Hi Ho, Hi Ho, It's Off To Practice We Go

Can you call yourself homeless if you find that you more or less live out of your car? Honest to goodness, I spend as much time in my vehicle as I do in my house most days of the school year.

It’s not that I don’t love my house. I’ve got the best comfy recliner. But I rarely get to sit more than 20 minutes at a stretch in my chair. My poor kitty feels so alone.

But I have children. And they have school, and sports, and lessons, and social lives. All of which I am the designated chauffer for once it hits 3:30. Just the sport practices and games are enough to make you weep. Monday is school volleyball practice. Tuesday is volleyball practice, soccer practice, and football practice. Wednesday is piano and two hours of volleyball conditioning. Thursday is school volleyball practice, football practice, and a soccer game. Friday is British soccer camp practice. Saturday is football chalk talk and a possible soccer game. Sunday is multiple football games and multiple volleyball matches. Then Monday we start it all over again.

Plus, I am generally on call for any school event that requires a driver. Because if you don’t have a regular 9-to-5 job, you don’t have anything better to do than drive the school kids to their game or the field trip, right? You don’t mind staying up ‘til 11 or 12 pm doing the work tonight that you would have done during the day, right? You don’t mind footing the bill for the gas either, right? Sure I can drive . . . yes I am a sucker. (Actually I’m not bitter. I really do enjoy going to these events now that Joe is no longer in the lower grades and I don’t always have to drive his class. Thank you Ms. Marquardt.)

As we travel down the happy road known as life and the children become more and more familiar with the back of my head, numerous items accumulate in our vehicle. Somehow our roomy seven-passenger Traverse seems cramped with just the three of us on these weeknights. Life gathers a lot of junk. The vehicle collects wrappers, sports equipment, clothing, and all sorts of other clutter that give off all sorts of disturbing odors.

If I went out to my Traverse right now, I bet I could write a novel about all the junk in that vehicle. But instead of a novel, here are the highlights of the random items found in the Traverse on any given day:

--half empty Gatorade bottles

--hundreds of ponytail holders (unless we need one for practice, then they all go into hiding)

--one soccer cleat

--mittens and gloves from last year (none of which match)

--wadded McDonalds napkins (sometimes handy if you can make out if they are unused)

--ketchup packets

--at least three jackets or sweatshirts

--a volleyball kneepad

--one to five folding bagged chairs (unless I leave the house for a game without checking, then they have all been removed)

--a ratty blanket

--numerous empty CD cases

--at least one volleyball or soccer ball that rolls back and forth in the back seat every time we turn the corner

--a broken phone charger (still plugged into the lighter socket)

--expired coupons

--old church bulletins

--hundreds of unsharpened pencils and old pens

--bottles of hand sanitizer

--a hospital puke bag (thank you Melissa, this is vital)

--dozens of half-eaten granola bars

--a half-torn drawing pad

--dead French fries

--knitting needles

--a partly broken red umbrella

--unmatched dirty socks (oh, Joe)

This happy family of discarded and lost items contentedly travels to the far reaches of Lincoln for all the sports practices, piano lessons, school events, movie dates, restaurant dashes, or any other thing I try to fit into my schedule during the waking hours, and even a few sleeping hours.

I’ve tried to clean it out, but these items keep finding their way back into the Traverse. At one time or another, almost all of these items have come in handy in a pinch. Of course, when you need one of these items desperately, someone will have thoughtfully taken it into the house the last time they got out of the car.

When I say I live in my vehicle, I mean live. Some days as I leave the house, I pack a little travel bag to keep me going. I throw in my knitting, my low-cal granola bars, a couple cans of pop, and a few random magazines. It’s not as if I can do a quick drop-off and go back to the house on my own. Why? Take, for example, soccer practice. Because Mandy continues to play with the same soccer team she’s played with since she was about 5, we have to travel to Airpark for practice. That takes me 25-35 minutes of travel time, one way, depending on the construction and train traffic. Practice is one and a half hours, so there is no point in driving home. I stay, read, knit, walk, text, call, watch, text some more, and then maybe take a nap. Then we drive to volleyball practice. I try to walk her in and leave, but funny thing, I seem to get sucked into conversation with the other volleyball moms, and by the time I look at the clock, there’s 15 minutes left of practice. I know, right? Me, talk? Also I am aware I’m not technically in my car for volleyball, but I’m not home either. You caught me on a technicality. My bad.

I know I am not alone. I see you out there, you other mothers with children in umpteen activities. You have that same haggard look. Sometimes I see you at the stop light, trying to hand out the drive-thru food on the way to the next practice. Sometimes I see you sitting in the parking lot, trying to catch a quick nap before the next trip. We are easily recognizable, if not by the type of vehicle we drive, but by those silly sports stickers on the backs of our windows. I’m Magic Mandy. I would also be Assurity Joe, but my husband, who only COACHES for Assurity, forgot to order a sticker for his son. But once again I’m not bitter…

For my birthday, which was in the middle of September, I asked my children to wash the Traverse and vacuum it for my present. Following a rainy midget football Sunday, the vehicle had become coated with chalky mud from the parking lot and the floor mats were filled with gravel and dried mud. It’s almost October and the mud and gravel are still in residence. I keep waiting. I keep hoping. But you know how this is going to end.

I’ve about a good hour until I have to saddle up and make the haul over to the school and start the week all over again. I’ll sit there and wait at practice with my knitting and my dirty floor mats, fuming that nobody loves me, at least not enough to pull out the shop vac. If only someone would vacuum. Maybe I’d lose a few of these French fries and ponytail holders along with mud. Oh well. Good thing I’ve never been bitter.

Bromance

I think my husband is involved in a “bromance.” I’m not jealous or anything. Actually, it makes me laugh.

This bromance, as they say, is with his assistant midget football coach, Brian. It’s not a new bromance; it carries over year to year and goes into high gear once the summer comes to a close.

About a month or two before football season starts, the phone calls begin. Once practice starts, I don’t even need caller ID. About 8:30pm after practice, just as we sit down for supper, the phone rings. We pick it up and say, “Hello Brian.” Same thing happens about 9:30 Sunday mornings before church and the boys’ football games. I know it’s going to be a long conversation if Rick takes the phone into the garage. They’ve got serious plays to consider. How are they going to win the corner today? Who can “man up” and shut down the hole if one opens up in the line? Will it be Carlos O’Kelleys or Las Margaritas on Friday night?

“Bromance” is a relatively new term, recently validated by Misters Merriam and Webster, that describes the complicated love and affection (fist bumps, I’m sure) shared by two straight males. You hear it now and again on television and around town. It’s one of those slang terms turned mainstream that everyone thinks they are cool to utter.

Rick is a man’s man. He has lots of buddies that he hangs out with, doing all sorts of man things, like fishing, camping, carpentry, and golfing (back when he had more time to do it). Actually, Rick has had a “bromance” with one of his partners at his office for many, many years. There are so many inside jokes that even I am not privy to, and that is just fine. The guys love to play poker, garden, fish, use their smokers, and use salty language. Our kids are the same age, so they have lots to talk about regarding children and wives (although Rick’s wife never causes him any stress, at all, so I’m sure that is a short, happy conversation.) When they worked downtown, they would go on walks after lunch on the UNL campus to get ideas for their home landscaping. How bromantic.

Now Brian, it makes me laugh really hard to use his name and the word bromance in the same sentence. You would too if you ever saw him. Brian played football in high school and college and, although he is much shorter than Rick, Brian could probably kick Rick’s butt from here to the stadium and back. He’s an intense, bald football and baseball coach who loves to make the boys take another lap if they aren’t working hard enough at practice. (Really, he enjoys making those boys work.) Mandy and I laughed so hard at practice the other day when Brian took one of the players aside to tell him that boys don’t cry in football. Those bruises and scars you get in football, well girls dig football injuries. Well that, and the uniforms.

The boys try to include us wives. Tammy and I, we arrange to eat out about once a week so we can drink our margaritas while the boys talk about hard-hitting linemen, fast-footed backs, and teenage daughters. We both clearly struggle with that last one. Tammy’s oldest teenage daughter is a senior cheerleader; her younger one is a twin and turns 13 soon. She and Mandy enjoy scoping the boys their age at games and practices. However Brian says Mandy has to quit getting out of the car at football practice. Evidently 12- and 13-year-old boys are easily distracted, even the ones without ADHD. Really? Is this new information? Doesn’t he know that is the whole idea?

Sometimes I feel a little like a football widow during the fall when my husband spends the time on the phone figuring positions and plays, and the rest of his time buried in his three-ring binder playbooks and his computer spreadsheets. Saturday mornings are chalk talks, and after early church, Sundays are a day of midget football. The days start about 9:30am if Rick’s team plays the first 10:30 game and can last until 6pm, if Joe’s game is the last game at 4:45. Rick and Brian use the entire day to make the rounds, scouting other D teams and talking to other coaches. And now that they have coached together for several years, Rick and Brian especially love watching the boys they trained a few years ago take what they’ve learned and pound the other teams. Assurity A team is undefeated so far this season, making the day so much more fun.

But I’m just fine with Rick’s football fixation. We each have our own activities in our lives that make us who we are. I love Rick because he is such a good coach and because he can’t do anything halfway. If he coaches football, he is going to do it right and spend as much free time devoted to his team as he can. I’m glad he has Brian to make that part of coaching happier. That he has someone to talk over the trials and mistakes and to celebrate the improvements and wins. And he has someone to do diamond pushups with at practice when the boys think the coaches need to pay for the two penalties they cost the team at the last game for having too many players out on the field. Whoops. Evidently 12- and 13-year-old boys have good memories in spite of the ADHD.

I’m here hanging in the background, washing the uniforms and coaching shirts, filling all the water bottles and making sure everyone gets to the game with their pads, hats, and whistles. I’ll sit on the sideline like a good woman should (tongue in cheek). Just as long as he takes me out to eat every once in a while and remembers my birthday this month, he is safe. I’m glad to cheer him on. Because diamond pushups, well, that’s one activity we will never share.

We Are the Champions by Queen

Like Mom, Like Daughter

Daughters are fascinating creatures, especially for moms. They are beautiful. They are frightening. They are like the weather in Nebraska. If you don’t like it, wait 10 minutes and it will change.

It’s scary to see so much of ourselves in our girls. Particularly when what you see are some of the things you would rather she wouldn’t have inherited. But it is wonderful, at the same time, when moms see that our daughters have taken what they are given and have made the best out of it.

I can not believe that I could have given birth to this tall athlete. She is currently two inches taller than I am. And I am pretty sure I am full grown. She’s definitely got her dad’s athletic abilities. I was a terrible athlete. They would stick me in at goalie for soccer and put the best player in as defender to make up for it. I was always the last one picked for teams. I was all skin and bones and pop-bottle glasses.

Mandy, however, loves to barrel down the field after the soccer ball, jostling and elbowing girls for control of the ball. She used to be timid on the field, but has recently discovered that little spark that makes her want to win. Every soccer season she scores a couple of goals, driving her back for more. She doesn’t score every game, but she keeps pushing herself in the hopes that she will.

And volleyball, well, Mandy is starting to love to hit. Last night the coach’s wife told me Mandy had some awesome hits at practice. She told me this three times. That’s fantastic. Most volleyball teams Mandy plays for, she plays middle hitter because of her height (she’s 5’8’’ at age 13). As other girls start to catch up, she will probably change over to outside hitter. She also is a great passer. The head guy at her volleyball club moved her up to his number two team because he discovered she is a good passer. Evidently if you are tall and can hit, you generally can’t pass. She’s good at both, so that is awesome. On the drive home from practice, she has been so excited that she is learning to hit harder and harder and that her serves go over the net. It is so much fun to watch her do well at the things she loves. I hope she can continue to improve and she can continue to be a good sportsman.

But she’s got a lot of her mom in her too. The girl can talk. Every team she is on, she’s Miss Congeniality. Mandy easily makes friends. I suppose part of that is the result of going to a small school in which she has only one other girl in her class. If she wants friends, she has to make them. I drop her off at a sports camp where she knows no one, and by the end of the week she has a gaggle of new friends she messages via Facebook every day. Mandy is the girl on the team who is the first to welcome new players, is the first to slap someone a high five for a good play, and is the first to pat them on the back when they mess up. She also has a lot of “best” friends. Currently she splits her time with three best friends, going to football games, going to the park, and going to the mall.

Strangely, all of these best-friend activities involve checking out boys. It is one of the biggest past times in her life right now outside of sports. Thankfully none of the current interests are too serious. She had a taste of that and had her first heartbreak. So now I think she is happy to have lots of new friends who are boys. Several are pretty interested in her, one or two are very interested in her. But she is just enjoying the whole crazy, spinning whirlwind of teenage crushes. She likes to “enjoy the scenery.” Some boys are best enjoyed from a distance -- especially when she discovered that good looks and smarts don’t always come in the same package. One plus is that none of the new boy friends have cowboy hats and boots, plus all seem to be too young to drive. This is fantastic. But some have bikes and know where we live. It’s a give and take I guess. I remember having a lot of boyfriends in high school. In fact, I believe my dad stopped calling them by name and began numbering them. No lie. I think number 42 turned out to be a keeper.

My baby also loves to write. This makes me so proud. Most nights and weekends I can find her up in her room with her homework done, busily typing away on her laptop. She just thought she might add another chapter to a new story she is writing. This is her idea of a fun way to spend a Saturday night, researching story locations, new character names, and dog breeds online.

So that’s the whole reason we bought her the laptop. She used to write stories long hand, some a couple hundred pages long, and I was so afraid they would get lost or damaged. I want to be able to save all the stories she writes. Some day she will write books. I know this deep in my heart. While I enjoy writing non-fiction and smart-aleck prose, she is a fiction writer. One of her teacher’s once told me that she has a gift for writing dialogue. I can’t even say how proud this all makes me. Perhaps we can be the next Higgins-Clarks.

But there are days I wonder who this person is. I never considered Mandy a drama queen, but her emotional hormones have kicked into high gear. There are a few days every month that there is no reasoning with her. Life is miserable. The world is ending. How can you face the day when you can’t do anything with your hair?

It’s difficult to remember that we can be very different people, especially when we share the same keen knack for embarrassing ourselves. She has her own life, her own decisions to make, her own mistakes to learn from. I have the hardest time not stepping in when I see her making a bad decision. I have to leave the room when I don’t agree with how she is handling a situation. I always thought she was like her dad when she got mad: it’s a big whoosh of anger and then it’s over as fast as it began. Everything is all smiles and fine. But maybe she’s more like me: silent with a long memory. Heaven help her future spouse.

I will always give her my opinion. Heaven knows I can’t completely shut my mouth. But I guess she has to learn. She will have to live with the choices she makes. This is one of the hardest parts of the job for me – one hundred times harder than 2am feedings and toddler timeouts. I have to learn how to walk away.

If I had her abilities, I would find a high school that allowed me to use those abilities, maybe a smaller parochial high school. And there are several parochial high schools in the area. But she could care less if she plays high school volleyball or soccer. Sure, she says, she will try out for the team. But if she doesn’t make it, oh well. (Yes, really, all this time and effort growing up playing sports season after season and she says oh well.) She says she can play for her club volleyball team until she is done with high school. And with soccer, there is always the city rec league. Plus, mom, she can just run with dad a couple miles a few days a week to keep in shape. (I may need a blood test to check our DNA after hearing that statement.)

She wants to go to high school where her friends go. Right now she is looking at Southwest (MaRiah and Mikayla are going there), Southeast (Anne is going there), and East (Megan goes there). Southwest is just a few blocks from Rick’s office and has block scheduling, which most of the kids really seem to like. A lot of her sports friends are going to Southeast, so she would have a ton of friends there. And East, well Megan is there and those two girls are a party waiting to happen. But this can all change, just wait 10 minutes.

She has a lot of decisions to make this year regarding where her future will take her. And this is just the start. I pray for guidance, I pray for patience, and I especially pray for my sanity.

How am I going to survive the teen years? How am I going to keep my mouth shut? OK, so maybe I know where she gets the high drama thing from too. And we haven’t even started driving yet. Talk about driving me crazy….

Spinnin' Around by Jump5 (lovin all the braces)

Teenage Daughters by Martina McBride 

First Cut Is the Deepest

I think it is time the bandages come off for good. I got the last of the stitches out this week. It’s time my scar sees the light of day in public.

Visited the plastic surgeon about two weeks ago, but it’s not what you might think. I’m not trying to be anybody’s hot mom. I have skin issues. They are issues I’ve been putting off for some time and should have taken care of sooner. I have melanoma on my leg (or some form of it) and I’ve been in and out of the dermatologist for about a month and a half.

I’ve had this large mole thing on my lower leg for about a year or so. It was a weird mole, and I thought, oh well, I’ve got lots of moles. But this one was bigger and kept getting bigger and blacker and red around the outside. I knew for a while I should do something about it, but what you don’t know can’t kill you, right? Not when it comes to cancer evidently. Ignorance is one thing, but dumb can kill.

I had a wake up call when doctors discovered my dad had very early stage colon cancer earlier this year. He had surgery at the beginning of the year and is still recovering. The doctor caught the abnormal polyps on a scan for something entirely different, way up in the top corner of the scan. I am sure God’s hand was in those tests, making sure everything was caught early -- early enough to take care of it with surgery, before he would need chemo. And he had a hard road to recovery, requiring two surgeries, blood clots, and a wound vac.

But it was a sobering event. So I made appointments to get all those fun tests done, like my mammogram. That’s a party waiting to happen. And then I bit the bullet and went to the dermatologist (although I had to wait two months just to get in.) I had made the appointment for a mole removal, but after one glance, the dermatologist said, yeah, we can’t take care of this with a simple office visit. Uh oh. You know that isn’t going to end with a little poke and a lollypop.

After she went out of the room for a few minutes, I caught a glance of a poster about all kinds of skin cancer on the back of the door. The picture of melanoma? Yep, that was me.

You know how the doctor over and over tells you all the worse things that your issue can be? You know how you start to get the hint that your issue is probably that bad thing the doctor doesn’t want to come right out and tell you that you have before the tests are complete? Doctors need to get trickier.

So I got to have a little surgical procedure done on my leg to take off the atypical cells. The little football-shaped incision wasn’t terrible. It was originally about one to two inches long. But the stitches looked really ugly. They looked like the stitches on the side of a football, only black. Actually, they looked a lot worse than they felt. And the scar probably would have healed up better had I not worked out as much as I did and pulled the stitches so much. I guess I just have a thing for Billy Blanks. That and my life does not allow me to sit on my butt for more than 15 minutes at a time, unless I’m driving to soccer practice. That takes 30 minutes – one way – up hill – both directions.

But the ugly scar turned out not to be an issue when the results came back and the dermatologist told me that she didn’t take enough. I had to have a second surgery. And because they needed to take such a large chunk, this time I had to go to the plastic surgeon. Fabulous. I always wondered what the waiting room would look like at a plastic surgeon’s office. I don’t think I have fancy enough jewelry to sit in a plastic surgeon’s waiting room.

But the waiting room was pretty much empty the times I was there. I didn’t have to wait in the waiting room long. I did the surgery at his office, and got to be awake for the whole thing again. It wasn’t too terrible. Dr. Orchard was the plastic surgeon and I would highly recommend him. We talked about midget football during the whole procedure because his kid is out for football, as well. Evidently all football coaches like to yell and nobody’s kid gets to play as much as their parents think they should. Imagine that? However, I could have skipped being awake for the part where he cauterized the wound. Nothing worse then smelling something burning and know it is you.

I don’t know if I should say I officially had skin cancer. I think the plastic surgeon put it best. He said with melanoma, it is not really black and white. What I had is more in the middle of the greys. I don’t have to have any kind of lingering treatments. But I do have to go back to the dermatologist a couple of times a year so she can keep an eye on me. Clearly she will miss my witty repartee while under the knife. Even during surgery I can’t shut up. I think that’s also why I don’t come out of my massage appointments as relaxed as I should. I must always bring the comedy.

The whole skin cancer thing is not unheard of in my family. I remember that my grandpa had to have little skin cancer things burned off his face when he was older. He farmed his whole life and I’m certain I never saw him take a break for sunscreen, and certainly not moisturizer. And one of my sisters had to have a patch removed from her neck. She also had to go back for seconds for surgery. She also thinks that was just fantastic.

I can’t sit here and blame all the years I suntanned, or the fact I never was slathered with sunscreen growing up. I think I seriously laid out in the sun for hours in high school and college coated with baby oil. Talk about cooking in the sun.

But it is what it is. I’ll deal with whatever future skin issues I have as they come along. Things could be so much worse. In fact, my difficulties seem so little and minor compared to the huge challenges so many people face. And they do it with such patience and peace, persistently facing whatever challenges God passes their way with a Christian attitude.

It’s an attitude I hope I can pattern my own after. Of course, I also will add a few jokes here and there. I can’t help but bring the comedy. Life goes better with a little flavor, no matter what you are served.

Doctor Doctor by Robert Palmer

First Cut Is the Deepest by Sheryl Crow