The Balloon

When Owen turned 3 last year, we got a Lightning McQueen helium balloon that made its home on our ceiling for almost two months. It became a fixture when it lasted week after week. At almost two months, it started floating around the house, following me wherever I'd go --- eventually.

This birthday balloon has been hanging around our house since February 26. We decided to see how long it would last. After hanging on our living room ceiling for almost two months, this week it decided to follow us upstairs. Now it's in hover mode, dancing from room to room. It's a little creepy but I've kind of grown fond of him.

A photo posted by Erin (@fitbottomedmama) on Apr 22, 2015 at 6:46am PDT

It was an interesting study in the air currents in our house. It made it all the way upstairs to the bedrooms and we discovered the ceiling fans were not friendly to our friend. It floated by me as I sat in the kitchen one day and eventually disappeared into the basement where it hovered for a couple of more weeks until we finally said goodbye.

This year, when Owen turned 4, we got the identical Lightning McQueen balloon and another one. Lightning made it even longer than his predecessor and it was only a couple of weeks ago that we bid him adieu. The second one was still hanging solid on our dining room ceiling a whopping four months later.

Emery has been sleeping phenomenally since about April. Not a peep overnight; it has truly been bliss. I wasn't aware that she has just been saving up for a rough night. And of course she waited for the ideal week to strike. A week when I was dealing with pink eye, a sinus infection and an ear infection. I go for the trifecta when I get sick. It's just not worth it if I can't get every single one of the toddler diseases at one time.

So I wasn't feeling especially awesome the night she decided to wake up at 3 a.m. I'd already woken up to take Owen back to bed after he'd snuck in with me. So I laid Emery back down and was trying to get her to fall asleep when I heard Owen yelling "Daddy!" Alan goes in and finds Giraffee. Helps Avery go pee. In the meantime, I've left Emery's room and hear Alan go in to try to soothe her because whatever I did didn't do the trick. She was still highly unhappy with life, so I went in and made the mistake of bringing her in bed with me. I couldn't breathe, my eye was matted shut and I just wanted sleep. But in Emery's mind, it was 8 in the morning and she was ready to party. I dozed a little and Em would beam at me whenever I'd open my eyes. At 5:45, I'd had enough, and I knew she'd be miserable if she didn't sleep longer, so I threw her in bed, and of course she cried for 2.4 minutes before passing out cold and exhausted. Kicking myself for not putting her back in bed sooner, I tried to settle down and fall back asleep even though the sun was already shining in my face.

Just as I was falling asleep after three hours of bullshit, I'm jolted awake. THWACK THWACK THWACK. I bolt upright to find that our friend the helium balloon has chosen that moment out of more than FOUR MONTHS OF MOMENTS to make its way upstairs and find its way to our ceiling fan. Have you ever heard a ceiling fan hit a balloon on repeat? It sounds like a helicopter is landing in your bed but more violent.

Alan, bless his heart, was in deep slumber, and because I wasn't, I was able to more quickly assess the situation, grab the stupid balloon and throw him in the closet.

It's a testament to how sick I was and my level of dedication to sleep at all costs that I managed to fall asleep again after that. This balloon didn't get the freedom to roam around the house to find his own resting place. I found his damn resting place in our closet.

Good Intentions, Poor Execution

Alan and I learned a long time ago not to bite off more than we can chew when it comes to outings with the kids. We go for frequency over duration in almost everything. We buy season passes to nearby attractions --- the zoo, Sesame Place --- so that we can go all the time but don't have to stay long. Outings are much more successful if, for example, we hit the train, the sea lion exhibit and the touch tank and maybe a few other animals at the zoo as opposed to doing all the things and dealing with getting exhausted kids back to the car. At Sesame Place, we show up soon after it opens at 10, hit a few attractions, maybe an Elmo Live Show if we're feeling crazy, and let the kids nap on the way home in the car. It's so much better than having to fit a year's worth of action into a single day, even if it feels like sometimes we're driving an hour just so Avery can ride a carousel. (That girl has never met a carousel she didn't like. We've tried them all. She still contends that the carousel was her favorite ride at Disney World.)

What I'm saying is, when they're done, they're done. Stick a fork in them, they're through.

Besides the bigger events like that we do, I try to do fun little side trips now that it's summer. We'll hit the pool or the splash park, maybe the little nature center to see dead animals and live snakes and nearly empty fish tanks. Today at camp they made handkerchief parachutes and I thought, hey, it'll be fun if I take them somewhere really high where they can throw them off. Like the high school bleachers. Then we can bike in the big parking lot. Simple but fun!

As soon as Emery woke up from her nap, we loaded the bikes and a toy shopping cart in the car, grabbed two water bottles and headed to the high school. What fun this would be! An empty lot for us to ride to our hearts' content.

Owen literally crashed his training-wheeled bike within 20 seconds. So fast that I hadn't even gotten Avery on her bike yet. And when Owen gets injured, it's done. There's no shaking it off, no moving on. It was tears and trauma and screaming and not letting me touch him for the next 60 seconds. I know it was 60 seconds because that's how long Avery decided to ride her bike. "I'm done." Swallowing my fury and frustration, I load the bikes back into the van and decide we'll at least go on a walk, with Owen dramatically limping along the way.

We walk up to the high school track, climb the bleachers, throw the parachutes off. They were not super impressed.


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We continue our walk, around the football field. Around the baseball field. Owen limping along. Avery expending all of her energy rolling down hills. Emmy being herself, being super happy and agreeable despite the 85 degrees. We round the outfield and we see two fawns staring us down, so I had to get a little video as we scared them into crashing baseball practice.


Even through his injuries, Owen was asking to go to the playground that is near the high school, so we made the trek back toward the car and then another football field length over to the playground. We found a bouncy ball, so we hit the blacktop and Avery and I fought each other for it. Avery trying to capture it is proof she takes after me.

It didn't take long for us to be done with the playground after our long walk, so we were headed back to the car when I realized my keys were missing.

What's one thing you don't want to lose when you've got all three kids out on a hot day when you've walked a mile around in the grass and all over tarnation? Your flipping KEYS that's what.

I patted my pockets about 50 times because surely I couldn't be so stupid. My phone and a wet wipe filled with Owen's tears were all that remained. We get to the car and I'm hoping that surely they're in there because that really was the best case scenario: Alan would come home about half an hour earlier than planned and rescue us, and we'd sit and wait and drink our bottles of water. But then I distinctly remembered having my keys in hand, beeping the car locked as we headed off on our walk.

I call Alan alerting him to the possibility that I lost my keys, thank God that we'd grabbed our water bottles out of the car, and we set about the task of retracing our steps. With three kids who, remember, were ready to get in the car and go home. Whose faces had been red and flushed for like a day already at this point.

We head all the way back to the playground because maybe the bouncy ball chasing had jarred them loose? That would be second-best-case scenario. Then we wouldn't have to do that whole mile-long walk again. Ha! Because that would be crazy! But deep down I knew I'd have heard them fall on the ground on the blacktop, and sure enough, they were not there. I cry a defeated internal cry and remember: the deer.

I'd taken my phone out of my back pocket to get video of the deer. Surely that was where they had fallen out. I wouldn't have heard them land on the grass, and it was the only thing that made sense. Just guess where we saw the deer? Pretty much at the opposite end of the complex. Around the football field and almost all the way around the baseball field. This time around, I had the added fun of carrying Emery the whole way.

Sleuth Avery declared it The Case of the Missing Keys, but she is a poor Sherlock because when we got to the spot where we had seen the deer, she walked within a foot of the keys and didn't see them. She was distracted by the deer, who we'd seen again in the outfield and managed to scare back to where they came from.

I've never been so happy to push the buttons on my keys and have the doors of the van slide open. It's always a little bit magical, isn't it? Or maybe that's just my dehydration talking.