young girls have picked them every one

Despite the fact that it's eighty skrillion degrees outdoors in the sun, it's officially Fall, which (at least around here) is the season for a particular brand of autumnal barnyard revels. Most of these places are pretty much the same. There are pumpkins, usually some variant of bounce apparatus, listless animals to pet, perhaps some sort of giant PVC tube slide done on the cheap, a corn maze, hayrides, a train ride where the train cars are inexplicably spotted like a Holstein cow 50% of the time, and perhaps cider with donuts. Standard.

That's not that interesting, because we've all been there, done that. But today we returned to a place we went to last year, Southern Belle Farm. The reason we went back to Southern Belle Farm is because they have a pick your own flower field. You heard me. PICK YOUR OWN FLOWERS. This...is different!

A few reasons we like this place. One is that, unlike the apple orchard we went to two weeks ago, they don't nickel and dime you for every damn thing. One ticket for admission covers everything you could possibly want to do, unless you want to buy food. Second reason is that it's very well-kept. Well laid out, neat, clean, and (at least on the two occasions we've been there), not crowded. Third reason is that right there. Pick your own flowers. 

The flowers are beautiful. I don't know what kind they are (maybe someone could chime in if you recognize them), but there's a giant field of them, organized into deep rows. Flower picking is included in the price of admission ($14 per person between the ages of 3 and 65 years old). You just go in and pick as many as you want to take home. Last time we came we didn't know about the pick your own flowers, so we weren't quite prepared. The stems are pretty fibrous so it's hard to pick them with just your hands, and also we didn't have anywhere to put the flowers, so they were all wilted and dead by the time we got home. But this time I was prepared, boy. I had a bucket. I had cold water . I had garden shears for each kid. FORESIGHT IS 20/20 (is a thing that over-planners should smugly start saying).

Oh, and just this last. On our way to the car, we passed the corn maze. My kids don't want to do cornmazes anymore because the last time we did one we got lost (an anxiety-provoking experience enhanced by the fact that I was actually on backup call that day and anxious about my potential for ready egress already) but I don't think this formative trauma prevents them from standing near corn. (Yet. I suppose there's still time for them to be PTSDed by the Iowa caucus later on.) So I told them to stand amidst the corn and peek their faces out, because that would be a great "Children of the Corn" joke that might be funny...to me. It was a marginal success, if you consider the margin to be the floor. Maybe in addition to garden shears, I should have brought scythes.

(Thanks to Andrew Moore for recommending this place to us last year. We'll miss you, Good Andrew.)

high water mark

Hurricane Irma hasn't arrive in our area yet, but somehow she's already caused some flooding here.

(We were trying to fill our bathtub with clean water in case anything came up, but then we lost track of how full the bathtub was getting and it overflowed. This reminds me of when we're starting a case in the OR, make a hash of the A-line or central line or what have you, and dryly note, "Anesthesia EBL: 10 mL." We caused the very problem we were trying to avoid.)

So, Hurricane Irma's set to arrive here tomorrow. Our friends to the south obviously have it much worse than us, so it feels insulting to even tangentially compare our situation to theirs. But Atlanta is...bad at weather. So. The kids have no school for the next two days. Joe cancelled his clinic tomorrow. We got a few extra flashlights to keep on hand. (We had a bunch already, but somehow they always wander, because the kids think that flashlights are toys, which I guess they kind of are until you actually need them.) We filled up a bunch of thermoses with fresh water. We are charging all our stuff, and all our accessory battery packs, just in case the power goes out. (This is actually the most likely scenario, as the power goes out with some regularity even under normal bad weather conditions.) We opened up the pool cover and checked all the gutters. And, of course, we tried to save a bathtub full of fresh water just in case.

I honestly think it's not going to be a really big deal, in the end, but Governor Deal has declared a state of emergency (which I think it's likely the most prudent decision), so what can you do? I'll be heading in to work tomorrow (ahead of the bad weather, I think--I don't believe it's supposed to get bad until the afternoon) but I'm pretty sure that as extreme weather shelters go, a hospital is probably not a bad place to be.

Everyone stay safe, drive slow, and I'll see you at work tomorrow.

the cider house RULES!

...is a joke that has surely never been made before!

(Sorry John Irving. Maybe if your books weren't so fucking depressing people wouldn't need to make jokes about them to laugh through the pain. A Prayer for Owen Meany? More like A Prayer for Owen SADDIE, am I right?)

(I'll...show myself out.)

Anyway. Where was I? Oh right. Today we went apple picking, because it's fall and the weather is beautiful and there's no way you would know that Hurricaine Irma will be up in our zone by the day after tomorrow. (Though hopefully just a tropical storm by then. Floridian friends, stay safe.) My kids like to pick things (noses, fruit, and scabs, in that order), you know I have a thing about getting out of the house on the weekends, and going apple picking means a higher than average chance of getting to eat a fried apple pie, which was the best thing they had at McDonalds before they decided to change the recipe and ruined my entire life.

(When I was about nine or ten, my family and I went to Paris, where I realized that McDonalds was still making their apple pies there in the old fashioned manner--that is to say, apples in a crust cooked directly in the deep fryer, served fresh.) And honest to god I think I ate a McDonalds apple pie there just about every single day of our trip. To Paris. Fuck off, galettes des pommes, I'm eating this other, better thing right now.)

The apple orchard we went to was B. J. Reece Apple House, where we'd gone apple picking last year. B. J. Reece is located in Ellijay, GA, where all the other apple orchards are, and they have a reasonably large variety of apples that reach peak season throughout the fall. I think right now, pretty early in the season, we were picking Golden and Red Delicious, Red Romes, and Galas--though we didn't get to the Galas because they were across the road and our bags were full by the time we finished one side of the orchard.

B. J. Reece also has your standard panoply of of Farm FFamily FFFun activities, though they do nickel and dime you a la carte. $12 per peck sized back of apples, $5 per person for admission, $3 per person for the petting zoo, $2 per for the bouncing pillow. Because of this piecemeal ticketing process, the check-in process is a bit annoying (and not precisely cheap), but...I get it. They need to keep the lights on. I have no idea how these places ever really make money, frankly.

We only ended up doing the petting zoo, and the giant slide (which, thankfully, was included in the price of admission rather than a separate ticket). The petting zoo was quite nice. They had your standard animals (there are always goats), but they also had puppies and kittens (I KNOW) and a baby cow, who was not at all interested in being pet, but very cute, and will probably teach you Important Life Lessons à la City Slickers.

This chicken thinks he's FABULOUS.

Also, these asshole turkeys. Why do they always have turkeys at a petting zoo? WHO WANTS TO PET A TURKEY? LOOK AT THEM.

B. J. Reece also has a market and bakery that sells your usual stuff. Pre-picked apples, farm fresh vegetables, honey, jams and jellies, hot sauces, baked goods, boiled peanuts, popcorn, cider, that kind of thing. They also have a bit of a lunch operation, though I don't think they've fully ramped up for the season yet, as the only food they had on offer were hot dogs.

I included this because I've seen clover honey before, but...cotton honey? That's a thing? (I guess it must be. I'm no apiologist.)

One last plus of going to an apple orchard early-ish in the season is you can still try to get in your family picture for your holiday cards. These never turn out that great (because usually we take the photos ourselves, quite often using a selfie stick, which is what you do when you are too cheap and/of self-conscious to hire someone to take family photos for you), but aside from general too-sunny squintiness, I think we made out OK this year.

Now to defensively eat apples for the next three months.

weekend warriors

I have this phenomenon in my house--you may be familiar with it in your own--where I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends to do something. It barely matters what. Really, it could be anything. The playground is a nice, easy choice. Or hiking, we like to do that. If it's rainy or cold, the Georgia Aquarium is clutch, or the Tellus Science Museum, or sometimes (when we're feeling a little least earnest in our intentions), any of a number of indoor playgrounds, plus or minus go karts. But the reason I need to get my kids out of the house on weekends is the same reason you need to walk your dogs. Well, maybe not in order to poop on the street, but really, the point of taking kids out on the weekend is to wear them out. You need to take that full gas tank full of hyperactive aimless kid juice and run it down, my droogs. Otherwise, the kids start to get bored. And when they get bored, they get fractious. And when they get fractious, they start to complain, and I can't be hearing any of that, because the complaining inevitably leads to screentime begging, which is THE WORST KIND OF BEGGING. (Generally speaking, my kids only get screen time on the weekends, and they know this, so this leads to a kind of hoarding mentality about screen time that is somewhat counterproductive. It's like food insecurity that you sometimes see in kids who grew up not having enough to eat, only my kids have had plenty to eat, and also they get plenty of screentime, so everyone shut up, don't you know I grew up unironically using a rotary phone, yet still, to my knowledge, have never complained about boredom as much as you three seem to?)

Sometimes on the weekend, they will be playing very nicely with each other in the morning, and Joe will suggest, hey, maybe we'll just let them hang out at home and do nothing and just have a low-key morning at home. And...OK, look. I love my spouse, I cherish his input, but sometimes I also wonder when he will ever get tired of being WRONG ABOUT EVERYTHING, ALL THE TIME, EVER. Because what happens is this. The kids play very nicely at home for a few hours. But then they get bored. And then they start complaining, "What are we going to do today? Where are we going to go? Why can't we go out to do something else?" Like we were cruelly holding them captive at home against their will! But by then, it's too late! The opportunity window has closed! By the time you let them realize that going out is the best course of action, it's too late to go out to do anything good, and then they're pissed, and you're pissed, and everyone is pissed, and in order to defuse the situation you just end up letting them play Minecraft for a million hours which makes them even more avolitional and makes you feel guilty for being That Piece of Shit Parent and then your weekend is RUINED.

I put this out there because several people have told me that I seem to take my kids to do a lot of things on the weekends, but it's really not anything that reflects well on me, because the only reason I get them out of the house is because I DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH THE COMPLAINING. I don't want to hear it, I don't want to respond to it, I don't want to try to troubleshoot it, and I certainly don't want to feel guilty for how I eventually deal with it. I don't want to do any of that. I just want to avoid the whole thing. Hence, the weekend activities.

So. This morning we went to do some strawberry picking at Washington Farms.

We have gone fruit picking many, many times before, though never at Washington Farms. The reasons we went to that particular location this weekend are as follows.

1.) They sent me an email from their mailing list, so I remembered that they existed.

2.) I usually buy two flats of strawberries from Costco per week, but this past week the strawberries they had on offer looked like hot moldy garbage, and...

3.) I saw some mention of a Super Spring Saturday petting zoo. Nina likes petting zoos.


So, Washington Farms! Bright and early this morning! So here was the part where I had to steer my kids into the skid a little bit. It's still the beginning of strawberry season in Georgia, so the crop isn't so robust yet, and I was worried that they would get picked out if we didn't show up early enough. (Their website warned of the same, and actually suggested that people call them to check on crop availability before driving in.) So I wanted to get to the farm on the earlier side. However, waking your kids up even five minutes earlier than they prefer to wake on the weekends is a recipe for them deciding that they don't waaaaaant to go pick strawberries. Why do we haaaaaave to go? Why can't we get strawberries at the stooooooore? So, what's a loving, engaged parent to do in response? Why, merrily ignore them, of course! (Really, what I said was this. I know. You think you don't want to go. But trust me, you're going to have fun.)

And they did.

Washington Farms was having a Super Spring Saturday this weekend, which means that in addition to the strawberry picking, there was your standard variety of Family FFarm FFFun offerings on tap, including A Bounce Thing:

An Animal Thing:

A Weird PVC Tubing Slide Thing:

And a Thing Where One of Your Kids Somehow Gets Buried In a Mound of Dried Corn:

Anyway, Washington Farms. Strawberry picking was a success, although now I feel like we're going to be basically eating strawberries defensively until they're all gone. (Last time we went strawberry picking, I made strawberry jelly, though I think I screwed up the recipe somehow, mostly because I didn't follow the recipe on the pectin box exactly. They told me how much sugar to put in and it was an almost sarcastic amount of sugar, and I though surely, that can't be right, and I'm a doctor, therefore I know EVERYTHING, so I cut it by 25%. So it turns out that the instructions were screaming at me to follow what they said the letter for a reason, because that jelly turned out kinda...not so jelled. But anyway. Color me chastised.) The Spring Fun activities were truly fun, and although we only spent about 45 minutes doing the actual fruit picking, we probably spent another 3+ hours there just doing the rest of the stuff. That coupled with the hour it took to drive home means that my kids didn't start thinking about screen time until past 4:00pm. And that, my friends, is what we call #winning. I've already cleared a place on my desk for my Parent of the Year award--it can sit right next to that pile of school papers I forgot to sign and the class pictures I forgot to pay for but also never returned. What? WHAT?

liquid schwartz

Well howdy. Explaining why this blog hasn't been updated is only slightly more boring than reading the blog itself, but in short I had to give Grand Rounds last week, and since I couldn't work on Grand Rounds at work or while my kids were awake, basically every free minute I had up until last Wednesday was channelled into that presentation. Thankfully, it's finished! Now to resume my life of indolent goofery!

You may also be disappointed to know that I ultimately decided against using the "Exorcist" slide in the talk (Factor 1: too early in the morning, Factor 2: Catholic hospital) but it may please you equally or maybe even more that I did use this slide as an opener:

(He's his own best friend.)

*          *          *

As a brief and unsatisfying epilogue to the fractured (ho) story of Cal's clavicle, these following addenda:

Right before Thanksgiving, I reached out to the principal again, asking him if he could give me an update on his conversation with the school nurse after the incident. Given my background (and recall that I trained for two years as a pediatrics resident prior to anesthesia) I also offered to sit down with the nurse and work with her on a standardized medical policy for parent notification--if, of course, they wanted my help.

He responded...well, let me just copy and paste the body of his response email in its entirety.

"Thank you for contacting me regarding your concerns. Yes, I have communicated with the school nurse and the district supervisory nurse regarding the incident. Additionally, we have discussed and developed a plan for proper notification to parents."

(Signed, Pally Von Principal.)

Note, no actual elaboration of what this "plan" is, nor any perspective from this nurse herself. So...basically a deflecting non-answer, right?

Also (and I probably should have noted this in the previous entry so as to not seem quite as much like we are raising a doormat) the day of the injury, after he got home but before we went to the ER, Cal and I had a little talk about self-advocacy and appropriate responses. And I basically told him that grown-ups aren't always right. He had just finished reading "Matilda" a few months ago, so I referred to that a few times, how Matilda was oftentimes smarter than her parents and how Matilda's headmistress (The Trunchbull! The chokey! Oh man, I really love that book) was usually wrong. And that while he should obviously always be respectful of adults, if he felt strongly that something was amiss and that the adults taking care of him weren't taking it seriously, he should request to call his parents regardless. Then I quizzed him on our cell phone numbers. Then I crammed more Tylenol in his craw and tried to figure out his NPO status.

Anyway, all's well that ends...if not well, then at least eventually.

*          *          *

Well, now we're all caught up, but now I realize that I didn't actually tee up anything fresh to talk about today. But instead of pushing save and kicking this half an entry down the road like a tin can, I'm just going to slap it up with a promise that I will put up a real entry soon too. I do, in particular, want to write a little something about Nina, in particularly about her Girlness and Christmas shopping for her, and this strange feminist guilt I have about getting her real girly things. And then the strange feminist guilt I have about considering dolls and their accoutrement "girl things" because boys can play with dolls too, patriarchy! Though I wish that I could find that same stroller that Cal had when he was Nina's age, because damned if they don't just make everything in pink now.

(Above: Cal and some rando kid, circa 2006. This was back when we lived in Manhattan of course, so while such playground spaces and pocket parks came at a premium I would just like to point out how much more I prefer this kind of rubberized flooring to the default "mulch and wood chips" surfacing that seems to be the standard playground-issue here in Atlanta. It pushes up your minimum age to enjoy the playground by at least 6 months, between waiting for your kids to walk well enough and making sure that they're not going to eat all the wood chips when they do fall. Though high-fiber gluten-free diets do seem to be quite popular these days, don't they?)

nature vs. nature

We found ourselves with only two kids Saturday morning. This sort of makes it sound like we left one in the back of a cab but in actuality Cal got invited to his friend's lake house, which is wonderful for two reasons. First, Cal is realizing that being unendingly polite is garnering him the reputation as The Kind of Kid That Other People's Parents Like To Have Around, and has thus been on the receiving end of a lot of very nice playdate invitations. Number two, of course, is that his friend has a freaking LAKE HOUSE. Which in Georgia is apparently pretty common, but as we have no such lake house, seems as exotic and Gatsby-ish as a straw boater worn non-ironically.

Usually we take these kinds of occasions to carve out some special time with Mack, if not just for the simple reason of heading off middle-child syndrome as distracting him from the cold reality that he has not been invited to boat and fish and tube and whatnot on the resplendent banks of Lake Wanahanapeepaw (note: not a real lake), and is, in fact, missing out on some serious fun.

Anyway. It's a beautiful weekend but as I am on call we couldn't go anywhere too far. So we went here, to the Big Trees Forest Preserve in Sandy Springs.

Mack wanted to collect some leaves for a project he's planning (I don't actually know what the project is--and I don't think that he knows exactly either, though I'm fairly certain that it will involve a lot of Scotch tape) and it's such a gorgeous time of year that I figured that something outdoorsy and wholesome was just the ticket. I originally wanted to go to the Chatahoochee River Natural Recreation Area, but of course because of the government shutdown most areas run by the National Parks Department are closed. Not that I'm complaining about it--though most visible, the shuttering of the national parks and monuments may be lower on the list of Very Important Things things the government shutdown is affecting--but I'm just pointing out that maybe in a few weeks, we'll bypass the municipal nature preserve and try something on a grander scale.

Smaller scale may have been a blessing in disguise anyway, as even the maximum loop entailing a mile and a half of easy trails can start to feel awfully long when carrying a large-ish 15 month-old (Nina can walk pretty well now, but on that kind of uneven ground she tends to fall a lot) (see also: muddy) (see also: persistent fear of snakes--my preoccupation, not hers) and felt even longer during the last leg of the hike when lugging around 40+ pounds of Big Mack. By the end I was starting to get paranoid--I assumed the trail was configured in a loop, but the longer we walked the less sure of where we were going, and there were no signs indicating EXIT or TRAIL HEAD THIS WAY or 500 FEET TO THE NEAREST CHICK-FIL-A.

I also started to get concerned that it was slightly inadvisable that we went that deep into the nature preserve in the first place--I'm on backup call for the hospital, so while one of my partners was already in house and though I checked in with him before leaving the house to determine that the chances of concurrent emergent-to-the-OR catastrophe was sufficiently minuscule, I did have a vision when I thought we were maybe-lost of being stat-paged to the hospital because, OMG TWO RUPTURED TRIPLE As AT THE SAME TIME, and having to rapidly extract myself from the middle of the damn forest using only my wits and by, like, feeling which side of the tree the moss was growing on. (To be fair, the preserve area is actually quite small, so it's not like I was on call and decided to go hiking in the middle of the Moab Desert or anything. We never even fully lost audio confirmation on the loudspeaker-amplified event in the parking lot of the Ford dealership next door. But still it's more dramatic if I don't tell you that part so forget I said anything.)

Anyway, we knew we had finally made it all the way back around when we saw the bright blue port-a-potty in the parking lot. Some of the trail had apparently washed out due to the heavier than average (some might say biblical) rains the latter part of this summer, and we had to scale an erosion-melted slope to re-enter civilization. At this point we had joined forces with another family who was similarly lost (they were not outdoorsy-types either and admitted that the only reason they were doing anything even remotely wholesome was because the dad had to attend a bachelor party later in the day and felt that he should pre-atone for the damage he was about to incur on his body), and I had recanted on all my earlier sentiments about the weather and the leaves and was basically like, "Fuck nature, let's go to Taco Bell."

AND WE DID.

(Fin.)

just the two of us

I'm in a Starbucks with a pumpkin spice latte and my laptop now like some goddamn stereotype. Man, even I hate myself right now.

Starbucks always makes me think of working hard. I studied for all my board exams in Starbucks-es, from Step I at that Starbucks on 103nd and Broadway all the way up through my Anesthesia Oral Boards at the location on Monroe and 8th. The difference between Starbucks-es in New York and Atlanta, by the way? The Starbucks-es in New York serve you much, much faster.

I also wrote my entire book at the Starbucks on 29th and Park, which if you need to do work is (or at least was five years ago) an ideal Starbucks--huge, a preponderance of large tables, with a strip of power outlets around the entire outer wall. Oh, another difference between Starbucks-es in New York versus Atlanta? People bring work to Starbucks-es in Atlanta of course, but usually it's more like a rest stop, or a place to have some coffee and kill time between appointments or tasks. In New York, people set up shop. I read once in an article that Starbucks aimed to make their coffee shop locations into "virtual living rooms," places where people can kind of hang out in an armchair and meet with friends--hopefully buying large quantities of overpriced food in the process--and I think that there's likely no place where this is more true than in New York, where a lot of people frankly don't have actual full-sized living rooms in their apartments.

I mean, I brought my laptop there, and maybe my bookbag, a manuscript envelope, assorted miscellany. But there were people who brought full desktop computers (24-inch monitor AND the tower), the entire contents of their law library, extra desk lamps for those darker corners of the store. During my final year of residency when I was trying to finish my book by the July 1st deadline, I would take one day per weekend that I wasn't on call, leave Cal with Joe, set up base camp in one corner of that Starbucks and just sit there for eight, ten hours at a time. I would buy one coffee and get something cheap(er) but filling, like an egg salad sandwich. And then I would sit there and bust ass, looking up only occasionally if something interesting was happening, like the police coming in to extract homeless people that refused to get out of the bathroom--something that happened with alarming frequency. When I left, usually in the early afternoon, my hair and clothes would reek of smoke from the coffee roaster, as though I'd just smoked a billion cigarettes.

This has been Starbucks Talk. I'm your host, Michelle Au.

Anyway, the point of this post was not to talk about Starbucks (and it goes without saying that I have no affiliation with Starbucks, not only because I don't run paid ads on this blog but because this is such a small blog that STARBUCKS DON'T GIVE A SHIT WHAT I SAY), but to catch you up on Mack.

When I decided to go part-time, one of the first things that pushed me to consider scaling back at work was the fact that Cal was already halfway out the door to college, but the things that made me actually decide to make the leap was Mack. Because see, the thing with Mack is that...he's fine. He's always just fine. Cal's the oldest, so he often gets a lot of attention because of his school and activities (Cal recently joined the Lego Robotics team at school, and to say that Mack is inelegantly jealous would be kind); and of course Nina gets a lot of attention because she's a baby and needs us to do every damn thing for her. But Mack? Mack is always OK. He can do a lot of stuff for himself. He can play nicely by himself or with his siblings. A lot of the things he needs (a glass of milk, help reaching something high) Cal can often troubleshoot, and does, especially if I'm tied up doing something like cooking dinner or putting the baby down. He's happy, he's pleasant, he's not really that high-maintenance for a four year-old. And that's how I think he ends up getting ignored a lot. Classic middle-child syndrome.

And the thing with Mack is that he's just so reassuring with how normal he is. Cal was by all accounts kind of a weird child (he's much better now, warm and social and adaptable in ways we could only dream of when he was Mack's age, when he was...less so those things) but Mack has always been like the textbook illustration of Boy in Early Childhood. He like sports and wrestling with dad. He plays pretend and makes up little playlets with his stuffed animals and action figures. He's sunny and affectionate and snuggly and fun. Even his drawings are textbook--every human looks like a happy scarecrow with vertigo, all stick limbs with five fingers on each hand, clubby feet, smiley face. Every house has a chimney, every flower has six petals, and there's always a sun with beams shooting out in the corner.

(The reason that I make such a big deal about the drawings is that Cal's drawings at this age were--well, they were pretty weird. He was always good at drawing inanimate objects or landscapes, but when it came to drawing people, his drawings were just odd. Even when he was five and beyond, he'd sometimes draw people missing limbs, sometimes missing heads, and when he did draw a head it would be tiny, like a pinhead, with no face on it. NO FACE. What the hell, young Cal? Anyway, long story short I started introducing Cal to comics and gave him a little key of facial expressions so that he could draw his own comics and so the reader would be able to infer the mood of each character and thus the thrust of the story. So that's not an issue anymore, but still, I will admit that there was a period of time where I was worried that this was the first sign that we were raising some kind of sociopath who was unable to read human emotion or something.)

(And yes, I also see how telling it is that I just spent a paragraph talking about Cal in a entry that I ostensibly started to talk about Mack, but see, that's the thing! Cal was so weird and attention consuming! And Mack is so normal and easy! That's exactly why it's so easy to set him on autopilot-parenting and exactly why he's going to quit his tutoring job and join a violence gang because his parents never paid attention to him! I mean, probably!)

One of my main goals now that I have more time is to spend some time with Mack, just the two of us, one-on-one. I had to take him to the dentist two weeks ago, an expedition that I billed as our "special day" (in that yes, we were going to the dentist, but he could skip school for the rest of the day and afterwards we could go the playground and then have lunch together wherever he wanted! And also: free toothbrush!) and the degree to which he was excited about his "special day" with me was unreal. He talked about it literally every day for the weeks leading up to the appointment, and he seemed to especially relish the fact that it would be just for him, that Cal would have to go to school and that Nina would have to stay home, and weren't they going to be so jealous? There really was nothing that extravagant about the day at all, so the special thing for him wasn't so much the activities or skipping school or the Chick-Fil-A for lunch, as the fact that it happened at all. For half a day, he was my only kid.

So anyway, something that I've committed to doing is to try and have a special day with Mack about once a month--or at the very least, a special morning or afternoon. We'll just do something low-key--making Rice Krispie treats, going to the playground, doing an art project--but just something that we can do alone without Cal being there asserting his own superiority in gluing pompoms ("I used to do it like that when I was four too, Mack...but you'll get better at it. I mean, probably.") or without Nina there needing all of my everything. And maybe we won't even need a dentist appointment as an excuse to do it.

Parenthood, right?

thar's a snake in mah boots!

Undoubtedly the scariest call I've gotten from work happened this Thursday, when the director of the chess club that Cal attends after school called that afternoon to say that Cal never showed up, and did I know where he was?  (I was at work and of course freaked out because OMG MY BOY IS LOST.  Long story short, Cal just forgot it was chess club day and so missed the bus that was to take him there--we tracked him down ten minutes later patiently waiting in the principal's office for someone to pick him up.)  So yes, that was scary.  But the second scariest call from home I received the day after that, when our nanny told us that she came home from school pickup to see two large copperhead snakes sunning in our driveway.

Joe and I pulled in from work at the same time, and there were no snakes visible, sunning or otherwise. Joe went peering by the back door to see if the snakes were hiding under this storage unit we keep there for balls and frisbees and assorted outdoor detritus, and said, "I don't see anyth--" before jumping back in the air about three feet.  Because there was this:

I don't think I realized that I was scared of snakes until that day.  I knew I was scared of cockroaches--growing up in an apartment in New York made me more than familiar with that particular evolutionary success story--but I honestly can't say I've really seen a snake that big outside of a zoo, behind a guardrail and an information placard and a thick, reassuring layer of plexiglass.  But now, peering out from the inside of my house at the venomous snake chilling outside, I can confirm that yeah, for sure, I'm afraid of snakes.

I mean, LOOK AT IT.

LOOK AT THAT FUCKING SNAKE!

(Borderline related: did anyone who got the iPhone 5 on release day have any input as to its improvements when it comes to low-light photography?  As someone who lives in a low ceilinged ranch house with not enough windows, I am interested.  Please weigh in if you're in the mood!)

Anyway, I looked at it and screamed girlishly. Then we called the kids to look at it and they did not seem particularly perturbed (or indeed even that interested), though I gave them both a stern talk nonetheless about if you see a snake don't go near it, it doesn't want to hurt you but it could bite you if it gets scared (I left out the part about tissue necrosis and the potential need for serial debriedments and fasciotomies because WHATEVER, TMI).  They shrugged, glanced and the snake through the window again before going back to their Legos.  But I could not be so blase about it because the snake, OMG the SNAKE.

About half an hour later the snake slithered away under some shrubbery along the side of the house, at which point we could see that the tip of its tail was a little squashed from our nanny accidentally running over it with her car when she first pulled into the driveway.  We noted where the snake was headed as we had already called A Snake Guy (I believe his official title was "Wildlife Removal Specialist") to come by and check our property the next morning, and wanted to give him a little help in finding what might be the nest, or as I called it, Snake HQ.

I was on call this weekend, so when I walked to the car Saturday morning (down a poorly lit driveway that my mind inconveniently imagined to be PAVED WITH SNAKES) I did again see one snake lying there in the middle of the driveway, not moving.  I didn't know if it was the same snake as yesterday and frankly I didn't care--I hurriedly got into my car (which was probably teeming with SNAKES) reached into my bag (also stuffed full of SNAKES) and started the engine (ditto SNAKES).

The Wildlife Removal Specialist showed up later that morning while I was at the hospital, and though I wasn't there, Joe said that he got rid of that one driveway snake (it was the same snake from the day before, already dead, probably from the inadvertent tail squishing--and it was inadvertent, because even though none of us like snakes and even though the snake could bite our kids/dog/selves, I don't think any of us has the stomach or cojones to kill a snake), sprinkled some "granules" in the high-suspicion region by Snake HQ (purportedly a repellent of some sort) and put down two glue traps that looked for all the world like the ones I could buy at Home Depot.  Total bill: $230 for half an hour of work.  He did not find a nest or any other snakes in the area, though it's not clear to me how hard he looked--half an hour in an area as dense with ground cover as our yard doesn't seem like a whole lot of time to spend combing the premises.  And the glue traps were covered with leaves by that evening, so it's really uncertain how effective those are going to be.

(This is probably a good point to tell you guys that I'm quitting my job and becoming a Wildlife Removal Specialist.  They have a higher hourly rate than I do and they don't have to pay malpractice insurance.  All those years of medical training wasted, but whatever, sunk cost.)

So that's that.  But what bothers me now--what really bothers me--is this: our nanny said that she returned from school pickup to find two copperheads sunning on our driveway.  Two.  One of them got accidentally squished by her car, and that's the one that we found, and that the wildlife guy removed.  (YOU GUYS HE DIDN'T EVEN KILL THAT SNAKE HIMSELF.  $230?  Really?)  But the other one we never saw again.  So in all likelihood, we may still have a large and extremely poisonous snake still hanging around our property.  He could still be in our yard.  He could be hiding under my car.  He could be calling me on the phone and oh my god, get out, the call is coming from INSIDE THE HOUSE.

So basically we have to move now, right?