Nudge The Nest & Pray They Fly
Thanks to Sadie’s hard work today, my second book is completed and ready to be sent to my agent! I appreciate prayers, happy thoughts and good karma that my agent falls in love and can sell it quickly. (All you writers who realize “quickly” can mean a couple of years, give me an “Amen!”)
Shuggie (my mom) met me at my in-laws this weekend to bring my two-year-old, Sadie, to me after a little spend the night visit at Shuggie’s house. We were unloading Shuggie’s car and my husband asked me for a diaper. I grabbed one out of the bag over my shoulder and asked my mother for the wipes.
Shuggie: I ran out of the ones you sent but I had some that I keep in my car.
She reached around in her backseat and handed them to me.
Me: Um, Mom? These are Clorox wipes. Tell me you didn’t wipe her butt with these.
Shuggie: Uh-oh… I… oh. Huh. Yeaaah… I’m not…
Me: *terrified face*
She DID eventually produce an actual package of baby wipes but she never said whether or not the Clorox wipes had pulled double duty.
My mother took Sadie (2-years-old) home with her for two days so I could reach my writing goal of completing my work-in-progress this week. Between running kids back and forth to school and doing all the things moms do, it’s still been hard to carve out time to write. Especially when Emma came home with a cold yesterday, which meant no school for her today… which meant I was still writing with kids hanging off of me. I had a couple of hours at home today and I set Emma up in the kitchen with the art supplies. She was painting with water for crying out loud. I was less than 10 feet away from her in the next room writing while she painted.
We had to run out the door to pick Aubrey up from school and run some errands and when we came home, almost TWO hours later, I saw THIS in the floor:
HOW was I with my kid for two hours totally unaware she was missing almost half of her hair?? Really?! I even stopped in a store and re-did her hair because her ponytail was falling down and her hair was everywhere… oh, okay…NOW I get it.
Several nights ago Aubrey was lying on her bed reading a Bearenstain Bears book, she sighed dreamily and said, “My family is just like the Bearenstain Bears…”
Is the blue polka dotted bonnet I wear? Zeb’s bright red suspenders? Living in a tree house?
I’m not sure. But I sort of think it’s the biggest and best compliment I’ve ever received as a mother. Hate on haters.
P.S. She doesn’t always dress like she’s on the Little House set, it was Thanksgiving Feast Day at school and she was a pilgrim.
Here’s what Sadie thinks of her Momma’s haters. (That is MY mother laughing maniacally in the background. Can you tell she thinks Sadie is so cute?)
Save your hate mail haters: a reader in Greenwood, Mississippi is on top of things.
I am not an animal person. As a child all of my pets had short life spans, I can’t think of a single pet that survived for over a year. As an adult and a mother I’ve never been one to get the “warm and fuzzies” over animals of any kind, and I haven’t felt the need to take on the responsibility of feeding and picking up after another living being. It’s all I can do to take care of the three children and husband that God, with his wonderful sense of humor, has seen fit to trust me with.
So I was beyond surprised when my oldest daughter, Aubrey, came home with “Kate”, a goldfish she won at school last week. She was thrilled, and I tried to put on my happy face as we loaded up and headed to the store to get a fish bowl and food.
But I was apprehensive, there have been many lives lost in the O’Bryant’s quest to becoming pet owners: Blitzen the Power’s family beta fish, for which Emma was convicted of involuntary fish slaughter (go to www.moultrienews.com/family for Blitzen’s full obituary) and the cat we inherited when our next door neighbors moved. Jevan-Samantha-Jennifer-Alexis-Hayley-Snead, who disappeared without a trace shortly after my husband taught Aubrey to shoot a BB gun and following the unexplained disappearance of a baby bird that had been rescued by some well-meaning, but totally unrealistic, member of my family.
In the wake of all the animals that have lost their lives before Kate, I tried to mentally prepare my children for her inevitable death, before we had even purchased her first meal. I explained to the girls that fish didn’t usually live very long and they didn’t need to be sad when she died, because truth be told Kate was going to be lucky to make it through the night.
Kate did survive that first night and when the girls walked into the kitchen the next morning they began dancing and chanting, “She’s alive! She’s alive!”
I got a little cocky. I was a real pet owner now. I had officially been in charge of a non-human life form for over 24 hours and it had lived. When my middle daughter, Emma, expressed a desire for a fish to call her own, I didn’t hesitate. I splurged the 32 cents and dumped another fish in the bowl.
For exactly three days my daughters spent every waking second staring wide-eyed into the fish bowl. It seemed they understood that there was no promise of tomorrow and they wanted to enjoy every second possible with their fishy friends– carpe diem or something like that. (Pun intended, of course.)
Until the expected happened, on Sunday morning before I had even gotten out of the bed, I received the news: ding dong the fish were dead. Kate and her adopted sister, Bea Jeni, had passed, gone on to that great fishbowl in the sky to join the throngs of O’Bryant pets who are gathered there, disgruntled I’m sure.
I was relieved that this particular bout of pet-itis was over, until my husband told me he was going to run to the store before church to pick up a couple of more fish. It’s a fishous cycle and it had to be stopped.
I warned my kids as they loaded into the car to pick their next victims, er, fish, “This is the last time! Do you hear me? No fish deserves to live like this! We’re not just going to keep replacing them!” I yelled as they drove away.
I went through the motions of getting everyone ready for church as my husband, Zeb, returned from his errand and acclimated the fish to its new home. Zeb read off of his store ticket, “Did you know you can get a new fish within 90 days if you keep your receipt?”
I rolled my eyes. Just what this family needs, I thought, an unlimited supply of fish.
We were about to walk out the door when I glanced at the fish bowl and saw it. There was no mistaking it. One of our new fish was already floating belly up in the bowl. In case you’ve lost count, that’s three fishy deaths in less than three hours.
Emma grabbed the net, scooped up her fish and marched to the toilet as Zeb chimed in, “At least I kept my receipt.”
***SERIOUSLY, Don’t send me hate mail over this. I will delete it without reading. I’m not raising serial killers over here we just don’t have good luck with pets. ALSO you might refer to THIS COLUMN where I explain my whole point of doing what I do. If you still don’t get it, I can’t help you.
