The one where DIY minor surgery and motherhood don't mix

I'm a DIY'er. Not for the important stuff I already know I can't do. Like, purchase stuff online. Ron does that. If I need my hair braided through the back of my baseball cap, Caymen is the girl. Need a sign made? I call Barbara. Need a shirt designed? Aubrey. Need a video downloaded to YouTube? Call Zac or Kearstin. Or is it uploaded? I don't even know. What I'm trying to say is, I know my limits.    

But when it comes to anything involving the medical field, DIY remedies is my go-to. And if you're familiar with this blog at all, you know that 99% of the time, that goes terribly wrong.

Despite regularly seeing a primary care physician, a chiropractor and a gynecologist, when symptoms arise, the professionals never come to mind before my own ideas do. 

Dislocated rib? Ron probably did it, so he can probably put it back.

Ear pain? Sticking keys, bobby pins, and the shower head down there might jog somethin' loose.

Yeast infection? Google says yogurt.

I inevitably end up sitting (or laying splayed in stirrups) and getting lectured on the importance of not inserting foreign objects...or sugar based dairy products...into parts of my body where it doesn't belong. Ok, first of all, google told me to insert the yogurt and I only inserted half the container. Google also never once said not to use peaches 'n' cream flavor, so let's throw a little of this shade in their direction. But I digress.

For the most part, I limit my DIY experiments to my own care and I'm happy to report that 3 of our 4 children have successfully escaped  moved out of our home as healthy responsible human beings because that's what pediatricians are for. 

But a few months ago, our 4th child started to complain about a painful bump on the bottom of her heel so I asked Ron to make her a doctor's appt. What I meant by that, was to call her pediatrician. But what he did, was call a foot doctor.

Pause here for a second. I used to work for a foot doctor so no offense to the whole foot doctoring industry, but I know what they push...$500 shoe orthotics fix everything, in case you've never been to a foot doctor. 

Against my better judgement, I took her to the appointment where a cocky nurse took one look and predicted she knew the doctor would say it's a clogged sweat gland and that Caymen needed...*drum roll please*...orthotics. Wow. Orthotics. I didn't see that coming. 

Then she did x-rays, which seemed like an unnecessary step if you can already tell it's a clogged sweat gland, but I think we've established that I'm not a real doctor. When the actual doctor came in, she took one look at her foot and diagnosed her with a clogged sweat gland and strongly advised orthotics. It's almost like I've seen this scam before or something.

Then she shaved off the top layer of the bump, put some medicine and a bandaid on it, and told me to call and set up a time to get her casted for those orthotics.

I didn't call. I'm never gonna call. You're shocked. I know. 

Anyway, the bump was gone. But then it came back.

Having tried the whole "doctor" route, maybe I could give this a go. 

I asked Ron to get me the headlight he straps to his head that he keeps in the garage. 

I bet if he'd noticed my pile of tweezers, toenail clippers, a splinter picker, and my Dollar Shave Club razor in the living room, he would've asked more questions. Dude might wanna pay closer attention. 

Every evening for 2 weeks, I sat on the couch wearing a light on my head with Caymen's foot on a pillow in my lap and I did surgical procedures on the heel of her foot and then I started applying wart remover because maybe it's a wart and then towards the end, athlete's foot cream, because that angry looking red ring beginning to form around the area looks suspiciously like

ringworm to me. 

We ended up at the pediatrician's office yesterday morning, through no fault of my own.

She looked at Caymen's foot and, low key accusingly, asked if I'd been doing anything to it. I wan't gonna lie to her doctor so I casually described how I might've done a little scraping and some wart remover sometimes.

Then she said, "You were on the right track. It is a plantar wart." 

I snapped my fingers triumphantly and said, "I knew it."

She offered to freeze it off with liquid nitrogen and said that would hopefully take care of it. Then she looked at me and said, "If she notices it beginning to return, you can try using a clean fingernail file over the area and then put some wart remover and a bandaid on it."

I was so surprised by such a simple and genius idea, I looked at Caymen and said, "A fingernail file!"

The doctor looked at me questioningly and asked, "What were you using?"

...long silence while she waited me out...

"Razors. And other stuff."

Anyway. The bump is gone, Caymen is fine, and I've been instructed not to touch it.

Next she'll be telling me I can't purchase liquid nitrogen online. As if.

Next week we'll get back to Ron stories as originally planned before this minor bump debacle arose, which had very little to do with me anyway. 

Granted, I may or may not be reported to CPS, but Ron hits pedestrians with his car. He's obviously the bigger problem here. 

The one where they think I need anger management

I promised my husband that this week's entry would be about me, so here we are. Honestly, you can scroll through this blog and find plenty of stories starring dumb things I've done. (I linked a couple.) It's just that Ron provides the most material and that's all I'll say about that. 

I asked him which story he'd like for me to out myself about today and he started to give me some examples where I become "irrational" over something "stupid." I said "You're naming things that make me justifiably mad. They're not "stupid and I'm not being irrational." He replied, "I think our kids would disagree, not to mention all the Amish."

If he's referring to the weed wacker debacle, he caused that whole thing and it was a few wagons of families, not the Amish community at large. The Amish community at large doesn't wanna hang out with me for different reasons, totally unrelated. And if he's talking about that Amish waitress I had a run in with last Fall, she had it out for me for no reason at all, so we're just gonna leave the Amish completely out of this.

As for our kids, in the interest of fairness, I put out a question in our Close Courters family group chat that read: The answer is probably no, but for research purposes, does anything generally mundane make me irrationally angry?

One of my sons-in-law, who rarely responds to anything in our group chats, was the first to reply. Almost like he's been waiting his entire married life to my daughter for me to ask that question. 

He said, putting "gross" trash in the trashcan. 

That is an absolute no no here. Anything that aids in the collection, cleanup, and/or removal of anything involving bodily excrements cannot be thrown away inside. ie; diapers, wipes, toilet paper and/or paper towels that have come into contact with vomit, urine, and/or poop. So.help.me, if I catch a whiff of any such category wafting out of an indoor trash can, it fuels my hate fire. But that's not anger talking. That's my gag reflex. 

Kearstin replied next.

"Lee's Chicken!"

Before you think I have hostility toward a fast food chicken chain, you need to know that for whatever ungodly reason, my family went through a phase of breaking the silence by screaming "LEEEE'S CHICKENNNN!" for absolutely no other purpose than to watch me jump and threaten them with bodily harm. As an added bonus, she made a video montage of her scaring me, to keep for their endless entertainment. I keep it so the coroner will know why my heart mysteriously stopped. 

They all like to scare me. It's like their favorite pastime. You might recall the time I almost killed myself with cashews because Ron yelled "DEEEEP" at me. And they call me the crazy one. For the record, I'm also not a fan of riding along in the car reading a book and minding my business and suddenly hearing "SLUG BUG!" and "CRUISER BRUISER!" followed by a punch to the arm. I will meet violence with violence. Don't forget who started it.

So I'm still waiting for the part where I get "irrational" over something "stupid."

Then Ron says,

"What about the time you lost your mind and crushed our emergency alarm?"

Ok. Don't make it sound like I just snapped one day and started smashing our security equipment. I was provoked.

While the kids were all waiting for the bus, one of the preschoolers pushed the panic button on a security fob alarm that was hanging from our key hooks in the foyer. I awoke out of a dead sleep to a high pitched ear splitting siren piercing through my ears, brain, and soul and no amount of me pushing the buttons and screaming profanity would turn it off. This was serious.

I messaged a picture of it to my family asking anyone if they knew how to turn it off. 

When no one answered back right away, I took matters into my own hands, carried it into the garage, laid it on top of the chest freezer, and began pounding it with a rubber mallet until it flew off and landed behind the freezer. It was still ringing. I was still cussing and now also heavy breathing.

I climbed onto the deep freezer with a broom and knocked it out where I could reach it, took it outside in the rain, laid it in the wet grass and began beating it with a hammer until it buried itself deep into the ground. Still ringing. Still cussing, heavy breathing, and now soaking wet with rain.

I got a shovel, dug it back up, laid it on the concrete this time, and with just 4 violent swings of the hammer, I shut that thing up once and for all. No more ringing. No more cussing. Just me sitting outside in the rain in my pajamas, covered in mud, panting like a deranged serial killer. 

When I got back inside, I picked up my phone and saw that Kearstin had replied to my message with a labeled picture of a lanyard that she said should be hanging on the key hook near the fob. All I had to do was stick it into the hole to silence the alarm.

I slowly turned to look and right there hanging on the key hook was the lanyard.

I messaged everybody back: 

The good news is, I silenced the alarm.

The bad news is, the fob has been destroyed.

Obviously, I don't need anger management. 

What I need is for my family to stop trying to scare me to death and to answer my questions in a timely manner.

Click here for Kearstin's video if you'd like to see the evidence of the torment I endure. 

The one where we did undisclosed things in an undisclosed vacation house

When our family of 13 vacations together, everyone pitches in to rent a big house for all of us to stay. We love finding ones with an elevator or an indoor pool or anything else that's super cool for the grand babies to experience and we're always mindful that this is someone else's home, therefore we treat everything in it even more respectfully than we treat our own and aim to leave it even better than the condition we found it in.

That being said, we're also human, we frequently travel with dogs, and we're...well, us, so we always get whatever insurance coverage the rental company offers. 

We're all pitching in on these houses, so I never ask or expect to get the "master" bedroom. What I do request, is that we stay in whatever bedroom is on the main floor with the kitchen since I'm the early-rising-coffee-drinking-breakfast-maker and I don't want to risk disturbing anyone else in the house.

So one undisclosed year at an undisclosed location, we got an amazing deal on an enormous undisclosed house right on the beach. It was 3 floors high, with the main floor being at the top, and it had an elevator, a theater room, and it's own pool.

Right off the bat, we found the broken elevator. 

Not ideal, but oh well. I got busy trucking our stuff up the stairs to the top floor.

My first trip up all the flights of stairs, I was met with the overpowering aroma of alcohol. The drinking kind. When I got to the top, I found 3 of our undisclosed kids picking up glass and sopping up an entire bottle of wine all over the floor. We've been here 5 minutes, but okay then.

My second trip loaded down with food and luggage up all the flights of stairs, I realized I hadn't seen Ron on either trip up and/or down these stairs. Hot and mad, I went looking for him in our bathroom, because heaven forbid the dude not poop every time he drives or walks from here to there and it annoys the freakin' crap out of me, no pun intended. Apparently it's a man thing, but seriously. No one can possibly have that much poop. I refuse to believe it.

I was fully expecting to open that door and find him sitting there on his phone, but instead I found him standing naked from the waist down with his head sticking out of the window overlooking the front of the house.

What.The.Hellll have I walked in on.

He jerked his head back inside and whispered "The bag is on the roof."

Dude. You're half naked and saying that to me as if it explains absolutely anything. 

Here's the cliff notes version:

He pooped without checking for toilet paper first.

He yelled to the undisclosed children cleaning up wine in the kitchen and they brought him a roll of paper towels. 

He wiped with paper towels. 

Unable to flush paper towels, he put them in the little pink trash bag in the can beside the toilet. 

As if alll of that were not enough, here is where the story actually takes the truly baffling turn. 

Rather than walking the bag downstairs fully clothed and quietly disposing of it in the trashcan at the end of the driveway, he decided the better option was to strip naked from the waist down and throw it out the window with the goal being...what. 

What.exactly.was.the.goal? To watch it drop 3 stories before landing at the feet of our children as they unloaded their cars below and then hope they didn't get curious and tear open the pretty pink gift bag that just fell from the sky? Or was hiding it on the roof of our luxury vacation rental the true end game? 

I gotta be honest with ya. If a bag of poopy paper towels is unavoidable, keeping my pants on and carrying it down 3 flights of stairs is the only option that would've crossed my mind. But hey. Maybe that's just me.

When asked why he didn't do that (Caymen literally asked him last night) he replied "I didn't want to draw attention and face all the questions." 

Well then. Good thing that didn't happen.

As it turned out, the broken elevator that never did get fixed while we were there wasn't the only issue with that house. 

The following day, 2 of our undisclosed kids walked in on us at 2am. (Read between the lines or better yet, don't.)

They said "It's raining downstairs."

Well that's a weird thing to say.

We all went downstairs to discover that when an undisclosed person staying in a second floor room takes a bath, it rains down through the light fixtures over the theater room. 

Also a sliding door wasn't installed properly and an undisclosed person knocked it off it's track and it fell onto the pool table. While we're at it, one of the dogs had diarrhea on the top deck.

We called a little family meeting. 

We've clearly stumbled into The Money Pit house, our trip insurance covers 2,500 dollars, and it's only Sunday. So we're gonna need to slow it down and get our shit together.

Lookin' at you Ron and Rufus. 

We all gonna start knockin' on bedroom doors first too, k?

The one where Barbara didn't understand the assignment

I love Zac's wife as if she were my own daughter and just like with Aubrey, Kearstin, and Caymen, I count Barbara as one of my very best girl friends. She's the whole package- smart, artistic, beautiful, kind hearted...and also slightly ruthless competitive.

Sometimes Barbara takes her slightly competitive side to the next level and occasionallyyyy gets a little...(whispers) mean.

On the boat over Memorial Day weekend, she and I played a guessing game of 'name that song' that ended after the first round with me telling her I pretty please don't want to play anymore.

Fast forward to 4 days ago when that song started playing on the boat, I interrupted a conversation and started telling Ron to "Turn it off, turn that song off, TURN THAT SONG OFF!" None of us understood why until I remembered that was the song I couldn't guess the title of and now I apparently have ptsd triggered by the worship song 'Forever Glorified'...

*Flashback to Barbara's clues- "NO! Shorten it. SHORTEN IT!! I.SAID.SHORTEN IT!!!"

WAIT! It's just Forever! I meant to say Forever! It's NOT Forever Glorified! I'm Sorry! 

Other than that, she's like the nicest person you'll ever meet. Also an amazing softball player, which combined with her mean er, competitive streak, makes her a force to be reckoned with on the field. 

Whether she's playing in a competitive women's league or the co-ed church league is irrelevant. She's wearing scary looking black teeth guards and she's out there to play hard and get dirty. Fun is secondary.

So our church softball team was asked to play a "fun" game against a special needs team last year...

You see where this is headed, right?

Going into it, there was an unspoken understanding that the special needs team would win.

I'm giving Barbara the benefit of the doubt that this understanding was never spoken out loud, although everyone on our team had been instructed to hit with their opposite hands so I feel like that was a clue. 

Long story short, the majority of our team "bobbled" catches, "missed" grounders, and "struck out"...while Barbara played the best game of her life.

At one point our Pastor leaned over to me and whispered, "Did Barbara understand the assignment?"

Listen. It just so happens she makes an amazing switch hitter and she can't be faulted for that...although gunning down the 40 year old man who hit off a tee and chasing and tagging the girl on the scooter as she rounded second might've been slightly over the top.

To my surprise, they were asked to play that team again this year and it's tonight. I asked her what her plan was for the game and she answered, "I plan on trying to hit to all parts of the field."

Oh boy. I hope she's not referring to all the parts that are over the fence.