Motherhood

Last Monday my friend AJ called and invited P, Caroline and me to spend Saturday at her family’s ranch. I told her we would love to because we always love spending time with her, plus she’s leaving in two weeks to go to Africa for three months to work on her book project called Lahema’s Legacy.

So on Saturday we headed down to the ranch for a day of fishing, swimming and just hanging out. Of course I packed so much for the trip that Caroline asked “Are we spending the night?”

No, baby. Your mama just has a fear of being caught anywhere without at least three changes of clothes. Some might call it a symptom of OCD.

We arrived at the ranch around noon and I made Caroline eat lunch before we did anything. I told her she’d need energy for the day. And somehow I didn’t feel like those two Cheerios she ate for breakfast were going to tide her over.

I would live to regret the decision to load her up with Fritos and ham.

As soon as lunch was over Caroline wanted to put on her swimsuit and get in the pool, and seeing as how it was 104 degrees we all decided that was a great idea. So we coated ourselves in SPF 50 and headed out to the pool.

I pulled up a lounge chair on the sundeck part of the pool next to AJ and her daddy. We sat and visited while Caroline and P jumped off the side and played in the pool. Good times.

About thirty minutes later, Caroline swam over to me, curled up in my lap and said, “Mama, my mouth feels funny.”

“Do you feel like you’re going to throw up?”

“No.”

“Well, here drink some of my water.”

Here’s where I need to tell y’all that the pool is a saltwater pool and I thought her mouth probably just felt kind of salty.

I was wrong.

She drank a sip of my water.

Then she stared at me for about ten seconds.

And in a scene that has replayed about a hundred times in my mind, she threw up all over me.

JUST KILL ME NOW.

I held out my hands in a futile attempt to catch it.

It didn’t really work.

Fortunately for the pool but unfortunately for me, my body and my new bathing suit caught the rest of it.

There is nothing that makes you feel quite as good as being someone’s guest, lounging by their pool, and watching your child throw up everywhere.

AJ’s daddy ran to get the hose and I spent the next ten minutes hosing Caroline and myself down.

Too bad I can’t hose down the memory in my mind.

Or AJ’s mind. I mean she’s twenty-five. She doesn’t have kids. I think she may be scarred for life.

She kept marveling that I tried to catch it with my hands.

Instinct, pure maternal instinct.

I wrapped Caroline in a towel and sat with her while she drank a few sips of water. And then two minutes later she was as good as new, begging to go jump in the pool.

So she did.

And swam for the next three hours. I finally had to drag her out because I was afraid she was going to sink like a stone from sheer exhaustion.

Really, other than the whole throw up incident, it was a lovely way to spend the day.

Although I kind of feel the need to bleach my swimsuit.

And perhaps my entire body.

P spent much of the day mocking my hat. Say what you will, but octogenarians and hillbillies everywhere would kill for that hat.

Sunday morning, P let me sleep in a little late but Caroline woke me up in time for church by bouncing into the bedroom and gently yelling, “HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY!”. She made me a darling zebra-print photo plate at school. I told her how much I loved it and then she asked, “Now where’s my present?”

I told her I gave her a gift almost five years ago.

It’s called the gift of life.

Not to mention the times I have served as some sort of receptacle for her bodily functions.

It was sometime around Easter when it dawned on me that April was right around the corner and I knew deep in my soul what was looming on the horizon.

So it was with fear and trembling that I opened Caroline’s school bag during the first week of April. Sure enough, there it was.

The note announcing it was time to make the shoebox Fiesta floats for the Fiesta float parade at preschool.

Joy.

The note gives parents the option of just sending a shoebox to school and letting the teachers make a float for your child.

Right.

I wonder if they offer some kind of complimentary therapy session for that poor kid? Hey kid, your mama doesn’t love you enough to spend hours slaving away with a hot glue gun and some glitter mixed with sand to create the perfect beach scene for Ariel the Little Mermaid.

It’s not like we have lives of our own. Lives that don’t normally involve using a hot glue gun.

The note also included a little reminder that this is a preschool project and your child should be involved in the process. Which is so nice.

In theory.

So I involved Caroline by asking what kind of float she wanted to do this year (y’all may remember that last year we did the Wizard of Oz float) and she answered without any hesitation, “Barbie Island Princess”, which worked out since we actually own Barbie Island Princess, her monkey and two little Island girls that came with an elephant named Sagi who raised Barbie Island Princess from an infant when she was shipwrecked on a desert island and before she was rescued by Prince Antonio.

What has happened to my life?

Anyway, I managed to put the project in the back of my mind for the next few weeks because I am nothing if not a procrastinator, but I finally realized the due date was quickly approaching so I headed to Michael’s to pick up float making supplies.

I loaded my basket with silk flowers in various colors, some greenery, glue sticks for my hot glue gun, and some bright Fiesta ribbon. While standing in line at the checkout, the woman in front of me looked at my basket and asked if I was making something for Fiesta. She was very perceptive.

I replied that my daughter had to make a shoebox float for school so I was buying materials. And she looked at me as if I had just announced that I was about to help my child cheat on the SAT’s and said, “My kids had to do those when they were little. I just had them put a few stickers on a shoebox and called it a day.”

Well good for you, lady.

Clearly you are very healthy and have your priorities in order. I happen to suffer from chronic OCD and the need to do simple craft projects in excess. It’s who I am.

My reasoning is that there will come a day when Caroline will come home from school and need help making a project for the Science Fair.

And she’ll be out of luck.

In fact, just the mention of Science Fair is enough to make me want to homeschool so that I can avoid all science-related homework. I know enough to teach Caroline that the Earth is flat and if she doesn’t listen to her parents throughout her teen years there is a good chance she will fall off into the abyss. That’s all the science she needs to know.

On a side note, when I was in tenth grade we were required to participate in the Science Fair even though it was clear that some people, who don’t need to be mentioned, were having enough problems just memorizing the periodic table of elements without having to come up with some sort of hypothesis and solution.

(By the way, thank God I spent all that time memorizing the periodic table because it has been ever so useful throughout my adult life)

I finally came up with an experiment that involved buying six goldfish with the goal of keeping three of them in total darkness and three of them in normal conditions and seeing which ones lived the longest. They all died within the week because I’m pretty sure I forgot to feed them on a daily basis due to the fact that I was very busy deciding what to wear to Junior/Senior Prom. Thus, my Science Fair exhibit consisted of six empty fish bowls and a piece of posterboard that said, “I Murdered Six Goldfish Due to Negligence”.

And then PETA came and hauled my Science teacher off to animal cruelty prison because he was an accessory to goldfish murder.

Not really but that would have been an awesome end to that story.

The real story is that I got a C – on my project which was basically a sympathy grade because I was scientifically impaired.

Anyway, the point is I am much better with Barbie Island Princess Floats and hot-gluing silk flowers.

Which is quite the marketable skill.

Caroline and I spent a Tuesday afternoon pulling flowers off stems and deciding where to glue them on the shoebox. The biggest challenge was figuring out how to secure Barbie Island Princess to the float without hot-gluing her bottom directly on the float because that seemed cruel. However, in the end, I had to hot glue her bottom directly to the float.

What do you expect? I hot glue bottoms and murder innocent goldfish.

Here’s the finished project.

And here’s Caroline in the parade.

I don’t need to tell y’all that this turned out so much better than my tenth grade Science Fair project.

At least so I thought.

Until I saw a little girl with a float that consisted of an electric horse that actually moved pulling a wagon made completely of popsicle sticks painted hot pink with Western Barbie riding in the back.

I bet her mama made a D on her Science Fair project.

So, yes. The blog is undergoing some renovations. It’s still a work in progress, so what you’re seeing isn’t the finished product. Right now it’s the beauty equivalent of having on some foundation, but knowing you’re going to look better once you have on a little bit of lipstick and perhaps some mascara.

And, no, the staff at Big Mama, Inc. is in no way involved in writing any html, or css, or what-have-you for the new look. Well, other than completely outsourcing the entire project to Jules at Everyday Design.

We here at Big Mama are big fans of the outsourcing. Stay tuned for the finished product.

In other news, thank you all for your well wishes for Caroline. The little midnight hacker is doing much better today and a trip to the pediatrician found her lungs clear and healthy.

She is no worse for the wear.

I, on the other hand, after three different steam baths in the wee, small hours, feel much like I have been run over by a very large truck. A truck that after running over me, backed up to do it again.

On the bright side, my pores have never been clearer.

And as I sat on the toilet (LID DOWN) last night and rocked my baby girl, the thing that worried me the most was that I couldn’t get the theme song from “Diff’rent Strokes” out of my head. It’s like I have opened some type of Pandora’s box that will ultimately cause my friends and family to abandon me one by one because they won’t be able to take the constant repeating of “it takes diff’rent strokes, it takes diff’rent strokes, it takes diff’rent strokes to move the world”.

Or is it “rule the world”? I couldn’t really remember last night at 3:00 a.m. while I was sitting on the toilet (LID DOWN) with sweat running down my forehead, watching beads of condensation trickle down the tiles due to the high humidity.

Anyway, last night before Cough Fest ’07 began, I planned to take Caroline with me to Bible Study over at Gulley’s house. P had to leave on an emergency hunting trip, the babysitter was sick, and so I told Caroline she could just go with me with the stipulation that she and Jackson had to QUIETLY and CALMLY watch movies in Gulley’s bedroom while we had our Bible Study.

The fact that this announcement was met with yelling and jumping up and down should have been an indication of how well this plan was going to go.

I got Caroline bathed and in her jammies. Then I noticed she was packing up her Hello Kitty! purse with a variety of things that didn’t seem to go hand in hand with QUIET and CALM. So I said, “Caroline, I don’t want you bringing a bunch of toys over there. The deal is that y’all will rest and watch T.V.”

She replied, “Don’t worry, Mama. I’m just taking the things Jackson and I will need. Guns and jewelry.”

Which is so weird because that’s exactly what J.Lo used to take on dates back when she was still with P.Diddy.

It just proves that it does, indeed, take diff’rent strokes to move and/or rule the world.

Last but not least, Happy Birthday, Mimi. We here at Big Mama hope you have a wonderful day complete with some good Italian food and a nice bottle of wine.

Guess what it did here yesterday? Seriously. Guess.

IT RAINED.

And here is where I’d like to make some stupid joke about animals walking down our street being led two-by-two by an elderly gentleman with a long beard, but at this point it just seems like a cliche.

Caroline got in bed with us at around 5 a.m. when she claimed that thunder had woken her up. The rule at our house, that we enforce with semi-regularity, is that she can only get in our bed if she’s sick or if it’s thundering outside. I’m not sure that it was actually thunder that she heard at 5 a.m., but I was too tired to debate it and honestly, it could have been because that’s all it ever does anymore. It thunders and it rains. Rinse. Repeat.

I asked, “Are you sure it was thunder?” She said, “Yes, it was thunder and I know because my ears are very sensitive.” I wasn’t convinced, but she won me over with the claim of her sensitive ears and and so I let her get in our bed. We fell back asleep and woke up around 8 a.m. to the sound of legitimate thunder and raining.

Gulley called around 8:45 because we had planned to take the kids to the free Wednesday movie at the theater, but we decided we didn’t feel like driving across town in the driving rain to go see “Clifford’s Really Big Movie”, otherwise known as parental torture in the form of a large, red canine. So, we ruled out the movie and Gulley asked, “What are we going to do all day in this rain?” And I said, “We’re going to pack us a sack lunch and come spend the entire day at your house.”

And that’s exactly what we did. Except we didn’t pack a sack lunch.

However, I did pack several of our DVD’s including “Muppets in Space” and also my new jeans so that I could show them to Gulley and she could try them on to see if she needed a pair for herself. Oh, and I brought my laptop, but never could figure out how to get it connected to the wireless interweb at Gulley’s, so I spent the whole day away from the computer and, other than some mild twitching around noon, I survived.

The kids all ran back to the playroom to play and we attempted to have a conversation, but kept getting interrupted because, apparently, the gang felt they needed to “ice skate” in the living room. So, because the rain has driven us to desperation, we went and got in Gulley’s bed, turned Food Network on the T.V., and let the children take over the entire house. Did I mention we were both wearing the same clothes we’d had on the night before? Clothes that are really one step away from pajamas, but if you call them “yoga pants” they become totally acceptable, if not attractive.

Every now and then one of the kids would come in and ask us for some juice or something and we’d say, “Why can’t you people leave us alone? Don’t you know we’re trying to figure out if black tights are really going to be in for the fall? This is serious, serious stuff.”

At some point we realized it was probably time to feed everyone lunch and when we emerged from the safe haven of Gulley’s room, this is what we saw.

They had torn the place apart. And we didn’t care.

We debated for awhile about what to do for lunch, the age old dilemma of McDonalds versus hot dogs. Delicious and nutritious either way. While we debated lunch, the kids started playing with a whoopee cushion. I’d like to say that Gulley and I were above it, but we weren’t. We gave in to the whoopee cushion and all took turns seeing who could give the most realistic portrayal of intestinal distress, loudly applauding all the dramatic efforts. It was all fun and games until Jackson got a little too enthusiastic and popped the whoopee cushion. He was pretty upset about it, but Gulley told him to just go get the other one out of the playroom. It was a proud moment for me to realize that my best friend is a two-whoopee cushion family. I mean anyone can have one whoopee cushion, but to have a spare? That’s just dedication to a lost art form.

We decided we could all probably use to get out for a little bit, seeing as how we were down to our last whoopee cushion, so we loaded them up in the Trailblazer and drove through the pouring rain to pick up McDonald’s Happy Meals. We got home, ate our Happy Meals and had a little rest time. Gulley and I could have easily reverted back to our college days and taken a four hour nap, but the kids wouldn’t even sit still for a movie. We finally gave up after an hour of repeated demands for popsicles and Chex Mix, and decided to let them bake cookies.

Gulley helped the kids make Paula Deen’s Triple Chocolate Chip cookies and oh my word, they are better than strawberry butter. I’m not even going to talk about how many spoonfuls of dough I ate because it’s just shameful. Here’s a batch fresh out of the oven.

So, we’d played, we’d talked, we’d eaten, we’d baked and we’d eaten some more. It was 3:00 p.m.

What to do? How do we fill these hours with meaningful, purposeful, perhaps even educational, activity?

We bowl, my friends. We bowl.

And please tell me that I am not the only one who is envisioning the entire bowling alley scene from Grease II right now. “We’re gonna scooooore tonight. We’re gonna scooooore tonight.” I actually thought they were just talking about bowling.

Anyway, we hit the lanes. We laced up our bowling shoes, grabbed the lightest bowling balls we could find and had ourselves a little tournament. Check out this style and form.

We discussed taking them to the museum, but decided to show them some real culture instead, to teach them a skill that will serve them well throughout the rest of their lives. And a great time was had by all, even though none of us broke 100 in spite of the bumpers in the gutters. Gulley should be ashamed of herself because she took bowling for kinesiology credit at A&M and really didn’t play up to her potential.

Eventually, everyone got a little bowled out.

We headed home, proud that we had turned what could have been a dreary, boring day into a day of fun and adventure. And I’m not even talking about the adventure that comes when you visit a bowling alley in a sketchy area of town.

If it keeps raining, we’re going to see about opting out of our pool membership and joining a bowling league. You can’t put a price on that kind of entertainment.