7 Quick Takes about How to Take Pictures of Your Favorite Mom, Beautifying the Bathroom, and Living in a Wildflower Meadow

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week? 

—1—

For the past few years, we've gone to the ocean on Memorial Day. In late May it's warm enough to be pleasant (only the bravest of us actually go in the water) and too early in the season to be crowded (parking is usually still free.) But it was a cloudy day and it's always windy at the beach, and I just knew I would be cold and miserable.

I convinced my family to make a Plan B, and we decided to make a day of going to a naval museum and get mochi donuts on the way home. But when our 17-year-old woke up sick, we didn't really feel it was right to toss a bottle of Tylenol at him with a "See ya tonight, try not to die!" so we made a Plan C and went with that.

We decided to take everyone else to a local park, grill hot dogs, and play wiffle ball and frisbee. We wouldn't be gone the whole day and we'd be close enough to run home if the 17-year-old needed anything. 

I had fun playing with the kids and enjoyed a nice nap in the sun.

Taken by my 13-year-old.

Why are these only pictures my family thinks to take of me? Heaven forbid they could leave a record of me doing literally anything fun or good as a mom. If it weren't for selfies, future generations would look through our family photos and think that I'd abandoned the family and left Phillip a single dad.

—2—

After our cookout at the park, the older kids had to go to work and Phillip and I took the younger kids fishing. Phillip says he learned to fish in late elementary school, just about the ages of our 2 youngest boys so it was the perfect time for them to learn.  

It wasn't a roaring success. They all retched at putting the worms on the hooks, one fell in the water, and all three kids got their hooks stuck in a tree.

The 11-year-old has been asking all week to go fishing again, so there must have been something positive in the experience. I'm just not sure what.

—3—

I'm so bad at drawing. I remember being frustrated at my lack of skill as a kid, and there's an infamous story of when my 2-year-old asked me to draw him a train and when I tried he started wailing "That's not a train! That's a pig-car!" (In my defense, a train does look like a car with a pig snout on the end.)

Anyway, Facebook apparently knows I need remedial drawing classes and has been showing me stuff like this:

I actually think this one is brilliant, and I'm thrilled that I could pass the Velocipedia test with flying colors now. I wouldn't have had a chance before.

—4—

For a couple of months, I've been ignoring something. At the midpoint of my sternum, just right of center, there's a tender spot. Twice I did a leaning-down-to-touch-my-toes kind of stretch and felt a searing pain accompanied by a hard knot in that place that took a minute to go away. Fearing a hernia, I ignored it until my next physical.

When I mentioned it to my doctor I learned that (1) it's not a hernia, yay, and (2) your lower ribs are called "false ribs" and "floating ribs." They're more flexible and mobile because they're attached to the cartilage of the ribs above them, so sometimes they can cause random pains in the exact place I was describing. 

So I guess no hernia surgery for me, which is good. My doctor examined it and told me nothing felt abnormal, so it was just a weird thing that hopefully won't happen again. Unless 43 is the age where doctors start dismissing all your concerns by saying, "Well, you are getting older" like my mom warned me about.

—5—

My kid's bathroom looks terrible. The floor is always covered in towels, the counter is always covered in hair paraphernalia, and the sink and mirror is always covered in toothpaste. I'm surprised the kids aren't ashamed to even go in there. I know I am.

But I recently ventured in to make some repairs. 

First, I replaced the nasty old toilet seat. It's not actually old, it just looks ancient and stained because our bathroom cleaner with bleach ate away half of the finish. Then I patched and repainted holes left over from the previous toilet paper holder that someone pulled out of the wall. Then I unclogged the sink and pulled out what looked like an entire cat's worth of hair from the drain. (We don't have a cat but we have three girls which is worse.)

Normally I don't do these things myself, I pester Phillip for months to do them. It's hard to justify learning how to do home repairs that Phillip already knows how to do, because he can do them three times as fast. It's kind of like how when he's writing an email, it's easier for him to yell, "Jenny, how do you spell 'alleviate'?" and write down whatever I say than to go find a dictionary and better himself by looking it up. We both have our areas of expertise, you know? But I guess it did pay to do it myself this time so I'll consider it in the future.

—6—

We are unintentionally participating in No-Mow May. I wanted the kids to go out and cut the grass on Memorial Day, but Phillip brought it up and then all the kids started chanting "No Mow May! No Mow May!" so fine. 

On the plus side, we have all sorts of pretty wildflowers in the yard now.

Left unchecked, these will spread and take over the entire yard. Shhhhh.

There's also a not-so-pretty circle of dead grass in the front yard from a leaf pile that my kids jumped in once last fall, then begged me to leave out instead of clearing away. I did, they played in it zero more times, and then it got left out too long and killed all the grass underneath it.

—7—

Remember how my 17-year-old got sick? Well, I woke up with it on Thursday and it was a doozy. I basically spent the next 32 hours in bed.

I felt too crummy to read so sadly, this was me.

By lunchtime on the second day, I felt okay enough to get up and do most of the stuff I normally do. It's just weird that it knocked my husband and 17-year-old out for almost four days, and I'm the one on immunosuppressants.

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