe. Did you know that some Southwest flight attendants can’t get in touch with headquarters so they have to share hotel rooms with flight attendants from other airlines??!”

I was indignant. Self-righteous. On a rampage. 

“Erin. Nana said he still hasn’t eaten.”

Tighe was getting increasingly worried.

“Maybe he’s doing a post-Christmas detox.”

Please don’t cancel my vacation, was just about all I could think.

We went to bed that night with no news from Southwest Airlines and no plan to travel to Florida, and woke up the next morning to still no update from Southwest and another update from Tighe’s grandmother and one of his aunts.

The gist: He still hasn’t eaten and he’s only had the briefest of wakeful moments.

Suddenly our priorities shifted. I mean, Tighe’s priorities had probably shifted long before mine; I was still clinging to hope.

Before I knew it, I went from preparing for a week in sunny paradise with the people I love most in the world to preparing to host my in-laws. Indefinitely. 

And don’t get me wrong, I knew this wasn’t about me anymore. I mean, I was still devastated that I wasn’t going to get to see my family, that my kids still wouldn’t get to meet their youngest cousin, and that I’d now have to mail everyone’s Christmas present. 

But I do love my husband’s extended family. And I completely respect the amount of love and admiration Tighe has for his grandparents. We visited them almost every Sunday after church for the last two years or so.

So in reality, it wasn’t difficult to make that pivot. 

Though my skin could really use a dose of Florida sunshine.

I blinked back tears when I called my mom to tell her we weren’t coming. She understood, of course, and I tentatively promised to book a trip in March or April. Maybe both. 

And over the next few days, we celebrated life. And cherished little moments together. And gave thanks for everything and everyone we have. Tighe’s grandparents house suddenly became the hangout, the place to be. Food, drinks, lots of people in and out. 

Lots of waiting, lots of laughter, lots of beautiful stories, lots of tears, and lots of saying goodbye.

Tighe’s grandfather finally passed just after 1am on New Year’s Day. The joke was that he made it to 2023 so his wife will be able to file joint tax returns this year. Tighe was in the room when he took his last breaths, as were both of his parents and several aunts and uncles. I know he’s so grateful for that experience and he’ll never forget it.

And our kids will never forget being there, too, with their very large extended family, watching the fragility of life slip away from their elderly great-grandfather, watching their great-grandmother sit at his side for days on end, holding his hand and kissing his face.

They’ll never forget the grandiosity of that funeral. They’ve learned that life is precious and sacred, as are the ties that bind us. And for me, selfish as I am, I’ve grieved my own grandparents all over again. And celebrated their lives in a way that I hadn’t given myself a chance to before.

None of that would have happened had we powered through the long, neverending drive to Florida. Or if our flight hadn’t gotten canceled to begin with.

I’m not saying I’m grateful for Southwest Airlines and their poor planning, their possibly corrupt downfall. We’re still debating whether we’ll ever fly with them again. We received full refunds plus an additional 25,000 points for each ticket, and they’ve promised to reimburse us for other inconveniences, like mailing all those Christmas gifts. 

But do I trust them to get us to our Spring Break destination? I don’t know. That’s not the point of this story.

The point is that life changes fast. And it’s out of our control. Life is precious. We are only guaranteed this present moment, right now. And we should be grateful for each extra blessing.

A Christmas Reflection

Merry Christmas, everyone. 

Overall, we had a great holiday. Lots of laughter and joy and excitement. 

And a few tantrums and tears here and there, too.

Naturally, I was the first one to melt down, though I managed to suppress most of it. 

Admittedly, I was pretty exhausted from late-night wrapping the night before and a holiday party the night before that, so I started my Christmas morning on a sleep deficit. 

And though we told the kids to sleep in, Nate or Sam—not sure who—set their alarm for 7:30. 

Let the thudding and shrieking and furious unwrapping commence, then.

Within minutes, scraps of wrapping paper filled the air, and after it floated down to settle on the ground, the kids began looking for more packages to unwrap. Like savages.

Except Lou, actually. 

He had gotten a Paw Patrol tower from Santa, about three feet high, and since it was so large, Santa’s elves didn’t bother to wrap it. It sat on the floor, surrounded by all its accessory toys. Lou was fully engaged in this three year-old’s heaven. He was so busy moving the brightly colored cars and pups down the ramps and back up the elevator, he didn’t even notice his plump stocking, nor all the other wrapped gifts behind it.

“Lou, open your other presents!”

The Others jolted away from his state of flow and cheered him on as he tore through the rest of the blue penguin wrapping paper, tossing the trash to one side and the toys to the other with reckless abandon. 

It was overwhelming for me. Not just because of the growing heaps of trash all over the floor, but also because of the accumulating toys around me. 

It’s a stark contrast to how Tighe and I met—in a volunteer program where the mantra was to live simply. Poverty was a virtrue, and materialism and wealth were scorned. 

Not a totally bad sentiment, though pretty extreme, and it’s a far cry from the shiny new merchandise invading our living room.

And yes, I realize that I’m largely responsible for it.

We started our parenthood with the best of intentions there. We aimed for all the gift-giving to be experiences instead of material objects. Not just from us and Santa, but from grandparents, aunts, uncles, and godparents.

“Instead of buying a new toy for our kid, gift them an experience that they can share with you.”

Bowling, iFly, mini golf, museums, zoo memberships, trips to the movies or Disney On Ice or a football game.

And for a while, that worked. 

But let’s face it, that’s tough to keep up with. Especially now that we live in a different time zone from most of our family. It’s a lot easier to have Amazon deliver a package than to book a cross-country trip or coordinate schedules. 

And just as difficult, as our kids have aged, they’ve been exposed to commercialism and the gizmos and gadgets that their friends have. They’ve evolved into American consumers, always hungry for the next thing. 

Nate wants an Apple Watch and a cell phone. And they all have a list of expensive wants. 

Which they often don’t get, but it is a lifelong battle, apparently. See: my early blogs of arguing with Nate and Sam at Target, wrestling ninja turtles from their grip, and dragging sobbing toddlers from stores and such. Ah, those were the days.

At one point, when she started to get bored with her deluge of new toys that afternoon, Tess looked at me and said, “Why didn’t you and Tighe give us any gifts?”

Ugh. Dagger to the heart. 

After all the hours browsing on Amazon, all the time spent in stores, all the wrapping, listing and measuring, trying to make sure each kids’ stash was equal to the others. Or at least that we spent an approximate equal amount of money on each kid.

But actually she was onto something. We had tried to make Christmas a little lighter this year. With Tighe’s new business, finances are still a little tight. But we usually do give a few gifts from us: usually the boring stuff, like socks and underwear, maybe a new toothbrush, or pajamas. The necessities.

Still, though. She could have given us a little credit. Part of me wanted to grab her by the shoulders and yell in her face: “There is no Santa! Tighe and I bought you all of this!”

Anyway, a little coffee and an apple cinnamon pastry helped me overcome my inner killjoy and I fulfilled my mom duty of facilitating merriment and serving fun snacks throughout the day. We had nowhere to be, after all, and looked forward to a really chill day. Plus the wind chill was still sub-zero, so who wants to leave the house anyway? 

For the rest of the day, Tighe and I took turns troubleshooting new toys, reading instructions, and supplying batteries in between spurts of our own work, while the TV alternated between the NBA and NFL Christmas Day games. 

Everyone was in their various states of flow throughout the house, playing video games, painting nails, assembling jigsaw puzzles, coloring, trying on new clothes, and more.

By dinner time we were all tired again. Tighe had sous-vide a prime beef tenderloin, I had a new potato recipe, and, per the usual with tired, cranky kids, the kids were only interested in pushing buttons. You know, those invisible yet highly volatile buttons.

Milk was spilled. The beef tenderloin was highly, and negatively, critiqued. And the potatoes were rebuffed harder than Simon Cowell dismissing some no-talent assclown. Which is nonsense because they were pretty amazing potatoes actually.  And don’t even get me started on the roasted broccoli and carrots. If there’s one vegetable these guys hate more than potatoes, it’s broccoli.

Except Lou, of course. He’ll eat pretty much anything and he loves broccoli. 

But the straw that broke the camel’s back was the slurry of insults that went back and forth between Tess and Sam. To be honest, I don’t know what precipitated it. Sam was salty about the “mushiness” of the beef tenderloin and very vocal about it.

And that’s about when Tighe or I—who can remember who snapped first?—lost it. We took turns lecturing about gratitude and kindness. About showing appreciation, respect, and consideration for other people. You know, pretty much the same sermon we’ve been giving for almost eleven years now. Sooner or later, it’ll stick.

Tess, who was just exhausted from the excitement of the day and being out late on Christmas Eve, started dumping on Sam, too.

“Yeah, Sam, you could be grateful!” she said.

This coming from a girl who refuses our homemade meal almost every night, in favor of cheese and a banana. This from a girl who wondered aloud why we didn’t get her any gifts this year. 

“Tess, stay out of this,” I snapped at her. 

Within seconds, she was teary.

“My parents are so mean,” she whimpered, sinking down into her chair.

Yes, so mean for making sure you got everything you wanted on your Christmas list. We should be locked up.

But Sam, eager to deflect any more accusations, kept going after her, muttering another barb under his breath in her direction. Something about how she never cleans up her own messes nor does anything for herself. Which isn’t true, but every older sibling thinks that about their younger sibling.

Lou, standing on his chair, ketchup smeared across his face, a giant brioche dinner roll in each hand, crumbs spraying from his mouth, joined in. Just because. 

“Sam! Be quiet! Eat your steak!”

No one paid him any attention, so when the focus shifted back to Tess, Lou immediately switched teams.

“Yeah, Tess! You so dumb!”

And then the poor girl spilled her milk. The entire contents of her cup flooded the table, spilling onto her chair and to the floor.

I buried my face in my hands and said, “Well, Tess, this is your chance to prove to Sam that you can clean up your messes.”

“Yeah, Sam and Tess!” Lou piled on from the safety of his chair next to Tighe.

“Lou, be quiet!” Tighe clapped back.

After a few moments, Sam got noticeably uncomfortable, and I could tell that he was embarrassed, ashamed even, like he knew he was in the wrong. Like, truly knew. Sincerely understood how and why his actions, both to Tess and to Tighe and me, were hurtful. Or at least insensitive. He perked up a bit and tried to initiate a cheerier conversation.

Which was a little bit of consolation. 

But the real consolation came at bedtime that night, and not just because we were moments away from a little bit of peace and quiet. Though that always helps.

I kissed Lou on top of his head and said, “good night, Lou. You’re my special guy.”

“And you’re my special guy,” he replied. “Mom, did you have a good Christmas?”

“Yeah, Lou, I did.”

“Was it your specialist Christmas ever?”

“Hmm,” I replied, genuinely thinking about my answer. I can’t remember a bad Christmas and I’ve never thought to rank them before.

“Yeah, Lou, I think that was the best Christmas.”

“Did you get any presents?”

“Yeah, I got a new sweatshirt and a sweater.”

“To keep you warm?”

“Yes, to keep me warm when it’s cold outside.”

“Aww,” he said, caressing my cheek. “That’s so nice for you.”

And the next day, the 26th, was a much better day. Aside from the moment Tess bumped her ear into the corner of the table. And when Nate toppled off a second floor space heater. And when Lou exploded three hot chocolate bombs all over the kitchen floor. The same amount of together time, but we slept later

But no dinnertime milk spills! It was a good day.

Season's Beatings

“Do we have any white eggs? Not the brown. And do we have any coloring to color the eggs?”

“You mean Easter egg dye?”

“Yeah.”

It was Tess. She was twisting her mouth and clasping her hands together, like, being December and all, she knew it was a long shot, but she was really, really hoping I had some stashed away somewhere. 

Which, actually, I may have. Leftovers from last spring or something.

But no, Tess, we’re not dyeing Easter eggs. 

I can barely wrap my head around the fact that there are only five days until Christmas and all four kids will be home for all of them.

And because the “high” temps are in the single digits all week, I can’t send them out in the neighborhood. Suddenly the statements “go ride your bike to Ben’s house” or “go jump on the trampoline” have become child abuse.

I’d normally plan some outings or go run errands myself, but it’s too cold. I’m not leaving the house either. And quite frankly, we’ve done all those things. We saw Santa, we did our Christmas shopping, we hit up the Union Station Christmas display. Lou and I do Wonderscope and Science City all the freaking time. We did gingerbread houses, we baked, we’ve watched just about all the Christmas movies—even the ones that strongly allude to “no Santa”—and sipped hot chocolate. 

I shot all my “killing time” wads too early. 

In reality, I have a few more outings we could take, but again, it’s freezing outside. Though, at the moment, Sam’s in only his underwear and Lou’s totally pantless. 

So now we’ll just sit and wait.

For Christmas. 

Tess goes through her countdown every night at bedtime. 

“And when I wake up, there will be four days. Then three. Then two. Then it’ll be Christmas Eve!”

She’s at the ripest age for Christmas and Santa and all that. 

Nate has a few basketball practices sprinkled throughout the week. Just enough to keep him occupied, so he doesn’t start bullying The Others. Nate requires competition and physical activity to thrive. Which is why we keep signing him up for tournaments, tryouts, leagues, teams, and celebrity death matches. 

Which is why he walks around the house dribbling a basketball. And rollerblading in circles with Sam. 

And he balances his jock side with his nerd side with books. This week, he’s totally consumed with The Hunger Games series. He’s about to finish the third book, which is great because we can finally watch the last two movies with the kids. And that’ll kill a few more hours.

Though I think the last one may have contributed to Lou’s night terrors. Oh, well. We can sleep in all week. ALL WEEK.

The kids have arranged and rearranged all the presents under the tree about 17 thousand times. Without peeking. Which is impressive. They’re mostly gifts from Tighe’s parents and siblings, so each kid has a few wrapped packages down there. 

One of the packages, addressed to Sam, has a little tear on one corner—just enough so that you can see some navy blue under the snowman wrapping paper. 

From shaking it, Sam has deduced, correctly I believe, that it’s a Lego set. So he took out a ruler and measured the dimensions of the box. 

Then he pulled out his handy iPad, logged onto Amazon, and started searching for Lego sets whose boxes match those dimensions and that navy blue color.

He’s narrowed it down to two or three. Detective Sam. 

You need a murder solved, Sam’s your guy. Especially if the motive, weapon, or crime scene itself involved Legos. Otherwise, I imagine he’d give up. To go play with Legos or something.

And Lou kills time by hurling objects across the house. Like he’s literally trying to kill something. We’ve already lost quite a few Christmas ornaments that way. 

Nate’s indoor basketballing doesn’t help that either. 

I don’t know whether the advent calendars make the waiting better or worse. Nate and Sam each got Lego advent calendars with a themed mini figure for each day of December. And Tess got one with a small Disney book for each day. 

Sam, impatient and greedy, opened the contents of his entire calendar on the third day, after much agony.

“Should I just do it? Should I open them all? Or should I wait? Oooh, I can’t decide.”

He was prancing in place in the dining room after school, trying his hardest to peer into the remaining, unopened Advent squares without spoiling the surprises. Delayed gratification isn’t his strong suit.

“Sam. Sam, don’t do it!” Nate was advising from the other side of the room, where he was standing guard over his own calendar.

“Then you won’t have anything to open for the rest of Advent!” Nate was really distraught. Sam’s impulsiveness really concerns him. I foresee similar conversations twenty-five, thirty years from now, as Nate’s trying to convince him to save for retirement instead of buying a boat or a sports car or, God forbid, a new Lego set.

“So you have to think,” I said in my calmest, most rational voice from my seat at the table, barely glancing up from my typing, “what would Future Sam want you to do? If you open them all right now, what would Tomorrow Sam say?”

But before I could even finish my words, the box was being torn apart, and each of the small plastic bags, almost simultaneously, sliced open with scissors. He’s slower than a sloth out in the real world, but when it comes to Legos, he’s a really fast worker.

“Sam, noooooooo!” Nate brought both hands to his face, shaking his head in disgust, as if his Christmas has just been ruined as well.

And so, every morning since, Nate, always the first one down in the mornings—he sets his alarm for 6:30 so he can do his homework—waits for Sam to tumble, reluctantly down the steps. Sam’s in no hurry to get to school.

Once he’s sure Sam’s downstairs and relatively lucid, Nate makes a big spectacle of the Opening of the Advent Calendars. It might as well be Jesus’s actual birth.

“Tess. Shall we?” he says, helping her situate her very large calendar on the table. She’s oblivious to the game he’s playing with Sam, but very excited to see which Disney story book she gets to not read that day.

Sam, used to ignoring Nate’s self-righteousness and manipulation, doesn’t even look up as Nate arranges his growing assortment of Lego mini-figures, narrating the whole process loudly, in an effort to make Sam jealous. 

His efforts have been largely unsuccessful until a few hours ago, when an argument between Lou and Sam somehow spilled over to include Nate as well. Lots of diplomatic relations gone wrong. 

Sam had been threatening to destroy everything Lou holds dear.

“I’m gonna kill your mom and your dad and Tess and Nate,” Sam was taunting Lou, who was mostly ignoring the threats. 

“...and Rocket and the Rescue Bots!”

And that’s when Lou snapped. Sam had taken it too far. Rescue Bots is his new favorite show. As of yesterday, anyway.

Lou can usually manhandle Sam pretty easily, partially because Sam’s the king of psychological warfare, not physical. He’s not really sure how to fight with a 3 year-old. He hesitates to fight back because, obviously, he doesn’t want to actually hurt him. 

Nate, sensing an attack on Sam, went to pile on with his own grievances against him. Until suddenly it became exclusively a Sam Versus Nate battle, with Lou jumping up and down and shrieking alternating yelps of encouragement from the sideline.

And that’s when a battle to microwave each other's Legos ensued. 

Lots of yelling, lots of microwave door slamming, beeping from all the buttons, and Legos smashing to the floor in the scuffle. It was loud and chaotic. 

Thank God no one actually started the microwave. Which was surely intentional on their parts, not a function of their ineptitude. They both know how to heat things up—Nate, his daily bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, and Sam, his daily hot chocolate. 

Nope, they understand that the last thing we need right now is yet another visit from our friends at the fire station.

But I should probably double-check that there are no errant Legos stranded in the microwave next time I go to nuke some leftover pizza. 

May the anticipation that is the Christmas season continue…

Edit: Minutes after I posted this blog, I caught Lou setting fire to today’s batch of Christmas cards that had just arrived in the mail. Guess I was wrong about that fire department. We might be long overdue for a visit.

A Week in the Life of Lou

I hate to say I told you so, but when I’m right, I’m pretty right.

Also, I’m pretty, right?

Sorry, kind of a dad joke there.

Anyway, let’s travel back in time for a moment to January 2019. Or maybe it was the first week in February, who can remember the exact date?

If you’ll recall, I’d had a miscarriage a few months before that. It was a long and arduous process, complete with all kinds of hormonal fluctuations, and ultimately, I had to have a D&C. (Dilation and curettage for all of you “miscarriage-uninformed.” I think that’s the PC term nowadays. Anyway, it included general anesthesia, which was AMAZING.)

That would have been baby #4 for us. I guess #5 if you count my first miscarriage back in 2008. 

Anyway, we already had very healthy Nate, Sam, and Tess and for some reason we thought adding a fourth one-syllable name to the mix would really round everything out. Make us feel complete. 

The plan was to wait a few months after my uterus recovered from the D&C to see if I got pregnant. By Thanksgiving, I was still infertile, so Tighe and I agreed that it was time to schedule his vasectomy. 

But the earliest they could take him was April. Five months away. 

So we’d just “be careful” for a while. Pull and pray. 

And then in early 2019, I felt sick one morning. I had just dropped Sam at preschool and I was STARVING! And dizzy. With no good reason because I’d just eaten a substantial breakfast. 

I pulled Tess away from her playdate a tad early and we headed to Target, where, among other things, I bought a pregnancy test. 

Yep, pregnant. 

Tighe was distraught when I shared my news that night. 

Okay, distraught is a strong word. But for a few short weeks we had resigned ourselves to three kids. We were done. Tess would be in school three days a week next fall. We’d potty-train her over the summer, then we’d be free to travel and spend money again. 

Never count your chickens before they’re hatched, I guess. Or plan your empty nest lifestyle before you’re done laying eggs. Or something. There’s some sort of avian metaphor that works there. 

“Don’t worry,” I told Tighe as we were processing this news together. “Someday this baby will be your favorite child!”

To be honest, I was reassuring myself as well as Tighe. Babies are a lot of work and sometimes they really wreak havoc on everything, especially the household sleep cycle. 

But… they’re cute. And toddlers are funny. So after they start sleeping through the night, they totally redeem themselves.  

Which is exactly what Lou did.

From my most difficult pregnancy—ten solid months of exhaustion and dehydration—to my most difficult newborn—six solid months of colic and sleeplessness, Lou became our favorite toddler. 

And not just because he was born into a larger fan club by default. The youngest child always is. He quickly learned how to tweak his antics to optimize laughter from his siblings and their friends. 

Sitting in his highchair, he originally looked surprised at the laugh track from the people surrounding him, but soon that surprise turned to a sense of accomplishment. Pride in his work.   

He lives his life with “an enthusiasm unknown to mankind.” It’s Jack Harbaugh’s mantra, or part of it anyway, and he tried to instill that in his kids. Tighe’s done the same thing with our kids, it’s part of his pre-game talk on the drive to school each morning.

And Lou embodies this remarkable, unparalleled enthusiasm. He’s setting the record. 

From the moment he wakes up in the morning until the moment he drifts off to sleep each evening, he runs. Sprints rather. Like a mini Forrest Gump.

A much perkier, much more vivacious Forrest Gump.

If Tess is Wednesday Addams, then Lou is the super bubbly kiss-ass male counselor at Camp Chippewa played by Peter MacNicol. Though a lot less nefarious. 

He cheers me on, he expresses his love and affection, he encourages everyone around him, and he eagerly asks what’s next on our agenda for the day. 

His Monday activities are the library and lunch at the big kids’ grade school. He runs at top speed, arms pumping, down the long corridor to the children’s corner, shouting out which books he wants to pick out along the way.

“I want a train book and a volcano book! And a dump truck book! And a snake book!”

And after nine years, I know exactly where to find each of those books. You’d be amazed how many dump truck books there are.

When we arrive to do lunch duty at Nate/Sam/Tess’s school, he sprints ahead, pulling me by the hand. Then, across four different lunch shifts, he zigzags from table to table, gleaning chips and cookies and occasional bad words, keeping everyone entertained with vigorous laughter and resounding energy.

On Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, Lou goes to school. Thank God. As soon as we pull into the drop-off line each morning, he unbuckles his seatbelt frantically, and hovers over my shoulder, one hand on the back of my seat and the other on the back of the passenger seat. He cranes his neck to watch the kids ahead of us—some he recognizes and others he doesn’t—and narrates the process. When it’s our turn, one of his teachers approaches the car to help him out, and he dives back into the third row to hide. 

Usually it’s Miss Jill who opens the back door. 

“Where’s my friend Lou?” she says cheerfully. 

He pops up immediately, laughing hysterically, full of excitement to surprise his teacher, as though she didn’t know to expect this every-single-day routine.

“Here I am!”

He maneuvers through the car, hops down onto the pavement, and before taking Miss Jill’s hand, he turns back, points right at me with a big grin and says:

“Goodbye, mom! You are the best!”

Then he turns back towards the building and struts inside, ready to attack the day.

“Thanks, Lou,” I mumble to myself as I pull away, trying not to smile too wide at the best compliment I’ll receive all day.

When I pick him up in the afternoons, I get a huge running jump hug, several kisses on my cheek and/or lips, and as I buckle him in, he almost always says, “Mom, I love my teachers and my friends.”

I can’t remember off the top of my head what our tuition is there, but it’s well worth it.

On Fridays, we have two super sensational activities. Sensational to Lou, anyway.

First, our Imperfect Foods box is delivered. Most of it is fruits and vegetables with an occasional snack for me, like a protein bar or dried seaweed chips, not super exciting for a 3 year-old’s palette. He’s definitely our best, most adventurous eater, but like most kids, he’d prefer a diet of Cheez-its and Lucky Charms. 

Still, he LOVES getting these boxes. I carry it in from the front porch, set it in the foyer, tear off the packing tape, and ask him to help me unpack it.  

He drops whatever truck-related activity he’s into at the moment and comes running, thrilled to be able to help!

“Yeah, sure!”

And then every single item he pulls out is as dramatic as though it were a winning lottery ticket.

“Mom! Broccoli! We got broccoli!”

Carrying one item at a time, he sprints into the kitchen and thrusts it in my face. I had to train him not to hurl the items across the kitchen, which is how he originally delivered them to me. 

“Lou! We can’t throw mangoes!” 

“Okay.”

Then after a pause, “Wait, why?” And he’s sincere, like he genuinely can’t understand why throwing fresh fruit and vegetables could be harmful. 

Once that box is unpacked and everything’s put away, we get ready to go to his favorite place on Earth—keep in mind he hasn’t been many places: Wonderscope, which is a very hands-on children’s museum about ten minutes away. We have a membership, we go a lot. They’re closed on Mondays, and since he’s in school three days, Friday is really our only chance to go. It’s usually his first request when I ask him what he wants to do that day. 

In the car on the way there, he leans forward, half backseat driving and half encouraging me, making me feel supported and loved and like I’m the best driver in the whole world. 

Last week, we happened to hit a lot of green lights on Wornall Road and each time, I got an electrifying “Yes! Good job, Mom! Green means go!”

“Thank you, Lou.”

Here I am, thinking I’m just obeying the traffic laws and the flow of cars around me, but somehow each move I made earned his emphatic blessing. 

Until I finally did hit a red light, around 103rd Street, when he said, just a touch of disappointment in his voice, ”Oh no, I guess you picked the wrong way to go today.”

But when we arrived about four minutes later, he was back to elated euphoria as he helped me navigate the lot and find a parking spot. 

And so, the lesson is… well, I actually don’t know what exactly the lesson is. We’re still learning. But I do know that any time anyone in our house hits a rough patch, Lou is usually the one to pull them through. His frenzied joy and his passion for everything are just so contagious. It’s hard to imagine life without him, though I’m sure our house would be a helluva lot cleaner.

Back to the Urinal

Okay, it’s time to write again. 

I just kinda need to.

And I enjoy it.

And, to be honest, it’s been a great way to document my kid’s baby and toddler years. Nate and Sam love to go back to PBU and peer at their old selves. 

The Ninja Turtle years. 

The temper tantrum years. 

The totally illogical and nonsensical conversation years. 

They’re at the age when they see the humor in all of that. 

And it jogs our collective Greenhalgh memories.

“Remember that time Nate wouldn’t take his medicine?”

“Remember when Sam said his penis was big? In church?”

“Remember Lotion Robot?”

And I love all that. It’s fun to reflect on those silly stories and recall others 

But sometimes I re-read a story myself and wonder: “Ew, why did I write that sentence like that?” 

Or “why did I pick that word?” or “why did I think that was funny or notable?”

Even though the stories are about my kids, they’re actually more revealing about ME.

Erin.

In that time.

In that phase of my life.

Which was a struggle.

Which was why I wrote.

It makes much more sense to me now, almost eight years after I originally started blogging: I needed to write because I was so lonely. 

I was suddenly in a new city. 

I had quit my job to move across the country and stay home with my toddler and newborn and in doing so, I lost my sense of purpose. 

I lost the self-actualization I had reached by coaching and teaching and regularly spending time with the family and friends that I loved.

I had reached the top of Maslow’s pyramid and jumped off. 

And at the bottom, spread eagle on the ground, I was a shattered mess and I didn’t know how to pick myself up and start climbing again. 

And the postpartum hormones didn’t help.

[If anyone wants details on my messiness at the time, ask me. I’m happy to share. Just know that I never wanted to hurt myself or anyone else, it wasn’t like that. I was just lonely.]

So writing was my bridge back, my connection to people and to myself. It was therapy. 

I saw the absurdity and the comedy in it all and I needed to write about it. 

To process it and to share it. 

Nate went through a phase where he insisted on wearing socks on his hands. That’s funny. What a weirdo.

Sam morphing from an infant into a toddler was quite the transition. Even once he became verbal and quite articulate, he couldn’t get a word in because Nate never stopped talking. Still hasn’t, actually. So Sam just emerged as this silent, quirky figure, conducting his own scientific experiments in the background. 

And Tess. Tess’s toddler years were tough to document because so much of her personality is just disdain. I mean, I don't think she actually feels the amount of disdain she gives off. I think she just has resting bitch face. She gives people the side eye like it’s her job. 

Ask her whether she’d like to go to Disney World for a week and she’ll give you the same apathetic response as she would if you’d just asked her whether she’d like to eat a pound of raw broccoli. 

She’d probably love to go to Disney World and she’d hate the broccoli, but you’d never know it to look at her. She’d just scowl.

And then each week after sharing my blog, I would get high on the positive, supportive comments that rolled in from friends and family members.

It was a reminder that people love me. I’m funny and intelligent and I have value and purpose.

And so mad props to the internet, social media, and cell phones. They all get a bad rap for all their negative functions and dysfunctions, but they saved me. They were a means of connection and positivity when I was at my lowest. 

So thank you, Al Gore, for inventing the internet. 

Lou’s baby and toddler years have been less documented. I’m not lonely in the same way anymore. I’m not as desperate for therapy and connection. I have friends and people I enjoy chatting with and a greater sense of purpose again.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still climbing back on top of Maslow’s hierarchy and I’ve a ways to go still, but I’m getting there. 

To reach the peak twice in a lifetime is no small feat. 

Who knows, maybe I’ll even find myself at the bottom again and have to reach the summit a third or even fourth time. 

But in the meantime, I’m going to write again. Both professionally and as a hobby. 

Spring Break Without Screens

“I could write a blog about tonight.” 

I closed my eyes as I rinsed the shampoo out of my hair and the evening’s events replayed in my mind.

“No, never mind. I probably shouldn’t. I don’t think I could portray us very well.”

Tighe turned off the faucet where he was brushing his teeth.

“Yeah, definitely not,” he agreed.

But here I am, six nights later, and for some reason I’m doing it anyway. 

It’s just that I have to explain why spring break was incredibly painful this year.

I mean, first of all because we didn’t go anywhere. We stayed home, Tighe and I were all amped up to get some spring cleaning done. We rented a dumpster, where we deposited three broken pieces of furniture; miscellaneous, discarded toys; and our swingset, which was aging and rotting and unsafe. Half of one of the legs of the ladder had been torn off, it was an emergency room trip waiting to happen.

Plus we have several more trips coming later this spring and summer, and amidst the chaos that is lacrosse, soccer, and rugby season, a week to do nothing sounded pretty darn good. 

Except it ended up being eleven days because it started with an unexpected snow day and a scheduled professional day for teachers. 

But the first two or three days were pretty good. We structured the kids’ days around some chores and outdoor play time and board games and puzzles and reading. 

All of which would earn them some screen time later that afternoon.

Seemed fair. But excessive screen time leads to bad attitudes, misbehavior, and a sense of entitlement. Which is a nice way of saying that they turn into jerks.

So it should have been no surprise that Sunday evening when the broccoli, sausage, and penne casserole I made for dinner was met with disgust. 

A chorus of “I’m not eating that” circled the table. Even from Lou, who usually eats whatever’s served to him.

Tess was the only one who didn’t complain. She’s so picky that she’s used to not eating what I serve for dinner. Every night, she scans the table for something she likes and when she doesn’t find it, she hops down from her seat, scampers out to the kitchen, and fishes some string cheese out of the deli meat drawer. 

Which is what she did this particular night, too. Slowly peeling the strands of mozzarella in silence as she watched her brothers melt down around her. Broccoli sets them off every time.

“I’m going to pour my milk into it!” Nate said, marching over to the casserole and pretending to dump his milk into the Pyrex dish. “Then no one can eat it!”

He was smirking, but he was also cautiously watching our reactions, knowing he was pushing limits.

“Don’t you dare!” Tighe boomed, “I think you guys had too much screen time today. I like the casserole and if you ruin it so that no one can eat it, you won’t get screen time for the rest of the school year!”

Whoa. That’s quite a threat. 

Nate took his cup of milk and returned to his seat, where he sheepishly slumped his shoulders and watched the table in silence. Still smirking, but quiet.

Sam, on the other hand, doesn’t always realize when the limit has been reached. 

“Yeah, it’d be a shame if I dumped my milk in there,” he said with sarcasm, positioning his cup just above the dish and pretending to pour.

“Sam!” I was still feeling pretty patient, but I have no tolerance for wasting food, “You have a history of clumsiness, so you probably shouldn’t even fake it. Or pretend to fake it.”

“Yeah, Sam,” Tighe kept going. “Or you seriously won’t get screens until May!”

A big time threat, but since they were both warned, the risk seemed small. 

Sam set his cup down on the table and we carried on with dinner. They each—except Tess— tried tiny bites of casserole. Not broccoli, of course, but at least some noodles. Then they filled up on milk and apple slices. 

But their snarkiness continued. Even Lou was being a smartass. Well, not intentionally, he was just mimicking what he saw his brothers do. It was loud and vaguely hostile, and in all the commotion, Sam, somehow—and I honestly don’t really know how—bumped his milk in such a way that it projectiled into the casserole dish. 

Which would have been fine had it been white milk. It would have made it a bit creamier.

But this was chocolate milk. 

And I don’t care how progressive you are, chocolate and broccoli and sausage do not mix.

I stood up, my hamstrings shoving my chair back into the buffet behind me, and then I ran to grab paper towels. 

Tighe stood and started shouting. His patience was worn and he had to follow through on his threat.

“Sam! I warned you! We told you not to do it. Erin told you not to put your milk there because you spill a lot, but you were careless.”

Sam had fallen to the floor, crying. He knew what was coming.

Nate, at the other end of the table, clutched his hair with both hands in suspense and fear.

Tess, who had barely said a word the entire meal, had paused her string-cheese peeling and her mouth was wide open in anticipation. 

And Lou, unable to read a room, laughed his deep belly laugh and pointed at the milk puddling in the pile of noodles. 

“No screens until the end of the school year!” It was the most tyrannical statement he’d ever said. That I’ve witnessed anyway. 

I lowered my head to hide my shock at the harsh sentence. This is a punishment to us. 

“That’s it, I’m done!” Nate grabbed his last remaining apple slice and headed upstairs. We didn’t see him again until just before bedtime. 

Lou was still chuckling and stabbing his food with his fork.

Sam was on the floor crying and refusing to help clean up any of the milky mess. This was a death blow for him.

Already we had a “no screens on weekdays” rule. And weekends were usually jam packed with birthday parties, sports, and playdates, so they were too busy to overdose on video games. 

But screen time is still a good incentive. And by incentive, I mean bribe. Whether it’s the iPad, the Nintendo Switch, the Kindle, the TV, or the use of my laptop, it’s how I get them to do chores and other activities they deem unpleasant. And maybe that’s not healthy, but it works. 

As we cleaned up dinner later, I consulted my calendar to count the number of weeks until summer break.

Eleven.

Eleven weeks. 

“It’ll be good,” Tighe was saying, “Every time we’ve banned screens, they’ve been great. Better behaved, more creative, more outdoorsy. They always find more to do. And they’re more pleasant.”

And by “they,” he meant Sam. And he’s right. 

Sam is like two different people when he has screen access and when he doesn’t. 

Without screens, Sam’s more intrinsically motivated. He makes messes and builds things and colors and tutors Tess and lectures Lou and rides his bike around the neighborhood and tries to “cook” and plays basketball and constructs forts and reads books and does logic puzzles and agrees to go on outings and helps out around the house and cures cancer and solves world hunger. 

Okay, we’re still waiting on those last three, but we have high hopes. 

So it’s been almost a week without screens and without school and without sports and other extracurriculars. And most of their friends have been in Colorado or Florida or Mexico or California or anywhere else that’s not a simple bike ride away. 

And Nate and Sam have survived. 

And so have we. 

Frozen Pizza Surprise

If I had a nickel for every time the fire department stopped by… shaking my head…

Especially since, according to Tighe and all the other recent Ukrainian-Russian geopolitical experts populating the world, the value of nickel is through the roof right now. My gosh, I’d be ridiculously wealthy.

I mean at this rate, they’re probably on the verge of calling Child Protective Services on us.

Are we that inept? 

And it probably didn’t help that Sam had boobytrapped our front entryway that morning with dining room chairs, toy bins and boxes, pillows, blankets and our blue, round ottoman. You know, to make a fort. On their fifth snow day in about eight weeks. 

But let me back up and explain the whole fire department thing. 

Something leaked in the oven, and I have no idea what it was. I didn’t even realize it had happened until one random Tuesday evening after returning from lacrosse practice when I darted inside, preheated the oven and then left again to drive the babysitter home. She only lives three blocks away, but it’s cold.

The kids were anticipating a frozen pizza, but when I stepped in from the cold again, smoke poured out of the kitchen.

It’s like our house is just destined to burn down.

“What is happening?” I said to no one in particular. 

Tighe was out of town, hence the babysitter, and it’s not like the kids noticed the smoke at all. 

I turned off the oven, turned on the vent fan above the stove, and left the back door open. 

Within a minute, the smoke detector started going off—remember the smoke detector? The very same one that DIDN’T go off when the candle exploded and the dining room caught fire a few blog posts ago?

Well, this time it went off. With a running jump, I reached up to silence it and used a tea towel to fan the smoky air out the back door. 

It worked well enough that the smoke detector didn’t go off again that evening. 

“Shoot,” I said to Lou, the only person who ever listens to me, “no frozen pizza tonight!”

“I want chicken nuggets and… cheput!” Which is what he calls ketchup.

I made grilled cheese instead. No one ate it because no one ever eats dinner during lacrosse season. Babysitter supervision means an afternoon smorgasbord of snacks.

“This is why you shouldn’t keep good snacks in the house,” Nate said, carrying his full plate of food to the sink.

Don’t get me wrong, Nate loves snacks as much as the next person, but he also loves a chance to be judgmental and condescending. 

Two more nights went by, complete with two more stovetop dinners—a stir-fry and spaghetti—and then we were faced with a snow day. 

Which means we were all home for an unprecedented amount of time. Since the last snow day, anyway. 

So I decided it was a good time to clean the oven.

I pulled some of those foaming oven-cleaner sprays from the cabinet under the sink, but a google search advised me not to use those stinky, toxic chemicals.  Just use the “self-clean” function on the oven. 

The four-hour setting. It’d be finished in time to make dinner. 

Set it and forget it, easy peazy. 

So that’s what I did. 

But google didn’t realize how dirty our oven was. 

And in less than five minutes, there was smoke coming from the top of the stove. Not a ton of smoke, but just a little.

“Hmm, that’s not good.”

I had hoped to do a workout while it cleaned itself, but I decided I should probably stay in the  kitchen and monitor the situation.

But first I had to go tell Tighe something. I don’t remember what, probably to share a meme or something. Or some gossip. Well, Tighe calls it gossip. I call it “meaningful and critical information for understanding why someone is the way they are.”

Anyway, I stood in the doorway of his office, telling him something either absolutely vital or hilariously funny when the loud shriek from the smoke detector cut me off. 

I jumped in the air, and Scooby Doo-ed my legs on the hardwood floors, scrambling to make it back to the kitchen to shut off the smoke detector. 

“Oh my gosh, it’s so much smoke!”

And it was! Like a dark, grainy fog clouding the entire kitchen.

Way more than there was a few nights ago.

I jumped to smack the button on the smoke detector, then slid across the wood floor to hit the “cancel” button on the oven.

Within seconds, the smoke detector was going off again, beeping loudly in that rhythmic yet irritating way. Alarming even.

I threw open the back door to the outside as Tighe reached up and turned off the smoke detector again. 

And so we raced back and forth, taking turns to swat the smoke detector and fan the flames out the door. 

“Ew, it smells like smoke in here,” Tess complained, mounting the steps from the basement.

Which was an understatement. I was coughing and the dogs were trying to escape out the door.

My phone lit up with an incoming call.

“Who would call at a time like this?” I said, gasping for air and trying to maneuver a small fan at just the right angle on the counter.

“Answer it!” Tighe was standing right next to me.

“Hello?”

“Ma’am, this is ADT, is everything okay?”

“Oh yeah, *nervous laughter* we just… the oven was smoking, but it’s off now and we’re just airing out the house now, trying to get all the smoke out of the kitchen.”

“Ma’am, what’s your password?”

“Uhhh… password? I don’t think we have a password?”

“Shoot! We have a password, I can’t remember what it is!”

Fortunately, the ADT guy was a professional. 

“Ma’am, is this your address? Are you at the home right now?”

“Yeah, I’m here, everything’s okay.”

“Ma’am, if you can’t provide the password, I’m going to have to call 911…”

He continued talking but whether it was his accent, a bad Verizon connection, or my own anxiety, I could not understand anything he said until…

“Good-bye, ma’am. Have a nice day.”

And he hung up. 

“I think the fire department’s coming,” I said to Tighe.

And sure enough, less than a minute later, I watched as a big red pumper truck, blue and red lights flashing, turned down our street and pulled up to our house.

“They’re here!” I announced. 

Tess didn’t budge from her seat on the couch—TV is an incredible babysitter—but Tighe scooped up Lou and carried him outside to meet the firefighters. 

They let him check out their oxygen tanks and sit in the front seat for a brief minute, all of which Lou’s actually done before. No big deal, our kids aren’t impressed with emergency professionals any more. 

“You sure everything’s okay?” one of them called before they drove off.

“Yep! Thank you so much! We really appreciate you coming out!” Tighe called out to our heroes, bringing Lou back into the house.

“See you next week, I guess,” I muttered to myself, waving and pulling the front door closed. 

About an hour later—I let the oven cool completely while I searched Nebraska Furniture Mart’s website for in-stock gas ranges—I pulled the cap off the oven cleaner spray and started scrubbing off the mysterious spill. All is well now. We have a functioning, non-smoking oven again. Frozen pizzas for everyone.

Trust the Science

It had been a Lou Day. 

Lou is almost two and a half years old and in those 30ish months of his life, the definition of a Lou Day has changed. 

It used to mean a day where he was colicky, cried a lot, and didn’t nap. 

Now it means he talks all day long and makes messes everywhere he goes.

And not your standard kid mess where they dump out Legos and puzzles and scribble on the walls with markers. I’m used to that. I’ve been enduring that for almost 10 years now.

I’m talking messes that leave me wondering “where did he find pliers?” or “why is he covered in ashes?” or “what is this screw from?”

And granted, I don’t supervise him as well as I did Nate and Sam. Tess never needed supervision because she’s perfect. Moody and irrational, yes. But otherwise perfect. 

But Lou’s toddler days find me at a different stage of life. I’m old. I’m tired. And I’m not as charmed by the toddler antics as I was the first few times. 

We don’t sit together and do puzzles or build Lego houses or construct towns on his train table. Okay, sometimes we do, but mostly I let him outside when I let the dogs out in the morning and he comes in for meals or an occasional diaper change. I peer outside every hour or so just to make sure he hasn’t crawled through the fence to the neighbor’s yard or disassembled the swingset. 

On rainy days or days that the weatherman has deemed “frigid,” I send him to the basement. Or he busies himself in the living room. Or the kitchen. Or Nate and Sam’s room. And again, he comes up for meals and occasional diaper changes. 

I should mention that Tess is only in school three days a week and she does a great job of playing with Lou and keeping him safe.

Meanwhile Tighe and I are working. Neither one of us understands what the other one does, but we have laptops and phones, so we look busy. Sometimes I sneak into Tighe’s office and print something out. 

But when we poke our heads up from our screens, we usually discover Lou has made a mess. 

On Monday, the day that I deemed a Lou Day, I walked into the kitchen just before lunch to find about 12 gum wrappers on the floor, a spilled bottle of bubbles, and three plungers in the center of the room.

Oh, and a smiling Lou. He held up the plungers with pride, “Look, Mom! I found these!”

If there’s one thing I don’t want in the room where I store and prepare food, it’s tools that have delved into porcelain bowls of feces.

“Where did you get these?”

“I got them down there,” he said, pointing to the basement. I have to admire his enthusiasm.

“Okay, well they don’t belong in the kitchen, so let’s put them back.”

“Oh, they not go in the kitchen?” 

“Nope.”

“Oh.”

He’s always so sincere.

“Mom, call me worker.” I guess this is his Marxist proletariat phase. 

“Okay, worker. Can you please put the plungers back in the basement?”

“Okay, mom.”

He did as he was told and returned to the kitchen while I cleaned up the gum wrappers and laid some paper towels on top of the bubble spill.

“Thank you, Lou.”

“No. Say ‘thank you worker.’”

“Okay. Thank you, worker.”

“You’re welcome, Mom.”

I mean, he really is so sweet. It’s hard to be mad at him.

So I wasn’t.

Until a few moments later, when, closing all the drawers and cabinets he had opened, I discovered another spill. 

He had squirted a bottle of sunscreen—like the good, expensive kind that doesn’t clog pores or cause cancer—into the drawer. 

The drawer where we keep car keys and my wallet and the extra clicker for the driveway gate and a small bowl of miscellaneous screws and allen wrenches and our never ending supply of gift cards.

Yeah, okay, it’s a junk drawer.

But it’s still annoying.

My favorite sunscreen that I rely on heavily during lacrosse season.

So, as I wiped the thick white lotion off of each gift card and a pair of heavy-duty kitchen shears I’d actually ever seen before, I yelled at him.

“Why? Why did you do this?”

“Betause I did that.” ← Not a typo, that’s how he says ‘because.’ He’s so adorable.

“Okay, well you made a big mess in here!”

“Oh. I made mess?  Sorry, Mom.”

“That’s okay, Lou.”

“No. Say ‘that’s okay worker.’”

“That’s okay, worker.”

He spent the rest of early afternoon eating his lunch—with pliers—opening and shutting the back door to talk to the dogs, rearranging the contents of the kitchen cabinets, spilling his milk, and poking around in the fire pit on the patio with a stick. A stick he later brought inside. 

By naptime, we were both exhausted. As usual.

He truly welcomes his nap every day. He earns that rest. 

I, meanwhile, finished some laundry, sent some emails, updated a spreadsheet or two, and prepared myself to head to lacrosse practice. 

Because yes, I’m still coaching lacrosse. 

But when I went to grab my keys from the drawer—you know, the lotiony one—they were gone!

And of course, I was already late. Gathering my mittens, scarf, hat, and handwarmers takes a bit of time.

I rummaged around for a few minutes, checking and rechecking the basket of masks that sits on the counter above the drawer, but alas, no keys.

“Lou took my keys!” I called out to Tighe, frustrated and flustered. I really hate being late.

Lou and Tess had both been carrying around a spare set of keys that go to nothing lately, and since he was in that drawer earlier, I knew it was him.

“What?” Tighe called back from his office.

I grabbed the extra set of keys that remained in the drawer and dashed out to the car. 

When I returned home just before dinner, the house was in shambles as expected. Homework was strewn about the table, markers were all over the dining room floor, and all four kids were taking turns sledding down the plush carpeting on the basement steps. On an actual sled. 

It was loud and chaotic.

“If you see my car keys anywhere, please let me know!” I yelled into the basement.

“What?”

“Look for my car keys!”

“Why?”

“Because they’re missing! Lou stole them!”

“Lou! Give Erin her keys back!”  Nate loves a chance to reprimand anyone else.

No time to look for them myself. I was minutes away from a zoom meeting, so I was hurrying to make dinner, eat dinner, clean up, and make the next day’s lunches. Followed by the bedtime routine. 

Later, as I was rocking Lou in the dark, I whispered in his ear, “Lou, where did you put my keys?”

“Um…” 

I could tell he was really thinking. But he also looked a tad confused.

“In the box,” he replied.

I returned to a quiet first floor and began my hunt. I started with anything he might call a box. Drawers, tupperwares, the shoe basket under the coat rack, the cleat basket which is next to the shoe basket, the basket where we keep hats and mittens and gloves, and various bins of toys in the basement.

At one point I did find a half-eaten tortilla in the basement toybox. It was solid as a rock, but didn’t have any mold so it couldn’t have been that old. I was still full from dinner, though, so I threw it away. 

I also checked under the stove (per my sister-in-law’s suggestion), in the fridge and freezer (per my other sister-in-law’s suggestion), in the floor vents (per my brother’s suggestion), and outside on the patio. 

I even checked inside the blender and the food processor, which are two kitchen appliances that he loves to fiddle with.

I stood in the kitchen, staring up at the ceiling and collecting my thoughts. I was tired and annoyed, but knew I needed to piece the day back together to figure out where he’d been and where he put them.

Think like Lou.

I recalled first thing that morning when Nate asked me to unlock my car so he could get his favorite hat out before he headed to school.

So I definitely had my keys then because I stood at the kitchen door and pressed the unlock button for Nate.

Didn’t I?

Were they my keys though?

Or were they the extra set?

Did I leave my keys in the car?

“Tighe, I’m going to run out and check my car!”

“What?”

I dashed outside, careful not to slip on the ice that had accumulated the night before, and flipped the garage light on. Rummaging around in the center console, which is full of granola bars, extra masks, and gum, my index finger suddenly looped around a metal ring.

A key ring.

Relief!

Embarrassment. 

They were in the car the whole time. I must have left them in there when I took Tess to a birthday party on Sunday afternoon.

I’m going to have to apologize to Lou tomorrow, I thought to myself. 

Sorry, Lou. Or worker, or whatever you identify as these days.

But honestly, Lou, you probably owe me for the first two and a half years of your life.

Let’s call it even.

PS I called this blog “Trust the Science” because parallel to Lou making messes that day, Tess was conducting “science experiments.” She filled ziploc bags with water, hand soap, nail polish and shredded notebook paper. I thought the blog might take me that direction, but it didn’t. You just never know when your fingers hit the keyboard…

The Night the Dining Room Burned Down, Version B

This is version B of the same set of events. It’s like Choose Your Own Adventure, but a lot less fun. Enjoy :)

“Everything calm in your household tonight?”

The text was from my mom. 

I glanced through to the dining room where Tighe was sweeping up soot and ash.

“Well,” I typed back, “no one’s thrown up since 3am so that’s a plus.”

I didn’t mention nearly burning the house down. 

It’d had been a long week.

And it was only Wednesday.

It started on Monday morning with Tess’s water bags. Which are semi-irrelevant to the main plot, but in the end, they were *almost* useful.

While I was busy trying to get ahead in the writing course I’m taking, Tess and Lou were busy creating projects. Lots of watercolor paints and markers and notebook pages stapled together and holes punched in construction paper and rocks and twigs glued to paper. 

And the project du jour was a water bag.

Which is simply a plastic Ziploc bag filled with water and a folded paper towel tucked inside. 

She was really, irrationally proud of the prototype to the point that she wanted to make enough for everyone she knows. After several minutes of painstaking negotiations, we settled on 4 additional water bags. 

One for Tighe, one for Nate, one for Sam, and one for me.

Lou was busy sprinkling blades of grass into a bowl, so he didn’t care about such an aquatic gift. 

Later that afternoon, when Nate and Sam arrived home from school and she awarded the boys their bags of water, she wasn’t the slightest bit fazed by their confused disinterest.

In fact, the next day she insisted on making 8 additional bags of water for her friends at school.

And so by Tuesday afternoon, our kitchen countertop was dotted with all different types of bowls, each containing a bag of water and a sticky note with the lucky recipient’s name on it. 

But we can’t skip over Monday night. 

That’s important to the plot. 

In fact, probably more important than the water bags. 

On Monday night, I threw up. 

The first time was about an hour after dinner.

Then again just before I went to bed, around 10:30pm. 

And again right after midnight.

At my bedtime retching, which sounds more glamorous than it was, Tighe leaned over for his phone and canceled his 7am flight to Austin. 

I spent the remainder of the night trying not to think about food, which was making me nauseous, wondering if I had a stomach bug or food poisoning. 

By dinner time the next night, Lou was warm and lethargic and not his spry, menacing self.

A few minutes after dinner, he sat crying on my lap, turned to bury his face into my shoulder and threw up chunks and foamy froth all down my shirt, my pants, my shoes, and deep into my socks.

And so that answered that question: stomach bug.

I stripped down and he played in the tub while Tighe started a load of laundry. 

About an hour later, I started to get my appetite back and just as I had bitten into a chocolate chip cookie, Lou ran to me from the living crying. Instinctively, I knelt down, preparing to pick him up and cradle him.

But Tighe saw what was coming and tried to minimize the damage.

“No, Lou! The toilet! Get him to the toilet!”

Tighe’s panic caused Lou to panic, and so he dug his fingers into me and held on tighter.

And once again, threw up all over me. Somehow it got into my underwear this time.

We threw Lou into the tub again and gathered more laundry from around the house. The laundry never stops. Which was a real problem that night.

By bedtime, he was lethargic and weak and everyone went to bed with relative ease.

Tighe packed his bag for his rescheduled 7am flight—Wednesday, not Tuesday this time—and just as we were getting into bed, we heard thudding down the steps from the third floor. 

Uh-oh.

Tap, tap, tap on our bedroom door.

Sam, in only his boxers, was curled up in a ball on the floor outside our room.

“I threw up… in my bed… I tried to go to the bathroom, but… I couldn’t.”

Without any words, Tighe bounded up the steps, Sam crawled up after him, and I went to the linen closet to gather some clean sheets, blankets, and pillows.

We changed the sheets, started yet another load of laundry, Tighe canceled his flight again, and we all returned to our respective beds. Where we would sleep peacefully for another 20 minutes.

I should mention that our laundry room is adjacent to our master bedroom. Which, 95% of the time, is super convenient.

Except when either the washer or dryer hits a snag and alerts everyone within a mile radius of an error message with the same sense of urgency that the federal government urges us to get vaccines. 

Loud, repetitive beeps, and bright blue lights woke us up to a drainage issue in the washer. 

In fact, our washer had been doing that for several weeks now, prompting a switch to the “spin only” cycle once or twice to fully complete a load. It was a bit tedious and time-consuming, but as long as we stuck to only one load a day, it worked.

Groaning, Tighe rolled out of bed, restarted the washer, and crawled back under the covers.

A few hours later, Sam knocked again. He couldn’t get to the bathroom and had thrown up all over those fresh clean sheets. We were running out of bedding, but I threw a Star Wars sleeping bag on top of him and positioned his water where he could reach it.

The next morning, we let the boys sleep in. Nate and Tess still felt great, Sam and Lou were sleepy and weak, likely dehydrated from all the fluids they’d lost the night before.

The bigger story was the growing piles of laundry. Wash cycles were taking more than two hours to complete and suddenly the dryer was reading “Error 64. Call for service repair.”

A google search informed me that Error 64 meant a malfunction with the heating element, which would likely need to be replaced. 

There was a vomit stench permeating the house and getting more and more vicious by the second. Plus Lou had some residual diarrhea lingering in his diaper, and even a clean one didn’t solve the nostril-tingling aroma issue. Literally gut-wrenching

“It’s probably on his pants,” I announced to Tighe, checking his diaper, “but without a washer…”

I cruised the house with some Febreze and a small spray bottle of frankincense and myrrh room mister. 

It worked for Jesus, I thought to myself, clicking the cap back on and wondering if Febreze would make a good baby gift. 

But the stinkiness still penetrated the senses, so after dinner, I lit a few candles. One on the mantle and a larger, 3-wick glass jar candle from Christmastime in the dining room. Balsam fir, I think.

I was officially winning now.

Until suddenly I was losing again. 

Big time. 

As we were putting the kids to bed, we smelled smoke. 

We sprinted down the steps to discover the dining room was on fire!

Flames were climbing the wall where the candle sat and smoke was spreading around the perimeter of the ceiling. 

Like a toddler at a birthday party, Tighe blew on the flames. With his lung power. Which fanned the flames even higher!

I started clearing potentially flammable items away from the flames while he darted back and forth between the kitchen and dining room, filling pitchers with water and dumping them on the flames. I contemplated tossing one of Tess’s water bags at it. (See? Almost useful.)

Within minutes, the fire was out and we were sweeping up ash and scrubbing soot off the walls, trying to deduce exactly what happened. 

We think the glass surrounding the candle shattered, causing the wicks and the wax to spread, like lava, across the surface of the antique mahogany buffet, heating it to the point that it began to smolder and burn. 

The lava-like wax must have slid across the buffet and ignited Sam’s shoebox diorama, which was perched on the corner. 

Of course we can’t know for sure. But we know that we’re very lucky to have caught the fire before it truly got out of control. Tighe’s quick actions saved our house and saved our lives. Our hero.

I, meanwhile, saved the fruit bowl. 

The headline: stomach bug takes us down, destroys washer and dryer, and attempts to burn the house to the ground! 

Nevertheless we persisted. 

The Night the Dining Room Burned Down, Version A

This is version A of the same set of events. A couple extra details in each one. Enjoy :)

Two years ago, almost to the day, we got covid.

I mean, I can’t prove it of course, because it was in January of 2020 and there was no testing available at that point. We hadn’t even heard much about covid, we just “knew” it was a virus from a bat in China that had jumped to humans. 

But fevers ran through us, coughing was rampant, appetites were suppressed, and kids stayed home from school on alternate days. And that was it.

After a few days, I sent a text to the moms of Sam’s friends that had been invited to spend the night for his birthday that weekend. I let them know we’d been sick and asked if they wanted to rain check.

Three of the four moms are medical professionals: two nurses and a doctor.

“As long as it’s just a respiratory virus and not a GI thing, I’m fine with it. I can handle some coughing, but not a stomach bug,” one mom texted back. Everyone else agreed and we proceeded with the sleepover.

But I will never forget that text. 

Because six weeks later, we shut down the world for that exact respiratory virus. 

Flashforward two years and we got the stomach bug.

Actually, first, we got covid again over Christmas break. Fevers, coughing, runny nose, some nausea, pretty much the same for every member of our household, both the vaxxed and the unvaxxed. But it was over in about three or four days. Nate was untouched. He wanted me to mention that. 

A few weeks after that, we got the stomach bug. 

It hit me first. On a Monday.

About an hour after dinner, I threw up.

Tighe, ever my hero, finished cleaning up dinner and got everyone ready for bed. 

I threw up again right before getting into bed. And then again just after midnight.

At which point Tighe reached for his phone and canceled his 7am flight to Austin. And I spent much of that night, lying awake, measuring the waves of nausea as they came over me, debating whether or not to run to the bathroom, and wondering whether it was a stomach bug or food poisoning. Stomach bugs are definitely worse than covid, I thought, as I tried my hardest not to think about food. Especially the foods I had eaten earlier that day that I was now periodically projectiling into the toilet. What a night.

I was fine the next day. Not great, but fine. Weak, tired, dehydrated and still had no appetite. But I’m a survivor.

My question was answered the next evening when Lou threw up all over me: stomach bug.

Two-year-olds, it seems, don’t have the foresight nor the life experience to know to get to the bathroom when they feel nauseous.

Instead he sat crying on my lap, turned to bury his face into my shoulder and threw up chunks and foamy froth all down my shirt, my pants, my shoes, and deep into my socks.

I stripped down while Tighe placed Lou in the tub and started a load of laundry. 

He threw up several more times that night—again, all over me and all over the kitchen floor.

Then it got Sam. 

That poor little threw up most of the night. He made it to the bathroom most of the times, but at least twice he didn’t. Both times he tapped on our bedroom door and then laid in a pathetic little ball on the floor while we changed his sheets and fetched him new underwear. 

The laundry accumulated and so we started a midnight load. The stench of vomit only gets worse as it sits and saturates your favorite Sherpa blanket. 

But our washer and dryer, those bastards, couldn’t handle it.  

We lost them both that night. Stomach bug casualties. 

The dryer suffered a busted heating element. Which is a pricey fix. 

And the washer reported a “drainage issue.” 

“There’s probably a goddamn mask stuck in there!” one of my friends suggested the next day. She’s probably right. But because we have a front-loading washer without a front panel to access the drain, the washer was a goner. (Trust me, I researched and I checked.)

So Tighe ordered a new washer and dryer to be delivered the following Monday. Oh, good! Only five days away!

We took turns starting and re-starting the cycles on both appliances to force them to sanitize all the pukey linens and clothing. 

But the next day, the whole house smelled like puke. 

Did I mention one of the dogs puked, too? Icing on the cake, I suppose.

“Ew, you guys! Who pooped?” our neighbor asked when she dropped off Nate’s homework the next afternoon.

No one had pooped. That was just our new household aroma.

Tighe still didn’t have his taste and smell back, so it didn’t bother him, but I couldn’t take it, so I started lighting candles on the first floor, including a 3-wick number in the dining room. Balsam fir or something. It smelled like Christmas, and it was in a shiny red glass jar.

For a few brief hours, our home was cozy and magical.

And then…

We were upstairs putting the kids to bed—pajamas, brushing teeth, a few stories. 

Then suddenly everything happened at once: Tighe was thudding down the steps, I smelled smoke, and Nate said “it smells like burning.”

“The dining room is on fire!” Tighe yelled.

I practically jumped down the entire flight of steps to the first floor. 

“Holy crap!”

The surface of the dining buffet, where that candle sat, an antique mahogany piece from my grandparent’s house in Baltimore, was on fire. Flames were climbing the wall and smoke was spreading around the perimeter of the ceiling. 

“Wow, smoke is so engulfing,” I pondered, musing at the situation and struggling to figure out how to help. 

The smoke was so mesmerizing. Lou and I read a lot of books about firefighters, airplane fires, and forest fires and I know for a FACT that the majority of casualties are because of smoke inhalation. Thank you, public library.

But there was no time for facts and statistics.

“Get out of the way!” Tighe yelled at me. Upon discovering the fire, he had tried to blow it out using lung power, like a birthday candle. Which, of course, only spread the flames even more, fanning them into the wall. Then he snapped to and ran to the kitchen, filled a pitcher with water and dumped it on the flames.

“I’m trying to help!” I snapped back. I moved an apple, then three mandarin oranges from the buffet to the dining room table. Fresh fruit is important to me. I saved their lives. 

The next two or three minutes—it all happened so fast—was spent sprinting back and forth between the kitchen sink and the dining room. It took 5 or 6 pitchers before the flames were finally out.

I got out a spray bottle of cleaning solution, a roll of paper towels and some plastic grocery bags while we waited for everything to finish smoldering and cool down so we could assess the damage. 

I’m no CSI, but I do believe in science, so my hypothesis, based on the evidence, is that the glass jar that housed the candle had exploded into three massive shards, the melted wax and the wicks must have caught fire to the wood buffet, at which point Sam’s nearby shoebox diorama, depicting the “awesomeness of plains,” ignited. 

By the time Tighe got downstairs, half of the 5-foot long buffet was burning and the colonial blue paint on the wall was blistering and bubbling.

We spent the rest of the evening scrubbing soot and ash off the wall and other nearby surfaces. The wall and the buffet were damaged—both will require sanding and a fresh coat of paint or stain.  

We realize we are very fortunate that the damage was not worse. We could have lost the entire house, not to mention the lives within it. 

But after a few minutes, we were laughing at ourselves and at our situation. Long story short: stomach bug, broken washer/dryer, house fire. 

I recalled my friend’s text from January 2020. Yep, I can handle a respiratory virus, but I can’t handle a stomach bug.  

Alone in a Hotel Room... With Lou

If you you've ever had to nap a toddler at a hotel or in a strange place before, this blog is for you.

For Lou and I on the afternoon of December 30th, that strange place was a Holiday Inn express in Pittsburg, Kansas. Not that Pittsburg is strange, though the lack of an H is a tad off-putting. Nor is a Holiday Inn Express strange. In fact, this one was rather nice.

But it was different for Lou. Different from his normal routine, which is his toddler bed in the bedroom he shares with Tess on the second floor of our home in Kansas City, Missouri. 

Instead, he and I were laying in one of the queen beds in one of two adjoining rooms we had for the long weekend. Tighe had taken Nate/Sam/Tess bowling, and so, with the blackout curtains drawn and the noisemaker on, it was dark and quiet and still in that room.

Save for Lou’s talking.

His incessant talking. 

His incessant, borderline schizophrenic talking.

Non-stop.

Erratic.

Nervous.

Persistent. 

He likes that one-on-one time and he was definitely tired, but he also sensed he was missing something exciting. He was determined to avoid a nap that afternoon.

But we still had to get through the wedding rehearsal. And the rehearsal dinner. And the actual wedding the next night. Not to mention the New Year’s Eve celebration.

So he had to sleep. 

I had to outlast him.

“Mom, firefighters need to sleep.”

I had told him this a million times. They’re his heroes.  Which is why he walks around with a spray bottle, “putting out fires” with squirts of water.

“Mom, I wake up and I probly go to Florida.”

“Mom, I love you so much.”

“Mom, you so fat.” 

“Mom, you so dummy.”

I tried my best to stay quiet and ignore him, but the sudden kisses on the lips were too much.

"Mom, you want more kisses?”

“Lou, close your eyes.”

“Otay.”

“Mom, my eyes closed.”

“Mom, open your eyes so you see my eyes closed.”

“Lou, stop talking.” 

“Otay.”

“Mom, you otay?”

“Mom, my arm still hurt.”

“Mom, I need to talk to people now,” he was reaching for the phone on the nightstand, something we’d strictly forbidden since the time in Philadelphia he inadvertently stayed on the line with the front desk for over an hour before we realized the phone was off the hook.

“Mom, I need to be on da phone.”

"No, you don't!"

"But I need tell people we go to the pool."

“We’re not going to the pool, you need to take a nap!” 

“Mom, I pew the bad guys!”

He aimed his index fingers, like tiny guns, towards the windows and in a high-pitched voice, made the sound of bullets or lasers or nerf darts: “Pew, pew, pew!”

How all boys seem to be born with that shooting instinct is beyond me. Very Freudian, I suspect. 

“Lou! Go to sleep!”

“Otay. Mom, I rub your back?”

He started patting my shoulder with his clumsy little hand and tried to sing soothing words, but whether he was trying to soothe me or himself, I don’t know. 

“Down my butt, down my butt, dowwwn my buttttttt…” 

The words didn’t make sense, but his next set of lyrics made even less sense.

“Who dat Tess? Who dat Tess? Who dat Tess??”

Is he a Saints fan? Or just a Tess fan? Again, I don't know. But I do know that his words started to get further and further apart. And quieter.

Until it became a very faint whisper: “who.... dat... Tess?”

And then silence.

Obviously, like any non-idiot, I laid perfectly still, scarcely breathing even, for a few extra minutes. I took inventory of all my limbs and extremities to determine just to how to best extricate myself from his tiny body. 

I moved first my right shoulder and paused.

Did he stir?

No. 

OK, now the left foot.

He was still unconscious. I did some weird back flip maneuver off the side of the bed that was probably a lot less graceful that I intended and paused again. 

No movement from the bed.

I crept out of the room, through the adjoining double doors, grabbing some pants from Nate/Sam's suitcase that they would need later.

Safely in the haven of our second hotel room, room #304, I sighed with relief and texted Tighe.

"I have never worked so hard to get a child to nap and if anyone wakes him, I will pew them!"

Life Lessons From Lou

It all started—well, okay, that’s not actually true. The truth is that who knows when it started. I’m just starting this story when The Incident most inconvenienced me. Because that’s when the best stories seem to begin.

So I’ll start this story and then we can backtrack just a tad to when it may have started.

A few mornings ago, over the kids’ Thanksgiving break, I was laying in bed, still trying to hang onto those last few minutes of slumber before I had to hit the ground running with waffle-making and bed-making and juice-pouring and diaper-changing and such.

Suddenly, footsteps thudded down the stairs from the third floor and the door to our master bedroom flew open.

“What do you want?” I said groggily, rolling over to see which blond head of hair was trotting across the hardwood floors, past the bed, and into the adjoining laundry room.

It was Sam.

“I need pants!” He was in his underwear and a t-shirt. “You never do laundry!”

First of all, I do at least one load of laundry a day. It’s necessary just to stay on top of sports jerseys, school uniforms, masks, hummus stains, Greek yogurt stains, blood, dirt, and dog hair, not to mention the occasional diaper mishap. Also there’s the fact that just as Sam forgets to stop whatever he’s working on to eat, he also forgets to stop and go to the bathroom, which also creates laundry issues.

What Sam’s referring to is the Great 2021 Supply Chain Disruption: Laundry Edition. I’ve been on strike, though not by choice. 

While on the phone with my brother the other morning, two mornings prior to Sam’s wakeup call, I was pacing around the house with a wet paper towel, wiping down smudges and fingerprints and rogue Crayola marker markings. It’s a pretty typical phone call activity for me, multi-tasking at its finest—my brain can’t handle much more.

And it’s very gratifying.

But suddenly I spied water on the new(ish) hardwood floors in Tighe’s office. Not a puddle, but more like a trail of water droplets, a foot long, each droplet about the size of a nickel. 

“That’s odd,” I thought to myself, still listening to my brother and his wife dissect the flavor differences between Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts coffee. Part of me wants to take this blog in that direction—who doesn’t love a good coffee talk?—but I sense that I’m already blathering on and I really need to hurry up if I want to nail the absurdity of the situation we’re currently in before I lose my audience. All two of you.

I know you’re both very busy people with lots to do—like laundry—but I encourage you to stick with me to the end to learn a very valuable life lesson.

I wiped up the water and spun around slowly, my eyes scanning the room for its source, but I saw nothing incriminating. 

Until I directed my gaze upwards. To the ceiling. And noticed some damp drywall and tiny little bubbles pooling in a line parallel to the one I’d just discovered on the floor.

“Uh-oh. I think I gotta go, guys. We have a ceiling leak here.”

I hung up the phone. 

[Who am I kidding? I was talking to Phrank, and both of us are terrible at ending phone calls, so we probably talked for another 20 minutes before one of us actually pushed “end call.”]

Anyway. Eventually I hung up the phone and scurried up the stairs to the room just above Tighe’s office: The Laundry Room. 

The washer had just finished a load and the light was still on, alerting me of its status. 

But just in front of the washer was a puddle of water. Not huge, but definitely big enough to be seeping through the floorboards and through the drywall beneath it. Especially if it happened each time the washer ran for several days. Which it probably had because I’d actually noticed a similar puddle the week before, but hadn’t thought much of it because there’s usually a small mat there and so I hadn’t realized how large the puddle was. I thought it was just a little water dripping from the inside of the door as it swung open, anxious to get those clothes to the dryer. 

A leaky washer is always risky when the washer’s in any location but the basement. I’m no plumber, but I do know that. We’ve had that front-loading washer for 8 (eight!) years now, one of our first purchases when we moved from Baltimore to Kansas City and we’ve never had a problem with it. 

Until now.

After tossing some towels down in front of the washer, I transferred the wet clothes to the dryer and started it, mentally panicking and imagining the devastation—not to mention the financial cost—if the entire ceiling in Tighe’s office collapsed from the deluge of water. Problems are always bigger in my head than they are in reality. That’s basically the definition of anxiety right there. 

And that was it. I didn’t do laundry for two more days to prevent further flooding. It was a nice little vacation actually. But hence Sam being out of pants. I should also point out that he’s super picky about the pants he wears. He’s skinny and relatively tall, so pants are either too loose or too short. He has three pairs he rotates through. Eat something, Sam!

When Tighe got home an hour or so later, we stood in the laundry room and analyzed the situation. Not that it took long to see the problem. 

There was a hole in the gray rubber ring that surrounded the door, thus sealing in the water that cleans the clothes. 

“A hole,” I said, running my finger along the crescent shaped gap. “Tighe, it looks like… uh…. this is weird… a bite mark. Doesn’t it?”

I felt stupid even saying it.

“Did one of our kids try to eat the washer?”

“Yeah. That’s exactly what that is.”

He pulled his phone from his pocket and ordered a tray for the washer to sit on, an accessory we probably should have had all along. Then he got some sealant tape from the hardware store and tried to patch the hole. I mean, the bite mark. 

In two days, Amazon Prime time, we were up and running again. But we couldn’t just run it without supervision. We don’t have the funds or the patience right now to risk a caved-in ceiling. Not to mention the baby grand piano, flat screen TV, and slew of office equipment that currently sits in that room. Also the new stapler that Sam insisted we purchase, but that’s another story for a different day.

So, we sat on the floor of the laundry room and watched a load of laundry get clean.

“Wait until it gets to the rinse cycle, that’ll be the real test,” I said to Tighe, peering up at the screen to see that we were currently in the “washing” stage.

“Erin. It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re watching a wash cycle. All because one of our kids took a bite out of the washer.”

“I’d rather be watching football,” I muttered.

“My mom! You in here?” 

Lou finds me no matter where I go. He stomped into the laundry room with a small plastic dinosaur and positioned himself between us, to also peer at the washer. He was probably hungry.

“Lou, did you bite the washer?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Be-cause!” 

Then immediately changing the subject, he pointed at the washer and shouted, “I see my fire truck pee-jays in there!”  

The three of us watched the red and gray fleece pajamas spin around and around in silence.

That was the end of our interrogation. 

But surely not the end of the problems Lou causes in his lifetime that we’re responsible for.

Lesson learned: teach your kids not to bite the washer.

In Need of a Bigger Table

Faithful readers of this blog—is there any such thing?—will recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about our really, insanely busy fall Saturday schedule. Multiple soccer games, multiple flag football games, a lacrosse tournament, and Tighe’s playoff tackle football game (he’s coaching, not playing). 

Several of those events had overlapping if not simultaneous start times, requiring us to be two places at once, sometimes 30 minutes away. Phew, they were exhausting.

Well, it turns out the comedown from those adrenaline highs was pretty rough!

And instead of taking out our aggression on the opposing team or coach or I-435 traffic, we began taking it out on each other. 

Yes, fall sports have ended and winter basketball—for Nate and Sam, anyway—is just beginning. Tess declined winter sports and Lou would absolutely play if there was a league for really aggressive 26 month-olds who are also obsessed with their moms. No such league exists. I checked. 

Tighe is coaching Nate’s team and only helping with Sam’s team, so he’ll be around more than he was in September and October. And we seem to have a weird interlude in his work travel schedule, so he’s around all day, too. 

Yes, lots of together time. No more—or at least not as much—rushing through homework and snack before we have to leave for practice, followed by another practice. Then home for a quick, non-nutritious dinner, frantic baths and showers, before we speed through prayers, teeth-brushing, and other bedtime rituals and wonder why they have trouble falling asleep. 

Instead, we’ve had a week or so of much more leisurely afternoons and evenings. Hours and hours to do their very minimal homework. Loads of time to play games and do puzzles and read books.

Which also means…

…hours and hours and hours of time to eat junk food, sneak Halloween candy, fight about things that don’t matter, break lamps, and scatter belongings, toys, and cups throughout the house. 

It’s really fun and just thinking about it warms my heart. 

And yes, I’m being sarcastic.

Yesterday after school, Nate changed into his play clothes and biked to a friend’s house to play touch football. So he was marked safe. 

Meanwhile, Sam, our resident nerd, aka Crazy Old Maurice, resumed construction on a robot. According to the directions in the box, you can deconstruct and reconstruct the robot into different formations that allow it to climb walls, transport items, and do other really cool things that Sam was pretty fired up about. 

He also had his homework—a math worksheet that he hadn’t so much as written his name on—out on the table, along with computer coding game that he got for Christmas a few years ago. It resembles Plinko from The Price is Right, but it’s designed to teach kids to problem-solve and create computer programming. I don’t really know how it works, but I do know that it’d be cooler if it didn’t involve so many small parts that end up on the floor, particularly the teeny tiny marbles that roll every direction at once. 

Oh! And he had out a Eyewitness encyclopedia book on ancient mythology that he had checked out from the school library that day. It sat open and he periodically, turned the pages and pointed out creepy looking statues and funky hieroglyphics. 

He might have ADHD.

On that same table, the table where we eat our family dinners, Tess was coloring in her giant Lisa Frank coloring pad with about 40 to 50 Crayola markers. 

And at the far window, Lou had a pile of dry-erase markers and was scribbling on the glass. Of course, they wipe right off and I allow him to do this, but still, the messiness of the activity gives me anxiety.

For about an hour, this arrangement more or less worked. I rotated between the three major players, coloring with Tess, fetching a snack for Lou, and taking apart the tiny robot pieces that Sam’s fingers just couldn’t manage. 

Naturally, there were a few hiccups. Lou, stuffing his face with crackers, almost choked, spraying crumbs everywhere and attracting the attention of the dogs. Tess and Sam fought over valuable real estate on the table, each pushing their belongings across the imaginary midline of the table. And Tess grew angry when Lou began using her markers as projectile weapons. 

But otherwise, it worked. 

Until it didn’t. 

As darkness began to fall, Tighe decided to walk a few blocks to fetch Nate. My tasks in the kitchen grew increasingly frantic as the dinner hour approached, and unbeknownst to them, the three kids in the dining room began to get hangry. They were more and more irritable by the minute. And so was I. 

Tighe was gone for a total of 15 minutes. He stopped to chat with a neighbor and watch Nate’s pickup game for a few minutes.

When he came into the kitchen, which felt like hours later, I shook Lou off my leg and shoved him in Tighe’s direction. 

“In the short time you’ve been gone, at least three of the four of us have cried,” I yelled to him over Tess’s woeful, high-pitched shrieks. If I remember right, she was angry about the type of cheese I was using to make her quesadilla. 

Sam, who hadn’t eaten since lunch six and a half hours ago, was both losing patience with the small, finicky plastic pieces of his robot and getting confused by the next “challenge” on his coding game. 

And Lou was just flat-out hungry. I had tossed a granola bar his way about fifteen minutes ago, but it hadn’t satiated him. Plus his socks were “heavy.” Whatever that means. But it was very distressing to him. He was wailing and hanging on my legs as I was trying to make my way between the three points of the kitchen triangle: sink, fridge, stove. 

“These people,” I muttered to Tighe, shaking my head and blowing out a stream of air through my lips.

A few minutes later, we were sitting at the table. The same table that was previously covered in games and books and homework and markers and tears. Now it had cups of milk and salad and enchiladas and apple slices and laughter. 

A return to quiet, docile evenings when we have nothing to do but fight, problem-solve, cry, and giggle is a good thing. We just need a bigger table.

Flooded With Blood

“I could write a blog?” I thought to myself, settling into a big comfy chair in a coffee shop. Tess and Lou, my usual Friday morning colleagues, were in a supervised childcare situation—where they even change diapers!—and I was pretty anxious to have a few hours alone to write. 

“About what?” I replied to myself, opening up my laptop.

“Well, there was the incident last night with all the blood.”

“Ahh, yes, the blood.”

My memory flicked back to the image to Tighe on his hands and knees mopping up the pools of dark red blood with handfuls of paper towels while I fetched new Swiffer pads and plastic bags to deposit the saturated rags. Which sounds more gruesome than it was. 

But perfect for Halloween weekend.

Somehow, impossibly, the stench of iron hit my nostrils again as I typed in my password and pensively opened a new Microsoft Word document.

It was a lot of blood, though. Dark red blood. In puddles on the hardwoods, all throughout the first floor. And then spritzing and flickering onto the cabinets in the kitchen as Wally galloped, trying his best to meet Tighe at the back door. 

Tighe had just arrived home from the airport, where he picked up my brother Kyle who was visiting for four days and nights. He likes seeing the kids’ costumes and helping Tess and Lou trick-or-treat.  I think he just likes candy. 

Back to the blood and gore, though.

As I sat on the sofa that Thursday night, alternating my attention between my book and the football game on TV, both dogs slept soundly on the carpet in front of me. In fact, Wally was snoring. Loudly.

But as Tighe’s headlights shined light into the house and his car rumbled up the driveway, they jumped up, startled and excited.

Wally was excited because he understood that a car means a person has arrived. And Rocket, with less brains than Wally, simply understood that Wally’s excited and so he should be excited.

It’s almost as if Rocket tries to learn from Wally, who, in response, ignores him. Just like he does with our kids. Like he’s a grumpy old man. Every other living being in our house is a nuisance. Outsiders are preferable because they give him the attention he craves. Until they tire of his neediness and stop petting him. 

Some people even push his paw away from them and then quickly glance to Tighe or me to see if we’ve noticed their dismissal. Yes, we’ve likely noticed, but we’re sympathetic. One can only pet a dog for so long. And poor Wally just doesn’t understand that his desperation can be a turn-off. 

If judges issued restraining orders to dogs, Wally wouldn’t be allowed within 100 yards of most people. 

And he underestimates his size.

Once, when we had just moved to Kansas City and wanted people to like us, our elderly neighbor on 73rdStreet came to the door to chat about a new fence between our yards. He was difficult to understand and I don’t even know what his name was because his French accent was so thick. The language barrier made all interactions a bit more awkward and tense. And frustrating. 

A gregarious, 80-pound Golden Doodle didn’t help.

As the man entered the house, Wally came charging through the dining room and leapt into the man, as if he expected the man to catch him in his arms and embrace him like a long lost relative. Unfortunately, the man, already frail and walking with a noticeable, if not debilitating limp, didn’t expect such a warm welcome. 

Startled, he jumped back, and the collision with Wally sent him into the air, to the point that he was parallel to the ground and he just dropped.

With a thud.

But never fear—Wally was there to lick his face and console him.

I dragged the dog off of him, pulling him to the kitchen where I shut the door. I could not possibly apologize enough times. The man—embarrassed and kind, as though he was the one at fault—truly struggled to get to his feet again, one knee, then one hip at a time. I can’t even imagine how sore he was the next day.

I feared a lawsuit, but the only thing he ever “served” to us was a little red toy car and an art set that had belonged to his grandchildren. It was way more than we deserved. 

So when a visitor arrives, Wally puts every ounce of energy and girth into his greeting. 

And that night that Kyle arrived, Wally galloped around the house, tongue out, tail wagging, while Kyle rolled his suitcase across the driveway. And Rocket dumbly followed suit, trotting alongside him and periodically nipping at his ears as if to ask, “Where are we going? What’s going on? Why are we so happy?”

And somehow, in all the commotion, Wally must have bumped into a table or chair and his tumor—remember his tumor? Giant, grapefruit-like thing that kind of resembles a human brain and seems to grow and shrink as the seasons change?—ruptured. 

Again.

But instead of puss oozing out in a steady drip as it normally does, this time it was blood. And it exploded and gushed. And in addition to the pools on the floor, it also speckled and dotted the kitchen cabinets and the white stool Lou uses to “help” me when I cook.

Welcome, Kyle. Wally hasn’t seen you in six months. Allow him to make your arrival most memorable. 

Fast forward a few weeks and the wound on the tumor has healed, mostly overnight, though it remains massive—softball sized. We’ve had a few mornings when Wally’s needed one of us to help him get up out of his giant dog bed. His hips just won’t cooperate. 

And he doesn’t gobble up his food quite as greedily as he has in the past. In fact, sometimes he doesn’t even finish it and nods to Rocket, who’s waiting nearby in case there are leftovers. 

But he’s still the first one to the door anytime there’s a visitor! And the vet assures us that he’s otherwise very healthy. 

Still, at thirteen and a half people years, we know his days our numbered. And we’ll be ready.