Pan Out, Julie

The devil's in the details, isn't that what they say?

I just came up with a whole long explanation of potential origin for that saying that involved crops and livestock and sulfuric retribution, and then I reread it and realized it made me sound like a crazy person, and since I don't need any help doing THAT ... it's gone.

You're welcome.

What I will say is that I'm all about the details. That's probably why I was drawn to copy editing (Lord knows it wasn't the money, yuk yuk yuk), and why I tend to get so sidelined by what some might call insignificant that I miss the hugely obvious. I'd be the one in the plane struggling to bring my seat to the full upright and locked position while we were nosediving toward the Atlantic Ocean.

I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed at the little paint splotch on the knee of Alex's jeans earlier today (and don't even get me started on why an art set marketed as a CHILD'S TOY comes with paint that could conceivably be used to coat your house) and was elated when it finally faded to the point that the pants were at least wearable again ... and then when I was tossing them into the washer for the fifth time, I saw an Alex-sized green handprint right on the seat of those pants. I gave up.

Today was the kind of day that spawned surrender from all corners.

Katherine refuses mixed veggies for lunch? Meh, give her a cookie.

The dogs want to stay in all day and be maddeningly underfoot and frightened of the vacuum cleaner and the baby, respectively? OK, but don't blame me if I suck up a tail in the vacuum or send Katherine to play her favorite new game, Squeal at the Skittish Dog.

Alex wants to skip his shower because "I didn't sweat that much today"? Well, I tell him, "At least run a washcloth over your feet."

It's not so much that I was lazy today, though I was, or that I had relaxed my let's-face-it-never-pristine standards of child-rearing for some noble purpose or strange experiment. It's just that, and bow out here if you can't stand to see a grown woman whine, I DON'T FEEL WELL.

I'm not good at being sick. All those jokes about "man cold"s and such apply to me. When I'm sick, nothing is fair, nothing is easy, and mostly, nothing is not irritating on a grand scale. My mother always took good care of me when I was sick. She gave me ginger ale and brought me sympathy and Saltines, a "food" whose sole purpose in existing is to sit on a sick person's bedside tray and silently taunt her with their almost-goodness.

Now that I'm a grown-up, now that I live with people who depend on me to be an actual functioning human being when my body is spontaneously deteriorating? Now I get "what's for dinner, Mom?" and the incessant leg tugging that is the universal baby sign for "Pick me up, pick me up, pick me up or I'm gonna screeeeeeeeeam!"

Details, though. Details.

Big picture tells me that this is a little sinus infection, that I'm going to get over it, that soon the sight of my children will not send me spiraling into NAGdom and my son will stop whispering to his dad when he thinks I can't hear, "I think Mom's gonna explode!"

Big picture also tells me that this is a decent place to vent, wail and gnash teeth and that the one or two people who read my blog and actually know me more than to wave at on the streets won't judge me for having a bad day. Cathy? Katie? (G or F, I love you both!)

So while the details insist that it's just about 5 degrees too hot in this house, that Jack has positioned himself right in front of the air vent so that not only are we not getting any air, but the whole bedroom smells like dog, that I forgot to get Alex's snack, water, and school bag ready to go for tomorrow, and that I'm about three days past the point where I need a girls' night (aHERM), the big picture is far less bleak.

It shows my kids warm (5 degrees too warm, perhaps) and safe in their beds, my sweet, helpful husband laughing at something on TV that probably only he would find amusing, two freelance projects in the works that I thank GOD for, friends, family, and goodness in the offing. And it's nice to remember those big-picture things when the details of the day involve lots and lots of snot, a hacking cough, an aching head and face and ... hair follicles. And what may very well be oil-based house paint that came disguised as a toy.

Oh, and there's at least one good detail: Clean sheets on the bed and new-to-us pillows. Thanks, Mother!

I'm going to make use of those riiiiiiight ... NOW.

I'm spring-broken.

I don't remember spring break when I was a kid. I remember AEA week, which had something to do with continuing education for Alabama educators, but I didn't call it spring break, and neither did anyone else.

But this was Alex's spring break, and I was determined to give him a good one. Sometimes beyond all reason, both physical and intellectual.

We went to the park a lot. I don't think that actually counts because the park is almost literally in our backyard. It takes five minutes to get there, walking slowly, and I know this because I've set the timer on my iPhone every day in the hopes that I would rack up some notable burned calories to add to my daily tally. Nah. Five minutes of "walking, pushing a stroller," according to My Plate, only counts for 33 calories.

Every day, when Steven got home from work, Alex and I went for a bike ride. The track behind his school is flat enough that I don't feel like I'm going to die, and the painted-on lanes inspire in him a limitless array of pretend race configurations. We've raced (and beaten, of course) Auburn, Tennessee, and "The Navericks," just this week. And that's not to mention the excitement of near-misses with two kids on scooters, an unleashed cocker spaniel, and a toddler named Brooke someone left to her own questionable devices.

We hit the petting barn at the state park, where we arrived early and were the only ones brave and stupid enough (on my part) to spend a good half-hour before the day warmed to comfortable. Alex brought a notebook and crayon and ran around heedless of the horrifying volume of farm animal excrement to take a survey of each animal he saw.



A goat tried to eat Katherine's stroller and pacifier clip, and she lost both socks before we decided to call it done.



A failed attempt at going to Chuck E. Cheese for lunch one day (thanks to a very well-intended grandmother) led us to the bowling alley, where Alex played one of the few operational arcade games a million times in a row and earned a whopping 59 tickets, to which I had to add $5.50 so that he could "win" the most expensive deck of cards ever purchased out of a mostly empty prize vending machine.

Pump It Up's pop-in playtime was our best choice of the lot. Alex jumped to his heart's content while Katherine crawled to the five-foot distance I allotted her before dragging her back to start over. She drew a crowd of preteen fawners, and Alex joined forces with a day-camp group while I sat on a bench and pondered all the germs they each were coming in contact with.



Afterward, we ate Chik-fil-A and I took them to Yogurt Lab, where Alex got an atrocity of Dulce de Leche with toppings of nonpareils and sour gummy worms.



All in all, it was a great week, and I'm glad we had it if not altogether sorry to see it end.

Have I mentioned that separation anxiety has suddenly kicked in with a vengeance? That Katherine doesn't want me out of arm's reach, much less sight? That she tries to climb up my legs, or, failing that, to fling herself backward so that I'll have no choice but to drop everything and catch her? That I've lost feeling in my left arm from holding her and have seriously considered cobbling together some sort of papoose-like contraption? That it's intensely more frustrating than one might have hoped?



No? Well then. Never mind.

There's something to be said.

After a weekend like this past one, when a particularly nasty stomach virus took down two of our troops (the boy had his bout a week ago, and I have THUS FAR, PLEASE KNOCK ON WOOD been spared), it's good to let oneself bask in the good things.

So I won't tell you about Katherine's new skill, wherein she lets out a bone-chilling scream when she doesn't get what she wants right away. Or about how today she tried to and for all I know succeeded in shattering all the glass in Publix by testing that skill when she caught sight of the Gerber Graduates puffs container that I put in the cart (GASP!) without giving her any.

I won't tell you that Alex's first teeball game got canceled because of the rain and that he cried his poor little heart out even though his parents were secretly rejoicing because (a) his dad was just mastering being in an upright position without a violent vomiting episode and (b) his mom hadn't had time or inclination to procure all elements of his ridiculously specific uniform. And (c) his grandparents were also ill, making it a double blessing in disguise that the teeball field was a mudpit, because sick baby sister in attendance would've brought down the SKY.

I will skip over the place where my diet just stopped even pretending to work, and the one where I felt really, really isolated and starved for the kind of grown-up water-cooler conversation (and hell, Idol gossip) I used to take for granted.

And I'll tell you, instead, that things are better. Baby K hasn't forgotten how to scream your eardrums loose. Alex still thinks that running more than one base at a time is cheating. I still haven't finished buying all the parts of his teeball uniform.

BUT.

I've already achieved most of the things I wanted out of life, and I experience all of them on a daily basis. I'm a wife. I'm a mommy. I'm a WRITER.

I have fantastic friends, people who would answer the phone if I called in the middle of the night to say "Bail me out of jail, " or, far more likely, "I need to talk."

I know more than anyone ever wanted know about unpredictable (and thus un-divulgeable) topics, I watch Judge Judy religiously, and I'm currently, shamelessly, reading Books I and II of R.L. Stine's The Baby-Sitter.

As of Wednesday, I will have been married for nine years to the only man in the world capable of not just putting up with, but somehow actually loving me along with my unshakable jumble of unclaimed baggage.

My kids, they are wonderfully weird, incurably awesome, and heart-piercingly sweet. And they remind me that, even when I manage to explode the tempered glass oven door facing and reduce Kraft mac and cheese to unrecognizable mush because I got sidetracked by some court show or other, I am loved and I've been given the rarer-than-you-might-think gift of loving unabashedly, brazenly, and without a filter.

It's the best I could've hoped for, and more than I ever expected.