women

I’m always looking for great new ways to play the hero to my children, while expending limited money and effort. Sometimes I really have to search for these opportunities and other times they just bonk me over the head.

The past week Laylee’s been really acting up. We’ve made some changes at home, I’ve been sick and she’s been looking for attention in less than helpful ways. Around Thursday we made up and she’s been sweet as pie the last couple of days, no snotty looks, cranky backtalk and picking on her brother for no particular reason. I’ve been trying to think of a way to give her some good positive attention for the attitude transplant.

Enter an email from one of the high school girls I teach at church and a mother-daughter date afternoon was born. Today Layee and I attended the high school drill and dance team competition — princess themed. For the cost of $5, both of us got into the event, Laylee dressed in an elaborate princess-meets-sorcerer-meets-flower-fairy costume. Our friends Eve and Missy joined in the fun.

Keep an eye out for this kind of thing in the local news section of your paper because it was a fun, cheap way to support the community and have an unforgettable time together. Laylee was absolutely smitten with all the dancers whose routines ranged from modern/jazz to drill team to pom to hip hop.

Laylee enjoyed the drill team stuff, crisp as lettuce with fake hair bouncing smartly. I’m sure she wondered why their hands were glued to the smalls of their backs whenever they weren’t dancing but she didn’t ask.

She thought the modern/jazz dancers were beautiful because they did pirouettes and arabesques like ballerinas. But when they finished and were followed up by the pom girls, she decided she liked the pom dancers better. “They were just SO much happier!” It’s true. They were happier. While the lyrical dancers were serious and dramatic, the pom girls had smiles that could not be chiseled off. I think it’s in the international pom code of ethics. If your smile is not atomic, you will be stricken from the team forthwith. I mean, if you’re shaking glittery poms and doing high kicks, your face has to keep up somehow.

At some point in the afternoon Laylee and Missy were eating snacks. Laylee had a giant chocolate muffin the size of her head and Missy was enjoying a dry white bagel. Looking for the perfect opportunity, she waited for Laylee to finish a bite and reopen her mouth before she shoved a giant piece of bagel into Laylee’s pie hole. Laylee sat in stunned silence, white carbohydrates completely plugging her mouth and Missy looked up at her mom proudly. “I always share,” she said. Laylee removed the bagel from her mouth and smiled at me confusedly.

Now the whole afternoon we were waiting for them to call the girls up to be led in a princess parade by one of the drill team girls. It didn’t appear to be happening. Rumor was that the parade would happen at intermission but intermission came and went and there was no parade. “Maybe we should go ask the announcer,” I suggested to Eve. “I don’t want to bug anybody though.”

“It’s okay mom,” Laylee said, grabbing my hand, “I’ll go up there with you.”

So we walked up together and I asked about the event. They didn’t seem sure but said they’d do it soon.

A few minutes later, they announced it was time for the parade and called all princesses to the center of the gymnasium. Laylee and Missy marched up proudly, followed by….. nobody. In the end, one mother carrying a baby princess joined the group and our two little divas, not at all intimidated by the bleachers full of adults and teenagers, twirled and flitted about with princessly grace. Their drill team leaders attempted to lead them across the floor and they followed them… sort of. But they were defninitely not going to give up their spotlight easily.

I love this video passionately and if you’re my mom or someone who knows Laylee, you probably will too. Anyone else can skip it. Just believe me when I say it was the experience of a lifetime for our little highnesses. My favorite part comes at the end when the music has stopped but the girls just stand like deer in headlights staring at the crowd and refusing to move until they are gently escorted back to their seats by their drill team idols. Priceless.

Best line of the day — when Laylee was watching a ballet-ish lyrical number, she leaned over to me and said, “Mom. I picture myself doing that someday.” Good job Laylee. Keep visualizing. I’ll be there to cheer you on. I won’t have poms though. They’re just not part of my past, present, or future skill set. I could wave a hanky or a program or something and if you really want me to, I’ll get my teeth whitened.

ABBA on broadway?!! Transported to Seattle?!!

I am ridiculously excited for this chance to go out for a night on the town with my ladies and see Mamma Mia! at the Paramount.

If you live in the Seattle area and want to join us for opening night, get your tickets and let me know. We’ll meet up for desert or something.

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On Sunday Laylee was in agony-induced meltdown mode over a sore neck which got more and more stiff as the day wore on. By noon she was unable to turn her head at all and sobbing every time we moved her an inch. Worried that the stiff neck might be indicative of the big scary M-word and unsure whether or not she had a fever as she’d been wearing a huge parka all day, we decided to take her in to Urgent Care on the way home from church. We called ahead and they said that we should take her straight to the ER.

I guess the urgent care doesn’t mess around with sudden onset neck pain in young children.

So we settled in for a nice long wait in an ER exam room full of sharps containers and other biohazards. Magoo was in heaven. Laylee laid perfectly still in the hospital bed while Dan spun Magoo on the wheely chair and sang hundreds of verses of Down By the Bay. I offered moral support, relieved Dan’s strained singing voice with my MP3-playing phone and occasionally threw peanuts at the children.

After an hour of waiting, we had a short visit from a female nurse who told us the doctor would be in shortly. The ER was fairly quiet besides the muffled conversations of the staff who seemed to be in no kind of hurry at all.

After our second hour of waiting, I commented on the lack of carnage I’d seen and told Dan that this hospital was nothing like the ones on ER or Grey’s Anatomy. Magoo commented on GOOOO HOOOME NOW AAAAHHHHH!!!!!!!

Dan said that for all we knew it was exactly like the TV drama hospitals and the reason we were waiting so long to see a doctor was because they were all in supply closets somewhere making out. He had a good point.

Eventually a man wearing a lab coat came in and briefly examined Laylee without introducing himself. He diagnosed her with Wry Neck or a sudden unexplained neck pain. Nice. I probably could have called that one. He prescribed an ice pack and children’s Motrin, which was then administered by a nurse. I wonder how much it costs to have your Motrin administered by a nurse in the ER as a cure for Wry Neck. Hopefully I’ll never find out.

There were a couple of strange things about our visit that the feminist in me cannot let go. First, the hospital staff went out of their way to ignore Dan’s presence in the room and only make eye contact with and speak directly to me. Never mind that he’s her father, that he was the one who’d been taking care of her all day, the one who had checked her in at the front desk while I was parking the car or that my hands were full when they brought in her release papers to be signed. They stepped right past Dan and handed me the clipboard, turning their back to him and explaining everything to the mother. I’m not normally sensitive to this kind of thing but it was really obvious.

Obviously as the mother and nurturer, I am the only one who can understand how to squeeze a dropper of Ibuprofen into her mouth. I mean if fathers could do that, then we might expect them to start periodically changing diapers and eventually women might begin to feel superior and demand the right to vote or something.

Secondly, when we looked over her release papers, we saw that the “doctor” they’d sent in was really a male nurse. So it seems that the female nurse had looked at Laylee, determined that calling a doctor was unnecessary, but hoped we wouldn’t ask questions when she called in a man in uniform, told us a doctor was on his way and sent in a male nurse wearing a lab coat.

Now it’s possible that all the doctors and interns were “busy” “getting” “supplies” and since she was fairly sure that nothing was wrong, she called in the senior grand poobah nurse (who happened to be male) and asked him to come have a look. It just looked fishy, especially in an ER where caring for children is considered solely women’s work.