Grandma Baked My Baby
/Or, My Mommy Went on Vacation and All I Got Was 2nd and 3rd Degree Burns
Or, A Pound Of Flesh: The Cost One Child Paid For His Mother's Vacation.
I could do this all day; the possibilities are endless. It all started like this:
I had really hoped to blog my way through my vacation with my daughter.
When it became evident to me that posting on the blog was all but impossible due to time restrictions, complete and utter exhaustion from trying to keep up with a rabid herd of teenagers and a lack of free wifi every where I went, I promised myself I'd blog the crap out of our trip the moment my feet touched down on Canadian soil.
You know what they say about the best of intentions.
I was so excited to get back home and back into my regular routine of neglecting my household chores in favour of surfing the net and playing Scrabble with my kids that I didn't even mind when my plane almost fell out of the sky on our trip home.
I simply thought to myself, "Awesome! Fodder for another blog post!"
Clearly I need some sort of blogging intervention. Because the normal reaction to when you are standing outside of an airplane loo, waiting to squeeze into a pathetically small space to relieve oneself, only to have the plane suddenly drop from the sky and sending you hurling to the floor, maiming yourself on the way down so that 7 days later you still have a giant purple bruise down most of your posterior side, the correct reaction would be one of general fear and complete and utter panic.
It became apparent that our plane hadn't just hit a bad pocket of turbulence. However, since I had just managed to gracelessly land square on my arse and damage my already injured spine I wasn't quite in the panic "We're all going to DIEEEE" mode.
I was in a more of a 'Holeeeey heck, that HURT and where is the damn flight attendant with the booze?' mode.
So when our plane safely landed fifteen minutes after almost dropping out of the sky and our flight attendants politely reminded us to exit the plane as quickly as possible, I was thinking about all the big bang jokes I could make on twitter.
(I was the third last row on the back of a very large, very full plane. There was a lot of time during disembarkation to think of clever ways to make fun of landing on my arse in a plane.)
When I finally had the chance to stand up and hobble my way towards freedom off the plane, the flight attendants were less polite and much more urgent about getting off the damned plane. Likely because our engine was on fire. But hey, who knew?
"Please exit the plane as quickly as possible," the blonde attendant hissed at me as I limped past.
It had been a 9-hour flight. Other than the one time I stood up to go to the bathroom only to land on my butt, I had been seated the entire time. There was no moving quickly at this point as I was crippled up, sore and walking like a monkey humping a football.
Just as I stepped off the plane, the sounds of sirens flooded the air. I remember thinking as I walked onto the gangway that hearing that many sirens on a tarmac could never be good. It wasn't until I was in the terminal and looked out that I realized all those sirens were from the emergency vehicles surrounding the plane I just walked off of. A plane now streaked black with soot on one side from the engine.
Awesome.
Later that night as I crawled into a questionably clean hotel bed, thoughts for blog posts swirled in my head. Air crisis along with two weeks of vacation excitement were swirling in my head. My fingers itched for a keyboard.
So the next day, when my daughter and I waited to board the last plane on our journey home, I didn't even mind when our flight was delayed because they discovered our scheduled plane had 'unfixable mechanical issues'. Better they discover that stuff on the ground rather than while we are in mid-air, right? I was mentally composing nuggets of brilliance to share on my blog as my daughter sat next to me, slightly green and wishing we could walk home.
Luckily for us, we made it home safe and sound, after a rather uneventful flight on a fully functional plane.
I fully expected to take a day or two to rest from our long flight home, do some laundry, love on my boys and then resume life as normal. In other words, blog the crap out of my trip and bombard you with so many photos you all start begging for mercy and threatening to beat me if I showed you one more poorly photographed ancient ruin.
What I got instead was a multitude of text messages when I turned my cell phone on saying there had been an accident.
Turns out, there is a price a mother has to pay for leaving her children to traipse around Europe for two weeks. That price would be a pound of flesh.
Literally. Off the arm and hand of my sweet little Jumby as it turns out.
As my daughter and I were busy bouncing around the skies above, my son was busy burning the flesh off the top of his fingers, hand and arm.
As accidents go, it could have been worse and an important lesson was learned by all: Wood stoves and blind kids go together about as well as oil and water.
There has been no return to normal since the moment I arrived on home soil my life has been consumed with burn care, skin debridement and doctor appointments.
And to think, only days before my biggest concern was worrying a monkey would pee in my hair.
*The Jumbster is recovering nicely but has a bit of a road ahead of him. His grandmother may never recover though. *
*Also, for the record, I love my mother-in-law. Even more than I love teasing her. *
Or, A Pound Of Flesh: The Cost One Child Paid For His Mother's Vacation.
I could do this all day; the possibilities are endless. It all started like this:
I had really hoped to blog my way through my vacation with my daughter.
When it became evident to me that posting on the blog was all but impossible due to time restrictions, complete and utter exhaustion from trying to keep up with a rabid herd of teenagers and a lack of free wifi every where I went, I promised myself I'd blog the crap out of our trip the moment my feet touched down on Canadian soil.
You know what they say about the best of intentions.
I was so excited to get back home and back into my regular routine of neglecting my household chores in favour of surfing the net and playing Scrabble with my kids that I didn't even mind when my plane almost fell out of the sky on our trip home.
I simply thought to myself, "Awesome! Fodder for another blog post!"
Clearly I need some sort of blogging intervention. Because the normal reaction to when you are standing outside of an airplane loo, waiting to squeeze into a pathetically small space to relieve oneself, only to have the plane suddenly drop from the sky and sending you hurling to the floor, maiming yourself on the way down so that 7 days later you still have a giant purple bruise down most of your posterior side, the correct reaction would be one of general fear and complete and utter panic.
It became apparent that our plane hadn't just hit a bad pocket of turbulence. However, since I had just managed to gracelessly land square on my arse and damage my already injured spine I wasn't quite in the panic "We're all going to DIEEEE" mode.
I was in a more of a 'Holeeeey heck, that HURT and where is the damn flight attendant with the booze?' mode.
So when our plane safely landed fifteen minutes after almost dropping out of the sky and our flight attendants politely reminded us to exit the plane as quickly as possible, I was thinking about all the big bang jokes I could make on twitter.
(I was the third last row on the back of a very large, very full plane. There was a lot of time during disembarkation to think of clever ways to make fun of landing on my arse in a plane.)
When I finally had the chance to stand up and hobble my way towards freedom off the plane, the flight attendants were less polite and much more urgent about getting off the damned plane. Likely because our engine was on fire. But hey, who knew?
"Please exit the plane as quickly as possible," the blonde attendant hissed at me as I limped past.
It had been a 9-hour flight. Other than the one time I stood up to go to the bathroom only to land on my butt, I had been seated the entire time. There was no moving quickly at this point as I was crippled up, sore and walking like a monkey humping a football.
Just as I stepped off the plane, the sounds of sirens flooded the air. I remember thinking as I walked onto the gangway that hearing that many sirens on a tarmac could never be good. It wasn't until I was in the terminal and looked out that I realized all those sirens were from the emergency vehicles surrounding the plane I just walked off of. A plane now streaked black with soot on one side from the engine.
Awesome.
Later that night as I crawled into a questionably clean hotel bed, thoughts for blog posts swirled in my head. Air crisis along with two weeks of vacation excitement were swirling in my head. My fingers itched for a keyboard.
So the next day, when my daughter and I waited to board the last plane on our journey home, I didn't even mind when our flight was delayed because they discovered our scheduled plane had 'unfixable mechanical issues'. Better they discover that stuff on the ground rather than while we are in mid-air, right? I was mentally composing nuggets of brilliance to share on my blog as my daughter sat next to me, slightly green and wishing we could walk home.
Luckily for us, we made it home safe and sound, after a rather uneventful flight on a fully functional plane.
I fully expected to take a day or two to rest from our long flight home, do some laundry, love on my boys and then resume life as normal. In other words, blog the crap out of my trip and bombard you with so many photos you all start begging for mercy and threatening to beat me if I showed you one more poorly photographed ancient ruin.
What I got instead was a multitude of text messages when I turned my cell phone on saying there had been an accident.
Turns out, there is a price a mother has to pay for leaving her children to traipse around Europe for two weeks. That price would be a pound of flesh.
Literally. Off the arm and hand of my sweet little Jumby as it turns out.
As my daughter and I were busy bouncing around the skies above, my son was busy burning the flesh off the top of his fingers, hand and arm.
As accidents go, it could have been worse and an important lesson was learned by all: Wood stoves and blind kids go together about as well as oil and water.
There has been no return to normal since the moment I arrived on home soil my life has been consumed with burn care, skin debridement and doctor appointments.
And to think, only days before my biggest concern was worrying a monkey would pee in my hair.
*The Jumbster is recovering nicely but has a bit of a road ahead of him. His grandmother may never recover though. *
*Also, for the record, I love my mother-in-law. Even more than I love teasing her. *
Jumby. The poster child for one tough little kid.
