Meth Lab Mama

     I don’t get sick very often, but with the insane lack of sleep that’s been beating me down now for three straight weeks, combined with the fact that my husband’s been traveling for those very same three straight weeks, it’s no surprise that I’d end up feeling like death warmed over.  All I wanted to do yesterday was to crawl in my big, comfy bed and snooze this virus right away.  That was most certainly not in the cards for me, though, since I am the only “responsible” adult available around here.  Luckily, my daughter had a playdate after school, so I was only left with one kid and one devil dog to try to control.  I was barely functioning, though, and in desperate need of some kind of temporary relief from my symptoms. Since our selection of cold medicine in the cabinet was running low, I dragged my little man with me to the grocery store to stock up for the night.  

     As I stood there in the medicine aisle staring at the vast array of choices, my pounding head couldn’t be bothered to make any rational kind of decisions.  I mean, really, what difference did it make if I took drowsy or non-drowsy at that point?  I was already a walking zombie anyway, so, rather than hem and haw over it, I just grabbed four different kinds and headed to the register.  The cashier couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old and was WAY too peppy for my last bit of patience.  I’m quite certain I didn’t look like I was in the mood for chit chatting, but Young Clueless was yapping a mile a minute about their special deal of the week. When he finally got around to doing the job he was paid to do, he stopped in his tracks to call out for assistance.  

     Turns out that you have to be eighteen years old to even scan cold medicine!  When I asked why, he told me it was because of the growing problem of using the ingredients in cold medicines to make crystal meth. My brain was too fried at the time to really process this, but what the hell difference does it make if he’s eighteen or not?  Is it because he isn’t mature enough to red flag a customer who’s buying a shit ton of cold meds?  Or is it because they’re afraid he’s going to steal the cold meds to set up his own meth lab?  I don’t get it!  After I paid for my purchases, he told me that he was really surprised that I was allowed to buy four different kinds because they usually limit it to three.  ”You don’t really look like you’re gonna set up a lab, though,” he said with a chuckle.  Hmmm, what tipped you off there, young blood?  Was it the six year old child attached to my arm or was it the bag of marshmallows that said child talked me into purchasing?  Actually, as awful as I’m sure I looked with the bags under my puffy eyes, a nose that looked like Rudolph’s, and my ratted out ponytail, I suppose I could’ve very easily passed as a meth addict. However, I think my suburban naivete was shining right through my rough-around-the-edges exterior.  I told the kid that not only would I have no concept of how to even begin to make crystal meth, I don’t have the freakin’ time to set up my Halloween decorations, let alone a meth lab!

     So, I took my bag of feel goods home and spent the night alternating between blowing my nose right off my face and popping NyQuil.  I feel hungover and woozy today, but the show must go on. Moms just don’t have time to be sick.  But, if I get a wild hair up my ass, I suppose I could now turn my kitchen into a drug den with all the new additions to my medicine cabinet.

Last Day at Grammy’s

     We left the grandparents’ house in such a frenzy over the weekend, that I didn’t even get a chance to blog about the adventures of our last day there.  You may recall that the visit started out on a bit of a sour note, and in true Nucking Futs fashion, our final day of the trip was no less uneventful.  When it rains in my world, it doesn’t just pour — it MONSOONS!!

     My daughter had been having allergy issues throughout the entire visit, and on our last day, she started complaining that her ear was hurting.  She has been prone to ear infections in the past, so I feared that a trip to the doctor’s office may very well be in our future.  We had planned to go to the pool that day, since the temperature was supposed to be near 100!  My kids absolutely LOVE the pool, so when my daughter started complaining and crying about her ear after swimming under water for a couple of hours, I knew that the day was about to take a turn for the worse.  

     My only option at that point was to take her to one of those walk-in clinics, which I despise with every fiber of my being.  They are always crammed full of sick people coughing and breathing their illnesses all over the place.  And when we got there, it was as expected — full of miserable-looking people, all slumped over their chairs in the teensy tiny little waiting room.  I wanted to hold my breath and scrub my hands the minute we walked in the place.  Rather than squeeze into the middle of this petri dish of germs, I decided to take the kids and wait outside in the sweltering heat. After all, we were still in our wet bathing suits from the pool. 

     Despite the heat, the kids were happy to be outside, at least in the beginning. We were told that it would only be about 30-45 minutes, but after an hour and fifteen minutes, the kids were not so chipper anymore. They were forced to use their imagination to play with the only things around — the dirty, nasty landscaping rocks mixed in with a bunch of cigarette butts left behind from some rather lazy smokers. The kids were playing soccer with the rocks and, naturally, got into a fight, that resulted in my daughter falling and scraping up her knee. We had to go back inside the germ box and ask for a bandaid.  After some hysterical tears and boo-boo fixing, we went back outside to wait some more, only to have my son then announce that he had to poop.  So, again, we had to go back inside the virus tank for him to conduct his business.  I was really getting aggravated at this point. It’d been almost an hour and a half!  

     After I’d asked about three thousand times, they FINALLY put us in an examination room only to have to wait some more.  My kids were about to tear down the walls out of sheer boredom.  When the doctor nonchalantly strolled into the room, I had absolutely no nerves left whatsoever.  He examined my daughter and immediately began filling out prescription forms — four to be exact!  I asked if she did, in fact, have an ear infection, and he said that it wasn’t really a full-fledged ear infection, but that he thought it most likely could turn into one.  I knew I didn’t have much brain power left, but even still, I couldn’t help but wonder why on earth my daughter needed FOUR prescriptions for an ear infection that she didn’t even have yet!!  I immediately called her regular pediatrician’s office after we finally got out of that hellhole to ask if all these medications were really necessary. They said that the guy was basically just trying to cover his ass. They said not to give her all of them and just see how she felt. Her six year check-up is this week anyway, so if it actually does turn into an ear infection, her doctor (who actually knows what the hell he’s doing) will be able to identify it properly.

     After leaving the two and a half hour adventure at the walk-in clinic, we then had to go and retrieve my bank card that an ATM machine had decided to eat the day before.  (Like I said, no dull moments in my world!) The bank was jam-packed with people, and my kids were absolutely looped by this time after being cooped up for so long.  I knew that none of us were going to have the patience to wait for anything, so I asked the first person I saw in the bank if she could go to the back and get my card. While I stood there waiting and my kids ran around like crazy, my daughter decided it’d be hilarious to lift up my cover-up and show the entire bank my black bikini.  The man a few feet from me whistled through his missing tooth and said, “Damn, mama!”  I wanted to die.  

     Luckily, that night, my parents had planned to take us out for dinner to a Mexican restaurant near their house.  All of the day’s problems slowly drifted away with each sip of my margarita on the rocks.  And so concluded our trip to the grandparents’ house.  Guess we rolled into town with a bang and rolled out with an even bigger explosion….

Germs Be Gone

Ask any of my friends and family, and they will tell you that I am a bit of a germ-a-phobe. When my twins were little, I used to really go overboard, wiping anything and everything with disinfectant.  As they’ve grown older and I’ve grown tired, I tend to let a lot of things go now days.  For example, I have fully embraced the three second rule, especially if the food falls on our own floor.  A little dust-off and you’re good to go.  However, my kids are like trained dogs and know that the first thing we do when we walk in the door is to wash our hands.  And whether they want to or not, I make sure their friends abide by this rule when they come over, as well. And judging from my observations, kids just flat out do not know how to properly wash their hands!  I swear they think it’s a race to see how fast they can whiz right through it. There’s no scrubbing, no lathering, and very little rinsing going on.  I have been known to make my kids, as well as their friends, re-wash what was never really washed in the first place. I may not be able to control every little thing they come in contact with when they are in public, but I can certainly try to scrub it off when we get home. Mentally, it just makes me feel better to at least attempt to ward off the latest, greatest virus in town, like this crazy swine flu crap that the media is trying to whip us into a frenzy over. I understand it’s their job to inform us about this situation, but do they really need to scare the hell out of the public? Don’t get me wrong, I certainly don’t want any pig germs to come strutting into my world any time soon.  I just think that, like everything else, the news channels are over-dramatizing the so-called epidemic.  Just to be on the safe side, though, we will continue to scrub our little piggies all the way home (no pun intended)….