Prologue to writing again

Hi there. For those of you not on Facebook (*cough* Harry and Ed *cough*) you may have thought I dropped off the planet. At times I wondered if I had dropped off the planet. The cancer stuff wears on you, you know? For a long time all I had to do was just report on the latest cancer news and that counted for writing. But then we went to Tennessee and got pills and were sent home and then I stayed home while Rich went for follow ups and there just wasn't much to report other than "hey, we're taking pills and hoping for the best."

I kind of forgot how to write about anything but cancer. Which means I forgot how to write period lately. And over the last six weeks I've figured out that it makes me feel crappy. So bear with me as I knock the dust off my fingers.

I actually have several topics to cover but haven't figured out how to write them yet. (See earlier comment about forgetting how to put words into sentences. Me talk pretty one day.) They probably deserve their own posts so I won't get into them here. Let's do a little catch up.

Rich had his CT scan yesterday that was after six weeks of treatment. Everyone in TN called his results "rock solid" and they were all very pumped about it. I think that means things are going well. Rich spends a lot of time worrying that things are not going well and no one has considered it at all except for him, but that's kind of how he works, particularly about medical things. It's a charming quirk of his that is part of his Rich tapestry.

I am still taking a photo every day but I keep forgetting to post them to Flickr. One day I will sit down and load all my backlog of photos but the task seems daunting right now. I actually got pretty jazzed when I watched the video about the new iOS 7 for my phone because it has a way to group photos based on date and location and I totally need that. Photo organization is a point of anxiety for me these days.

Ian graduated from day care last week which makes no sense because he is still there all summer until he starts Pre-K on August 26. I got annoyed because the teacher we don't like (the one that told Ian he couldn't wear Batman fleece pants because they were PJs and that's only allowed on PJ day) told me that my son was the only child without a mother at the Mother's Day lunch last month. My own kid didn't seem to notice or care, but she was "worried" about it. I think my kid gets enough Mommy time so he will survive the occasional work conference I have. I missed graduation too, but Rich took pictures and Ian seemed more concerned about getting his cupcake than knowing I was there since Daddy and Nana and Granddad were in attendance. No need to bust out Cats in the Cradle or anything. The boy still sleeps in our bed.

Speaking of cats, the eldest cat Ms. Kitty has finally settled into a routine. She had started peeing on the rug downstairs and couldn't be trusted to roam free. After having to remove all 35 carpet tiles from the dining room and scrub them on the back deck, I declared this Not Cool and forced her to live in the bathroom. That seemed cruel, though, like solitary confinement in prison so I tried setting up the 4' dog gate with a 2' dog gate on top of it. My damn 17 year old, three-legged cat scaled the gates to sleep in the middle of the downstairs floor. A stroke of genius and a generous loan from Curtis and Kathy led to Ms. Kitty now living in a dog crate next to the loveseat downstairs. She has food and water and a litter box and is perfectly content. We let her out when we're home and bless her fuzzy little heart she goes back in the crate to pee in her litter box. I think she's just too old to share with the other cats, which I can get.

We finally replaced our SleepNumber mattress with a Tempurpedic knockoff and I am super pleased. The SleepNumber was wearing out and getting to be very frustrating. Rather than try to figure out how to bolster up the sides via complicated mechanics, we just replaced it. I considered lighting it on fire as a warning to other mattresses that might cross us or perhaps attach a wolf head to it and parade it through Ocean View, but figured I might be watching too much Game of Thrones and that we could just give away the pump and bladders while sending the rest to the landfill.

Last thing because it just came up ... I have a Windows machine at work and a Mac at home. I am fine with both and content with my multi-platform world. But I have got to figure out how to resolve the differences in keyboard shortcuts between a PC and Mac. Neither is better than the other, but they are so annoyingly different. My fingers don't know the difference. I started a sentence and wanted to erase it, but if you hit Shift+Home and then Backspace you delete EVERYTHING versus just the last line of text. That's a real heart-stopper. Thank God for Ctrl+Z (oh wait, Command+Z cause I'm on the Mac right now). Each time I hit Ctrl+Home and realize I have to hit Command+Up instead, it kills me with a tiny little knife. (And good gravy, if I hit Control+Up instead of Command+Up and suddenly I'm looking at multiple desktops? GAHGAHPWKCFNVMELDWI131AFWCW!!!)

So that's what's going on around here ...

Cheap date

Me: "When we were at the beach yesterday, Ian was doing his best Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue poses in the surf. He kept yelling, 'Splash me, Mommy! Splash me!' while rolling around."Rich: "Sigh. I love my gay son."

We were originally just going to go for a bike ride. But then Ian wanted to ride towards the beach. Then he wanted to ride up the boardwalk to the beach. Then he wanted to walk down to the firm sand to draw in it. Then he wanted to walk near the water. Then his shoes were wet. And then he tripped and his pants got wet. At that point, in for a penny, in for a pound. He splashed all over and raced me in the surf's edge. We stayed until he was soaked to the bone.

He purposely put his head underwater when a wave came in while wearing his bike helmet. When he came up, sea water was pouring down his face and he was laughing with delight. This is the kid who flips out if I try to wash his hair in the bathtub.

When it was time to leave, he wanted me to carry him and his bike but physics don't work that way. We opted for him sitting on his bike and me pushing it home. It's a wonder I can type because my forearms are still sore. He agreed to letting me clean him up in the shower and put on clean clothes. He then snuggled up for spaghetti dinner while watching Spider-Man.

Since it got colder today, we opted to go see dancers instead of going back to the beach to catch pneumonia. Australia's Strange Fruit was performing downtown for free tonight and it looked interesting. We were not very well prepared in that we didn't have warm clothes or blankets, but we did have light jackets and his blankie and some peanut butter crackers for snacks.

I wasn't sure if he was going to like it, but the entire thing was only 30 minutes long and the price was right. He sat there in relative silence other than a few times he demanded my phone so he could take pictures. When it was over, he was willing to leave for dinner but kept asking about the dancers and where they were and when they would be back. He later told me he took soooo many pictures of the girl dancers because they were his favorite. Then he wondered why the girl dancers had boobs. I offered it was maybe to feed their babies and he assured me they had "baby dancers" too and that those were also girls and he liked them too.

The only way I could keep him from staking out a spot on the lawn for the 9pm show was to remind him how cold it is and to promise we can come back tomorrow. So Ian and I have a date tomorrow on the lawn at the corner of Bank and Charlotte Street. We'll bring warm clothes and blankets and dinner and watch the dancers again. He might even take more pictures. Afterwards we might walk to the mall to play on the indoor playground until it closes.

All this is to say that despite him being a NO factory this morning, hanging out with a three-year-old is pretty awesome. It's amazing all the fun we can have for free.

Great Wolf Lodge with a three-year-old

When we were flying home from Nashville on Friday, Rich looked over and said, "Thanks for setting up the Great Wolf Lodge visit. I'm really looking forward to it and the timing is good." I actually had booked it because Ian kept saying he wanted to play at the beach but it was too cold. The fact it was right after a week of drug trial stuff and being away from Ian, was just a happy coincidence, one I was pleased about too. I wanted to give a little run down of how Great Wolf was for us. I had never been before and was booking our stay based only on a few reviews from friends and the fact that they had warm water inside when it is still cold outside.

There is no entry fee for the park itself; you have to be a guest of the lodge to enter. So that makes sense why rooms have a maximum number of occupants. We decided to go on a Sunday/Monday because the price of the room was literally half the price of Saturday/Sunday. But then when we got there and checked in, they upgraded us to the Grizzly Bear Suite.

With Ian being a tall three, we were in a sweet spot for stuff. He ate free for all breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the restaurants but since he's over 42" tall, he could ride on more rides than tiny kids.

I had pre-paid for a Wolf Pass, hoping that it would give us an itinerary and save a little cash. It did save us a tiny bit of money, but it also just made it easy to check off things to do. We were able to do everything on the pass except for mini golf, and that was mostly because it was chilly outside and we were uninspired. A note about the Wolf Pass or Paw Pass. Write your cell phone number on the pass because if you (or your kids) lose it, you're out of luck. Hopefully a good samaritan will call you.

I'm pleased we did the Sunday/Monday stay because while Sunday was not super crowded, Monday was a pleasant ghost town. At one point we literally had the arcade to ourselves. We also found that since our Wolf Pass had one movie pass, the dude actually let all three of us ride on Ian's ticket since he was so little and we were literally the only people he had probably seen in the last hour. We also got to share Ian's "button game" (Oliver's Time Challenge) where we just all pushed buttons as they lit up.

We played in the Ten Paw Alley bowling alley while we ate lunch on Monday and that worked out great. Low drag, easy, $15 for a large pizza for us all. I would have thought the bowling games were expensive except that we recently priced bowling in an alley recently, so $5 a game didn't seem horrible. But again, we all shared Ian's games since he's three and was lucky to get the ball to go all the way down the lane.

You're not supposed to bring any outside food or drink into the water park area, but I saw plenty of people breaking that rule. There was a family next to us that brought in PBJ sandwiches and chips and bottles of water. We had a smaller kid, so we didn't need to eat in the water park, just timing it so we took our breaks around mealtimes. I brought some emergency snacks in but only used them to fix my constantly tanking low blood sugar (walking up three flights of stairs to ride down burns calories apparently). We rented a locker for $10 each day and that was all we needed. A safe place for iPhones and a change of clothes and my illegal snacks. It was also nice to have even after we were done with the water to not have to head for the car after playing.

Our big splurge was the robot ice cream machine. I actually asked Rich later, "What is Robot Fusion and why is it on our credit card bill?" Oh, right. But we totally got our $7 worth out of that. I recorded the whole thing and this evening when Ian was sad about leaving the park, he consoled himself by watching the robot over and over on my phone.

There are lots of cheap food places off site that are under two miles away. You could send someone out to retrieve Chick-fil-a, Quiznos, Burger King, Pierce's BBQ, or whatever. But that was not our idea of fun. There was a mini-fridge and microwave in our room so we could have even reheated stuff and made food for ourselves to eat there, but again, we had not even been home long enough from Tennessee to properly pack for our adventure. Rich forgot t-shirts for the weekend, so packing dinner was not happening. We spent $120 on food for two days (including robot ice cream!), so if we had brought all our own food for the room, we could have saved that much. Meh, I'm not upset about it.

Our Wolf Pass also got us a giant souvenir drink ($8.99 value) that we filled with Coke Zero the first day and refilled with ice water from the same machine the rest of our stay. Best thing ever. That souvenir cup, a piggy bank and wooden car from the Cub Club craft area, and the prizes Ian got with his tickets were all we took home, but that was plenty for us.

The only thing I'd do differently next time is bring sandals versus flip flops for in the water and bring a Lifeproof case for my iPhone. We did find that if Ian ever took off his water shoes, he would slip and fall, no matter if he walked or ran. Rich told him at one point that if he didn't want to leave the park for the hospital he would have to put his water shoes back on.

We got there as soon as we were allowed to start in the park on Sunday (1pm) and were able to check into our room by 3pm (they say check in is at 4, I think). We could have stayed all day today until 8pm, but we have a three-year-old so he fell asleep in my arms at 3pm waiting for his piggy bank to be glazed in the craft room. We didn't maximize our water time but we had a small kid. I saw families with bigger kids arriving at 1pm in their suits and heading straight for the water as soon as their wrist bands were on.

The wrist bands were super neat. They had chips in them that would work as your room key so you always had it on you. You could also link it to your room charge to use it to buy things on site (it's how we paid for our robot ice cream). They really wanted to make sure you weren't swimming with your wallet but still free to spend money all over the lodge. Pretty cool.

Oh! The bathroom/shower/locker room was neat. You could put your wet bathing suit in a drying machine thing that would gyro all of the water out of it. We're living in the future. The robot ice cream, credit card wrist band, leaving with a dry swimsuit future.