We'll Call Him Mack

This evening family and I went to the beach for a swim before dinner.  As we made drove down Farm Road on the way home my Other Half suddenly slammed on the breaks.

There, just to our left, was a mama turkey and two tiny turkey babies.  They couldn't have been more than a day old.  The little darling stumbled through the field, barely visible above the grass.

That's what my family saw.  What I saw was a lonely baby turkey squatting on the right side of the road. 

My Other Half gave him a wide berth and drove around him.  And then we waited for him to join his mama.  But he didn't join her.  He just stayed sitting on the side of the road peeping like a madman.  After a painfully long minute of his pitiful cries I finally walked over, picked him up, and placed him safely in the tall grass on the other side of the road.  At least he was closer to his family.  Then we stood by the car waiting for him to leave.

But he didn't leave.  And his mother didn't give a damn.  She kept on walking away with her two favorite babies.  Ignoring his cries for help.   

When it was more than obvious that she was just going to leave him there I asked the question we were all thinking: Can we keep him?

And so, of course, we did.  Baby Turkey rode with me in the front seat.  When we got home I busted out the baby chick gear we have from last year's baby guineas.  We got out the heat lamp and crunched up some chicken food for him to eat until I can make it to the feed store tomorrow.  We put Baby Turkey in an empty cardboard box and brought him inside until the baby coop- the rabbit hutch- was ready for him.

Lou wanted to name him Cinderella.  My Other Half is totally over the Princess names.  How about we name The Turkey something other than a Princess name?

Um... Ok. 

Well, how about Belle?

Princess name.

Oh I know! 

Aurora!

After a few unsuccessful attempts to steer her away from Princess names we realized we had the entire arsenal of names from the movie Cars- perfect!  How about Lightning?  Like Lightning McQueen?

Not good.  It should be a girl's name.

She did finally give in, though, when we suggested Mack.  Yay!  We'll call him Mack!  My Other Half is more than a little relieved we didn't name him Cinderella. 

Sure, he might actually be a she, I haven't read enough on turkeys yet to know if there's a way to tell before they get huge.  Oh well, it might actually be Maxine, but for now Turkey is officially Mack.

We had planned on keeping Mack inside for the night to keep an eye on him.  Odds are pretty good that there's a reason his mama didn't want him.  Turns out that day old baby turkeys (poults to be exact) can actually jump quite well.  Mack made his escape from the diaper box as we were putting Lou to bed.  My Other Half discovered him missing and there were a few minutes of frenzied searching- step lightly!- before I spied him frantically trying to leave through the door that goes to the furnace.

So, out to the coop with him.  He looked lonely so I made a bed out of a hand towel and gave him a small stuffed bear to snuggle with. 

And so, once again, the collection grows.  Although at least this time it wasn't, entirely, my fault. 

Oh, and by the way, does anyone have some spare baby turkeys to keep Mack company?

I'm kidding!

I think...

Chronic Bug Aversion

I don't like bugs.

Maybe it's the girly girl in me.  Maybe it's worn off from the distaste for bugs my mother had.  Maybe it's an aversion to all their creepy legs.  I have no idea what it is, but I don't like them.

That's why I have Guinea Hens.

That's also why I have a vacuum.

When my Other Half is around, he's the designated bug-getter.  But he's not always here.  So what's a girl to do?  Why, get the vacuum, of course!  My vacuum is indispensable not only for all the conventional reasons, but also because it's the perfect way to get rid of bugs without having to look at them too closely or to hear that nasty crunch when you grab them.

I don't like to touch bugs- maybe if I absolutely HAVE to, like Lou's life depends on it.  But other than this extreme and remote circumstance, I try not to touch them.  This leaves me with a few options when one appears inside:

The first is the Napkin Technique, where you use a napkin as a paper shield and grab the offending bug.  But you need to get so close to the bugs.  You need to actually grab them.  Sure, your hand is protected by a thin layer of paper, but what if the bug suddenly mutates into a Godzilla-like entity that threatens to destroy your home unless you feed it?  What if it grows a set of fangs and infects you with a poisonous venom in one deadly bite?  And I have to come back to the grabbing aspect because when you grab a bug you need to hold on tightly lest it get away.  What if you feel it?  What if you hear it crunch?

No.  For obvious reasons the Napkin Technique simply will not work.

Another technique is Drowning- glorified water boarding.  This technique removes the risk of a deadly hand bite as your hand need never touch said bug.  But the first problem is that one must get close enough to turn on the water and you run the risk of seeing the bug.  Sure, once the water is on the bug is rendered helpless as he is sent to the watery depths from whence he can never return.  But what if he does?  What if this particular bug is some sort of super bug, able to withstand massive amounts of water?  What if the water actually brings about these super bugs powers; fueling his bug-filled rage and causing him to launch himself skyward and back into the sink?  Plus, this only works if the bug is already in the sink.  If it's not then you're faced with the dilemma of getting it in there and you're most likely going to have to apply the napkin technique.

Therefore Drowning, too, is out of the question.

I could trap them in Tupperware and toss them outside.  The Trapping technique was highly favored with the geckos that often made their way inside when we lived in Florida.  But, again, I don't want to see or get too close to bugs, so I cannot use the Trapping Technique.

The best technique I've found thus far, aside from calling one of the Hens inside, is to suck the offending bug up with the vacuum.  Best part is that you can stay as far away from the bug as your vacuum hose is long.

Of course, you can't just suck up the bug and be done with it.  You need to run the vacuum for a period of time to ensure his death and eternal entrapment.  I like to count to ten before I turn the vacuum off.  It's a good, safe number to count to.  Plus, it's easy to remember in times of high stress, such as the times I'm faced with a bug.

For all of us with Chronic Bug Aversion, there is hope and there are options.  Pick your technique and perfect it.  You too can conquer bugs without the help of a designated bug-getter. 

Although it never hurts to keep one around, just in case.

Time for Me

That's something I have to do for myself.  Make time for myself. 

Time to shower, time do put on makeup, time to read, time to do nothing but be.

That's the thing about being Mom.  My job is to take care of everyone around me, but who's going to take care of me?  For the lack of another qualified candidate it has to be me.

There's this image that mothers try to live up to.  This impossible standard of a well-manicured woman with an immaculate house who makes extravagant dinners but her kitchen's still clean.  A woman who makes sure that everyone's bed is made, the toilet seat is kept down, the pantry is full, the playroom is clean, and the diaper bag is always packed.

We accept this image of a well-run house, but what about the woman behind it all?

How does she find the time to be so put together?

She has to take time for herself.  She has to set limits in order to do this.  How come we don't see that part?  And when the hell does she do it?!?  Out of the plethora of baby advice I received, I really wish someone would have just said to me, "you deserve to shower every day."

Instead I got advice on which diapers to buy, what clothes Lou should be wearing at every stage of life, tricks to get food out of the minuscule crevices high chair manufacturers are apparently mandated to make (why aren't high chairs made of one solid piece of plastic? that would eliminate the countless folds and cracks that trap baby food and breed mold...), what food I should buy, what food I shouldn't buy, which diaper cream was best, where to buy nursing pads, how to fold blankets to form perfect baby sushi rolls, what music to play at bedtime, what music to play in the morning, what books I absolutely, positively must read to my child. 

But nothing, not one little bit of it, was about how to take care of me.  How am I supposed to shower when I have a child who sleeps no more than two hours at a time?  When do I get to read? Do I ever get to just sit?Oh, I should do all that when she's sleeping?  Ok, well then when do I sleep? 

But that's the point of motherhood (martyrhood?).  No one cares if your teeth are brushed.  What matters is whether everyone is fed, diapers are clean, there's socks to wear to the playground and you know what's for dinner.  You have to be the one to care about you, and it's all about finding a balance. 

After my ethereal epidermal with Lou I was seized with the compulsion to curl my eyelashes.  I believe the drug-induced logic was that people would be looking at me, fretting over me after I had given birth. 

Oh how I was mistaken. 

Despite seventeen hours of the most gruesome pain of my life, no one gave a damn how I was doing.  It wasn't about me anymore.

So it's not about me, and it never will be.  But through it all, I do still care whether or not I'm clean.  I do feel better when I've curled my eyelashes, and I'm a hell of a lot more confident when my underwear is clean.  And that's the thing about being Mom.  I'm the one in charge now, I'm to one to take care of others, there's no one here to remind me that it's ok to be clean.  I'm the one who does the teaching now.

So I'm trying to lead by example.  Sure, I could play with Lou as soon as I get up.  But I'll be a much better sport if I have a cup of coffee and let myself shower first.  She won't waste away without me for fifteen minutes and she'll learn that I'm human too- crazy concept.  Hey, she might even learn that showers are something she should WANT to do in the morning.  I can take twenty minutes to read sometimes.  If I want my child to read, it can't just be something I preach.  She values what I value and if I read, then she will too.  And I can curl my eyelashes in the morning.  Odds are I won't give her some makeup complex, hopefully I just teach her to make sure she's put together.

So maybe that baby advice I needed was really just some reassurance that it's ok to take care of me too, doing so won't take away from my parenting.

Well that and, "Leave sometimes!  Everyone will be better off if you do."

Good Lord How I Must have Aged...

Hyundai has an ingenious new commercial for their Sonata featuring a sixteen year old's bedroom. The point of the commercial is that we don't live like sixteen year olds, but we do have to share the road with them so your car had better be safe.

Obviously this room is exaggerated for entertainment purposes, but I'm pretty sure my room was almost equally horrific when I was sixteen.  No wonder my dad was always on me to clean...  Anyways, there's days when I still feel like I'm sixteen and not ready for all of this real life I've got on my plate, but this ad makes me realize just how old I've become.

Being six months pregnant for my twenty-first birthday, I missed out on a lot of that late college, early twenties, roommate-sharing type of life.  There's a small sense of loss at things I've missed out on.  I've never been able to go out and party without worrying about what's going on at home, crash wherever the night takes me, and sleep in on someone's couch the next day before heading out to a late breakfast I can't keep down.  I never lived in that house in some shady part of the city with five other girls where I had some romantic vision of sleeping late and walking down the street for coffee with the last two dollars I had after paying rent. 

But now when I think of those things, I'm not feeling like I lost out on all that much. 

I still have friends living in that rented roommate-filled house in the city, but that life has lost it's sparkle for me.  I have no desire to share a bathroom with someone who isn't family and I can only think how disgusting it would be to cook on a shared stove in a kitchen I'm not all that keen on cleaning because, hey I didn't make that mess, and then eat off of a plate that some other chick has hand washed.

Ick.

I would loathe cleaning the bathroom filled with some other girl's hair and I'm not sure I could bring myself to scrub a toilet used by other people.  Sure I do that here, but at least I made fifty percent of the bladders that use this one.  I'm pumped that I never have to lug a pile of dirty laundry down to the laundromat and let the world see my bras.  I know the dude who cuts my grass and he's the same one who will be doing this until age or a gratuitous income make him stop. 

I can paint my walls without an angry letter from my landlord. 

I have a garden.

In short, it feels nice to grow up.  Nice to wake up early not because someone's yelling that I'm running late, but because I just wake up early now; things to do- always things to do.  Nice to know that the dirty dishes are there because we had a late ice-cream night, not because Mindy came home drunk again and gorged herself on all things chocolate.  Nice that the hair on the floor belongs to me, and that wet spot on Lou's bed is there in the morning because she's three and has night-time accidents that have nothing to do with drinking too much and then taking an Ambien.  And nice that I can park my car in a garage and not down the street three blocks.

Guess that's all part of growing up.

Heavens I'm getting old.