2009-05-30 - 1:50 p.m.
SUP FOOLS
Boy, I got quite a response to my last posting. I actually heard from more people than I was aware still read this Lovely Purple Diary of mine. THREE whole people actually contacted me about a particular thing I wrote. It was a total mind-blower. I was like "whoa".
The entry that prompted the feedback was the following passage, which I said in regards to the two perfect, brilliant, beautiful little babies who have invaded my home:
"I can already picture them as teenagers, with Melody being sweet and friendly and outgoing, and Madison being likewise, of course, but perhaps a little more mischievous. A little more of a diva."
The replies can basically be summed up thusly, written by the very person who this blog owes its existence to: "So what you're saying is Melody takes after her mommy and Madison takes after her daddy?"
That's not really how I thought of it, but I suppose there may be some accuracy in that statement. Rantings of a Mischievous Diva would have been a good title for this blog, now that I think about it.
Anyway. I have oh so much to tell you.
Charity, as you may know, just had a birthday here in the last week. She's now TWENTY-NINE. Man. I can't believe it. I might have told this story before, but way back in 2001 we were both in our second year of college, except Charity was going to school in California. But our spring breaks matched up and she came home for a week.
During that week, she'd been over at my house and was leaving, and I remember looking out the window and watching her walk to her car. She had a little purse slung over her shoulder and she was putting a pair of sunglasses on, and she got in the car and backed out of the driveway and left. And I was kind of stunned by how grown-up she seemed. I have no idea why such a little moment, which lasted probably no more than 30 seconds, has had such an impact on me that I'm still talking about it all this time later. But it did.
The thing is, though, I have realized in the years since that she wasn't really that grown up. She was twenty. She was barely a year removed from being a teenager. And now she's almost THIRTY. Now she's a MOM. In the years since that moment, she's gotten married and she's got kids now and all whatnot. She's just so... OLD. It's rather depressing, frankly.
I can say this, of course, because my own birthday is not for a few days yet. As of this writing, I'm still a spry and youthful 28. Thankfully, in the meantime I don't mind being with an older woman. I appreciate the perspective and the experience her advanced age provides her. Plus, she's got the whole MILF thing going for her, so that's good. Or is it "cougar" now? I'm not up on the latest jive. She's a mom, so I would think MILF still applies here.
So what else. Hey, get this, I got my 10th high school reunion coming up in a few weeks. Naturally, that means I graduated in the class of 1999, which is a pretty cool class to have graduated in. It was the final class of that century. Of that millennium! What if you graduated in like 1996, what cool thing can you say about your class? I'll tell you what you can say: a whole lot of nothing, that's what.
Charity is on the reunion planning committee and she tells me that we are the only two members of our graduating class to have gotten married. Which isn't to say that nobody else in our class got married, just that the person they married wasn't someone from our class. Charity and I are the only married couple our class produced, that's what I'm trying to say.
That seems strange to me. But I guess it just confirms my long-held suspicion that school has little to no influence on the person you'll end up becoming, and thus it's really just a waste of your time. It's nice to know my theory has been correct all these years.
Speaking of the reunion, though, a couple years ago I had this idea of making a profile of myself on Facebook or Classmates or one of those sites where people who went to school with each other can catch up. Except instead of being honest, I was going to lie about where I lived and what I was doing.
Back when Charity and I were in college, we went to the Bahamas for spring break -- incidentally, this would be a totally different spring break than the one I already mentioned. Just to avoid any confusion.
Anyway, we have this picture of me on the beach that looks like I'm walking out of the water with a surfboard, as thought I just got done hanging 10 or shootin' the halfpipe or something surfy sounding. Which I had not actually done, I just picked up a board and was like "Hey, take this picture".
But it's a good picture. I'm all wet and shirtless and I was considerably more buff back then. It's very Matthew McConaughey. I have no idea where that picture is, but I know it's somewhere. So I was going to find it and use it as my profile picture and talk about how I invented something awesome and now I lived in Hawaii and was doing all these zany things like that Richard Branson guy does.
The point being that I still live right in the same area, and I'm married to a fellow classmate, and so on and so forth. And most of the people who'd see that fake Facebook/Classmates entry would know that and they'd know the stuff about Hawaii and inventions wasn't true. And even if they didn't know that, if they saw my fake profile they'd also see Charity's actual truthful one right next to it, which would totally give me away.
So it's not that I wanted to mislead anyone, it would just be like "oh, that wacky Jake". Admittedly, this isn't the greatest idea ever conceived, but it seemed funny to me at the time.
Anyway. I happened to mention this to Charity back when I thought of it, and oh my goodness, she got SO PISSED. Oh man. She totally took it the wrong way, taking it personally, thinking such an idea meant I was embarrassed about my life with her or ashamed I was married to her or something completely insane. None of that could be further from the truth, of course. If I could, I'd buy a billboard to advertise that I'm married to her. I make a point of trying to do stuff like grocery shopping with her as much as possible, just so I can be seen in public with her. I adore her in a wide variety of ways, as you well know.
BUT... even though I know she hated the idea, with all this reunion stuff going on, I am once again really really really feeling the urge to post that fake Hawaii thing, so that maybe people will see it and then come up to me at the reunion and ask about it. I'm hoping writing this blog will take my mind off doing that. It's not working, I'll be honest.
The girls are doing a-okay, thanks for asking. There was a little... incident since my last post, though. Yes, it's true. Prepare yourselves for a tale of woe.
You see, a few months after they were born, I happened to notice that Madison really likes it when I play with her feet. I don't remember how it started, but I have discovered that if I kiss the bottoms of her feet or rub the bottoms of 'em with my nose or things along those lines, she laaaaaaaaughs and starts waving her arms and kicking her legs and whatnot. Which is actually kinda dangerous, 'cause she's got some power in those stubby little legs. You gotta pull your face back before you get some chin music.
Needless to say, though, this whole feet/laughter business is the most adorable thing of all the times. So I do it as often as possible. And back around the end of March -- it was on a Sunday evening -- the girls had just gotten a bath and I was kissing the bottoms of Maddy's feet. As she always does, she just laaaaaaughed.
And then... she coughed. A few little coughs in a row, not just one little one. I was like "hrm". And then she coughed again. ZOINKS.
As you can probably imagine, our house quickly went to DEFCON 1. Thankfully, this was a couple weeks before the whole Swine Flu thing started, or there's no telling how far the panic would have spread. Charity was on the phone with her mom immediately, her mom being a doctor, and she said to stay calm and just observe Maddy and see how she behaved. Make sure she was breathing normally. If she kept coughing, try to notice if it was a dry cough or a wet cough or none of the above. I never did figure out which it was. And we took her temperature and made sure it was okay. All that stuff.
Maddy seemed fine and everything, but we stayed with her all night to watch her and she did cough a few more times. It was really a minor little cough, but even so, it was about the worst noise I ever heard. I don't even know how to describe it except to say it was like the sound of sadness. Every time I heard it, it made me sad.
We gave frequent updates to Charity's mom and she suggested a few things to see if they helped at all. It readily became clear that it wasn't serious and we didn't need to rush Maddy to the doctor or anything.
But we basically did the same thing all day Monday, watching her and waiting and listening. We tried this thing where you run the shower so the room gets all steamy, and then you bring the baby in for a few minutes to breathe in the air. Like a homemade humidifier, basically. And by dinner time she had pretty much stopped, except for a little "ack" now and then. It was weird, she didn't have any other symptoms, like if she had a cold or something. It was just this occasional little baby cough.
Anyway, our sleep got all messed up, so by Monday afternoon Charity and I were napping in shifts so one could sleep while the other watched the girls. And then that evening I stayed up all night while Charity went to bed, 'cause I wanted her to be able to get back on her normal schedule. But she woke up around 4:00 am and took over and told me to go to bed. So I did.
Thankfully, that ends the baby distress portion of our tale. You'll be happy to know that Madison was just fine and by Wednesday her cough had vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
But that was not the end of the story, oh indeed not. For while Maddy and her baby cough were on the road to recovery, the pain and suffering and sadness for someone else in the house had only just begun. And that person... was ME!
dun
dun
dunnnnnnnn
How's that for a cliffhanger? The second half of the story, while hopefully interesting, is also pretty long. Too long for me to tell you about right here at this moment. But I'll post about it soon. I swear. Probably in a few weeks or so. I can tell you about our reunion too, if there's actually anything worth talking about.
BYE
