Sugar and Spice

I’m sure you’ve all seen that Subaru commercial where the dad is ticking off a vehicle safety checklist to his daughter who is seated in the driver’s seat. At first glance, he seems to be talking to a cute fidgety toddler. It’s only at the end of the commercial, that you realize he was only seeing her as a toddler and that she is, in fact, his beautiful grown daughter. It gets me every time. Every. Single. Time. That commercial is always followed in our house by tears, nostalgia for years that have not even passed us by yet, and, if she is close enough, a big and usually unwelcome squeeze of Pumpkin. This morning I had a completely opposite experience. As I’m sorting laundry, I look up and, lo and behold, Pumpkin has draped a sports bra around her neck and is holding a set of car keys in her hand. I felt like her whole life had flashed before my eyes. I was no longer looking at my 19-month old, but at my 19-year old. Granted, I hope when she is 19-years old she is wearing he

Give me your poor, your tired, your huddled babies trying to breathe without the nebulizer, but please God keep your vomiting, stomach-bug infested babies from now on. Boy, I didn’t know how good we had it with the wheezing and the breathing treatments until last Thursday when Pumpkin was hit with “the stomach bug.” That’s right, not “a stomach bug” but THE stomach bug. From 11 PM until 7 AM we dealt with violent projective vomiting every thirty minutes like clockwork. I had spoken in hyperbole before about being “up all night” but this time we were literally, Up. All. Night. Not only were we up, but we were disgusting, shameless wretches of our formal selves. Once her own bed was declared a hazardous waste zone, I moved her to ours. Being that she is still too young to explain the concept of hurling off the side of the bed into a trash can, I laid there watching her little limp body for the first sign of distress at which point I would cup my hands under her little mouth. The t

I almost don’t even need to write this blog entry and you can probably guess how things have been. Pumpkin has been battling respiratory illness, I’ve been battling the Children’s Clinic, yadda, yadda, yadda. I’m sure it’s getting old to my faithful readers; God knows it is getting old to me. But after the third diagnosis by the same doctor in a two week period, and my subsequent dismantling of his opinion on WebMD I got to wondering how in the world people parented before technology. I’m not even referring to days of yore when kids were bred for working and you lost a few to diphtheria along the Oregon Trail. I’m talking about a mere 20 years ago. I’m talking about MY lifetime. Like, how did my parents do it? How did they survive? Better yet, how did I survive? What in the world did people do when they didn’t have Google, WTE.com, Facebook, and portable DVD players? My research started with a consultation with my own mother. First question: how did you ever go anywhere more