Every Mom's Best Friend

We have had so many cars I have lost count of them. Once day my husband and I started a tally and stopped around 19. I have heard the comment “you change your cars more than you do your underwear” more than once. Start talking about having the same car a year or two from now and my husband breaks out in a sweat.

Last March I was driving home from Castle Rock, when the car died on the side of a 75 mile an hour interstate. My oldest starts yelling that the trucks are going to run us over and the second one starts crying because we are lost and won’t get to eat anymore, and my third, unborn at the time, starts his afternoon aerobics on top of my bladder and I was acutely aware of how far away bathrooms are from the side of the interstate.

A few weeks later I was introduced to my best friend, my minivan. After we signed enough papers to kill three trees we were handed the keys and my anxiety went down as my husbands went up. Some of my fears about having a minivan have happened. For example the twenty something guy in the Camaro see’s right through me, however the 50 year old guy in the sedan will wink at me every now and again. Cars tend to switch lanes the minute they see me, but thats only because they have no clue that having a minivan does not mean you forget where the gas pedal is. Ask the friendly officers of Colorado Springs. They’ll tell you I still know my way around a gas pedal. My four year old’s shouts from the back “Eat my dust” and the three year olds echoing “I am speed” can also testify to the fact that my lead foot is still kicking.

My husband had the minivan last week. I suspect he has a secret bond to our little “Swagger Wagon” even though he tries to cover it up by loudly calling it choice names on the 27th of every month or throwing tools at it when he changes the oil. Anyway, as he pulled up to the mail box, a neighbor out watering his grass, says “great van.” My dear humble husband makes a full circle before looking back at the neighbor and pointing to himself with a confused look on his face. Later he tells me, “he had to have a vision problem.” My response was, “no, he probably has three children, three car seats, a diaper bag, a backpack, a stroller, a stuffed dog, three jackets, a bag of goldfish and 50 bank receipts and had to get groceries in his car.”

So on Tuesday’s when I am sitting in a long line of minivans, and my little four year old comes out of preschool carrying a huge paper painting of a leaf still dripping paint, and my three year old has insisted that every toy he owns wants to come along and my infant son is pulling his socks off and throwing them out the side of his car seat, and the groceries I just got are all nestled securely in the back of my “mommy car” I’m ok with 50 year olds winking at me. Because the mom over from me has a really nice car and may still get the 20 year old winks, but right now her kids are having a fist fight in the really nice backseat and there is wet paint smeared on the really nice window, and three bags of groceries just spilled on the ground.

My “partner in crime” got me to preschool in 8 minutes flat the other day. It held my child in time out at the park after he dumped 3 pounds of sand down his brothers back. It holds a lifetime supply of teddy grahams in the backseat. It rocks my sweet energizer bunnies to sleep as I run my 30 errands a day. I have no worry that I will be out and won’t have a sippie cup or a diaper, or Immodium, because somewhere in there, they are there.

I looked in my rearview mirror today and saw three of the world s cutest tiny faces smiling back at me and I thought, this is what I have always wanted to do and this is what I want to be!

Peanuts and Biology

I’m in school right now, intensely confused about what it is I want to be when I grow up. I thought teaching would be fun, but teaching requires a measure of patience that some women were just not gifted in, and I happen to be the ring leader of that group of women. So my current course of study is headed in the direction of nursing. There is a side road, though, leading off the path of nursing that has been beckoning me and the voice screaming out my name is not one enticing me towards anything in particular, rather, its the voice of my biology teacher yelling her lungs out for me to get OFF her path of biology.

Anyways, I have a whole class with this beautifully screeching get-off-my-path voice instructing my every failing move, and tonight is the night of my second biology exam. My first biology exam ended with a bang; that bang was me hitting the floor as I fainted dead away after realizing my dismal failure in chemistry. Now I am the daughter of a genius. A very intelligently gifted chemist. A chemist who can’t, for the life of him, understand why I wasn’t born with the innate knowledge that if you mix X and A together you come up with D reaction and F product and QRS atomic number. A chemist who sadly shook his head when I dropped out of chemistry class in high school so I could take karate with the cute kid three lockers down from mine. A chemist who, I sometimes suspect, sleeps with his test tubes and periodic table snuggled under his pillow.

All day I crammed for this test, and in between I folded underwear and changed diapers and asked my three year old to stop climbing the refrigerator door three times. I actually studied more than I typically do for tests, meaning I didn’t just open the book, lean back in my chair, wipe my brow and say, “Whew I need some ice cream.” I still didn’t quite understand why some proteins were so much cooler than others or why they could do passive work while others did active work, but I did decide I had more passive proteins in my body than did most normal humans, and I was ok with that.

I called my dear husband around 3 in the afternoon to inform him that he would not be getting dinner from me, and graciously accepted his forced offer to get pizza. After inhaling way to many slices of pizza, still hoping by some miracle that the next wonder diet drug would include pizza ingredients and therefore my baby weight would magically diminish with each slice I ate, I pulled my book out planning to spend the last few minutes before heading off to class, studying and hoped that pizza would also be discovered as an intelligence booster.

I had read three paragraphs and day dreamed about my perfect life where I had a maid and chef for only a few minutes, when my three year old walks up to me. “Honey not right now, mommy has to study,” I said and tried to decide if my chef had made me chocolate cake or cheesecake in my daydream. “But mommy I can’t get it out.” “Uh huh thats nice sweetie.” I murmured. “Mommy it hurts! Get it out!” Realizing that he was not going to go away I looked at my mischievously angelic little boy with his upturned nose for my inspection. “You can’t get what out?” I asked now dreading his answer. “The peanut in my nose!” Sure enough, the little nut winked back at me from inside his nostril and I think it even laughed at me for thinking I had everything under control and a shot at passing this test and living happily ever after. “Why is there a peanut in your nose?” I asked. “Because I put it there.”

Sneezing, nose blowing, and tweezers wouldn’t budge the little guy and the clock is ticking closer and closer to my exam time. I get on the phone with the doctor. “My three year old has a peanut up his nose and I need to get it out fast because I have a test in 40 minutes and my teacher already hates me and I really need to do something different if I am ever going to get my own worlds-best-cheesecake-making chef.” Well Dr. practical’s solution was Urgent Care, and since my husband was totally unwilling to explore the boundaries of his capabilities with three children and a 2 hour wait in a room full of sneezing, vomiting and bleeding strangers by himself, he ventured to every man’s land: the garage. Tools fix everything right?

Funny how long it took him to find that enormous red box in the garage when the back fence broke or when my curtains needed to be hung. It took him 10 seconds flat to wade his way through the fishing gear, bike helmets and strobe light when he had enough pressure. I guess all I need to do in the future is push a peanut up my nose! And so without the use of doctors or Urgent Care’s or $100 copay’s, my handyman fix it husband used an automotive “picker tool” to pluck the peanut from our son’s nostril. I made it to my test on time and knew at least 10 of the answers on the 100 question test, but my chef never did materialize.