Attention King Soopers’ Shoppers – I apologize profusely if you were subjected to my shameless display of nostalgia and longing in the baby product isle this week.
It’s just this – my kid turned 5 on Sunday.
FIVE.
How the actual eff was the kid in this picture, which CLEARLY happened just a blink ago, now 5 full years old?
I have been a damn mess pretty much my whole life the past week or so – reminders of his completed babyhood have been everywhere.
As I cleaned out some toy bins to prepare for the onslaught of superhero crap birthday gifts that would need storage, I stumbled on this old friend:
This is Pocket Bert. Toddler Jr loved Bert so much that we had Bert in varying sizes – Pocket Bert got his name because he resided in the pocket of the diaper bag, there to comfort and amuse Jr at a moment’s notice. Oh how he loved Pocket Bert so.
:::pause to make Pocket Bert do a dance while humming “Doin’ the Pidgeon.” :::
Sniffle. Whimper.
Andplusalso, stop what you are doing and behold this picture of his tiny baby cuteness that TimeHop threw at me this week. (Well, don’t stop what you are doing – keep right on reading the awesomeness of Reluctantly Suburban, but pause to take in that smoosh.)
I can’t even so much that I can’t even EVEN with that one. All of them, actually. I can’t open TimeHop without a box of Kleenex stationed next to me.
So it was inevitable, I guess, that as I was grabbing some groceries this week, I found myself at the end of the isle of baby products:
I knew I shouldn’t – but I ventured in.
There it all was – tubes of diaper cream both awesome (Purple Desitin) and pointless (Butt Paste,) and gas drops and washes for tiny people with sensitive skin. Jars of liquid fruit and veggies, delicious little “puffs,” and the Baby Mum Mums that I used to order by the case from Amazon since the stores weren’t carrying them then (oh sure NOW you have them, King Soopers.)
Bottle parts and teething rings and liquid gold Jr’s expensive special formula…. Itty bitty, teeny tiny diapers that used to be too big for him in his first few weeks of life.
It was that last thought that got me – that was in the first few weeks of him and I… we were together in his nursery, high above the busy city below, figuring out all of those crazy products and what we needed to do… now there has been 5 years of him – and of me as his mom.
BOOM – grocery store ugly cry. Waterfall of tears. I could almost hear the PA announcement “Wet (and sloppy, and crazy) clean up, isle 16!!”
I walked the length of the isle slowly, taking it all in and having a good cry (if there is a “good cry” to be had in public, FFS, Keri.)
Then I went and got him a new Super Friends straw cup and a box of the shortbread cookies shaped like doggies that he loves so much and collected myself (kinda) before checking out.
Then, for some reason, the Catalina coupon dispenser shot this puppy out at me after I paid.
Diaper coupon.
But my son is 5.
FIVE.
“Wet clean up near the crazy crying lady at the U-scan. Bring Tissues.”
We’ve all been there.
The family is gone/sleeping/miraculously quiet for unknown reasons and then you hear it.
That repetitive noise that signals distress in your abode.
Maybe it’s a chirping noise. Or dripping. Or tapping. Or air whooshing. It’s something – over and over again, and now you are tasked with finding the source of the mystery noise.
Working away at the kitchen table yesterday, my ears caught a repeating noise – so faint I thought it was a drip in a far away bathroom (seriously – in The Treehouse I would have known where that was coming from instantly, but not with three floors of potential origins spread out for me to search through,) and got up to investigate. Master and hallway upstairs bathrooms were drip free, as was the main floor laundry, kitchen, and bath. The ceilings all looked dry…. At the top of the basement stairs I heard the noise again, louder this time. Was it a drip, or was it a chirp? (I panted and wheezed at the top of the stairs for a moment resting contemplating this question.)
Bathroom, windows and ceilings all seemed dry – leaving only the utility room. As soon as I opened the door the noise sounded again. It was a chirp, not a drip, Not a fire alarm battery chirp, it was lower – Potter wasn’t losing his doggie mind yipping and running all over the house in desperation to escape. On the contrary, he was sitting on the sofa watching me run up and down the stairs, having himself a doggie blast.
It was an alarm of some sort. But beyond narrowing it to that little room, I couldn’t pinpoint the source. It seemed to come from everywhere and nowhere all at once. Bouncing off the furnace, leading me briefly toward the unused whole-house-humidifier, before sending me back toward the radon mitigation piping.
WHERE THE HELL WAS THAT COMING FROM!?
I did what any grown-ass woman does when she can’t figure out what’s wrong with something. I called my dad. He didn’t answer, so I left a message and went back down to keep investigating.
Then I saw it. The pressure gauge on the radon system was a perfect U shape –even on both sides. Not good. One side should be higher (BTW – I am not a radon system expert – it says this very clearly on the pipe.)
Damn. Off I went to Google to find a solution, and spent the next hour or so checking breakers and cords and switches and such, while the faint chirp taunted me from downstairs.
I noticed the switch on the outside of the house by the fan was in the “off” position, so I flipped it to “on.”
Nope. Nothing.
Poop.
Daddy came over with his trusty tool bag, poked around inside the house and out, but we couldn’t find anything. Clearly the fan had gone kaput and I needed a new one, so he loosened the coupling on the top and bottom and pulled the fan and it’s housing out from its spot in the piping – and stopped short.
“OH!!! That’s your problem right there Ker-bear!”
I peered in.
Fairly fresh dead squirrel.
I jumped exactly nine thousand and two feet into the air while yelling a slew of strung together swear words that made no sense and included the Big F at least twice. I can count on one hand the number of times I have dropped the F-bomb in front of Mom and/or Dad… that number may have actually doubled and moved on to the second hand yesterday. (Sorry Daddy.) Of course I am always level headed and never over-react, so this was totally shocking behavior from me (where is the sarcasm button on a keyboard, anyway?)
We dumped the deceased offender into a hefty-bag for disposal at an alternative location, and surveyed the fan inside the now empty housing.
He had eaten the wires down to NOTHING – he’d even taken chunks out of the metal fan. “Probably electrocuted himself” observed my dad, poking at the tiny nubins where the wires once were.
Internal conflict was rampant. No one likes to think about a fluffy little squirrel diving down a pipe sticking several feet up off the top of a roof- plunging down into a slick-sided abyss he has no hope of escaping, then thinking “oooo – toasty in here though, and look – stuff to ea-AHHHHHHH!!!!”
BUT – that little douche killed my fan, and killed it so well that I have to pony up the almost 200 bucks to get a new one and then strap it to the side of my house. So I kinda don’t feel that bad. Except that I had to carry a little wrapped up parcel away and have a dumpster-side service before hucking him in, hoping he cleared the tall side of the receptacle and didn’t fall back down toward me seeking revenge from beyond the grave. (Yep. I clearly have a very realistic idea of what goes on in the mind of a squirrel.)
We are 4 years into this suburban adventure –and as I have previously confessed, I’m pretty well soft on the place at this point.
But I have my moments, people. This shit didn’t happen in the city. I know I am sound bonkers but I maintain that city animals are smarter than wildlife in the burbs. The squirrels in the city are scrappy and mildly suspicious even in the parks where picnic crumbs and bulging trash cans demonstrate the usefulness of the humans around them.
Suburban squirrels are always wandering in and getting caught SOMEWHERE. Like many things in burbs, they are just too trusting and friendly for their own good.
Don’t even get me started on the damn geese out here.
Oh – and fun side note – that chirping noise? Wasn’t even the radon mitigation. As my dad pointed out – those systems aren’t actually equipped with a “squirrel electrocution alarm.” The water sensor on the floor below the water heater needed a new 9 volt.
So, to make a long story short (WAY TOO LATE,) water sensor needed more power, squirrel needed less.
Just another Monday in the burbs.
Filed under musing
It’s time for another round of Keri’s Burning Questions….
This one gets all corporate about things, y’all.
Here it goes:
Using “Ladies” as a greeting/salutation in business correspondence – yay, or nay?
Examples (as a bonus, I’ve included as much business jargon as I can cram into each example, because funny):
1.
Ladies,
I just wanted to touch base about how we are leveraging our latest deep dive before I run it up the flagpole.
Regards,
Keri
2.
Hi Ladies,
Ready to reach out to the client with the new verbiage since I’ll be out-of-pocket for the rest of the week. Let’s talk turkey about the action items we outlined during the cross-fuctional call last week.
Best,
Keri
So- is “ladies” acceptable here, or not?
You guide me.
Shout it out in the comments below!
Filed under Burning Questions
Ya know what, Troy? Cram it. (Credit: http://www.spot.ph)
40 is coming. Or rather, I am currently rolling downhill like a snowball headed for hell toward my 40th birthday in June. If you smash my twin sister and I together, that is 80 years of twinny “us-ness” on this planet. Scary stuff.
I didn’t think 40 was going to bug me. After all, 40 is the new 30, right? We are a FAR CRY away from the 40th birthday I remember my mom having, complete with coworkers stringing black streamers everywhere and outfitting her with a cane and veiled black hat to go with her “over the hill” cake.
That just isn’t what 40 means today. Think about who else is turning 40 this year. Reece Witherspoon. Ryan Reynolds. Melissa Joan Hart – Sabrina the teenage witch, yo! Keri Russell – awesome first name to match her awesome looks! 40 ain’t nothin’ at this point, right? I remember thinking when Jennifer Aniston turned 40 (7 years ago, people,) that 40 was spectacular. That all you had to be by 40 was a grown-ass version of you. (With apologies to Troy from Reality Bites, because none of us knew ANYTHING at 23, really dude.)
But therein lies the rub. 7 years ago, 33 year old Keri was, if I remember correctly, putting some fairly substantial pressure on herself regarding her Jesus year, and thinking that “way far off into the future” of Keri-ness, at the ripe old age of 40, she would finally have gotten it together as a grown up.
Guess what? NOPE.
I am a warmed over mess. Don’t get me wrong, it is my warmed over mess… this is my 40 year old bed, I made it and I can lay in it, blah blah blah… It isn’t the whole “I’m so damn old, woe is my aged self” thing that has me reeling, although I do confess feeling kind of old of late. It’s the nagging “shouldn’t I feel like a dang grown up by now?” question. I am like, way far into this dog-and-pony show, right? At what point, exactly, am I going to stop feeling like I should be calling my mom to come and pick me up from this charade, because it MUST be way past my curfew? The ghosts of Keri-ages past would be pretty disturbed to know that at 40 it was all still going to be feeling like a total crap shoot. That sucks, yo.
I briefly considered diving into a good old-fashioned midlife crisis- but dipping my toe in those waters by taking an ill-advised shopping trip in the Juniors’ section for clothes that look ridiculous on me, drinking like a 23 year old at the neighbors’ house, taking on a bunch of contract work in all my free time so I can “do what I love,” and otherwise generally acting “un-Keri” just left me feeling embarrassed and desperate and old.
Man, I miss just feeling old.
So the midlife crisis is off the table, as I don’t have time for self-destruct just now since I can’t get even my adult shit together without that added BS. There’s really no spare time to blow everything up when you are just hoping to get your kid and yourself out the door with lunch packed and pants on both of you, can I get an amen?
But what then? Or what now, I mean. Here I am being all old (but not,) coming to terms with the idea that maybe, JUST maybe, this is all there is.
I am not destined to change the world, or even my little corner of it. There is no cosmic line to cross or switch I have to find and flip to make things “the way they are supposed to be.” No fairy godmother is going to come donk me on the head and pronounce that I am now fully qualified for adulting and open a door to some wonderland of grown-up-edness.
I always pictured myself as the girl humming the Mary Tyler Moore theme song and whipping my hat off to toss as I spun around knowing I was “gonna make it after allllllll.”
But staring down the barrel of the very adult age of 40, all I seem to be able to muster is a half-hearted bit of the theme from “One Day at a Time.” Then I realize that BOTH of those shows are so ancient, I can’t even come up-to-speed on TV references. AND I LOVE TV!
Again I find myself back at Reality Bites, and Troy; the-once-and-now-again voice of my generation… Now it seems, is “the winter of my discontent.” But Troy remains forever frozen in fresh-college-grad smuggery as he utters that line through his 90s facial hair.
Here in 2016 and MANY years away from my English lit degree, borrowing lines from Shakespeare seems awfully grand a way of phrasing the realization that I’ve been on the planet for 40 years and still cope with stressful situations primarily through nacho consumption and magical thinking.
Filed under musing
Reluctantly Suburban 