Riding the Waves

I clearly remember when Sam was nearing about a year old that I had this crisis of sorts.  His whole first year, I had that schizophrenic this-is-hard-but-I’m-not-supposed-to-complain-because-I-had-infertility-and-he’s-such-a-blessing voice murmuring in the backround.  But I also had this sub-backround voice…more like an assumption…that if I could get past the first year, then being a mom would get significantly easier.  Like, POOF, on his first birthday he would get a cake-messy face and I would get a magic wand with all the answers or something.

Smirk…I know…I really am that naively optimistic.

So this time around I realize that this is not the case.  And I am slightly more prepared this time…in general…or at least I am more comfortable with winging it on a regular basis.  I only mention this more to reassure myself that Abby being, gulp 11 months old, really should be a crazy time. 

She is shear joy.  Truly she is.  But this child is into EVERYTHING.  God made her this way so we couldn’t get too angry with her while she tears up our house.  We had family come and stay last weekend, and while I cleaned the basement, Abby followed behind me and took apart all the good that I was accomplishing.   I put the Wii equipment away.  Abby happily discovered where we kept the Wii equipment and pulled it out, tasting every little plastic part.  I gave Abby her toys and created a barrier of pillows and laundry baskets to the Wii drawer.  This was like a presenting her with a Survivor obstacle course challenge to run.

Abby and Sam are keeping me busy enough that I haven’t had a lot of time to ponder how it will feel to have Abby’s birthday and yet a whole year away from our William coming up next month.  I don’t even have much time to run the parallel time of ‘what was I doing last year right now?’.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  I don’t know though…balance seems to be the key with grief.

In general we’re just plodding through from one little island of stability to the next.  I’ve been watching a lot of the earthquake/tsunami coverage in Japan almost in awe of the grand scale of that disaster.  I feel so awfully horrific for those families and it just about kills me each time the next news story up is about Charlie Sheen or the Royal Wedding or something.   Hmm…I guess we all need our distraction.  The news about Japan reminds me about the earthquake in Haiti from January 2010.

I never wrote a post about this, but, Will died the same day as the earthquake in Haiti.

When I watched all the coverage I felt so very, very small in the grand scheme of it all.  Not that Will didn’t matter…not that.  But I was also so keenly aware that there are always bigger things and more pain all about us.

But that pain does not erase our own…just gives us perspective.

So, my perspective is that I’m tired but generally happily so.  I wisely understand that I will be MORE tired as Abby gets closer to two not LESS.   Abby cut her eyebrow open last week, and Mark and I wisely determined that we could use skin-glue (much like superglue) instead of an ER visit as the cut was gaping but very small.

1. Try number one resulted in my finger being glued to her skin.
2. Try number two resulted (as she fussed and flinched) in her eyelid being temporarily glued open.
3. Try number three seemed to do the trick though my nerves were shot.
4. We decided we might be too dumb to use skin glue (it was quite a way from her eye by the way)…though it looks awesome now – not sure got past foreheads into the eye area again.

I try my best to ride the bumpy ocean waves of regular life…and even enjoy them (albeit in retrospect) – knowing that these are not tidal waves.  These are just what to expect.

Another wave today…Sam was quietly building legos at the kitchen table this morning when suddenly he began to cry and panic.  He had, you guessed it, lodged a lego up his nose.  I’m not sure what possesses a child to think to themselves, “Hmm, I’ve got a small lego, I’ve got a small hole in my nose.  Let’s see what happens,” but I guess this is pretty common.

So, we rode the wave.  Put my coffee down calmly (because I’ll be needing that for later), and commanded him to stop picking his nose and shoving the lego further up.  Squirted a little saline and tried to get him to blow it out.  No go.  Off to get the “Remove Lego From Nostril” kit:  flashlight, tweezers, towel to cover Sam’s eyes, alcohol swabs, wet wipes.

Sam’s sniveling and the saline really did help, as the slime helped slide the lego down back into a reachable position.  Luckily, Sam DID stay still when I told him to (so I didn’t stab him in the nose with the tweezers), and I plucked that baby out pretty quickly.  Sam had chosen a round red headlight-type lego for his ‘experiment’, which came out easily once I got a hold of it.  I would say that was pretty smart of him except that sticking the dang-on thing up there in the first place pretty much voids out any intelligence-motivated thoughts on his part.

As I tried to give my gravest lecture about not sticking thing up one’s nose, or ANY holes in one’s body, for that matter, Sam really seemed more interested in getting the lego back to so he could return to building.

Sigh.  A mother LIVES for those kinds of lectures.

Anyway, back to surfing the waves.  I know tsunami’s are out there…but there’s really no accurate warning system in life for those kind of things.  Maybe they’ll invent an app for that.