I hadn't even thought of that

As some of you might remember, a couple months ago a devastating tornado went through our neighborhood, splintering entire houses into toothpicks and nearly killing our family. If you know me at all, you know that I never exaggerate. But really, the storm DID blow Wesley's sandbox away, blow down our neighbor's fence, and tear up the trees in our yard. And, more importantly, it scared the bajeebies out of me because it made me realize that we didn't have anywhere to hide except our bathroom. And while our bathroom is a lovely venue for eliminating body waste, it wasn't really made to be a tornado shelter. I guess a safe place to go in case of a tornado is one of those things you don't really need until you need it. Like flea powder for your dog or a Vanilla Ice cassette tape.

Well, after that traumatic incident, we (read: I) decided to get a storm cellar. My MIL found a local company that installs storm cellars so I called and made an appointment to have them come and put one in. My understanding was that they come to your house, dig a giant hole in the yard with a tractor, drop in the pre-made cellar, put dirt around it, and leave. Then, I go down in the cellar and add the finishing touches - hang some pictures, put out some potpourri, perhaps a little rug and maybe even draw a cozy fireplace on the wall to make it seem homey.

I did think to ask the saleswoman on the phone if there was a sample cellar that I could go and see. She told me where it was - a kind of remote area out in the country - and I set out to see it.
To say that it was in the middle of nowhere would be perfectly accurate. Had she not given me the directions down to the tenth of a mile, I would never have found it. The CIA couldn't have found it without directions.

I got out of the car (which I kept running in case I needed to get out of there fast) and walked through knee-high weeds to the cellar. I pulled open the door to get a good look. Oh, how I wish I had just ordered a cellar and called it a day. Inside the cellar was the thing I fear most in this world - a mouse. A MOUSE! The fact that it was dead and decaying was not help to me because - let's be real - it didn't just fall in there dead. No, it scurried in there alive.

Something very bad must have happened to me as a young child involving a mouse. I know that if I could just think rationally, a mouse really isn't going to hurt me. But when I see a mouse, I don't think rationally, I go into cardiac arrest. And so seeing this mouse crushed my dreams of our family seeking shelter during a bad storm, laughing and playing card games by flashlight. No, this had just turned into my own personal episode of Fear Factor. People, if a tornado was headed straight for me and I opened the cellar door to find a mouse in there, it would be a toss up - get killed by a tornado/die of heart attack from mouse...I might have to flip a coin on this one.

I tried to put it all in the back of my mind. The day finally arrived when a giant truck came hauling a cellar and a tractor. The guy in charge came to the door to ask me where to put it. I gathered my courage and asked him, "How do you keep mice from getting down there? I hate mice."

He grinned at me with his four pearly ecrus showing and said, "Boy, I don't know. My wife isn't afraid of the mice - it's the snakes that get in our cellar that bother her."

Someone hold me. Because this is going to take a lot more than potpourri.

it was at least the size of a cantaloupe

Last night right before bed I stepped into the hallway to turn off the light and something caught my eye. It was a GIGANTIC spider crawling on the bed in the spare room. I probably could have killed it myself, but I wanted Bryan to see it, to raise his awareness of the spider situation in our home. Now, I am not a squealy girl who screams every time a tiny spider walks by. But 1.) we have been having a little bit of a problem with poisonous spiders called Fiddlebacks in our house lately and 2.) this was no tiny spider - its legs were quite possibly longer than mine.

So I called for Bryan to come in and make sure it wasn't the poisonous kind and to kill it. Bryan was less than thrilled about being called out of bed to smash a spider. He looked at it and made a half-hearted attempt to grab it with a kleenex. But the spider was apparently a seasoned criminal and disappeared under the bed in a flash.

Bryan said, "Well, it's just a harmless wolf spider. Let's go to bed."

Um, was he kidding? I wanted to see some spider carnage before I went back to bed. I mean, this thing was so big we could have strapped a saddle on its hairy back and ridden it into the Grand Canyon. And as Bryan suggested that we just go to bed, a vision flashed through my mind of that big hairy thing crawling over my infant son's head...or my toothbrush.

"Uh, I would rather try to find it and kill it first," I told Bryan.

Bryan's response was that he didn't even know where the flashlight was. At that point, I would have driven to Arkansas to get a flashlight if I had to. But, alas, I knew exactly where the flashlight was. So there we were, after 11 at night, laying on the floor with our butts in the air, looking under the bed for Spiderzilla.

In the end, I had to go to bed defeated. All night long, whenever the sheets touched me, I imagined it was my arachnid friend from the other room, coming to poop on me or lay eggs in my ear or just lick the chapstick off my lips.

It is such a curse to have an over-active imagination sometimes.

bringing home baby

I know that I promised my next post would be telling all the details of my horrid hospital stay. And I really tried to think of how I could recount the tale and make it funny or even just amusing. But the problem is that writing about it is almost as bad as re-living the whole traumatic event. So I am going to have to sit on this one a while and try to come back to it later, perhaps after all my flesh wounds have healed. I hope you understand.

Instead, I will bring you a little up to date on our new life as a family of four. Plus one dog that eats her own poo. Bringing a baby home from the hospital is sort of like bringing a goldfish home from the pet store: you get really excited about bringing this little thing home only to realize that in all honesty it doesn't really DO very much. Like, you never hear someone say, "The other day I was at the park with my goldfish and this really cool thing happened..." You also never hear anyone say, "Yesterday, I was playing my Wii with my newborn baby and he did the neatest thing..." Or at least you rarely hear that.

But there are some real differences, too. For instance, a goldfish never shoots projectile diarrhea at you when you change its diaper. And if you go out shopping and leave your goldfish at home, no one calls DHS. And, a goldfish doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night twenty-seven million times with a Scream So Shrill That You Want To Cut Off Your Own Ears just to let you know that he is hungry. Again.

Other than that, though, it's pretty much the same thing. And things are going well.

the longer version

As most of you probably know, last Saturday I gave birth. Again. And trust me - the whole experience gave me lots of possible material to write about. But if I thought it was hard to find time to sit at the computer with Wesley demanding my attention, I had no idea how hard it would be to sit and type with a small human attached to my nipple (sorry, Mom.)

Anyway, last Friday was a tough evening. I went with Bryan's family to a fish fry and I was self-admittedly a huge crank-monster. I really just wanted to be alone and lay down on the couch but I did my best to be polite-ish. Then, Friday night when everyone else in my house was resting peacefully in their cozy beds, my stomach started to feel like my uterus was about to rip open (which is a remote possibility since Wesley was born via c-section.) So I went out to the couch to watch some info-mercials. All I can say is, "Sham-Wow!" But my stomach was still hurting. Thinking I might be hungry, I decided to enjoy a big bowl of the always delicious and nutritious Cookie Crisp. When even that didn't help, I just went back to bed, knowing that Wesley would be awake in just a few hours. And no matter how hard I try to convince him to sleep in for Mommy's sake, he just doesn't have empathy down yet.

Sometime after 7:00 a.m. Wesley was awake so I got up to use the restroom and get ready for the day. But as soon as I was walking to the bathroom, it became clear that something was going on.

"My water just broke," I told Bryan.

His reply from bed was a sleepy, "Yeah, right."

You see, I MIGHT have been making the joke that my water just broke for about three weeks now. Sort of like the little boy who cried "wolf" only more like the girl who cried "my water just broke." Except, get the mop, I wasn't kidding this time.

We called Bryan's parents to come get Wes, Bryan started making calls to his boss (because he is supposed to work every day and luckily was able to find someone to cover for him for the day), and I began packing. Yes, you read that right, I Began Packing. Because I had thought that I still had two weeks before the blessed event was to occur. Silly me.

Within an hour, we were at the hospital. I was slightly less than panicked. Now the first time I had a baby, I was scared because I didn't know what to expect. This time, I was scared because I Knew Exactly What To Expect.

But to keep this from becoming the blog that never ends, I will give you more details in my next post. I only hope the anticipation doesn't keep you awake until then...

it really was the frog's fault

One night last week I woke up to a terrifying sound. No, it wasn't Flavor Flav whispering sweet nothings into my ear - it was a different kind of terrifying. It was a sound like a million rocks being thrown at every window of our house. It took me a minute to figure it out because I had never heard anything like it - it was hail. Lots and lots of golf-ball sized hail. About a minute later, Bryan's mom called us to tell us to get to a shelter because a tornado was headed our way.
Now, if you live in Oklahoma, you already know this but if you are from somewhere else, you might be surprised to find out that hardly anyone here has a basement, including us. Some people have a little one room "basement" under their house but more common is the storm cellar (think Wizard of Oz). We don't have that either.

I took Wesley into the bathroom with a candle, fully expecting every window in our house to be broken but what troubled me even more was the thought that WE WERE ABOUT TO DIE!!! On TV you always hear tornado survivors say, "It sounded like a train was coming straight towards us," and that is exactly how it sounded.

Now, when I was a youngster, probably about six years old, I remember my dad decided that our family should have a practice fire drill. I know - it sounds very "Brady Bunch" and in reality we couldn't have been further from the Brady Bunch but DARN IT, we were going to be prepared for a house fire. Well, my sister and I shared a room in the basement which meant that to get out, we would have had to climb up on our dresser and out through the window well. This should have been a real treat - what kid doesn't want permission to climb on the furniture and out the window?!? Well, the answer is - me. Because I knew there was a frog that lived in that window well and it might touch me. Or even worse, look at me. And I knew in my six year old heart that it would be better to burn to a crisp than go near that frog. After many failed attempts to coax me out, it became clear that even the Jaws of Life would not get me through that window. My poor dad's plan to practice fire preparedness had failed, all because of me. The end result was a string of cursing that would have been more appropriate if, say, I had actually SET THE HOUSE ON FIRE.

But back to last week....I think my dad was right to try and make a plan. And in case we have another tornado, we need a plan, too. Because during our brush with the tornado, it became clear to me that our plan was something like this: gather in the bathroom and kiss your *asp* goodbye. And that plan doesn't work for me.

So I guess on my "to do" list, I need to add another item: formulate frogless plan for tornado preparedness. Yeah, that should be a piece of cake.

Cadillac, here we come

One of the things that we knew we would haver to replace when we became homeowners was the garage door on our house. The seller originally agreed to fix it but in her state of mental breakdown changed her mind. And that's okay because it was truly beyond repair. It was sort of buckling in on itself at the seams and sometimes wouldn't go down. It became a game for Wesley and I - before we could leave to go anywhere, we'd sit at the end of the driveway and chant, "Go down! Go down!" And then lately it developed another quirk - going up by itself. We would come home from being gone all day to find it wide open, inviting the world to come in and steal our watering cans and half used rolls of duct tape.

This week we had finally had enough of the garage door drama. Bryan called to get an estimate but it had really gotten past the point of being optional and had moved into the category of necessary.

I'm just going to be open about all of this - we're friends, right? So we had been planning on spending $700 or so on the new door. Because we just had gutters put on and we still need to put up a fence so the neighbor will stop complaining that Winnie poops in her yard. Bryan talked with the guy outside and when he came in, I immediately knew we were in trouble.

"It's going to be a little more than we thought," Bryan told me. But he was going with the guy back to the door shop to see if there were any on sale that might work.
When he had been gone for over an hour, I knew that we were really, really in trouble. He returned armed with pamphlets and shifty eyes.

Now, I had stupidly thought that buying a new garage door would be simple - you know, pick a color, windows or no windows, and you're done. I was wrong. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 7 million options available and a good salesman will convince you that if you don't get at least half of them, your children will end up in prison because you didn't love them enough to buy a better quality garage door.

Bryan told me that it was going to be $1300. And that was a screamin' deal for this door. He probably should have told me to sit down first.

"But," he said, "this is the like Cadillac of garage doors." As opposed to the Ford Festiva of garage doors we could have gotten on our budget, apparently. "And it has a lifetime guarantee," he assured me. I didn't ask but my thought was, "Whose lifetime?" Because when Sam's Club first opened, my dad bought a lifetime membership. A few years later, he got a notice in the mail that it was no longer valid. And he wasn't dead...

But that's beside the point I guess. I tried to mourn the financial loss we were about to take by brainstorming what else I could buy with $1300. I could either get a breast augmentation in a third world country or buy about two tanks of gas. Either way, we aren't really giving up much.
Heck, maybe we should have gone for the Ferrari of garage doors. Wesley doesn't need to go to college anyway.

Do they make fur-lined flip-flops?

Every good hobby has an element of danger to it. Maybe you enjoy skydiving or riding on ATVs or horseback riding - all of which can be fun but potentially dangerous. In blogging, the constant danger is that you might (heaven forbid) offend someone. Living in a small town and having relatives who read my blog makes it even more likely that this will happen at some point. I tell you all this for a reason - the event that I am writing about actually took place over a month ago but I had to wait until some time had passed before I could safely document my feelings on it. I feel confident now that no one will be able to figure out when or where this happened and therefore I can avoid creating enemies.

Here it is:
Today I was forced to spend the afternoon socializing with people who epitomize what I never want to become. People whose natural haircolor is a mystery to even themselves, who talk incessantly about how demanding their eight year old daughters' pom-pon schedules are, and who probably use Crest Whitening Strips on their dogs' teeth. I have always considered myself to be somewhat of a "social chameleon" meaning that I can get along and chat with just about anyone - kids, librarians, engineers, PETA members, the Schwan man, convicted felons - anyone. But these women stretched my skills to their very limits.

You see, I've spent my entire adult life developing a disdain for people like this and all that they stand for - women who strive to remain 20 lbs underweight, have professional French manicures on their toenails and who wear fur-lined boots to the swimming pool. Women who look as if they just climbed out of the tanning bed year round, who have never had pudding between their toes or worn the same underwear two days in a row. These women live on streets with names like, "Better Than You Boulevard." And their idea of a "wild" time is going to bed without washing their makeup off first.

And when I find myself in the presence of a group like this with no hope of escape in sight, desparately wishing I was at home with chicken pox, it makes me really think.
I'm glad for the nearly eight years that I lived in Colorado and for the life experiences that have made me into the Laura I am today. Even though I don't always fit in here in Oklahoma, it's okay.

I'm glad that I am comfortable in my own skin - as pasty-white as it may be. But if I start posting pictures of myself in fur-lined boots (and they aren't pictures of me on a ski slope), I need someone to hunt me down and slap me. Promise me you care enough to do that.