"Michael Scott's Dunder Mifflin Scranton Meredith Palmer Memorial Celebrity Rabies Awareness Fun Run Race for the Cure. This is Pam."

"You spend your whole life trying to get people to like you, and then you run over one person with your car and it's not even one of the popular ones...and everyone gets on your case."

"Well, if you're going to reduce my identity to my religion, then I'm Sikh. But, I also like hip-hop and NPR. And, I'm restoring a 1967 Corvette in my spare time."

"I'm not superstitious, but I'm a little stitious."

"Well, you left your TV on...and your cat is dead."

Labels: Ramblings

Sigh…I looked at my eight year old daughter this morning and couldn’t believe how big she suddenly was. It was like she sprouted up a few inches overnight. She was only 2 pounds 9 ounces when she was born, and that baby…that little, teeny, tiny baby who could fit in the palm of her father’s hand…well, she could NOT be the same child I see before me now. It’s like this new kid just gobbled up the other one. A dingo didn’t do it…a third-grader ate my baby.

As we near her 9th birthday, it’s hard to think that her life in this house is almost half over. Nine years from now we’ll be nearing her 18th birthday and she’ll be entering college shortly after that. How is that possible? The years since she was born have flown. They’re a blur really. Day to day crap didn’t eat my memories, it devoured them.

Today before I sent her off to school, I gave her an extra hug and kiss. What more can I do really? I can’t hold on to her forever, though there are days I wish I could. There are times I wish I could hold that little two pound baby in my arms…go back to a time, after she got off her heart monitor, when I didn’t have to worry about her so much. When there was no hustle and bustle of school, homework, sports, life. I want to yell at her, “Stop growing!”

And yet, there is so much joy in watching her mature. She is smart, funny, extremely kind and generous, a wonderful big sister and friend, and not a bad softball player either. There’s no doubt that life won’t always be a breeze with her. We know we have battles ahead. So somehow, someway, I have to find time to enjoy her while she’s young. Just for today, I’m going to take the day to day crap and shove it where it won’t get in the way. Just for today, because tomorrow is only nine years away.

Labels: Kids

I have been tossing around the idea of allowing comments on this blog. My in-box this morning had two separate requests for a comment section, but I have reasons why I've avoided it up to now.

Though my life and language are not always G-Rated, this blog is. My eight year old reads it. My mother and my mother-in-law read it. So, if you post a comment I ask that you please use discretion and "clean" language. I know, for a fact, that the first thing most of my friends would like to do is leave a comment laced with profanity, just to get me in trouble! I'm trusting you won't.

Labels: Ramblings

My dog is driving me crazy. She sheds so much fur that I don’t know how she can bear the cool evenings we’ve been having. I half expect to roll over in bed and see her snuggled up beside me saying, “Hey! Quit taking all the covers already!” Her fur comes off in such quantities that I never want to pet her, or let anyone else pet her. I find myself yelling at guests, “Stay above the collar! Stay above the collar!” so as not to find a pile of yellow fluff floating around the room, inevitably landing on someone’s black pants.

Secondly, she has some serious odor lately. Flat out STANK. I think it’s part dog breath, part stagnant pond water. We do our best to keep her from it, but she can occasionally stray and manage a dip in the park's green water with a film on top. Not to mention her gas, which is so bad that it’s become audible in her old age. It used to be that if we saw her get up and sneak slyly away, an aroma like no other would follow. It was so bad that she would actually leave the room. But now she’s old, and she simply lays there and lets the dog vapor linger around her…and all around the room. If only people could see us watching TV in the evening with our shirts pulled up to cover our mouths and noses. We don’t dare breathe that toxic air.

But, what I find most disgusting is that whenever I let her outside, she delights in eating squirrel poop, or rabbit poop, or whatever animal leaves those tiny turds in our yard. She will meander over to the ivy under our tree, find a spot and literally dig in. She will bury her teeth in the dirt, get a mouthful, and begin to chomp, chomp, chomp. I can’t even bear to watch without gagging.

The last dog I had not only ate other animal’s waste, but she rolled in it. She once squirmed around in fresh dog poo and was completely covered from the tip of her nose to her shoulders. Because it was a frigid winter day, and because I was a moron, I decided to put her in the bathtub to rinse her off. I pulled the curtain shut and turned on the shower full blast. I then opened the curtain to pull the removable shower head off so I could get under her neck. But when I did that, she did the soaked-dog-shake and wet poo was flung to the walls, floor, ceiling…everywhere. Crevices I didn’t even know existed were speckled with dripping feces.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should be grateful for what I have now.

Labels: Creature Features

I have been living somewhere in the Twilight Zone the last few days. Mostly foggy, kinda teary, sometimes sleepy, and always off balance. The symptoms of my concussion worsened on Sunday evening. After hearing ringing in my ears, I got this head-rush sensation where I feel like I’m about to fall over and black out…and it won’t go away.

But, amidst this haze I have one thing I can clearly see, that I have friends, family and neighbors who are there when I need them. My husband is away and it has been impossible for me to run this house in my condition. So the people in my life have stepped up and helped me muddle through.

I’ve had two kids shuttled to two different schools by three different people, and a best friend who had just gotten dinner ready for her family, then dropped everything to take me to the hospital last night. My neighbor brought me groceries, and Mom's from my daughter’s school have offered to bring us dinner. Oh, and I can’t forget my RN friend, who nursed me and woke me during the night after my head was hit to ask me if I knew where I was. My sister has sat with me, my Mom has sat with me, my niece and her roommate took turns watching my kids, then spent the night here in case anything happened, my daughter took over some household duties, and lots of friends have called to check in. What’s comforting is that I’ve barely skimmed the surface of the friends and family pool.

So, despite the pain, nausea and dizziness, I’m feeling pretty good. Having a support system like mine takes some of the pain away. My thanks go out to all of you.

Labels: Ramblings

If this post begins to ramble and make no sense, it’s because I am recovering from a concussion. I won’t go into the embarrassing details of what happened. However, I will say it had something to do with my annual girl’s weekend, a hammock, and some vodka.

Although this incident was not really my fault, you will never hear me say that I am, in any way, graceful. As a kid, I was famous for spilling, dropping, breaking, tripping and falling…and not much has changed. I am a klutz. I am a gargantuan doofus. I am a clumsy, butter-fingered, fumbling oaf.

It's partly because I’m quite tall and have feet so big that I envision getting a call from the circus telling me the clowns want their shoes back. I also have limbs so long that a teacher once dubbed me orangutan arms, and my brain is pulled in so many directions at once that sometimes I just can’t concentrate. Put these together, and you have the perfect storm.

So, it shouldn’t have been any surprise that I single-handedly put a halt to this weekend’s festivities. In a matter of hours we went from having a party, to something resembling a knitting group. No lie. As we debated whether or not I needed to go to the hospital, we slowly went from drinking beer to making pot holders, from happy to glum, from laughter to yawns. All while I held a bag of ice to a knot on my head, which was so big my friends could’ve cut it out and played volleyball with it.

I didn’t know it when I named this blog, but Urban Dictionary lists synonyms of "Momo" as dolt, blockhead, and numskull. How fitting is that? I unknowingly created a blog name which refers to my true nature. Coincidence? I think not.

Labels: Ramblings

Near our back door, we have a rather large basket full of shoes. Lots and lots of shoes. All of which belong to the two kids. Yesterday, I told my son to go get a pair out of the basket and put them on for school. I was folding laundry in the other room, and kept yelling, "Did you put your shoes on?" He would reply, "Not yet!" And, I would say, "Well, hurry up! It's time for school." We did this over and over before I finally went to check on him.

I found him in the back hallway, completely surrounded by shoes. He had dumped the entire basket onto the floor. But, that wasn't what surprised me. He often dumps all of his trains, cars, and books all over the house, so why would shoes be any different?

I stood there silently and watched him hold a shoe up to his face and smell it, then put it down, pick up another shoe and do the same thing. After he did this a few times, I asked, "What are you doing? Why haven't you put your shoes on yet?"

He looked up at me with a disgusted look and said, "These shoes all smell like Michigan."

Labels: Ohio State Buckeyes, Shameless Statements

Friday brought disaster #756 to the Fali household. What really burned me up, is that Friday is the day I actually get stuff accomplished around here. We often have weekend visitors, so I save the piles of dog hair and kitchen counter crumbs to be cleaned up on Friday so our guests will walk in and say things like, “Your house is always so clean!” AH, HA, HA! I feel like an evil genius when that happens.

This past Friday was no different. I had managed to move the entire dining room around, mostly because the area rug has left a mark on the floor and I want to even things out. My thought being that maybe people will think we designed the floor to have a sun-faded wring around all the edges. In addition, I managed to do some dusting, sweeping, mopping, and bathroom cleaning. Because, scrubbing other people’s poo off the toilets is just another wonderful thing about being a homemaker.

I had run the dishwasher and done four loads of laundry, when my daughter went into the basement. I heard a dreaded, “MOM!” from downstairs. The type of “MOM!” you hear when someone is about to projectile vomit, or the kind where someone other than the kid yelling has broken something very expensive. Either way, I knew it was bad.

My daughter ran upstairs and said she had stepped in a puddle. I thought, “No problem!” because, last week after a morning of diarrhea and vomiting, our dog was confined to the basement while we were out of the house. When I came home, I found she had peed on the floor down there, which was a pleasant surprise considering what I was expecting to find. So, in this case, I was thinking the dog had managed to sneak downstairs and pee. Because, well…our dog is old and the basement is chilly. I can just see her dog brain thinking, “Ugh. The heat, the humidity…I’m not going out in that sweltering grass.” And, again because, “MOM!” usually means I’ll find something resembling pea soup on the walls, dog pee was not a bad alternative. This was not a big deal.

But, I couldn’t be so lucky to have dog urine on the floor. Instead, it was covered with four loads worth of laundry water, as well as what was run through the dishwasher. The toilets had backed up too, but thankfully no one had pooped since I started the laundry. There was only #1, which had been diluted by tons and tons of water, soap and bleach. But still it was a mess. One wall to the other, the entire floor covered with two inches of water. After a three hour clean-up, my husband called Roto Rooter. I didn’t want to call, because the last time they came out, the plumber brought a bucket into my kitchen and said, “Look here. This is what was causing your back-up”, and showed me a BIG wad of a certain, supposedly flushable, feminine product. Oh, that’s not embarrassing. I mean, what was I supposed to say? “Well, where in the world did those come from?” I may as well have passed gas right there in front of a complete stranger.

But, knowing that I had not flushed anything of the sort since that day, and because I couldn’t bear the thought of having sewage come up into our basement, I was happy to hear they could come out the next morning.

After lots of snaking, and having a plumber pull a tree root through our basement floor, we were back in business. And, let me tell you just how nice it is to be in business, when you have a family of four who needs to do their business.

Labels: House of Horrors

Truly, I am not making this stuff up. My son is obscene in his honesty. He is positively audacious and blunt. He seems to always feel the need to comment on everyone’s looks and compare them to someone, or something. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come off as rude as I hurried him along, in order to avoid having to offer up an apology.

I actually live in constant fear of what he’ll say. He has compared people to fish, asked a rotund, MALE, friend of ours if he had a “baby in his belly”, told a cousin she has a huge chin, asked another friend why she was so big, and tells middle-aged people they’re old. Men are called women and women are called men. I have to avoid anyone overweight, as well as people with birthmarks, scars, strange hair, tattoos, bald heads, and prosthetic anything. He will gladly tell men in pink shirts that “pink is a girl color”, and boys wearing earrings are promptly told that they’re not supposed to. Taking him out in public is like getting a sharp booger. It’s unavoidable and painful, yet inevitable.

So, I shouldn’t have been surprised, when a very wrinkled, older woman was behind us at the store the other day, and he pointed and said, “She’s like Sam-I-Am!”

I tried, HARD, to play it off and said, “Yes! She looks like Gram.”

Or...what Grammy would look like in….oh, say, 100 years. But, I figured this woman would think she resembles his Grandma, and we would all go merrily on our way.

But, it was a futile attempt, because he emphatically said, “No! Sam-I-Am! Sam-I-Am! Not Gram! Sam-I-Am!”

I quickly paid, then picked him up and tickled him a little in order to get him to giggle instead of making another comment. Then, I tried to alleviate the situation as any sane person would...with humor and bad poetry. As I tickled his belly I said, “Oh, please excuse him, Ma’am. His Gram likes Green Eggs and Ham! He’s really into rhyming, because her name is Pam! You DO NOT look like Sam-I-Am!”

Thank goodness, she laughed. Another predicament handled with ease. But, as I made a break for the door, I vowed to NEVER AGAIN take him out of the house. I can not take him here, or there. I can not take him anywhere.

Labels: Shameless Statements

This blog is meant to be light-hearted and fun to read. It is supposed to give parents something to relate to, and for you non-parents, maybe the stories give you a twinge of relief that you don’t deal with the strange behaviors and circumstances a child brings into your life. But parent or not, life isn’t always carefree and joyful. More than anything, this is a blog about life, and life can come at you like a ton of bricks. One moment it can be smiles, giggles, good times, and happiness…pure contentment with your existence. The next moment, your world can be turned upside down. I know from experience, because the mood in our house went from pleasant and happy, to somber and mournful in one small instant.

A few days ago, my son’s classmate died. John was 5 ½ years old. We hadn’t seen him since preschool let out for the summer, but he was perfectly healthy at that time. Big, strong, tough, HEALTHY. He was getting ready to start Kindergarten. All was right with the world.

A neighbor of the family said she saw John playing with his little brother on numerous occasions and that her day was brightened by the sight of him bouncing around, and the sounds of his carefree joy. He enjoyed life. He was sensitive and kind. He was an amazing big brother. He made my son laugh by making funny faces. He loved his teachers, his parents, his brother, his pets, his friends. Until he got sick a few weeks ago, life was happy, good, and normal.

I just got back from the funeral home, filled with 5 ½ years worth of adorable pictures. John with his brother and parents on the beach. John with friends and cousins. John in Halloween costumes. John at his baptism. Many of them were of John in goofy and silly pictures that are just like the ones that fill our scrapbooks…just like our pictures except they belong to a different Mom and Dad. A Mom and Dad whose pain is beyond any that I can comprehend. Two people who will have to fight really, really hard to find the strength to get through this. My heart breaks for them.

But as I type this, my two resilient kids are running around the house, filling it with their laughter and my heart is overflowing. And, I can only pray that someday John’s family will once again find happiness. I hope that their lives never, ever again get turned upside down, and that they will find peace. I hope that somehow, someway they will be able to say that all is right with the world. John would want it that way.

Labels: Kids

This morning, I handed my son a rinsed-out bottle of laundry detergent to put in our recycling bin. As he was walking into the other room with it...because of a past experience with Poison Control, I yelled, "Don't drink that!"

He stopped and asked, "Why?"

I said, "Because, it's yucky. It's gross. It'll make you sick."

"Yucky like poop?"

"Yes. It's yucky like poop."

"Yucky like a skunk?"

"Yes. It's yucky like a skunk."

And, although I knew he had another analogy ready to toss my way, I wasn't expecting him to ask, "Yucky like Michigan?"

He's getting his allowance doubled this week.

Labels: Ohio State Buckeyes, Shameless Statements