Fruitcake with Nuts

For the past week and a half I have been the equivalent of a living Christmas Fruitcake. My family has been passing me around from place to place like the Christmas gift that you never really asked for but can't quite turn down either. Surprise, it's a fruitcake. Oh thank you, just what I always wanted. (whisper - we can pass it off to great Aunt Bertha. She deserves a fruitcake for Christmas.) Everyone is careful with the fruitcake, just in case anything happens that it should appear damaged and used (as if it is possible to actually damage a fruitcake), but no one really wants to hold onto it for too long in case it gets forgotten on top of the fridge only to be rediscovered some hot July day as you are searching for another bag of chips for the picnic. I, the fruitcake, have been shuffled from one place to another dragging behind me my little suitcase and cheerfully celebrating the holidays while accepting that I am one gift that will soon be passed on to someone else. As good old Ben Franklin said both fish and houseguests stink after three days...especially when you don't offer them a fair fighting chance at the shower before all the hot water runs out. But in this family, the fruitcake may have the upper hand. Because while I am being passed around, I am being circulated amongst a bunch of nuts. We put the "fun" in dysfunction and "screwed" in "screwed up". I am actually among the sanest and most normal in my family...that is one incredibly scary thought. Almost enough to make me click my bright red shoes together three times and say "anyplace but home". Then again, these nuts are my nuts and what is a fruitcake without nuts? Just another lonely fruitcake without anyone to keep it company. And this is perhaps the stupidest thing I have ever written - well, sober at least. Whatever! My christmas has been wonderful, fruit-cakey, and nuts but I would not want it any other way! Well, I could have done without my niece peeing on my suitcase and then knocking the Christmas tree over almost on top of me. And my father's dog sticking his tongue inside of my mouth.... but those are the nuts!

Pissy Christmas

Brief note, as I am in the middle of the traditional family Christmas celebration. Do not allow a three year old to sit on your suitcase. Ever! They leak. Sure, she is cute and charming but that vanishes when you are scrubbing pee out of your suitcase. Merry Christmas! :)

Cold Con Artists

I have not yet experienced the combination of awe, joy, and terror that must be having a child of your own. However, I do think that after working with children in some form or another for over half of my life, and two college degrees, I have figured out just a few things about children. For the love of everything holy, do not fill your child up with cold medication and then send them off to school thinking that no one will ever possibly catch on to your little plot. First of all, if your child is verbal, they will rat you out every single time. Please, if your child is willing to tell me your version of how babies are born, what makes you think they are not going to tell me that you gave them cold medicine that morning? And yes, you should wonder just what your precious child has shared with the class about your family...just wonder about that one. If your child does not yet talks, I will still find out about your plot. See, even if you administer the medicine as the child is leaving to get on the bus to school that still means that the medication will at least begin to wear off if not wear off completely before your child leaves my classroom to head home. Darn those doses that are necessary every 4-6 hours. And I do find it suspicious when a child morphs from an animated, interactive child to a listless, snotty, coughing form curled up on the carpet almost exactly 4 hours after they would have left home. See, that high school math does pay off. I know that parents have to work, that child care is expensive, and that it is not easy to care for a sick child. However, I need to work too, and caring for your sick child while teaching nine others is not easy either. Plus, sticking my hand into my pockets and finding handfuls of kleenex covered in someone else's snot is just a whole new level of nasty. Almost equal to having your child wipe it on my sleeve - MY sleeve, not theirs! Can we just cut the act and be honest here - at least tell me up front that you are sending in a sick child so I can have a fair chance. Not that in a preschool classroom where we breed new and exotic germs I ever have a chance. Perhaps I am just grumpy because one of those darn germs managed to catch up with me in spite of the obsession with hand sanitizer, Clorox Anywhere Spray, and "let's wash our hands". So to whichever child found it in their heart to finally share something, even if it was this disgusting cold germ, thanks. And to their parents who tried to sneak them into the classroom with tylenol and dimetap - I may save a few little germs to bring along on my next home visit. Just to return the favor.

Fly Away Home

After someone left handprints (well fingerprints) somewhere other than my arse, and they were not using fingerpaint, I did what any self-respecting woman would do. I called home, crying, and talked to my parents who made arrangements for me to fly home early for Christmas. I desperately needed to be around people who would make me feel safe again, who would keep my mind occupied by things other than what had occurred, and who would not make me feel judged. Now before you picture a Norman Rockwell painting, my family could probably win the Dysfunctional Family Olympics even without bringing along the off-shoots of the family tree. But we do crap well - we are used to pulling ourselves together to take care of one another when the crap comes. And we seem to find crap as regularly as rain in the rainforest. Hence the rubber boots...now the white coats are another story. So anyway, I managed to sneak in on one of the last flights before it started to snow. It snowed, and snowed, and snowed. And then, just for fun, it snowed some more. I think we ended up with close to a foot of snow on the ground and a few inches inside my boots. I would like to thank God for going to all that trouble to create such a beautiful welcome home for me, I mean the biggest single day snowfall in years is quite an honorable welcome. However, God, next time could you remind my brother not to drop his ginormous wet boots on top of my very cute new red shoes? The sweet new ones I just bought and wore once before bigfoot's boots made them into a soggy, dirty mess? Thanks. Please feel free to stick that memo to his forehead. Oh, and also could you remind my adorable nephew that if you hit your aunt in the face with a snowball there will be retaliation? Once is funny but then hitting me again while I am still blind from the first one...that is just wrong. But please don't warn him until I exact revenge. Thanks. Amen. This is the best treatment a girl could find for a bruised soul and a shaken mind. Family, snow, hot chocolate, sweet innocent children (well, maybe not so sweet and innocent - you will pay my pretty...you will pay) who are excited to play in the snow and get ready for Christmas, and the magic of the Holiday season. Most of all, wherever I am I have some of the most beautiful little handprints on my heart. And my sweaters, and my jeans, and tiny little fingerprints that refuse to wash off my glasses.....

Drugs and Bugs

I wanted something interesting to start this journal off with, some quirky story about the daily experiences of being a preschool special education teacher. Wow, was I mistaken to wish for something interesting to happen. By now you would think that I would have learned to not want anything other than plain, average, dull as paint drying days (and perhaps a flask in my hip pocket to make me believe that would actually happen). A darling child was escorted into my room by a bus attendant who pulled me to one side and whispered - because the other three year olds might accidentally overhear- that said child might perhaps have head lice. Ugh! I immediately started scratching my own head out of that association response - just think about lice for a while and you will start itching. So I quaranteened said child and called for reinforcements from the school nurse. Turns out we had a lice highrise and nursery firmly established on her head with rooms for rent and a flourishing community. Now somehow I escaped my childhood without catching headlice and I really have no desire to entertain them now. So itchy child was isolated and the rest of the children were given a good checking (as were the now very nervously scratching teachers). No one else has anything creeping around upstairs thankfully, but I do now have the wonderfully fun job of bagging up our dress up clothes for its two weeks of solitary confinement in the closet as well as spraying down the beanbag and cushions. Just writing this is making me itch. Try explaing to a three year old that you need to check their hair without freaking them out that there may possibly be bugs crawling around in their hair. Um, yeah. Then another parent decided that it might be entertaining to send a bag full of prescription medication to school in their child's backpack for me to theoretically administer to the child. No warning that the child has prescription drugs in his bag that they could have completely injested on the school bus. And really, have childproof lids ever prevented a child from opening a container? I have frequently asked a child under the age of ten to open those containers for me when I can not pry or contort the things open. They never fail. So now I have a very angry parent because, well, the medication did not return home in the bookbag but was kept safely in the office for a responsible adult to pick up. I wonder who that will be? I don't like surprises when I greet kids in the morning, because 99% of the time they are the start of a bad day. Like a day of bug catching, head checking, drug confiscating, and all over itching. So now at work everyone is walking a good foot or two around me in the hallways because of the bugs in our classroom and I am feeling slightly like I am horrifically deformed or a victim of the plague. I expect to be given a scarlett L tomorrow and have a sign posted on my classroom door warning all who pass by of our shame. Anyone brave enough to come play with us?