Weekend Roundup: Surgical Recovery Edition
You know, I was just about to beg off writing a Weekend Roundup today, citing the long, exhausting week we all just went through, when I realized: every week is a long week. Every week is long and exhausting and full of soul-draining activity. So has it always been, so shall it always be. So if I’m going to use it as an excuse today, I might as well never write another Weekend Roundup again. I might as well have used it every weekend since we started doing this thing! So I guess what I’m saying is, yeah, the week sucked, but show me a week that doesn’t. Such is the life of a modern working parent, I suppose.
I don’t know why I’m complaining, because at the moment the house is as quiet, still, and peaceful as it’s been in months. It’s a cool, gray Sunday afternoon. Steven is over at a friend’s house. Everyone else is taking a nap in a house that’s a little less loud and crowded now that our helpers have all gone home. What helpers? That would be my mom–who drove up from Arkansas–and Shannon’s mom and grandmother, who drove over from St. Louis. And who were they helping? Shannon, of course, who had relatively major surgery last week. And who am I kidding? They were also helping me take care of the kids and the house.
I won’t go into the gory details of the particular procedure Shannon had done; many of you already know all those gory details anyway. Suffice it to say that she had some repair work done where the sun don’t shine. See, last summer she had this exact same procedure done and it, um, didn’t take. And that failure to take caused a number of complications that eventually caused Shannon to have to have another procedure (her ileostomy) that put her in the hospital for a couple of weeks. For the past eight or nine months, she has been recovering and waiting for a good time to try the first procedure again. Last Thursday (4/27) was Zero Hour (not this one). Her doctor went in and did the original repair again, and this time, because of the ileostomy, her recovery went much smoother. In fact, she was able to come home the very next day. Yes, she’s in some pain still, which was not unexpected, but she is experiencing none of the complications of last year.
Plus, the house is clean and the laundry’s all folded and our bellies are all full. And I had nothing to do with any of it! The Nanas (with the help of one great-Nana) basically took care of everything for us. And I mean everything… they did the following:
- got the kids off to school
- drove me to the bus stop when I was running late
- drove back and forth to the hospital to mind Shannon when I was at work
- stayed with Shannon at the hospital to ask the doctors and nurses all the right questions (they’re both nurses, so they know the questions to ask)
- made dinner
- cleaned up after dinner
- washed every washable item in the house, often multiple times (sheets, blankets, curtains, underwear, the whole nine yards)
- cleaned out our refrigerator, which was ridiculously cluttered and kind of gross when you think about it, I mean there was stuff crammed in the back of the fridge that had been sitting there since Shannon’s first surgery, oh man, we are so gross I guess but it’s not like there was mold or anything, we just kind of lost track of it so don’t think we’re like one of those crazy white trash families that live in a rundown trailer with cat pee and feces everywhere, because for one, we don’t have cats, also I guess I am kind of rambling here
- cleaned Steven’s room, which was a typical 10-year-old’s room so you can probably use your imagination here
- everything else
There were a couple of times I was even able to sit down and play Excite Truck for like a half-hour at a time, because they were taking care of all the stuff I would normally have to worry about. It was awesome. Of course, our house is kind of small, so yeah, we were stepping over each other for a few days, and since we don’t have a guest bedroom we had to get a little creative with the sleeping arrangements. I think every flat, reasonably soft surface in the house had someone snoring on it at some point this week. Any other time, that stuff would drive me nuts, but not this time. The kids loved having the Nanas around to dote on them; I appreciated having a few extra hands around the house so I could do the important stuff, like going to the comic book store and buying a new TV for our bedroom.
(I once swore that I would never put a TV in our bedroom. Who wants the lousy local news blaring when you’re trying to read a book or sleep? But when the wife-type is laid up and basically bedridden for at least a couple of weeks, she’s gotta have something to do. And that something is apparently watching horrid bonnet movies–you know, those twee British Jane Austen-type flicks that no guy would be caught dead watching–and other equally horrid things, such as the entire daytime lineup of the Bravo network.)
But the Nanas have moved on now, back to their respective homes down south and back east, leaving me to fend for myself. Now what? My mom made homemade pancakes for the kiddies every day. I ain’t got that kind of time. How am I gonna compete with that? Who’s gonna be washing everything now? ME, that’s who. Still, we’ve got a network of friends who have stepped up: tons of people are going to be bringing us food so I don’t have to worry about cooking, and get this… parents at Maya’s school have volunteered to swing by the house for the next six weeks to pick up Maya and take her to school and to pick her up and bring her home at the end of the day. They set up a schedule and everything! Plus, people from church have volunteered to come by and do everything from organizing to cleaning to babysitting. Amazing, when you think about it… people actually volunteering to spend time with us rather than what they usually do, which is make excuses not to. (Well, that’s what they do to me, anyway. I guess when Shannon’s involved, it’s another story.)
I guess what I’m trying to say is this: to everyone who has helped us so far, to everyone who has said they would help us in the next few weeks as we deal with a laid-up mommy, to everyone who has said a prayer or sent a card or made a phone call, to everyone who has decided to briefly put their lives on hold so that we don’t have to…
Thank you.
Who’s up for a crappy Weekend Roundup? WE ARE!
Look, people, it’s been a long few days. It’s around 10 p.m. Sunday night, and since Thursday, I’ve driven 900 miles, cleaned the house (twice!), mopped up a four-year-old’s vomit, hidden easter eggs for my own kids and for a bunch of complete strangers, and cooked up a big ol’ ham. Frankly, I’m whipped (and also tired–zing!). I’m not feeling up to a lot of typing tonight, so I’m just gonna post a bunch of photos of often dubious quality that may give you the flavor of the weekend. Note: I did not take any pictures of the ham. Many apologies.
This pic (with me and Steven, and with my nephew Andrew smooshed between us) was taken at my folks’ house down in Arkansas, where Steven had been staying for the past week. The 900 miles I mentioned was my driving down there and back to pick him up. In the few hours I was there, though, I drove around my parents’ land on one of their new four-wheelers, tearing the place up. And I do mean tearing it up: I left some huge ruts in their front yard when I got the thing stuck. Well, that’s what they get for letting an incompetent drive the thing. They should have let one of the boys do it.
Ever wonder where Scooby and the gang live? Apparently in a run-down apartment complex not far from my parents’ house. I spied this nifty and bewildering vehicle in the parking lot and had to stop and take a picture with my phone.
You might want to check that back tire, Shaggy.
Saturday was the Eggstravaganza, a community Easter egg hunt/party thing hosted by our church. After the kids worked a shift hiding eggs for the 0-23 months kids (which meant just throwing them on the ground so they could pick them up–easiest job around), Maya did a little hunting of her own.
Steven went on an egg hunt, too, but he was off with his friends and was too cool and too unavailable to get his picture taken. Except for this one time, with a giant mutant rabbit that inexplicably wore clothing. Call the news media!
Which leads us to Easter morning, which means baskets of candy. Here, the kids show off their chocolate loot celebrating the resurrection of our Lord.
Note what you don’t see in those baskets… no dyed easter eggs! The reason: we just never got around to it. Sorry. The kids neither noticed nor complained. Don’t you judge us.
Well, we also had a bunch of people over for easter dinner (remember that ham I was talking about?). Of course, I didn’t take any pictures. Our friends the Crows were there, though, and they did take some pictures. Why don’t you go over to their blog and see if they wrote up something about it? Go on, I won’t mind. It’s not like you’re going to miss anything over here.
I can see a new Weekend Roundup, underneath the blazin’ sky
I’ll be where the eagle’s flyin’, higher and higher! Gonna be your man in motion, all I need is a pair of wheels. Take me where the future’s lyin’, St. Elmo’s Fire! Wait a minute… St. Elmo’s fire is nothing more than a natural phenomenon involving static electricity interacting with ship’s masts at sea. I fail to see how it can produce enough energy to cause travel through time (1.2 gigawatts is the scientifically accepted figure, I believe). Also, how will a pair of wheels enable me to fly as high as an eagle? I guess I could ride a bicycle off a high cliff, and before I plummet to my death I will briefly be at the altitude of the typical eagle’s flight, but then I would go lower and lower, not higher and higher. Wow, this 80s song does not make a lick of sense. Just like a typical Weekend Roundup. Which I’m going to start now.
Honest Abe’s Untimely End
The Boy’s class is studying Abraham Lincoln. Fascinated by the grisly end of the story, Steven produced this fine comic chronicling The Great Emancipator’s final moments on this earth.
I’m pretty sure that panel 2 is a spot-on representation of the look on Lincoln’s face as the assassin’s bullet did its worst.
Howdy y’all, pull up a Weekend Roundup and sit a spell
Well, as I live and breathe, if it ain’t (insert homespun, Ozarky, down-home nickname for your self here; suggestions: Puddinhead or Highpockets). I ain’t seen you in a month o’ Sundays! What’s that? You’re hankerin’ for a tale of a weekend, are you? The kind that starts all quiet-like on a Friday night then speeds up through a wild and wooly Saturday before it ends on a lazy Sunday afternoon where we’re all lazing by the crick, wearing straw hats and fishin’ with a cane pole with our old houn’ dawg by our side? Well, I can’t say as I got one of them. I can only tell you about a borin’ weekend where nothin’ much happened, jes’ like every other one. Well, if that’s all right with you, let’s start spinnin’ this go-nowhere tale. It all started, like most Weekend Roundups do, with an unexpectedly busy Friday evenin’….
Okay, enough with the old timer talk. If you’ll remember from last week, we are currently operating without a crucial bit of furniture: a dining room table. Seems like no big deal, but with no place to eat we have been reduced to eating off the floor like savages. Savages! Ripping the charred animal flesh with our sharp teeth and filthy hands! Well, not really. As I said before, we’ve just been using an old card table we hauled up from the basement. And I, being an American male who is still psychologically a 19-year-old college student, would be just fine using this card table forever. But Shannon, being a sensible voice of civilization, decided that we needed to eat off a table, like we’re royalty or something. Whatever, Queen of England.
So it was that Friday night found us tramping off to Nebraska Furniture Mart, the retail furniture behemoth. And no, we didn’t drive to Omaha for a lousy table. It would have to be a wicked awesome table to drive that far. We went to the Kansas City, Kansas location to table-shop. I was all ready for this trip to be an hours-long, painful ordeal, full of long arguments about the merits of this finish versus that one, or counter-height versus regular height, combined with high-pressure sales tactics and constant entreaties to sign up for some high-interest financing plan. As it turned out, we were there for only about an hour. We browsed, a nice and helpful saleslady helped us find the kind of table we were looking for, we paid cash, arranged delivery, and were out the door. That’s how you shop for a stupid table, people. If we hadn’t had to spend half the time trying to keep the kids from testing the bouncing properties of every single sofa and loveseat and easy chair we passed, we might have been able to get that time down to 30 minutes.
Afterward, we celebrated our furniture acquisition with the ceremonial devouring of frozen custard and toppings. Well, most of us, anyway. As we stood in line at Culver’s, the conversation went something like this, somewhat paraphrased:
Shannon: What does everyone want? I think I’ll have a raspberry sundae with extra raspberries because that is all I ever get and why mess with perfection?
Steven: I want a sundae with every available candy bar mixed in.
Price: I would like a turtle sundae, the kind with pecans and caramel and hot fudge, not the kind with endangered Galapagos turtle meat in it. I will try that one next time.
Maya: I want a hamburger.
Yum. The best dessert is one with ground beef in it, I find. So that’s what she got, a hamburger and fries, while the rest of us ate sweet, calory-laden custard. To each her own, I suppose.
So sure, not the most exciting Friday night, although it did get us out of the house at least. At any rate, it was more exciting than Saturday, a day in which the kids didn’t change out of their pajamas until three o’clock in the afternoon and I didn’t even step outside the house until 3:15. We all left the house that early to get to church, which didn’t start for two hours but we had to get to rehearsal for the drama I was acting in and Shannon was directing.
So we did all that, we did our drama and church came and went, all that went fine, blah blah blah. Then we stayed after church for a pizza-and-game night thing, an event that might have been a lot more fun if somehow Shannon and I didn’t end up more or less babysitting everyone’s kids most of the evening. It wasn’t planned that way–the kiddies were supposed to make their own entertainment and find their own games to play–but for some reason, all of the child-types kind of attached themselves to the two of us and insisted on being included in whatever activity we picked. Eventually, they tired of us (who wouldn’t?), but by that time all of the grown-ups were in the middle of their games and it was too late to jump in. Phooey on that.
Anyway, the event eventually wound itself down, and after we tidied everything up, got the kids together, and made our way home, it was after 10:00. Not so bad, you say, except we realized that it was the night of the Annual Leap Forward. The night everyone loses an hour of sleep for No. Good. Reason. Why do we do this, people? I mean, maybe it made sense 100 years ago, though I can’t imagine what that reason was. But there’s no point anymore, is there? Is there? I’m not oging to go into a panic if it’s dark when I get home when just six months ago it was light. What happened? Is there no order to this chaos? Look, humanity did just fine before DST and we’ll do fine after it. The Romans didn’t move their sundials ever-so-slightly twice a year, did they? We can adjust to life without DST, I promise. So I propose we get rid of this ridiculous tradition. Toss it on the ash heap of history with every other idea that, though well-intentioned, ultimately proved a colossal waste of time. Like boy bands, or communism. Who’s with me? HEY HEY HO HO DAYLIGHTS SAVINGS TIME IS A RELIC UNSUITED TO 21ST CENTURY SOCIETY AND HAS THEREFORE GOT TO GO. Repeat!
So anyway, like lame time travel, it was suddenly after 11:00 and the kids were way past their respective bedtimes. To bed with them, to bed with us, and thus ends our weekend.
Wait a minute! Didn’t anything happen on Sunday?
No. Look, we went to church, we ate some lunch, I folded laundry, we took naps. It’s the same thing we do every Sunday, and it’s just as dull this weekend as it was last weekend. So I’ll spare you the details. Wait, I already gave you the details. There were no details. That was it! So go on, get out of here. I’m done rounding up this particular weekend. If you want to know more about this weekend or others like it, visit your local library.
This Weekend Roundup is almost as short as I am
When I was a little kid, we attended a church where my uncle was the pastor. Like most southern evangelicals, we attended church at least three times a week: Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night. Like most southern evangelical kids, I was bored out of my mind. Most of the stuff just went right over my head, and I would rather be home playing with my Six Million Dollar Man action figure or watching Barnaby Jones. Once in a while, though, on a Sunday night, my uncle would get up behind the pulpit and say that he didn’t have a full sermon prepared, and that he just had some comments (or as I misunderstood at the time, “comets”). The upshot of this was, church would be over pretty quickly, which meant that we could go home early, or occasionally even go out to eat at some fast food place. That’s sweet stuff for a little kid, so I went into every Sunday night service hoping–praying!–for a night of “comets.”
Well, Weekend Roundup readers, it’s Comet Night. See, it’s 10:15 on a Sunday night and I’m just now getting around to this. I’m tired and I don’t really have the energy for a fully prepared Weekend Roundup this week, so I’ll just mention a few of the highlights and lowlights and miscellanea of the weekend rather than issuing forth a rundown of every stupid thing that happened from sunup to sundown every single day. So let’s get after it, shall we?
We watched two movies Friday night. TWO! Craziness! It was like we were just out of control. First, one for the kiddies: Mr. Bean’s Holiday. I was not expecting much from this flick. We all love Mr. Bean, and we own all (or nearly all) of the original TV series episodes, but his first movie (Bean) was a big disappointment. So I expected about the same from this one, but I have to say, I was pleasantly surprised. Sure, it was not as great as the show, but I laughed a lot more than I expected to, and even if some of the jokes were retreads of ones from the series, there were enough original gags that I was willing to overlook it. And what the heck, it co-starred Willem Dafoe? How did that happen? So I would say it’s worth seeing. Not a classic by any means, but good enough.
The second movie, which we watched after the kids went to bed, was The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. It’s a documentary about a couple of guys vying for the world-record at Donkey Kong, with a glimpse at this weird subculture of classic video game devotees. Absolutely amazing. Get it, rent it, put it in your Netflix queue, whatever, just see it. I won’t spoil any of it, but let me just say that if someone made up the character of Billy Mitchell, the self-absorbed, mulleted hot-sauce mogul, you’d never believe such a character could exist. The fact that he’s a real guy just makes it all the better. Why are you still here? Go get the movie! Wait, read the rest of this, then go get it.
Saturday morning some volunteers from our church came over and hauled away our furniture. Well, only some of it: we needed to get rid of some old furniture that was taking up space in our garage, and a homeless shelter that the church supports needed some furniture, so there you go. Everybody wins. Well, somehow Shannon Jedi-mind-tricked me into also giving them our kitchen table, leaving us nothing upon which to eat our foodstuffs at the appointed mealtimes. So we went to a furniture store near our house, just to check out the merchandise and see what struck our fancies. As soon as we walked in, this salesman named Andre, a heavily accented fellow of indeterminate ethnicity, descended upon us and proceeded to hang off us like a leech for the whole time we were there. We’d make an innocuous comment like, “This table seems nice,” and he’d whip out his clipboard. “You buy? You buy now? I make you good discount!” (I am not exaggerating his Borat-esque speech.) We did find one table, a floor model, that we kind of liked, but it was as wobbly as a sorority girl at 3 a.m. We pointed that out, and Andre said, “Oh, you just lock it underneath, it is fixed.” We did so, and it continued to wobble. “Oh,” he said, “you just tighten the corners, it is fixed.” By this point I asked Shannon to look at something interesting under the table, at which point I said, through clenched teeth, “WE HAVE GOT TO GET OUT OF HERE BEFORE I MURDER HIM.” So we did. And so for now, we’re eating off a stupid card table.
Saturday night I was talking to Maya and somehow the subject of facial hair came up. I was explaining to Maya why I shaved and what happens when you don’t shave, etc., and I asked her if she thought I should stop shaving and grow a beard all over my face. Adamantly, she replied, “I don’t want you to be like Jesus and build a big boat!” Hmm. A little Biblical confusion there, but I take her point.
After the Saturday night service, Shannon went to volunteer at a fundraising auction at Maya’s school. She attends this thing every year, and always comes home with a van-full of stuff that I regret her buying. Well, this year–thanks to church–she got there too late and so bought nothing. Well, almost nothing: the school uses the event to sell special photos of the students. A professional photographer comes, they let the kids pick out their own props and costumes, they snap the picture, then gouge the parents who just can’t turn it down. Check out Maya’s own brand of fashion.
Saturday and Sunday were absolutely beautiful, weather-wise. Spring-like, even. Sun shining, birds on the wing in a blue sky, people out and about wearing T-shirts and shorts. It was nearly 80 degrees on Sunday afternon when we got home from church. Maya hopped on her bike and rode up and down the street. It was the first time she’d been able to do so in forever. Now, as I type this, it’s raining pretty hard and the temperature has plunged 40 degrees, with colder temps and snow–SNOW–forecast for the overnight. Winter, you lousy season! You’re like an unwelcome houseguest that overstays your welcome, trashes the house, finally leaves, and then, just as we’re getting the place back in shape, pops back in to say that you’ll be in town for another two weeks and mind if I sleep on your couch for a while, and how about gettin’ your old pal Winter a beer, wouldja? We may not tell you to your face, Winter, but oh, we murmur under our breath, we do, and one of these days? We’re going to move and never tell you where we’re going.