Archive for the ‘Blogosphere’ Category:
Power to the Peoples!
So if you breezed past here yesterday, you probably figured out we’re having a party…a party for the people!
And you’re invited!
8pm
Thursday, July 17
The Elizabethan Room
The Westin, San Francisco
Libations, door prizes — and hopefully some food for all us lightweights — will be supplied courtesy of The People’s Party sponsors. We heart them.
Your Hostesses:
Oh, The Joys
The Blogess
One Plus Two
Mother Bumper
Velveteen Mind
and yours truly…IzzyMom
The People’s Party generous sponsors and providers of extreme party time goodness:
If you’re kinda sorta thinking you might make it to the partay, be sure to leave a little note in the comments. We need to make sure we have enough martini olives, lil’ paper umbrellies and uh…booze :)
The Big Tease #4
Hello! You’ve arrived at Teaser #4.
(If you want to know what’s going on, start at Teaser #1)
If you came from Teaser #3, now go to Teaser #5 to find out what’s next!
Or come back tomorrow when all will be revealed!
Hooray for Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll!
At the age of nine, I became a latchkey kid. My mom went back to work and I got my first house key on a keychain featuring my birthstone (sapphire, faux, of course). The major upshot to the suckitude of having a working mom was that we had cable back then and being largely unsupervised for extended chunks of time, friends congregating at my house and watching movies on cable was a common activity because you know, RATED R MOVIES, DUDE!
Our parents had no frakking idea we were watching stuff like Death Race 2000 (”in the future, hit and run isn’t a crime, it’s the national sport!”; Crazy Mama (guns and boobs, baby!) and the totally effing creepy Phantasm (hooded killer dwarf creatures, a flying drill-ball, and a demonic mortician…FUN!!!)
How I turned out even remotely normal I’ll never know.
But there was one movie that I still love to this day (Kurt Cobain once said that it was his favorite film, too) It was called Over the Edge (now something of a cult classic) and it starred a teenage Matt Dillon (HOT!) in his first movie role as a sort of ringleader of juvenile delinquents in a suburban “master planned” community in the middle of nowhere.
Having grown up in a master-planned suburban environment in the seventies, I can attest to the accuracy of this film in terms of being trapped in suburbia with nothing to do but get in trouble — sex, drugs, rock n roll, vandalism… (okay, there was none of that for me, personally, as I was a tween but I knew plenty of kids older than me that were all about it)
My best friend and I wanted to LIVE this movie. Being bad never looked so fun. In fact, the film was so controversial at the time that it never made it to a theatrical release, debuting on HBO instead. And the soundtrack? AWWWWESOME –> Cheap Trick, Van Halen, Ramones, The Cars, Jimi Hendrix…
Check out this site to behold the awesomeness of Over the Edge (a website by someone far more obsessed with it than even me). Or better yet, rent it. They have it on Netflix.
So what about you? What movie(s) rocked your world as a kid?
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For more posts on this theme, visit these other fine purveyors of Friday Flashback bloggery:
Mamalogues
And if you want to play along on your own blog, link this post at the end of yours, add the participants above, and then email me or leave a note in the comments so I can link you here.
Where Mothers Fear to Tread
My son fell off a swingset yesterday. He fell not from the swing itself but from the crossbar that holds the frame together. Factoring in his own height, he fell about five feet and hit his head on the concrete so hard I could hear it. Just thinking about that moment makes my eyes burn.
He had climbed up there while I was on the phone. I was right there, trying to stop him but, ironically, I was afraid that by fighting him, I’d make him fall. So I went around the frame to get behind him as I was positive he would end up falling backwards but before I could put a hand on him, and in the blink of an eye, he fell forward and hit the concrete along the outside of swingset. I will never forget that slow motion fall to the ground and the sound of his head hitting the unyielding cement. I screamed.
I inspected his head for the blood I was certain would be pouring out of it but miraculously, he wasn’t bleeding.
I carried him inside while he cried like I’ve never hear him cry before. It was relentless and mournful. I put ice on his head but by then, I couldn’t remember which side hit the ground. I kept asking him to show me where it hurt but he wouldn’t answer. He just kept asking to lay down and kept blinking his eyes like he couldn’t see.
I was terrified.
As I dialed the pediatrician, I replayed in my mind all the stories I’ve ever heard about people hitting their heads a lot less hard than he did and dying from it. I thought about my friend who hit his head when he jumped from the car we were in together. His brain swelled from the impact and he didn’t make it.
The pediatrician suggested I bring him in immediately rather than go to an emergency room as it would definitely take longer to get even a basic head injury assessment.
I hung up the phone and began to sob uncontrollably. I felt like I had failed my son by not being able to prevent his fall.
And for the first time ever, I considered my childrens’ mortality for more than a half a second.
I’ve read many blogs written by parents who have lost a child and I have cried tears for them as I tried to grasp their pain. But I’ve never, ever allowed myself to imagine the horror of losing a child of my own. Even though the ever present spectre of death has been a part of my life since I was a child, I’ve willfully never let my mind go to that dark place until yesterday.
I cried as I put my son’s shoes on, knowing I shouldn’t do so in front of him, but powerless to stop. He’d said almost nothing since the fall maybe 15 minutes prior and he seemed very out of it but as I cried, he climbed off my lap, gently wrapped my face with his two tiny hands and kissed me. My heart ached.
As we drove to the doctor’s office, I forced myself to not cry, opting instead to make silent bargains with God.
After an extensive examination, his doctor concluded that while there was a very small chance he *might* lose consciousness, it was okay for him to go home as long as we agreed to wake him every three hours to make sure he was not unconscious. If he was or if he started vomiting, we were to go to the ER immediately. She also said it was a miracle his head didn’t split open from the impact of hitting such a hard surface from five feet. My sentiments exactly.
P made it through the night okay but he might be feeling some minor effects from the fall as he’s been very fussy today and a wee bit clumsy, hitting his poor little head again on my desk. Cognitively, he seems okay and I’m guardedly optimistic that he’s going to be wonderfully, perfectly fine in a day or two. I hope.
There is nothing on this earth that will make you appreciate your children more than thinking you might lose them. It’s not that I needed to be reminded to appreciate my son but in the chaos that is our everyday life, it’s easy to forget that my children are really the only things in my life that truly matter to me. I don’t want to lecture or preach but please, look at your kids and take in their essence; their goodness; their ability to love you unconditionally. And then imagine if all of that was gone from your life.
I really believe P is going to be okay and aside from knocking a couple years off my life, I’m fine, too. It was a horrible event that’s now over. The one good thing that came from it is a very pointed reminder to not take life for granted — yours or anybody else’s.
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I wanted to do this in my last post but since it was a Flashback Friday, I opted to wait—
I just wanted to say thank you to all you nice people who sent their well wishes and congrats via email, comments and twitter for my little 15 seconds of fame in the Wall Street Journal. Most of you were not friends, as one might have expected (lamers!), but rather total strangers (and maybe new readers?) who found their way here from the Journal. Your kind and very unexpected words made me feel really good. I realize now it was kind of silly of me to feel so oddly self-conscious about the whole thing because I am good enough, I am smart enough and doggone it, people like me! And If I ever channel Stuart Smalley again, pinky swear that you’ll throw me in front of a bus.
The Truth About Camp Unspeakable
I meant to do this a lot sooner but if you know me, you know nothing gets done in a timely fashion around here. Nonetheless, I have finally put together some extremely scintillating thoughts and a deeply interesting critique of my experience at (insert giant corporation name here)’s Camp Baby.
Entitled I Went to Camp Baby and All I Got was a Lousy Nintendo DS Lite, you can read it here if you are so inclined. Or not.
In other news, though it’s not 100% complete, you can see that I’ve given ye olde blog a makeover that was looong overdue. As you can also see, I likes me some red. Oh and I’m finally on the Twitter. You may now exhale :)
More later after I put my kids to bed and drink a toast or ten to the the END OF SPRING BREAK.
