Nurse Mama

I am putting off doing one of my least favorite jobs as a mom.  I need to give Jane some cough medicine, but she won’t take it.  She fought with me last night, and finally threw it up.  It takes a lot of work to toss up 1/4 t of cough medicine.  As I type, she is muffling her cough in her blankets so I won’t hear her.  She has never like medicine, and has puked up more than her share.  Bribing with chocolate won’t help, and she won’t drink tea with honey either.  I don’t want to offend anyone, but I think she is Christian Scientist…Maybe I will try a cough drop this time. 

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I wrote a letter to a prisoner today.  I have never done that before, I have never known anyone in jail before.  My friend did something colossally stupid. While he can probably plea this down, it will still follow him forever.  So what do you write to a prisoner?  Turns out not much.  I didn’t ask any questions or pass judgement. Right now, he just needs a friend. I just wrote a short newsy letter.  I thought about every topic, and how it would feel to read that behind bars.  None of it felt very good, but I will send it tomorrow anyway.  I am including a book too.  I doubt he reads much, but I am guessing he might get tired of tv. I might even hunt down a Sudoku book too.  Those things are kind of addictive.

Paul still crawls everywhere.  He will take maybe three steps now, but he is hell-on-wheels with the baby walker thing.  He will probably start walking when GD and I are on our vacation in early Feb.  Speaking of GD, he has been busy.  A couple of weeks ago, he went to school with Jane for show-and-tell on D day, as in Dad.  Two days later he was eating lunch with the kindergartners right before show-and-tell on… shall we call it “G” day.  He liked school lunch, and was appalled at what the little kids throw out. 

I have been following through on my resolutions so far, mostly.  I am still on schedule with the Daily Bible thing, and I have read and returned several books the owners had surely given up on.  I believe I still have four books borrowed.  This does not count Out of Africa.  That would be five.  Most of these books are of the self help variety, and while I undoubtedly need to help myself, a person can only become so good.  I have books on how to have a good marriage, how to handle difficult people (two of those), and how to look at yourself through God’s eyes.  

I am not doing as well on the excercising part.

Good night.  

My not 100 list

People are posting ‘100’ lists about themselves.  I am not sure that I have done 100 things that I both remember and that would be interesting to anyone beyond me.  This is my list.  I am going to end it when it is over and not drag things out.

 

1. My eye sight used to be worse than 20/200…I couldn’t even see the big E on the chart.
2. I found a used condom in our driveway once.  I mailed it back to the previous owner with a note that children lived at our house, and would he please use the trash can – located outside the passenger side window where he was parked – next time.  Turns out his mom opens his mail.  Or she used to.
3. I have lived in two states.
4. I have visited 41 states.
5. I have visited three countries.
6. I spent nearly 3 hours a day on the school bus every day when I was in grade school.
7. I was pregnant for 36 months (not all in a row).
8. I can set irrigation tubes.
9. I know the scientific names of lots of plants.
10. I ate dinner with the president of the University of Wyoming because I got someone to donate $300 in a tel-a-thon.
11. I can harness a team of mules.
12. I had been driving for 10 years before I first drove a car with an automatic transmission.
13. I once had a date to a fancy “do” and I told the guy not to be late, (he was always late).  When he did not show up, I found someone else to drop me off.  My date showed up about 10 minutes late, and was never late again.
14. I read 118 books one year.
15. I was in a big tornado and didn’t know it.  I promise a blog on that later.
16. I have written three complaints to various post offices, and only once gotten results.
17. My finger prints are on file.
18. I have picked up three hitch hikers, including one I did not know.
19. I still own the first vehicle I ever bought.
20. I used to own a fighting rooster.
21. I made it into the top 10 in our county spelling bee my 8^th grade year.
22. I kick butt at trivia.
23. I play with my kids’ toys after they go to bed.
24. The biggest city I have lived in is population 26,000.
25. I used to have a four digit phone number.
26. I have eaten rattlesnake.
27. Someone once held a knife to my throat.
28. I got my hair cut by an ex-truck driver once.  Just the once.  And they gave me my money back the next day.
29. I am at ease talking in front of people, even if I don’t know what I am going to be talking about, and that happens more often than you might think.
30. I am a night owl.
31. I have a cutting from a Christmas cactus that my great, great grandmother owned.
32. I have run a fire-dripping torch at a prescribed burn.
33. I once preg checked a heifer.  The guy two critters down preg checked a steer.  Oops.  Always double check.
34. I was our local Stockgrower’s Queen.
35. I was assigned to write a report on a poet for high school English.  We had to write a 500 word bio, but there weren’t 500 words anywhere on Baxter Black in 1986, so I called him and interviewed him over the phone.  I got 117% from the toughest teacher in the school, and later got him to autograph my report.  He said I got better grades on his work than he ever did.
36. I skipped a fun party to take a tour of a home that was filled with original CM Russell paintings.  It was well worth it.
37. I rode over the Grand Canyon in a helicopter.
38. I love to scuba dive.
39. I have called Poison Control twice.
40. I called the Center for Disease Control once.  I should blog about this someday.
41. I overpay my baby sitters because I remember watching 10 kids for 6 or 8 hours and getting paid $10, and it wasn’t THAT long ago.
42. I have never been to the emergency room for any occasion.
43. I have put diapers on baby calves.
44. I took a beginning piano class in college.
45. I lived for about three years without a TV.
46. I lived in two houses that were condemned after I left.  I was the last tenant in one, and my roommate was the last tenant in the other.
47. I think I have voted every time since I could.  This includes off year primaries and everything.
48. I have donated over a gallon of blood.
49. I spent two nights on a yacht in Long Island Sound.
50. I was driving a car once when the accelerator stuck on all the way down.  I was in the middle of nowhere and my car was drag racing by itself.  After it hit about 100 mph the cable came unstuck on its own.  If this happens to you, put it in neutral and turn the engine off.
51. I almost got struck by lightning.
52. I had four great grandparents alive when I was born.  My kids also have four great grandparents.
53. My first date.  My brother’s friend kept calling because he wanted to go to the movies with him.  My brother was not home, so finally the friend asked me if I wanted to go to the movies with him.  I said sure.  I remember sitting in the parking lot and watching him shoot up insulin before we went in to the show.  He was a nice kid.
54. I love high school football.  Don’t care much about college football.
55. I have credits from 5 colleges but only one degree.
56. I took a welding class.
57. I flipped a pickup end over end.
58. I stayed four nights in a rent-by-the-hour motel in the middle of gangland Albuquerque when I was in college. We were on a school trip and the professors were too cheap to pay for something decent.  There was nothing safe about this place, one of our classmates found drug paraphernalia in our closet.
59. I was once the drop-off man for a friend who re-possessed a car.
60. Another story about my re-po friend. She lived in another state and happened to be assigned to call someone who lived near the small town I had just moved to.  This was the place with the four digit phone number.  As she was speaking to the co-signer of the loan, she asked if he knew me.  He said, “Yeah, she rents the little house on my place.”
61. One of my bosses overheard me apologizing to a customer.  He told me never to apologize, we work for the government, we don’t do anything wrong.  I told him I made mistakes all the time, so get used to it.
62. My first boss quit two months after I started working for him.
63. I once dated a guy who turned out to be my boss several years later.
64. The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band gave a free concert for my university the night of my 21^st birthday (a Wednesday).  Best. Birthday. Ever.
65. I am out.  I can think of nothing else.

Has it really been that long?

My twentieth high school reunion is coming up this year.  I am in touch annually with four of the nearly 200 classmates I had.  That is about right for me.  Someone found me on Facebook a few months ago, and I have heard from several others since then including a guy I have no memory of, but I guess I went to school with him.  

 

I don’t use Facebook much.  I look at it from time to time, but I don’t really use it to  communicate with anyone.  There is just too much “stuff” there, I am always worried I will get a virus when someone blings me or whatever.  Anyway, back to my story. 

 

The person who found me is someone I would call a doctor’s kid.  Her dad might not have been a doctor, but she definitely belonged to the country club set. She would not have given me the time of day 20 years ago, and I would have avoided her if at all possible.  I am probably still a little offended from our last reunion.  I found out about it two weeks ahead of time.  “We didn’t know where to find you,” she said.  Well, my mom still works in the high school library, how hard did you try? 

 

Come to find out this gal is sick, as in probably deathly sick.  She posted a tongue-in-cheek something along the lines of “if I ever said something nasty to you, please forgive me so I can get over this disease” on her Facebook page.  Even in my darkest thoughts I never would wish that on anyone.  She is approaching her illness with humor, which has to help, but she is really sick.  I feel bad for her, I really do, but my only memories of her are the haughty snotty girl she was in high school.  I need to work on changing my perspective.

 

It is not easy to put away those old sentiments, the intense feelings and memories about the people who disdained you in high school.  Now they act like we were one big happy class.  (Obviously they went to a different high school.)  It would probably be easier if I lived in town and saw them more than once every ten years.  I am kind of looking forward to the reunion, not so I can re-connect with anyone, but I am interested to see where people ended up.  At the last reunion I kept getting mixed up because most of the doctor’s daughters had Princess Di haircuts.  I wish they would have kept their same hair styles and colors.  I guess that is why we get nametags.

Another unsolved mystery

We broke through a wall today.  We have been pushing against it for over a month.  Leo is potty training.  We have learned that if he is naked from the waist down, he uses the potty.  If he is wearing cotton training pants, Bob the Builder big-boy underwear, a pull-up or even just pants, he will tinkle in them.  When a guy stopped to ask if he could hunt on the place across the road from us, Leo was running around in the livingroom with just a tee-shirt and socks on. 

 

I decided to give up on diapers entirely this weekend, so I have been traveling with a spare pair of training pants, socks, pants and plastic bag.  Today, Leo came to me and announced that he had to tinkle, and sure enough, he pulled down his training pants and proceeded to pee all over the underside of the toilet seat.  Seriously, how do they tinkle up when the darn thing is pointed down?  We even had a floating Cheerio for a target!  We will have to get some training on aiming.

 

Okay, as I was looking for a funny book to put on my Xangazon thing, (and I did find one…although I am left wondering what exactly is under the flaps) I noted that they have 408 books on potty training.  *Note to self, don’t try to publish a potty training book any time soon.

 

 

 

 

It is about time I wrote something

Well, it has been quite a long time between blogs for me here.  Tonight I actually went on a date with GD.  We had Mongolian grill then watched Valkyrie.  (We never go to the mall theater, except for tonight.  The prices are shameless and buying refreshments is like being held up in the alley.  Our downtown theater charges $3.5 for adults and $3 buys a huge popcorn, drinks start at $1.) We were watching a commercial on TV earlier in the evening, and I said, “That music is ‘Ride of the Valkyries’.”  I love being right!  The babysitter even cleaned up the kitchen.  Life is good.

I have discovered a new mystery series to love.  C.J. Box.  He (or she) writes about north central Wyoming.  The protagonist is a game warden who seems to get into all kinds of trouble.  I don’t know for sure what I like so much, I know I like the attention to detail he puts into the scene.  The characters step out of the page.  I like that I feel familiar with the landscape.  The author’s description of the small town is fantastic.  Having lived in a town just like Saddlestring, it is like reading about home, I think I even know some of the characters.

Probably people who live in New Jersey feel the same way about Stephanie Plum, or maybe not.  Another author I like a lot is Lisa Wingate.  I just read another book of hers.  Her books are all related to each other, vaguely, but you don’t have to read them in order to understand things.  They are also about a rural area near here. 

I am trying to read the Bible all the way through this year.  As much as I read, it is a shame I have not read all of it by now.  This thing has me hopping all over the Bible, so that is kind of fun. 

I just wanted to say hello.