losing my mind | Excitement on the side

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The Power of the Mind

Posted on February 15, 2014 | 10 comments

I believe in the power of a strong mind. Couple a strong mind with tremendous focus and anything is possible.

I put the power of my mom mind to a test this past weekend.

I waited this long to write about it because I was afraid of jinxing myself.

Guys, I willed away a stomach bug. I did. My sweet eight year old daughter came to me with tears in her eyes and said “I threw up.” I pretended I did not hear her. She repeated herself. “Mom, I threw up. Like nine times.”

I translated this from melodramatic kid speak to normal english in my mind. Maybe she just vurped. Maybe twice. (Vomit burps, tell me I didn’t really need to explain that. Vurps, you guys know what those are, right?)

She ran past me into the bathroom. Her little self was hunched over the toilet.

That wasn’t a vurp.

She stood up and turned to look at me, tears in her eyes again. I mustered every bit of strength I had and I looked deep in to her big, blue eyes. I looked past the sweet face of the child I adore. I’m not sure where stomach bugs reside (in the soul? In the gut?) but I looked there and I said “You can not be sick right now. Do you understand me? You can not be sick. Right now we have lice.”

I was knee deep in laundry when she informed she had thrown up. I had spent more than two hours “nit picking” with the magical metal comb and having my own head picked. I would spend the next 34 hours doing laundry.

I wasn’t fucking kidding.

There would be no stomach bug.

I was waging a war against lice. I didn’t have the manpower to take on a stomach bug. And to be quite honest, there was no way I was spreading towels on beds right now. We had an all out ban on fabric in our home at the moment. You get one towel, one pillow and one blanket. It goes in the downstairs bathroom in the morning and you put all of your dirty clothes directly in the washing machine. I had no space in my washing machine or my head for puke towels.

And it worked. It worked. I was rewarded for this feat of strength with a blizzard and a headcold but I still feel like a winner. At some point this week in between the Lice Laundry and the Snowpocalypse I gave my dryer a little break. I have slugged enough NyQuil to need a trip to rehab but I still feel like I am coming out on top. Because my head doesn’t itch. And nobody has thrown up.

Mind over matter, people. You can do anything. Anything.

When I am not doing laundry I like to let my kids out of the car and then lock the doors. They fake cried until I broke down and got out of the car. But for a few blissful moments I was all alone.

10 Comments

Posted in Bad Mood, Nonsense, Parenting

Tagged home invasion, lice, losing my mind, snow storm, stomach bug

The Smell of Winter

Posted on December 20, 2013 | 1 comment

I wasn’t just trying to get off the phone. It was an emergency. Something reeked. I had to find it. “Mom, I have go to go, something smells like mildew or something!!”

I emptied out under the sink. Nothing was leaking. It didn’t actually smell under there at all.

Earlier in the week we’d had a party. The dog was generously fed by everyone. In the following few days I think I said “Jeeezus, Fisher. Man. What did the dog eat?” about 857 billion times. It smelled. Bad. Really bad. Dog fart bad.

I have a top loading washing machine and I don’t close the top when I am not running it. I don’t use the $7 tablets to wash my washing machine. I just run a load with bleach every now and again and I figure it is clean. But this week I stood in front of the Affresh tabs for about 17 seconds (which with a toddler in tow at the grocery store feels like a millenium.) Because something smelled really bad when I was doing laundry.

The smell. It was following me.

My offspring are strange little beings.

When I was pregnant with Lucy I went on an all out rampage until I found one. single. mothball. This was no mothball. This was a bad, bad smell and I was going to find it.

Last week I pulled a rosary from Lucy’s mouth. It was weird and frightening in the same way that those magicians pulling the scarves from their mouths can be, with an added bonus of overt religiosity. I mentioned this on Facebook and several of my friends wanted to know why there was a rosary in my house to begin with. I explained it away quite simply. My husband has all brands of religious artifacts. He keeps most of them on an altar high up on a bookshelf.

I don’t mess with his stuff and he lets me write about our deepest darkest secrets on the internet. We have an understanding. So when he said “I found the smell” sheepishly I had no idea it had been coming from his altar. I had no idea what was even up there.

He could have just thrown it away. He could have kept it a secret and I’d have been convinced the smell had gone dormant in the cold and I’d have worried and wondered about what was rotting under the floorboards of the kitchen for months.

But instead he told me.

I’m not trying to tell you what to do. And I will admit that our family has had great juju, good times, lots of laughs and a relative absence of negativity in the last several months. I’m just saying that if you put AN EGG ON A SHELF IN YOUR KITCHEN DON’T LEAVE IT THERE FOR MONTHS. Because it will eventually stink. And your wife will be the only one that can smell it at first. And she will start to lose her ever-loving mind.

But your trash cans will get cleaned out. I suppose that’s a plus.

Whatever your religious and spiritual pursuits have you doing this holiday season I hope you remember where you put your egg!!! Merry Christmahanakwanzika, y’all and enjoy your Yule and Winter Solstice tomorrow!