His most pressing concern?

“Someone took the gumball machine!”

There was no question about it. My three-year-old son was the new poster child for what it means to be feeling no pain.

But wait, it’s not what you think! As it happens, Noah was in the hospital’s outpatient surgery wing, being prepped to have his tonsils removed. The pre-surgical cocktail was really a sedative intended to keep him calm and ooze him into drowsiness in advance of the real anesthesia. It worked; he was certainly a happy little man.

He was also more than a little woozy. My comedian son decided AFTER the Versed had been administered that a trip to the potty was in order. The boy could not have stood on his own two feet to save his life, so I dutifully carried him down the hall to the nearest bathroom, trying as best I could to protect his modesty in the skimpy hospital gown. Then I had to hold him upright to do the job. Otherwise he would have plunged face first into the toilet, and somehow I don’t think he would have cared one bit!

But have YOU ever tried to hold up a floppy (and heavy) three-year-old at the potty while at the same time trying to direct his aim and simultaneously keep him from dropping Ducky in? Because there was no parting Noah from Ducky. Yet due to the cocktail, he wasn’t exactly holding on to him with a death grip. Ducky was in real danger, I tell you. Barney (clad by attentive nurses in a hospital gown and wristband of his own) too, for that matter.

Somehow, we managed. Nothing got sprinkled that wasn’t supposed to, and thanks to a Hurculean effort on my part, neither Ducky nor Barney touched any icky public bathroom surfaces. 

It was also at this point when I realized why the hospital gown seemed so cruelly skimpy. I had missed one of the ties in the back. I decided to fix the problem immediately, before parading Noah back down the hall. But because he was loopy and droopy and not at all in a condition conducive to staying upright without assistance, ingenuity was required. I started out by squatting down on the floor and balancing him precariously on my knee to find the other half of the tie. Not good enough. Lacking magical abilities (super powers notwithstanding), there was no way only two hands could keep Noah, Ducky, and Barney off the floor AND tie the gown. I don’t know about you, but I have not yet mastered the fine art of fastening barely there hospital gowns with just one free hand. So I shifted over until I could prop Noah’s shoulder against the wall, with one leg unsteadily extended to catch him if he fell forward. It took a few tries but we did get the gown properly adjusted, barely.

After all that effort, I’m not sure it helped. Did I mention that hospital gowns are just evil? But anyone who is familiar with my clumsy ways (and if you aren’t, you can read about some of my hall of shame tumbles here and here) can now marvel at the fact that I didn’t topple over and mortally injure us both.

On finally returning to the pre-surgical staging area, all dry and in one piece, we discovered that even in his drunken state, Noah still has a pitcher’s arm. Just as we were sitting down, Ducky went airborne. He who could barely even hold on to Ducky two minutes earlier had, without warning, hurled him across the room. All the while with that same goofy, tipsy grin. Noah looked at that moment like he was living the Barney theme song, in an inebriated sort of way:

"I love you, you love me, we’re a happy family…" 

It seemed inappropriate to laugh, considering that the little guy was about to be put under for surgery, but really, how could you not laugh at such a sight? 

They kicked us out of the hospital practically as soon as Noah woke up, and he has been resting comfortably at home all day, sleeping off whatever drugs they gave him to knock him out. A very different experience from when Maia went through the same a few years ago. I’ll never forget her singing Hakuna Matata in the car on the way home. From having her TONSILS out. Her throat was supposed to hurt! She never did go back to sleep that day. Instead, she threw a tantrum because she wanted to play baseball outside with Daddy and we wouldn’t let her, being still under the effects of anesthesia and all.

So Noah is doing as well as can be expected, living on chocolate milk. Poor guy, though… the anesthesia and the surgical morphine have pretty much worn off now, and we can tell his throat is really starting to hurt. He’s a trooper, but he didn’t want to eat anything for dinner. Not even ice cream or chocolate pudding or popsicles. He just sat there, not complaining, but with a quivering lip and a single tear rolling down his cheek.

Maybe laughing wasn’t so appropriate after all.

As I presume anyone newly possessed of such novel talents would do, I’ve been contemplating how I might use this alleged reading superpower to benefit humanity, subvert the bad guys, and save the world. But first things first. I need a catchy alias. The Battling Bookworm? The Revolutionary Reader? The Paperback Protector? The Literate Liberator? So many good candidates to choose from! And, equally important, what about the requisite spandex costume? I certainly couldn’t practice my new powers without looking fashionably ridiculous. I’m picturing something in black and white, reminiscent of pages fresh off the printing press, with a cape meticulously tailored to evoke a book cover. But wait a minute, I watched The Incredibles. I’m afraid I’ll have to nix the cape. Finally, I’ll need some scholarly sidekicks to complete my new identity. They will help me carry out my mission to read every book ever written and use the acquired wisdom for good, rather than evil. Any volunteers?

As for how to vanquish the enemy, I’m new at this sort of thing, but I have some preliminary ideas. I mean, books would make good weapons, right? Especially the weightier volumes of hardcover variety. I’m sure with a little practice, I could aim well enough to take down an illiterate adversary or two with my specially crafted, one-of-a-kind, auto-firing book catapult. Except how could someone who loves books treat them with such disrespect? I’d probably be too worried about damaging them or not getting them back. Besides, the logistics would never work. How could I reasonably carry around a good supply of ammunition? Instead, when I really need to send a message to the masses, I can always lead a riot of… peaceful reading? I can picture it now. An angry mob reading silently in protest over some dastardly and evil book ban. Yeah, that’ll show ‘em!

So maybe this particular superpower isn’t about what I do with books so much as what is inside them. That’s where the real power lies. Books open up new worlds of knowledge and imagination. With a good book I can learn something new, challenge myself to be better at any number of things, or just lose myself in a cleverly fabricated yarn. Reading won’t give me x-ray vision or superhuman strength or the ability to fly, but it keeps my intellect engaged and stimulated, which I hope in turn makes me an informed and productive member of society. Since the only foe I’m fighting is a stagnant mind, that’s good enough for me. And hey, if I’ve set a good example for my kids to be readers themselves, that’s really all the superpower I need.

So we all should have known, when she decided last weekend to lay out a rug upstairs in her new house, especially when we learned that graph paper had been involved, that there was no way it wasn’t going to work. But some of us, including and especially the person who has been married to her for 38 years, never learn, and we all thought we had a better way to build the mousetrap. And in my family, when we think we are right, we can be a snippy bunch. Thank goodness my sister and I were there, because I think our laughter is the only thing that saved my parents from bloodshed.

It all began because my sister and I and my dad were available to help roll out the rug and position it under the furniture that was already inconveniently in place. This begs the question: whose bright idea was it to lay the rug AFTER the furniture had already been moved in? Kent, handily, had gone to bed with the kids, so he missed out on all the fun. Though how they slept through the whole thing, I’ll never know, since all the screaming and yelling (and laughing) was taking place right outside the bedroom doors.

The positioning of the rug required lifting the couch, which is where the problems started. Some of us wanted to lift one side of the couch at a time. Others wanted to lift the whole thing and hold it aloft while the rug was unfurled underneath. Still others wanted to move it out of the way altogether until “The Boss” (aka Mommie Dearest) pronounced the rug satisfactorily arranged according to her exacting specifications. My dad at first missed the whole point that the rug was supposed to be laid out fashionably askew and argued that it couldn’t be done. Oh, but it could—it was on GRAPH PAPER, for crying out loud!

We finally got the rug in place, but it was, of course, at the wrong angle. Amateurs, every one of us. Two of the corners were supposed to brush adjacent walls, rotated precisely so that one side of the rug grazed the corner of a bookcase on the opposite wall, just so. Instead, we missed the bookcase by a mile, and one corner of the rug lapped up onto to the wall by a good six inches, at least. We knew it could work, because my mother’s graph paper proclaimed it to be so. So we had to start over. Several times. We just could not coax that recalcitrant rug into its proper plotted position.

Throughout the ordeal we each had strong opinions about how it should be done, and we weren’t afraid to express them. Evil looks and sharp words were exchanged. We argued over which direction and how far to pull the rug. We argued over the degree of rotation that would result in the correct alignment of the rug with the walls and furniture. We argued over who should lift each end of the couch and when, or whether it really even needed to be lifted at all. Couldn’t we just lift one corner and then twist the rug into position around the other leg? The correct answer is no, we could not, though my sister generously agreed to test this theory, just to keep the peace.

Pop. Thud.

Oops, that was a leg breaking off the couch. So much for the “twisting the rug” theory.

At some point my sister’s husband returned from an errand and was quickly ushered upstairs to mediate. He immediately assisted in breaking off another leg. And another one. We reattached them, but did I mention the potential for bloodshed? Except by this point, all we could do was laugh until it hurt. It had become a comedy of errors such as we had not experienced in a long time. Everything we tried went wrong. Yet in the end, the graph paper prevailed, and we DID wrestle that rug into submission. If my mother ever changes her mind about where she wants the thing, though, I’m so outta there. But I’ll do one parting favor as I leave. I’ll promise to call 911 to report the ensuing murder-suicide.

_____________________________________

Miraculously, no family members suffered bodily harm during the events depicted here. And all involved have confirmed that this is an accurate account of what transpired. Though to be fair, my husband claims he did NOT sleep through the whole thing; that no one could have slept through that. He says he was awake but remained wisely hidden in bed.

*****

Kent: Maia, can you put Noah’s shirt on him?

Maia (with attitude): No, that’s Dad stuff.

Kent: No, that’s sister stuff.

Kent won. Maia put Noah’s shirt on.

*****

Kent: Where is the clicker? Who took the clicker?

Maia (with attitude): Obviously not me. A two-year-old had it.

After the clicker has been successfully found…

Kent: It must have been you. The TV is on the Disney Channel!

Busted!

*****

Meanwhile, I’m sitting here at the computer chuckling to myself and transcribing everything, instead of helping to dress Noah or search for the remote control. I have to take my amusements where I can get them.

We were tired after a long day of playing hooky at Disney (we had a good excuse; it was Maia’s birthday!) and wanted to grab a quick bite for dinner on the way out. We settled on sandwiches, and Kent chose tuna since he never gets it at home. The plan was to share it with Noah, but Noah wasn’t having any of that. So Kent did the logical thing. He spread a little of that tuna on some bread and told him it was butter. Noah wolfed down every bite!

Did I ever mention that my husband is a genius? I would never have thought of that.

As we were driving home from church this morning, Kent brought up a story that was on CBS Sunday Morning about privacy, surveillance, and how every move you make online and in person is being tracked somewhere, by someone. My reply was that it doesn’t bother me. I’m not doing anything illegal or immoral and I have nothing to hide. You might even say I’m boringly squeaky clean (well, except for that one speeding ticket…). So I just don’t really care if I’m captured on an ATM or traffic camera or if some database somewhere knows what websites I visit or any of a million other details about my family, finances, spending habits, medical history, or anything else in my life. As long as the information isn’t being hacked into and used to steal my identity, the fact that some anonymous person out there might know these things doesn’t change anything for me. I do take the necessary shredding precautions with my personal data at home, but otherwise I don’t worry about this stuff too much. There’s not much I can do about it anyway and I have bigger fish to fry.

But this morning I was feeling impish so just for sport, I decided to shock my dear husband with the fact that somewhere out there, I might have an FBI record. It’s true. On a family vacation to Spain some number of years ago, we were on a flight that was diverted back to New York in the dead of night due to a “security incident,” which turned out to be a bomb threat from an unknown passenger aboard the aircraft. An army of fire trucks and ambulances lined the runway with their flashing lights in preparation for the worst, but we landed safely and taxied to a remote location very far from the terminal, with those flashing lights fanned out behind us reminiscent of O. J. Simpson’s slow speed chase. The FBI was brought in. Everyone on the plane was required to personally identify their luggage on the tarmac in the presence of bomb-sniffing dogs, then herded to a holding location and asked to complete a written statement about anything suspicious they may have seen. My best educated guess is that the FBI now has a dossier on me with at least that one piece of paper. For a few brief hours I, along with all my fellow passengers, was a suspect. We weren’t even allowed to go to the bathroom without an FBI escort.

The rest of the conversation went something like this.

Kent: When did this trip happen?

Me: I don’t remember. I think maybe sometime in high school?

Kent: (Hysterical laughter)

Me: What? What’s so funny?

Kent (hurt): I was there! It was May 1997. I was with you the whole time and you don’t even remember!!!

Oops.

No wonder I had never thought to tell him this story before. Let me state right now for the record that he is absolutely right. He was with me through the whole traumatic experience. This was an oops of gigantic proportions. It was a family vacation, but one taken after Kent and I were married, so he was of course there too. Much apologizing and soothing his hurt feelings ensued, along with quite a bit of laughter and teasing about my early onset Alzheimer’s. Plus the suggestion from Kent that I start taking vitamins because maybe I have not been eating right on my diet, and it might have addled my brain. I’ll be making up for this one for a very long time.

In my admittedly shaky defense, I’ve been to Spain several times growing up because it is my father’s homeland and part of my heritage, and most of his family is there. After a while the trips all kind of blend together. Obviously I would never forget that Kent and I had been to Spain together with my family; I just forgot it was THAT trip. But I do now remember hitting all the newsstands in Madrid with him, looking in the English language papers for mention of the incident, and finally finding it in USA Today.

And the sad proof that I have become addicted to blogging? The laughter had not yet subsided ringing in our ears when I said the first thing that popped into my head, “I think I just got my blog story for today.”

The good times began before the trip even started, in the planning. The three of us who flew put together a travel kit for those who were driving. Our totally cool kit included emergency snack rations, reading material (including, if I remember correctly, some magazines of questionably smutty nature), a mix tape of driving and travel-themed songs, and probably a few other things to help pass the time.

But the best addition to the kit was the “Official Guide to Wasting the Next 26-28 Hours,” authored by me and one of my flying friends for those who were making the long drive. It was 10 pages chock full of trivia for the weary travelers to answer about themselves, each other, and the journey, along with some other deep and absurd questions, just to give them interesting things to talk about along the way. I still have this guide in one of my college scrapbooks—both a blank version and the one completed by that crazy group. I’m not sure how I ended up as the keeper of the completed document, but I’m glad I was. This morning I pulled it out and read the entire thing. And laughed out loud many, many times at the memories. I could share some of the responses here, but much of it relates to personal information and inside jokes, so it’s probably only funny to me and those who knew us then. Those guys were jokesters! But I also know tidbits like who caused the group to be late leaving, who took up the most space in the car, who asked “how much longer” first, who fell asleep first, who were the fastest and slowest drivers, who talked the most, and who was the crankiest traveler.

We gave them some record-keeping assignments too, so among other things they tried to keep track of the number of McDonald’s they passed (lost count after 15), the number of accidents they almost had (2), and the number of times they got lost (2). I recall that they unintentionally drove around Washington D.C. twice, and the unlucky driver who missed that turn did not live it down for the rest of our college years. We later made up a song about it to the tune of Peter Gabriel’s “In Your Eyes.” I still remember some of the words to it:

“______, you get so lost, sometimes. Take us around D.C. again. When I want to go to Florida, I’d rather not, in your car. Take us, around again, take us back to the place we started. All your instincts, they were wrong…”

All these years later I still think of it every time I hear that song.

The rest of the week was lots of fun (so much fun that we did it again the following year with even more people). We had several days at the beach, a couple of theme park trips, lots of singing and dancing to my mom’s jukebox and playing pinball, and a birthday celebration for one among us whose birthday fell during the week. And just generally driving around in my convertible and hanging out piled on my waterbed. Most of which is heavily documented with photographic evidence.

The stuffed purple cow of a friend factored heavily into our amusements. That cow was always under attack, and not just during spring break. We were on a mission to exterminate the ghastly bovine. At one point, it was “skewered” by my dad’s Spanish swords that hung crossed over our staircase. Another time it was set adrift on a raft in the swimming pool. I don’t recall how he got into either of those situations. I of course had nothing to do with it. There is also video footage of the cow getting stomped on and assaulted with a coat hanger, and a foiled attempt to nuke him in the microwave. One evening we came home from the day’s excursions to find that even my parents had gotten into the act. They had laid out the cow in a wooden “coffin” surrounded by candles in a makeshift memorial. I always did have cool parents—I know my friends thought so. But maybe not the friend who was the owner of the cow!

And the things we ate that week! We kept a list, which is also now part of the permanent record in my scrapbook. Let’s just say that it inspired my roommate and me to host a “Pig Out Party” in our dorm room upon our return, recreating the same junk that constituted our diet during that spring break week. It must have recently been Girl Scout cookie time in Florida, because they were a daily staple in our vacation menu. My mom always bought boxes and boxes of those cookies and froze them so we’d have them throughout the year. That year, I’m sure we cleaned her out.

These are just a few of the memories that came to mind when I dragged out my college scrapbooks this morning for the first time in ages. There are oh so many more. I’m still in touch with many of the friends who were on this trip—three of whom I saw last weekend, and one or two of them even read this blog!

In other growing up news, Maia is a big-shot first-grader now. This is the big time—first grade is hard! Textbooks, homework every night, and tests all over the place. Things sure have changed a lot since I was in first grade. I don’t remember it being so much work. But so far she loves it. Except today, because she bumped her head pretty hard on the playground. I asked if she cried, and she said yes, but only until she got to the school clinic because they have a “no whining” sign.

Whoa, stop the presses! Is that all it takes???? I am smacking myself on the head. Note to self: The “no whining” sign goes up in our house TONIGHT! Think it will work?

Do you play the school bus game in your family? We do. The objective is to be the first one to see a school bus. You get a point for each one you call out first. Yelling “SCHOOL BUS!!!!” at the top of your lungs usually does the trick. Maia is an expert at this. She always wins, except when she and Kent cheat on each other (but they call it “cheesing,” not cheating, as in “You’re cheesing me!” I think it’s supposed to be a cross between cheating and teasing, but sometimes it’s safer not to ask). Almost every night they ask each other how many school buses they saw during the day. Neither one wants to be the first to say. Whoever caves first, the other always saw exactly one more. No matter what. It’s hilarious.

I’m the big loser in this game. Even Noah beats me now at seeing school buses. But I’m not telling this story to gain sympathy for my school bus spotting deficiencies. I’m leading up to a funny story that happened in the car this morning. Maia, as usual, spotted a school bus long before it registered on my aging brain. I told her she had an “eagle eye,” and then explained to her what that meant. So she is very proud of herself for having eagle eyes, and even makes up a little song about it. And she wants to know if her friend, at whose house I am about to drop her, has eagle eyes too. She then goes on to tell me that she uses her left eagle eye to see things on her left side and her right eagle eye to see things on her right, but she doesn’t know which eagle eye she uses to see things in the middle. That just struck me as really funny because I pictured a Cyclops eye in the middle of her forehead. Just my little amusement for the day.