I’m home from the hospital and minus one Evil Gallbladder. I feel a million times better than I did before the surgery, although I’m still pretty sore. Thanks to everyone for prayers, help with my kids and bringing food. I am so blessed to call you my friends.

The nurse was going through the litany of questions she was required to ask me during my pre-op interview, and Zeb was sitting at my bedside, occasionally holding my hand and fielding phone calls, as I answered question after question. He was holding my purse and I slid my wedding and engagement rings off and gave them to him for safekeeping during surgery.

Nurse: Past surgeries?
I answered.
Nurse: Any allergies?
I answered.
Nurse: Any meds you take on a daily basis?
I answered.
Nurse: Religious preference?
I answered.
Nurse: What’s your husband’s name?
“Zeb,” I answered. I nodded my head towards Zeb, “But this is Chris…”
The nurse jerked her head up and looked back and forth between the two of us bewildered, until I collapsed laughing.

The nurse popped me on the leg and said, “You are SUPPOSED to be sick.”

“Ahhahaha! I am! But I’m never too sick to get the funny.”

Why the quotes? Take a look. The amount of work I get done in a day is directly proportional to the amount of confetti my kids make in their “office.” So yes, today was a productive day.

Please note how Emma has conveniently placed a stool to give herself easier access to the en-bel-lopes. She is obsessed with the post man and all things having to do with mail and/or delivery.

Here’s a little nugget I found while looking through some old files. I probably never ran it because my husband reads the newspaper but almost never reads the blog. I like to bait him on occasion to see if he’s lurking around but he never is. Don’t tell on me, OK?

I call my husband every day around 5:30 to see when he expects to be home, so I can have dinner ready or to tell him to pick up a pizza on his way home, depending on how my day has gone. Recently I called to check in with him and let him know dinner was hot and ready to eat.

“I may not eat,” he said.

“Why?”

“My stomach is killing me, I ate an orange a couple of hours ago and I’m having terrible stomach pains.”

Now I realize there is a stomach virus going around and that he is grown man with a history of acid reflux triggered by citrus fruits, but I’ve also been married to him for almost twelve years. He said “orange” but I sniffed a deeper story.

“What did you eat for lunch?”

“Sardines in hot sauce….”

“Ah-ha…so it was the orange that upset your stomach, not the canned fish in hot sauce…”

“Well, maybe it was the fish.”

I told you I know this man. When our second child was five months old, she contracted a stomach virus so terrible it put her in the hospital for three days. I contracted the virus while we were in the hospital. I was breastfeeding my recovering infant who had an IV in her arm and I was simultaneously puking into a trash can. This incident resulted in our family’s departure from a traditional pediatrician to a family doctor, because whilst I was vomiting, Emma’s doctor came in to the room to tell me she would be ready for discharge in twelve hours, if she could continue to keep her milk down.

I pulled my head out of the garbage can, wiped my mouth and said, “That’s great. Can you do anything to help me?” He suggested I go to the ER and sign in as a patient as he was NOT my doctor. I wanted to ask him if he could babysit for the next twelve hours while I was treated in the ER, but instead just thanked him for his time and never went to see him again.

Twelve hours later my husband came to pick us up from the hospital. He had been running back and forth from work, to the hospital, to my friend Gena’s house, where we had stashed our oldest child. He came up to Emma’s room to help me gather our belongings and I noticed he looked a little green around the gills.

“Babe, you alright?” I asked him

“Yeah, I’m OK. I haven’t had a lot to eat today.”

We made it to the patient pick-up area in front of the huge university hospital and were loading the car when my husband looked at me with panic in his eyes and stated very matter of factly, “I’m gonna puke. Where do I go?”

I pointed to the bushes and he ran. I waited in the car for him, and as he buckled his seat belt he said, “I knew I shouldn’t have eaten those canned peaches.”

Ex-squeeze me? Say WHO?

“What in the world do you mean?”

“I ate a can of peaches for lunch because it’s all I could find and I thought they tasted funny. I think I got food poisoning…”

“HONEY! Are you serious? It couldn’t be the debilitating stomach virus that just ripped through our family, could it?”

So you see, he said “orange” and I was a bit suspicious. This particular day I had been in my workout clothes since ten o’clock in the morning and asked if he could lie on the couch and watch Spongebob with our kids for thirty minutes so I could take a quick walk around the neighborhood. (Seeing as how folks around town like to ask me if I’m expecting…)

“Just lay here for thirty minutes and I’ll put them in bed when I get back, OK?”

He agreed. I returned from my walk to find him sitting on the couch with the baby and the two older girls in bed and calling to me from the bedroom. I went to go give the big girls good night kisses and Aubrey, my four year old begged me to read a book.

“Honey, I can’t. Daddy has a tummy ache and I need to go get Baby Sadie from him so he can lie down and rest.”

“Not anymore Momma, he ate chocolate cake and made it feel all better.”

Just another example of how I entertain and amuse myself on a daily basis…

As you may have deduced, Sister Wife and I spend a lot of time together. Not only are we BFFs 4-EvaH, but our husbands, Zeb and Heston, (heretofore referred to as Zebston, and no, it is NOT okay for you to refer to Lizzie and me and Lizbin) work together.

Zebston are at work together from 8 to 5 everyday, and for the most part, if one of them is out of town on business, they are both out of town. Which is really great for Sister Wife and me. We carpool, feed our kids dinner together and have what we like to call “prison showers.” We turn on the shower and each child gets 5 minutes to themselves before they are jerked out of the tub and put in their pajamas.

But occasionally, eating leftover spaghetti with a 7-year-old, a 5-year-old,a 4-year-old, a 3-year-old and two 18-month-olds gets…well, old.

Tonight, Zebston had a business dinner with The Boss Man (a.k.a. Sister Wife’s father-in-law, do you need a chart yet?)…antywho, the wives were officially uninvited. Again.

So The Boss Man’s Wife (aka Sister Wife’s mother-in-law, which would make her MY mother-wife-in-law) led a rebellion, and invited Wifey and I to dinner. At the same restaurant all of our husbands were having their meeting.

We lined up babysitters, got dressed to the nines and made up our minds to completely ignore our husbands.

I was nervous about going into the restaurant alone because I didn’t want to look like I wanted to eat dinner with “The Boys” because I most certainly DID NOT.

Luckily for The Girls, our timing (as well as our outfits AND our makeup) was flawless and we beat them to the restaurant. We were all casually sipping on a glass of wine and perusing the menu at our small table for three when they all wandered in looking confused.

According to my husband’s co-worker, his exact words were, “What the hell?”

My. Thoughts. Egg-zactly.

And in a move that transformed my mother-wife-in-law to Hero status, she had our waitress send the guys our check before we were even offered dessert. That’s what you call “making them pay.”

Mothers are the hardest working people in the world. There are no lunch breaks, no clocking out and the pay sucks. But we are the most important people in our children’s lives and no one can take our place.

My mother is amazing, (EXHIBIT A) I am beyond thankful for everything she’s done and continues to do for me and my children. Out of all the things I’ve learned from her there are two lessons that have carried me through every storm in my life.

1. Love is always the answer. I know it sounds cheesy and kumbaya-ish, but in every situation in your life, you choose to love the people around you (no matter what) YOUR life will be immeasurably better.
2. You might as well laugh. I can’t count, on all my fingers and toes, the number of times I have laughed with my mother until we cried, our bellies ached and one (or both) of us had to run to the restroom to keep from peeing our pants. My Momma’s not perfect and neither am I, but moments like those make up for all the little bumps in the road.

What did you learn from your mother that you hope to pass on to your children?

This is my 500th post! Yowsa!

The last couple of weeks have been really trying for me, but I don’t want to dwell on the negative. I have an email thread going with some of my veddy best friends (What UP, LOLers?) and when we are having a Debbie Downer kind of day, we make a top five list of things we are grateful for…here’s mine:
1. My family. All of them. They are amazingly supportive, loving and healthy!
2. My husband. All of them…kidding. Just checking to see if Zeb actually reads my blog.
3. My friends. I have SCORES of people whom I interact with on a daily basis, who make me laugh, smile, cry and occasionally blow snot bubbles when I do both at the same time.
4. Coconut M&Ms- because sometimes it’s the little things. (Hello Mars Company…need ad space?)
5. You. (Not YOU, Anonymous…yeah, YOU!) Those of you who read, comment and share your lives with me.
6. Nair Shower Power because it’s almost swimsuit season and I’m busy yo.
7. My sense of humor…because no matter what I will laugh. At myself, at you…whatever it takes to get by.

What are YOU grateful for?

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