mothermayi

Safe Driving

While I drive around in my car, I often come across other drivers whose driving style leaves me cold.  Tailgating, meandering, forgetting to use turn signals, these are things I like to grouse about.  My most despised fellow driver though, is the jerk in the big rush.  The guy weaving back and forth in the lane obviously put out by my obeying the speed limit and near perfect lane control.  I enjoy saying things like ‘what’s the big rush jerk? Got to get to your Jerks United meeting?  YEESH!’ 

Today I was returning from an irritating trip to the pediatrician with both the kids in the back seat. Tennessee hopped around from foot to foot the whole time we waited in the tiny exam room peppering me with questions and trying to open all the drawers and touch all the stuff.  Then we made our way up 33^rd Avenue at a snail’s pace, Tennessee announced that he had to pee.  I told him that we were almost there and that he could pee just as soon as we got home.  He wailed that he couldn’t wait.  I started driving like a jerk. 

Not that I haven’t cleaned pee from a car seat before.  Not that I don’t expect to clean pee from a car seat again in the future.  But it is summer, and pee makes the car stinky in the heat, and let’s be honest, I can think of at least forty seven things I would rather do than clean pee from a car seat. 

I gripped the steering wheel and weaved back and forth in the lane, I tailgated, I shook my fist at the guy in front of me.  Tennessee yowled again and I gave him words of encouragement.  ‘Just hang on buddy, we will be home soooo soon!’  He yowled some more, and Lucy snapped that he was hurting her ears.  Finally I peeled into the driveway, tires screeching, whipped open the door to the back seat, got the full bladdered fellow out and hustled in to the house.  I set Tennessee down in front of the bathroom door where he looked up at me and said ‘I don’t have to go now, I wath juth kidding.’  Then he hopped off down the hall on one foot then the other.

Maybe I will be less looky down the nosey about rushing drivers in the future.  Maybe they are being lied to by small children too.  Maybe driving like a jerk to avoid possible pee cleaning duty is dumb.  Maybe it is time for me to teach the kids to pee in a juice bottle long haul trucker style.

Fever Fever

Lucy had a fever all weekend.  It is gone now.  She is plucky and giggly, just like she was before the fever started.  I am kind of tired from my hyper vigilant temperature checking.  Fevers are my least favorite of the veritable buffet of childhood ick and sick symptoms.  Barfing is no fun, of course.  Nobody likes to wash linens over and over.  Snotty noses are no prize either.  But neither scares me like a fever.

It may be that I placed too much stock in the Little House on the Prairie books I read as a kid.  The older sister or maybe the younger gets a fever and goes blind. I know, I know, there was no Children’s Motrin on the prairie.  I am pretty sure that prairie children didn’t receive a battery of vaccinations either, but logic and chemistry don’t make me any less fearful of a fever.  My fear addled brain wakes me up every hour to pad in and feel little Lucy’s forehead (as though my palm and fingers are highly calibrated thermometers with blindness alerts built in) to make sure that she hasn’t burned up and gone blind in the night.  Once again, fear beats logic when mothering is at hand.