A valley, two vines, and a flower

A place for a mom to rant and rave.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Bloody nose, field sobriety, prayer, and a filling: A busy day in the life of a mom

Today was one of those busy days that everyone hits once in awhile. I spent 3.5 hours in the car today, was away from home for 10.5 hours and was only in two counties of Wisconsin.

The day started with me needing to take the kids to playgroup; we left the house at 11:30 am. While on the interstate, Ivy got a bloody nose. I couldn't easily find the box of tissues to hand her, so I pulled off to the side. Then I dropped the console tray between the two front seats of the van and crawled around the seats to find the tissues and hand them to Ivy. Without other incidents, I pulled back onto the interstate and travelled on.

As we neared our destination, I spotted a truck pulled over by a county sheriff. The deputy was demonstrating a heel-toe walk for the person who was wearing a distinctive brown cowboy hat. I glanced at the clock and saw it was just after noon. I then wondered: is that person still drunk from last night or did they start drinking early? Then we drove on to playgroup, where I dropped the kids off so I could make my 1:30 dentist appointment. I got back in the van and retraced my route. The truck was still parked alongside the road and the distinctive hat could be seen in the back seat of the sheriff's car. I guess he didn't pass the field test, huh?

On the trip up, I remembered that I had forgotten the book I planned to read while waiting for the dentist. If there were no hang ups with traffic, I would just have enough time to stop and get the book. Luckily, traffic was moving along (except for the person pulled over for speeding on the interstate) and I was able to drop by home and grab the book. Leaving our house, I spotted two people walking in the parking lot of the nearby gas station. The male of the two dropped to his knees in the parking lot and bent his head down as if in Muslim prayer (time 1:19 pm). The woman he is with just stopped and stood by him. I thought praying in the middle of a parking lot seems risky, but maybe something else was going on. Since I only had 10 minutes to get to my appointment and that gas station is right across from a police station, I did not stop to see if something was wrong.

I got to the dentist and had to wait a bit to be called back. I used this time to read and relax a bit. Since the filling was in the second bicuspid (I think that is the right tooth name), we had decided to spend the extra money to get a tooth colored filling. It was apparently not a very deep decay spot, so the dentist gave me the choice of it being numbed or not. But since the tooth had already been a bit painful, I decided to go ahead and get the shot. At least they are now using some sort of quick acting gel to numb the gum first. I then spent the next 5-10 minutes discussing drunk drivers with the dental assistant whose husband is a police officer. Talk about an interesting discussion! Especially on a day where I was driving a lot.

I left the dentist office at 2:00 pm and headed back to playgroup to hang out for a while with my mom friends, retracing the route I had already driven twice. Unsurprisingly, the truck was still sitting in the location where the guy was presumably arrested. The kids were happily playing and I sat and chatted with my friends. At some point, I lamented that we were not filming a movie because someone could have slapped me and I wouldn't have felt a thing. We stayed there until 4:30 pm when it was time to get in the car and spend an hour driving to another friend's house, where we were supposed to spend the evening.

We arrived at our destination at 5:30, having survived rush hour traffic on the interstate and the beltline we settled in for a relaxing evening. I helped a friend with touching up her hair color while her husband cooked dinner for the kids and us and pseudo-supervised the children. When we finished with her hair, the kids were eating and he was playing Knights of the Old Republic on the XBox. I got my dinner and kibbitzed his playing until the kids finished and decided to go outside to play with a paleontology kit. The kids spent the next hour or so digging plastic bones out of a plaster "rock" managing to get dust all over themselves and the front porch. We adults sat inside and watched some exercise videos.

We left their house and arrived back home at 10:00 pm. I got the girls some milk and as they were drinking it, Glenn arrived home and we put them to bed. It is the end of an exhausting day and I am tired and a bit crabby. I decided that this day was just weird enough to deserve some sort of memorial, so here you are. If you have read this far, I commend you! Thanks for listening to my debrief.

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