A Charmed Life

Dog Dazed

I really hate to bellyache again but this just isn't my week.  This morning, we had to put Raffles, our beloved Italian greyhound, down.  He was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma last April, and we were having the tumors removed as they appeared, but our vet had warned us that the disease causes tumors to form around internal organs as well, and that Raffles would eventually die painlessly in his sleep.  Would that it had been that easy.  At about 1:40 a.m., Dave and I woke up to him whimpering in his crate and figured he just needed to go out.  He didn't normally wake us up but we'd put him to bed early and he did have a teeny bladder!  But by the time we got out of bed, he was literally screaming in pain.  We let him out and all he did was run around the yard, shrieking.  He came back in and sat on his favorite futon and wagged his tail...but yelped again at the lightest touch on his back.  We decided to leave him there until morning and call our regular vet unless he started crying again, which, thank goodness, he didn't.  We'd have brought him to emergency otherwise, but with my fever and a sleeping toddler, we were glad we didn't have to send Dave by himself to that office in the middle of the night.

By daylight it was obvious that there was some sort of lump or swelling on Raffles' spine.  It had literally appeared overnight.  We called our dear friend and neighbor, Auntie KQ, to come sit with Sephie while we took Raffles to his last vet visit.  I would have had no problem letting her say goodbye to Raffles if he had been peaceful and calm, but he was in excruciating pain and there's no way to explain that to a two year-old.  It was heartbreaking hearing her say, "Bye-bye Wafoos.  I vuv oo Wafoos."  She had just gotten to the point where she'd learned how to be gentle with such a fragile dog, and she loved how he would snuffle in her ear ("It kickles!!") to give her kisses.  She would even come to me and ask me for "Wafoos tisses?".  For a toy dog breed not known for being comfortable around kids, he was really great with her.

The vet's diagnosis was an aneurysm or blood clot from one of the tumors.  He was as surprised as we were that Raffles didn't die painlessly as expected, but also said that clots like that were pretty common.  I'm embarrassed to admit that I didn't do nearly as well with Raffles' euthanasia as I did with my other pets, probably because he was actually shrieking in pain up until the needle was inserted into his leg.  Maybe I can blame it on my fever but I just stood there sobbing with my hands over my face the minute they touched him and made him cry.  I hope that if, Heaven forbid, something ever happens to my daughter, I pull myself together a little better than that.

I miss him already.

She Give Me Fever

Remember the movie "Outbreak", where the cute little monkey is carrying the Ebola virus that's making everyone bleed from their eyes, yet she's literally bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, remaining unscathed from the deadly illness?  Well, apparently I have my own adorable germ vector here.  My darling daughter, who loves to go to the gym with me and "kiss boys??"  (her words, not mine), has managed to manufacture some sort of killer bug and pass it on to me.  She's fine.  Not that I want her to get sick, but...aargh!

So last night my fever was almost 103.  Everything hurts, and I think my internal organs are liquefying for the sole purpose of coughing them up more easily.  I'd say I'm sick as a dog, but I have neither the flexibility nor the inclination to lick myself.  I could say I look like Death, but at this point I don't think I could lift that sickle. 

Anyway, thanks for all the support for my mom's "Leave No Mom Behind" campaign...updates to come as soon as I feel human again!

Life's a B*tch and Then Your Dog Dies

I'm going to have to pass on Weird Wednesday this week while my sense of humor is on hiatus.  We had to put our nine year-old Corgi, Marty, to sleep last night, unexpectedly.  I will spare all of you the awful details and just tell you that he was an awesome dog and we miss him terribly.

Oh, and not to be overly dramatic, but yesterday was also Sephie's 2nd birthday.  We'll be celebrating tonight instead.  Had she been old enough to have known it was her birthday I would have sucked it up and put on a happy face but as it stands we were at the vet's office until half an hour before her bedtime.  So, happy pictures to come later in the week.

Hope everyone is having a better day than mine.

Mad Martigan "Marty" S.

You were a good boy.  I'll never stop missing you.

Pre Molar Snit

Poor Persephone has been acting more like your stereotypical, nightmare-type toddler for the past couple of days.  She'll be tooling around, babbling happily as per normal, then decide to shriek at the top of her little lungs when she perceives that something isn't going her way.  One minute she's giggling and grinning, and the next she's scowling ferociously, stomping her feet.  I'm at my wit's end because she'll look me dead in the eye and scream right in my face.  If I could get her to hit that high note a little closer to my lower abdomen I wouldn't need birth control.  If she were about 13 years older I'd know exactly what to do...hand her a Midol and have her chase it down with an icy diet Pepsi and a healthy chunk of Oreo brownies.  Yes, I am craving brownies right now.  You got some kind of a @#$! problem with that??

Ahem.  In any case, the cause of her misery seems to be the eruption of her first molars on the bottom.  I wasn't really expecting them to come in yet, since she still has only six teeth total, four of which are on top.  (And the most adorable gap between her two front teeth...Lauren Hutton, eat your heart out!)  I thought the other two bottom teeth would come in first.  Those bottom molars are totally ditching.

So I guess the whimpering and whining and chewing of the remote controls (remotes control?) aren't going to stop anytime soon.  From what I hear, molars can take a month to fully erupt.  In which case I should probably stop chewing on those remotes, because they're expensive, I'm setting a bad example for my child, and they don't taste remotely like brownies. 

So Long, Mate

The planet, especially Animal Planet, will never be the same.  Steve Irwin , better known as the "Crocodile Hunter", died today from a stingray barb to the heart while diving.  He was 44.

I'm sure people will be talking about his daredevil life, and how they always knew he'd die young in an accident.  They'll smugly smirk and shake their heads from the safety of their sofas, and blithely change the channel.  Everyone dies in the end, though, and in my opinion Steve lived, loved and accomplished way more in his too-short life than any armchair warrior can even conceive of, and he did it with energy and passion and conviction.  The creepy, scaly and slithery creatures of the world have lost their greatest champion, but I'll bet nobody will ever take them for granted again, thanks to him.

I won't ask why God "took" Steve Irwin, a beloved husband and devoted father to to young children, while Fidel Castro, a sick and ancient dictator, and Osama Bin Laden, a hunted man on dialysis for crying out loud, are still alive and kicking.  I'm sure this is part of the Great Plan that I'm not supposed to understand, or perhaps Heaven is opening up a new zoo and needed a director.

But, why can't Kim Jong Il take up diving, instead?

Tongue in Cheek

I haffa boo-boo in my mouf.  Ahem.  Sorry, I talk to a baby all day long.  But I really do have a boo-boo in my mouth that is making me talk funny and ruining my good mood.  I managed to bite the inside of my cheek the other day (less filling, tastes great!), and all I can figure is that I must be venomous, because it really hurts and my salivary gland on that side is swollen.  I am constantly worrying it with my tongue in a futile attempt to shield the wound from my razor-sharp molars so I imagine I look like a pro baseball player with a nice wad of chaw in his lip.  And to add to this vision of feminine loveliness, I sound like Stan's big sister from "South Park".

I really hate to be a baby.  No, really, I do.  Do you have any idea how hard it is to find footie pajamas in my size?  But it hurts to talk, and it hurts to eat, and it hurts to brush my teeth, so I am now cranky with less-than-minty breath.  I actually stole my daughter's baby Oragel to use on the "bite wound".  That stuff is great...the entire right side of my face is numb.  No wonder it stops her crying.  And as a nice side benefit, I can do a great Marlon Brando impression now.

When it heals up and I can eat to my heart's content again, I can do a better Brando, I'm sure.

Blood is Thicker Than Oxyclean

I got my nose pierced today.  Well, just the inside, actually.  Sephie is cutting her first tooth, and likes to gives kisses by putting my nose in her mouth.  But lo!  I am smart and crafty mommy, and I also read Amalah   , so I know to watch out for those deceptively cute little toofers.  While I was busy patting myself on the back for dodging her insistent incisor, she hooked one papery, sharp fingernail inside my right nostril and made like she was coring an apple.  OUCH.  Before I could check for blood, she grabbed two double handfuls of my hair and hung on like George of the Jungle.  I can barely get my own hands out of my hair...it's past my shoulders and pre-Raphealite curly when it has product in it, and frizzy as a Bichon's when there's a baby in it.  (I once had a panicked cockatoo flapping about madly stuck in my hair, but that's a tale for another day.)  As I reached down to open the little fist that was clenching my coif, I felt the gush of blood, and clapped it over my face instead to keep the blood from dripping into my poor daughter's open mouth. (See what a great mom I am??)  Said baby is now crowing with delight at the surprised look on my face, and is still tangled in my hair.  So now I have one hand under the baby supporting her weight, one hand collecting blood, and I can't even lift my head to call for help.  So I start kicking the closed bedroom door repeatedly and yelping, "Mave!  Mave!!"  ("Dave!  Dave!!) to alert my husband.  By the time he got across the house to come to my rescue, I had blood all over the front of my shirt, Sephie's shirt, my face, and both hands.  I've always wanted to be the  lady of the manor, but Lady MacBeth was not what I had mind.  The good news?  Cold water and Oxyclean saved our shirts, and I cleaned up the blood before the asparagus fern could smell it.

Beech [Nut] Bum

This was Persephone's first trip to the beach, this past October.  Oh sure, I'm rubbing it in for all you folks who don't get to live here in southern California.  I say to you, if you'd like to put up with wildfires, mudslides, awful traffic, and the occasional earthquake, not to mention jaw-dropping real estate prices, come on down!  (Believe it or not, the worst of these is the traffic!)  We should at least get to gloat about our extended sunbathing season.

So after a shaky, careful trip down some very steep wooden stairs carrying a small infant in my arms, I got to see said small one nap peacefully on the sand, oblivious to her parents snapping dozens of pictures.  I'm glad we got to savor this moment forever, because it was the last time I would see my beloved Ray Ban sunglasses.

I escaped the "mother's curse" just fine.  However, I seem to have succumbed to the dreaded "sunglass curse" instead.  It started with my dad, back in the late '70s.  We were on a family vacation in the Gulf Coast of Florida.  My dad was and is a very well-groomed gentleman, immaculate in his appearance like many older Europeans are.  He had on a pair of $70 sunglasses, which at the time was quite a chunk of change, especially on a teacher's salary.  They were prescription glasses, and so he'd decided to wear them into the water.  My then 4 year-old brother was roughhousing with him in the surf (so far as you can call the bathtub conditions of the Gulf of Mexico "surf"), and knocked the sunglasses off of his face.  Even in the crystal-clear water, they were never seen again.  Apparently my father's rage and indignation (he's kind of a cranky guy) scarred the family's karma, and so the curse began.  My mother was the next to suffer..the one pair of expensive sunglasses she ever owned melted when she left them in her glove compartment.  I don't know what kind of plastics they were using in 1980, but I'm starting to get a little worried about my reproductive organs.

I didn't get to wear any sunglasses for a long time.  I got prescription glasses starting in the third grade.  Nice thick ones.  I'd always have people telling me, "oh, you should get those "featherweight" lenses!", and end of embarassing them when I informed them that I already had the lightest lenses possible.  Seriously, if I stare really really hard, I can burn ants.  When I was a kid, they didn't have small clip-ons, and when I was older, I wa smart enough to know that clip-ons were very uncool.  (Why didn't anyone tell me that squinting in the sun would give me extremely uncool wrinkles??)  So when I finally got contacts and got out on my own where nobody could tell me not to waste perfectly good money on sunglasses that would just abandon me anyway, I got really nice ones.  Cool ones.  the kind where you need to get the convertible to match.  I did that, too =)  Hey, I live in southern California, I may as well look cool while sitting in bumper-to-bumper traffic.

So let's see..I've been through three (ouch) pairs of Ralph Lauren tortoise-shell glasses.  One pair was lost in a movie theater (I went back IMMEDIATELY and they were vamoosed), one pair in the restroom of a very small store (ditto), and the third pair I can't even remember.  $270 total, out the window.  I swore I would never buy an expensive pair again.  Then my new husband got me a pair of Ray Bans...I relented because we got them at Costco and they were selling at much less than retail price.  They're the ones Sephie has perched on her face in the above picture.  I left them on a table at a restaurant where I was having lunch with friends.  I got to my car and turned around instantly to retrieve them...you know the rest.  No doubt I made a waitperson's day with some free shades, though they swore up and down they hadn't seen them.  I can't tell you the name of the establishment, but when you're there, you're Family.

So hubby convinced me I really needed to get another pair of sunglasses.  I refused to get expensive ones again and just bought  a $30 at our local REI.  I didn't even want to spend that much.  Well, Seph decided that they were tasty, so I let her teethe on them.  We were standing on grass, so I didn't hear her drop them.  However, I did hear the "crunch" as I stepped on them.  Sigh.

So now my other half would like to get me another nice pair instad of cheap ones.  He insists I'm not cursed.  Should I let him?  It would be almost as fun being right as it would to get another pair of Ray Bans ;)