a memorable ten [the she version] part 2

Ah, part 2! I know you all have been on the edge of your seats waiting in breathless anticipation for the next five memories. In the words of Lucas, "You don't have to worry!" Here you go, six through ten!

- The time we stayed up all night in New York City
We had just moved into our Delaware apartment a couple days earlier, and we decided to go on an adventure! We packed a backpack, hopped on a bus, and took off for New York City... on the day before Thanksgiving. That's right, we were headed for the Macy's Day parade! This is truly one of my favorite adventures. What makes our adventure especially adventurous is, due to the need to keep things as inexpensive as possible, we were going to arrive in NYC the day before the parade, sightsee all the sights to see, and then just wander about all night until the parade started the next morning. Who needs a good night sleep anyway? Adrenaline will keep us awake! Or so we hoped. It was so.much.fun. And so cold. And so exhausting. And so worth it. We ooh-ed and ahh-ed at all of the decorated Christmas windows. We thoroughly wandered Central Park in both daylight and at night. We ate pizza and roasted chestnuts. We took advantage of the fancy restrooms in the multi-storied department stores. We pretended to be sheep. We got glimpses of the parade balloons being aired up. We sight-see-ed all the sights there were to see. It was a good, tiring day. We checked our watches, and it was only 9 PM. It was starting to get a wee bit chilly. By 10 PM, we started feeling that cold-seeping-into-your-bones feeling. By 11 PM, we were reconsidering our life choices and wondering how in the world we were going to make it to 9 AM. But then we stumbled upon a grand plan: Go see a movie. Two hours of sitting in a warm, dark room? Brilliant. It was November 24th, 2010, and we discovered a new movie was premiering that night. So that is how we managed to see Tangled on opening night at midnight in New York City. That movie will forever be attached to good, good memories. It was so warm. And so dark. And so sleepy. But I think we managed to stay awake for 99% of the movie. But, come 2 AM, out we were shoo-ed, back into the cold. We wandered about until 4 AM, when we decided to stake a claim to what we hoped would be our parade viewing spot. Things we did not take into consideration: 1) It is so, so, so much colder to sit in one place than to be moving and 2) You can only go so long before you need to go to the bathroom again. Hypothermia crossed Jason's mind a dozen times [it only crossed mine 3 or 4] as we were sitting there. We sat and shivered and convinced ourselves we did not need to pee and ate granola bars and cold chestnuts that I'd forgotten in my pocket and hoped, wished, pleaded for the sun to come up. Marching bands started arriving/practicing and that got our adrenaline going again. We were going to watch the Macy's Day parade live and in person and from an amazing viewpoint! It was starting to get really packed with people, shoulder to shoulder, I-can-smell-your-morning-breath packed. We knew the parade had started up, but since we had chosen a spot near the end of the parade route, it was still going to be a little while before it got to us. It was, of course, at this critical point in time when I finally couldn't put it off any longer - I had to find a bathroom. Pushing our way through the crowd to get away from the parade route was much harder than you'd expect. People did not want to move, even though it was quite clear we would be freeing up space closer to the front. We had to walk pretty far to finally find a restroom to use and ended up watching the parade from a less crowded spot [though not nearly as close to the road as our first spot had been]. By this point, fatigue was definitely setting in and I almost found myself wishing the parade would pick up the pace a bit. I believe we had a 4 PM bus ride back home and I may have slept the entire way back. It was the greatest and most exhausting of adventures.

- The time we went on a winter wonderland, tree cutting adventure
Jason has actually already written a post about this particular memory, but I couldn't leave it out of my list as it is one of my favorite days from the last ten years. It was so snowy. The roads were not great, which increased the risky adventure aspect of it. We had to keep the heater blasting in the car to keep our windshield clear of ice. The tree farm was beautifully covered in snow. It was picture perfect. And we didn't know it at the time, but we were just a mere two weeks away from Lucas entering our lives. Craziness.

- The time we slept in the trunk and nearly froze
I believe we were making the 12 hour trek from Delaware down to Tennessee to spend Christmas with my family. Being the young, cheap whippersnappers that we were, we opted [as was our custom] to not book a hotel nor start out on our trip early in the morning. Instead, we would leisurely start driving once we got packed the morning of, take breaks whenever desired, eat many a road snack, stop at a rest area when we got sleepy, and sleep in the car for a while until we wanted to drive again. Ah, pre-Lucas-and-Finley us... So young and rested and full of brilliant ideas. Well, since it was nearly Christmas, it was obviously cold out. Quite cold out that year in fact. We drove. We sang. We ate. We stretched our legs at every leg-stretching spot we could find. We ate some more. And then we got sleepy. We pulled into a rest stop and set up our bed for the night. We put our duffel bag of belongings in the front seat [oh to travel light again! no playards! no diapers! no ten changes of clothes! no bags of kid food, utensils, toys, books, and "we have to bring this to make our trip with kids easier" items!], spread out a blanket on the folded-down backseats, and got cozy with our pillows and blankets. The car was off. The winter was outside. We slept. And then, some amount of time later, I woke. The car was still off but the winter was now inside. It was so cold. There was not a speck of heat remaining in the car. I could not feel things that I knew I should be feeling. I kicked Jason awake and he started up the car. But as we sat there, waiting waiting waiting for the car to warm up again, I remember thinking there was a very serious, real possibility of frostbite and WHAT WOULD WE DO. But, here we are, five or six years later, and we both still have our ears, noses, fingers, and toes-es. So whew.

- The time Lucas tried to eat a ping pong ball
This day was a pretty awful Mom day. I'd give myself a solid D- if I'm in a good mood [read: if I have a pint of ice cream in my hands]. Lucas was a brand new 10-month-old. He was all over the place - crawling over any barriers we tried to put up, standing up against anything that would hold him, and trying to ingest all things food or otherwise. It was nearing his bedtime and he was playing on the couch next to us. All of a sudden, he just threw himself backwards, off the couch. I remember seeing it almost in slow motion. It sounds so dramatic, but it seriously felt like everything was moving so slowly, molasses-like, as we tried to keep Lucas from falling off the couch. But the molasses [or, more likely, our slow reflexes] kept us from rescuing him and off he went. He landed with a solid thud, flat on his back [better than on the top of his head/neck I guess?]. Again, time was doing its weird thing and I felt like I just stared down at his completely still body for the longest time. But then time started up again and Lucas started wailing and I kept standing there trying not to freak out and Jason leaped over and scooped him up. STOP. Halt. Wait a second. This was supposed to be about Lucas eating a ping pong ball, not some other random event, right? Well, it is, I'm getting there. Stick with me here. So, Lucas needed some snuggles and soon seemed completely normal. He recovered from the incident much, much, much more quickly than I did [I needed until the next day before I could relax and stop entertaining ideas of brain injury]. I am quite sure that the emotional effects of the couch tumble were dampening my normal level of "don't let the baby have things that can fit in his mouth" alertness, because in my foggy state of "make Lucas happy at all costs to make sure he's really, truly okay" I handed him a ping pong ball. Why was there a nearby ping pong ball to hand him in the first place? Because Lucas loved to use it in our mini foosball table, of course [it was larger/safer than the ball that was supposed to be used with the game...]. He loved, loved, loved those balls and I knew he would laugh and giggle and be ever so happy if he got to hold the ping pong ball in his hands. So, for the laughs and giggles and happys, I gave him a ping pong ball. I fully intended to be on high alert for him trying to taste it, but he didn't even give me a chance. As soon as he had that ball in his hands, he got SO excited and just popped the entire thing into his mouth. Just, in it went. And, cue freak out panic attack #2. The ball was just small enough to fit completely in his mouth and so was also scarily enough just big enough to be difficult to get out since you couldn't get your fingers inside his mouth at all to pop it out. Again, time slowed down, everything took forever, yada yada yada. As terrifying visions of incapacitated babies flooded my brain, my molasses hands finally got to his face and while one hand barely managed to jam a finger into his mouth, the other squeezed his other cheek from behind. And pop, out came the slobbery ping pong ball. Lucas was completely fine but was pretty miffed that I had taken away his special treat. Kids. Based upon this dramatic retelling alone, it is probably quite obvious why this memory makes it into my ten memories. Mom emotions really make things stick with you, for better or worse.

- The time a random mom told me I was doing a great job
Kids. You do things that you know they will love, and they throw you for a loop by pretending you are making them walk through lava. This past Christmas, we took a trip to Branson with Jason's parents and one of our planned activities was an indoor water place. Lucas has always been one to fight the very idea of being in the water and then never want to leave once you get him in [typical kid?], so I was expecting some sort of orneriness but was hopeful that I could pull him through in time for him to have a fun time. Well, of course, this was the time that Lucas chose to be especially stubborn and no amount of coaxing, pleading, bargaining, or reasoning made any progress in getting him into his swimsuit. I finally decided to just lay down the law and told him he had to wear his swimsuit even if he just wanted to sit in a chair and not have any fun in the water. He agreed to this compromise, until we got to the bathroom to change. And then it was wild sobbing time. Sigh. By this point I had completely resigned myself to this outing being a complete flop and was only, naively, trying to work out the why to the madness. I wasn't going to force him to have the fun I knew he would have, but I did want some kind of explanation as to why he was putting up such a resistance for seemingly no reason. So there we sat/stood/crouched/kneeled/squatted in the busy restroom, swimsuit-ed peoples walking to and fro, in and out, attempting to make some kind of communication breakthrough. I would talk. He would wail. I would suggest something. He would blubber. I would ask a question. He would stutter out some incomplete thought. And since I love being the center of attention for a bunch of random people, it wasn't at all awkward and didn't make me at all self-conscious. But, slowly, eventually, we got to the point where the frustrated stomping and hair-trigger crying wound down to snuffling and occasional coherent responses. And it was around this point where two things happened, two people randomly interacted with our overly dramatic situation. First, a girl, probably aged ten or eleven, came through the door, passed us, and then walked backward to come stand in front of us. She looked at Lucas and then at me and said, "He's really cute." Blubber and boogers everywhere, his shirt half off, face streaked with tears, and a blank stare - I'm really not sure what the girl saw at this particular moment, but it amused and pleased me all the same. She gave a little wave to Lucas and skipped off. Less than a minute later, a woman came up behind us, on her way out of the bathroom, and stopped next to us. I remember feeling like she was towering over me since at that point I was crouched down with Lucas sitting on my knee. I thought perhaps she needed something behind me. But instead she simply smiled at Lucas and turned to me and said, "You're doing a great job. You are doing everything right. I have four of my own and I just wanted to tell you that you're doing great, Mom. Stick it out. It's all worth it, isn't it? They're worth it." And she left. It sounds so silly, but this random woman's words were like a balm to my soul. She didn't know me. I'll never know her name. But she was a mom who heard/saw another mom going through probably an all too familiar situation and she reached out in solidarity and said the exact words that I needed to hear at that moment. So, since I didn't get a chance to say it in that echo-y water park restroom, I will say it now: Thanks, fellow mom. You have probably completely forgotten this interaction by now, but it will stick with me for a very, very long time. Your words of encouragement in that moment were perfect. To moms! [In case you were wondering, Lucas, shortly after, did don his swimsuit and had a grand old time, as expected...]

So there you have it. The second batch of five memories from the last ten years. Is it a coincidence that these five "off the top of my head memorable" memories happened either when I was freezing cold or when a child was crying? No, no, it is not. That's how I roll. And now you know how to make memories with me in the future.

Because this post isn't nearly long enough, here are a few honorable mentions:
- The time I ate a mouthful of ant cereal
- The time we stuck it to the man and walked out on a job
- The time we road tripped 1,759 miles to Wyoming
- The time Lucas freaked out and ran away crying from a dog who 1) was friendly and 2) was ignoring him
- The time Finley pooped up to his neck, took a shower, and still managed to leak poop drips from his feet

I will now commence my nagging to get Jason working on his, undoubtedly more succinct, list of memories.

Forever memory #1

Forever memory #2