One Flew Into The Cuckoo’s Nest


My last post was a bit of a downer (sorry). This next one starts off rough, but the day did get better.

First, I slammed three of Jilly’s fingers in the car door. We were in the YMCA parking lot trying to make it to her last swimming class. Needless to say, we did not go to swimming class. Instead, Jilly had Tootsie Rolls, a lollipop and a few cartoons for breakfast. Injured fingers are doing just fine.

Later, I entered our screened-in porch to find a little brown bird flying around it. I quickly close the door behind me and started to open the porch doors to see if I could shoo the bird out of doors. Curious as to what the heck mommy was doing, the kids opened the door to the porch and walked in, leaving the door wide open behind them.

Of course, the bird flew through the door and into my house. He landed on his back on my fireplace hearth. As I searched for something to capture him with, he disappeared.

I now had a small, possibly dying bird in my house. And, I have a cat.

Searching for this little brown creature was futile, so we gave up and went on with our day. I figured I’d find him in a few days, stiff and dusty in a corner.

It was almost one o’clock when I heard D yelling, “Mommy! In the weeds! In the weeds!” He was pointing to a window seat in our family room on which I keep a bunch of plants. Sure enough, the little critter was hiding in my house plants. I grabbed my daughter’s butterfly net and tried to catch him.

Petrified, the bird flew over my head and directly into the kitchen where he bounced off the screen in a window and landed—bonk!—in the kitchen sink. Stunned, he kind of floundered about long enough for me to get him into the net and out the door.

As he few away, he chirped twice. I think he said, “Later, Suckas!”

All’s well that ends well.

What Happens to the Kids?

“Did you hear the news?”, my neighbor asked, breathless, on the other end of the phone. A small plane had just crashed near my home, into the supermarket parking lot I had been planning to visit to pick up some groceries.

I turned on the news and tried to piece together what had happened. It was an Angel Flight: a pilot had donated his time and plane to take a cancer patient and his wife to Boston’s Dana Farber Cancer Institute for treatment. I imagined a sick old man and his wife, holding hands, and felt terrible for them and the pilot.

The next day, I learned that the patient wasn’t a sick old man, but a 43-year-old father of 4-year-old twins. In a flash, two children were left without, not only their father who had been battling cancer, but their 37-year-old mother as well.

I can’t stop thinking about those twins who are around the ages of my Jilly, who is 5, and D, who is 3. What do they know? What do they understand? I hope that extended family has swooped down around them to love them and take care of them.

About four years ago, Fairly Odd Father and I got around to making our will. In doing so, we had to designate guardians for our kids should both of us die. It was an awful feeling, imaging our kids growing up without us, but the choices weren’t difficult. Honestly, I’m not sure we’d even need a will for a judge to know where the children should go, but we wanted to be sure that the family wasn’t torn apart should others come into the picture and want to lay claim to our kids.

How about you? Have you figured that out yet? It sucks to think about, and I hope that we’ll never need it, but this week’s events really drove home the need to consider life without us.

This is Scary


Dropped into the local Target today for a few things.

Stopped dead in my tracks when I saw this sign:


Hmmmm. . . what holiday could this be? I mean, I haven’t even gone on my summer vacation yet, and they are promoting, what? Labor Day?

Um, no:


Oh, yes, that would be Halloween-themed clothing. Thankfully, I did not see the fun-size candy out yet, but it can’t be far behind.