Sunday Smorgasbord

Sienna is a Disaster

waiting to happen. When she was two, she tripped on a brick on UD’s Mall. Granted, the Mall is notoriously dangerous and sinking in odd places, but still, she broke her tooth in half. We had to have it pulled the next day. 

Then, four months later, she fell into my parent’s fireplace and split her eyebrow open. Blood. So much blood. Oh, so much blood.

Plus, my mother, from whom I totally did not get my propensity to panic, immediately scooped her up and screamed at me in a total panic, leaving me feeling oddly like a terrified mother and a terrified child at the same time.

Then the ballet accident happened, then she got a black eye last spring and nearly broke her nose. Then yesterday, while hopping up the stairs (which her father should have immediately put a halt to, given her inherited clumsy gene) she slammed her forehead into the concrete step. 

Right in between her eyes. She looked like a Klingon, and the Ogre proceeded to call her Klingon for the rest of the night. I tried (unsuccessfully) to hide my laughter. 

But she didn’t really cry. We put ice on it and she was more upset that she couldn’t see around the ice pack to watch a movie than she was about her forehead, so we didn’t think much about the injury. She fell asleep on the couch, which is a little odd for her but not terribly out of the ordinary, and we put her in bed.

Fortuitously, we had forgotten to give her the antibiotic she was taking for an ear infection, so we woke her up three hours later when we remembered. Or we started waking her up three hours later. It took us half an hour to get her awake enough to take her medicine, by which point we were alarmed enough to check her pupils for dilation. By this time in this child’s life, we’ve learned the signs of a concussion by heart.

But the light apparently hurt, because she spent the next thirty minutes screaming every time we got the light even near her face. We finally had to hold her down and hold her eyes open, only to determine that her pupils weren’t even thinking about dilating. 

So the Ogre stayed up all night and woke her every hour. She seemed fine the next day, so we decided to watch her again the next night and take her in to the doctor on Monday. 

But seriously. Children need to come with full-body armor and an on-call paramedic. And a prescription of Xanax for their mothers. Jeez.

Charlotte, on the Other Hand,

will never get hurt because she’s scared of the whole world. Most recently she’s developed a paralyzing fear of nighttime, making it necessary to either a) carry her up the stairs in one arm and Liam in the other while trying to quiet her hysterical cries of “Char…scared! Dark! Scared! Mommmmmmmmyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy!” or b) walk up the stairs while carrying Liam with Charlotte clinging to my leg in abject terror and screaming. This is an addition to the growing list of Charlotte fears, which include but are not limited to, playground tarps, swimming pools, the trash truck, random people who smile at her, the tower at UNLV, hair floating in the bathwater, flies, and the wind. All of these things elicit screams of terror and panic. 

She’s ambivalent to the rest of life, except shoes. 

Let me illustrate this with pictures so you really understand the difference. 

Here’s how Charlotte feels about everything in the above list (and sparklers):

Here’s how Charlotte feels about everything else in life except shoes:

Here’s how Charlotte feels about shoes:

In the Other Room

the Ogre is watching The Dark Knight.

Did anyone else hate that movie? I loved Batman Begins, but The Dark Knight…sheesh. 

I watched it diligently, three times. Three times because the first two times I fell asleep, albeit in different places. But I promised the Ogre, who loves it, that I would watch it all the way through. So I did. 

And I really wished, in the immediate period following the movie viewing, that I had just fallen asleep again. 

It’s lame! It’s like, five thousand story lines all woven together into one incoherent and deeply tortured mass. It’s like the emo movie that never ends. With awesome technology and Maggie Gyllenhaal.

I’m sure the reason I hated it is because there’s something wrong with my understanding of honor/justice/questions of morality/what constitutes quality entertainment, but I’m kind of okay with that. I’ll stick with Two Week’s Notice any day.

Or The Proposal. Did anyone else love that? I love Sandra Bullock. She’s hysterical.

Next Week

I’m going to do a blog post about the responses I got to my Daughter of Eve post and some things that I’ve realized since then. I want to thank you all for your wonderful responses. They really got me thinking about the way I was approaching the entire issue (especially Melanie’s) and I think I’ve been able to make some significant strides in overcoming my battles as a wife and mother already.

So check back next week for an update. I seem to be getting a lot of “I understand completely how you feel” responses, both publicly and privately, so maybe I can put together everyone’s responses in such a way that it will help us all.

And, well, I can’t leave you without showing you a few pictures of the bracelets the Ogre and I made last night. One is mine and one is his, and the other is also his but he seems to have made it after ingesting large quantities of LSD. 

So aside from the Insanity Bracelet, can you guess whose is whose?