Can't. Do. It.

Today, CH and the kids and I bagged over 15 huge leaf bags, and bundled 10 huge bundles of sticks, and we pruned and mulched our back flower beds.  I'll take a picture and post, they look lovely.  

However, I am allergic to nature.

During the day, I kept going with a combination of these two:

The breakfast of champions.  And I drank it like this:

 

After a day of dealing with Mother Nature and all of her dusty, polleny tree shrapnel, I have dosed with this:

 I know, it's bad for my liver. 

But so is lack of sleep with drainage 

down my throat all night.

Tomorrow is Youngest Daughter's 7th birthday, and I don't have any of her presents wrapped, her cake baked, her school treats done, or even have all of the presents purchased.  Still missing?  The Zhu-Zhu DS game and the Zhu-Zhu accessories.  For those of you unfamiliar with Zhu-Zhu, this is what they look like:

They are fake hamsters, which is SOOOO much better and less smellier than the real thing.  And they don't eat or poop, which is a pre-requisite for any new animals coming into our house.  They also make Zhu-Zhu babies.  (NOTE - the actual Zhu-Zhu's do not make the babies, the factory does.  Another bonus!)  YD is getting one of those, but this is the toy she wants with it:

I know, they're weird.  But again, no pooping or feeding, so it's all okay.  The only problem:

George the Superpet will want to gut them like a small, real, tasty little rodent.  It will be YD versus George.  Let the Celebrity Deathmatch begin.

I'll write a real post tomorrow night, I promise.  But for now, my sweet sweet friend Nyquil is kicking in.  I have to say that even in the bliss of Nyquil the Hamster song today is annoying.  I must apologize.  Have a mahvelous Monday!

Yard Work Be Dammed

On Friday I wrote about Spring Cleaning.  Back in the 70's when I was a kid in the 'White Lights Christmas City' in Nebraska, one of my Spring Cleaning responsibilities was raking the leaves.  We lived on a lake, so there were lots and lots of trees, and the damn things littered those leaves everywhere.  I was a lazy and asthmatic child, so I usually got out of some portion of the raking in one of two ways:

1. I would have to go to the bathroom, A LOT, and each trip would usually take about a half hour.  I would saunter into the house, grab an apple, watch a little TV, all the while looking out the window to see if my dad was coming in to check on my whereabouts.  Eventually they would come looking for me, and I would be on my way out the back door as they came in to check.
2. Once the bathroom excuse was exhausted, I would just stick my face in a pile of leaves, which would make me sneeze and get wheezy, and then my parents would send me inside so they could avoid a hospital trip.  Have I mentioned that I was a deviant and manipulative child?  (But I really did have asthma.)

The leaf did not fall far from the tree with my children.  We live on a corner lot with lots of trees, and every spring and fall we force the children to grab their rakes and head out into the yard, where multiple bathroom trips and small injuries ultimately occur.

Since I like to think I am cleverer than the children, I sometimes disguise work activity as play.  We have a huge crabby tree in the front yard that spends its time swearing and throwing small branches at our house, and in the spring we will end up with hundreds of branches in the yard.  Over Spring Break, The Son had an out-of-town friend over for a few days, and I suggested to them that it would be really, REALLY fun to build a beaver dam in the front yard.

ME:  "I bet you guys could build a HUGE beaver dam here."
THEM:  "How would we do that?"
ME:  "Just like beavers do!  With all of these sticks!"
THEM:  "But won't they cave in?"
ME:  "Nah!  First you put up a frame with the bigger sticks, and then you build around it with the smaller ones.  It will be easy."
THEM:  "Hey!  That sounds like fun!  Let's do it!"
ME:  (Walking back into house) "MWAH HA HA HA HA HA...suckers."

The idea was that the sticks would be in one location, and therefore easily bound and prepared for pickup.  Four hours later, I did an abduction check (and really, they could've been in Ohio in that amount of time) and found a beaver dam in my front yard.  A real, legitimate beaver dam.  And not only had the boys built a four foot by six foot hut next to my front door, they walked over the three million leaves in my yard to get the BAGGED leaves by the garbage, and dumped them over the top of the dam.  

DAM IT ALL!!  Now I had the same amount of sticks in the yard, AND my previously bagged leaves were back in the grass.  Just when I started to think about getting annoyed, two of the happiest boys I've ever seen came bounding out of the Dam Thing.

"MOM!  This is the COOLEST thing EVER!  Take pictures of it!  Can we sleep out here?  Do you think actual beavers will move in?"  

 Boys.  Enough said.

I was a goner.  Who cares about the Dam leaves?  Or the daffodils coming up that are now in the side room of the Dam.  There is nothing like the joy of a 10-year-old kid.  So we took pictures of the boys, and of course, pictures of Todd "Hot Nuts" Epstein in his formerly natural habitat.  Now that he is a dead taxidermied squirrel and unused to the elements, he needed his stocking cap.
  

 Todd loves the Dam Thing.

Youngest Daughter carried approximately 12 sticks to "help" with the dam, and she was angry at the end that she was not included in the Building Credits.  Hell hath no fury like YD scorned, as the boys were soon to discover:

 Sleep lightly, boys.  YD will have her revenge.

It snowed over the weekend, and as we live two blocks from the Mississippi River, Current Husband and George the Superpet found themselves wondering how many critters were squatting in the Dam Thing for the night.  Our neighbors found themselves wondering why no one thought of writing a neighborhood covenant when we moved into the area.  The boys found themselves wondering how much candy it would take to buy their safety.  And I found myself wondering how I got outwitted by the children, again.  Dam it.

Sweet Caroline, my calves hurt!

Where it began, I can't begin to knowing
But then I know it's growing strong
Was in the spring
Then spring became the summer
Who'd have believed you'd come along?

With Neil Diamond Month coming to a close, I'm feeling pressure to get some other songs up. What is Neil Diamond Month without Sweet Caroline? Huh? Or Soolaimon (soolay...soolay...soolaimon!)? Or who can hear Heartlight and not think of E.T.? How can I not write about Coming to America and call myself a fan? These are the things that keep me up at night.

Another thing that keeps me up at night is pain, particularly when I exercise. I try really hard not to exercise because my body seems to not like it. When I was an asthmatic kid, I was told not to exert myself. Okay. (And don't think for a second that my high school friends didn't LOVE to razz me about my trifecta of asthma, my speech and debate letter, and the Flock of Seagulls haircut. Don't even get me started on your haircuts, girls!)

Last spring, Mommy got punished. (I realize this is an older bit I wrote last year, but it was very traumatic and bears repeating. And I can make it work with the song, so zip it.)

I'm not talking about "Oh, is Big Daddy going to spank me?" kind of punished, but actual, public, physical punishment. Mommy attended a Boot Camp workout with a bunch of crazy people, and it took four days to sit down without crying out in pain.

I should have known what to expect by the person who invited me in the first place. She's a clean, organized mom who is uberfit and very energetic, like the head cheerleader/prom queen/track star all rolled into one. I say this with the greatest affection, because I have witnessed her drinking beer and eating dessert, so she's not scary-perfect. She sent a chipper e-mail to a group of moms from the school, saying, "Hey, let's all get together and exercise! One of the moms is a trainer, it will be SO FUN and we can all do it TOGETHER!!"

After deleting the e-mail that was clearly not meant to come to me, I got a follow-up call from her: "Julie, you have to come, it will be fun! You are always talking about getting in shape; this is a great way to do it with a bunch of people of varying fitness levels! It's only an hour, YOU CAN DO IT!"

And then I said yes. Because I have absolutely no spine, and if someone asks me to do something, anything, my first response is to say yes and then spend the rest of the time trying to figure out how to get out of the commitment. I knew full well that I was the weak link in this fitness chain. I'm the mom who wears workout clothes so people think I work out. I'm the mom who will sometimes drive the block and a half to school because it is too cold to walk or it might rain.

After I said yes, I remembered that this session was to be called "Mom Boot Camp," not to be confused with "Making S'mores" or "Singing Around the Campfire" camp. This was not a "Mom scrapbooking party" or a "Mom candle party" or a "Mom sex toy party." This was a "Work your ass off until you cry like a baby" party, and I had already RSVP'ed.

Another friend, who is secretly at the same yoga level as Madonna, e-mailed to plead with me to come to Boot Camp, as she was purportedly out of shape. I met her in the park that fateful morning, me in my dumpy tank top and black sweats, she in her skin-tight Lycra shirt that showed off her sinewy guns. Damn her. Cheerleader Mom showed up next, fresh from her MORNING workout (yes, I mean before Boot Camp!), so damn her, too. Then Trainer Mom showed up, chewing a bar of steel and spitting out bullets. Damn them all!

The Big Engine That Couldn't looked for an escape hatch, but the session was starting. We all ran around the park, past the group of City workers spreading mulch at the play set and anticipating the show. We then progressed to the park picnic tables, hereafter known as the Den of Pain, to climb up the tables in rapid stair steps and then down into lunges, triceps curls, dips and push ups. This was followed by sprints up a hill that has a 10% incline, and then over to the tennis courts to do Navy Seal crunches and jumping jacks.

Hands, touching hands
Reaching out
Touching me, touching you...

Let me make a few small observations. First, I don't do sprints unless the ice cream truck is at the top of the hill, so I didn't. Another mother in pain joined me as we pretended to power walk up the hill while the suckers sprinted it. Second, I don't have triceps, I thought those became extinct during the dinosaur age. Third, anything the Navy Seals are doing should not be on my list of activities, and therefore I threw my legs up in the air and waved them like I just don't care. Finally, anyone who has survived one vaginal childbirth, not to mention three, knows that all the Kegels in the world won't get you through a session of jumping jacks dry. It is just a fact. In my one moment of comfort, I was doing push ups on the picnic table benches, and every time I would rise, I would see a Nazi symbol and a "f*ck you" carved in the table, no doubt by an empathetic teenager. Indeed.

I'm not sure how I got through that hour and fifteen minutes, but I lived to tell about it. The rest of the day I flaunted my post-workout body for my husband, throwing in terms like "feel the burn" and "quadriceps" and "optimum heart rate." The next morning I woke to a world of pain I hadn't known since labor. Who injected lead into my legs? Why do these children need me? How can I get to the hospital?

And when I hurt
Hurtin' runs off my shoulder
How can I hurt when I'm holding you?

I do not belong in something called "Mom Boot Camp." I am too old, too soft, and too weak, and not one of those women brought snacks. Someone needs to remind these fitness-obsessed moms what reckless abandon looks like. And that is exactly why I went back. With donuts. And that time, good times never seemed so good.