Archive for February, 2010

16
Feb

But it comes with Mickey Ears….

   Posted by: Ashley Moreno    in Parenting, random funny stuff

You would think that if I could build my own house, teach my children algebra, and write a novel, that I could master something as simple as cutting a 4 year-old’s hair.

But you’d be wrong.

I mean, I get the basic concept. I cut the 10 year-old moppy-headed boy’s hair. I do it the old fashioned way, with scissors, because the science behind the electric trimmer thing escapes me. Voodoo–that’s what it is. Some kinda complicated hair voodoo that I totally do not get.

In theory, Mason’s hair should be easier to cut. His head is smaller, and there’s not nearly as much hair on it. But this is MASON’s head we’re talking about—the one that’s attached to MASON’s body, and ruled by MASON’s mind. You can take nothing for granted.

The best—and least traumatic—haircut Mason ever got was at the Main Street Barber Shop in Walt Disney World. That chick made it look easy. First thing she did was slapped about 50 Mickey Mouse stickers all over him—rapid fire: bam-bam-bam-bam-bam—and while he was trying to figure out how all those stickers got on him and what exactly to do about it, she got about 85% of the job done. When the stickers lost their mystery, she reached for a light-up-spin-around-make-lots-of-noise-Buzz-Lightyear toy and finished the other 15%.

For the record, I’ve tried the sticker trick. And the noisy-light-up-spinning-toy-trick. Somehow stuff like that only works if you’re at Disney World—some part of the whole happiest-place-on-Earth-magical-no-crying-in-Disney-World experience.

The fun begins the minute he sees the spray bottle of water. The head goes back, the arms start flailing, and the wailing-and-gnashing-of-teeth begins. Mason gets pretty upset, too….

Part of the problem is that he just doesn’t like me holding onto his hair. But the biggest cause of the trauma boils down to the fact that he inevitably ends up with a mouth full of hair.

It’s a vicious cycle: Mason anticipates the mouth-full-of-hair; Mason screams in anticipation of the mouth-full-of-hair; Mason ends up with a mouth-full-of-hair. Lather (or rather, foam-at-the-mouth), rinse,  repeat. I bought him a visor to alleviate the problem. Great idea, don’t you think? Yeah, wrong again. Turns out the only thing he hates as much as a mouth full of hair is having a visor on his head.

I’ve never been a real stickler for boy-hair maintenance.  The 10 year-old likes his hair long & shaggy. When someone in public mistakenly addresses him as “young lady,” he asks me to cut it, and I do. The Hubby has threatened to march him to a barber shop for a proper buzz-cut, because he swears that after I finish cutting E’s hair, it doesn’t look any different that before. But that’s the way we like it, my moppy-headed boy and me.

But Mason has some eye issues (I know, you thought we were talking about hair, not eyes. I’ll get there). When he was 7 months old, he had surgery for strabismus (lazy eye), and his right eye is still a little weaker. When he gets tired, it drifts every once in a while—just barely. The eye doctor and I are the only ones who notice it. We treat it by putting weekly drops in his good eye which blur his vision enough to make him have to depend on his weak eye, thereby strengthening it. It also works to strengthen my upper body—it’s hard work pinning a ferret down while simultaneously prying his eye open and holding a bottle of eyedrops without letting the tip come into contact with any potentially unsterile surface.

But it means that I try to be careful about not letting his bangs grow out too long. I figure he doesn’t need anything interfering with his vision, bangs included. And I’d hate to think that all of the trauma associated with the eye drops was for nought. 

So as I write this, I’m psyching myself up for the fact that I am, at most, a week away from the dreaded haircut. I’m thinking of doing it on a Friday night, so that I can console myself with a few glasses of wine afterward. I’m also seriously considering giving in to the temptation to just shave his head.

In desperation, I’ve considered taking him back to WDW for a haircut. The nearer the inevitable date-with-the-scissors looms, the more plausible it begins to sound. You thought Slick Willie Clinton’s $250 runway coiffe was expensive? Try $7,000….

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7
Feb

Pride and—-no, just pride….

   Posted by: Ashley Moreno    in Writer's Corner, random funny stuff

I love wordsmithery, shopping for words in the rich aisles of the English language, meshing and moshing and molding them together to paint pictures vernacular and spectacular. And like Ozymandius and his ill-fated stone monument to greatness, I dream that my words will live on when I’m gone. Because I’m all delusional and stuff, too….

About a week ago, I penned a quick blurb and posted it as my Facebook status. A few minutes later, a friend commented and copied it for her status. It’s an awesome feeling, knowing that something you wrote resonated with a fellow traveller on this journey. Another reposted, then another, and soon I was seeing people comment on their postings, saying things like “I like this—I’m going to copy and post it, too!”

Somewhere along the way, as I saw my words posted and reposted, taking on a life of their own, reaching people I never could have reached on my own, a thought crossed my mind.

“I’m not getting the credit for this.”

Admitting that makes me cringe.  While a whole community bound together by nothing more than a thread that runs through an extra chromosome in our children saw truth and spread truth, I started pouting that my by-line wasn’t attached to it. Nevermind the fact that somewhere in the wild word, someone might read those words and be changed by them. That person would never realize that it was MY words that changed them.

I related this story to my family today at the lunch table. I asked them if they could identify the sin behind my emotions, and before I had the “-n” tacked on to the end of “si-” Ethan blurted out “PRIDE!” 

Ah, there it was, obvious even to a 10 year old. Pride, we learned this past week, is the root of all contention. The elevation of self-interest over common good. Not to say that my words were such an enormous, world changing contribution to the common good. But boy, did I act as if they were. God’s gift to Facebook.

I’m not going to post the post-in-question here. Believe me, I want to. I toyed with the idea of starting out this post with the quote-in-question. But I’m not going to. Call it an exercise in exorcising the spirit of pride.

A few days later, it happened again. Only this time, the quote was something I’d written a few months back, recirculating among the Facebook community. And here it was, being posted and commented on and reposted. I felt that familiar monster clawing through into my consciousness. And I stopped myself. What does it matter whether anyone knows whose words those are? Isn’t it wonderful that I am part of this community of wonderful people who strive to empower each other in the fight for truth? Isn’t the far greater issue that someone might read one of these posts and see Down syndrome in a different, more truthful light?

It’s been a week of growing for me, to be sure. (And not just because I’ve fallen off of my diet and eaten an entire loaf of homemade bread and 3 boxes of Triscuits and 1/2 a bottle of Shiraz this week. Tomorrow’s another day….)  I’m honored that someone saw promise and hope and truth in my words, and that rather than tossing them into the FB dust-bin that is the “older post” page, they shared them.  That is something real. It doesn’t matter whether I get any credit for it.

At least, not until I’m a published author with an agent and an editor and an option deal. Then I’m pretty sure it’ll be copyright infringement….

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4
Feb

And tired always followed sick….

   Posted by: Ashley Moreno    in Chaos, random funny stuff

  

I am sick… 

and…. Well, you know the rest. If you don’t, then you need to go buy Bill Cosby’s Himself.  My all-time favorite stand-up routine. I’m talking about laugh-until-you-can’t-breathe funny. Doubled-over-in-tears funny. Seriously, if you’ve never seen it, consider yourself comedically deprived. If you have seen it, feel free to post your favorite lines in the comments. 

Image from Amazon.com

But seriously, I am really sick. Major chest congestion, relentless cough. Those of you who’ve birthed a few babies no doubt understand how terrifying the term “relentless cough” is. For the same reason that I no longer jump rope, I live in fear of being caught off guard by a surprise coughing fit before I have a chance to cross my legs. Those of you who have as yet not offered up your bladder as a prenatal trampoline or had a part of your body referred to as a “canal” are laughing at me. Go ahead. Your time will come. And when it does, maybe I’ll be old enough to have finally surrendered to the joy that is Depends, and you won’t be laughing anymore—not because you feel sorry for me, but because then you’ll realize that laughing is right up there with sudden coughing. Not so funny anymore, is it?  

Where was I? Oh, yeah–I was right here, in my fuzzy pink leopard robe, with my unwashed hair (washed my face, though—huge sense of accomplishment) and my Halls throat lozenge.  

In addition to being sick, I am (here it comes…) tired. Oh-so-very-tired. Exhausted, really. Comatose, bordering on lifeless corpse. Yesterday afternoon about 5pm, I was smiling to myself because any minute He of The Cute Knees was going to walk through the door and deliver me. Being the wonderful man that he is, he would surely send me to my room (which is where I wanted to go in the first place… Some of you get that. The rest of you seriously need to watch the DVD…) and tend to the children. Then the phone rang. My bliss-bubble didn’t burst right away, because The Hubby offered to run by the grocery store on his way home. He always calls from the grocery store to find out what I need.

Sometime between my giddy “Hello?” and The Hubby’s heavy sigh, all that changed. Something that was supposed to work wasn’t working, and whatever was supposed to fix it wasn’t fixing, and the remedy for a non-fixing fix is for Mr. Fix-it to find a feasible fix to fix the faux-fix. Which translates into “all-nighter.” So I handled the witching hour—I mean, the evening family time—on my own: dinner, dishes, refereeing, 15 minutes of WWF-worthy wrestling that we call “the diaper change”, and bedtime.When I finally got all the kids in bed, I was exhausted.

I slathered on a dollop of Vicks vapo-rub, popped a coconut Dum-dum in my mouth to ward off the cough (thinking that I could safely fall asleep, on account of while I could feasibly swallow a cough drop in my sleep and wake up dead, I don’t think I could actually swallow an entire lollipop, stick and all), bundled up in my robe and multiple blankets, cursed the fact that I’ve never followed through on my plan to fashion a nosewarmer out of a Breathe-right strip and Polartec fleece, and collapsed into bed. 

About 2am—I know it was 2am only because later, Riley asked The Daddy what time he finally got home, and he said “2am”—The Hubby finally made it home. I didn’t hear him come in. I didn’t realize he was home until he tried to take the lollipop out of my mouth. 

Evidently I screamed. 

 Turns out he wasn’t so sure about the whole not-being-able-to-choke-to-death-on-a-lollipop-on-account-of-it-having-a-stick-attached thing. He has evidently learned not to underestimate my ability to achieve the impossible.

It was sweet, really—The Hubby caring for me, worrying for my safety, making sure I don’t wake up dead.But somehow all I can think about is how totally and completely unsexy I must have looked, wrapped up in my pink fuzzy leopard robe, lollipop in my mouth—do you think it’s possible to fall asleep with a lollipop in your mouth and NOT drool? yeah, me neither. And by the way, I’m sure my mouth was probably wide open, seeing as how I couldn’t breathe through my nose. Which means that in all likelihood I was making some sort of sleep-type noises that if they were to come from The Hubby would be called ‘snoring,’ but which were totally not snoring because I’m a lady, and ladies totally do not snore—even when they can’t breathe through their nose. Oh, and don’t forget the icing-on-the-proverbial-cake, the fact that I reek of eau d’ Vicks Vapo rub.

Oh yeah, he wanted me….  

The really frustrating thing is that I have a laundry list (oh crap—do you have any idea how much laundry is piling up while I’m throwing my little pity party? And you can’t donate dirty clothes and then just start over with new ones. I know–I asked someone once, and they said you definitely can’t do that) of ‘to-do’s  for the adoption, none of which are becoming ‘done’s. There’s nothing funny in this paragraph. I just had to rant for a second. 

Sick and tired; tired always followed sick. I am both.

 And now if you’ll excuse me, I have a Bill Cosby DVD to go watch. With my legs crossed….

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