The Blood Test

Yesterday, I had to take my son for a blood test. No worries, it's all just to make sure there's no Lyme disease crawling around his system since I had it earlier in the year and my in-laws' dog has it too. They watch him after school, so there's a chance.

Ticks rule like that. Vile little beasties.

Anyway, it was decided that I would fly this mission solo since Jacob gets all 'momma's boy' when she's around. She's a crumbler at the first sight of tears too. I happen to have a convenient heart of stone for these situations. I keep it in a little box filed under, "crappy stuff that has to be done."

The time was nearing to go pick him up and I had the requisite feeling of dread, but there was nothing to be done; the sentence had been passed.

I drove over to the in-laws to pick him up and let him know it was time for his test at the doctor's.

The Boy: "What kind of test daddy?"

Me: "Oh, you know, just one of those tests."

The Boy: "Am I getting a shot?"

Crap, this was going to be like a big game of dodge ball all the way to the doctor's.

Me: "No, not a shot." Similar concept though...still a needle involved, but they'll be taking instead of giving. I was not lying here, mind you, merely omitting.

The Boy: "How long will it take?"

Me: "Not long."

The Boy: "What kind of test is it?"

Me: "Dunno, buddy. We'll find out in a minute." Okay, I lied. Bite me.

The Boy: "Will it hurt?"

Me: "I don't think so." Hey, pain is all relative. Of course, a needle to a child might as well be a sharpened drain pipe.

...and double bite me.

We finally got there and were walking across the lot when he asked, "Am I having surgery?"

I burst out laughing. "No, no surgery."

We entered the office and I was all prepared. We had a stuffed animal du jour and I had the pocket video recorder so I could show him the movies we took for Halloween. Yeah baby, I had it covered. Dad o' the year, that's me.

We were in the lab in under five minutes and he was sitting on my lap. He was watching videos to the left. He never even looked to the right when they did the strappy thing to his arm. Things were moving along nicely.

Cool, this might just work out.

Then he looked to his right just as they were about to put the needle in.

Full. Bore. Nutty.

"I don't wanna. I want to go home. I want my mommy," over and over again. A protective mantra at 100 decibels. Then the tears came.

My little, stone heart chipped a little.  Perhaps it cracked a smidge as well. It's rough. You tell your child it's so they wont feel icky later on but it's still hard to do.

The nurses broke to their respective corners and we talked him down. After a minute or so, he realized there wasn't any escape. Especially since mommy wasn't there.

Some more tears flowed as I put his little legs between mine and crossed them so he couldn't kick and I held his flailable arm while the nurses held his other. It was over pretty quick and the nurses were great.

I said, "Let's bolt," and we were outta there. On the way to the car he said it wasn't any worse than his flu shot. I thought, "Yeah but you could have at least had the consideration to make it easier on me." Sheesh, these selfish kids nowadays.

The Boy: "You didn't tell me that was going to happen."

I thought, "Duh, I couldn't have gotten you through the doors without a team of Clydesdales pulling you if I had."

I said, "Gee, I wasn't sure what kind of test it was going to be buddy."

Liar, liar. Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do though. Let's hope that's the last test for a while.

 

Technorati Tags: sorry man - life is like that sometimes

Church, it does a blog good.

Every time I think, "There's no way I can possibly get more material from church," all I have to do is pull up and get proven wrong.
So I get to church and try to park...evidently the Pope issued a special edict that Catholics no longer have to park between the lines. This is good for me. I like special treatment like that. Of course, I'm pretty sure this is the same reason Martin Luther broke away...no spot for his damn horse.
We were late, so The Wife likes to pull the 'baby room' trick in an attempt fool Father into thinking we weren't really late. Whatever. We get there and there was this little girl. She was a cutie but she was non stop. Non. Stop. Srsly. If at one point she would have stopped and had to cut and snort another line of coke to keep going I would not have been shocked. She had those little girl shoes too. They made this sound on the floor: *thump* *thump* *thump* *thump* one way and *thump* *thump* *thump* *thump* the other way. Mom just let her go.
It's okay. It's my church and I expect this.
During the homily (I had to look that up, I was going to call it a 'sermon' but my acute Catholic senses told me that was wrong. Saved by 40 years of nigh paying attention.) Father was blathering on about something but it was hard to pay attention with all the *thump* *thump* *thump* *thump* one way and *thump* *thump* *thump* *thump* the other way. He also has an accent so what follows is totally not my fault.
Anyway, Father said the word 'basilica' at some point. With all the distractions though I heard this:

GODZILLICA!

RUN! It's the church come to strike you down with holy Jeebus fire! Repent now mofos! (I'm fairly certain that's how the pope refers to non-Catholics.)

Think how useful the Godzillica would have been during the crusades though. You could worship inside and then go kick some ass. Take THAT heathens!

The good thing about me mishearing something like this is that it burns a good 10 minutes of church while my little mind turns it over and over.

About this time another little girl, with a much lighter step, comes in and we start having a race around the baby room. Lil Miss Speedball was winning by a mile until:

*thump* *thump* *thump* *thump*...*WHUD*
Yeah, the ump says she was 'safe.'
She bounced right back up in time for mommy to actually dart forward -- Hey! Nice ink mommy! You're gonna need a lot of butt spackle to patch that crack though. -- and grab her girl. She held her around the waist, but I was pretty certain that anything less than a full-nelson wasn't going to do it. Nope, she was out of the pit in record time.
The Wife and The Boy left around this time. I assumed it was to go potty. Then about five minutes later I saw them heading up to the altar for the Holy Ritz.
Wha? Did I miss a memo? You leave me in here with speed racer and her mommy -- who I noted was wearing socks with her peep toed shoes. Is it me or is that wrong? -- and head off for crunchity waferness?
She got back and I leaned over. "You ditched me! No cookie for me today."
She just started laughing. See? Even The Wife works against me in church. How am I supposed to get all holy with all this material flying around?

Technorati Tags: Even if I did confession I'm pretty sure it wouldn't handle this

Sunday Randomness

Dear son,
Just because a pen is left out in the open, undefended, does not mean you have to use it to write on any piece of paper (including photographs) within reach. Thank you for you consideration in the future.

Sincerely,

The management

==========

The scene: We had Chinese food the other day. The restaurant is owned by a Chinese couple down the street. They're really nice. Anyway, we had the neighbor's girl over (she eats here as much as The Boy does sometime) and this was the conversation at one point:

Girl: "So do they speak Chinese?"
Me: "Yes they do. They immigrated."
Girl: "Cool, I wonder what it sounds like?"
The Boy: "Hola!"

Yeah, close enough for now buddy.

==========

Grandma was watching The Boy the other day and stopped over at the house. She accidentally tried the car keys in the door.

"You can't drive my house, Grammy!"

==========

Captcha Love  for the week:

 
I'm pretty sure this was the tech support guy's name when I called Verizon.

...and this was his last name

 

 
The election's over. Can we ease up on that already?

 

====================

I'm sneaking this in down here. People are going to start thinking I pay people for this stuff...

This award comes from Wayne over at Wayne John. He's a great guy and has a fantastic series on how to make Blogger work. If you need tips on how to do things in Blogger, this is the place to look. He also happens to be a twitterer extraordinaire.

This is a friendship award. It's the Proximidade Award. He tells me that "This blog invests and believes, in 'proximity' [meaning, that blogging makes us 'close' - being close through proxy]. These blogs are all charming and they aim to show the marvels of friendship. Lets give more attention to them! So with this prize we must deliver it to eight bloggers who in turn must make the same thing and put this text."

It also sorta makes my blog multi-cultural. You didn't know I could be so classy, huh?

So here are the eight people I award this to for being a part of my community of bloggers. My heartfelt thanks to them all for making blogging so rewarding. (They only let me pick eight people, I'd pick you all if I could. That and listing you all would take me way too much time.)

Mary Anne @ The Stiletto Mom

Jen @ Blissfully Caffeinated

Diane @ Diane's Addled Ramblings

Petra @ The Wise Young Mommy

Tony @ Life with Tony

Deb @ I Need a Martini Mom

Tara @ From Dawn Till Rusk

Mel @ Melanie in Oregon

Kelley @ Magneto Bold Too

 

Okay people, go relax...it's Sunday.

 

Technorati Tags: awards,randomosity

Words I can't shake

We all have them. They're either left over from high school or picked up from the streets as we move through life. Our 'go to' words when all else fails us. They're ingrained in us. No thought required most of the time. They just bubble to the surface unbidden. Here's a few of mine:

Boffo: To this day, I don't know where the hell I picked this up but I love it. I get the occasional strange look when I declare something 'boffo,' but I'm used to that. It just rolls off the tongue and makes everything extra awesome.

Gnarly: When I was in high school I used to make fun of people that used this word. It was a dumb surfer word. Then I went to college and started rock climbing. A lot. It was the perfect word. "Dude, that bracket you used to get to the top of the white lightning route was gnarly." or "Dude, you're gonna need stitches for that, it's just gnarly." (I just used some crazy glue and kept climbing btw, it was no where near gnarly enough for stitches.) Anyway, 'gnarly' is just too all-purposey for me and it's staying.

Dude: Yeah, there's no getting away from this one either. It's all purpose too. It's all in the inflection. It can be used in greeting, outrage, commiseration, surprise...it's a catch all. I should do an audio post for that to truly capture the essence. I think I'm too lazy to though. Dude.

Tard: This is probably my most anti-PC term. Hey, I'm a child of the 80's. I don't do politically correct. Besides, I use it to describe people like...um...me actually. Usually after a particularly smooth move. It's more like a term of endearment. If I didn't like you and you did something stupid, you'd be an asshole. But you're all 'tards in my book. You're welcome.

MoFo: This one is my newest. I picked it up to replace my previous favorite so that The Boy didn't go spouting that one off. See, I can be a role model. It's bad enough that he lets the occasional 'Jesus H. Christ' slip after he helps me work with plumbing.

Two quick asides while we're on the topic:

"What does the 'H' stand for, daddy?"

"Harold. You know, like the song, "Hark the Harold Angels sing."

(Yeah, I can't wait for the Catholic School to call after he tries to explain that to his class.)

and

"What does MoFo mean daddy?"

"It's just a funny word that grown-ups say...and only grown-ups say. We use it to describe the things in life that stymie us."

"Do the things go away then?"

"Nope, but we always have our funny word for small solace."

I have some others too, but those are the ones I catch myself with most often.

Now it's time for some commenty goodness: So what are the words you can't shake?

 

Technorati Tags: Words

Wrong Number

We switched to IP phones at work. This was a while back and ever since, I've been getting misdirected phone calls. Basically when someone dials a local number on the other side of the state, it gets redirected to our system here. Verizon insists that this isn't something that are responsible for, but that's their M.O. and another blog entry entirely.

The calls are the entertaining things. Voice messages are routed to my inbox so I can save all the really entertaining ones:

Message: "I was wondering when and where you want me to drop off this hot tub"

Well holy crap. A free hot tub? I wonder if I can get that guy to drive it 3 hours to my house? I'm not sure if I have the room for a hot tub though, so I may just have to resell it. I wonder what shipping would be on eBay?

Message: "Yeah, we're ready to have that grave dug. Give us a call when you would like to do it."

I wonder what the going rate is for grave digging? I can do that. The guy that was supposed to do it will never notice. It'll be sort of like it was subcontracted out. I'm thinking my shovel isn't going to cut it though and I don't have a backhoe handy, so I'll have to pass on that one too. I sure hope they call back and get the right number. That could potentially be an awkward situation.

Message: "You can come pick up the oxygen bottle."

What? I wonder what the market value is on an oxygen bottle? It's related to the medical industry, so I should be able to charge roughly 200,000% of its production price. This one may be worth looking into.

Message: "We're ready for a new oxygen bottle."

Okay, this one scares me. We're not provided with the caller ID's on numbers that are misdirected. Eventually I picked up the phone and caught this person to let them know that they should keep trying until they get the right number.

Message: "Kurt, the blade needs to be sharpened on line 8.

Sucks to be line 8 then, doesn't it?

Message: "You better get that money to me today or I'm coming over there."

Look lady, I don't have your money. If you can find me however, I will give you five dollars for your awe-inspiring stalker skills.

Message: "Kurt, the roller on line 8 is loose. We're worried that it's going to come off and hurt someone."

What the hell is up with line 8? Kurt better get his ass down there and straighten that out.

The really funny thing is that I eventually got hold of Kurt's number after a caller left it in a message. Calls for Kurt are my number one source of misdirected calls. When it's serious now on line 8, I usually call him and let him know. He's a nice guy.

P.S. If anyone wants to work with me on the grave digging, let me know. I know a guy. Well, not really, but he doesn't know that I don't know him.

Technorati Tags: misdirected phone calls,Verizon blows goats