It’s time to break out the die cuts and vibrating-uvula-shaped punches because Wanda just had her first full-scale grocery store melt down and I’d like to capture this special moment properly.  [Read more at Parenting.com]

Sometimes you have to face facts. Sometimes your fake Christmas tree is just dead. You should not try to resuscitate it. You should not try to meld the stand back together with Super Glue. You may end up gluing your fingers to the tree and then to each other while the tree lies lifelessly in a pool of its own ornaments on the baby’s tummy-time blanket.

A $20 fake Christmas tree from Rite-Aid does not owe you anything. After 5 years of service, sometimes it’s best just to say, “Thanks. It’s been a good ride. Ho Ho Ho Croak.”

I’m not talking about The Weathermen, although bombing public places is also sinister. I’m talking about the men and women who predict the weather and then talk about it on television. I’m talking about exhibitionist meteorologists.

These people are way too excited about carnage-inducing destructive weather patterns. During the heat wave, you could tell that from their air-conditioned studios it was the best week of the year to date. They got top billing on all the advertisements leading up to the news that night. Then they got to pop in throughout the broadcast dribbling out bits of weather information with a wink and a grin and the infamous, “Is this heat wave EVER going to end? I’ll tell you coming up later in the broadcast.” (As though maybe it wouldn’t ever end and if you didn’t watch, then surely it wouldn’t.)

And if a heat wave is good for business, the windstorm 2 years ago was probably the single best thing to ever happen to Seattle weather people. Sadly, most of their viewers were without cable or power so they had to take to the radio, offering up their cheerful gloom and doom without the inconvenience of makeup or wardrobe or having to stand outside wherever the weather was most severe, pointing to cars, ACTUALLY IN THE PROCESS OF BEING SMASHED BY TREES, while trying to look like they felt bad about the occupants.

When the big much-anticipated earthquake hits the Northwest and their weather reports are picked up by the national news organizations, I think their heads will explode.

I don’t blame them. It’s their job. They have the blood of newsmen running through their veins and we all know how the news industry works. The greater the destruction, carnage or pain, the greater your audience, the higher your ratings and the more money you make.

Even as a not news person, I’ve sure gotten a lot of mileage telling stories of the Big Freeze or the Catastrophic Wind Storm or the Flood of Oh-Six. Stories of peril and narrow escapes are the stuff of good drama. I think we all enjoy being the news anchors of destruction from time to time, which is possibly what makes this sketch so funny to me. Then again, maybe it’s just the eyebrows.

I love how it doesn’t matter on local news if they have any information to share. It WILL NOT STOP THEM FROM TALKING. They say things like, “We have a situation here and what we do know is that an incident has occurred,” and gesturing over to the meteoric inferno of emergency vehicle lights, “The police action appears to have occurred over in that region there where you see those lights.”

On Friday night in Seattle all the network stations were hi-jacked by news people anxious to share the details, of which there were none, with the citizens of the Puget Sound area. Two men had been shooting guns and running across a major freeway. By the time I caught up with the Breaking News, both suspects were in custody and the reporters were at that awkward place where they start interviewing every person within a 3-mile radius about the event and asking them what they think might have happened, even if they were unaware of the incident until the cameras and lights clamped on their faces.

Which direction did the men come from? How tall were they? What were their names? If you can’t release their names, then just tell us what their mothers would say if they wanted to call them in to dinner. Were they shooting at the nearby college? You don’t know? If you had to guess, would you venture to say that they had been shooting at the nearby colleges? (Shooting by colleges is much more tragic than, say, random drunken shooting in the woods.)

I kept waiting for them to get back to the regularly scheduled programming but eventually decided to play a little Dr. Mario with Dan before bed. It’s fun. Nobody gets hurt and it causes my little giant baby oven to contract. All good things. None of them news-worthy. I guess that’s why I need a blog.

I love the idea of Craiglist. You sell things. You buy things. You give away things so that people will haul them away from your house for free. I have been able to give things away on Craigslist that no one on Freecycle was willing to take from me. In theory, Craigslist is just a hands-down all-round super-awesome idea. It has one major flaw that I can see though – People use it.

Yes. When you’re buying and selling on Craigslist, you have to deal with People and People are sometimes flakey and overly picky and sometimes they don’t tell the whole truth about the whole everything. I know this. I have years of experience both dealing with and being People.

The last time I put something up for free on the List O’Craig, I had about 20 people ask to come by for it. I began trying to give it away on a first come, first served basis but the first people to respond were not necessarily the first ones who could come by and even when they said they’d stop by, they often didn’t. So for days, I’d tell one person they could come get it, we’d set up a time, I’d wait at home and they’d not show up. This happened several times so that when I finally got rid of the darn futon, I was thanking the taker PROFUSELY for actually showing up to get the free furniture.

So now I’m a shopper. I’m looking for baby stuff. My MacLaren Quest Stroller of Bliss and Joy that I’ve had and loved for the past 6 years molded and mildewed in my garage over the winter and so I want a new one without paying for a NEW one to the tune of $220. My infant seat has expired and although I’m not sure I believe in expiration dates on car seats, I have enough doubt in my heart that I would blame myself if we got in an accident with the old seat and the baby was injured in any way.

So I found a top consumer reports car seat on Craigslist that was 6 months old and in “perfect condition” from a non-smoking, pet-free home and the woman swore it had never been in an accident. Since Dan does not believe in expiration dates on car seats, he was much more amenable to my spending $85 on Craigslist than $200 at Babies R Us for the infant seat.

However, the day before I was to pick up the seat, the woman emailed me to say her child was still using it and it wasn’t really available yet until she got him the bigger seat. Okay. So it was on Craiglist but not really for sale yet. She apologized and said if I could wait a week, she’d have it ready. This went on for a few weeks when finally she emailed to say she’d purchased her new seat and I could come pick it up.

Not wanting me to come to her home, she asked me to meet her at a grocery store 35 minutes from my house at 6pm as a celebration of cranky hungry kids and rush hour. I told her I could come at 6:30 and she said that by 6:30 she’d be at her church for an event. She told me to meet her there, gave me directions and said to call her on her cell phone when I got close. Well her church was 40 minutes away and it was still rush hour but I packed my kids in the car and drove out to meet her.

The directions were wrong and after driving around for a while I found it anyway because it was a super giant mega-church, having a humongous concert of some kind with a full stage and lighting set up in the parking lot and hundreds, if not thousands of people in the audience. All the parking was full. People were walking from blocks and blocks away to hear the music. I was getting concerned about how I was going to find her and whether I’d have to drag my two kids and my crippled pregnant body for blocks and blocks to the concert and then blocks and blocks back to her car and then blocks and blocks back to my car so I called her.

And it went straight to voicemail again and again and again. I left her some choice messages, sort of polite in a biting sort of let-me-describe-in-detail-all-the-ways-you’ve-put-me-out sort of way and I teared up a little and headed 30 minutes from there to Babies R Us to buy the dang car seat new so I would never have to deal with People again, only sales associates.

To her credit, she called a couple of hours later to apologize and say she’d left her cell phone at home by accident. I could not bring myself to say, “It’s okay,” or do anything to really make her feel better. My feet were swollen. My people were cranky and we’d spent 3 hours about town in rush hour traffic on a wild goose chase. I told her I was frustrated. I told her I’d used half a tank of gas for no reason. I told her I never planned on using Craiglist again. I wished her luck selling the seat and I hung up.

Strangely, making her feel bad did not make me feel better at all. I still had melon feet. My kids were still mad and I was still out $200 bucks, a tank of gas, and a few ounces of sanity, only now I also felt guilty. I could have let her off the hook. I could have not spent the entire drive telling my kids to be quiet because I was busy talking to Dad, Grandma and my sisters about what a total jerk-wad this lady was on my Bluetooth. I would have liked them to have seen me be a bigger person than that. I would have liked to have played 20 questions or listened to Eye of the Tiger and I would have liked to have remembered that I’ve stood people up before, forgotten my cell phone or just gone temporarily brain dead.

But I still kind of loathe Craigslist.

Now tell me. Do you believe in car seat expiration dates?

Every day when Laylee gets off the bus, she and Magoo run down the hill to our house at top speed, scaring me to death and forcing me to cup my hands and yell, “SLOW DOWN. YOU’LL FALL AND BREAK YOUR ARM.” I mean it in the, “You’ll poke your eye out” sense. I don’t ever really expect them to break their arms.

So yesterday she got off the bus and Magoo took off like a shot. Laylee soon followed after him but hadn’t gone 10 feet when she tripped and went sliding down the asphalt. She began to scream as she often does when road rash attacks. I sort of pregnant jogged over to her to offer some sympathy and she sobbed, “Please carry me down the hill. I broke my ARM!”

“Yeah,” I thought, “I broke mine too.”

“Okay, honey. Let’s walk home and we’ll have a look at your arm, maybe put some arnica on it. I can’t carry you because I’m pregnant and you weigh too much. You can make it.”

She was a bit hysterical and I could see scrapes all over her legs. I knew they stung but I just couldn’t face carrying her the long way home.

“CARRY ME PLEASE! IT’S BROKEN!”

Then she rolled over and I saw her arm, all sort of wavy and visibly broken.

I carried her.

I was fairly calm, telling her it would be okay and commanding Magoo to go next door where our neighbor was working from home and tell Steffen we needed him. Steffen came out and offered to come with us to the ER but I asked him to take Magoo for me instead and went inside. When Steffen was so concerned and sweet to us, I fell apart and started bawling, which did not do much to calm Laylee’s fears.

Friday had been my big cleaning day and I was greasy and sweaty and wearing a tent-like shirt and low-riding old sweat pants. I had no makeup on, having planned a shower as soon as the house was clean.

I laid Laylee on the couch with my friend Candice whom I was paying to clean the bathrooms at the time and went into the other room to fall apart a bit more, while calling Dan on every number I could think of. I was not un-hysterical and he wasn’t answering so I got the patient into the car, reclined her seat, elevated her arm and ran inside to at least change out of my sweats.

For the last week or more I had gotten up every morning, showered, dressed, blow-dried my hair, curled it and put on make-up, whether I was going out or not. The one day I didn’t, I had to take my baby to the ER. It’s not just vanity that made me take the extra 2 minutes to change. There’s a part of me that thinks our care won’t be as good or they’ll be more likely to suspect abuse if I look like a shlep.

In the car, I took a mini shower with baby wipes while driving and calling Dan and all of his co-workers repeatedly. My tears were silent and Laylee was calming down. As I dialed I reassured her that it would be fine, and how cool that she would get a cast, and I’d always wanted a cast, and Daddy would meet us soon and he’d bring us lunch. As I drove by the fire station, I realized that I had not put any ice on the injury so I pulled in and flagged down a couple of fire fighters who were walking into the building. Again I lost it and bawled and begged for ice. They offered to drive me to the ER in the rig and spoke calming words to Laylee. When I declined the “rig” offer, they looked me in the eyes and walked me through the steps I needed to take to get her safely there. It’s like they were trained or something. “You know her birth date and medical history, right? You know where the hospital is? See. You have all the tools you need. You can do this. Just concentrate and stay calm and you’ll be fine.”

So I did. Eventually I got ahold of Dan and a few minutes after Laylee and I were checked in, he arrived with a Happy Meal that she was not allowed to eat because they were worried she’d vomit or pass out or something. They didn’t ever really explain, just said she couldn’t eat or drink until they were done. I slipped into the hall to chow… for the baby while Dan chattered away, ignoring her twisted arm, lying limp under the ice pack.

When we checked in, they asked her what her pain level was from one to ten. I explained what that meant and she said, “Oh, I guess it’s kind of medium. Like a five.”

We talked to about a million check-in people, nurses and doctors and each one would ask her why she was there. She’d tell them her arm was broken and they’d give her that sweet, “Yeah sure” smile and say, “Oh yeah? Let me have a look.” Then she’d pull back the blanket, they’d flinch just a bit, replace the blanket, nod and ask the next question, “How did you do this honey?”

Her answer was the same every time. “I had just started. I wasn’t even going that fast.”

Then they’d look at me and I’d fill in the blanks. “Every day I tell her not to run so fast down the hill or she’ll break her arm and she’s just telling you that she wasn’t doing anything wrong. She was running down the hill.”

Then came the fun part, the part when they needed to insert an IV. When I told her we were going to the hospital, she balked. “Don’t put a needle in me!” she begged. I promised her that I wouldn’t, not mentioning to her in her hysterical state that someone else might have to.

She’s inherited my tiny, rolly veins and the last time someone tried to insert an IV in her arm, she was 18 months old and 4 nurses and 11 needles later, they gave up, leaving the terrified baby sobbing on the ER bed.

I warned the doctor that it might not be pretty but they started to try. The first nurse inserted the needle and dug around for SEVERAL minutes while Laylee screamed and Dan and I held her and tried to comfort her. When she gave up, I went in the hall to “check on something” and sobbed my eyes out while nurses passed me tissues and told me I was doing just fine. The second nurse asked Laylee to try not to scream because it made it harder to get the needle in the right place so Laylee asked Dan to please hold his hand over her mouth. We did Lamaze breathing and as the nurse pulled out and dug in and poked and dug, Laylee breathed and her eyes darted around in sobbing panic like a frightened animal who’s being tortured to death. Her face shook violently and she sobbed almost silently but she kept her hand perfectly still with no one holding it.

Several minutes later they gave her another break and called down a nurse I assume was from pediatrics. She slipped it in first try and we all breathed a sigh of relief.

They needed the needle in her hand so they could pump her arm full of lidocaine to numb it for the setting of the bone. Once her arm was numb, she watched cartoons and could not care less about who was touching her, which was amazing because from check-in to X-ray to the orthopedic specialist, she had been unwilling to let anyone but me manipulate the arm. She trusted me to move both halves at the same exact time without jarring the bone that was broken and poking up at a 30 degree angle. The other arm bone was broken through but staying together.

Now the orthopedic guy was flopping her arm around like a rubber chicken, bending it various directions to get the bone set just right and she didn’t even give him a glance, so engrossed was she in her PBS cartoons. Thank heavens for modern medicine. I got some pretty freaky video of the bone setting that will go in her digital scrapbook. So bizarre to see what he’s doing to her while she just lays there zoned out like a TV zombie. He checked the alignment with a portable CT scanner, gave her a temporary splint and invited us to come back to his office in 6-10 days for a real cast once the swelling had gone down.

We were sent home with a new stuffed animal and a prescription for liquid vicodin.

As I was starting the car, Laylee commented enthusiastically, “Well that was quite an adventure! That was pretty cool. I bet when you were little and you wanted a cast, it was because you imagined having an experience just like the one I had.”

(That is a direct quote. She really speaks like that. Pretty much always has.)

“Well, I did always want a cast,” I deflected.

“Well, you probably didn’t imagine the needle part. But the other parts were really cool.”

“Nope. I didn’t imagine the needle part.”

We went home where Magoo was having the time of his life with the neighbors who had made us a wonderful dinner and special dessert for Laylee.

So now I just need to keep a 6-year-old from bumping her arm or getting it wet for the next week, while finding shirts that will fit over her giant splint that goes up past her elbow.

She warned me that she may not do her best work at school since she’ll have to write and draw with her left hand. I told her that would probably be okay.

Today I moved, I really moved for one of the first times in 4 months. Magoo was at preschool a 20-minute walk from our house and there was a smattering of sun peeking through the clouds.

I was out of breath in less than a block, surprised at how weak and puny and scrawny and pathetic and other words generally used to describe nerdy 7th grade boys I was. But I made it to preschool, sure that Magoo would be enraged when he found he’d need to walk home.

You see, my lay-about lifestyle has become the family lay-about lifestyle and my kids, especially Magoo, are sadly out of shape. Actually, even when I was fit, the kids weren’t all that fit. We’ve spent most of the winter inside and although I’d been going frequently to the gym before the sickness, Magoo doesn’t get much opportunity to get his body moving. I need to be more proactive about it. I didn’t have the pregnancy excuse all winter long but I’m happy to use it now.

He wasn’t that resistant to walking home, until we’d traveled about 50 feet, at which point he asked that we walk home in the car next time. But we pushed forward with little to no choice, up the high hills and even made it to the park for 20 minutes before we had to walk to the bus stop to pick up Laylee.

When I got home, I found I had used every speck of strength and energy I had in my body. I fell asleep, impervious to the mounting disaster that is my home.

I was awakened by the sound of my kids opening the door to one of my dinner co-op buddies. She’s a new co-op buddy and this is only the second time she’s been in my house. The dining room table had dinner dishes from last night stuck to it. The sink was full of filthy dishes, every counter was covered in filth and Magoo led her happily into the kitchen to bring our dinner. But she couldn’t find anywhere to set it down so she stepped over the caked-on spaghetti sauce on the floor and placed our dinner on the cold stove, the only clear place in the room.

I wandered downstairs in a post-nap haze and promised her that although my house had looked like a condemned building the only two times she’d visited, it was the exception, not the norm. (Maybe it’s the norm these last few months but over the course of my lifetime, on average, this is definitely a freakish level of filth that I am in no way comfortable with.) She hugged me and said it didn’t matter and when she left I held back my tears while I read Flylady.com for an hour and then scrubbed the everliving cheese out of my kitchen.

It looks good. And the laundry’s done. For just 30 seconds I considered calling up my friend at 10pm and asking her if she wanted to come over and share some jellybeans… in the kitchen. That seemed like a stupid plan but, unsure of what my house will look like next Wednesday night, I went to get my camera so I could email her a picture of my great feat of progress.

I somehow stopped myself… barely. My kitchen may be clean but that doesn’t make me unpathetic.

I have set a limit of four days on this:

It’s been three days and today I gave warning. The Stuffed Animal Utopia of Bliss must be dismantled by tomorrow night.

“But the animals will be so sad.”

“But you set up every toy, stuffed animal, laundry basket, block, doll blanket and interesting-looking household item we own in a mess-like pattern in the living room.”

“But it’s so much fun.”

“But the living room’s the first thing people see when they walk into our house and it looks like the toy room vomited all over my entry way.”

Blank stares. Squinty eyes. Cocked heads. Looks that say, “And that’s a problem because?”

The Utopia is coming down tomorrow.

Do you remember a while back I wrote a post about the level of sheer carnage occurring with my brawling preschoolers? Well things have calmed down through the months. The kids have stopped the smackdown and their attention spans have stretched to include schoolish activities lasting up to 15 minutes in length as long as the mother who’s teaching does a pretty elaborate song and dance routine to keep them engaged. It’s been going pretty well.

There are six moms in my group and we all take turns teaching our group of 3-year-olds from a purchased curriculum, complete with activities and pre-cut craft projects. Then we get 5 weeks off to run errands, go to doctors’ appointments or simply lay around the house bonding with our much loved inter-uterine parasite.

This morning the kids arrived at my house and I was optimistic. I was ready. I’d even vacuumed the floor and laid out all the supplies.

Over the last few days Laylee and Magoo have set up a spaceship playhouse under the stairs, under the staircase with the 8-inch wooden beam along the outside of it. It’s a cramped space and they’ve pushed the couch up against the opening so there’s only the teeniest space for them to climb in and out of their hideout. I decided to let them leave it up for a few days and the preschoolers were thrilled.

15 minutes into the playdate, one sweet teeny 3-year-old smashed her nose at full speed into the wooden beam while jumping around inside the spaceship. Blood was EVERYWHERE. The poor kid was in pain and completely traumatized by the red dribbling all down her clothes, the couch and smeared all over her face. I ran her into the kitchen where I sat on the floor, holding her and sent Magoo to get a full roll of toilet paper and my cell phone.

The bleeding was intense for someone so tiny and in a soft voice she kept saying, “I want my mom.” But her mom was unreachable and I was the next best thing.

While I tried to stop the gushing, the other kids ran around like total insane sun-starved maniacs from the rainy northwest who CANNOT HANDLE ONE MORE DAY TRAPPED INSIDE. They were squawking, sword-fighting and hitting the walls, the furniture and each other with various objects.

Then another one started screaming. Poor little S-Dawg with the cast on his arm and the brand new baby brother at home had smashed the back of his head on the wooden beam and was howling in pain. All the other kids came running. “S-DAWG SMACKED HIS HEAD.”

One of my most basic parenting instincts kicked in and I decided that hemorrhaging trumps concussion so I called out comforting words to the poor little guy while rocking the bleeder and changing her compresses. Meanwhile the other children, forgetting their fallen friends, went all Lord of the Flies again.

Eventually I got her cleaned up and convinced her to change into some of Laylee’s clothes. She insisted that the shirt be pretty enough or she’d remain happily in her gore. If she were 3 years older, she’d be Laylee’s very best friend.

I dealt with Head Wound Boy, outlawed the space ships, outlawed the swords and light sabers and got everyone to chill while I googled “how to remove blood from upholstery” and followed the listed instructions.

We started preschool over an hour late today but all the children were alive or at least clinging to life when they left my house. That is my story.

I’d gotten up the gumption to tidy the kitchen, sweep the floors and even eat some food. These gumptionful actions sent me straight to the couch where I was contemplating a long term stay. I had both phones next to me, my laptop on top of where it’s supposed to go as per its creative name. I was wasting time on Facebook.

Laylee and Magoo walked into the room looking somber.

“Mom,” she began, “I decided it would be better to just tell you the truth.”

“Yeah,” piped in Igor, shaking his head but standing boldly at her right shoulder.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“Well, I was getting out the cheese,” she said, holding up a 2lb babyloaf of Tillamook, “And the salsa fell down.”

“Yeah,” her henchman echoed, trying to look sober but actually looking super-glad he wasn’t to blame. “And broke.” “With glass.”

I looked up at her. I’d just cleaned the kitchen floor for the first time in weeks and now I was recovering, only to be told that the little filth-mongers who are my children have just shattered a bottle of salsa on the floor.

How do you respond to someone who says, “I decided it would be better to tell you the truth”?

Do you freak out and tell them by your actions, “You probably should have lied because I am Ticked OFF!”?

No. You remain calm. You roll off the couch and you clean up the salsa and glass off the floor. You thank them for telling the truth. Maybe you passive-aggressively remind them that you just finished cleaning the floor and ask them to be more careful.

When they spin it like that, you don’t have much choice. I think they know this. It’s all part of the plan.

So we’re experiencing the worst flooding here in ~90 years and our town is cut off in every direction from the rest of the world. Dan made it home before the flooding and our house is up high enough that we always fare okay. There’s just no new mail, no garbage pickup, no grocery deliveries to the stores and no easy access to hospital care. So many people have lost their homes throughout the state and as the waters recede, there is damage to our major routes out of town, so it may be several days until people can get in or out safely.

Luckily Dan is stuck on this side of the water and is able to work from home fairly effectively. And although Laylee thinks she’s broken her leg and is begging me to take her to Children’s Hospital for X-rays, I’m fairly certain that the Arnica I just rubbed on it has done the trick. With the way she’s prancing around the living room, I think I’ll hold off on calling the fire station emergency evac boats into immediate action.

Click over to Parenting to read about the REAL secret of how we’re handling the whole situation. Parental wisdom comes from surprising sources. It’s humorous and highly useful information to enrich your life.