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Bedbugs, Brain Collapse, & Birthdays
Long time, no type.
Mainly, I’ve been riding the wave of gleeful post-homework life and spending very little computer time doing anything that requires significant cognitive processing. Not to mention that the last few weeks at work have been tremendously busy, and insanely stressful what with top-down administrative reorganizations, severe budget cuts, and the like. So needless to say, I haven’t been in much of a bloggy frame of mind.
However, I feel the need to issue a report on our grand vacation in early June; a whirlwind trip that started with my #1 niece’s high school graduation and ended with a crazy 5-day stint in…..you guessed it…..Las Vegas. The Vegas leg of the trip was a long-awaited family celebratory extravaganza to ring in a host of decade-centric birthdays (ahem, yes, I wasn’t the only one with a milestone this year.) One of my nephews, my brother, and my dear hubby all hit “decade” birthdays between mid April and mid June. So naturally we all felt the need to hoop it up in sin city.
But before I get ahead of myself too far, let me reel back a bit and describe the first segment of the trip. My dear eldest niece, so lovely in body and spirit, was graduating with honors from a tremendously rigorous International Baccalaureate-affiliated school the first weekend of June. I was very excited to attend, particularly to hear her speak at the graduation ceremony. However, seeing as said ceremony was scheduled to begin quite early in the morning, at roughly a 2-hour drive from our house, we opted to drive up the Friday before and meet up with GMom to share a hotel room.
Considering that we also had to plan ahead/pack for the Vegas trip, get the pets settled, load the car, feed the kid, and a million other things after an already-long day of work, we didn’t get out of town until almost 8pm, which put our arrival into a rather late-ish timeframe. After unloading our overnight gear and securing a late night snack courtesy of the only open business in the area — Circle K — I started prepping the little genius for bed. I left her in the hotel bathroom to marinate in the shower for a few moments while I went to unpack her jammies and get the bed ready. Upon reaching for a pillow, what did I see but a tiny little bug on the pillow!
Now, not that I travel all that much, but you’d have to live in a deep cave anymore these days not to be aware of ye olde modern hotel bedbug epidemic. Being a bonafide bug-o-phobe already, of course my mind leapt to the possibility of bedbugs, although the little specimen was very tiny. I asked FF and Uncle Bubba (also sharing the room) to give it an eyeball, and in the course of examining that and other pillows, they located a much larger and more suspicious looking critter, which we caught in a plastic cup. At that point, with frantic smartphone image Googling underway, we felt rather alarmed and certain that we hit the unlucky jackpot of a bedbug-infested room.
And honestly, the front desk wasn’t all that much help…they offered to move us to a different room, but that wasn’t very reassuring considering that all of us had horrific images of bringing home our very own bedbug buddies to our respective domiciles, never to be pest-free again. This was particularly unsettling to FF and I, considering that a few years ago we suffered through an epic, almost yearlong flea war at our old crappy apartment. And believe me, we tried everything, to no avail. Moving out WAS the final solution. So needless to say, we are pretty particularly picky when it comes to bug issues.
So our troops did a quick huddle and we decided to relocate to another hotel (by this time nearly 1am), yet unfortunately the only affordable place reasonably nearby was a 30 minute drive away. Ugh. However, despite our collective exhaustion, this seemed a better option than potentially offering ourselves up as blood donors to the native fauna. The little genius was taking everything in stride pretty well, despite some confusion and tiredness. We repacked our overnight gear and shuffled back down to the van. Unfortunately however, during the baggage and kid-loading insanity, we managed to lock a) the kid b) all our stuff and c) the keys, snugly in the van.
Oh shit.
So yes, friends and neighbors, we stood outside a bedbug-ridden hotel in a sleepy small hamlet at 1am shouting instructions through a closed window to our frantically crying daughter on how to escape her snug, safe, 5-point carseat harness with the child-resistant latch so that she could unlock the van for us. Totally not one of my proudest moments. Fortunately the little genius is a trooper and she calmed down and persevered enough to get us out of the fiasco. After that, we hit the highway and about an hour later we all collapsed into an exhausted slumber.
So the management did call and talk to Gmom the next day (she had made the reservation) and were properly apologetic and all that crap, issuing refunds and free night coupons ad nauseam. And a few days after that, they emailed a copy of their pest company report, predictably denying any bedbug issues but admitting the presence of some “carpet beetles”. Well, I appreciate them sharing the report and all but I gotta say that I’m still not convinced and I don’t think they actually examined the critter we captured and showed to the front desk staff.
SO, needless to say the next morning came very early and as for my little family pod, we reluctantly decided to skip the main ceremony and let the little genius continue to get some much-needed rest. We did attend the post-ceremony graduation party and it was a lot of fun, particularly when my niece “unwrapped” a very exciting present: a car! K thought that was just about the coolest and most exciting thing she’d ever heard of, and I’m pretty sure she will not forget it, and thus expectantly hold it over her parents’ heads until her own high school graduation. Sigh.
So with that dramatic report out of the way, I’m happy to say that the Vegas phase of the trip was tons of fun and very smooth sailing with no buggy or incompetent parenting episodes. We bowled, we saw movies, we gambled, we swam, we played a lot of cards in the sumptuous top-floor suite that K2 & family occupied, and generally a great time was had by all. The young guys (uncle bubba, my #1 nephew and #2 nephew) camped out in the 2nd suite bedroom and turned it into an X-box blazin’, Dr. Pepper guzzling, stinky man cave. They loved it.
FOUR LAYERS!
The guys went to see Cirque’s new Elvis show one night, and the next night the girls went to see Menopause: The Musical. Which was, um, quite an experience and has given me a slightly worried perspective on my future hormonal event horizon. (Is it too early to already be experiencing the whole brain collapse thing? ’cause lately….) Seriously though, the show was quite a laugh and a lot of fun to see with Gmom and Aunt D (K2′s mom).
Speaking of Gmom, she brought some serious magic to the table and managed to somehow make an amazingly elaborate cake in a hotel mini-kitchen for us birthday folks! Totally awesome. (and delicious!)
All in all, a trip (and birthday) to remember!
So Much for Weekly Posts
Or alternately titled Not Gone, but Probably Forgotten.
Anyway, due to ongoing time constraints, this post is relegated to a pathetic “I’m still alive” three minute update, and a commitment in writing to get back on track blogwise in the coming weeks. Now, on to the good stuff.
- The powers that be at my graduate program have decided to LET ME OUT! I got notification last night (late last night, otherwise I probably would have gone out for celebratory bar-hopping…) that my applied project received a PASS, which right now to me feels exactly like a parole order from prison. I am not DONE with the semester yet; I still have two weeks of zombie-like sociology coursework to complete, but all the hard stuff is behind me.
- After some recent serious brain-frying cogitation, I decided for a variety of reasons not to walk in the graduation ceremony. I still feel vaguely guilty about this decision even though ultimately I’m the only one who might conceivably have any future regret about it. Honestly, I skipped my undergrad ceremony too and never thought about it twice, so this really isn’t a big deal. The accomplishment remains.
- …HOWEVER, the “now what?” interrogations are just starting. And the fact that I don’t really have any specific answers right now makes this more than a touch irritating; not towards the inquiring parties, but rather more inwardly-focused. I’ve been so utterly driven to finish over the last whatever semesters that the means haven’t begun to connect to the ends yet, in my mind. Oh shit.
- I should take this moment to thank Björn, ABBA, Meryl Streep, Amanda Seyfried and all their buddies for getting me through many a difficult homework night, most especially (repetitively) in recent weeks. Without the focusing force of Pierce Brosnan’s eye-twitchy singing performances, I might never have graduated.
- It’s official; I have joined the 30 club. I have a lot of thoughts about this, and have started writing a naval-gazing reflective post. I know you are excited, so stay tuned.
- A few days ago, I broke my cardinal rule about not trimming my daughter’s hair myself. I could not stand her shaggy-dog look anymore; had no time to make a trip to Supercuts; and she wouldn’t let me otherwise constrain it with clips, bands, bows, ties, clasps, barrettes, or hats. The results aren’t terrible, but they aren’t fashion-mag cover material either. I solemnly swear I will take my poor abused child to a proper salon to get further tidied up before her big upcoming dance recital.
- We have infected her entertainment life with Fern Gully. Anyone of a Certain Age remembers this movie with some amount of amusement and horror for its absurd stench of the 90s. Naturally, my daughter loves it, and spends a great deal of time now pretending to be, in fact, a forest fairy.
- Speaking of the little genius, guess what? She is going to be graduating too! And it makes me want to cry! Oh wait, I probably WILL cry on the big day. And we still have no firm answer on which school she’ll be attending in the fall yet. Sigh.
- And for a final thought, all she (desperately) wants from the Easter Bunny this year is a Live! Butterfly! Garden! Ummm, ok, bug-phobic child. And thank you, TV infomercials.
I Survived*
Well, here I am back from the brink of fall-semester-induced insanity. I dearly wished to have kept up with the blog more actively, but it is unfortunately one of those things I’ve had to include lately in the complex time/energy equation of daily life. I hope to get things freshened up in a bit in the next couple weeks, design-wise, and to try and jam out a few miscellaneous update posts, and if I get really froggy I might even be able to pick up the threads on a couple of half-finished drafts! Won’t that be exciting…in a reheated-leftovers-kind-of-way!
So basically I thought I’d just try to capture some short-ish snippets from my current stream of consciousness, but be warned there is little organizational rhyme or reason.
Fall sucked. I tried not to be tedious here and whine-blog ad nauseum about my academic woes, but I gotta say, this fall was a ringer. I may have been a little more emotionally balanced than past semesters, but the two classes I took were incredibly demanding on my time and patience. After putting it off for two years, I had to take another class from the she-devil, that whorish instructor that nearly made me quit the program way back in my second semester. I’m pleased to report that (obviously) my stubborn persistence was more viable than her stupidity, but the consequence was having to take another class from her. It was every bit as obnoxious as I expected, but forewarned is forearmed. Or some shit like that.
I’m so fatigued. I presume this is not a unique phenomenon for any grad student but I am definitely feeling the drain of this academic adventure. I am lately beginning to look at the tally book to evaluate whether the trade-offs, financially, emotionally, logistically…will be worth it. I do value the experience and the opportunity, blah blah blah, but still. When viewed in scope with the rest of my life, I am just really fatigued right now…intellectually, emotionally, physically. It is sort of a numb feeling at times and I think some days it causes me to coast through other life-minutiae to which I should be paying more attention. Sigh. And ironically this causes my insomnia to flare up, so here I am blogging at 5 o clock in the morning.
One semester to go. Yes this is very exciting, but I am also currently experiencing a lot of trepidation and anxiety because I don’t have a handle yet on what the hell I’m going to do for my capstone applied project. I’ve been saying that for well over 6 months, with a sort of blind hope that I’d be struck with an academic epiphany (yes, this does happen to me sometimes), but as yet, I haven’t been able to dial in the picture with any clarity. I’m planning to do some serious thinking, and maybe some serious drinking, and then maybe some serious thinking-drinking over the next couple vacation weeks. The failsafe plan is to BS something or other that is doable but perhaps not anything in which I’m really personally or professionally invested. Less than ideal, but it offers an escape hatch from grad school, and ideally, I can pick up the threads of more-invested research projects a bit further down the career road.
Merry Christmas. This has been truly a less-than-engaged holiday season for me. I have been so drained that it’s been difficult to summon the mental energy for anything other than the basics for the sake of the little genius. Minimal decorating, minimal shopping, minimal excitement, minimal everything. We decided to stay home this year for Christmas morning, but I am a little bummed that Gmom, Uncle Bubba & co. won’t be joining us. Instead we will be packing up and heading to their place later in the day for Christmas dinner and to spend a couple days in the (hopefully) snowy northern reaches. So we’ll still get to spend some time together, but no Christmas morning follies and famous Gmom cinnamon rolls. The thing I am most looking forward to is a lovely Christmas eve feast that FF, kiddo and I are planning to cook together. I really wish it were possible to enjoy such a thing with all my siblings and their families too, but it is simply impossible to gather everyone for Christmas anymore. I wish it were important to them in the same way it is important to me, but I guess that is part of growing up and away from one’s immediate family.
Our little monkey
Little genius is 5. We did a combo-birthday extravaganza with K2 and it was a really fun, happy day. We rented one of those moon bounce inflatable things and everyone had a great time. They went with a Tangled (Rapunzel) theme, and we happened to also see the movie the same weekend, which reminds me…I’ll have to whip up another post one of these days regarding my reaction to such a weird Disney movie. Moving on. Recent kiddo developments:
- New antagonistic/argumentative/dramatic behavior swings. Um hello, where did THAT come from? It’s crazy and I haven’t figured out how the hell to respond to all that yet. Ugh.
- Yesterday she discovered her first loose tooth! This is exciting and yet it makes me feel a little nervous and anxious…which is kind of strange, but there you go. Hopefully this first baby tooth experience goes smoothly with a minimum of drama, and the tooth fairy comes through with some good loot.
- She was pretending to be a mommy giraffe the other day with 2 babies and couldn’t recall the word “nipples”. She called them “piffles”, and both FF and I nearly wet ourselves trying to hold back the hysterical laughter.
- This spring will be her last semester of preschool, and then it will be on to Kindergarten. Still makes me want to go somewhere and cry a little.
- This spring she is switching from the regular gymnastics class to a combo dance/gym class. Because my kid? she wants to DANCE! I think this is going to be a lot of fun for her (and us).
- We are going to get her started with soccer at our local Y sometime in the next couple months and she is very excited, yet anxious about “not winning games” and thus being ineligible to receive trophies. Uhh? I didn’t even TRY to explain the concept of non-competitive soccer yet. Will definitely cross that bridge when we get there.
- She randomly had a freak-out the other night around 4am when she came into our room to sleep, because she noticed while getting in bed that the fuzzy blanket caused a couple static sparks. You would have thought the kid was about to get hit by lightning. She was so wigged out that even after 30 minutes of patient (sleepy) discussion, she still wouldn’t stop sitting on her pillow plastered against the wall, cringing away from the dreaded, death-ray blanket. She simply couldn’t be reasoned with and she chose to go back to her own bedroom to sleep, rather than risk electrocution by killer blanket. Oddly by the next day, she was over this phobia and all was well again for her with our bedroom. WTF?
- She recently volunteered herself to help out with a project at my office, in which we needed a child to “star” in a brief educational video on measuring height of pediatric patients. She was willing to do this as long as we all promised NO shots or needles. Pretty pragmatic negotiator, if you ask me. Anyway, it went well and she was quite cooperative but halfway through production, a renegade spider appeared in the clinic room and she refused to commence acting until the media techs disposed of the offending vermin. That’s my girl!
I finally got to watch season 6 of LOST. I always wanted to watch the show but never connected with it during actual broadcast seasons, so I decided to make it my summer entertainment project, and consumed the first 5 seasons in short order. But due to various time constraints and Netflix availability issues, I did not get to start season 6 until last week. I gotta say, I tried to avoid a lot of the media/fan commentary since May so as to not spoil the ending but I was generally aware of a lot of fan heat following the finale. After impartially watching the season 6 episodes, I have to say I found them to be really confusing and lacking a lot of the little touches that captivated me in earlier seasons. And then…the finale. I had high hopes to get some questions answered and to generally just not be pissed off. On the one hand, it seemed pretty anticlimactic, and there were more unresolved issues than you can shake a stick at, but on the other hand, awwwww, who doesn’t love reunions! Still, I think it was pretty weak for a story that had so much magnificent potential, creatively-speaking, and such a strong cast. So I guess that leaves me thoroughly irritated, if not exactly pissed, and still kind of mourning what could have been but able to make peace with the way they closed it. I read one critical analysis which suggested that the weirdness might be easier to take if one viewed the final season storyline separately from the other 5, and I think there is something to that notion. For the record, I’m still totally in love with Des, and I’d certainly play footsie with Sayid as a reasonable second.
Before this gets any longer. So much for “shortish” stream of consciousness! This final bit is a multimedia box of holiday cheer…the few things that have actually brought a little Christmas spirit my way lately.
- Baby it’s cold outside – Martina McBride/overdubbed Dean Martin version. how is it that I didn’t hear this particular version until a couple weeks ago? Definitely the best I’ve heard and deliciously retro-glamorous! Just listen to that smooth, sexy Dean-voice surrounded by big sultry brass, and McBride’s crystalline, expressive voice playing along. Brilliant!
- I have to watch the Christmas Can-Can every year by Straight No Chaser because it’s just damn funny.
- Amazing light shows created by hobbyist dude in Utah. Really incredible and worth a few minutes of exploring on his website. Here is a sample:
*but I’m more burnt out than a flaming piece of toast.
Snark-Free Reflection
Well, the evil-genius turns 4 next week. As I’ve mentioned before, mentally I always kind of put “4″ as that terminal barrier between babyhood and childhood. Arbitrary I know, but hey we all have these inexplicable assumptions in life. Anyway, this kind of puts me in a sappy reflective mood; thus a sappy, snark-free post is imminent. Consider yourself warned. Actually, I guess this post is really for my mom, because in the great cliché that is parenting, all that stuff she warned me about regarding having kids has pretty much come true.
RE: weeklong blog hiatus…actually this time just the result of a state of lethargic mental stasis. I kind of achieved a place of pseudo-homework-catchup and I was so burned out that I just didn’t want to look at a computer at all. Even the cathartic pleasures of blogging couldn’t drag me out. So my precious leisure time was spent catching up on episodes of NCIS, SVU, and I watched Casanova. I’m not sure how I missed that when it came out, but while it was a funny-fluff type movie, I genuinely enjoyed the stellar performances by Heath Ledger, Oliver Platt, Jeremy Irons, and Lena Olin. [Oh, after consulting the oracles at IMDB, now I know why I missed out on this movie. It was released in December 2005 - a month after the evil genius was born. It all makes sense now.]
Without further ado (in no particular order), Stuff I Understand Now that I’m a Parent:
- Loving someone so selflessly and completely that you would trade a lifetime of your own to ensure even so much as a day of theirs.
- The bone-crunching fear of a long wakeful night with a sick baby/child, and how you’d do anything to take away their suffering.
- The anger and hate you can feel towards reckless / aggressive / stupid drivers that threaten the safety of your vehicle when your child is on board. I TOTALLY get those lame “baby on board” stickers now.
- The complete and utter awe/pride you can feel over the smallest things…your baby crawling to greet you with a huge, goofy, toothless grin; the first time they laugh; the strength in their tiny newborn body and spirit.
- The ability to be absolutely 100% immune to getting grossed out over snot/poo/urine/vomit/any combination of all the above.
- Sleep deprivation so profound that you can no longer comprehend basic, simple language, like “do you want a glass of water?” (I have a distinct memory of asking FF “what do you mean?” in response to that query in the hazy first few weeks after birth.)
- Feeling soul-crushingly guilty for things that were truly beyond your control. Even realizing that things were beyond your control and STILL being unable to rationally deal with the guilt.
- The wish to slow down that process of growing-up. To just keep that little baby in your arms a little longer, to nurse her one more time, to know that her family is her whole world for a little longer.
- To see nothing but beauty, joy, and perfection in a person. Even after their third potty accident of the day.
- To realize that you want to be a better person, and find out that you can be kinder, more understanding, gentler, and more generous because of it.
- To be unable to watch or read movies/shows/stories that depict large-scale destruction or disasters. To not be able to tolerate TV shows that depict harm to children without tears in your eyes.
- To be way, way more sentimental than you EVER thought possible.
- That you can be full of frustration, irritation, impatience, AND love at the same time.
- Mini-vans are totally the cat’s meow. I wouldn’t have been caught dead saying that a few years ago.
- To know that this post really exposes one to a whole lot of “I-told-you-so’s” and to really not care. Hah!
