Mrs. CPA

We are at Nan's

Having a block party.

When I see a cotton picker going down Main Street, I know I'm home.

Fourth Grade

Previous

I started a new school in Dumas. Where they changed classes! I had a big yellow book bag that my parents brought home after a parent teacher conference because I had it full of papers and junk. My brother and I flew to visit a family friend in Houston and I got a new purple one from a kiosk at the Galleria called Everything Purple.

My deep hatred of spelling words began. There was only one set of books in class and we had to copy down the words. I would write them down wrong.

Somebody wanted to be my boyfriend on the third day. I can't remember his name. He was in the 4th grade and we used to meet at the fence.

There were rumors that Mrs. Everett would throw tennis balls at kids in her science class or make them get in her storage closet. I never saw this with my own eyes, but she did keep tennis balls on her desk. She taught us that you should never sniff scientific experiments, we should waft the fumes towards our face with our hands. She also told on me and my boyfriend for meeting at the fence.

My math teacher was Mrs. Tyler. She had the biggest lips I've ever seen. She taught us our times tables and how to tell time on a real clock. I remember a problem in her class about a clock and how many times it chimed in 24 hours if it chimed the hours and every half hour.

Mrs. Southerland was our reading teacher. We had those stupid workbooks where you had to write the answers in complete sentences, which I thought was a waste of time. So I used ditto marks, and got in trouble. I hated those exercises. She used to ask us questions in the last few minutes of class. One day she asked us to name mammals. I said whale and she tried to argue with me that I wasn't right. I was. She had someone come in to teach us French. I don't remember one word.

I got sent to the principal's office (not the last time I encountered the principal's office) because of some stupid girl fighting about who was friends with who, and when someone was absent, Kristin wanted to be our friend, but when Mandy was there, she didn't. Everyone got their feelings hurt and there was a lot of cattiness. The principal was one of the girl's grandfather. While we were in his office, he artfully removed his paddle from the top drawer to threaten us to get our shit together. I think it worked. 

We used to ride the big blue school bus to the church on Monday afternoons for choir when it was raining.

We played jacks on the sidewalk at lunch, I had a little pink suitcase of them. The boys played popping pencils. Nolan Moore was the undisputed pencil popping champion. He also had the tightest rolled jeans.

Once you sat down in the lunch room, you couldn't move again. Drew was the slowest eater and would end up having to shove a whole fruit roll-up in her mouth at once because we had to leave.

I Finished Something

Back in November of 2006, during the first NaBloPoMo, I talked about sequins and the stockings that my parents made for my siblings and me. I had started Hudson's stocking, but I left it to languish in the plastic box that got moved across two states for 3 years.

I finally finished it last week, except for his name. I need some more red sequins.I sewed every stitch, and the puffy parts are stuffed with pilfered pillow filling from our couch pillows.

I started Maddie's stocking today. I'm going to try and finish it before NaBloPoMo 2012.

Last Month(ish)

· My Dad was in the hospital for nine days with a bleeding ulcer. Again. After nine units of blood, two throat scopes, a colonoscopy, a radioactive bleeding scan, an ultrasound, pissing off his girlfriend, thinking he was going to die, and 4,972 blood draws, he got to come home from the ICU.  He’s fine now, but he’s done something to his hip and had to have an MRI last week. He’s falling apart I think.

· Maddie went back to the pulmonologist for her follow up appointment. If you remember, she gets pneumonia frequently and easily. She had to do a swallow test, where they make her drink varying thicknesses of barium liquid and take X-Rays as she swallows. This is to see where that liquid ends up; is it going straight to her stomach, or is it going towards her lungs, or into her lungs? Her tests showed that the liquid is getting to her vocal cords. It’s why she always has a raspy voice, and gurgles and snores at night, it’s why the gunk in her sinuses and nose got into her lungs and gave her pneumonia three times last winter.  Normally children outgrow this, so I suspect that it was much worse when she was younger and that’s why she kept getting sick. It also means that we have to thicken any liquid that passes her lips - anything that will become liquid in her mouth, or that has an overabundance of water in it that will be released when she chews it has to be thickened, including medicine. The stuff you use to do this is not covered by insurance and is not exactly the cheapest stuff on the planet (of course!).  There will be no spontaneous trips to Sonic for Maddie. No sips from the water bottle, no popsicles or ice cream, no watermelon or grapes (how do you thicken a grape?). I have to make her cups for the whole day at day care and we can’t go anywhere without something to drink for her already made up. I know it’s not like she has some genetic disorder, or a life threatening illness. I know. That doesn’t make it any less soul crushing to realize that we’ll have to be extra viligent about everything she ingests until she outgrows this. She goes back in February to have the tests run again.

·  Maddie also has the distinction of having the worst case of eczema that the afterhours clinic had ever seen.  She was covered in it, and we could not stay ahead of it. The doctor who saw her even brought in someone else for a second opinion to make sure that’s all it really was. It took about a week, but we finally got rid of the worst of it, but if we miss even one day of slathering her up with hydrocortisone, it starts creeping back.  We’ve run out of the prescription cream and the rash is taking  over again. The doctor also tried to tell us that she had scabies. When I asked where she might pick up such a thing, he said “day care” in the same way one would say “a dirt floor whore house built on a garbage dump full of dead bodies and used needles.” It wasn’t scabies. Her spots of eczema just travel all over and set up new little colonies. You can see some of it on her face in her Halloween picture. We are going to have to go into the pediatrician's office - a giant hotbed of sickness - for it again.

· Hudson convinced me that he put a rock in his ear. One Friday afternoon, he kept ignoring me or saying, “What?” every time I would finally catch his attention and talk to him. It was so infuriating. So when Tim got home and he was still doing it to Tim, I asked him if he put something in his ear while he was at school. He said yes, and when asked what it was, he said it was a rock. I put him up on the counter and peered into his ear. I saw something blue in there, so we headed off to the ER. One Hundred dollars later, the doctor found Hudson’s little ear tube, which had naturally fallen out of his eardrum, in his ear canal. It’s blue. 

·     Then I got strep throat.

· My job is going awesome (as far as I know. Once you get yourself fired, you’re paranoid at work forever). It’s always slow this time of year. October 15^th has come and gone, and it’s not quite time for projections yet. And me without a vacation day in sight!

·  Tim’s job is also rocking with the awesome since they finally got their project completed at the end of September. A few all nighters and some middle of the night phone calls, and they are rolling right along.  They had their company picnic this weekend and I won $25 to Chili’s on the second game of Bingo. I should have picked the Lands End one and gotten myself a new pair of house shoes, but I thought of our family first. And our tummies.

·    We've been to Boo at the Zoo, eaten breakfast at Stoby's in Russellville to eat in the train car, we've gone to football games, had a huge crab leg and shrimp boil with my Dad's entire family and generally run around until we are all ready for some down time.

Back tomorrow with something I finally finished.