From Arachnophobia to Arachnodog

The long day gets even longer.......

falling asleep at well after 2am, then lying half-awake from 6am to 7am, I just wanted to go back to bed. But Bug had to get ready for school, do some classwork that she couldn't complete in class, eat breakfast and watch an episode of "Drake and Josh".

Oh yeah, and tell me how I'm the meanest mom in the world and recounting all of my failings thus far in the day. I am SO loved.

In the early afternoon, I was resting and Buddy was in the kitchen watching Spongebob. He starts whining about a big 'fiiiiiieeeeerrrrr" so I ran in looking for fire. Seeing only sunlight, I told him that the sun was shining on him, that is why he was hot.

Then he pointed to IT.

IT was the biggest, hairiest, wolf spider to EVER get into our house. It is cold in the mornings now, so they start coming in. The good for nothing cats won't kill them because they bite and must not taste good. The dogs won't kill them because the dogs are lazy and domesticated.

Buddy yells to me "kill it!"

Now I'm stuck in a conundrum. My baby is begging me to kill this scary thing, but I'm terrified of the scary thing too. My eyes well up with tears, as I pick up a shoe and approached it.

It had big pointy fang things. I backed away with a scream.

"Kill it mommy, you have to save me, kill it!"

WHAP!

I hit it spot on with my shoe and leave it hanging on the wall. slowly its guts pull away and it falls to the floor.

But I am now hiding behind my son, shaking and crying after screaming like a little girl.

"I'm not scared of spiders mommy."

Now, couldn't this announcement have been made BEFORE I had to go near the biggest damn spider in Central Ohio?

"Why didn't YOU kill it then!" I've been betrayed by my baby.

He looks up at me and says so innocently "I'm too little."

Argh! foiled by cute!

But the story does not end there, because, after all I live HERE.

Anyway, I left it on the floor...no way was I going near it again. Brutus walks in and sniffs it, but it sticks to the drool on his mouth. And, of course, being the long dust bunny that he is, he's always under my feet. So I start running away from him, crying, and he's bounding after me, dead spider hanging off of his face. I wound up on the kitchen counter, shooing him away.

If this does not seem amusing to you, think of this: Basset Hounds are short dogs, until they stand on their hind legs, then they are very tall. I was standing on my counter, Brutus dangling the dead spider every closer to my feet as I'm screaming and kicking at him. If you've never seen me, think of someone with Rosie O'Donnell's build standing on a counter crying and kicking a slobbery dog with a spider hanging off his snout.

Then Buddy saves my life by dropping a cracker on the floor. Arachnodog senses food for the taking and runs away, dropping the spider corpse back under the table, almost exactly where it fell to the ground after I killed it.

But the story of suburban terror and familial betrayal does not end there. I stagger to my office, and send a frantic e-mail to my husband. This is the reply he sends to me.

OK, I'm going to hell, but I need to 'fess up. I saw that thing this morning, but it scampered under the computer desk before I could kill it. I tried to rattle cables and the other crap down there, but the spider was so very not leaving his warm little hidey-hole.

I thought about telling you, but I decided it would be better not to. I figured if the spider showed his head again, I'd get a phone call ... 8^)

He knows that I listen to enough true crime shows while I work that I know how to kill him, make it look like a natural death, AND get away with it.

You DO NOT leave GigantoSpider both in the home AND alive, knowing that a serious arachnophobe is the only one there to protect the baby. It could have bitten me, I would have swelled up and died, then it would have eaten the boy, the dogs and all our food before moving on to the neighbors. (But he would have spared the cats, no one messes with our cats). Did he not learn ANYTHING from Bill Cosby and the Chicken Heart? Does he just not UNDERSTAND how close the Far East Suburbs came to extinction today?

I have to now go hermetically seal myself in a gas permeable body bag, smear Jello all over the floor and set fire to the couch. There is no way I can sleep tonight knowing that there may be more 8 legged freaks of nature out there, thirsty for blood.

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If you do not know about Bill Cosby and the Chicken Heart, a) you've lived under a rock for all of your sad life, and b) go buy his comedy album "Wonderfulness". You will not be disappointed.

A Conspiracy of Pauls

So, I was thinking about this today, and have come to the conclusion that what is happening to my body is not so much a sad turn of events, or perhaps even some would say a tragedy in the making, but rather, a vast medical wing conspiracy.

It came to me this morning in the glorious cleansing ritual that the commoners refer to as a "shower". It is a Conspiracy of Pauls.

Exhibit A: My urologist is Dr. Paul K. He has been to Omaha, he owns a hunk of Warren Buffet's empire, please go to Dairy Queen today and support him.

Exhibit B: My General Practitioner is Dr. Paul G. He has never been to Omaha. He is Italian (I think) and there are lots of good Italian restaurants in Omaha. Watch the Sopranos tonight, think of Dr. G.

Exhibit 3: My favorite actor is Paul Sorvino. He is Italian, he sings Opera, probably likes ice cream, and I don't care if he has been to Omaha or not. Go watch "Goodfellas" tomorrow.

Can you see it?!?!?! It is all here in dark green and dots! Paul K. discovers the pain, Paul G. writes me prescriptions to treat the pain, and Paul S. plays the legitimate businessman who supplies the pharmacy with the drugs that "fell off a truck" to fill my prescription!

Oh....My......GAWD!!!!!

It is now that I will advise you of the fact that I inherited the Blanche DuBois gene from my mother's side of the family. Fortunately it is tempered with the Hakuna Matata* gene from my father's side of the family, so the majority of my hysterical rantings and dramatic license are literary.

Dr. K has already talked to a local laparoscopic surgeon at the Kidney Stone Center at Riverside hospital here in Columbus. He has agreed to take my case, and my information is being sent to him, I see him Tuesday.

We leave and take Buddy to school. We are late, and he managed to stop for one picture,






and then I got one more.





He pretty much left me in the dust.

We picked Buddy up at noon, came home. I made him his "first day of school" lunch, PB&J cut in triangles and arranged like NASCAR flags around the bottom of plate, red grapes in the middle and quartered strawberries across the top of the plate. I served this with a glass of "yellow juice" which is, ironically, Orange Juice.

He looks at the plate, and the side of yogurt served with it. "oh Nice!" He thanks me and proceeds to eat a package of Zesta Saltine crackers.


Buddy, don't you want to eat the lunch I made for you?

By now I'm bent over the counter, holding it for support, I literally cannot stand because of the pain.

"nope, it's too pretty"

Never again will I serve aesthetically pleasing food.

I convince him to come upstairs and play with his trains so I can lay down. After about 90 minutes, he is in the bed with me, and we are watching a very entertaining episode of Spongebob Squarepants, when I finally feel the meds winning out over the pain.

We go see Dr. G. I tell him of my Paul Conspiracy Theory. He looks suspiciously at me, and now I know I'm being watched.

He prescribes a Duragesic Patch for me. I put it on when we got home. I began to feel a gradual numbing of the pain a few hours later. It flared up again, but I was able to beat it back with Percocet and rest.

Narcotics do not make me sleepy. I don't get a "high" from them, so I don't understand why people abuse them. I guess if you aren't in pain, you get all euphoric with them, but not me. The Duragesic patch so far is great, except keeping it on. I'll have to find a better place on Sunday when I put the new one on.

Then I tried to go to bed. Normally, this is an exercise in futility. But I felt myself drifting off to a peaceful sleep....and I freaked out. Oh No! I feel floaty and light, I must be having a fentanyl overdose....ack! must consult internet immediately!

Anyway, I got about two hours of sleep in, when I was awakened by a smell. I got dressed and followed my nose to the source.

The bassets looked guilty in their crates. I was sure one of them had an accident.

I let them go potty and investigated the crates. It seems that Mr. Brutus had some really bad gas. So bad that when they came back inside, he immediately ran to bunk with Henry. It must suck to have one of the strongest senses of smell in the animal kingdom.

So I'll leave you with this. Hounds are the most burying type of dog I've ever seen. Give them a rawhide bone, they have to go bury it....to let it ferment or age or something, and then go dig it up a few hours or day later and enjoy it. This must be a useless "throwback" instinct, as they tend "bury" their bones in blankets, clothes baskets, couch cushions, etc.

Monday, Super G cleaned the litter boxes for me.

He found very little cat poo, (all dogs love catbox crunchies) but he did find a rawhide bone.

It is so very weird to live HERE.

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* Hakuna Matata is a phrase from the Disney Movie, "The Lion King" which translates to "no worries"

The Child Impact Index

Back in the day, when I was getting ready to stand at the bus stop on a cold January morning, I remember hearing on the radio that it was 15 degrees below zero, but the wind chill index put the temp down around 40 below. School was not, however, cancelled. This was Nebraska, if they closed schools because kids had to wait in sub-zero temps, no one would go to school for the entire month of January.

Later on, the meteorology cabal came up with the "Heat Index". This was the actual temperature, combined with the humidity to tell you exactly how miserable you would be. In places like Omaha, when the temperature and the humidity are usually the same astronomical number, this is a cruel joke at best. In Ohio, where the weather is milder, such dire warnings are taken with great seriousness. People in Central Ohio are weather weenies. They have to explain the terms Wind Chill Index and Heat Index as "Real Feel", or how cold/hot you "really feel". If your weatherman has to explain how the weather feels, you don't have anything to complain about.

Today, as I scraped deodorant off of a beloved Thomas the Tank Engine wooden train (new and improved! Painted with 99 % less lead!) I came up with a term to explain a child like Buddy.

The Child Impact Index.

This is a measure of how many children it "feels" like you have, when you are dealing with a particular child.

For example: Bug, for all her hysteria, and drama, probably has a Child Impact Index of 1.5. She's fairly easy and compliant, but chooses her battles over the most inane things. The loss of a baby tooth is so traumatic, it takes two adults to extract a tooth hanging by a bit of gristle, and then four hours minimum of reassurances that she will not bleed to death out of the tooth hole.
But she will believe pretty much anything you tell her, and she is good to her little brother.

Buddy, on the other hand, has a CII of 15. You cannot take your eyes, ears or mind off of that boy for a second, or he's teaching the neighbor kids to pee and poop in the backyard. Or washing the dog with foaming hand soap, drawing on the walls with deodorant, or tonight's great adventure: Chemical warfare.

I was trying to get some work done before the sitter arrived. We had curriculum night at school and since we wanted to actually hear what was going on, we chose to leave the kids at home. As I'm keying my work with great speed (and minimal accuracy) I hear this blood curdling scream from Buddy's room.

I run upstairs and see him walking in the hallway, screaming that the "bubbles" burned his eyes.

Bubbles? Why was he washing his hands....voluntarily.....without assistance?

I take him in the bathroom and turn on the water, I smell his hands, they don't smell soapy, they smell like chemicals.

I try to rinse his eyes at the sink, he continues to scream.

I look into his room and see his train table soaked with fluid and some bubbles. A purple bottle of Carpet Cleaner and a bottle of Downey Wrinkle Releaser are on the floor. Further inspection shows that they are both empty.

There are no first aid directions on the Downey bottle ( they should have some instructions, you know some idiot out there will try to remove their own wrinkles and age lines with it) But the carpet cleaner says to rinse the eyes for FIFTEEN minutes. Are they insane?

So I try putting his head under the bath tub faucet, no luck. Now my pants are wet and the phone is ringing and I have twenty minutes to get to school.

Long story short, he is okay, we got to school on time and we now call him Chemical Buddee.