Life with the Laceys

Before and After

2012-01-05T06:13:00.000-08:00

We are all undeniably shaped by the things that happen to us; from the moment we're born things happen to us that shape the choices we make, the way we view the world, and the way the world views us. Most of the time, we're not even aware of the minute changes that happen. It's not until we look back over the landscape of our lives and that we see the mountains we thought were rolling hills.

There are a few moments, however, that stand out and we describe them as such: ground breaking, earth shaking, life changing. I've been lucky in my life that I have had very few of those kinds of moments, almost all of them happy. I've mostly bobbed through the charmed ocean of life, with happily married parents, few heartbreaks, and few disappointed hopes. September 2010 changed that.

This is not a blog to talk about Molly or her medical condition - if you are interested in following Molly's journey, her mom Kristen has written eloquently on the topic in her caringbridge blog. But her illness, critical condition and the adjustment to the "New Normal" has left a mark on me, and I will forever think of life as "Before" and "After".

In order to decide to become a parent, you have to take a gigantic dose of "that won't happen to us" pills. This is what allows you to love someone so completely, without reservation. If people stopped to think of everything that could go wrong with pregnancy, birth, babies, toddlers, tweens, teens, college students.... the human race would end. To function, you HAVE to be able to convince the rational part of your brain that yes, bad things do happen, but they happen to other people and your child won't have a problem. Before, I lived happily in that bubble, "knowing" that there were kids with problems out there, but satisfied with the idea that it wasn't going to be my kids, or my friend's kids.

Seeing Molly on life support was a terrible thing. The ups and downs of those dark days deeply affected me in ways that I'm only now starting to understand. It was as if I had been walking down the street, a beautiful street, lined with pretty houses with neat yards and when I reached out to touch one, I discovered that the whole thing was a paper thin backdrop that I could punch a hole in. And when I punched that hole and tore the paper, behind the beautiful houses were sick and dying children, their parents and siblings, and families and friends. I couldn't get the idea out of my head that there were thousands of kids like Molly out there; sick, clinging to life, with their devastated families sitting by their sides. I became obsessed with Caring Bridge posts, I found myself searching Facebook for pages asking for prayers for this kid or that. I became completely unable to leave the house for fear that I would miss a post or a phone call from Kristen about Molly. I couldn't fall asleep unless my cell phone was plugged in next to me and I found the loudest possible ringtone so I would be sure to hear it, even in the deepest sleep. Not that there was much sleep to be had.

I went through alternating phases of completely overindulging my kids and getting mad at them for not understanding why I was sad. I stopped reading some Facebook posts, cause I would get so angry about people complaining about their kids. I wanted to shout at people "Hug your kid! Be happy he's well enough to misbehave!" I went to the mall and standing among the crowd of strangers, I realized if I started to cry, no one would know why, and it made me start to have a panic attack. I got into a fight with a friend because he asked, via Facebook, to ask people to pray that the financing went through on his truck. I told him that people like him were clogging up the prayer lines and did he seriously think God had anything to do with financing a truck and if He did, then the whole notion of God was insane. I would swing wildly between praying to God and thinking that I couldn't believe in a God who would allow people to go through so much pain.

I was so angry. Angry at God, angry at the doctors, angry at everyone who didn't stop their whole lives to help Molly. I knew it was unreasonable, but I couldn't stop myself. And I would get angry at myself, for having emotions that I wasn't sure were really mine to have. Molly's not my kid, and I'm not a member of the family, so did I even have the right to be so sad and mad and scared?

Slowly, the anger ebbed. The grief has been largely replaced with gratitude that Molly has recovered so much. But I am in the After. I no longer think of AI Dupont as a place you take your kid for a broken bone, it's where Molly went on life support. I still jump at texts and phone calls from Kristen, and when the caller ID said AI Dupont recently, it took me a minute of conversation with the person calling before I got my heart out of my throat. Kristen and I had a running joke in the Before - if your kid was sick and you wanted to take them to the doctor, you called Kristen for advice. If you didn't, you called me for advice. That's not true anymore. I'm much more likely to err on the side of caution, and my stack of EOBs from the pediatrician proves it.

The biggest difference in the After is in how I view my friendships and how I deal with people. I have realized that people have different priorities from me, and that's okay - Everyone gives what they can, when they can. Just because Kristen and Molly have this BIG problem, doesn't make the problems that other people face less important to that person. I had to stop comparing everything to Molly, but I also had to distance myself from friends who were having crisis because I knew I wasn't equipped to handle it. I also learned that when the shit goes down, you will be surprised by who steps up and who steps out.

I think I'm more serious now. When I see a speeding car, I tend to wonder if that person is rushing to the hospital before I think "what a jackass". It's been hard to write this blog, as you might have guessed by my lack of posts. At first, I felt like happiness was a sort of betrayal to Kristen, my bestest buddy who was anything but happy. Then I wanted to talk about how I was feeling about this, but didn't know how for a very long time.

The After isn't entirely a bad place. I think I'm more patient with my kids and husband. I appreciate our health and our happiness more now. I think it has made me kinder to strangers and more aware of the people around me. My girls are much more aware of special needs kids and adults and understand that there are kids who are less fortunate than they are. Personally, I would give up all this awareness and sensitivity for another cold drink by the pool with Kris and all 7 of our kids acting like shit monkeys in the pool, but this is not the life we lead. I'm grateful to Father Foley and his continuing miracle of Molly, and I'm grateful to whatever trick of fate led us to Delaware and me to the Pike Creek MOMS club.

Photo Card

2011-12-15T05:39:00.001-08:00

Merry Bright Greeting Holiday

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2011-10-19T11:08:00.000-07:00

Every store in America should be legally required to have a drive thru.

It's raining today. Again. For about the seventy-fifth day in a row. And I had to get milk. Which meant dragging Will through the rain to get two gallons of milk and then carry everything back to the car. In the rain. Did I mention that it's been raining a lot lately?

I sat in my car contemplating my options - don't buy milk and deal with not only the screaming from Will, complete with the most heart wrenching signing of "milk" and "please" and "more" and, perhaps more importantly, sentence myself to a morning of coffee with non-dairy creamer and the nasty chemical coat I'd wear on my tongue for the rest of the day as a result, or suck it up and drag myself and Will and 2 gallons of milk through the rain.

Carrying my son shouldn't be such a burden, right? I mean, he's my kid and I love him. Throw myself in front of a moving train kind of love. However, this little bundle of joy that I love so much weighs 30 pounds and fights me like Oscar La Hoya when I try to carry him. He yanks my hair, hits my face, screams and wiggles, all with the absolute knowledge that I will not drop him from a height of four feet and run for the nearest bar (which happens to be right next door to the store where I buy milk). And, unfortunately for Will, this is my fourth time around so the whole cute baby thing doesn't have as much cache as it might have had for Ellie. Doing errands with kids sucks and it sucks hard core.

Just recently, a friend commented that he called 911 on a woman who left her kids (approx 7 and 4) in the car while she went into Starbucks. Fortunately for the woman, she got her coffee in a timely enough fashion that she avoided an uncomfortable conversation with the police. My friend got feedback from his FB friends about how terrible that was and how could any mother do that. And I'm sure he was proud of himself for taking a stand against bad parenting and poor choices. Well, I'm not a terrible mother. I'm a really good mother, if I do say so myself. And I've done it. I've left my kids in the car while I got a coffee. While I've gotten another kid out of school. I've put the kids in the car and then come back in to the house to get myself ready. In Delaware, if someone called 911, and the police came, they would likely take my children away from me and put them in a foster home until an investigation was completed. Because you can't leave your kids in your car, cause it's a slippery slope. If you let some people leave their kids in their cars, then where do you draw the line. There was a woman in my recent memory who left her kid in her car while she went into a bar and had a date. Is me running into Dunkin' Donuts so much different? It's all a matter of degrees, right?

While it's possible that this woman is a crappy mom and is taking her own issues out on her kids, I'd like to think that she was probably just a mom who didn't feel like dragging her kids into another store. Especially one that sells tasty looking treats for approximately the same price as my last pair of tennis shoes. Maybe she had been out running errands, or worse taking them to the doctor, all day and just wanted a coffee without commentary from her kids. A wise cop friend of mine once said that no situation is so bad that it cannot be made worse by the presence of a police officer. My friend's intentions were excellent, but maybe just waiting by the car to make sure nothing happened to the kids, that they were in no danger, and then a private word with the mother might have been kinder and more civilized?

This brings me back to the rain. And the milk. And Will in the car, happily playing with a train. And being a bad mother. Suddenly, it dawned on me that there is another option. It is completely socially acceptable for me to leave my children in the car while I go into the gas station. I could be in there buying smokes and porn, but no one thinks twice about a car full of kids at a gas pump. So I went to the gas station and bought milk for a ridiculous price, brought it home, and enjoyed my coffee while ignoring Will so I could watch Grey's Anatomy.

That my friends, is being a good mother.

Maggie's 5!!!

2011-07-15T13:15:00.000-07:00

My Maggie is 5. She is definitely a kid who knows what she wants and knows how to get it. She is the mayor of munchkin city around these parts, all the little kids love her, despite her nearly choking almost all of them while trying to pick them up at one time or another. She is a force of nature. I hope you enjoy this little review of Maggie's year!

Carnival Games prepared me for Motherhood

2011-02-20T17:36:00.000-08:00

When you walk in a room four kids aged 6 and under, you get a lot of commentary from strangers. "You certainly have your hands full." "You're busy!" "That's a little army you've got" and my personal fave to date, "That's ALOT of kids!", as if I had 14 kids with me rather than 4. After the shock of seeing a seemingly normal person with 4 kids wears off, the next most common line of attack is "I don't know how you do it!" I usually smile and say something self deprecating, unless I'm feeling snarky. Recently an older gentleman commented, "So what do you do in your spare time." I responded with "I have four children, what do you think I do in my spare time?" with a large wink thrown in for good measure.

I've recently figured out how I manage four kids though. It was all the carnival games I played as a kid. Let me explain:

Whack a Mole - perfect training for life with four kids. My day to day is filled with kids popping their heads up and asking for various things. I have to get a snack for one, while another is asking for crayons and another is crying about a boo boo, and the fourth is needing a diaper change. It's all about peripheral vision and quick responses.

Ring Toss - Total practice field for throwing snacks with accuracy into the way back of the van. If I had known then what I know now, I would have practiced more with my back to the bottles and looking in the walleye mirror.

The Balloon Dart game - more of a metaphorical preparation, but I do puncture the wild schemes of my kids pretty much daily.

Duck Pond - well, hasn't every parent fished something out of the toilet?

Dunk Tank - I've spent hours trying to figure out how to do baths dunk tank style. It's a work in progress.

Bean Bag Toss - totally prepared me to feed four kids at the dinner table. I can throw a dinner roll with wicked accuracy.

Fun House - Pretty much goes without saying. Sometimes scary, sometimes dangerous, but you always want to go back through.

So all in all, I'd like to thank all those toothless carnies, who in their own way taught me as much about motherhood as Dr. Spock.

thoughts on Motherhood...

2011-01-11T18:05:00.000-08:00

My days are filled with poop and pee,

arguing, whining, and squeals of glee.
I like to think I have control,
but my kids think that is rather droll.

Each day I start with a sense of hope,
that the coffee’s ready and will help me cope.
My sleep interrupted, my body wants to revolt.
I need the caffeine to give me a jolt.

Four little creatures, I see waiting there,
Running around with sleep-messy hair.
Feed them, dress them, start the days grind,
brush one’s hair, wipe one’s behind.

One onto the bus, preschool for another,
Two stay with me, their harried mother.
Tomorrow I think, I’ll do this all better,
get up earlier, make lunches, get it together.

I’ve given up on being THAT mom,
the one with makeup, jewelry or matching clothes on.
No, I’m the one running late,
for school, for appointments, for a playdate.

I usually forget something I need,
thank Heaven for friends who loan things to me.
These girls are my rock, the cut me much slack,
And they know that I’ve got their back.

The years are short, but the days are long
and some days I feel like I’m doing it wrong.
My kids watch TV, eat junk and fight,
they haven’t learned Spanish or how to sleep through the night.

But most days we laugh and hug and kiss
Those moments I know it doesn’t get better than this.
My kids know I love them and I do my best everyday
to make a good home for them to learn and play.

So after six years of this motherhood stuff
I’ve learned being a parent is really tough.
I’m a good mom and I’m a good wife,
and I can’t wait to see what happens in life!

Merry Christmas!

2010-12-23T12:49:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Claus,
Thank you for hiring us to audit your Naughty/Nice list this year. Enclosed, please find the report on the Lacey Family of Wilmington, Delaware.

The youngest Lacey, William Jeffrey, started off the year clearly naughty. First, after causing his mother to go slightly crazy after being two full weeks overdue, he then had the audacity to weigh 11 pounds, 3 ounces at birth. However, he has shown remorse and spent the rest of the year applying himself diligently to repairing his image. His smiles, infectious laugh and his excellent sleeping habits have allowed us to firmly recommend William as “Nice”.

Next, we investigated Jack, aka “Muqtada al Toddler”. Jack is an enigma. He displays characteristics of naughtiness, for instance, his tendency to destroy his sisters’ artwork or by throwing a Thomas Tank Engine with deadly accuracy. This behavior, coupled by his obvious lack of remorse, would place him squarely on the black list, but his adorable smile and hilarious way of saying “okay!” has charmed even this seasoned auditor. We recommend Jack as “Nice”.

While Maggie has been up for review several times in past years, this year, we are happy to report that Maggie has grown into a wonderful big sister and an excellent preschooler. Maggie shows an ability to see the best in everyone and is quick to compliment a friend or to kiss a boo boo when necessary. This year Maggie also added swimming to her resume, and she is a regular fish in the water. While still having her moments of “exuberance”, Maggie is most definitely “Nice”.

Ellie has set the bar high for her siblings. She can now add star Kindergartner to her list of accomplishments. Ms. King, Ellie’s teacher, says she is kind and friendly and she is showing great aptitude for school. Ellie has a strong interest in science and loves to create little experiments in the back yard. She is clearly still “Nice”.

There is one addition to our regular audit of the Lacey Family. Caroline Aime, a 17 year old from France, joined the family in August as an exchange student and has already become more like another daughter than temporary guest. In addition to being sweet and kind, Caroline has already received Distinguished Honors at McKean High School, one of only 3 seniors to do so. She is loved universaly by the family, especially the dog Joey, who is hopeful everyday that today might be the day his love is returned. Caroline is firmly “Nice”.

As a side note, though we don’t generally audit dog behavior, Joey deserves special mention for his 11 years of steadfast service to the Laceys. Particularly in the last year, while he has endured pokes and prods, been pressed into service as both Prince Charming and a stepstool, he has done it all with wag of the tail and only one or two room clearing farts a day.

Finally, I’m saddened to disclose that there was an ethical problem with the initial report on Erin Lacey. Apparently, her husband Jeffrey, in a misunderstanding of semantics, tried to bribe the first auditor to put Erin on the “Naughty” list. Once the gifting ramifications were made clear to Mr. Lacey, he requested that Erin be placed back on the “Nice” list and that his actions be fully disclosed. Mr. Lacey, despite this transgression, is also recommended for “Nice” status for his continued efforts to tame four wild animals into productive members of society and for enduring forty-two weeks of pregnancy without once trying to drive Erin into the middle of nowhere and leave her for dead.

All in all, the Lacey family has had a productive and happy 2010. They are extremely grateful for their wonderful friends and family and sincerely hope that they have an even better 2011.

Regards and Merry Christmas,

Elves of India, Inc.

Go Big Red!

2010-11-28T20:53:00.000-08:00

You probably know me well enough to know that I love me some Facebook. I love the random nature of seeing the daily minutiae of the lives of people from all different parts of my life listed in my news feed. It's like "This is Your Life" everyday. My first friend from childhood talks about his new baby, and then right under it, my girlfriend is asking for advice about digital cameras, and then there's something random from one of my relatives.

Lately, there's been a lot of talk from one group of friends... my high school friends. You see, my high school football team was in the state championship playoffs and this past Saturday, they lost in the final seconds to Dunbar High. Apparently there was some controversy over the last play, in which Dunbar scored, breaking the tie and winning the game. This is the kind of information I wouldn't know, if not for Facebook. You might think this is just superficial FB crap, but to the people of Cumberland, MD, there is nothing more serious than football.

We moved to Cumberland when I was 10, almost 11. Fresh off living in Detroit, MI, a place my entire family hated for the 11 months and 4 days we lived there, my first impression of Cumberland was made by the sign posted on the way into town "Cumberland, MD - Home of the National Marbles Champion 1981". My thoughts were along the lines of, "wow, this town does not have much to brag about." Moving from Pittsburgh to Michigan had been pretty traumatic for all of us, and I was just prepared to hate everything about this new hick town my parents had landed us in.

My feelings of dread were not relieved by our new house. It was unique in it's splendid ugliness. The front door was painted safety orange with brown trim. Apparently, the previous owners had gotten a good deal on this orange and brown paint, because the entryway and living room were the brown and the kitchen was the orange. The downstairs powder room had wallpaper that rivals Repub's... silver and black metallic with yellow fuzzy diamonds. My bedroom looked as though someone had color matched a Pink SnoBall. It was putrid pink, even for an 11 year old girl. If I remember right, my parents' bedroom was the same safety orange, cause really, why stop at the kitchen? And their master bath was spectacular in it's tackiness, complete with shag carpeting.

Me, age 11

But home it was and we unpacked and prepared for that most awkward of childhood moments, starting a new school mid-year. There's a special kind of pain that is caused by starting mid-year... everyone already knows where they're going, the cliques are already formed, and you're bound to get the seat directly in front of the teacher in every class. It's like showing up late for church. There's no way to sneak in without anyone noticing. Well intentioned teachers think it's helpful to have you say something about yourself, when really all that does is allow all the other kids to get a good look at your glasses and crooked nose and bad hair and bad clothes. At least, that's what it feels like.

Determined to make a good impression, I dressed for my first day in my favorite blue sweater, the one that I hoped made people notice I had blue eyes hidden behind my ginormous glasses. I got on the school bus with no problem and thought maybe this would be okay. Maybe I would make a good impression. Maybe I would finally be like Elizabeth from Sweet Valley High and everyone would love me.

I noticed something strange pretty quickly: my bus was decorated with red and white signs and streamers. This seemed odd to me, but I didn't really absorb it as I was busily trying to disappear into the seat. However, when we drove through Cresaptown, I couldn't help but notice that people, some of them adults, were yelling stuff at the bus. One kid actually threw a rock. What the hell? Who throws rocks at a school bus??? The kids on my bus were yelling out the windows back at them. Was I in the middle of some bizarre small town gang war? I saw that the buildings and cars we were passing were decorated with blue and white. Slowly, I looked around at my new classmates. Every single one of them was wearing red and white. My blue sweater, so perfect that morning, suddenly felt two sizes too small and extraordinarily hot.

It was Homecoming. See, in Cumberland, there are two public high schools. Fort Hill and Allegany. Fort Hill, or Big Red, is where I would go. But at this point, I was only in 6th grade, and going to Washington Middle School. However, Cumberland is somewhat of a geographical anomaly - it's 3 hours to everywhere. Equidistant from Pittsburgh, Baltimore and DC, affinity to any of these cities is tenuous. It's alliance to the high school team that defines this town.

Of course, my first day of school was Pep Rally Day, when the Fort Hill Sentinels made an appearance to their younger fans. Every kid was dressed in red and white, and I stuck out like a big blue thumb. The hated Allegany Campers (and I have no idea to this day why they were named that) school colors are blue and white. My mortification was epic.

Erin & Kellee

Defeated and embarrassed, I got on the bus to go home. Prepared to sit alone and stare at my textbooks the entire way home, I was shocked when a pretty blond girl positively bounded onto the seat next to me. "Hi! I'm Kellee! You're new, right? Where are you from? Do you like it here? Where do you live?" She shot questions at me faster than Kirstie Alley eats potato chips. With each question, my amazement grew. This girl was actually talking to me, and being nice, and seemed interested in me. Could it be? Could I actually have a friend? I did. I was lucky enough to meet Kellee Gulck, and from that day, Cumberland became my home. I eventually went on to be a Sentinel, and I still have my letter jacket to prove it. I was on the Rifle Squad - no, not shooting, twirling - so I performed at every football game. My heart still skips a beat when I hear "Anchors Aweigh" which was the tune used for our fight song. And I can still march 10 yards in 8 steps.

We moved from Cumberland when I was 17. College and life have happened in the 20 years since high school, and if not for the power of social networking, I would never know that Fort Hill was robbed of their States chances last weekend. Not that knowing materially changed my day, but somehow it's nice to know that those traditions are still there and that part of my childhood lives on. Cumberland seemed like a hick town when we drove in, but it was a great place to be a kid and I'll alway consider myself priviledged to have lived there.

Sunday Sermon

2010-11-15T09:29:00.000-08:00

When Caroline decided that she wanted to come stay with us for the year, one of her few requests was that we go to Mass each Sunday. Jeff and I are pretty much your standard "C & E" Catholics - we go on Christmas and Easter, and even then it's wholly dependant on how the children are behaving. But how do you turn down a 16 year old that wants to go to Mass?

Taking the whole family to church every Sunday is not an option. I'm a firm believer that if you're spending the whole time entertaining/diciplining your two year old, you might as well not be at church anyway. I don't want to be a distraction to others either, however, Ellie is five and that's plenty old to learn how to sit still for an hour. So we decided that one of us parents, Caroline, and Ellie would be attending each week.

Each week, Ellie whines and complains and moans and cries about going. Yesterday it was my turn to take the girls and I was prepared for the onslaught of "It's boring! I don't like standing. I'm hungry. I'm Jewish." that I knew would start as soon as I told her it was time to go. Luckily, I had the threat of a birthday party to hang over her head and with the proper motivation ("If you don't stop complaining, you're not going to Mr. Taylor's birthday party") we were off. Of course, there was much kvetching and dramatic sniffling from the back seat and I commented offhandedly to Caroline that yet another generation learns to hate going to church and that started me thinking about my own journey through the practical part, not the religious part, of churchgoing.

My dad is the driving force behind my church upbringing. He's Catholic and has gone to church every Sunday, with very few exceptions, my whole life. As a child, my recollections of church are of being lost in a forest of adult legs, staring at the pew and tracing the wood grain patterns with my fingers. My favorite part of Mass was when my dad would carry me up to receive Communion. Communion was also my least favorite part, for when I got old enough, he would leave us in the pew and I believe he acted as an usher from time to time. Sunday school was always kind of a drag, but I LOVED my first Holy Communion... I loved the dress, I loved the hairpiece I wore, I loved the party afterwards and I certainly didn't look askanse at the gifts.

After that, Communion continued to be my favorite part of Mass, but not for the 'transubstantiation' (when the bread becomes the body of Christ in Catholic mass), but rather because in good Catholic tradition, we weren't allowed to eat before Mass. So the wafer was generally the first thing I'd eaten that day and they're actually kind of tasty.... in an unleavened bread sort of way. Jeff and I both discovered our mutual taste for Hosts recently and had a good laugh about how we both wished you were allowed to get in line for another. I can rememeber being very stressed out about chewing it though, cause there just seemed to be something terribly wrong with the idea of chewing up Jesus' body. I would hold it in my mouth for as long as I could and try to let it melt. This almost always resulted in the wafer sticking like plaster to the roof of my mouth, causing me to spend the rest of Mass surreptitiously trying to scrape it off with my tongue.

As a teenager, my favorite part of Mass was actually the drive home. And not cause it was church was over, but rather, after my brother went into the Army, it was just me and Dad in the car. It was probably the only time I was alone with my dad and we had the best conversations. We would talk about boys, college, careers, religion... you name it, we talked about it. These were the times when my dad told me that I was capable of anything I put my mind to, and that I should never accept less than total respect from my boyfriends, and he may not know how carefully I listened. Lord knows I tried to pretend like I wasn't. To this day, I love going to church with my dad. It's like putting on your comfiest pair of slippers.

Now that I'm a grown up, my favorite part of Mass is the time after Communion, when the priests are putting everything away and there's a few minutes of just music. People are still kneeling and praying, and I usually take this time to talk to my grandparents. When I was a kid, I'd talk to my grandfather Moran, who died when I was 7. I'd tell him about myself and I'd use that time to consider if he'd be proud of me. These days, I tell my grandmothers about my kids and what they're doing, and I still talk my grandfather and ask him for advice. I think I've always had the idea that my problems might not be important enough for God to get to right away - it's not world peace or anything - but my grandparents have to be interested, right?

So for now, I know that I'll have to deal with complaining and whining for a few more years... as each kid gets old enough to be allowed to go to church. Hopefully, they'll have something of the same process as me though and find out that church is a quiet place to think and that being still isn't always a bad thing.

Back in the saddle

2010-11-10T18:42:00.000-08:00

It's been a while since I posted and I have a couple good reasons. Things in the Lacey household have been a little bit crazy for the last two months. September started strong with the typical back to school madness, all of which was completely overtaken at the end of September by the catastrophic illness of my bestie's daughter Molly. Kristen has written eloquently and bravely on her CaringBridge site, so if you're interested in Molly's story go to https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/mollydunne/createorsignin.

Meanwhile, in LaceyLand, we've had our own shares of stress and strain and in typical Erin Lacey style, I try to see as much absurditiy as possible. Which leads us to tonight's story. On Sunday, October 10, Jack awoke seemingly fine, but it became apparent very quickly that he was having some kind of issue. I thought it was an ear infection and, with him being a third child and all, decided that he would still have an ear infection on Monday and left him home with Caroline, while the rest of us attended a party for our friend Andee.

Monday morning, I awoke to the sound of Jeff getting Jack out of bed and saying something to the effect of "Holy crap!" I leapt out of bed - and by that I mean dragged myself into a sitting position and then took a minute to curse all things morning. Once I collected myself, I came down to the dining room to find Jeff holding a very odd looking Jack. The entire right side of his little face was swollen and he looked generally miserable. Jeff took Maggie and the baby to drop Mags off at preschool and Jackieboy and I went off to urgent care.

Strangely enough, this happened on the first occasion in the five years of going to Dr. Field that she wasn't available when I needed her. This is our doctor who, when Jack was a baby with croup, called us back on a Sunday and had us meet her in her office, but asked us if we could wait to meet her until after her cake came out of the oven. However, Dr. Field's father in law had passed away over the weekend and she was at his funeral on Monday. We got to the Lantana Square Urgent Care only to find out that it was closed until noon. I called Dr. Field's office in hopes that her trusty office staff could tell me where I should go next, and when I described Jack's symptoms, she stopped me at facial swelling and told me to go to the ER.

Having just spent a good bit of time at AI Dupont, I was leary of going there again. It seemed like a bit of a bad dream to be pulling in with my own child. They whisked us right back to a room and within twenty minutes of being there, Jack had IV and a CT scan and a diagnosis of Parapharyngeal Abcess. Basically this means that he's had an infection in the WAAAAAAY back of his throat. Treatment? Two days of IV antibiodics. WHAT?!?!?!? My mind started to race... I'd need a change of clothes, someone to watch the other kids, can Jeff take off work? I hadn't even had breakfast, now was I allowed to leave him to eat?

We were admitted and taken to the care of the Gold Team on 4F. Jeff got us settled in and then left for the night. Jack was pretty dehydrated so in addition to the antibiodics, he was also receiving fluids. At some point after Jeff left, Jack went to sleep. A couple hours later, the alarm indicating the fluids had run out started to blare. Not wanting it to wake Jack, I ran out to the nurses station and called in Nurse Nancy (that was really her name and it pleased me endlessly). Nurse Nancy came in and while she was changing the bag, I noticed the gauze covering the IV site was bloody. One second later, it became apparent why... Jack had rolled over in his sleep and pulled the IV needle right out of his hand. The IV fluid had just pumped out all over his crib and his gown. Nurse Nancy told me that she'd get the "IV nurse" up there to fix him up.

IV Nurse, who's name I've forgotten, has absolutely no luck with sticking Jack. Probably the worst part of the whole experience was wiping the streaming tears from Jackie's face while they stuck him three times, trying to get a vein. Finally IV nurse said that she couldn't do it, so they were going to have to call transport. Transport? I asked. Turns out that when they have a particularly difficult IV to put in, Transport is the go-to. I guess they have to put IVs in kids while bouncing in ambulances or airplanes, so it sort of makes sense. In walks the Transport Nurse, the best of the best, the savior of my poor Jack, and she looks at me over Jack's sad little form and I immediately notice that her right eye is looking at me, but her left eye is looking at Nurse Nancy. A little shocked by this, I immediately tell myself not to worry about it. What's a little bit of a strabismus? Obviously the Nurse Nancy thinks that she's the best choice. Then Transport Nurse reaches out to take Jack's arm to inspect his veins and then I notice that she only has two fingers and half of a thumb n her right hand. Strangely enough, the thing that interested me the most about this latest development was how was she going to get a glove on? Quick as a flash, Transport Nurse, walleyed as she was, had a new IV in and Jack's arm taped within an inch of it's life. So that will teach me to judge a book by it's cover!

The rest of our stay was uneventful. On Wednesday morning, we were released back into the wild and Jack was given a clean bill of health a couple days later by the returned Dr. Field. There is nothing like having your friend's kid be critically ill to put things in perspective, and in the grand scheme of things, this was a blip. Before we left, the nurses in 4F were asking us if Jack was acting more like himself, and at the time it was a BIG no. I told them that when he started throwing stuff at them, it was time for us to go. Last thing Jack did before we left was throw his full sippy cup and hit me right on the top of my foot... it was time for us to go!!

A day at the Y

2010-09-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

Well, this isn't the blog I thought I was going to write tonight, but I had to share this story... cause it's a typical Erin Lacey story.

So, I go to the Y with more frequency than I used to, and my favorite thing to do is right the "Expresso" stationary bike. It's got a screen and it allows you to pick different "tours" that appear on your screen and it is supposed to feel more like you're riding outside and less like you're riding a bike while watching TV. As far as gym equipment goes, it's a little more complicated than your average treadmill, and people are forever getting on the bike next to me without a single clue how to get the thing started. Therefore, I've developed some skill at explaining the way the thing works, while still pedaling.

Yesterday, I was pedaling on the "Bent Spoke" when I notice a group of people come in the gym. I'm a total nosy neighbor at the gym. I do the same thing at church. I know I'm supposed to be meditating and reflecting on my own workout/sin, but really I spend a lot of time looking at people's outfits and wondering why anyone would wear pantyhose in this day and age. This particular group stood out though, and it was apparent it was a group from an adult care program of some variety. The bike next to me stood open and the caregiver set up a young lady of about 20 on the seat. The caregiver fiddled with the controls for a moment when the guy on the other side of her offered to help. I kept pedaling and watched as he got her set up on the race track tour.

Part of the fun of the TV screen is there are other racers on the tour with you. You can pass them, or if you're in the mood, you can ride your bike right through them. The guy on the other bike kept telling the girl that she could race the other people and she answered a couple times with "Do I have to pass them?" I thought to myself that this guy was nice for helping, but he wasn't really listening to her. He finished his ride and left. I noticed that she was still having a little trouble with the pedaling and steering, so I mentioned that she didn't need to worry about the steering cause the computer wouldn't let her run off the track. She said that she was uncomfortable cause the straps holding the pedals on her feet were loose and asked if I'd fix them. So I jumped off my bike and fixed her right up. I hopped back on and continued to chat with her, keeping up a running stream of encouragement. The whole time, in the back of my head, I'm hearing one of the kids' Bible camp songs, about loving a stranger like a neighbor and I'm mentally breaking my arm patting my back for being so nice.

I was watching her screen and I could see that she was rounding the last turn before the finish line. "You're almost there! Just make it around this turn and you'll see the finish line!" I say. I was so excited for her to finish. In my head, I'm thinking that maybe there's a volunteer opportunity here, this is so rewarding! Special Olympics, maybe? "Just a little further! You can do it!" Wow, it's really awesome to watch someone accomplish a goal. "Keep it up! There's the finish line!" We're mere feet from the finish line when she looks at me and says, "Can you please stop talking to me? It's really distracting me."

You've obviously mistaken me for someone who gives a crap

2010-07-31T08:31:00.000-07:00

I've often been told that I have "one of those faces." The kind of face that makes people feel free to tell me their innermost secrets. Once, while sitting on a wall in Boston Common reading a book, a man sat next to me and began to tell me how he was there for a parole hearing for his brother and that he really didn't know if he thought he should get paroled but thought his mom would want him to tell the parole people what they wanted to hear, etc. Another time, I had a woman tell me on the subway in excrutiating detail about her various surgeries. In my effort to be polite, I have been privvy to way too much information.

Last night, when Jeff got home from work, I was about one "Mommy, can I?" away from shot putting Maggie across the room. Jeff gently suggested that I leave the house, telling me that sometimes it's more fun to be around the kids when I'm not there. Never one to let pride get in the way of an escape route, I bolted some dinner and got the hell out of Dodge. Not really having a plan, I went to Kohls. I was just kind of wandering around aimlessly looking at housewares and dreaming of a day when I will have breakable things on end tables, when an employee noticed my slow progress through the aisle.

"Can I help you find something?" she asked.

"No, I'm just enjoying wandering around." I said, "I don't have any kids with me so I'm taking my time." In hindsight, I know that this was my mistake. Giving any additional information is seen as in invitation by crazy people to talk.

"How old are your kids?" she asks. I told her about my circus of kids and predictably, she tells me that I'm going to miss the days when my kids were small. "I know I will." I respond. "But right now, missing my kids sounds like fun." She then tells me that her son is 26 and she misses when he was little. Foolishly, I say, "That's a great age though, I think that's when you start to appreciate your parents." I tried to walk away, but this was the opening she had been waiting for.

"All my son wants to do is get wasted as fast as he can!" she tells me. I looked longingly for an escape route, but shifted my feet and got comfy. Cause there's really no polite way to get out of this conversation. I mean, "Sorry that your son is a wastoid, but could you tell me how much this fingerbowl costs during Kohls PowerHours?" doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. My new friend tells me about how her son was the sweetest five year old who was such a great sharer and a caring boy and now he doesn't care about anything. Her fridge was covered in his artwork. She went on and on and I tried to maintain a neutral look on my face while trying to figure out what I could say to end this conversation and get to the 70% off rack I could see out of the corner of my eye. "Maybe this is the year that he'll pull it together." I say, backing away now. She followed, hanging on my words hopefully. "I know I learned a lot more in my late 20s than I did in my early 20s." Still backing. Finally I hit the hard tile of the main aisle. "Good night, and good luck!" I say waving goodbye.

I guess I could have just not engaged with her at all. The smart thing to do would have been to just say "No" when she asked if I wanted help and then went on. But maybe, our little conversation helped her feel better about something that was obviously bothering her. I hope that I was able to at least make her night go faster. I guess I have one of those faces cause I figure that spending five minutes with a stranger isn't a total waste of time. You never know what people are going to tell you and that's kind of fun, it's like an adventure every time. I come by it honestly, my mom is the same way. Mom struck up a conversation with a man in a bar in Dewey Beach once and it turned out that it was Captain Lou Albano. But that's a whole other blog!

Thoughts on the first days...

2010-07-28T18:33:00.000-07:00

I have several friends who have recently had their first babies. Thinking about them with their new little baby in their house has really brought back a whole flood of memories of bringing baby Ellie home and what it was like to have our first baby.

When leaving the hospital, first Jeff had to take all the crap we'd brought with us out to the car. I can remember thinking that the nurses must have thought we were such assholes. We had a laptop, movies, CDs, books, two suitcases, and all the stuff that you steal from the hospital. I don't know why we had so much stuff, but it was as if we'd been at the hospital for a month, rather than 2 days. Jeff wheeled me and Ellie down and we all got in the car. It was raining, and warmish for January, and as we drove past the other cars on the road, my kept thinking how strange it was, our whole world had shifted on it's axis and these other people driving by had no idea. I wanted to shout at people, "Don't you know I had a baby?!?!?!"

We arrived at our townhouse and went in to introduce the dogs to Ellie. Like most childless dog owners, we had treated our pups as our kids and we were nervous about their reaction to the baby. My parents took one of Ellie's hats home from the hospital so the dogs could sniff it and get used to her smell. We had watched "Baby Story" on TLC with the dogs in the room to help them get used to the sound of a baby. We carefully planned our arrival home so that Jeff would walk in without the baby and greet the dogs, so that they wouldn't feel "replaced." In a nutshell, we forgot while treating our dogs as children that they are, in fact, dogs and they really don't give a crap about a new baby in the house unless it affects mealtime.

I remember arriving home, putting the carrier on a chair and wondering, "okay, now what?" My mother was staying with us and had already been at the house for a couple days, so it was in pristine condition - every surface cleaned within an inch of it's life, every scrap of clothing washed, folded and put away. The house felt foreign, felt like I was visiting my house after someone else had moved in. I was a stranger in a strange land, a parent in a house that had been childless.

I'm sure we ate something and then made some phone calls to friends and family. What I do remember more clearly was that first night. Oh holy night. Our perfect baby had been a wonderful sleeper in the hospital and I know that I secretly thought it was my natural parenting ability. That first night, and the next day, a Friday, will forever be called "Cryday" in the Lacey lexicon. No one, not the nurses, not the doctors, not our friends with kids, had warned us about day three, when Ellie got hungry and my milk hadn't come in.

Breastfeeding hadn't been going well since jumpstreet. Starting all the way back at our breastfeeding class, the lactation consultant teaching the class completely freaked me out. She made it sound like every doctor, nurse, orderly and quite possibly total strangers, would be trying to sneak my baby formula in a bottle, thereby ensuring "nipple confusion" and the failure of my ability to breastfeed. I tend to be dramatic when pregnant. In the hospital, the nurse, an angry woman with bad breath and unfortunate facial hair, had basically grabbed my breast and shoved it in poor Ellie's face. Now, I'm a pretty self conscious person, and not really into having strangers touch me while naked. Ellie screamed, I cringed... it was bad all over. After several attempts, the nurse told me that she had to eat before midnight or else I HAD to give her a bottle of formula. The minutes ticked by, I kept trying, but she kept refusing. Midnight came and the nurse brought us the little "ready to feed" bottle and told us she'd be back to check on us. I don't know what came over me, but I got out of my bed, took the bottle and poured most of it down the sink drain. Ellie wasn't born until 4:30 PM, and something just told me that this nurse was checking a box off, not really thinking about our situation. When the nurse came back, I smiled at her and pointed at the bottle. Score one for the boob nazis. Sure enough, about an hour later, Ellie threw up an astonishing quantity of brown gunk, amniotic fluid as it turned out. About an hour after that, she nursed and all was right with the world.

However, that was day one and this was day four, and oh what a difference a few days made. Ellie was up all night. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. She'd scream, I'd nurse, and she'd sleep for 10 minutes. And so on, until my poor boobs felt like I'd been nursing a bench grinder. Finally, sometime around dawn, when Jeff went to give her to me again to nurse, I had a little freak out - "There has to be something wrong with her besides being hungry!" I yelled. Then I demanded he open the pack of pacifiers that we had, but hadn't given to her for fear of "nipple confusion". I nursed and then ever so carefully took myself out and slipped the pacifier in, a slight of hand I'd get very good at in the next months.

Sleep deprived and disheveled, we took Ellie to her first doctor appointment. In the car, the silence overwhelmed us... for the first time in hours, Ellie wasn't crying. I called my mom and informed her that we would be driving to Mexico and back. At the doctors, I cried silently the entire time. The doctor assured Jeff that this was totally normal, and to expect frequent outbursts of crying from me for no good reason. Ellie was a little jaundiced and had lost more weight than the doctor liked, so we were sent to get labs and with an appointment for a weight check in a couple more days.

More crying from both Ellie and me. Finally, my mom was on the phone with my Aunt Barb, who gave me the following advice: Drink a beer. Now, that's Aunt Barb's advice in pretty much any given situation, but this time she had the old wives behind her. It's an old wives tale that beer will bring in your milk. Well, never one to question good advice, we went to a mexican place and got take out and picked up a 6 pack of Coronas. Lo and behold, sometime in the night, I was visited by the milk fairy and spent the next two weeks drowning poor Ellie in milk as my supply worked itself out.

That first week, my mother didn't do a lot of things... she didn't offer unsolicited advice, she didn't hold the baby endlessly, she didn't try to manage our baby for us. What she did do, I can never repay her for. Meals showed up on the table, clothes continued to get washed and put away, and the poor dogs, who fell from their pedestals faster than Oprah gains and loses weight, still managed to get fed and watered. She was truly the hero of the week. I hope that my kids think I'm 1/100th the mom that my mom is. After Ellie was older, she did tell me that the first night, she stood inside the guest room, which was next door to the nursery, hand on the door knob and talked herself out of coming to help us. I would have welcomed her help that night, but I'm sure that it was better in the long run that we did it ourselves.

After Mom left, and I stopped crying over nothing, there was a night where I looked at Jeff and said, "there's still another person in the house." It was the moment that I really understood that parenthood fundamentally changes everything in your life in a way you can't grasp until you've experienced it. Everything around me was the same, the thing that had changed was me.

Getting there (and getting ready) is half the fun

2010-07-23T19:23:00.000-07:00

In 22 days, I will be on the beach enjoying a frosty adult beverage while my children play at my feat, making sandcastles and memories at the same time. However, in 21 days, I will still be in hell, driving the second day of a 10 hour long journey to Oak Island, NC.

Vacations are a part of my family tradition, like noxema on sunburns and corn niblits in butter sauce at every holiday meal. One of my earliest memories is of swimming in a kidney shaped pool at a hotel and being confused why anyone would shape a pool like a kidney. My brother and I jumped into that pool endlessly, while my dad would stand some appropriately scary distance away from the edge and then give us a push back to the side of the pool. I learned to dive in that pool, taught by my dad to put my hands on my head like a shark.

When I explain where we're going on vacation, people often say that we're crazy for driving so far, or that we're brave for going so far, or that they would love to go there, but it's too far to drive. When I was a kid, we would drive 625 miles from Pittsburgh, PA to Myrtle Beach, SC just about every year, until we found Oak Island in 1986. We would always take two days to get there, stopping overnight somewhere a bit more than halfway.

Vacation doesn't start with the drive though, it starts with a list. Or several lists. It moves from list to pre-packing, when my mother would begin to lay seemingly random items on the dining room table. A shirt. A book. A bottle of wine. Soon a pattern would emerge and in the last week before we left, the table was covered, the floor had stuff on it, and you couldn't wear anything you might want to take to the beach cause if it wasn't on the table, it wasn't getting packed.

The last evening before we left, the anticipation would be intense. My brother and I were sent to bed early with admonitions to go to sleep quickly cause we were getting up early in the morning. I don't know what time my mom would wake us, but I do know that it was always dark. We'd pile into the car, and I'd try to go back to sleep with my head on my pillow resting on the back window. Sometime around dawn, my parents would find us a restaurant to eat breakfast. My brother did not eat breakfast food as a kid. He always wanted a hamburger, which was hard to rustle up at 7AM. Now that I'm a parent, I have a whole new perspective on what my brother and I put my parents through. So he'd ask for a hamburger, the waitress would check, then tell us no they can't make him one, and then Mike would be grumpy. Being the near perfect child I was, I happily ate my Frosted Flakes, out of the little perforated box of course.

Back in the car with my cranky brother, the games would begin. I think you should be able to get a dividing line painted down the middle of your back seat as an option in sedans. I know that one year, we did this drive in an unairconditioned, black Camaro with leather seats, but I don't really remember it. I think I've blocked it out because the pain caused by peeling my poor young thighs off of those seats was simply too excrutiating to remember. I do vividly remember the sea foam green interior of my dad's company car, a Chevy Impala. I remember how the velour upholstery got warmed by my body heat and would never get cool. I remember how velour, though soft to the touch at first, would eventually start to hurt after sitting on it too long. I remember that Mike would draw a line in the seat by running his finger down the seat, creating a dark green line in the upholstery and then dare me to cross said line. And of course, being a younger sister, I crossed it many times.

It was the 80s, so there were no pesky car seats to tie us down. I would take the shoulder strap of the seat belt and put it behind me and then curl up in a ball on the seat to sleep, with the lap belt running from my mid chest, over my hip and behind me. Another favorite position was upside down, head on the cooler that always ended up on my side of the car, behind my dad, cause I was short. I used to look longingly at conversion vans as we drove by, thinking that those people knew how to travel.

My mom is a master of making up games. We did all the standbys... "A my name is", "In my grandma's attic I found", car bingo, license plate bingo. Over the years, other games were added. We would bring the Trivial Pursuit cards and ask each other questions. We made up a game that involved hitting the room of the car every time you saw a car with a cargo carrier and shouting "Snail!" One year, my parents rustled up a tiny black and white television with an antenna and we managed to watch snow interrupted occasionally by television programs. When we were young, there was the CB radio to keep us amused. I actually miss CBs. It's like cell phones on a party line with it's own language... breaker 1-9... what's your 20? My dad's handle was "Lieutenant" and I loved to hear my grandpa, "The Judge", call over the radio to warn him of a smokey at mile marker 129 northbound. I had no idea what it all meant, but it sounded fantastic. We made truck drivers honk their horns for us by madly pumping our arms up and down and waved at people in other cars to get them to wave back. And the scavenger hunts... oh man, that's a whole other blog's worth of entertainment!

Becuase we'd left so early, we'd always get to the hotel fairly early and we'd have the whole evening to hang out. The overnight in the hotel was always a favorite part of vacation. I mean, no where else could you walk down a hall in your PJs and get ice in a little tiny brown bucket. To this day, I love the sound of the ice machine in hotels. It's the sound of summer vacation starting. There was always a pool and that is where my story started, in the pool on the way to summer vacation.

Jeff's first year going to the beach, I prepared as my mother taught me... I made lists and began to put stuff out in a one layer think spread across the guest bed. Jeff, in his effort to be the man with the most, packed it all on Tuesday night. I spent Wednesday in a panic. I couldn't see what was in the bags, and I hadn't checked off my list. Thursday, I unpacked and repacked everything so I could check off my list. We got up and drove to Emporia, VA and spent the night at a really crappy Red Carpet Inn. It didn't have a pool, but it did have an ice machine. Now Jeff knows that the lists and the stress and the drawn out car ride are all part of vacation and he just goes with it. Cause the getting there starts in January, when we book the place to stay, continues through the year when Mom and I write the scavenger hunt, and is ending when we are getting into the car, and it's definitely half the fun!

Damn baked goods comparison

2010-07-13T15:59:00.000-07:00

Jeff has a guy he works with who once lifted his shirt, squeezed around his belly button and called the ensuing bulging flesh the "bagel". Today I realized that if I did the same thing, it would be more "bundt cake" than bagel. Bummer.

Amateur night

2010-07-10T07:58:00.000-07:00

Wednesday nights are Ellie's ice skating night and Jeff always takes her. It's sort of their little daddy/daughter time. She does lessons and then they free skate together. Well this Wednesday, Jeff had a late meeting and he wasn't going to make it home in time to go to the lesson. So, it was me and four kids who hit the road Wednesday night.

Though we've lived here for almost 5 years, the route 273/route4/route 896 area of Newark remains a mystery to me. Everytime I drive in that area, I feel like I must be lost. Jeff used to say that he thinks Washington, DC employees a team of people to go around changing road signs, and I feel that way about Newark. It's like the brain, it can be studied but never fully understood. Of course, skating lessons are in that vicinity and knowing this, I googled "University of Delaware Skating Rink" and dutifully looked at the map. We left with PLENTY of time, cause I knew I had to get four kids there, out of the car, into the building, get skates on Ellie, get her on the ice, and maintain some kind of order over the other three.

Jeff had told me to make sure I dressed everyone warmly, since it is cold inside the ice rink. So Maggie's got on a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants, Jack's in long sleeves and jeans and I have a blanket over the baby's carseat. Ellie was dressed in her typical leggings with jeans over ensemble. Keep in mind that Delaware is currently hotter than the surface of the sun. So the whole way to the rink, the kids are screaming that they're hot, and truthfully by the time we arrived at the rink they'd probably all lost weight from sweating.

Needless to say, I got lost. I tried calling Jeff, but he was not answering. I thought to myself, "C'mon Moran, you can do this, Newark's not this big. Stoned college students find their way around all the time."   Suddenly I remembered that my good buddy Kristen is a UD grad, and luckily, she also answers her phone with regularity. Kristen was kind enough to not only give me directions, but to stay on the phone with me like some kind of directional 911 operator.

We found the place with moments to spare. I started herding the troops in the door and I notice something suspicious... everyone coming out of the rink is dressed in normal clothes. That's not totally accurate, the obvious skaters were wearing long sleeves and pants, but the spectators were all in shorts. Great. So lesson learned, in 100 degree heat, even the ice rink is warm and you look like an asshole if your kids are wearing sweatshirts.

Anytime I enter a building that is not specifically designed for small children, I get the same feeling I do when playing pinball and you get the "multi-ball" prize. Trying to keep my eyes on all the kids, trying to make sure that they're going the right direction and occasionally whacking one so send it the way you want it to go. I herded them all over to the bench and that's when I realized that I don't have the prepaid skate rental card. Luckily, the woman at the desk took pity on me and didn't make me take all four kids back to buy a skate rental. I grabbed the skates and ran back to where all the kids were sitting.  Skates get on and that's when I realized I'd forgotten the helmet and gloves. Damn. Oh well, what's a little head injury between friends, off you go Ellie.

Ellie skated out to what I hoped was her class, since I had no idea and I take the kids over to the bleachers. To get to the bleachers, you have to pass the vending machines, and every parent knows that vending machines hold the key to happiness. Every little brightly colored package contains pure child joy. Maggie immediately started begging for M&Ms and Jack just started shouting at them in two year old garble. We found a seat and I started trying to dole out the crayons and stuff I brought to entertain the kids. My next mistake was to actually try to watch Ellie doing her lessons. I looked away, and when I looked back, Jack was gone. I could hear him calling me, so I wasn't stressing, but I didn't want to lug Will around in his carrier while chasing Jack, so instead I did that thing where I backed away from Will, still facing him, trying to get a visual on Jack. I headed towards the vending machine, thinking I would find him with his face pressed against the glass. Backing up, backing up... I can see all the machines but one and there's no Jack, and his yelling is getting more frantic. One more step and I see Jack, with his arm stuck up to his shoulder inside the vending machine.

An interesting thing happened next. The lower half of my body turned to run and free him, while the upper half turned and realized that to do that I'd have to lose sight of Maggie and Will. Then the upper half turned to save Jack while the lower half tried to go back to get Maggie and Will. So after watching me do this parental watusi, a woman sitting near the car seat offered to keep an eye on him while I saved Jack from vending machine amputation.   Isn't it funny how it's completely socially acceptable to let a total stranger watch your children in a public place, but not your luggage in an airport?

So disaster averted, Jack still has the use of both arms, baby's asleep, middle children have snacks... what the hell is all over Jack???? I looked at Jack and was shocked to see that in one minute he's covered in mess. Brown and red mess. While my brain tried to process how he got so dirty so fast, he smiled at me and spit out the chewed up M&Ms he had in his mouth and smeared the results all over his shirt and pants. My first thought, I'm ashamed to admit, was "That's a Gymboree shirt, damnit!" I looked at the clock with some desperation, how much time could be left? 20 minutes. All this had happened within the first 10 minutes of her lesson. Good God.

When people see me with all four kids, and they invariably say "you have your hands full!", my standard response is "There's never a dull moment." And I mean it. Luckily, we made it through the rest of the lesson unscathed. I marched everyone back out to the car and proceeded home with the single minded thought that I would be able to turn them all over to Jeff when I got home. My hopes and dreams were crushed when I rounded the corner at Flint Hill Road and saw his car wasn't there. So I did the only thing I could think to do... I drove around the block a couple more times until I saw he was home, cause I was keeping them all strapped to car seats until I had back up.

The next night... I sent Jeff to Maggie's gymnastics lesson with all four kids and had a glass of wine while getting my hair done. Ahhhhh.......

Breaking the Law

2010-07-08T20:58:00.000-07:00

So my girlfriends and I were chatting about our upcoming family vacations and we all agreed that we are much more stressed out in the car since having children. I don't mean the "my kids are screaming and I've listened to Wheels on the Bus 432 time" stressed out, I mean the irrational feeling that someone's going to rear end us at any minute, wiping out my whole family while I walk away unhurt kind of stressed out.

Before Ellie was born, I worked just inside the Capitol Beltway in lovely Largo, MD. The Capitol Beltway is the Thunderdome of commutes - it's kill or be killed out there. Before that, I drove in Boston, where the roads seems to have been laid out according to some evil Southern plot to kill as many Northerners as possible. I'm was not a timid driver. But then I got pregnant and something happened... I turned into my mother.
My mother has spent most of her life employing a passenger brake on my father's cars. They started dating in high school, and though I have no proof I'd be willing to bet that my father's "adventurous" driving probably affected her ability to stay completly upright in the passenger seat. Susan Moran, in addition to her many other talents, has the ability to completely disappear in a car. At least, if you're following my parents, you'll notice that my mom's head starts out at a normal height and as the speed increases, her head gets lower and lower in the car and eventually, somewhere around 50mph, poof! She plumb disappears.

Anyway, I've digressed, as per usual. So I was talking to some friends about this terrible anxiety I have in the car and I said that I was considering asking my doctor for a prescription for Xanax. I've never taken any anti-anxiety medication, but pretty much everyone I know has taken Xanax for some reason or another, so why not me? Trish, being the tried and true friend she is, right away offers to give me a couple of her Xanax so I wouldn't have to go to the doctor. I mean, is there a better friend than one who will share her prescriptions with you? I don't think so. During this conversation, I also remembered that I owed Trish money for something unrelated. So as we're parting ways, I tell her that I'll have her money at school pick up and she responds with "Okay, I'll bring the pills then too". Quickly, I realized that it would sound like to anyone overhearing that part of the conversation that Trish was my dealer and we would go to jail. Luckily, no one seemed to notice, and Trish sure enough did bring me a couple Xanax to "smooth the edges".

I did take one of "mommy's little helper" on the way to our family reunion in Shenandoah, and spent a while in a sort of haze... until I realized we'd gone the wrong way around the Beltway cause I was stoned and told Jeff to go east instead of south. I sobered up and started to pay attention then.

A couple days later, I was being followed by a cop and it dawned on me that the pills were still in my purse and if the nice police officer decided to pull me over and somehow got it in his head to search me, I'd be arrested for possession. So I drove very carefully, or gently since I am from Maryland, and came home and threw the pills away.

Between sounding like a druggie, screwing up the directions, and worrying about cavity searches, I decided that anti-anxiety medication makes me anxious.

Dad, you probably shouldn't read this

2010-06-20T19:00:00.000-07:00

So, when people find out we have four kids, there is usually some joke made about "don't you know what causes this?" Our standard response is "Eating after midnight, right?" That's partially cause that answer is a dumb as the question, and partially because it seems like we eat after midnight more often than we do anything that would actually cause pregnancy. We referred to Will as Bullseye in utero cause it he was the result of a good shot.

It's an age old joke - put a quarter in a jar for every time you have sex in the first year of marriage and then take one out for every time you have sex in every year after and you'll never run out of quarters. Every newlywed couple swears this won't happen and pretty much every couple I know that's been married for more than five years knows better.

With four kids under six, it's probably not a big surprise that my libido is a little off. Besides my hormones being totally whacked, I'm completely "touched out" by the end of the day. When the kids go to bed, the last thing I want to do is cuddle. I want to lay on the couch with my crossword puzzles or the remote control and not move, not get anything for anyone, basically be a lump. I read in a parenting magazine once (back when I read parenting magazines) that women get all their "physical contact needs" filled by their children and should remember that their husbands have "physical contact needs" too. I think I stopped reading that magazine about that time. Cause, really, seriously, the magazine wasn't happy just making me feel guilty for not making homemade peanut butter or doing some other sixty-five step craft with my two year old? Now they had to tell me I should give more blow jobs?

Then another day, I heard a report on NPR about a study that showed men whose wives felt like the housework and parenting duties were equally shared in their households had more sex. Now that tidbit I passed along to Jeff. But the thing I got from it was that sex in marriage is a big enough issue that someone did a study about it, most likely a man. Which got me thinking, Jeff does plenty of housework and we all know that he's the dad with the most, and he's not getting it all that often, how rarely do the "slacker" husbands get it?

I've done a lot of thinking about this problem recently and I realized something profound just last night... though I do get touched approximately 938,837 a day, rarely am I touched in a way that is "giving" rather than "receiving." I mean, my kids touch me to ask for a snack, to tattle on a sister, so I can lift them up, put them down, help them jump, hold them steady, kiss a boo boo, and even hugging is more like a contact sport than a comforting thing. So by the end of the day, my touching quota has been met in spades, but I'm emotionally drained. (I know, I know, I'm supposed to look at my children and feel overwhelmed with love every second of the day. Newsflash, a lot of the time, I look at them and just feel overwhelmed) So though I cringe at the thought of more touching, I need to remember that Jeff is the only one who can really fill tathe emotional quota. So I asked him for a hug last night, and it was the best hug I've gotten in a long, long time. It was just a hug, with no ulterior "this backrub could turn into a full body" vibe to it. I can't tell you how much better I felt, and how much more interested I was in that hug turning into something else.

So ladies, tell your husbands to do more housework, take more time with the kids, but mostly, tell them to give you a hug!

Perspective is a funny thing

2010-06-18T14:07:00.000-07:00

I was just looking at the most recent pictures I've taken of my kids and thinking that I don't remember getting that messy as a kid. Then I realized that's probably not because I didn't get dirty, but because kids don't see dirt. They look at a mud puddle and see possibilities. Moms look at mud puddles and see laundry.

Stop it you StinkyBucketSmeller!

2010-06-16T14:12:00.000-07:00

Nanny Nanny Nah Nah! The universal refrain of childhood. When we embarked on this child rearing adventure, like all first time parents, Jeff and I had a fantasy about what our children would be like. For the most part, in the early days, Ellie complied with that fantasy. Ellie was a lovely baby; smiled when anyone smiled at her, rarely threw tantrums in public, and generally pooped before we got in the car. She was also very docile. The first time she tried to put her fingers in an outlet, I shouted "No!" and that was the end of outlet curiosity. To this day, she's very aware of rules and in general, good about following them. Except for one. No Name Calling.

I don't know how it happened. I don't call her names. Jeff and I don't fight in front of the children. All the parenting magazines told me that if we limited her TV watching, fed her green vegetables, and only bought her educational toys this wouldn't happen. Alas, my darling girl has turned into a name calling, back talking, teasing, tongue sticker outer. Sigh.

Being teased is a right of passage for all kids, I guess. And those of you that have siblings know that there is no one God's green Earth who teases you more than your sister. However, I was a kid that was much more likely to be on the receiving end of teasing rather than the giving end. A pretty shy kid, I wore glasses, had crooked teeth, and bad hair complicated by a bad decision to get a perm in 1986. My parents moved us around a couple times and we eventually landed in Cumberland, MD, home of the 1984 State Marbles Champion. This is where I earned the nickname "Batgirl" for my horrendous octagon shaped glasses, that I got cause I read a book in which a shy girl gets octagon shaped glasses and almost immediately becomes popular. Not so much.

Needless to say, I'm now sensitive to the issue of name calling. I try to tread a fine line between intervening and letting it go, and I'm afraid that I'm simply going to confuse the issue. Besides, it's a terribly complex thing to explain to a 5 year old... some names are okay to call people - smartypants for instance. And something can be stupid, but someone can't? What if the name is accurate - calling the lady in the too small outfit a fatso is accurate for sure, but definitely not allowed. They're often extrodinarily creative names; "fartybabycarrotface", "poopydinnertablesitter"... you almost have to give them credit for originality.

A couple years ago, I was sitting at the pool with my friend and we were complaining about how hard parenting is as we watched our kids, all 5 and under at the time, play in the baby pool. A woman leaned over to us and said "I hate to interrupt, but this is the easy part. Little kids have little problems, big kids have big problems." She's absolutely right, and Ellie's still pretty little. I'm afraid that this is just the tip of the iceberg for us, and I'm bracing myself for the ride. Wait until school starts!

Summertime memories

2010-05-25T17:14:00.000-07:00

When I close my eyes and think of my childhood summers, the first thing that comes to mind is Noxema. My dad is a great believer in Noxema. Sun burns, minor cuts and scrapes, bug bites… there’s nothing that couldn’t be cured with Noxema. Once on vacation, my brother threw me into a pool, almost. I hit the side of the pool with my back and some well intentioned person told my parents, after they dragged my bloody screaming self from the pool that with an injury like that, I may have permanent disabilities. My dad made me walk up four flights of stairs and applied Noxema liberally to my wound. He swears to this day that my unaffected ability to walk can be credited to that creamy white miracle cure.

I remembered...

2010-04-23T16:15:00.000-07:00

So, I remembered what I was going to write about last night... the adventures of my car. Last week, I was sitting at a stop light, when BAM!, my car gets hit. I thought that I had been rear ended, so I put the car in park and got out to look accusingly at the person behind me.

When I got out to look however, the person behind me was far behind me, no way she'd hit me. I looked around and saw my driver side passenger door and there's an enormous dent in it. On the ground next to my car was a tire. Just a tire. I looked around to find the car that must be pulled over with three tires. There's none to be found. I must have had the dumbest look on my face, cause the woman in the car behind me yells out the window that the tire fell off a truck going the other way.

I got back in the car, after wrestling with whether or not I should take the tire with me, and started towards home. I decided that it must have fallen out of the bed of a truck, cause surely if it was off a moving vehicle, it would have had to stop. Grumbling to myself about insurance deductibles, I stopped at the stoplight in front of my development. That was when I banged a U-turn and went in search of the vehicle with the missing tire. And about two miles up the road there was a truck pulling a horse trailer pulled over, driver and passenger on the side of the road. I pulled up behind him and asked out the window, "Did you lose a tire?" They nodded... yay me! Mystery solved. The horse trailer had "duelie" tires, two tires on the back and one had come off. The driver was on the phone, and I lost my temper a bit when he didn't hang up to talk to me. "You hit me and I have a two week old in the car! You need to deal with me." I told him. This got him moving.

Because it's me this happened to, of course there's a weird twist. The truck and trailer didn't belong to the driver or passenger, turns out they were just driving the horses from Delaware Park for their trainers. And they didn't speak English. And they couldn't find the registration or insurance. I asked the driver for his boss' phone number and he hands me his Iphone with the contact name "Boss" with a number listed. Skeptical, I asked him to call it. Sure enough, a nice lady answered and I explained what happened. She gave me all the information I needed and I went on my merry way, all proud of myself, feeling like Cagney or Lacey (well, I always feel like Lacey I guess) for having discovered the tire's owner.

Again, because it's me and I live in Delaware, there's another weird thing... I was at swim lessons for the girls when I saw another mommy I know. She's a horse trainer too and I told her what had happened. She looked very surprised and pointed at another mom, "That was her trailer." What? The number I'd called was a Florida number, and the insurance company had confirmed the truck was registered in Florida. Turns out, the owners live half the year here, and her kid is in swim lessons at the same time as mine. So I introduced myself and told her that her insurance company was very nice. It was slightly awkward!

So for a couple days, I got to drive a Chrysler Town and Country - ahh... that's how the other half lives. Ellie actually offered to give me her allowance so we could buy it. Keep dreaming honey. We're driving the Blueberry until the wheels fall off.... wait a minute... I know someone that happened too!

Wait, I had a really good idea... no, it's gone

2010-04-22T17:22:00.000-07:00

The other day, an old friend stopped by for a bit. She has two kids, aged 7 and 10. I only had Jack and Will with me at the time, the girls were at school. In the hour and a half she was here, I got up and down no fewer than 946 times. Well, I may be exaggerating, but it was probably at least 15 times. I never think about how much up and down and running back and forth I do until I have someone with me that doesn't have to do it.

Since then, I've been doing a little observation and I realized that I don't have any conversation between the hours of 7AM and 8PM that aren't interrupted. I can barely get one complete sentence out, forget a whole conversation. After some unscientific observation, I've realized that none of my friends do either. The average conversation sounds like this:

Me: "Oh, hey I saw something at Kohl's that I... Put that down!"
Friend: "I like Kohl's but I ususally end up at... don't hit him!"
Me: "I was talking to... yes you can have a snack"
Friend: "What was I saying?"

It's shocking that any of us know anything about each other at all. It's even more amazing that, though I seem to never finish a sentence, I feel like I talk all day. Jeff often asks if I'm mad at him cause I don't want to talk after the kids go to bed, but the truth is, I just flat out don't have anything left to say.

Recently some helpful person told me that women lose up to 10% of their brain cells during pregnancy. This means that I've lost 40% of my brain in the last five years. I have hope that it will come back, but I'm not optimistic. Just to prove my point, I opened this blog to write about something and then forgot what it was. So I wrote about forgetting things instead.

Go figure.

Teacher Maggie

2010-04-13T10:44:00.000-07:00

So much of parenting is recapturing your own sense of wonder. I think it's easy as adults to forget that our kids are exploring and learning all the time, and that they don't have "places to go and people to see". Every morning, as we try to get everyone ready and out the door, I silently curse the girls "surprise" that I need them to get dressed and fed and combed. We do this everyday girls, I say everyday.

Today, I was hurrying Maggie out the door and she was not paying attention. I started to count, "Maggie, get in the car before I get to 5 or I'll take your toy away... 1, 2" only to be interrupted by her saying in an equally frustrated voice, "I'm getting you a present!" Sure enough, she comes around the car holding a branch from our forsythia bush. It was beautiful and sweet, and I was reminded that sometimes you just got to let your kids be late to school so that they can learn.

A night in the life of the Lacey's

2010-04-09T18:23:00.000-07:00

5:30 - Jeff gets home
5:45 - Family sits down to eat dinner
6:00 - Jack starts throwing food
6:01 - Erin starts asking if it's Jack's bedtime yet
6:15 - Girls are running around, playing "Catch the Ellie" or something like it
6:23 - Jack throws his sippy cup at Erin's head
6:24 - Jack goes up to bed for his own safety
6:43 - Girls ask if they can have a treat
6:44 - Girls are reminded that being good is it's own reward
7:00 - Girls head to bed, Will has his dinner
7:03 - Girls begin to fight over who is picking the Calvin and Hobbes book
7:04 - Jeff tells girls that it doesn't matter who picked it cause they both get to hear it
7:12 - Jeff finishes books, starts story time
7:13 - Ellie tells Jeff he's telling the story wrong
7:14 - Jeff threatens to leave the room
7:25 - Song time starts
7:30 - Jeff goes to our room to wait for the girls to fall asleep
8:30 - Erin wakes Jeff up
8:45 - Erin and Jeff realize that there's nothing on TV to watch and go back to bed
9:00 - Will poops
9:30 - Baby is back in his cradle, lights off for Jeff and Erin
11:00 - Will wakes up
11:30 - Will is back down
12:30 - Ellie sneaks into our room
12:35 - Erin and Jeff make a "nest" for Ellie on the floor of our room
1:30 - Will is back up
2:00 - Will is back asleep
3:00 - Jack wakes up
3:30 - Jack stops crying, goes back to sleep
4:30 - Maggie wakes up, wants to go downstairs
5:00 - Erin and Jeff talk Maggie into our bed
5:30 - After being kicked for 30 minutes, Erin goes to sleep in the girls' room
6:00 - Jeff gets up with girls, Will wakes up
7:00 - Jack wakes up
7:30 - Erin gets up, Jeff goes to work

So... if I seem out of it, now you know why!!!

The trauma of childhood

2010-04-07T19:13:00.000-07:00

So last summer, Dale, Jeff's dad, bought an enormous wooden playset for our kids. The Trading Post it's called. It's huge. If anything catastrphic happens to our house, we could, all six of us, live in it. It's a thing of beauty. However, we already had a Little Tykes playset that our friends had given us several years before. the night before the Trading Post was to be installed, Jeff had begun to disassemble the Little Tykes set. Ellie freaked out. Melted into a total puddle of toddler. So the Little Tykes set stayed.

Almost a whole year later, there were still two playsets in my backyard. In my spazzing out during my last week of pregnancy, when I started pretty much throwing everything out that wasn't nailed down and one of the casulties was the playset. Friday was the day it was scheduled to go to a new family.

I'll go on the record here and say that Jeff was against this project, cause he knew that Ellie would freak out. My response, being the hard hearted mommy I am is that into every life some tears must fall and we simply don't need two playsets. Also, we plan on using the proceeds from the sale of the set to build an enormous sandbox, so don't cry for Ellie, Argentina.

Anyway, Friday came, and I took the kids to Johna's so they wouldn't have to witness the dismembering of the playset. Saturday, we went to Mom and Dad's house for Easter weekend, and no one noticed the missing playset before we left. The girls spent a couple days in Salisbury and they came home today. The girls wouldn't nap, so in a fit of frustration, I sent them outside by themselves. I sat down at the computer to do some important Facebooking, and that's when I heard the realization hit.... "Where's my PLAYSET????"

I went outside to see Ellie in tears, trying to get Maggie to be upset with her. "Maggie, it's gone! It's gone! Where did it go?" I grabbed Ellie up onto my lap and gently explained that the Easter Bunny had taken the playset to another family. I said "you know how you got a new Zhu Zhu pet from the Easter Bunny?" She nodded and I continued, "well, you got a new toy, so we had to give another away." Zhu Zhu pet for a playset? C'mon Mom, even a 5 year old knows that's a shitty trade.

Ellie is normally my mild mannered child, but when she melts down, it's a full on Silkwood. She was on my lap explaining to me how much the playset meant to her when she pulled out, "It was on my list of things to do this summer." I had to literally bite the inside of my lip to keep from laughing. "You have a list?" I asked. "Yes! I was going to swing, roller skate, pick flowers, play ball, slide on the colored playset, ice skate, and pick more flowers." Kid's been making plans without me apparently.

Finally, I was able to convince her that her entire summer wouldn't be ruined, and I told her that she could pick the spot for the sand box. The combo of many hugs and kisses and some control seemed to do the trick and she was fine for the rest of the evening.

Lesson learned? You can't pull as much over on a 5 year old as you can a 3 year old!

New Sideshow Freak - the eternally pregnant woman!

2010-04-07T10:30:00.000-07:00

Believe it or not, I started a blog in February about how well I was coping with being pregnant. I thought I was doing really well with holding it together. Then... the waiting began. You see, though I always go a week late, I had (once again) convinced myself that I would have this baby early. I talked a good game about how I didn't expect to have the baby before March 15, but in my heart of hearts, I thought I'd have a late Feb/early March baby. Boy, was I wrong.

Mom, in true best Mom on the planet style, basically moved in with us in the month of February to help me (read keep me from killing the kids). I told her that someday, the girls would know how grateful they should be to her for being here, cause the amount of beating they would have received was greatly reduced. After a week or so of being here, Mom gently suggested that we put the girls back in pre-school and I quickly realized that she was right. My ability to do anything creative or fun had really been sucked entirely out of my body. So we signed them back up and after a couple gigantic snow storms, they started in March.

March 9, my due date, rolled up on the calendar and now my dad joined the party. He was pretty convinced I would have the baby quickly, and wanted to be here to help at a moments notice. (here's where I'll tell people that don't know, my parents live about 2 hours away and we all thought this baby would pretty much fall out of me, this is why being close was important) No baby on March 9. No baby on March 10. Do you see a pattern? I had an ultrasound at 40 weeks to check on Bullseye - they predicted the baby weighed 11 pounds 3 ounces. We all laughed. This baby wouldn't be anywhere close to that, those late ultrasounds are so inaccurate. This baby would be 10 pounds probably, but no more...

By March 15, I started to lose my sense of humor. People started telling me that we'd HAVE to name the baby Patrick or Patricia if it was born on St. Patrick's Day. My response? Would I name the baby Jesus if it was born on Christmas? NO.

Advice on how to go into labor poured in. Seriously? I thought, I've had 3 babies, don't you think I've tried all this crap? But try it again I did. Indian food, raspberry leaf tea, castor oil, chinese food, coffee ice cream... nada. Walk, walk, walk! People said. Like it's my fault that I'm not in labor cause I'm lazy and obviously not doing enough to go into labor. March 17 went by, I wanted to have a ceremonial burning of the "Baby's First St. Patrick's Day" outfits. March 18, 19, 20.... In my more morose moments I felt like I was disappointing everyone by not having the baby. My parents had basically put their lives on hold and were living in my house. My poor dad is hobbling around on a bad knee, but hadn't scheduled an MRI cause he was at my house helping me out. And in the background, the voices started... there's something wrong... there's a reason this baby isn't being born. I'm going to have to have a c-section, the baby's got a problem, something's not right...

If I went two weeks overdue, I would automatically be transferred from the Birth Center to Dr. Cookse's care at Christiana and I'd be induced. Mom superstitiously believed that I was waiting for Dorinda to be on call before I'd have the baby and would ask if she was on after each visit. Sunday, the 21st, I got the stomach bug that had already struck down most of the house. I woke up and was immediately ill. After having a boo hoo in the shower, I called Jeff upstairs and told him that he needed to make everyone leave the house for the day. I basically wanted to sit on the couch and feel sorry for myself all day, without anyone observing the puddle of depressed pregnant woman I was going to become.

Monday the 22 was it, the deadline. At 9AM, I had an appointment to have my water broken, a non-pharmaceutical induction method. We showed up only to be told the baby was still too high to break my water. (If you break your water and the baby is high, the umbilical cord can come out first and that's a big problem) After a little discussion, Dorinda suggested that I try castor oil again. Okay, sure, why not. So she goes and gets the biggest dose of castor oil I have ever seen in my life. It was a dixie cup FULL. In case that doesn't sound like much, go get a dixie cup, fill it with Wesson Oil and drink it. I made if halfway through the dose, gagged, but rallied to finish it. I tried to imagine it was Jagermeister. After a chaser of cranberry juice and a spoonful of peanut butter to kill the taste, we were sent to go eat some breakfast and walk for a couple hours, with orders to return around 1. The last thing Dorinda told me on the way out the door was that if I wasn't having contractions by then, or the baby hadn't moved down at all, I would be going to the hospital that night to be induced.

To Cosmo's Diner we went, where Jeff's mom joined us. After breakfast, we went to Babies R Us, cause seriously, where else can a woman that pregnant go without drawing alot of attention to herself? I started feeling some crampiness, but chalked it up to the castor oil. We bought some binkies for Jack and headed back to the Birth Center, where I was now completely certain I would find out what time my induction was scheduled. On the way, I told Jeff that I had gotten right with the idea of going to the hospital. Jeff asked me what I wanted at the hospital - drugs or no drugs? I said DRUGS. Absolutely. If I was going to the hospital to get a pitocin drip, I was getting the full court press. Drugs, a couple days in the hospital, the whole works.

We got back to the Birth Center and I had just gotten the words, "I'm feeling a little something" out of my mouth when a contraction like a freight train hit me. Suddenly, I was in full "labor song". My mom burst into tears. That morning, I was 2-3 cm. When they checked me now, I was 5. Hooray castor oil. The old wives know of what they speak. Sarah, the midwife, began filling the water birth tub and now contractions were coming every three minutes or so and they were getting more intense. I kept looking at the level of the water in the tub, thinking when can I get in? Everyone had told me that the water would really help ease the pain and relax me, and I was ready to be eased and relaxed. Finally it was ready and things started really rocking and rolling. Kristen arrived to be my photojournalist and Johna came in for moral support.

The whole time I was in the tub, I was trying to concentrate on the things that my friend Michelle Uy had told me about hypnobirthing - each contraction is one closer to the baby, my body is doing the things it needs to do, etc. It was now around 2 and we all took bets on when the baby would make it's arrival - 3PM was the general consensus. Great, I can do this for an hour, I thought, I can do anything for an hour. I was fully dialated except for a "lip" of cervix by 2:45 and was definitely feeling the urge to push. Sarah did some midwife magic and we thought we got the lip out of the way. Out of the tub I came and onto the bed, which hurt like a son of a bitch. So we tried the birth stool, which is basically a chair with the middle cut out. Strangely enough, contractions on the birth stool were not particularly painful, but they also weren't effective. I was pushing and pushing and pushing, and nothing was happening. Now the crazy voices in my head began to take over. Every person who had told me a c-section story had a moment in my head. It was 3:30 and I said to Sarah, "This isn't right. I don't push for hours." I only pushed for 8 minutes with Jack for crying out loud. Sarah kept assuring me that things were fine, but I wasn't believing her. I totally lost my head and at one point told Jeff that he needed to do something cause no one was listening to me. Sarah went to go get Dorinda for a consultation.

Now, let me tell you about Dorinda. Jeff and I joke that when she's not delivering babies, she's busy changing the seasons, cause she's actually Mother Nature. Dorinda Dove is EXACTLY what you think a midwife is going to be like. She's capable, confident, and caring without being schmaltzy. She delivered both Maggie and Jack, and in both cases, she came in at the end of my labors to do it. She swept in the room this time and the whole energy of the room changed. Up to then, it had been very quiet, except for the beepclick of Kristen's camera. Sarah is an excellent midwife, but the quiet confidence of Dorinda seemed to open up all my support people. I know that my mom was relieved to see her, it made it feel like if something was wrong, Dorinda would fix it, or know when to call it.

Dorinda checked me and found the cervix was still there. She pushed it out of the way, and then moved to let Sarah take back over. She didn't leave though, she stayed with us, and for that I will always be grateful. She sat by my head and told me what to do. If she had told me I could push for five more hours, I probably would have believed her. The other thing that changed was Kristen and Johna began to cheer me on. Because they could now see the progress I was making, and because they're good enough friends that I know they would bullshit me, I knew if they were excited, I really was making progress. I can still hear Kristen's excited voice telling me I was doing it. They probably don't realize how much that really helped me. People think it's weird that I have a lot of people at my births, but it works for me. I thrive on that kind of energy.

Finally, the baby made it's way into the world.... and it's a BOY! William Jeffrey Lacey. He was completely grayish blue though and didn't cry when they put him on my chest. After a couple scary seconds, with oxygen and much rubbing by the midwife and nurse, he began to cry and pink up. Everyone was immediately taken with how BIG this child was. My first thought was, Thank GOD That's over!, but my second was "Holy crap, look at his cheeks!" Turns out that he was "sunny side up" or upside down in the birth canal. What this means is that A) his head didn't put equal pressure on my cervix which is probably why I didn't go into labor earlier and B) that I had to push the widest part of his ENORMOUS head out. Babies' heads are like little transformers and when they're born the right way, the head compresses to be born. Not my boys, cause Jack was the same way. Stinkers.

Normally, the staff of the Birth Center is in no hurry to take your baby away from you to measure him, but this time, you could tell they wanted a weight on this kid. So when I was getting myself taken care of, Colleen, the nurse, weighed the monster baby... 11 pounds 3 ounces... just like the damned ultrasound said.

In the end, we have a beautiful baby boy to complete our family. Three boys and three girls, including Jeff and me. Joey is the deciding vote, but he's neutered so he can go either way. We couldn't feel more blessed and I now feel like our family is complete. Each girl has a little brother to bother her, each brother has a sister to introduce him to cute girls. Life at the Lacey's is good.

People keep asking me how I feel, am I having baby blues, etc. I think I got all my baby blues out in the last two weeks of pregnancy and now I'm just so happy to not be the endlessly pregnant woman that I can't imagine being anything but all smiles.

Thank you again to everyone who supported me during this journey... from the beginning to the LONG awaited end. Every joke, every FB post, every phone call or babysitting duty, they were all appreciated. I have to especially thank Jeff, my patient and wonderful husband, who dealt with all the ups and downs of this pregnancy. I joke all the time that I got a deluxe model husband, but it's times like this when a man's quality really shows! Stay tuned, I'm sure there will be more craziness to come, just not pregnant crazy!

Things I've learned about men

2010-02-17T18:02:00.000-08:00

Many moons ago, Jeff and I were caravaning on the way to Pittsburgh to visit family with my parents, when we all stopped at a rest stop to take care of nature. As my mom and I went to the ladies, I had the random thought that it might be strange for Jeff to go pee with my dad. Seeing as how they all stand up next to each other and such. I mean, I wouldn't want to squat along the side of the road with my mother in law, as much as I love her. So when we got back into the car, I asked him if it was strange. Jeff looked at me like I had asked him if it was strange that birds fly and fish swim. Patiently, Jeff explained to me that, no it isn't strange, and then launched into describing the rules that define male bathroom etiquitte. There are tacit rules that boys learn at some age - personally I think they must teach it when they separate the boys and girls in health class, or maybe it's just part of the DNA in the Y chromosome. All men know it implicitly. There's even a game on the internet - The Urinal Game - where men can test their knowledge.

From that day on, it was as if a whole world had been opened that I never knew existed. There are two kinds of houses - open bathroom doors and closed bathroom doors and my family is firmly in the closed bathroom door camp. As I child, I believed my father slept completely clothed. He would emerge, fully dressed as if from Zeus's forehead. And as a teenager, I mostly tried to not think about my older brother's bathroom habits. From then on out, I lived with women. So when Jeff opened up this door to the secret life of men, I had to find out more: What are urinal cakes? Do men really pee in troughs at ball games? Why didn't the guy that sat next to me at my old job at least try to hide the newspaper he carried out with him every day at 3:30?

Jeff still tries to maintain some of the secrecy... for instance, he won't give me a straight answer about why it takes 45minutes for men to poop. I have several theories, depending on how annoyed I am that day. One is that the mother ship "uploads" her commands via the toilet. My mom and I spend much time debating this concept, but in the end, I've decided that women have missed a huge opportunity here and have ceded the bathroom majority to the men. For a while I considered slipping Jeff an iron pill every day to see if his productivity went up in direct proportion to the decrease in bathroom visitations.

I'm not sure why I'm sharing this on my blog, other than I'm tired of bitching about being pregnant, but Jeff wants me to add this final thought - Ladies talk proudly to each from stall to stall, because men are not allowed to speak.

Hear that? That's the cavalry!

2010-01-30T19:24:00.000-08:00

Apparently I must have sounded pathetic in my last blog post, cause yesterday I got a call from my old friend Naida, who decided to take pity on me and drive from Boston to visit and cook. Naida, in addition to her many other talents, is a trained pastry chef, so there was definitely an element of "ooh, we're going to eat really good all weekend" to my excitement.

I met Naida in my pre-mommy days, and it's good to have someone from the long ago and far away to give me some perspective on my life outside of mommydom. It's so easy to forget that six years ago, I had a life that didn't involve constantly watching for life's hidden dangers, like wall outlets and magnets. We used to work together, in my wild and crazy single days living in Boston - you know the days my kids will never believe I had.

As moms we so easily give up our whole selves to our kids, we need to remember that our kids don't define us. That's part of the reason I am so glad to have friends like Naida from the 'old days', and also why "Moms Night Out" is vital to my sanity. Without my fellow moms, I'd go totally mad!

34 weeks

2010-01-26T15:20:00.000-08:00

Wow, time flies when you're having fun... which is how I can prove for certain that the last 10 weeks of pregnancy are no fun at all! It's amazing how the first and second trimester flew by and for all my effort to convince myself that February is a short month, I can't shake the feeling that it's forever until I have little Bullseye.

To take my mind of things, the kids have all graciously decided to get sick at one time. There's a special kind of hell that is three kids having three fevers and three coughs in the same night. Add to that, my pregnancy issues and Jeff's "surgical" scars, and the five of us were a pretty pitiful crew this weekend. I'm patiently waiting for the part of the movie where the cavalry arrives and tells me that they'll do all the laundry and cooking for a week or so. :)

By way of getting out of the house today, without overly exposing anyone to our germs, I took the kids to Babies R Us with the idea that they could each pick a small gift out for Bullseye. Ellie right away picked out a stuffed dog and Maggie chose a frilly, girly outfit. I tried to explain to Mags that we couldn't get a girly outfit, cause we don't know what kind of baby we're having. She threw an epic fit - screaming and yelling that it was a girl baby and that was it. She doesn't want a boy baby. She only wants a girl baby. Don't know how we're going to handle that in case it doesn't go her way in the end. Ellie, ever the problem solver, says to me that we can buy two outfits, one boy, one girl and then take back whichever we don't need. When did she learn about returns???

My cousin Susan is now 38 weeks preggers, and my friend Krisanne is 36, so I'm now marking time by the buns in their ovens. I'm trying not to go crazy like I always do at the end of pregnancy. I think I'm probably going to fail, but it's worth a shot. My cousin Lori, who is also pregnant, keeps reminding me that this is my last pregnancy and I should try to savor it. To me, that's like trying to savor a root canal. Pregnancy is cool and all, but seriously, I'm way more into actually having the baby.

Remind me of that when I'm blogging about how little sleep we're getting!

My turn.

2010-01-16T09:54:00.000-08:00

Ah... so this week was my birthday. I thought about asking my mom to blog about it for me, and I still may. I know that I was born a couple weeks early, induced because of my mom's pre-eclampsia. I was a bitty thing - 5lbs 3 oz - and not a very attractive baby, if the pictures are to be believed.

As anyone with a birthday close to Christmas will tell you, it sort of sucks. There's a lot of that "this is for Christmas AND your birthday" stuff going on, and even at 6 I knew damned well that they weren't giving my brother and Christmas/Birthday presents. No, he'd get another whole round of gifts in June! To this day, I refuse to open birthday presents given to me at Christmas until my birthday. My poor mom, her birthday is December 27, so she really gets the fuzzy end of the lollipop. When Jeff and I talked about having kids, I swore that I wouldn't have a child near Christmastime... and hello Ellie my little January 4th baby. Oh well, the best laid plans.... Anyway, all this may lead you to the idea that I might be a little bit sensitive about my birthday, and you'd be right. So in my adulthood, this has translated into I like to throw parties for myself and make a big fuss over it.

For my 30th birthday, Jeff threw me a big surprise party at a deuling piano bar in Baltimore. I knew that there was a party, and I knew that it was at Howl at the Moon, but what I didn't know was that he had secretly told everyone to wear shorts and t-shirts under their sweaters and he'd bought luau paraphanalia from Oriental Trading Company. At a signal, shirts and pants came off, the box was whipped out and suddenly I was surrounded by people in grass skirts and Hawaiian shirts... a luau in January!

For my 34th, I had an "adult" party here at the house for my girlfriends. We had a denmonstrator from Pure Romance or one of those places come and show us her wares. I am not really a girl who talks about such things, so my friends took great pleasure in my embarrasment and watching me blush with each more outrageous thing she would display. The best part of that night was when she had Johna "try on" a piece of equipment (over her clothes thankyou) and then turned it on without telling her. Johna, who is about 110 soaking wet, damn near knocked the girl over my railing and down the stairs.

And this year, I've hired a psychic to come and do readings for some of my friends. I used to go every year on my birthday with my friend Casey and it's a fun little tradition I've missed since Boston. So, my next blog will contain all her predictions for my future... I'm hoping she'll tell me when this baby is coming and maybe even what flavor of baby I'm having! Stay tuned!

31 weeks and counting

2010-01-08T06:53:00.000-08:00

I've officially reached the point in pregnancy when people look at me and either smile benevolently or look worried that my water is going to break. When I was pregnant the first time, I never asked for help or took it when it was offered, but I've learned that the kindness of man only extends so far and you might as well take advantage while you can. For instance, I regularly get offered help to the car with groceries, packages, etc., when I DON'T have any kids with me. When the children are with me, I'm on my own. And God forbid you do anything like grocery shop with a newborn... people are as likely to tell you how irresponsible a parent you are for bringing your new baby out as they are to help you. I had a man in Costco seriously get in my face when Jack was about two weeks old for bringing him to the store. I finally told him that he had two older sisters and the dangers were probably fewer in public than at home.

Seriously, she's 5?

2010-01-04T16:54:00.000-08:00

I know it's the old cliche, but man, the years do fly. Actually, I heard it put a better way by my friend Mish, the days are long, but the years are short. My Elliebelliecicleweedpie is 5. I don't know why that seems momentous, but it certainly does.

As I have done for her sister and brother, I guess I should take a moment to chronicle her birth here in cyberspace...

Jeff and I had lunch one day in April 2004, and had a couple beers. We had been "trying" to get pregnant for a month or two and when we got home, with a bit of an afternoon buzz on, Jeff told me to take a pregnancy test. I went to the powder room, and Jeff played the piano to distract himself... much to my shock, it was positive. I walked out of the bathroom and said "Jeff?" He stopped playing, turned around to look at me and I just nodded. Speechless, he simply hugged and kissed me and we just sort of looked at each other in a "what do we do now" kind of way. Immediately, we said we would keep it a secret for the prescribed 12 weeks. After about 30 seconds of complete secrecy, I decided that I would be completely unable to talk to my mother for 8 more weeks and this was not a tenable solution. So we agreed to call the grandparents that day, and "just tell them". Their reactions were much as you'd think they'd be - total joy and surprise. First thing the next morning, my mother called me, telling me that they'd determined that they would be buying a pony, installing a merry go round and hiring a clown within the next 9 months.

Jeff referred to my first pregnancy as the "Great Wife Experiment" and that it was. He largely stared at me like I was an interesting, if terrifying specimen of never before seen insect, until I finally freaked out about it at week 9 or so. Mercifully, I never suffered morning sickness, but the first trimester exhaustion was something I could never have imagined. I would get home from work at 6:30, sleep until 7:30, Jeff would wake me for dinner, I'd eat, drooping in my plate, and then go to bed by 8:30. Each morning, Jeff would make me lovely yogurt smoothies and send me to work with bags of healthy snacks and strict instructions to drink 400 ounces of water.

Before I got pregnant, I had some recurring back trouble and was actually scheduled for an MRI that was cancelled because of pregnancy. During the second and third trimesters, my back grew increasingly painful, but I mostly attributed it to pregnancy weight gain. By the third trimester, I couldn't really pick my left foot up much past stair height and actually needed assistance to do things like tie my shoes. My other complaint was heart racing. I would be sitting perfectly still and suddenly, my heart would begin to beat as though I was running a race, getting into the 120s - 140s. Luckily, I was working at an office furniture dealership, cause after this happened, I'd have to lay down for twenty minutes, so the couches came in handy. My doctor, who was very soft spoken, calm doctor, told me this was perfectly normal and if it got worse, he'd put me on bedrest. This was Dr. Yadav's answer to any question - "Dr. Yadav, my head fell off yesterday. That's normal, if it gets worse, we'll put you on bedrest." When this heart racing thing started to happen while I was driving on the Capital Beltway, however, I got nervous. Nothing like thinking you're going to pass out while driving on that crazy road to make you think twice about driving. So, Dr. Yadav put me on "house arrest" meaning I couldn't drive anymore. The day before Thanksgiving 2004 was my last day of work in 5 years...

Now stuck at home, I became fully convinced that I would have this baby early. Jeff was 6 weeks early, and so was I, so surely our baby would be early. The holidays sped towards me and I still had a baby on board. My due date was December 28, and I thought I would certainly have a baby before Christmas. Christmas eve, we drove to 34th Street in Baltimore and oohed and aahed over the crazy light display and all the while I silently counted contractions. I hoped that this was the big one... nope. December 25, 26, 27, 28... nothing. December 29, 30... nothing. I developed the "three freakout a day" pattern: 1. Wake up and cry cause I'm still pregnant 2. Look at the clock at 3PM and cry cause even if I go into labor today, I won't have a baby until tomorrow 3. Go to bed crying cause I'm still not in labor.

The phone became my enemy. Every call was some well meaning person asking if we'd had the baby, and God forbid you don't answer when you're 41 weeks pregnant. Jeff sent emails telling people "don't call us, we'll call you." New Year's Eve, we possibly the morosest dinner of our marriage at Hunan Manor in Columbia. New Year's Day, we drove to Ocean City, MD, three hours from our hospital, in a bid to dare my uterus to act up. Finally on January 3, 2005, we went to Dr. Yadav for our 41 week exam and he told us that we were going to have a baby sometime in the next 24 hours.

You see, I had gone for an ultrasound the Friday before, and the result was that they were estimating the baby would be 10 pounds, 6 ounces and they didn't want it to get any bigger so induction it was for me. HOLY CRAP! My mind screamed in denial. Jeff and I together didn't weigh 10 lbs 6 oz at birth. After mentally running around like chickens with our heads cut off, Jeff and I got our shit together, called grandparents and our friends and invited them all to have dinner with us one last time. My induction was to start at 10PM that night. I'd be on the pitocin drip all night and then in the morning, they'd start cranking it up.

So we had dinner, and then Jeff and I and our fourteen suitcases of crap went to the hospital for our induction. Let me say, Howard County General Hospital has a NICE birthing facility. The room looked like a hotel. It wasn't really until after, when I saw the pictures that I saw any medical equipment at all. It was all hidden by art work and cabinetry when I arrived. I had planned to go without an epidural, but once there, I found out that since I was an induction, I would be strapped to the bed and I said, bring on the pain meds. An IV of Nubain later, I slept all night. My last full night of sleep since.

The next day, the nurse started cranking up my pitocin. I got a lovely epidural and the grandparents all arrived to watch the Erin show. Our nurse was a nice girl, though she did seem a bit odd. Before I got the epidural, she told me to go to the bathroom, which I did. Apparently, the nurse was supposed to record this bit of information, because a little while after the parents arrived, the charge nurse came into our room and confronted our nurse, yelling at her for basic incompetance and saying that she could have caused me to have an emergency C section. They both left the room, leaving us all a bit unnerved, and then a new nurse came in and introduced herself. A few minutes after that, the original nurse comes back into the room, crying about being sent home and not being allowed to work on that floor anymore. So there I am, in labor, hugging a perfect stranger and telling her it'll be alright. What a looney.

Shortly after that excitement, it became clear that a baby was coming soon. Dr. Yadav came in, spoke quietly about how he loved the room we were in because you could watch the Medevac copter land from there and got suited up. Everyone, except Jeff and Mom cleared out to do the waiting room thing. When the moment came to push, suddenly, my quiet doctor, the man who had hardly ever spoken above a loud whisper became Mr. Hyde, shouting at me to "PUSH, PUSH, PUSH, HARDER, HARDER, HARDER." I was so shocked I swear I pushed simply so he would stop yelling at me.

Pushing was short and sweet only about an hour and out came the baby... I heard "It's a girl!" from the nurse and "She has dimples" from my mom. My first words were, "Jeff, give me your wallet" cause I knew the combo of a girl and dimples would be his undoing. Elizabeth Helen Lacey was a petite 8 lbs 9 oz, a little off from the late ultrasound estimate.

Ellie gets her name from two of her great grandmothers. You see, Jeff and I both lost our grandmothers within a couple weeks of each other. We still weren't in contact at the time, but the way we have it figured, Elizabeth Hoover and Helen Lacey must have met up in heaven and realized that their grandkids knew each other. We attribute our reuniting to them, so when we found out we were pregnant, we knew within moments that if it was a girl, she would be named for these two women we loved so dearly and missed so much. I hope that someday, we'll be able to explain to Ellie how the grace of those two ladies touched our lives and left a mark so great that we honored her with their names.

On a couple of side notes, the wacky nurse actually came to visit me in the maternity ward. I was nice to her, cause I was afraid she'd try to steal my baby or something. When I found out that I was preggers with Maggie, I went to a new practice in Columbia - one with midwives that hopefully wouldn't yell at me - and the midwife asked me why I wanted to try birth with a midwife and I explained that I was a little shaken by the idea that one person had such control over me and she said "Oh, that was YOU?" It seems the story of that nurse had made some news among the medical community in Columbia. Also, the back pain I had talked about... well, it got way worse after birth, but I was still trying to make it be about pregnancy weight. I was unable to walk any distance at all, and I mean the distance from the couch to the TV was pushing it. I went to the doctor about my wrist, which I had hurt during labor. She noticed that I was walking strangely, and after a short exam, sent me for an MRI. That was Tuesday. By Wednesday, I had seen a neurologist, and had a discectomy scheduled for Friday. The neurologist said that he'd never seen anyone with a herniation as large as mine that was able to walk, let alone control their bodily functions. The following week, I was right as rain... and I've never had back problems again. It was amazing.

All in all, Ellie has brought great joy to so many people - I never get tired of watching her charm people with her intelligence and her inquisitiveness. She is a totally unique person and she is my total joy. I try not to play favorites with my kids, but my Ellie is truly my girl in every way. I love her and I can't wait to see the girl/young lady/woman she grows into.

Thanks for indulging me in yet another LONG post... those of you that know me well, know that there are no short stories from me!

Are you done yet?

2009-12-30T17:29:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, called Columbia, MD, a man and woman got married and dreamed of someday having a family. The man, we'll call him "J", was an only child and as a result of the childhood trauma of never getting away with anything, wanted to make certain he had enough kids to spread blame around. The woman, we'll call her "E", had not much opinion on the subject, though she had once made a deal with her friend Heather that Heather would be pregnant with all the kids and E would raise them.

You may have guessed, I'm talking about us. I really didn't have much desire to have kids until Jeff and I got together. Those of you that know Jeff will understand immediately how I knew that having kids with him would be an adventure I didn't want to miss. We were married in September 2003, and didn't decide to "try" to have kids right away, so much as we didn't try to prevent things. Those of you that know me well will know that after a month or two of that not working, my goal-oriented personality kicked in and we got serious about the matter. Elizabeth Helen, "Scout" as we called her then, was discovered to exist right around May of 2004 and was born on January 4, 2005. The second she was in my arms, I knew that we would have another baby, and soon. I knew it like I knew that I was going to marry Jeff after one phone conversation.

Sure enough, nine short months later, I woke up in the middle of the night to the knowledge that I could smell the entire contents of my fridge from my bed and I knew that I was pregnant. Margaret Leigh was born in July 2006. Poor Maggie's "in utero" nickname was Avis - cause number 2 has to try harder. As anyone who has had a second child knows, the transition from one to two kids is as earth shaking as from zero to one. Maggie came out with definite opinions and an altimeter that prevented her from sleeping unless being held between 4'4" and 4'8" inches off the ground. There was a definite learning curve and Jeff and I struggled to catch up to our much smarter baby.

However on Maggie's first birthday, when it came time to throw away the "1" candle that I had used for both girls cakes, I hesitated. Partially cause Maggie had slept like a dollbaby through the whole party, her peaches and cream complexion glowing in the summer sun, but mostly cause I knew in my heart I wasn't done. Our family wasn't complete. Two months later, we were blessed with our third baby.

Jack came to us in June 2008, and he is truly a character. I am constantly amazed at how different all three of my kids are - from the way they were born to the way they play. People said to us all the time, "Guess you can stop, you have the boy!" and I would get pissed. Like my girls weren't enough for me. Coming from a matriarchal family, I can't understand the whole "carry on the family name" thing. My grandfather had three daughters, and I can't imagine that a son with the last name Hoover could do better at carrying on family traditions and teaching the generations about what it is to be a close family. I would joke with Jeff that the only way to shut people up would be to have another baby, to make it clear that we weren't "trying for a boy". The only other good reason to have a fourth baby was to make sure that our Mags didn't suffer too much from middle child syndrome. The list of reasons to not have more kids was endless. But yet, neither of us could say - to each other - that we were done. We told everyone else we were done of course, cause when you start talking about wanting a fourth child people start looking at you like you might have something contagious.

We finally decided we'd give it one month. And voila, fouth child. AKA Bullseye, due March 9th

People are funny creatures. When they see that I'm pregnant, (and you can tell from space that I'm pregnant right now, I'm as big as the damned Great Wall), people say "Oh how exciting! Your first?" and when I say, "No, it's my fourth" the smile freezes in that same way that smiles freeze when you give someone a really crappy Christmas present. "Oh, wow, you will have your hands full" is almost ALWAYS the response I get. Except for the old people, they always get happy about it and want to tell me how they're one of umpteen kids and that's the way it should be.

And just like I knew that I wanted another when Ellie was born, and like I knew that I wanted to marry Jeff, I KNOW that I'm not having anymore kids! I knew if from the start, but this pregnancy has been far and away the most difficult of the four. First I was sick for 12 weeks, then, I got a blood clot in my leg. Got the clot resolved, then I got an "incarcerated" hernia which hurt like a bitch, and for my latest trick, now I'm anemic. The ironic part of the anemia thing is that the blood clot was going to preclude me from giving birth at the Birth Center cause of the possibility of another clot. Now I'm at risk because anemia can cause you to not clot enough, and bleed out. Sheesh. Will my body make up it's mind? I'm "advanced maternal age" now - which is what they call you when you're 35, and I think that we've caught our limit.

Don't get me wrong, I know that I am blessed. For all my problems, nothing is life threatening, to either me or the baby. I'm just done. I'm thrilled to have my "little" family, and ready to face the challenge that I'm sure four kids, aged 5 and under will be. I'm doubly thrilled to face it with Jeff who is the best daddy in the world (besides my own of course) and the best husband a girl could ask for.

Now... if I could just fast forward a couple more weeks and have this baby!!!!

This must be what it's like to the be cobbler's child.

2009-11-30T09:53:00.000-08:00

If you're on Facebook, then you know that FB is a little bit of an obsession with me. You'll also probably notice that I haven't been on in a few days. Well.... it was a bad week for our computer. Jeff is a computer guy, and a very, very good one at that. He manages the team that manages thousands of desktops at Barclays. So, since I'm married to a computer whiz, I've turned over all responsibility in that area to him. Jeff likes to keep us up to date, and that means that we're always on the latest and greatest version of Windows and we just recently updated to Windows 7 - the OS to solve all problems. Unfortunately, we had a mishap. Accidentally, all of our pictures for the last two years (the pics that have been uploaded since the last update) were deleted.

Now, I consider myself a rational person, I do have a temper, but my control over my inner monologue is good and I generally don't say things in anger. I have to be pushed pretty darn far, and I have some friends who would be happy to attest to the fact that it's not pretty when I do lose control. I can't recall a time in our marriage, or even before our marriage where I have yelled at Jeff with the spectacular variety of curse words and recriminations that I did the night before Thanksgiving when we realized what had happened. All the while, I knew of course that Jeff would have turned himself inside out to undo the mistake, but I just wanted to be mad for a while.

So needless to say, I've mostly come to terms with it now and if you have any pictures of us from 2008- 2009, please forward them on! Jeff is doing his best to try to recover things and that's why I haven't been online for the past few days. Basically, until he could take the hard drive to work and see if anything is on there, we didn't want to write over any more old information. It's our very own forensic computer search.

Here's to a better week!!!

20 things I'm thankful for - not in any particular order

2009-11-25T05:34:00.000-08:00

1. Jeff
2. The Kids
3. My parents
4. My in-laws
5. My wacky family
6. Jeff getting up with Maggie most days
7. Coffee
8. The dog not having cancer
9. Facebook
10. My friends, especially those that keep me sane on a daily basis
11. Kraft Mac n Cheese
12. PBS Kids
13. The rare moments when my kids get along
14. Contact lenses
15. Instant oatmeal
16. Health insurance
17. Being born in America
18. Travel mugs
19. My sense of humor and the fact that I have people that get me
20. Coffee.... it deserved two slots.

Certainly not my comprehensive list, but not bad for 1 cup of coffee and 8:30AM.

Halloween

2009-10-31T17:51:00.000-07:00

Ahh... another hurdle to Christmas is done. Don't get me wrong, I love Halloween, but pretty much the second I get home from vacation, I'm ready to get out the sweaters and hang my stocking by the chimney. I have almost no use for August and not much more for September. I ADORE Christmas. I love the shoppers, I love the decorations, I love the 24 hour Christmas music radio station. I'm a serious dork.

However, Halloween is where we are and we had a lovely evening with our friends. Today, we babysat for my good friend Trish. Her son Tyler is only a couple months older than Maggie, so needless to say there was a lot of talking about sharing. The kids all do really well together though and it was actually a really great day with all four. Gave me a little hope for my future!

Later, a whole gaggle of my friends and their kids arrived and I had the satisfaction of having more people than I have chairs for. I seriously love to have everyone over. A long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I had a boyfriend who didn't like to have guests over. That may be unfair, I tend to stress and get wound up before people come over, especially in my pre-children, neat house days, but he didn't seem to get the same kind of enjoyment I did from having a houseful. My fantasy was that some day, I'd have the house in the neighborhood that everyone comes to and wants to hang around with us. So far, so good. Jeff is a natural entertainer and he understands that my freaking out is part of my enjoyment of the occasion :)

Well, the panic has begun.

2009-10-05T16:42:00.000-07:00

I'm now about 17 weeks pregnant with "Bullseye" and the panic over having 4 kids under age 6 has begun. How am I ever to give them all the attention they each deserve? How can we afford to send them all to college? How will I ever get a shower again?

I know that when the time comes we'll just deal with things as they come, but I have all this time to think about things. Especially with Maggie giving us such a hard time at bedtime and Jack is starting to become a light sleeper, I worry about how any of us are ever going to sleep again. I know that Jeff and I are good parents and I'm soooo thankful that we have a good relationship, cause if we didn't, I think the stress of 4 kids would put a serious crimp in our style.

Thankfully, we have many, many good friends and our parents are always there when we need them. People keep offering help, they're going to be surprised how much we take them up on it! I remind myself that there's a reason we don't really remember our early childhood and while my mom assures me it's cause I was perfect, I'm sure she yelled at me for not great reasons at times and I don't remember any of it. As a matter of fact, my earliest memory of really getting yelled at wasn't until 6th grade, when I scratched my mother's brand new car (it was an accident, but wow, you'd have thought I took a screwdriver to the paint). So in the end, hopefully, what they'll remember is the good times, not the crazy bedtimes or the not so great mornings before Mommy's had her coffee.

So in the end, this is a blog about my panic, but also a warning... don't offer help unless you mean it, and I'm sorry for the crabby pregnant lady I'm going to be for the next couple months!

Wow....

2009-10-02T10:14:00.000-07:00

you know that you're a mom when going to the dentist counts as "alone time".

Aahh... Fall

2009-09-18T12:25:00.000-07:00

September is here and I'm so happy to say goodbye to the dreaded month of August. In my world, there should be no August. Actually I'd be happy to go right from Vacation (and I think of it like that, capital letters and all), straight to sweaters. I'd almost be willing to go right to Christmas, but I do like Halloween and the crunchy chill of autumn.

We haven't really been up to a whole lot since the reunion in Pulaski. Jeff and I did celebrate our 6th wedding anniversary on the 13th. I vacillate between feeling like it's been a blink of an eye, or feeling like it's been forever. Some days, I still think "wow, I married Jeff Lacey! That's really crazy!"

You see, Jeff and I met in college and, ahem, "dated." Since my mother may read this, I will not go into details, but suffice it to say, we weren't exactly a long term, meaningful relationship. However, when we did break up, it didn't go well, and we didn't speak again for 9 years.

Then one day in February 2002, I received an email from my good friend Annie Brown about some idiot frat guys in Frostburg who had torn up their frat house. I forwarded it on to a lot of my friends, and one of the people I sent it to was Jeff Lacey. Much to my great surprise, he emailed me back! Turns out he and his wife had just signed separation papers and he was SOOOO happy to hear from me. Strange as it sounds, it really seemed like fate at the time and in hindsight, still seems too good to be true. Our email relationship took off like gangbusters. I was in school at the time and I would rush to the library between classes to check my email to see if he had written me. When I was at work, we would IM constantly. Finally after a couple months, we actually spoke on the phone. When I heard his voice, I knew that I had to see him. And when, a month later, I flew to Maryland for my friend Heather's baby shower, I saw Jeff waiting at the airport with a daisy in his hand for me, I knew that I could never, never let this man go.

I moved back to Maryland on July 1, 2002 and we were married September 13, 2003 - 11 years after we had first met. Now, 6 years and almost 4 kids later, I am still surprised at our good fortune. I love Jeff with everything I've got and as I often tell my friends, I got a deluxe model husband!

On the Road with the Lacey's

2009-08-31T10:16:00.000-07:00

My childhood memories of long car rides consist mainly of my brother drawing and redrawing a line in the velour that I could not cross, always having something under my feet cause I was the shortest, and praying the car needed gas soon so I could pee. My father is a believer in not overusing the starter in a car by needlessly turning the engine on and off for trivial things like letting your small children relieve themselves. We stopped when the car needed gas, and that was it. So notorious for this was my father, he earned the nickname "No Pee Lee."

My other overarching memory was passing all the signs on the highway for cool, amazing, wonderful attractions. Things that would enhance my creativity and spark my curousity. Things that would make me more popular in school. Things that we passed at an average speed of 55 miles per hour, in a colorful blur of dashed hopes next to the highway. When I am a grown up, I promised myself, I will stop at these things and see what I missed!

So... now I'm a grown up and as Jeff would love to tell you, I have inherited more than a few of my father's habits. I hate stopping needlessly, I hyperventilate if we need to make a stop on the wrong side of the road, and I seriously hate ever having to back track on the road. But there is still a part of me that wants to stop at all the cheesy roadside attractions and see what I missed.

This weekend we drove to Pulaski, VA for Jeff's family reunion. Pulaski is in southern Virginia, practically in Tennessee. On the way there, what do we pass? A thousand signs advertising Luray Caverns. Holy crap! I've always wanted to go there!! So, Jeff and I hatch a plan to leave early on Sunday and go to the caverns on our way home. Hooray us.

The reunion was great. We got to see all the relatives, everyone appropriately fussed over my kids, food was fabulous, etc. The whole weekend, we talked to Ellie about the Cavern. Showed her pictures from the brochure. Made up stories about dinosaurs leaving the "fried egg" formations behind. It was the stuff of parenting books.

We left the reunion on Sunday, brimming with optimism. We trundled up Rt. 81, all the way keeping our eyes open for those lovely green and yellow Luray Cavern signs. "Hear our Stalactite Organ!" "Largest and Most Visited Caverns" "Probably more expensive than you think it should be, but think of the stories your kids will tell" etc. Finally, exit 264, we turn off and begin to follow signs to the Caverns. This is when my inner Leo Moran begins to talk... this is pretty far off the exit... it'll add hours to the whole trip... we could make it to Frederick before the car needs gas.... I do my best to squelch these thoughts and we press on. At long last, the gates to Luray are before us. We pull in, find a good parking spot, so far everything is coming up roses.

The entrance fee is $21 per adult, but thank the Lord, kids are free. (the inner voice for that part was my mom) Next on the agenda is finding Maggie a sweatshirt, as the brochure tells us it's a chilly 54 degrees at all times in the cavern and we didn't have a coat for her. Another $15, and Mags is suited up in the cutest Luray Cavern sweatshirt they had (read, the only sweatshirt in her size).

Okay, we're in line, get our self guided tour headsets and down we start. Now, I had called Luray to see if we could bring a stroller and we could, but the nice person on the phone neglected to tell me there's fourteen stories of narrow staircase to go down. Okay, I exaggerate, it was only about two stories, but still. Jeff mans up and carries the stroller, and I take Jack in my arms and begin herding the children down the stairs.

Halfway down, Ellie, my normally mild mannered child, begins to SCREAM. "I don't want to go here! I don't want to go here!" I suddenly realize that in all our talking about the cavern, we neglected to tell Ellie that it was, in fact, underground. Of course, Maggie also begins to scream too, cause if Ellie's scared, it must be scary. Ellie's muscles have locked and she's not going anywhere. And of course, there's a line of people behind Jeff, wondering what those terrible parents are doing to their children. I quick grab Ellie around the middle and carry her down the stairs and then repeat with Maggie. Quickly strapping Jack in, Jeff and I turn our attention to our girls who are both blubbering and hollering. Just then, the helpful Luray staff girl comes over and offers to show us how our headsets work. What? Are you serious? I wave her away and continue to try to calm the little psychos down. No dice. Five minutes later, we're going back up the 27 flights of stairs to the top. I'll give Ellie credit, I wouldn't have thought she could go up those stairs so fast.

While I stood in line to try to get a refund, Jeff took the girls out to the car. The people at Luray were very understanding and did give us a total refund. Jack and I head back to the car and when I see Maggie, still snuffling, in her cute Luray Caverns sweatshirt, I did what any reasonable person would do... I wrenched that damn sweatshirt off my toddler and stormed back to the gift shop, where I got another refund.

All in all, not our best family outing, but I will say in the end, it turned out to be a nice day. We ended up taking a drive through Georgetown, in DC, and even got street parking and had dinner at Johnny Rockets. The girls both got balloons, and you'll have to wait until the next blog installment for the end of the balloon story!

Most importantly, we all got home safe and sound and the girls are still talking about meeting their cousins. I guess I'll focus on that part of the weekend!

Excuses, excuses....

2009-08-30T17:33:00.000-07:00

I've been away for so long... I know you all have been missing my witticisms. We basically had company from June through August this year and our computer is in the guest room. Can't exactly blog while someone is trying to sleep, right?

Starting June 17th, my good friend Andee and her son, Jack came to stay with us from Flagstaff, AZ. To make a long story short, Andee wanted to have her second child here in Delaware and we had the most convenient house for her to stay. Jack and Ellie are only a couple days apart in age, and were playgroup friends a million years ago before they could even walk. Jack has been living the life of Riley as an only child for the past 4 years, and he got a quick education in the law of the jungle that is living with three kids.

For example, just a few days after they arrived, we were fortunate enough to get an enormous playset, courtesy of my in-laws. When I say, enormous, I mean that if anything goes really wrong, we could always move into it. Well, it's got a "horse" swing, the kind that two kids can sit on back to back and swing together. For some reason, Ellie only wants to face "front" meaning towards the house. Poor "Big Jack", as we took to calling him, always had to face the trees. They would swing on it for a solid half hour like this. One day, I overheard Jack saying he wanted to be on the front and Ellie told him that she wouldn't be his girlfriend anymore if he did... next thing, Jack's riding backwards and Ellie's the princess.

Andee, Big Jack, and eventually her husband Graham stayed with us through the birth of their son, James, and Jeff and I had the honor of being named Godparents to another little man. It's always a thrill to be named a special person in a little one's life.

The day that the Williamson's left us, we received another visitor, this time from another country. Caroline Aime, a teenager we met while in France last year, came to visit us to work on her English skills and to help us out a bit with kiddos. Caroline is 15 and beautiful and very shy. The kids loved her and she spent many a happy hour (happy for me at least) entertaining them. I felt badly most of the time, dragging her around from playdate to playdate to Bible camp to McDonald's, but we did get a few fun trips in - Ocean City, New York City, and the Philadelphia Zoo.

Finally, August 20th rolled around and Caroline went back to her parents and for the first time in three months, Jeff could walk around the house in his underwear if he wanted. It was fun to have everyone here, but it's nice to have the house back to ourselves, and I'm enjoying only cooking for five people again!

Now that I've given all my excuses as to why I haven't been keeping you amused with my blogs, I'll end here and write another about our family reunion in Pulaski, and our failed attempt at going to Luray Caverns!

Poor Middle Child

2009-07-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

I just realized that I wrote a lovely blog about Jack's 1st birthday, and didn't do anything for Maggie's! Poor middle child. When discussing the potential fourth child, Jeff and I kept trying to come up with "a good reason" to have a fourth and making Maggie not be the middle child seemed to be the best we could do!

But I digress...back to Maggie's birthday...

So three years year, nine months ago, I woke up in the middle of the night and I could smell everything in the house, and I knew immediately that I was pregnant. Ellie was just nine months old and we were in the process of trying to move to Wilmington, DE. As a matter of fact, we had been looking at houses just the day before; two bedroom houses in Trolley Square with small yards... well, needless to say, the news that we had another baby coming changed our plans quick! Suddenly, four bedrooms and a yard were imperative. So, we found our house in Pike Creek and moved in December.

Before we moved, I went to see a new OB practice in Columbia that had midwives practicing with them. After my experience with Ellie, I felt that midwives were really the way I wanted to go. In Maryland, midwives can attend births in the hospital and you can have drugs too. Best of both worlds, I thought. After we moved to Delaware, I was confronted with a problem - Delaware does not allow midwives to practice in hospitals. It was a birth center: no drugs, no two day stay, or a hospital and a potential repeat of the aggrevation and fear I experienced with Ellie. So Jeff and I toured The Birth Center in Wilmington, and our decision was made. We'd go with the midwives. I mean, seriously, how hard could it be, right???

I mostly tried not to think about natural child birth. My pregnancy moved along as my pregnancies do, uneventful and slightly boring. I was due July 16th and of course thought I would go early, cause why wouldn't I? The last week of pregnancy came and I got more and more crazy, actually getting angry at Jeff for going to work and leaving me alone with a 18 month old. Thank God Ellie was a pretty easy toddler! I came up with a game called "baby birdie" where I would lay on the couch and make a "nest" and Ellie would be my birdie... and sit there for an hour while I fed her "worms". What a good girl.

Finally, the day arrived... I woke up around 4AM with contractions, but they weren't regular and they weren't bad. I hesitated in telling Jeff, cause he is a well known contraction killer. Every time I tell him I'm having them, they stop. Around 6 we broke down and called grandparents. Everyone arrived around 9AM, just in time for the contractions to stop AGAIN. I was angry, frustrated, irked... we had already had one false alarm, and I wasn't going to do that again. So, Mom, Jeff, Ginny and I packed up and went to the mall. We walked around and eventually contractions started up again. I didn't notice, but according to Jeff, people were looking at me very strangely, as if they were waiting for my water to break in the food court.

We decided to meet the grandpas in Newark for lunch around 2PM. The whole lot of us, including Ellie, went to Klondike Kate's for some lunch. Little did we know we picked the Newark Beer Festival day to be wandering around down there. I was very tempted to partake! Ellie was just thrilled to have balloons and no one was paying much attention to me. Slowly, during lunch the contractions began to build, until we were done and decided to walk to Bing's Bakery. For those of you not from this area, it's maybe a 1/4 mile, but let me tell you, it seemed like the Bataan Death March to me.

While in the bakery, Mom asked me what kind of stuff I would want for breakfast the next morning, but I couldn't answer. I was doubled over with a contraction... suddenly, everything began to move very fast. Jeff ran to get the car, and we were off.

I figured I still had enough time to take a shower, so we stopped at home and I went upstairs to get in the shower. Blammo! Water broken.... now I needed a shower! We left for the Birth Center at 4:00 and Margaret Leigh made her appearance at 6:30! Whew!

Our first months were tough, as I think it's very hard for anyone to go from one to two kids. No one can fully explain to me why it's so hard, but man... it was tough. Now, at age three, my Mags is a lovebug, a little mommy, and a dancing queen who loves to laugh. As much as she makes me crazy, she tickles me every day with her little ways. She loves her brother, a little too much I might say, and she is joy to watch.

Remind me of this later today when I want to duct tape her to the wall! :)

Topsail Island!!!

2009-07-14T12:47:00.000-07:00

Woo hoo... Jeff and I got up on Saturday morning and sat around drinking coffee, discussing with Andee and Johna what we were going to do for the day, when we started talking about the fact that my mom and dad were probably halfway to the ocean by then. Jokingly, I suggested that we see if we could find a last minute deal and three hours later, we were packed, and in the car on our way to Topsail Island, NC to do vacation with the family.

Each year, my family, including aunts, uncles, cousins, grandpa, etc. gather at the beach and spend a week together: catching fish, catching rays, drinking beers, and generally having a great time hanging out. This year, it's just the Trimbers and the Morans and Opa, my grandfather.

The trip was LONG. We usually spend the night at my parents house the night before we leave and then take off from there, and I didn't realize how much time that cuts off the trip. We pulled into Topsail at 1AM on Sunday morning and collapsed into bed.

Sunday morning, everyone was up bright and early, as per usual, and we moseyed down to the house were the rest of the family is staying. My little clan is holed up at the St. Regis Resort, and the rest of the fam is staying in the lap of luxury in a fancy schmancy house with a pool and a hot tub. Of course, these fancy houses always have their problems and it seems that this house's problem is that you can't change the air conditioning temperature and it's currently set somewhere around meat locker. Other than that, and the fact that my cousin Jeff and his wife are trying to sleep on bunk beds with their sons, it seems like a really nice house and having a private pool rocks.

The beach here is gorgeous and practically deserted. I remember when I moved to Cumberland, MD and people would tell me that they vacationed at Ocean City, how I thought that vacation automatically meant that you were going to North Carolina and it seemed strange to go on vacation in your own state. For years, we went to a different beach, called Oak Island. It was great, small enough that my parents would let their teenage daughter roam around at night unattended. After my brother went into the military, my parents allowed me to start bringing friends along with me and there were several years where Alissa Maiers and I ruled the beach for one week a year. Ahh... youth!

So, right now, I'm hanging out in the condo with a sleeping baby, Maggie is enjoying a nap at the house with GoGo and Pop Pop and Ellie is out with Daddy buying a birthday present for Maggie's big day tomorrow - and I highly suspect, something for Ellie.

Life is good and I'll post more later!

Well, guess you didn't see that coming

2009-07-10T12:22:00.000-07:00

So much has happened since my last post.... I meant to write before this, but didn't know where to start.

Pretty much everyone knows by now, Jeff and I are expecting our fourth child. Never in a million years did I think I'd be the mother of four kids, especially not in a span of 5 years! Well, life is full of these surprises, and we couldn't be more pleased. We're referring to this baby as Bullseye, cause it seems that Jeff has very good aim ;)

On a graver note, my good friends Kristen, Andee,and her 4 year old son Jack were robbed at gunpoint this week at our local Dunkin Donuts. Kristen is my photographer friend and they had just taken some maternity pictures, and decided to get Jeff and me a coffee on the way home. The gunman actually came into the store and pointed the gun in Jack's direction - what a bastard! To make things even more disgusting the Dunkin Donuts employees didn't lift a finger to help, not even after the criminal was gone. They couldn't even give Kristen the address for the DD while she was on the phone with 911. Terrible. I've written to the paper, and the local moms clubs, asking people to boycott the Milltown Dunkin Donuts. I intend on writing to the local franchise and telling them that this behavior is inexcusable. I can't do anything about the criminal, so I'm taking it out on DD. Believe me, it pains me cause I certainly drink my fair share of coffee and this was our local shop. I will drive out of my way to go to another location!

Keep reading for news of "Bullseye" our newest (and last!) addition!

Fourth of July!

2009-07-04T05:08:00.000-07:00

Last night we went to the Hebron Fireman's Carnival, in lovely scenic Hebron, MD. I felt like I had walked into a Norman Rockwell painting. Well, except for the too tight short shorts and the huge number of tattoos. Anyway, the girls were vibrating at the thought of going on the the rides. For those of you who know me well, I want to put in here that the carnival rides didn't get started until 7:15 PM, and I decided to throw caution to the wind and let the girls stay up late. I know, I'm a rebel.

We get to the carnival, get the girls their wristbands, and head immediately to the carousel. Cause if Ellie didn't ride the carousel, it may have caused her to have a stroke. Someone please tell me why every single ride started promptly at 7:15, except the ever-lovin' carousel? After a few hairy minutes, a man started the thing up and Ellie and Maggie climbed aboard. I went on to help Maggie onto the horse, and the conductor asked me to please stay with Mags. Not really a problem, but it hadn't been my plan. We start our trip and the girls are loving it. Every time we go around, Maggie is waving and saying "yeehaw!" and generally being cute. Then, disaster... the conductor started the music.

Maggie literally leaps off the horse and into my arms, screaming, "Too Loud!" For the rest of the ride, and let me tell you, the people at the Hebron Carnival want you to get your money's worth so the rides are LONG, Maggie clung to me like a spider monkey. Poor girl!

The ride finally ends and we all get off. Ellie was exhilarated, Maggie crying noisily. In an effort to save the night, I suggest that they try the airplane swings. They appear to be making no noise at all. The girls get on the plane and start swinging. Everything is going great and then.... the clattering roller coaster starts up next door. Maggie begins to scream again, this time with no parent. Just as I was going to ask the operator to stop, Ellie leans over and puts her hands on both of Maggie's ears and pulls her head to her chest. It was hilariously cute! Again, the Hebron carnival people give you a little extra on each ride, so it seemed a long time that this happened.

Believe it or not, after both of these experiences, Maggie wanted to get back on other rides. They did it all, ride upon ride. The only other trauma was when Ellie insisted that she ride the roller coaster by herself. Not a good plan... there was much crying!

All in all, it was one of those rare, golden nights. The kind of night that keeps a parent going through many a tantrum. The kind of night we'll look back on when we're old and looking at our grandkids on rides. A good kind of night!

Why you should never lie to your mother

2009-07-03T04:44:00.000-07:00

Since I don't have anything to say about my life as it stands today, I thought I'd relate a story from my past, complete with a moral... why you should never lie to your mother.

Let's go back to summer, the year 2000. I was living with Steve in Boston and had come to Maryland to visit my parents. Before I left, my mom slipped me $40 and told me to take a cab home from the airport, instead of the subway and then the commuter rail. Ha ha!, I thought to myself, I'll pocket the $$ and take the train and then I can have take out a couple times on Mom.

The plane ride was uneventful and I made it from the airport to the commuter rail station without trouble. I had to walk a block or two to make it to the station, and on my way, I saw ahead of me a woman and her two kids. The older child is pulling a suitcase upside down so the wheels are on top and he's more dragging it than anything, and the mom was holding the younger sister's hand and pulling another suitcase. As I approach, I hear the kids are both crying - not screaming, but miserably crying. The mom seemed to be keeping up a steady stream of cursing. Being a generally good girl, I caught up to her and offered to help. Keep in mind here that I also have a suitcase and a bag filled with every piece of sheet music I had at my parents house.

The mother accepted my help without a smile and thrusted her suitcase at me and told me that she has to get on on the green line. Inwardly, I groan. The green line in Boston is the elevated rail, and I knew that it was going to be up at least two flights of stairs. Gamely, I turned to the little boy, set his suitcase on it's wheels and he and I hurried to catch up with his mom, who had started without us. She was still cursing, and I could hear snippets about "your f*$!ing father" and "piece of s$#t". We got to the bottom of the stairs and the little boy looked up the metal steps and let out a wail. I managed to get another stranger to get his bag and up we all travelled. Finally we reached the top of the steps, to find out that we were on the north side and she needed to be on the south side. I talked the stranger into helping us all some more and down we all truck to the other side of the street and back up the other side, the whole time, the kids crying, the mother is cursing, I'm carrying two suitcases and a canvas bag, and another stranger is carrying one suitcase.

We got to south side and I turned to leave and the mom says "Aren't you coming with us?" to which I replied no, that I had to get on the commuter rail. She actually had the balls to huff and then told me that she didn't have enough money to get on the subway. I talked the ticket person into letting the kids on for free and the stranger gave up fare of the mom and we took off without a look back.

I was mulling over how no good deed goes unpunished as I ran to the commuter rail, now cutting my time fine as I had to catch the train. I made it and settled myself into the seat and started reading "A Wrinkle in Time", a childhood favorite that I had taken from my parents house.

I smelled him before I saw him, and I thought, that person is going to sit next to me. On a nearly empty train, the crazy homeless person, ALWAYS finds me. Sure enough, a man wearing a motheaten fur and leather coat, wool hat and gloves sat down next to me. Remember here, I was visiting my parents for the 4th of July. He reeked of beer and BO. I'm liberally minded, but sheesh, really God? You had to send this guy to sit next to me?

Mr. Stinky then opened his mouth and mentions he has read "A Wrinkle in Time" too and that he actually has been to Malden (a town in MA) in the year 2025. I don't know what else he said cause the rest of our time together, I was formulating an escape plan.

We came to the first stop on the rail line, which wasn't my stop, but I told my new friend that I had to get off there and asked if he could please let me out. Of course, he couldn't. So I gently reminded him that if he didn't move, my suitcase would probably hit him in the head. He moved an inch and I scooted by and hurried to the next car.

I spent the rest of my trip afraid that Mr. Stinky would find me and get enraged that I had lied to him about my stop. I jumped off the train with total relief at my stop and finally got home, sweaty, exhausted, and totally bemused at my advenure. Surely that much stuff doesn't happen in one day to everyone. Then suddenly it hit me...

NEVER LIE TO YOUR MOTHER!

If I had taken the money she gave me and taken a cab like she said, I would have made it home way earlier, without aggrevation. I have never lied to her again!!!

Nintendo has been good for my marriage

2009-06-28T17:22:00.000-07:00

When I didn't make enough money from the Mothers of Multiples resale to cover the cost of membership to Sherwood Park Pool this summer, I was bitter. Mostly at my husband for his rare moment of fiscal responsibility.

So I had a couple hundred dollars burning a hole in my pocket, and I did what any responsible adult would do, I bought a Wii. I don't know why, I'm not a game fan. But I bought it, and then our good friend Johna came over a couple days later with the whole Rock Band kit and caboodle. Love her! So now, almost every night, we play Rock Band. Our band is called "Kids in Bed" - we have Mad Dog Lacey on guitar, Johna on vocals, and "E" on drums. I have to say, I've surprised myself with my percussion proficiancy. Even when Johna's out teaching, Jeff and I play. It's been so much fun to be on a team together and we're pretty good at saving each other. We've even unlocked the "Endless Set" - 84 songs in a row, with no stopping... we're waiting for babysitting for that one!

Jack stats and smells

2009-06-26T11:47:00.001-07:00

Little Jack Sprat is truly my littlest... he's a svelte 19 pounds and not quite 30 inches. For a baby that was born almost 10 pounds, he's really slimmed down this year. Doc says it's probably cause he's so active.

Poor Jack had a bad day though, three shots at the doctors, and because I'm a paranoid mom, I mentioned another issue to Dr. Field. Jack has the stinkiest pee, I mean, really rank, and I'm somewhat of an expert on kid pee. So before we left, the doctor fitted Jack for a "urine catch", which basically means a sandwich baggie gets stuck to his penis and scrotum with a sticky note. So after grabbing a quick bribery Happy Meal for big sister Ellie, we headed over to LabCorp to get his blood drawn and turn in the bag o' pee.

Here in Delaware, it's mandatory that all one year olds get tested for lead poisoning, and Dr. Field recommended that we go ahead and get a renal panel done, just in case the pee turns out to be a problem. With the girls, the blood draws were no problem at all, in and out, no tears. Jack... well, that was another story all together. She first stuck his left arm and got nothing. My kid apparently has no blood at all in his left arm. Then she stuck the right arm and got a "flash", and then nothing. By this point, Jack is screaming his fool head off. I'm a strong woman and I can take a lot in the name of good health, but it was nearly too much for me. In both arms, she was basically fishing around for a vein and kept saying "the baby's roll terribly". I'm sure that they do, but wow. I pulled the plug on the fishing expidition, and we'll just have to go back on Monday. At least it made him pee, and we got the baggie off his bits.

As if to demonstrate his extreme displeasure, Jack proceeds to take the grossest, smelliest crap while I'm getting my bag and Ellie together. Stunk up the whole darn lobby. Whoops!

Lacey Bed and Breakfast

2009-06-25T12:23:00.000-07:00

Some of you may already know that my friend Andee and her son are staying with us for an extended stay while she awaits the birth of her baby. Her son is also named Jack, so by way of clearing things up, we're referring to him as "Big Jack". Big Jack is just a couple weeks younger than Ellie and she's pleased as punch to have a friend to play with who "gets it". Though we call him Big Jack, he's actually a peanut - actually shorter than Maggie and he only weighs 29 pounds. By contrast, Maggie is 38 pounds. So Big Jack is taking some lumps as he gets used to being in a house with two girls that can seriously throw down.

Andee is expecing a second baby boy and hasn't yet picked a name for this little man. I'm amusing myself by throwing random names at her to see if any of them stick. So far, no good, but there's always hope. The most exciting part for me is that I get to see this baby be born. Andee has asked me to act as a kind of doula at the birth and I'm honored to fill the role. I'm a little nervous, since I've never been on the other end, so to speak. I can't wait to meet little... Andrew? David? James?

After Andee leaves, we will be welcoming Caroline Amie, a young lady we met when we were in France last year. She has asked if we would be willing to host her so she can work on her English. She's written to say that she also knows how to cook, do laundry, iron and wants to help with the kids... can you say Au Pair? Woo hoo! Actually I'm looking at it as a great experience for my kids to meet someone from another country, and who knows, maybe when Ellie's 15 she'll be able to go to France for a couple weeks!

I guess that it may seem like a lot to have people staying all summer, but we so love having company and our house is set up nicely for guests to have privacy. Just call us Motel 1116 and we'll leave the light on for you.

Happy Birthday Jack!

2009-06-24T20:07:00.000-07:00

Today my littlest person turned one. Of course I spent all day thinking about what I was doing a year ago....

The day started like every other day for the last two weeks... I was still pregnant. This despite Jack being my third child in three years and the fact that he was due on June 19th. The adorable "Gemini Baby" onsie still mocking me from it's spot on the floor in the back of the closet where I had thrown it in disgust on June 22.

I got up and went to the bathroom, and when I was finished, I got up and checked the bowl, just to make sure the baby hadn't come out while I was peeing. (Why does that happen to those crazy "I didn't know I was pregnant" people? Those women are either certifiable or flat out lying. ) So there was no baby doing the backstroke in the bowl, and I wandered down the stairs cranky and mad at the girls for daring to be awake and happy. Just when I was considering how much longer I could sleep on the couch while the girls watched Curious George, it happened... a contraction. Nah, couldn't have been. I'm a circus freak who doesn't go into labor. Look kids, it's the amazing pregnant woman! She's been pregnant for 400 years. Wait... there's another! Woo hoo... bring the pain.

So, now what am I going to do? I figured this was going to be a long day and it would take my parents at least two hours to get to my house, so I rounded everyone up and went to Andrea's house for playgroup. It was freaking hot, and she had the sprinkler out. I informed the moms that I was probably in early labor, and that I would not be managing my own children today. Of course, the girls had other plans and I was refereeing and keeping Maggie's teeth off Ellie's back (we called her Marv Albert most of last summer). As playgroup wore on, the contractions kept coming and at some point I decided I should go home before I couldn't drive. Those of you that are locals should be amazed to know I navigated through White Clay Creek while having contractions.

By the time we got home though, woo nelly. Now they hurt. And no one was here yet. I desperately tried to talk the girls into a nap, but they weren't biting. I called my parents and thankfully they were close. Jeff was also on his way and his parents weren't far behind. My parents walked through the door at about 12:30 and I checked out of parenting. I have no idea what the girls did for the next four hours while I labored at home.

About 5PM, we finally went to the Birth Center. By that point, the contractions were about 5 minutes apart and I was not really able to talk much during them. When I had Maggie, I went to the Birth Center for a false alarm labor and before I had even finished walking through the door, the midwife told me I was smiling too much to be in active labor. We all trucked to the Birth Center, well, the granddads stayed at home with the ladies, and settled in for the big show.

This is the point in the story where I'm obligated to tell you why I choose to have babies without drugs... Having a baby without drugs is much like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer.... it feels really good when you stop doing it. I didn't choose the Birth Center cause I'm anti-drug, I often say that the anethesiologists of the world are good people who should be very proud of their work, but the people at the Birth Center are so incredible, I can't imagine going to a hospital. Dorinda, Peggy, Katie, and everyone else there is as caring and as warm as you could possibly imagine. The feeling of belinging to their family is something you cannot get from a hospital where 2000 babies are born a year. People should make whatever choice works for their family and this was the one that worked for us.

It seemed like we were there at TBC for a very long time. There was time to sit in the living room and hang out on the birthing ball, time to take a bath, and finally it was time to make the magic happen. Johna was there to videotape and I kept telling her that there would be more shouting by the end and I don't think she believed me until it was go time. By the time I was in the birthing room, which is really a bedroom, I was in the stage of labor in which every woman says "I can't do this, I have to stop". I was feeling the urge to push and was devastated when the midwife, Katie, told me I was only 8-9 cm and I shouldn't push. I think I could have pushed a SEPTA train up Everest at that point, so it was pretty big task to wait. I thought it would last for hours, I thought I couldn't do it, I wept and cried into my pillow... and then, something changed and it was time to push. 8 minutes later, Jack was born. He was born in his amniotic sac, meaning my water never broke. Dorinda spent the last few minutes of my labor expecting to get showered, cause apparently the sac was like a big water balloon coming out of my hooha. I'm working on balloon animals for my next labor. In the end, she had to cut it with scissors and yank it off Jack's head.

Being born in the "caul" as the old wives call it, is a sign of second sight. I attribute Jack's laid back nature to the fact that he's psychic and he knows that I am going to get his food and that he is going to get whacked on the head by Mags, but it's not going to leave a scar.

He was a gorgeous baby, a perfect 10 on his APGAR. Pink and plump and 9 pounds 8 ounces. Born at 9:04 PM, and perfect in every way.

A year later, he's made our family whole. His sweet smile and great giggles keep us all happy. He's starting to walk and even more exciting, he's starting to sign, so soon I hope to be posting about what Jack has to say!

Happy birthday to Jeff's mini-me, my main squeeze, Ellie's little Meatball, and the love of Maggie's life. John Moran Lacey

(Oh and when I called one of the moms who was at the playgroup the next day to tell her that I'd really had the baby that day, her response... "I figured you would, you were really bitchy yesterday." Love you Trish!)

Sappy sentiments ahead.

2009-06-17T20:12:00.000-07:00

So, if you know me, you know that I love Facebook. I have over 250 "friends" and I keep saying I'm going to go through and edit them - you know, cut it down to the people that I really keep in touch with. Then every time I try, I end up thinking about how I really like all these people and though I may not send them messages all the time, it's comforting to know that they're out there in cyberspace and I can find them if I want to. Maybe it's a product of moving around so much, maybe I'm just a sucker for people, but in the end, I just keep adding friends and being glad that I've met so many different kinds of people.

That's my sappy sentiment for the day.

Home again, home again, jigetty jig

2009-06-17T11:48:00.000-07:00

We're back from the epic trip to Pittsburgh. Let me tell you, my mom is a brave soul - 14 hours total in a car with three kids under age 5 and their stressed out mother... yikes. The kids did really well, honestly. Jack was a little angel, hardly heard from him the whole way.

On the way up, we drove scenic Route 30 through PA, past the Elephant Museum, Living Treasures Animal Park and the Land of the Little Horses. Some day, I swear I'm going to take week and drive on that road and stop at all of those places. There's also Idelwild and Storybook Forest, I mean, what more could a girl want, right? Mom did her best to entertain everyone, but she mostly entertained me by throwing stuff at the kids. In her defense, it's really the only way to get stuff to the girls when they're all they're all the way in the back. So they'd ask for some drink or something to eat and Mom would whip it at them and pray they caught it. This worked great until we were about 30 miles from Opa's, when Mom threw the last sippy of milk at Mags, and she dropped it. Tragedy. Anyone who knows Mags, knows that this was a disaster of epic proportions. She screamed about that damned sippy the rest of the way.

It was great to be in the city of Champions for the Pens win. I'm not really a hockey fan, but hey, who doesn't like to see their team win?

Jack had a little first birthday party at Beth's house with my Hoover family. It means a lot to me to have birthday's with my family, probably because we moved when I was young, and I didn't celebrate my birthday with them very much. He got lots of cute clothes and some great toys. Poor kid is probably getting tired of playing with dolls, so it's good that he finally has some trucks to push around.

The funniest thing that happened was when we went to South Park to meet my dad's sister, Alice. South Park is an enormous green space with tons of small playgrounds. Alice knew of a nice area to have a picnic, so we followed her there and set up all our food. Well... don't you know, the bathrooms were all locked and of course, Ellie and Maggie had to pee almost immediately after we arrived. So the girls learned to "camping pee" - drop trou and pee in the breeze. Maggie ezpecially thought it was the greatest thing in the world. She spent most of the rest of our lunch naked from the waist down, peeing. I'm going to have to watch that she doesn't start peeing in the back yard I think. She wanted to try pooping, but I told her that I wasn't equipped to deal with poop.

I wasn't with Ellie most of the time. She spent most of her weekend with my mom and my grandfather. I'm going to admit her to an inpatient detox so she can get off the Oreos and orange juice, not to mention the undiluted GoGo time. She was in her glory - anytime I came to the house, she'd tell me to leave and to take Maggie and Jack with me. She even went fishing with her Great-Uncles Boo and Cherry. (On a side note, everyone of the "adults" in this family have a goofy kid name - Mimi and Cherry, Gigi and Boo, GoGo and Uncle LiLo) All in all, she had a great trip and was really not in the way of wanting to come home.

But home we had to come and the drive home was a little less relaxed - Turnpike the whole way. About 2 minutes after we pulled out of my grandfather's driveway, the DVD player gave up the ghost. So there was a detour to Target, where a new and improved DVD player was purchased, thanks Mom for the kids' birthday present. Of course, I got a chatty Target guy who wanted to talk features with me and I had to cut him off saying "my kids are in the car with my mom and we're on the road, now... just give me this one!" By Lancaster, PA, the kids were toast and Ellie and Maggie disolved into screaming at each other for fun and I actually had to stop the car and take Ellie out onto the curb and threaten her with leaving her behind. I asked her if she wanted to stay on the curb and she said "No" and then I asked if she wanted me to tie her car seat to the roof rack, and she said, "will it be fun up there?"

Finally we arrived home and picked up our $5 pizza, where of course I ran into Noel, like I always do on Tuesday nights at Valle, and then I threw the kids at Jeff and went out for an hour, by myself!! Hooray! Of course, where did I go? Babies R Us... kids are a sickness!!!!

Okay so I'm serious this time

2009-06-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

I keep saying I'm going to start a blog, so here it is. No really. It's here. This is it, you're reading it now. I guess I should start being witty now...

This weekend was the second First Friday Happy Hour of the summer. Of course, this month, the month of rain here in lovely Delaware, First Friday happened on the first Saturday. The regulars were all here - I guess we ended up with about 14 adults and 10 or so kids. Jeff bought new sand for the sand box, most of which ended up in Tyler's pants, I believe. That kid is going to be well exfolliated.

Today was the Blue Rocks game - Maggie and Jack's first baseball experience and Ellie's second. Ellie was largely interested in all the food options, which should be a surprise to no one at all. She's not a fan of Cracker Jack, so I'm not sure at all if she's my kid. Maggie had a good time in the moonbounce they have there and managed to figure out that Daddy couldn't fit in the little hole to get her out, so she bounced away in the back where he couldn't reach her. Stinker.

The Jack man continues to amaze us with his eating abilities as well. Tonight he had chicken, peas, asparagus, 8 oz of milk and then still wanted to nurse. Good Lord, when he's a teenager, I'm sunk. I'm going to need to have three jobs to keep my kids in food.

Mom and I are preparing for our big trip to Pittsburgh. Should be a good trip, though I'm anot looking forward to the ride. 6 hours in a car with three kids under the age of five. I think that's a prison sentence for some crimes. I'm definitely looking forward to seeing everyone, especially Opa. It's so much fun to see him playing with Ellie, it's like her personality was made to play with an old grumpy man.

Well, eventually, I'll get a new camera and I'll post some pictures to this site as well... Have a good day party people!