Chipmunks and Excavators Drive Me Crazy!

Parenting can be rough some days! This week, Sam had a doctor appointment, so I had to take Ella to school. Afterward, I had to drop Andrew off at Nana’s house so I could go to work.

Usually he is all about going to Nana’s. For whatever reason, he did not want to go. He was clinging on to Sam when it was time to leave. Eventually, I had to just scoop him up or Ella was going to be late.

This led to a non-stop meltdown. He fought to get buckled in his seat. He was kicking the back of my seat. He was screaming and crying.

The drive to the school is about 30 minutes, and then we have to wait a few minutes before we can go inside. I was not in the mood to listen to him scream for that long.

Normally, I can put on the kid music channel on Sirius XM and that works. He will settle down most of the time. That morning, however, he didn’t. Ella suggested playing his two favorite songs. After 10 minutes I was ready to try anything.

The first song is from the most annoying kid host EVER – Blippi. He has way too much energy and he just gets on my nerves. Andrew loves his music. So I searched for The Excavator Song. God help me…..

While the crying slowed down a little, it didn’t stop. So Ella suggested another song, Chipmunk At The Gas Pump. Yeah, you read that right.

The kids have a few sing-along Tonies. (A Tonie box has figures you can buy and set on top of it and it plays songs or stories.) One of them is from the Laurie Berkner Band. They do a lot of kid songs. Apparently, the Chipmunk song is on there. So I had Google find it and I played that next.

So the song is goofy enough, and then you see the video and it takes a whole new turn….

Anyway, the crying stops midway through this one. When it is over he says he wants the Blippi song again. When that is over, Ella wants the Chipmunk song again. And it goes on like this for the remainder of the trip.

After I drop him at Nana’s, I head into work. Almost four hours later, I am going through patient charts and for no reason at all I start singing, “Jump! Jump! Pump it up! Chipmunk at the gas pump…”

My coworkers looked at me like I was nuts. Rightfully so. The next day, I was shaving and that doggone Excavator Song wouldn’t get out of my head…. Urgh!!

Yeah, parenting is rough some days.

Conference, Clubs, and Croup

Conference

Many readers know I work in Sleep Medicine. Every year there is a sleep conference in Detroit that we try to go to to earn our Continuing Education Units to keep our registry. That conference was last week.

Sam and I drove down to Detroit early Thursday afternoon. (The kids got a sleepover at Nana’s house.) The conference took place at one of the casinos. When we checked in, they asked if we wanted an upper or lower floor (we chose upper) and whether we wanted a city or river view (we chose river). It was a nice view!

After speakers were done on the first night, Sam and I went to a small mixer where guests could have a drink together. We hung out with a couple of my coworkers and folks who graduated from the same sleep program. They had raffles while we were there and Sam won a Tim Hortons gift card. My coworker won a $100 Amazon card.

We went up to our room and we were exhausted, but hungry. We decided to order room service ($$$$$). She ordered nachos and I got a burger. When it arrived, it was apparent that we should have just shared the nachos because it was HUGE!!

After the conference on Friday, we had hoped to go out to a nice dinner. Because room service was SO expensive, we decided to get something on the way home. After getting the kids from Nana’s, we ordered pizza and brought it home.

Just a side note: As parents, you can’t wait to get a night or two alone and away from the kids. Of course, when you do, you can’t stop thinking about them and are overjoyed when you see them again!

Clubs

My son, Dimitri, turned 16 on Sunday. I told him I wanted to take him out golfing. It’s something he and I have never done together and I knew it would be a good time for us to connect and chat. We decided to go Saturday morning, and the weather was perfect.

I haven’t been on a course in at least 3-4 years. I knew I was gonna really golf badly. He hasn’t been out in at least a year, since leaving the golf club at school. Thank goodness it was a slow day in the course.

I hate when you’ve always got someone waiting for you to tee off or shoot. I realize it’s part of the game, but I always feel rushed and often just want to hit so we can go. Dimitri and I were far from professionals out there, so it did take us a bit longer than usual. We finally let the twosome behind us play through.

He is like me in that he has his favorite clubs. He rarely uses his driver, but he can crush a ball with his 5 wood. I have a 7 wood that I used to hit well, but topped it every time Saturday. I had a few good drives, just enough to keep me coming back.

We bent the rules a little bit, and had plenty of mulligans (redos), and impost probably a dozen balls in the woods and water. Despite all of that, it was a great time together. He, naturally, beat me by two strokes. I can’t wait to do it again.

Croup

Sam called me while I was out golfing and said that both kids sounded sick. Both had low grade fevers and a cough. By the time I got home, Ella was sounding better after taking some allergy meds. Andrew’s fever was gone but still had a cough and that raspy voice.

Sam wondered if we should take him to urgent care or ER. Everyone we talked to said wait to see how he was in the morning.

That night at bedtime he cried a lot. He wound up in our bed. He woke us up with a nasty cough and wheezing about 3am. He fell right back to sleep, but it was enough to freak us out a bit.

At 6am he woke up sounding worse, so we rushed him to ER. Nana met us there and brought Ella back to her house. We planned to be there a while and Sam packed loads of snacks just in case.

They got us right back and he was seen almost immediately. We weren’t sure what to expect because we were there right at shift change. However, once we were in our room, the nurse came in, followed by the doc. Once the examination was done, she told us it was croup and she gave him a steroid and told us he should be back to normal in a couple days.

How fast were they? Well, we had finished with the nurse and the doctor AND the meds were administered all before the registration gal came to our room! We actually had to wait to get registered before we could leave! Total ER time – about 70 minutes.

Ella decided she wanted to have a sleepover again at Nana’s, so when Sam left for work last night it was just me and Andrew. He really improved throughout the day. Before bed, we stood on the porch and watched the thunderstorm together.

Andrew is still sleeping and Ella should be home later today. The house should return to it’s normal chaotic state shortly after her arrival.

They Call Me “Dad”

At some point, when I get an extra few bucks, I wanna order this shirt.

I am kind of over everything right now. Perhaps it is a lack of sleep, the need for a break/vacation, dealing with stupidity in many facets of life, an overwhelming amount of stress or a combination of all of these things. I am not really sure what the issue is. The past couple weeks, I feel like even the smallest things get under my skin. I feel like there is so much going in in my life right now. I feel like I lack the mental capacity to sort through it.

I can kind of fool most people. I usually can so this by just staying to myself – reading a book, listening to music or an old time radio show with headphones, or playing a dumb trivia game. The one person I cannot fool is my wife. She knows I am struggling, maybe she hasn’t said anything, but she knows. She can sense it. Even with an Oscar worthy performance, she knows.

She’s dealing with her own stresses right now. She’s doing SO much running around with the kids. Some days she has two different doctor appointments – one for each kid – each one in different cities. While doing that, she has to be sure she has bottles and diapers, and so on and so forth. It’s hell. It is days like this, that I wish I worked a normal schedule.

That’s a lot of crap to vent, and for that I am sorry. I hadn’t really wanted to write that much, but I was told by my therapist that sometimes you gotta just get it all out.

Despite having so much on my mind, I was not going to write a blog today. I just had nothing to write about. Then, while scrolling through Facebook memories, I found a post that probably hit me harder today than it did when I first posted it! It was a powerful reminder of how no matter what is going on in my life, I have an important role that I simply have to live up to every single day.

The Facebook Memory:

An amazing thought for the day: Parenting “is greater than any milestone you will ever hit in your career. It dwarfs any fame you may receive for your ideas or inventions. You’ve been handed a piece of history in advance – a gracious gift you send to a time you will not see – and you play the biggest role in how that history will ultimately be recorded” – T. Kimmel

This quote blows me away. Wow! This really shows how important a role I play in my children’s life. I’m not always going to be here for them, and when I am gone, I can only hope that they have learned something from me that they will take with them in the future. I hope that there is something that they learn from me that helps them in the future.

Another quote that is similar to the one above is :

I do not want to fail my children. I love them with all of my heart and soul. My role as their father is more important than any of the BS that is going on in my life. I have to make it a priority. I will love them, care for them, teach them, and guide them the best that I can, so that when they get out on their own, they will be ready to take their place in history.

There are days that I look through Facebook memories and I cringe as I delete things from the past. There are days that remind me of fun things the kids did, fun trips, or wonderful memories. Then there are days when one simple quote will knock me back a few steps to realize my focus is on the wrong things … and to adjust that focus to the right things!