The Tooth Fairy

Scout has been having a very busy week! First she had her friend party, then her birthday. After that it was Thanksgiving and she got sick. Her lower lip was cracked and bleeding from the fever and she was pretty miserable. Then, horror of horrors, one of her front teeth started to wiggle! She was excited about the prospect of the Tooth Fairy coming to visit, but since this was her first tooth, she was nervous about the level of pain she might have to endure to receive her prize.

As the tooth wiggled looser and looser, it started to hurt a little. She became so distraught; I couldn’t get her to eat. She thought that something as simple as crunchy peanut butter might make the tooth fall out and that might mean blood and carnage and she just wasn’t ready for that. I tried to get her to let me touch it (i.e., pull it out when she wasn’t expecting it), but she refused to open her mouth. She got so worried that I even had to give her a little Ibuprofen to ease the pain and stress in her neck and shoulders!

Then last night, she came running into the office while I was working on my post. “It fell out!” she cried and placed the tiny tooth reverently on my desk. “Yay!” I enthused. “Did it hurt?” She skipped back out of the office. “No,” she called over her shoulder. “Get a cup!” I reminded her. It’s been many years since we encouraged a child to put a tooth under a pillow. The “cup” method makes life much easier for the Tooth Fairy.

 The fortunate child expecting a visit places the tooth in a small cup and sets it in the kitchen window. Then the Tooth Fairy can quickly and easily find the tooth and leave a prize in the window. Much better than a huge lump under a pillow! That’s because our Tooth Fairy NEVER leaves money. It’s always a small gift of some sort, usually something between five and ten dollars. Sometimes it’s a movie, in fact Crafty receive the Flipper twin set just a couple of weeks ago for losing a tooth. But this was Sport’s first tooth, so it was bound to be something amazing.


She was so excited when she finally dragged herself out of bed this morning and headed for the kitchen. By then, most of her siblings had already gone to school, but not before they admired her new treasure. She was so excited to find a Lil' Webkinz puppy! When I was a kid, we got a shiny new dime…and I’m pretty sure I was just as excited as Scout to receive it. How about you? What does your Tooth Fairy leave?

Community Camping

I haven’t slept in days. Not that I haven’t tried, but camping with a bunch of kids just lends itself to no sleep. We left on Thursday night, after swimming lessons were over (because we can’t possibly MISS a swimming lesson), and drove a couple of hours to a beautiful campground near my hometown. We always called it Community even though the Manti-LaSal people have christened it something else.

The first night we didn’t do anything too exciting except set up camp and cook a bunch of hot dogs. My girls had all been camping with their YW group and their Scout groups, so naturally they wanted to sing around the campfire. This didn’t set well with our grumpy neighbor one fire over. Just before 11:00 he showed up making all sorts of complaints. I disappeared into the tent with the little ones and tried to settle them down. But I don’t know what you do about a crying baby…usually the camping community is much kinder than it was to us. In fact, I heard other babes in the night and I just felt bad for those poor moms trying to shush their little ones in a strange, cold, and very dark place. I don’t know how anyone could sleep anyway, just like when we camped at my MIL’s house on the 4th, the leaves from the quaking aspens make more noise than the people.

We dragged ourselves out at the crack of dawn and hiked the half block to the restroom. I was glad I had planned cold cereal for breakfast. I just wasn’t in the mood to build a fire. Despite the rough beginning, the trip turned out to be surprisingly fun. My sweetie got a chance to fish and actually caught one! The girls were very surprised and then very upset when he said we were going to eat it. Finally he ended up letting it go even though it had very little life left in it.

In the afternoon we filled up all the rafts and let the kids paddle them all over the lake. I even had a chance, but the Prima Donna and I couldn’t get our paddles in sync. Finally I just let her row us in. After that we headed back to camp for a while and those who wanted to fish walked back over to the lake. Teach and I (with a little help from Gamer) built the evening fire and we roasted Brats and more dogs for the kids. At some point the kids took the rafts back to the lake. We played lots of Toy Story Uno and a silly game Princess calls Scum.

After another sleepless night but without the rude neighbor, we got up early this morning. Eggs and pancakes later and it was time to break camp. It took us about 2 hours to pack the van and Bossy and Gamer’s new truck. We finally got everyone loaded and realized that someone had left the lights on in the van and the battery was dead. Thank goodness we had jumper cables. We were soon on the road and headed back to civilization. After a quick stop to visit both grandmas and grab a bite of lunch, we drove the rest of the way home.

It took us another 2 hours to unload the van and get most of the stuff put away. But I guess we didn’t get enough of camping, because the Dog Walker set up the tent in the backyard and decided we all needed to sleep outside for one more night. This time my sweetie cooked a delicious Dutch Oven rather than a bunch of hot dogs. Now if I could just figure out how to sleep…

The Woes of my Toes

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I’ve been thinking a lot about family vacations since we just got back from one. You know I said we suffered from the lack of electronics and that got me thinking about all the vacations we went on as kids. We didn’t have any electronics, not even cell phones. The closest we got was a transistor radio in the shape of an apple that I bought from Mr. Lee’s Variety Store for $9.98. That was about 1975. It was around that same year that we had planned a trip to Mesa Verde.

Similar to our camper- picture credit

I’ve told you before that my parents had a camper and my mom drove it around following my dad in the Bookmobile. Well this was different because it was not that kind of trip. This time we were all traveling in the camper and we were very excited! The camper had a little fridge in it and Mom always packed it full of milk and frozen water jugs so we could have cold water while we were traveling. She had a big freezer, but it was often full of good deals from her shopping trips up north, so sometimes she had to freeze her water jugs at Grandma’s house. I’m pretty sure it was the summer of ’75, but it could have been ’74 or ’76 when we took that trip. We were all loaded up when we drove the three blocks to Grandma’s to pick up the ice jugs. I ran inside to help haul them back to the camper. With a jug in one hand, I mounted the step to climb into the camper. That’s when that cold slippery jug decided it didn’t want to go on a trip and it jumped from my hand.

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Now this wouldn’t have been such a deal except for two things…one of my feet was still on the ground, and that same foot was bare. And that is exactly where the jug decided to land…right on my big toe! I screamed myself silly, obviously. Blood gushed everywhere. Thank goodness Mom was close by. She grabbed a towel and applied pressure to stop the bleeding. My siblings crowded around. I could tell by their angry faces that they were afraid our trip might be canceled because of my stupidity. Mom called the doctor and we ran right up. I seem to remember some stitches, but I could be wrong…I was pretty hysterical.

As it turned out, we didn’t have to cancel our trip; it was just delayed by a few hours. Mesa Verde was beautiful, but I didn’t enjoy it much. Like every other trip I took as a child, I was incredibly carsick and miserable. Not even my radio could make me feel better…an apple a day doesn’t really keep the doctor away, at least not for me.

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The Tangled Web

Last night I was ready for bed at 11:30 which is kind of a record for me, but I hadn’t been feeling well the night before so I was a bit sleep-deprived. I promised my sweetie that I would finish my blog and head to bed as quickly as possible. Besides, this thing with Sport’s arm had me really stressed and worried (I took him to the doc, btw and she put him on oral antibiotics. The swelling is now 10 inches long and 6 ½ inches wide. If the swelling isn’t down by tomorrow it will be another trip to Primary’s). I had just finished reading my last bloggy friend post, gathered the baby, and turned to head upstairs. That’s when the Prima Donna showed up. But she didn’t look much like a Prima Donna. She looked like something from an 80s monster flick. "Mom," she whined. "Can you help me with this?" She had wrapped the entire front part of her hair around a curling iron brush! The handle and the cord swung loosely toward the floor, but most of the bristles were totally wrapped in her long brown locks.

"What did you do?" My voice raised a little too high for the late hour, but I was exhausted and my patience was wearing thin. "I just wanted to see how this curling iron worked," she stated matter-of-factly. I reached for the rod. It was cold. "Did you even plug it in?" I asked. "No, I was going to figure out how to wrap it first," she said. I rolled my eyes and began tugging at her hair. The hair barely moved. This was not going to be an easy task. I handed the baby off to the Dog Walker and began tugging with a vengeance. This was so not fair! It was my night to get to bed before midnight.

Fifteen minutes later the hair had budged very little. "How did this get so bad?" I wanted to scream in frustration. "Well," she said, "When I couldn’t get it right out, I tried to brush it out…I think that made it worse," she trailed off. "Ya’ think?!" I was ready to get out the scissors, so I sent her over to have the Drama Queen give it a try. Less than five minutes later she was back. The Drama Queen suggested baby oil and some scissors.

Good riddance!

The Prima Donna had an even sillier suggestion, "Do you think if we plug it in it might help?" "Yeah," I answered sarcastically, "Then I’ll burn my fingers trying to do an impossible task." After another 20 minutes, I reached for the scissors. I know I’m the meanest mom on earth, but I started snipping. "You’re cutting my hair?" she wailed. I didn’t answer right away, because I thought she deserved to suffer a little. I was actually snipping all the little black balls from the ends of the curling iron brush. I was thinking that without them I might be able to slide the hair down and off the end.

"Do you think maybe a bobby pin would help?" questioned the Prima Donna hopefully. The Drama Queen was watching and offered, "Yeah, then you’d just have a bobby pin stuck too!" I snipped a few more balls. "You aren’t cutting my hair, are you?" Prima Donna asked accusingly. "How do you know?" I snipped some more. "’Cause little black balls are falling all over me," she said. I tugged harder. After a total of 72 minutes, I finally slid the last of the hair from the end of the devastated curling iron. As I dangled its sad and broken body over the garbage can, I bid it a grateful farewell.

It took the Prima Donna another 20 minutes to comb out the rat’s nest (littered with little black balls) that it left in her hair. She sent me a picture text just before I turned off my light. I glanced at the clock…1:00 AM. My sweetie would be unhappy. Oh the tangled web we weave…well, somebody did something with a tangled web...I'm just too tired to know who!

Bifocals

It’s my birthday next week. To celebrate I had a visit with my eye doctor. For some reason the letters on that bottle of Tylenol had gotten much smaller since my last birthday. I twisted and turned the bottle in my hand, thinking that maybe with better light I would be able to read the dosage without a magnifying glass. It didn’t help. "I think it’s time…" Dr. Hardy smiled as he said the words, but the sting of "bifocals" hung in the air like the inversion and they stunk almost as bad.

You know, 46 is not that old! Yes, I am a grandma and I have been since I was 39, but I don’t feel old. In lots of ways I feel like a young mom just starting out. It’s easy to feel that way when you stare into the eyes of your newborn, only now I have to do it wearing bifocals!

The path I am currently on has been a long one. I was married at 18, a first-time mom at 19. Then the babies kept coming, every couple of years like clockwork. Other parts of life came and went, but the babies were constant. I finished my BA in English in 1986, had my second child in 1987. I finished my MA in 1988, had my third in 1989. 1991, 1993, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008, and now finally in 2010. That’s 12 if you are counting, and no, they aren’t cheaper by the dozen! With 8 girls and 4 boys we still clearly hold the two-thirds majority when it comes to voting rights even though our house is definitely NOT a democracy.

Our oldest is married with 2 little boys, 6 and 3. We have 3 in college, one in high school, two in middle school, two in elementary, and 3 pre-schoolers. Life is full of dance, basketball, scouts, homework, housework, laundry, diapers, doctors, and just plain living. I guess now I can add bifocals to that list. I’m excited to share my life with you. I’ve had so many people say "You should write a book…" Unfortunately, I don’t have time to write a book, but maybe if I blog it one page at a time…at least I’ll be able to read it and the Tylenol bottle. Darn bifocals.