My car almost gets stuck in the snow.

There is this hill by our neighborhood pool. At the top of the hill there are tennis courts. At the bottom of the hill is the parking lot. This hill must be 45 feet wide and 15 feet up. There are stairs leading up to the tennis court area on the left.

I take one picture. This one.

Ian takes his first run down the hill he immediately flips over and hits his head on the stairs.

Did I mention this hill is about 45 feet wide?

Claudia is next. She goes for it. She is doing well until she hits the ice ramp at the bottom that some big kids must have built yesterday.

She flies in the air and lands squarely on her tailbone.

She cries for 10 minutes so we get in the car and drive home where she continues to cry for another 15 minutes.

I call the nurse at the pediatrician’s office.

I say:

Hi. My daughter was sledding and she took the ice ramp and landed on her back and she is complaining that it hurts. She can walk and I can’t see anything but she has been crying for 25 minutes. Do I need to have her looked at?

The nurse says:

Spinal injuries are very serious! Take her to urgent care to have an x-ray!

I freak out.

I call my mother-in-law.

Sledding went poorly. I have to take Claudia to the emergency room to get x-rays! Spinal injury! Can you please help with Ian?

She says she’ll be right over.

I come to my senses.

I call the nurse back.

Hi. I just talked to you about my daughter and you said I need to get x-rays and that spinal injuries were serious but is there any way I can come into the office to have her seen?

Five minutes later I have an appointment in 25 minutes at the pediatrician’s office.

I call my mother-in-law and tell her I just have to take the boy with me because we don’t have much time but we will be fine.

Claudia is still whimpering and saying It hurts. It really hurts.

Ian starts crying because he doesn’t feel like going to the doctor’s office.

And I am starting to freak out again.

We somehow make it to the pediatrician with two or three minutes to spare.

Then we wait for 45 minutes.

Minutes 1 – 5: Claudia cries the entire time.

Minutes 6 – 15: Claudia whimpers.

Minutes 16 – 20: Ian begins to go nuts on the baby toys in the waiting room. Claudia starts to wander around holding her back.

Minutes 21 – 30: The kids play with the baby toys. Claudia holds her back on and off.

Minutes 31 – 38: Both kids ask me: When is it our turn? When are they going to call us? Why did those other people get to go first? Is it our turn now? I’m thirsty can I have some water? Where is the drinking fountain? When is it going to be our turn?

Minute 39: They finally call us back.

Minutes 40 – 45: Both kids jump and dance around the examination room.

Minute 45: The doctor comes in checks out her back. Says everything is fine.

We give them $20 and get in a big argument about if we should stop at McDonald’s or Wendy’s on the way home.

Sledding blows.

Right.

In lieu of new thoughts, I’ll just direct you to my MamaPop Top Chef recap. (And don’t forget to check later for the MamaPop roundtable. I sing some opera instead of actually answering the question. I am sneaky like that.)

There is also a strong possibility I will be back later with some questions for you. I suppose it depends on how fast and furious my cold medicine kicks in.

*

She was wearing jeans and climbing in a tree she knows she isn’t supposed to be in and somehow she has a huge scratch on her ass.

I heard her crying outside, but since she has a fit about every 45 seconds I decided to ignore her. Who knew that this time would be a legitimate injury?

(Seriously, last time I went out there to see why she was crying so loudly it was because Ian ruined her life by not letting her stand near the see-saw.)

To fix her problem I got out one of those huge 1 3/4 inch by 4 inch band aids that has some sort of antibiotic prepackaged on it.

I joked with her.

This is going to cover your whole butt.

Please don’t put it over the crack, Mommy. She said, Or else I won’t be able to poop.

I didn’t, but I like how her mind works. I think.

What kind of moron leaves her iPhone on the seat of the van?

Of course the answer is THIS kind of moron. I remembered my backpack. I remembered the Nikon D90 that I am borrowing. I remembered my purse. I remembered to bring my laptop bag. And I forgot my iPhone. My security blanket. I don’t leave home without it. I don’t go to the mailbox without it. It is my phone, my watch, my address book, my memo pad, my book, my iPod. It is the non-human love of my life.

More importantly, why was I in Philadelphia?

continued here

___

* To be sung to the tune of “I Left My Wallet in El Segundo”

Not the toilet swimming scene, not the one with the dead baby, but the one where Spud wakes up at his girlfriend’s house.

Note to parents of sick children: Just because your kid hasn’t eaten in a couple of days does not mean he or she is empty. Yet.

Now if you will excuse me, I’ve got some laundry to do.

***

Ian threw up in my bed last night.

Thrice.

Eventually we were on our last set of clean sheets (I won’t even go into what happened in his bed) and he and I came out to the living room and slept on the floor.

I gave up got creative and gave him a bowl to throw up in when it became evident that he wasn’t ever going to make it to the bathroom in time.

To make a long and messy story short, I got about three nonconsecutive hours of sleep last night and odds are pretty good that this whole house smells like puke.

Here comes the strange part. It makes me a little bit nostalgic. Ian had reflux when he was a baby. I forgot that for eight months is was standard procedure to wash my sheets every single day because there was a 99.9% chance that he would ralph in my bed.

As I was throwing a load of soiled bedding into my washing machine in a sleep deprived haze I think I actually smiled.

Last night sucked but it was way easier than having infant twins. Sorry Nora. You will never hear me saying that I want to revisit that time in my life. Having a baby with colic and another baby with reflux was maddening, yet somehow we lived through it and now we have these amazing little people that only vomit when they are sick and only scream all night if I really piss them off. Plus, even though it was a huge pain in the ass, twin babies are very cute and at some point (I don’t remember exactly when it was, but I assure you it was after six weeks and before one year) they were even kind of fun, and at some much later point they started sleeping through the night.

So yeah, being puked on sucks but he also still cuddles up with me when he doesn’t feel well and that won’t last forever either and so for now I am willing to take the trade-off.

So I go to the doctor. Well, we go to the doctor. (Just one of the joys of being a stay at home mom.) As soon as I check in Claudia has to pee in the potty. Don’t get me wrong, I love it that she is peeing in the potty (finally) but it occurs to me that she is much more likely to pee in the potty if we are in public. The more inconvenient it is the more she is potty trained.

She successfully pees and her brother successfully washes his hands three times for no apparent reason.

We go back into the office and eventually they call us in.

I am thinking that this is going to be pretty simple. I tell the nice man that I coughed so hard that I pulled a muscle and he will give me some cough medicine with codeine in it and we will all be happy.

Not so.

He asks me about 1000 question then tells me I need to go downstairs to get an x-ray. They want to make sure that I don’t either have pneumonia or a hole in my lung.

A HOLE IN MY LUNG? Holy shit. Really?

So the kids and I go down to the radiology center and as I am filling out all the forms for this place the lady at the desk asks me if I have anybody with me to watch the kids, because they can’t go back with me to get my x-ray.

Now three of us are panicking: me because what the hell am I going to do with my kids, Claudia because she has no interest in staying in the waiting room with a bunch of strangers while I go in the back, and Ian because he is set on seeing what I look like on the inside.

I do the only think I can think of to do. I call my in-laws. I don’t even know if they are in the state or not. Amazingly, they have just arrived home and are immediately available and live five minutes away.

This is part where I brag and tell you that I have the best in-laws in the universe and everybody should have married Gabe. I encourage all single people to rush out and try to marry Gabe’s sister immediately. No joke. There is no way I could have done better in the in law department and I fell in love with Gabe before I even met these people.

So, Gabe’s parents show up at the radiology lab less than 10 minutes after the lady (who looked so much like Petunia that I couldn’t help staring) told me that I couldn’t take the kids in with me. Then they whisked the children off and fed them lunch.

It gets very boring from here on out, but I will tell you this:

1) It took to long that I missed my 1:00 conference call.

2) I don’t have a hole in my lung or pneumonia.

3) I got my cough medicine with codeine. (Woo hoo!) Plus a prescription for Motrin and an antibiotic.

4) I was diagnosed with costochondritis* which is an “inflammation of the cartilage that attaches the ribs to the breastbone“. It is both gross and painful, but thankfully not a big deal, and I will live.

5) I’m already feeling better. I should have gone to the doctor last week.

* Not to be confused with Costcochondritis, which if I’m not mistaken is what happens when you go to a Warehouse Club to buy toilet paper and a big ass thing of dog food and you come home with 12 DVDs, a huge multi-pack of twix bars, a set of towels and a new couch but you forget the toilet paper.

I’ve had the flu for over two weeks. I’ve coughed so hard that I pulled enough muscles in my side that it actually hurts to breathe.

I’m going to the doctor. I know – it is weak to go to the doctor for the flu, but I have no choice. I can no longer function as a parent. I can’t pick the kids up, every day I cough so hard that I puke, it hurts to do laundry – hell, it hurts to sit.

So yeah, flu, you win.

Maybe the doctor will give me crazy pain killers and then I can be funny again, or at least jacked up enough so that you can laugh AT me. I’m not proud.

I am wearing my skinny jeans.