Precious moments. We’ve all had them—those moments that make your heart catch every time you remember them. No matter how often you revisit them, they never get stale or lose their power. Tender or funny, poignant or inspiring, they fortify us against toddler tantrums and pubescent (and pre-school) power struggles.
Leave a comment sharing your moment—or, if you’re feeling ambitious enough to write a whole post (or want to link from your own blog), email me and I’ll use your story as the moment of the day.
***
File this one under “I should have known better.”
To say that I am allergic to poison ivy is a bit of an understatement. For me, poison ivy goes “systemic,” which means that it gets into my blood, and even after I have washed every item in the house that could possibly have oil on it, new spots keep popping up all over my body.
This particular time, I didn’t even know where I’d gotten it. I hadn’t been out of our yard for a week, and there wasn’t any poison ivy there. All we could figure was that Christian had carried it home from the golf course. To make matters worse, I was pregnant. Do you know what they do for a pregnant woman with poison ivy? NOTHING. The triamcinilone acetonide cream they prescribed for the itch was a concentration of .0125. That’s less than what they prescribe for a newborn!
So I was pretty miserable that afternoon. Fifteen-month-old Alex was keeping himself amused by punching buttons on the phone. Usually I kept him close by me while he had it, just to make sure he didn’t dial China. But today, I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the screaming itch wrapped around the right side of my face from chin to eyebrow.
Until I realized that I was hearing more than the external beep of the phone—I was hearing the touch tone, which meant he was dialing.
I hauled my worn-out body off the couch and grabbed it. “Oh, no,” I said, punching the off button. “We do not dial the phone!” I sat back down and shoved the handset behind me, where Alex couldn’t get at it. He pointed and grunted for a while, but eventually he gave up.
Then the doorbell rang. Huh, I thought. Who could that be? I got up and went to open the door.
A sheriff’s deputy stood on the doorstep.
“Uh…hi,” I said.
“Ma’am, is everything okay?”
What an odd question. “Umm…yeah.”
“Are you sure?”
“Um…yeah…” The entire conversation seemed to hinge on something he knew and I didn’t. What the…?
“Ma’am, we received a 9-1-1 call from this address.”
Oh, crap! I ran to retrieve the handset, and sure enough, there it was on the memory: 911200499997444… “Look,” I said, showing him, but he just gave me the stone-faced stare. “I’m fine,” I said, writhing with embarrassment.
“Then what happened to your face?” he asked.
And that was the moment when I knew I would NEVER let my kids play with a phone EVER AGAIN!
Kathleen M. Basi 