Poison Ivy

I begin with a story.

I am pregnant, and I have poison ivy. Not just any poison ivy, mind you. This is the poison ivy case that came from nowhere–I haven’t been out & about in nature for weeks–and exploded into the worst case of the red bumpy itches I have ever had, including my sophomore year in high school. It is everywhere, but concentrated in a long line around my right eye and cheekbone. I look like I have a shiner. I look something like this woman.

Every day some new spot pops up in an area somewhere else on my body. And it is miserable.

The doctors insist that oozing poison ivy pustules do not spread the infection further, that I have clearly missed washing some item of clothing–the couch, the bed, something. I know better. I am washing every item of clothing every day, and changing the bed every morning, the bathroom towels–everything. And yet they still keep coming.

I am home with an 18-month-old little boy named Alex one fine (miserable) afternoon, sitting on the couch in all my pregnant glory while Alex plays with the phone. After a while I decide that’s dangerous, and I take the phone and stick it behind me on the couch so he can’t get at it.

Not long after, the doorbell rings. I open the door to find a sheriff’s deputy on my porch. “Uh…hi,” I say, racking my brain to come up with some rational explanation for the presence of law enforcement on my doorstep.

“Miss, is everything okay?”

“Uh…yes…” (Sounding confused.)

“Are you sure?”

“Y…yes…” (REALLY confused.)

“Well, miss, we just got a 9-1-1 call from this address.”

My jaw drops, and then I realize….that little stinker–the phone! I run to grab the handset, and sure enough, the first three numbers in a long string of twenty are…9-1-1. I come running back. “My toddler was playing with the phone, I’m so sorry…look.” And I show it to him.

“Ma’am, are you SURE you’re all right?”

By now I’m beginning to feel a bit frantic. “I’m fine!”

“Then why is your face all beat up?” he asks.

poison ivy in summer

From the wisdom of this experience, I have a few poison ivy tips to offer:

1. Don’t let your kids play with the phone.

2. Poison ivy has the potential to “go systemic.” In other words, a really, really bad case can get into the bloodstream. If this happens, new spots of poisony ivy will continue to pop up in random places on your body for a couple of weeks. Fortunately, the longer it goes, the less severe the spots are.

3. Product Recommendation #1: Tecnu is an oily wash that you rub on exposed skin right after coming out of the woods. It adheres to the poison ivy oil and gets it off the skin. No use once the outbreak has begun.

4. Product Recommendation #2: Zanfel. I give you the brand name so you can find it, but most places also have a generic brand. Zanfel is very expensive; the generic is still steep, but absolutely worthwhile! Here’s why: it is made for use after the itchies begin. Zanfel is essentially a sand-filled scrub to lift the oils from your skin…and you get to RUB THE SAND ON YOUR RASH for thirty seconds! Anyone who has ever had poison ivy knows that the release you get by scratching is body-wide.

Go forth and scratch, poison ivy sufferers! :)

(Note: we eventually concluded that Christian brought the poison ivy home from the golf course, where he had chucked a ball into the very rough. My OB joked that I got poison ivy because my husband needed to learn to play golf better.)

Published in: on July 7, 2010 at 5:20 am  Comments (2)  

Our Family Motto

Motherhood Moments

Every family needs a motto.

I discovered ours one day last fall at dinnertime, when the nursing baby was yelling, Julianna was whining, and Alex was shouting about who knows what. Superman, his favorite shirt being dirty, a fly buzzing around—it could have been anything. Of course, none of them directed their angst toward Daddy, who was newly arrived home from work, sitting at the table waiting for me to put the food on the table so he could eat before his piano students arrived. Nope, they know which direction to aim their rancor.

Now, moms know that it’s impossible to pretend their kids are not in anguish, even if you know all they need is food, and you’re working on that—you can’t block it out. You can’t even compartmentalize it. It’s not in Mom’s psyche. We’re wired to freak out when they freak out. And so I rushed around, every moment more frantic, until finally I stopped and threw my hands out and shrieked desperately:

“Everybody just CALM DOWN!”

I pointed to them each in turn. “You calm down, you calm down, you calm down! I’m making your food! It will be there in a minute!”

Older, wiser mothers can guess how well that worked. Uh-huh. Not at all.

Bless Alex. If not for him, this might have been one more “Mom is losing it” moment, quickly buried among a million others. But not Alex. No, Alex leaped to his feet and echoed my stance, pointing at Julianna and Nicholas and me. “Everybody calm down! You calm down, and you calm down, and you calm down!”

And in a moment of uncontrollable giggles, our family motto was born.

A motto I still have to squeeze between my teeth almost daily…

Okay, folks, your turn–what is YOUR family motto? (Think hard. I know you have one, even if you haven’t realized it yet!)

Published in: on May 27, 2010 at 5:44 am  Comments (3)  
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Fashion Follies

Note to Target, Kohl’s, Penney’s, et al:

Seriously, people. Who are you making clothes for? Because—news flash—it’s NOT ME.

Today I am guest posting for Amy over at Never-True Tales. Go visit me there!

Published in: on April 16, 2010 at 5:25 am  Leave a Comment  
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Is it Easter yet?

Alex hates going to the grocery store (which is a good thing, since I always spent more money when he comes along). But occasionally, we have no choice. It’s a cooking night, and I’m missing an ingredient, usually because I spaced out and didn’t put it on last week’s grocery list.

Monday was one of those days. At 4:30p.m., I loaded the kids into the car and drove to the (expensive) (but nearby) grocery store for one item: Italian dressing for the pasta salad. Lately, Julianna gets giggly when I put her in the car. Nicholas sighs and starts pulling his socks off. But today, back in the back seat, Alex shoved his cheek into his fist and groused all the way there. He complained about his propensity to car sickness. He complained about the grocery store. Which got him thinking about the yummy treats that this store has sitting right in front of the door. “Mommy,” he said, “is Lent almost over?”

“Oh, honey,” I said, “no, I’m sorry. There’s a lot of Lent left.”

Dramatic sigh. “Mommy, you know God talks to me inside my head.”

“Oh?” I smiled at this evidence that he’s receiving his education in a Christian environment.

“And God talked to me, and told me that it’s Easter right now.”

:)          :)          :)

Published in: on March 4, 2010 at 7:14 am  Comments (7)  
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Tiny Talk

They can be so darned adorable.

Last week, Christian took Alex to the grand opening of the new fire station. For three days after they came home, Christian kept remembering funny tidbits of their outing:

1. (already shared last week):
          Reporter: “So do you want to be a fireman when you grow up?”
          Alex (tilting his head and looking sideways): “No, actually I want to be Batman.”

2. Conversation with a fireman:
            Alex: “Do you have a pole?”
            Fireman: “A pool? No, we don’t have a pool!” (Laughing.) “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

3. Upon entering the office/bedroom, Alex gets super-excited: “Daddy, look! LOOK!”

Christian looks and can’t figure out what Alex is pointing at. “What is it, buddy?”

“Daddy, it’s a scissors just like the one we have!”

And then there’s Julianna. Julianna (AKA Minnie the Moocher) can’t talk yet, but yesterday morning, she saw Nicholas’s sippy cup full of breastmilk sitting on the table, and decided she was thirsty. She helped herself. You should have seen the look on her face. It said very clearly: What the @#$%^& &#$%^& was THAT?”

Ah, so cute. These are the moments that help make up for the frustrations and difficulties of being a parent.

For more tiny talk cuteness, visit http://notbefore7.blogspot.com/. For more instances of joy in the ordinary, visit Tuesdays Unwrapped at chattingatthesky.com.

Published in: on February 16, 2010 at 6:25 am  Comments (6)  
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Ladykiller

Ah, my son, the ladykiller:

Exhibit A: Alex, sitting at the dinner table, looks out the window and sighs dreamily. “Mommy, I love C____ soooooo much!” Mommy and Daddy exchange a look and bite back giggles.

Exhibit B: Taking advantage of a brief mild interlude, we go outside to play, where we discover the little neighbor girls and their mother doing the same thing. The kids chase each other up and down the sidewalk for a while, and then their mother calls them inside. As everyone protests, she gives me an ironic look. “E___ said to me the other day, ‘Alex is sooooo handsome.’”

Exhibit C: It’s all too funny to keep to myself, so I tell these stories at choir practice, and one of the other “choir baby” mothers pipes up. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “C____’s planning to marry Alex, too. He’s got the girls lined up!”

And he looks so innocent, too!

Published in: on February 11, 2010 at 6:21 am  Comments (2)  
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How To Get In Trouble With the TSA (WFMW)

1. Travel with a kid who plants his feet and says stubbornly, “No! I WON’T take my jacket off! I WON’T take my shoes off!”

2. Travel with a cute little girl who likes to play hard-to-get. She’ll pretend that she’s walking through the metal detector to you, only to turn around mid-arch and run away.

3. Travel with a kid who thinks he’s being helpful by running BACK through the metal detector to chase after her.

4. But my very best worst lesson of all dates from the pre-kids, full-time liturgy era, and was safely buried in the “Memories that Make You Shudder Whenever You Think Of Them” file, until we had to start explaining to Alex about the TSA and why we had to do EXACTLY what they told us.

We were flying out of Kansas City for a Basi family trip, and they flagged me going through the line. The woman was very cagey about what she had seen in my carryon, but she went digging and digging until she came up with…are you ready for this? A steak knife.

Imagine my horror.

It was an old, cheap, extremely dull steak knife, along with a mismatched fork, that I had been carrying back and forth to work for months to cut tomatoes for cottage cheese & tomato lunches. But at some point I got tired of that lunch and quit packing it. And then I forgot about the knife. And it burrowed its way to the bottom of my bag.

And we flew from Kansas City to Denver, and spent a week in the mountains. Then we flew from Denver to Kansas City, back home. And no one caught it. And I went along in blissful ignorance that I was carrying a great big fat no no in my bag.

Until the day I found myself in a taped-off area of the airport gate, with a police officer measuring the knife to find out if it constituted an automatic trip to jail. Frankly, I think it did, but thank God, they sized up this trembling, frightened, obviously freaked out twenty-something and realized that I was obviously harmless…and they let me go. (Without the knife.)

Since that day, I have become a compulsive bag-emptier before every flight. Even the homebound ones. You never know what you might have thrown into your bag during the trip, without thinking about it.

(Visit Works for me Wednesday at wearethatfamily.com for more useful tips than mine!)

Published in: on January 27, 2010 at 6:27 am  Comments (8)  
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Occupational Hazards of Motherhood

There are occupational hazards to motherhood.

“Mommy, I haven’t got to pway with you in SIXTEEN YEARS,” Alex declared upon arriving home from a two-hour playdate with his friend down the street. The trouble was, he was right. I hadn’t played with him all week. At all. Too many sick kids. Meetings. Errands. Housecleaning.

But all those sick kids, meetings, errands, and housecleaning meant I hadn’t had time to write much this week, either. Gnashing my teeth as I warred between what I ought to do and what I wanted to do, I opted for compromise. “All right, I’ll set the timer for 45 minutes,” I said. “Give me 45 minutes to work, and then I’ll play with you.”

All too soon, the timer beeped, and we made colored crystals and then went outside. We played hide and seek, and then Alex donned his breastplate, shield and sword. “Woody is the sheriff, and you’re the princess, and Jessie is the queen,” he said.

“And what are you?”

“The knight,” he said.

Silly me. “Okay,” I said. “Let’s go find a dragon to fight in the woods.”

“A real dragon?”

“Um, no. A pretend dragon.”

We wandered the woodsy paths for a while. Then we reached the dangerous spot. “Okay, you go first,” he said. So much for chivalry. So I led the dauntless knight through the dead undergrowth. When it came time to turn around, however, nothing would do but for Alex to lead. Only he didn’t like the undergrowth. “Use your sword to clear us a path,” I suggested.

“Okay!”

I leaned forward to help him, and WHAM! Wooden sword on bridge of nose.

Occupational Hazard #1: Getting punched in the nose by a wooden sword.

“I’m sorry!!!” Alex shrieked, knowing it was even odds whether he’d get in serious trouble for that one. I gnashed my teeth some more and reminded myself that it was my own darned fault for telling him to wave his sword around and then leaning into harm’s way. But I lost my appetite for playing in the woods after that.

Two hours later, back in the house, I was sitting at the piano with a voice student standing beside me. Julianna climbed up and started shrieking in my ear because she wanted to play the piano. I shifted my feet on the floor and bumped into something warm and soft. I looked beneath the bench to find my 8-month-old staring up at me, whimpering pathetically. “Okay, okay,” I sighed, and picked him up. He was not happy that I wouldn’t let him bang on the keys. Neither was Julianna, now that Nicholas was up there and she wasn’t.

Next thing I knew, I was “playing” “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” with Julianna hanging on my right forearm and Nicholas leaning on it from the other side.

Occupational Hazard #2: The path to Severe Carpal Tunnel.

And that was just three hours’ worth of parenting.

Anybody want to share some of the Occupational Hazards that I missed?

Published in: on November 23, 2009 at 5:58 am  Comments (2)  
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Okay, so since everybody’s looking…

The hits are jumping skyward so clearly people are jumping over from Facebook, expecting updates on Julianna. :)

Well, the vaporizer failed us at last, and Julianna went to the hospital tonight. We managed to keep her home for almost 10 days, so that’s something. I was putting her seat in Christian’s truck tonight when I saw our neighbor, a respiratory therapist-turned-administrator, decked out in tank top & fatigues & knee-high combat boots (yes, it is that warm on November the 6th). I yelled for him to bring his stethescope over and take a listen. We must have looked a sight, out there on the sidewalk between our houses: the unlikely medical tech, the snazzy suit-and-tie daddy holding a baby in a cute turtleneck and no pants, and slobby Mommy in her sweats and T shirt.

Anyway, the point is, they went to the ER. The boys and I packed up dinner and overnight stuff for Daddy & Julianna and drove down to the hospital at 7:15. I had to wake Alex & Nicholas both up when we got there, and Alex was all a-flutter to go see the helicopter that flies over our house 10x a day. (Boys.) So we headed for the ER, and I said, “This way, Alex,” as we passed the east elevators. “We’re going to a different place than usual.” And I had to shake my head as the words processed: that we actually have a “usual” destination in the hospital!!!! AAACK!!!!

The woman who brought us back into the ER said, “What’s the patient’s name?” She looked it up and then said, “Oh! I remember her.”

As we turned the corner I heard her screams echoing around the ER, and I thougth, I’ll just bet you do remember her.

She was already on her second IV, and that one blew sometime shortly after we arrived…but they’d already given her steroids and clearly that helped, because she had WAY more energy for venting her unhappiness with the world than she had at 4:00 when I called Christian to come home.

However, Town House crackers and Colby cheese cheered her up considerably, as did the Gymboree play book that she can sit and look at for hours on end.

She’s improved enough already that we hope she’ll be home tomorrow, but there are no guarantees, so all prayers are appreciated. Especially since her big brother won’t pray for her to get well and come home. “I like Julianna in the hospital!” he said. “I like going to the hospital every day!”

Oh, Alex. You can still render me speechless.

Published in: on November 6, 2009 at 9:51 pm  Comments (2)  
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“Bad Kitty” days

Christian just sent this to me, and I thought it was funny enough to post. Trust me, I have my own reflection on the last two days half-composed. Stay tuned for tomorrow. In the meantime…

“Bad Kitty ” Days, by Christian Basi

Yesterday was:
 
  • I LOST my tie
  • FOUGHT with the insurance company
  • SCRAMBLED to the get the right medicine
  • LOOKED up records for the hospital bill
  • DRIED Alex’s tears
  • Got MAD at the mail when I opened it.
 
Today:
  • The dry cleaners FOUND my tie
  • The prescriptions are READY for pickup
  • The insurance company CLEARED the confusion.
  • The doctor MENDED Alex (almost)
  • I SENT a letter back to the Marion hospital.
Published in: on October 15, 2009 at 3:48 pm  Comments (1)  
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