Where Is My Gum Specialist's Restroom?

It's quite alarming, really - people turn forty and immediately complain about how their bodies suddenly fall to pieces. I would wholeheartedly object, but out of nowhere my gums are receding!

I can tell by his name that my gum specialist is Korean. And though I have just days before read about the War with Korea - I determine that this might not be the best conversation topic at my gum consult. I vow to keep the dialogue mainly centered on what is to be done about my rapidly elongating teeth.

I've recently taken up coffee drinking, and gum-consult day was particularly stressful, so I downed three cups of coconut coffee right before driving a LONG way across town to meet my new specialist. This means I had to pee like crazy even before I got lost three times, within a block of my destination.

Evidently, disorders of the gums are rampant, because this office is NICE. I only had a moment to take in the opulent surroundings before asking for the potty.

There is no need for me to draw out what happened in the restroom. Let's just say that I was going about my business like normal when the room went pitch dark. Where once there was light and the hum of a fan --- nothing. Perhaps it was instinct that caused me to immediately flail my arms and wave my torso. Whatever, it worked. The light came back on and the annoyance that began with the receding of my gums and grew with the distance of the specialist and getting lost on the way was now enormous.

I finished, situated myself and what's left of my gums on the plush sofa in the lobby, and began the tedium of doctor's office paperwork. Part way through, a man in a tie approached me with a clipboard. He told me that as soon as my chart was complete, he would commence our tour of the office.

What reaction am I to have upon hearing I'm to be given a tour of my gum specialist's office? What purpose does it serve to know the layout and workings of such a place? In my life, I have been to pediatricians, general practitioners, gynecologists, obstetricians, dermatologists, dentists, orthodontists, radiologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, chiropractors, massage therapists, hair stylists, midwives, ear nose and throat specialists, orthopedists, optometrists, and ophthalmologists, and never once before have I been offered a tour of their office! All I can assume is that this is some sort of customer service gimmick and that they think if I've been shown around the digs, I will feel loyal to this specialist forever.

Included in the tour: the restroom (I'd already discovered it, thank you), the coffee maker (as if), the orthodontic room, several staff members in scrubs, and two cutting-edge-technology machines which were explained to me as if I cared one whit (or even understood). My one question: if you pride yourselves on this amazing new technology, could you please do something about the motion-sensor light in the bathroom that leaves your patients in pitch-black mid-pee?

Around three thousand dollars from now, I will have a small piece of tissue grafted from the roof of my mouth and relocated to cover my three nearly-naked teeth. I will drink only milkshakes for a week, and the stitches will dissolve on their own. This was all explained to me very kindly, with the aid of state-of-the-art video. On the way out, I stopped in the restroom to pee again before my trek back across town to home. And yes, the light went out and I sat in blackness. Just forty feet or so from the eight million dollar imaging whatsit machine that my tour guide was so proud of.

I remember the days...

... of college summer Saturday nights in Ridgecrest. I'd arrive at the house of a friend where a bunch of us would gather to hang out and eat and usually watch Saturday Night Live.

It is a vivid sad memory that "Deep Thoughts with Jack Handey" would come on and I would be laughing so hard I'd be doubled over on the carpet. Everyone else (like, nine people) would be silent and stoic and not getting it.

Is it the same thing now with "Catalog Living?" Well, not exactly, because I'm reading it on my computer, usually by myself (some glorious days Kevin reads over my shoulder and laughs, and this is a big part of the reason I married him and not any of those guys from Ridgecrest - even though one of them had the last name McCrary. And Teri McCrary is an epic name.) So typically there is no one around NOT to laugh. But it is all I can do not to post it every single day here or on facebook. It is my fear of the silent and stoic reaction that keeps me from doing so. Go read it! Only tell me if it cracks you up.

Scene at a Suburban Park

I always try to avoid fights. In fact, I have always succeeded. I have never once been in a fist fight. Or even a slap fight. I have been known to raise my voice a time or two, but only rarely at strangers, and the time I hung up the phone on a guy at my library job, I got fired for it. Everyone thinks I'm quite demure, so when I flare for a moment, the troops dive for the bunkers, so to speak.

Recently, I've taken up a friendship with a person who shall remain nameless, who used to "organize" a "fight club" at his/her place of work after hours in a big city. Frankly, all the talk of this makes my heart palpitate and I wonder when his/her old "associates" will "catch up" with him or her and I will have to witness a "payback."

Truth be told, I'm not even entirely sure what a "fight club" is, but the notion is rather gripping, isn't it? And herein lies the problem. I like gripping. Not much in my life is gripping. Never has been. This may be why I once wanted to be a reporter. Reporters crave gripping, and they go after it, and then they write about it. I'm a housewife. But I still crave gripping, and I go after it, and afterward I write about it.

Why, just today I loaded my four offspring into our automatic-door minivan and drove up past the nine-million-gallons-per-minute fake fountain into the country club neighborhood of Anthem. Ah, Anthem. Not really a gripping place. But I parked my minivan and stepped out and smelled trouble in the air.

Dozens of middle-school-aged youth were swarming on the playground equipment. "Don't they have anything better to do?" I complained to my friends who had accompanied me to the park. We should have been an intimidating sight to those middle-schoolers. Three housewives, one of us nine months pregnant, walking in slo-mo toward the playground with eight children between us. But these are middle-school-aged youth, as I've mentioned, so they didn't disperse as I hoped they would. Instead, they turned up the volume on the swear words, blocked my daughter from climbing on the play equipment, and one of them, inexplicably, pulled his pants down. I didn't personally witness the pants incident, but my housewife associate did and I'm just lucky it didn't bowl her over, because she is the nine-months-pregnant one and I would have had to help her up in the midst of all the gripping turmoil.

Add to all this craziness the fact that I had recently ingested two cups of coffee, and am still new to caffeine. The psychological drama, paired with the coffee gave me the shakes. Or maybe I was just scared of a brawl. I don't care how brawny I am...  no one, NO ONE can take on several dozen junior high misfits at a park. Well, maybe my fight club friend could, but he/she wasn't there. So I did what any self-respecting middle-aged suburban housewife in her right mind and with a penchant for "gripping" would do: I called the cops. I didn't mean for it to turn into fodder for my facebook page, but I can't help it - it just was.

After Little Miss Non-Emergency Dispatcher in her safe-haven control center got through asking me questions like, "Are there drugs?" (No.) and "Are there weapons?" (Well, no... but they're cussing, Little Miss Non-Emergency Dispatcher! Cussing! And I don't get out much!) --- she agreed to send an officer on the double! (She didn't actually say "on the double!" - but I wanted to somehow work that in to my story. You understand.)

Mr. Officer was so nice! But don't confuse "nice" for "not intimidating." As soon as those kids (read: hoodlums) saw him coming, they picked up their backpacks (maybe chock full of knives and nunchucks) and skedaddled. Mr. Officer followed on foot and issued a "stern warning" to some of their remnant to "keep their pants on" and "find another place to play." Then he came back to chat with me and assure me of my safety in this mean suburban jungle. During this chat, some other friends of mine arrived on the scene and were intrigued to see me talking to a law enforcement officer, since the last time I invited them to this park, there was a bus load of convicts cleaning up trash on the grounds. I know what you're thinking - action follows me. Come with me to the park sometime!

Flying Kids

I grew up flying over town in my dad's single-engine airplanes and playing in grease in hangars during Summer while other kids played in swimming pools. My dad is an A&P mechanic and a workaholic, so I learned the NATO alphabet at the same time I learned the regular one. Therefore it makes perfect sense that I try to introduce aviation to my kids.

Until recently, my efforts included meals at the municipal airport cafe around the corner; watching jets land in the designated observation lot near the runway at McCarran; and trips to see Grandpa at the hangar where he's working now - even at the age of 74.

But earlier this month, we took advantage of a very cool program which is part of the Experimental Aircraft Association - the Young Eagles. You can read all about it by following the link to their website, but for the purposes of my blog, you only need to know that Joseph got to fly for free over our beautiful Nevadan desert for about half an hour in a homebuilt airplane. I have included a photo of the plane, just before landing safely, in case that word "homebuilt" makes you nervous. Preceding the flight, he was given a basic explanation of the parts of the plane, how it flies, and a logbook of his very own. Any child between the ages of eight and eighteen is eligible for this and you can find a chapter in your area on the website.

The experience impressed my often-stoic ten year-old. And I was proud to have done my part to promote an ongoing affection for aviation in our family. Plus, four more children have been taught to "walk wide around the propeller." Heard that a time or two growing up.

Cayna declined a flight, but liked the right seat.

Bethie wanted to fly, but has to wait a couple years.

Coming in for a landing!

What I Did On My Summer Vacation

I find myself, at age 41, and with a husband and four children, frequently clueless but concerned about what our family life should look like. I've had enough therapy to know that this is largely due to my parents' divorce. To compensate, I look to other people's families for a model, or resort to my own sky-high ideal based loosely on movies and television. This actually works out okay some of the time. (It helps that I know Jesus, have a phenomenal husband, and am intelligent enough to spare myself too many mishaps.)

Sometimes, however, I am in really unfamiliar territory. Summer vacation for instance. My own childhood summer vacation memories consist mainly of spending weeks with extended family without my parents; going to camp (again, without my parents); or taking long trips with my dad and my brother and sleeping in hotel parking lots in my dad's conversion van. You can see how I might not know what I'm doing, or how this is supposed to go.

Summer, 2011 began and I knew it would be fun and healthy to get out of my house and out of Las Vegas for more than a long weekend. But the idea of making that happen paralyzed me. Facebook gave me some ideas of what people do: The beach. The lake. Washington state. And I talked to people: One friend was packing up her pregnant self and her two small children to fly to New York for two weeks to visit both sets of grandparents. Our teacher friends, with the summer off, spent four weeks on the East coast and included a Bermuda cruise. Our neighbors took three weeks to go to the Virgin Islands. My brother and sister-in-law planned a cross-country camping and sight-seeing trip in their Honda Odyssey.

By late July, the most we had done was pick a week with no major obligations and in early August, Kevin requested the time off work from the 19th through the 26th. Our only semblance of a destination was Carson City, to visit our state capitol since Joe studied it this year - and maybe Lake Tahoe, owing to its proximity to Carson City. My friend Michelle, planner extraordinaire, sent me an inboxful of links to help plan this trip that stubbornly refused to plan itself.

Unexpectedly, on August 12, our friend Rachel Hamilton passed away. She had battled an evil stomach cancer for four months. Her funeral was planned for August 20th in Denver. It was a heckuvan event to plan a vacation around, but it rapidly came together.

One night shortly before the trip, I sent out a deluge of texts and facebook messages to anyone and everyone who might help me with any aspect of this trip. One particularly helpful response came from the Dixons, a family we know with family in Denver. Not only are they in the habit of pulling off this crazy one-day, Vegas-to-Denver road trip, but they do it with four kids! I was incredibly pleased with the detailed itinerary that Rob Dixon sent to me. So much so that I gushed about it to other friends and to my husband. Looking back on all I learned over the past week, I think that it not only fed the scheduled, planned, controlled part of my personality (a sizable chunk) - it also relieved some of my extreme anxiety over what a family vacation looks like. I had it right there spelled out for me on my iPhone in the form of a facebook message! Now if only I could have hit up other friends for plans for the other six days of the vacation... I might have been much more relaxed to start with.

We rolled out of our driveway last Friday the 19th right on schedule at 5:30 a.m. And we were able to stay on schedule until maybe a couple hours out of Denver when we hit a LOT of rain and some unavoidable bathroom stops in unfamiliar towns. Overall, I think we all did remarkably well for having spent roughly 15 hours in a minivan.

The funeral was both sickeningly sad and wonderfully warm and inspirational. It was healing to see our friend, Jeff, (Rachel's husband), and their two daughters Jane (4) and Cate (2). We spent hours afterwards in their backyard while our kids played and watched a movie and we talked and told stories and visited with a bunch of friends.

From there, our vacation week was mostly marvelous, the stuff of postcards. Mass at the Denver Cathedral with the sunshine streaming through the stained glass. A drive to Glenwood Springs, 160 miles west of Denver. Setting up camp by the Colorado River. Swimming in the Hot Springs, tubing on the waterslides. Touring a cave. Racing down a mountain on an alpine coaster. Dining high above the canyon, with breathtaking views from the restaurant and from the tram that delivered us. Playing miniature golf. Getting ice cream downtown. Riding a zipline across the Colorado River. And back. Watching the kayaks and rafts go by, and keeping John from throwing rocks at them.

When I list all those things, doesn't it sound delightful? It really was, in part. But there were also numerous instances when Kevin and I bickered. Or the kids bickered. Or the restaurant sucked. Or we took a wrong turn AGAIN. Or I wanted a shower. And I didn't handle it well. When my ideals aren't met, sometimes I spiral downward into a pit of despair and am absolutely convinced that we are ruining our children and our marriage is done for and the six of us will one day make a cautionary tale told by psychiatrists across the nation.

All I can do during those times is pray. I might initially be miffed at my husband, but the hope and forgiveness that is part of leaning on Jesus gradually takes over. Then I'm able to recall the countless stories I've heard from other families, older than mine, that tell how family vacations are often quite challenging - but years later, either the bad stuff is forgotten or it becomes a really good story.

On the way home today, on the curvy roads of the Colorado highway we were on, Cayna finally succumbed to the motion sickness that seemed to be manifesting itself the entire trip. She barfed all over herself and the back seat. Alarmed by the spewing, Bethanie screamed as if she had witnessed a murder, which scared John, who burst into tears. We pulled over, put on the hazards, and furiously dug through our forty-two bags to find our towels. I soaked up the barf and Kevin stuffed the towels into a trash bag to be dealt with at home. And Cayna got a lesson in motion sickness from her father who suffers as well. And Bethanie quieted down, as did John. And we eased back onto the highway. Crisis managed. And not once did we bicker. (Well, there was one tiny dispute over whether to use paper towels or real ones for the clean-up.) It is a joy and a relief to realize we handled the barf incident way better than some of the issues that came up only days earlier. We're learning. It's funny that it took an unplanned, unprecedented, and unpleasant event to prove that we are making progress in figuring out this family thing. I didn't need facebook help or a text to get through it, and I'm proud that we worked together, cared for Cayna, and then got back on the road.

Underwater Birthday Moments

I think at the moment I officially turned 41, I was reclining on the couch watching my son's home video of my daughter being loony in the car. Then I went to the grocery store.

My official position is that no birthday girl or guy should have to grocery shop. But I have other official positions that supersede that one, such as: no family should be without food. But thankfully, Kevin took off work early so at least I got to grocery shop alone. And also thankfully, the grocery store wasn't the main feature of my day.

Main features of my day:
1) Snuggling with kids in bed since it was a lazy Summer morn. I will spare you the full truth about how this ended in strife when Bethanie and Joe decided to start slapping each other.

2) Going to McDonald's for Egg McMuffins. Because we had no food in the house.

3) A morning swim. With the Egg McMuffins still digesting, we plunged into our backyard swimming hole. It was marvelous. I hope to always remember how the water sparkled in the July morning sunlight. And how my children are trouble-free when we are in the pool.

I am a swimmer. I even lettered in swimming in high school. And MANY of my childhood memories are in my grandma's pool. But even with efficiency in all the main strokes, I still love swimming underwater best. It is so quiet and peaceful and otherworldly beneath the surface. I have never SCUBA dived, but I am convinced I would like it if I could get over my fears of the bends and terribly poisonous fish. In the pool this morning, I purposely kept swimming the length of the pool underwater. And noting how quiet it was. And how blue and shining. And how risky considering any one of my children could cannonball right into my spine without warning. But no one did. And I reveled in the experience.

4) Purple Penguin with Pinneys. (Can't resist alliteration from time to time.) My good friend Michelle and I took all the kids to the snowcone shack and ordered up some flavored ice. It was tempting to order "Birthday Cake" flavor, but I went with my usual, Pina Colada. Memorize this bit of trivia as it may appear on a pop quiz at my 50th birthday party.

5) Dinner with Dad and Vivver. BBQ flavored grilled chicken. Foil pack buttered asparagus, and roasted red potatoes and olive oil. It is a RARE thing that I cook my own birthday dinner, but it just sounded good to me, and no particular restaurant did.

6) Driveway dessert with 21 of our neighbors, plus my parents. It was scrumptious. And sitting out on a night as splendid as this one, with a faint breeze, but mostly just the coolness of the shade - I had to concede that maybe it's not the most insane thing in the world to give birth to a baby in July in Las Vegas, Nevada.

7) A homemade necklace from Cayna. I will treasure it, and this day.

On the Eve of My Forty-First Birthday

I'm hopeful. Isn't that the best way to be?
Kevin and I had our first counseling session together in a long time. I want to work on anger issues and how they affect my parenting, and he wants to support me, and we BOTH have tremendous loads of crap from our childhoods to deal with - and the good news is: it's possible! It's possible to deal with it. And to heal. And to improve. That news is the highlight of my year.

I'm loving my children. On the eve of turning 41, they are ages 10, 8, 6, and 3. They are funny, sweet, smart, loving reflections of the joy of the Lord. I can't wait to hug and kiss them on my birthday tomorrow.

I'm able to run. For yet another birthday. And I have a neighbor nice enough to run with me each time we are both willing to put down the snack foods and put on the running shoes. I still love running more than I hate running, and that keeps me getting out there.

I'm excited about the cake and ice cream. From age one aaaaaaaaaaalllll the way until tonight, I have loved cake and ice cream. And it's even sweeter when it's in honor of a birthday celebration.

I have purpose. I seek to grow in my love for God every day. I want to be a better wife, and have fun with my husband and our kids. I homeschool with conviction (and am ELATED when next year's pieces of curriculum arrive in my mailbox one by one). I maintain and improve our home. I buy portions of grass-fed beef; strive to improve at sewing; read good books; want to grow closer to my friends; try to do Weight Watchers, then screw up, then try to do Weight Watchers again; organize closets; analyze relationships; and continue to pray for everyone I love and plenty of people I don't even know.

All that oughtta keep me going another year, huh?