Wordless Wednesday

This Weekend = One Wild Ride

The end of last week right through the weekend was quite a wild ride. Have you ever felt like you needed a vacation just to recover from your weekend? I could use a whole day to do nothing but sleep. Seriously, I could shut my eyes and be out like that. Within the last two weeks we have had 1 trip to urgent care and 2 trips to the ER, with the two ER trips happening this weekend. Basically, we are all getting through this with nothing too horrible, but it was definitely scary when it was happening.

So it all started with getting A Bird squared away Thursday morning. She had this huge weird rash and the doctor’s couldn’t get it figured out and it had been going on for a couple of weeks. Finally, a doctor suggested we take her to a dermatologist. She had her appointment Thursday and it turns out that she had a severe case of eczema. Great, finally an answer and a treatment to get her some satisfaction. It is always so stressful when your kids are sick and there isn’t much you can do to help them.

L Bird gets home from work Thursday and has a tiny bump by her elbow that looks like a small bite. She mentioned to me that she had noticed it earlier, but wasn’t too concerned. Then Friday morning she gets up and is covered in hives and her hands are extremely swollen. I ended up getting a late start to work so I could drop A Bird off at daycare while L Bird went to the ER. The ER doctor chalks it up to a penicillin allergic reaction because she had just finished some antibiotics. He gives her some pills for the itching and tells her to let it run its course. The pills worked well enough where we both went to the B.B. King & Buddy Guy concert (I’ll try to post some video from the show, it was awesome!) later that night.

Saturday morning comes and L Bird’s hands are swollen again and the hives are spreading and red and itching. She contemplated going to the ER again, but decided to muscle through it and see what happened. So she was pretty miserable all day, but she was managing and I have to leave to go to my brother’s bachelor party. The party is a good time, but L Bird calls me about 10:30 PM saying that her throat was tight and she was worried. After some talking she thought about it, and decided she was well enough and she didn’t need to go to the doctor’s.

Then in the middle of the night L Bird is on the end of the bed hyperventilating and crying. She is yelling to me to wake up because something is wrong. I jump out of bed and try to figure out what the hell is going on. She told me that she got up to go to the bathroom, then her throat felt really constricted and she couldn’t breathe, then as she was walking out of the bathroom she must have passed out because she woke up on the floor looking at the front door. So now I’m in total panic mode. I call 911 and get an ambulance on the way, then I called and woke my poor mother up at 3:30 AM to come down and stay with A Bird while I went to the hospital. The ambulance and EMTs show up and they start giving L bird oxygen and she is starting to be able to breathe better. The whole time I’m praying that A Bird stays asleep so she doesn’t wake up and be traumatized by seeing her mother strapped to a gurney and being wheeled into an ambulance. Luckily for me she slept through the whole ordeal.

My mother shows up to stay at the house and I was off and racing to the ER. When L Bird got to the ER, the doctor gave her a shot of epinephrine to stop the swelling and something for the hives and itching. We spent the next 4 hours sitting and watching her hives gradually lessen in degree of severity, but not go away completely. The doctor finally releases us with some more pills and a final diagnosis of severe allergic to penicillin.

We finally get home and everyone (L Bird, my mother, and me) are exhausted, just purely spent, but A Bird is a ball of fire and ready for the day. Luckily my Dad called and he and my step mother came down and took A Bird for the day. My Mom went home to rest and L Bird and I got some well needed rest.

At the start of today I was and still am dragging. I’m still too tired to be of much use to anyone, but thankfully things look like they are starting to turn the corner. A Bird’s eczema is just about all cleared up and while L Bird still has hives, they are much less than they were and she is having no trouble breathing.

It was one hell of a weekend, but even with all of that I am so thankful. I am thankful that it was something that was treatable with both my ladies. Things could have been a lot worse, but in the end they turned out ok. Thank God for small miracles.

My Gramps…

Today is my Grandfather’s birthday, he is 83 years old today, or if you ask him he’ll tell you he’s 38. He’s dyslexic when it comes to his age. Growing up, I spent a lot of time at my Grandmother’s house. I lived out in the country and there were very few kids my age to play with, but my Grandmother lived in town and there were always a ton of kids around including my cousins. So I would beg my mother to let me go into my Grandparent’s house as much as I could.

When I was at my Grandparent’s house, it was always my Grandfather who would organize all of the neighborhood kids into teams for games of baseball or football in the park. He would collect as many kids as he could find and walk us all up to the park to play. We would pick teams and to make it fair he would be “all-time” pitcher or QB, meaning he would pitch for both sides or he would quarterback for both sides. He has always been a big kid, and he would always have a huge smile on his face as we would run out and catch a pass or hit one over the fence and round the bases laughing. One of my fondest memories of him, was when he took me fishing. He used to take all of us fishing, but this time it was just me and him that day. I had spent the night at the house, and he woke me up real early just as the sun was coming up. We had some breakfast and walked down to the city pier. It was great to just be there with him. He let me pay for the bait at the pier bait shop, he showed me how to bait a hook with a soft shell crayfish and with minnows, and we sat there all morning. Me next to him, sitting on our overturned 5 gallon buckets. To tell the truth I can’t remember if we caught any fish that day, or what we talked about, but I remember the sights, sounds and smells of that day just as vividly as they were that day.

Now my Gramps has his own very unique quirks. He lost all of his teeth when he younger, so as long as I have known him he has been toothless. I guess he had dentures at one time, but when they moving from one house to another they got lost or thrown out. He swears that either my father or my Uncle Phil threw them out and both of them blame the other one and deny having anything to do with it. Sometimes when both my father and Uncle Phil are at his house, I like to bring that story up and get my Gramps all riled up about it and have him give them the business all over again as I sit back and laugh. So because of that incident he has never gotten more dentures, and if you ask him his answer is always “Why should I buy new teeth? Someone will just throw them out!”. I’m not sure if it is the fact that he has no teeth, or because he grew up poor, or a little of both of those things, but he eats the weirdest things ever. It’s normally anything he can find put between two slices of bread, then he folds the sandwich in half, sticks in a glass of milk and eats it that way. Anything left in the glass he fishes out with a spoon then he drinks the milk. It’s pretty disgusting but he has always been that way. The worst combination that I have seen was hot dog relish on bread, with Reese’s Pieces candies, dunked into a glass of milk. Even his coffee is different, instead of cream and sugar, he floats a healthy table spoon of butter in his black coffee to “Sweeten” it.

One of his other quirks is what he does when he has company he doesn’t particularly care for. If he hears that people are coming for a visit that he doesn’t like, he grabs the dog’s leash and takes Brutus for a walk. He’ll walk for hours or until the people leave, then he comes home. If he has no prior knowledge of the visit, he’ll say hello but within 5 minutes he is grabbing the dog and apologizing for having to take the dog out. It’s actually pretty funny to watch, and amazingly the people he’s avoiding don’t seem to notice that it happens every time.

But anyway, my Gramps is one hell of a man. I owe a lot of who I am to him. I have his (and my father’s) dirty sense of humor, his occasional hot tempered outbursts, and his love of cards. He is a UNO freak, but also taught all of us to play Euchre, until he quit because he said me and my cousin cheat. He’s a bit of a sore loser, but he’s in his eighties so I think he has earned it. I am thankful to have him in my life.

Happy Birthday, Old Man! I Love you Gramps!

What do you see?

 
Have you ever wondered what people see when they look at you? I’ve thought about it a lot throughout my life. I am just curious about people’s honest first impressions. When I was a kid, I was skinny and scrawny, had coke bottle glasses and a bad shake from my CP. For the majority of the people I met I knew what they saw in me, I could read it in their face as easily as I could read a book. WEAKNESS. For some people this made me a source of their pity, they would feel sorry for me and “try to help” me in the most condescending ways. I don’t want or need your pity; weak is not what or who I am. For others, this perceived weakness made me a target. A target to take advantage of, push around, mean mouth and extort. For a long time I took that kind of treatment and bought into the fact that I was somehow less than them and this was just the way of the world. I spent many nights asking GOD why he made me different and why I couldn’t just be “normal”.
Then one day everything just snapped and seemed to come together for me. I embraced my differences, they are what make me, ME. They are what make me unique. So I started fighting back, I rebelled and raged against anyone and anything that told me I couldn’t do something. I would become an unstoppable force and I would and will leave my mark upon this world. This realization started the pendulum to swing the other way for me, but all of my pent up anxiety and anger swung it to the extreme.
I spent the better part of my teenage and early twenties getting into fights just to prove how tough I was. I started lifting weights and bulking up. I grew confident cocky and belligerent. I would get into fist fights with anyone over anything. If someone told me they were having a hard time with somebody, I would “take care of it” for them. My favorite line was “What are you looking at? You can’t beat me!” It was like I had to keep proving to myself and the world that I wasn’t weak. I portrayed every tough guy characteristic I had ever seen from movies or people I looked up to. This led me to be viewed as a meathead or a two bit hooligan. I had turned into one of the bullies I had hated as a kid.
Because of this I have very few friends. People don’t want to get close to me, because I really must be the asshole I made myself out to be. It’s taken me a long time to break this macho man, tough guy demeanor that is a second skin for me. But I am getting there; I’m so much more than weak or strong. I’m a nicer guy than I ever have been. I’m trying to smile and laugh more and leave the mean mug at home. Wag more, Bark less, you know what I am saying. I’m a father, a husband, and a good friend. I’m slowly becoming a hippie farmer with my garden and chickens. I give good advice. I am so much more than a single word descriptor. I am ME!
I still teeter totter between seeing myself as that weak kid and the meathead when I catch people looking at me when I eat my sandwich between my index and middle fingers instead of my thumb and fingers, or when my head bobs and shakes, or just when my lips twitch. But I am infinitely more confident in who I am than I was.
The point is people are so much more than that first impression. In this world it is so hard not to be judgmental. It’s hard not to meet someone and instantly size them up and pigeonhole them before you even shake their hand. I am just as guilty as the next person of this, but I am trying to rectify that. I am trying to give people the benefit of the doubt and get to know them. Ask people questions, have a conversation, don’t make assumptions. Give people a genuine shot and listen to what they have to say before writing them off.
These are just my thoughts of the day, take them for what their worth…

Wordless Wednesday…..

Old Nature Photos…

This weekend I pulled out my camera and was looking through the pictures that have amassed on the memory card and I came across a few I thought I would share. They are nothing fantastic, but I thought that they were pretty good shots when I took them.

What do you think? How many pictures do you have lost hidden on your memory cards?

Car Rides...

So I’m pretty sure that I could be a stay at home Dad. I had yesterday off and spent the day with A Bird. We didn’t really do anything exciting but we got a lot done. We went down and got my Jeep inspected and an oil change, then headed over to Lowe’s for a few things I needed to finish up some projects and then back home. Although we didn’t do anything special, it was a special day because we were together. I could easily get used to staying home and having days like that. Yep, let me win the lottery or L Bird get a big promotion and that’s it I’m gone. I’ll stay home do the laundry and dishes, put A Bird on the bus, then go play a round of golf or putter around the garden until she get home. Yeah that sounds pretty good to me. Well, it’s like they say “A dollar and a dream” right?

But anyway, one of the things I noticed was how much we both seemed to enjoy the car ride. It used to be I would strap her into her seat and turn on the radio and she would be completely quiet and fall asleep. But these days, she is asking me to play her favorite songs on CD’s and turn up the radio and she is singing along with most of the words correct. It just hit me like a ton of bricks at how old and how mature she seems.

She’ll tell me to turn down the radio, and then she’ll make a profound statement that always seems to hit me in the gut. It’s stuff like:

“Dad, you know JW is my boyfriend and when I get older I’m going to marry him”

“Dad when I grow up I’m going to buy a motorcycle and JW can ride on the back”

“When I’m older I’m going to be a cowgirl!” (Or singer or dancer or doctor, it depends on the day)

Or she’ll hit me with questions:

“Dad, look at those clouds, is that where GOD lives?”

“Dad, what do deer eat?”

“Dad, I want something cold to eat, which way is the ice cream store?”

I guess the point is, that she is having many more conversations with me. She is turning into such a little person. I can converse with her and enjoy our time together. I don’t know I guess it just really hit me yesterday and I’m still in awe at how she has become her individual. I just keep talking and listening to her, so hopefully I can lay the groundwork for more car ride discussions as she gets older. That’s all you can hope for, right?

I hope so.

Wordless Wednesday....

Wordless Wednesday...

What home is …

We tend to get a ton of magazines at my house. I get Mother Earth News, Grit and All About Beer quite frequently. However I read through them all very fast and quickly run out of things to read. So occasionally I’ll pick up one of L Bird’s  magazines and flip through it. Yesterday I was out of my magazines so I picked up L Bird’s Real Simple and then Better Homes & Garden. As I sat there flipping through the pages, I saw a ton of beautiful homes and immaculate rooms. They all had bunches of trendy tricks to spruce up rooms and decorate with little trinkets. But as I saw pages and pages of these pictures they started to look really sterile to me. Everything was just too perfect and you could immediately tell that anyone who lived in these houses didn’t have pets or children. They just reminded me of fancy doctor’s offices and had that very detached clinical feel to them. They just didn’t feel like home to me.

Nope, that definitely isn’t home. Home is coming home to laughter and toys scattered everywhere. It is being greeted by two wet noses and wagging tails. Home is the kitchen table being cluttered with paints and markers because you want your daughter to be able to express herself (plus I normally get a cool drawing autographed by the artist). Home is the lawn being a little longer than the rest of the neighborhood because you would rather spend time playing “pirate ship” and “jail” than be sitting on the mower and wasting precious moments of their lives. Home is taking the clean linens and dining room chairs and making forts to hide in and have lunch under. Home is trying not to stumble on the cat as you’re making your way to the bathroom in the middle of the night or it is trying to navigate your way from the kitchen to the dining room with a hot cup of coffee over two dogs and a 4 year old riding her tricycle in circles.

That is what home is to me. Yes, I do routinely get frustrated with the organized chaos my house can become from pets and a crafty 4 year old, and yes I get caught up in the whole “keepin’ up with The Jones’” syndrome where I get envious of other people’s homes and how perfect they seem. But I wouldn’t trade it. Yes, sometimes it’s crazy in  my house but it will be the memories we make today that will remind A Bird of “Home” when she’s older and has a family of her own.

That’s what home is…