I have found myself in a situation that I never once, even in my darkest dreams, imagined I would be in.

In fact, my twisted mind never even CAME UP with this scenario.

Apparently it happens to my sister-in-law all the time.

And she has 5 KIDS! Not 2!

I don’t know how she has survived.

I’ve BARELY made it through the weekend.

I’ve just never considered what laryngitis does to a mother of toddlers….

Unfortunately, its not just laryngitis.  I took Siggy in for The Issues last week and by some point…don’t even remember which day….

…I had the pink-eye.  And then the fever.  And then the sore throat.  It went something like this….

By Saturday my voice was gone.  How do you handle life when you can’t scream at your children?  I had to resort to exaggerated looks.

The worst is that one where  you try to convey how incredulous you are and it requires your chin(s) to slide back into your neck….

And The Emotion Charades….

Boy are those ineffective.

By Monday morning I had become this big, stupid gorilla. Lumping around, sniffing things and grunting at my offspring.

On Sunday I took some drugs and got out long enough to watch my kids put plastic orbs in portable containers.

But the rest of the week has been me sleeping in the crib with Boy…

Or the recovered child all up in my grill at the plumbers crack of dawn….

I wish I could say that I was feeling better but let me tell you, these antibiotics should be fired.  Jerks.

So I have this lotion that I only use when I’m in a bad funk.  Its for my face.   I love it to a degree that is almost sick.

They should hire me.

I love to wear it on my skins.

It gives me them special feelings.

But most importantly, I like to smell it real hard.

Right before we left for Africa, Cathy gave me  a bottle of it.  I didn’t use it until we moved into our horse patty in Noordhoek.   And then I didn’t use it again until just a few months ago.  I have specifically avoided purchasing it because its expensive, and I know how intensly I associate smells with memory.    I didn’t want to wear it out.

But I broke down and bought a bottle of it, and now I bust it open on funkytown days.  Its like Noorhoek is slapping me in the nostrils.

These are some of the pictures we took while we lived there.

It was so green and so ridiculously beautiful.  I’d always hoped to visit a paradise but I never thought we’d live in one.

The light was a different color there.

And the rainbows were INSANE!!!

Almost as insane as our landlady…..

…who would text us if she saw our car was gone.

This was the most popular text…

Man I did a lot of walking there….

We didn’t have an internet connection while we lived there.  It really was a horse village.  Not of lot of high-tech anything.  But we discovered a stump in the very front of the property and if you sat on it just right, you could piggy-back onto the neighbors wifi.

For those of you who followed my Africa blog, you know the log of which I speak.

The only problem was the roosters.  Who knew they hung out in gangs?  There were 9 of them and they all looked exactly alike and they never wandered from each other.  And when they saw me sitting on the log, they’d all come trotting over in their aqua rooster-pants.

And….well, thats all I have to say.

Good night to you.

Basically, we left the house.  That was unusual.

These past few weeks we haven’t done much so evreything has been a blur.

Same ole’ same ole’.

So yesterday afternoon I finally found my keys and we went to a soccer feild to weild our mad skills.

It felt coastal outside.  Warm and muggy with a cool breeze.  Heaven.  There was nobody out there andthe field was right up against some woods.

So nice.

Siggy is a bit of a worry-wart though.

So I wasn’t concerned until this enormous deer came galloping out of the woods towards us.

The deer, in and of itself, was not such a weird site. Even though San Antonio is a big city, it is full of huge tracts of land.

But it was a little creepy that the deer was coming at us.  The boys lost their….marbles.

And then, out of the woods behind the deer came a large, white pitbull.

…..aaaaaand we all lost our marbles.

And we hid in the netting while the dog/deer combo passed us by.  Then I tried to get the boys to run back to the van with me but Boy just stood there screaming with his hands over his ears and his eyes shut, and Siggy was scaling my  body like he was about to be eaten by sharks.  So I had to stuff our football under his shirt, pick up both cry-babies and kick the soccer ball back to the car.

My pants were barely hanging in there.

But then we got back in the van and we were all…

And on our way to sonic (right around the corner), I looked out my window and there was the mayor standing in a parking lot talking to some lady.

And I only recognized him because he’s some fancy-pants who spoke at the DNC.  I’m too lazy to google his name.

And then we came home and I ran over to check the mail and I could hear someone talking on a walkie-talkie.  He said, “There’s a nice looking woman headin’ yer way, Walter”.  And for a nano-second I felt all…

…and then I looked up and realized it was a really old naked guy…..

…and I realized that I could be the love-child of Roseanne Barr and Carrot Top and this guy would still  think I was a pretty little lady.  So I was bummed.  And totally creeped out.  And totally on the lookout for creepy walter.

“Verbally”, that is.  And we might as well add “mentally”.

I have mental moves that would bring shock and awe to those around me.

But I guess y’all know all about that.

Just last month I dished it out for my sister-in-law.

Her name isn’t Tina but both my boys call her that.

But those are my usual slip-ups.  I have a great filter on my mouth otherwise.  In fact, I have over-filtered issues…

I literally cannot stand for an innocent person to have their feewings hurt…

…and even the not-so-innocent people deserve mercy and IT CAN’T ALL BE ABOUT ME.  I need to tattoo that somewhere.  Maybe on everyone I see on a regular basis (for me, not you).  Somewhere obvious where I can see it and be reminded. Foreheads are good.

But there was once a time….

I can hardly think of these specific thirty seconds without pain in my heart.

It was in the suburbs of Chicago.  4th of July.  We were chilling with friends.  These weren’t our usual group of friends so we didn’t know them that well, but we enjoyed them.  All us women-folk were sitting out in the yard cramming. My best friend eBirdie, was in the house piling enormous gobs of cake on her plate (haha).  I was sitting there alone with a very quiet group.

Unfortunately, every once in a while, when the planets are just right, and I’m in a quiet, uncomfortable-for-me situation, the dam bursts and I just can’t shut my pie-hole.

Its like a nervous tick that only manifests itself once every 7-and-a-half years.

These were NICE girls though and they totally tolerated me.  In fact, the one next to me was the grand-daughter of Mother Theresa.  Or she might as well have been.  Greatness ran in her family and she was uber-precious.  I didn’t know her at all….

Eventually my sass-flaps ran out of nonsense to spew.

And while I was cramming fruit into my face, the nice girl’s baby started to sneeze.

And it was juiciest, slobberyest, sprayiest sneeze you’ve ever heard.

And the baby-head kept at it for a good minute.

And the spray was far-reaching.  Why nobody was reacting was beyond me.  That made things very hard for my nervous brains.

And I just couldn’t stop laughing unless I started making words out loud.

I thought it was witty.

Who can’t have a sense of humor about their babies nasty habits?

But man, I was getting nothing from the audience.  A little of this….

…and a little of that….

Talk about crash and burn!

But then I looked at the face of the mama.

And she had the hurt feelings.

Mainly because…

Someone.  Help.

Please help.

Just shoot me in the head with a big bag of sugar.

That would be a good enough way to go.

I was longing for an enormous pink school bus to come careening around the corner and take down a tree or two.

Where are your distractors when you need them?

I had to think MUCH FASTER than I am accustomed to thinking.   I decided my safest route would be the “unfazed teaser” route.

And it started working…..

Oh thank you Mother Theresa.

And then things just went back to normal, except my psyche, which is forever scarred.

I haven’t talked too much about my time in Glen Ellyn (a beautiful, WEALTHY suburb of Chicago).

Hills. Hundred-year-old homes. Trees.  A great little downtown area.

I worked for a British woman named Jane at tiddlywinks & scallywags.  She designed girl’s clothes and I set up shop.

We worked great together in that we were creative in different areas, and we worked horribly together in that neither of us wanted to deal with people.

I also worked for Melissa.  Girlfriend cray.

We’re absolute polar opposites and I appreciate that about her.  Man does she have a personality on her….

And then there was Michael.  He owned Cottage Gardens, a totally gnarly garden shop.  It. Was. Spectacular.  I think it was an old meat-packing plant.  High brick walls.  A giant glass domes ceiling.  Fountains.  Trees. Plants.  Michael could be one of my brothers. We’re practically twins.

Anyway, Michael opened a second shop called Florae (totally industrial concrete and glass flower shop) and I used to work it.

I worked HARD on those flowers.  Such grueling labor!

Really it would have been great, but I learned that 75% of people who want flowers are total jackwagons.

One customer in particular was NOT like that.  His name was Carl and he’d come in regularly.

He was in his 60′s and wealthy.  Had a bit of the Bruce Jenner thing goin on with the plastic surgery…..

His face just didn’t fit him if you know what I mean.  And it was so drastic that people stared which made me want to punch them in the neck.  Or maybe its just because they were all jerks buying flowers….

Anyway, Carl would stay and talk and bla bla bla. I liked the guy.

But one day I was working by myself in the store.  Scrubbing the floors probably….

…when an older, nervous-looking woman walked in.

It took me about .00002 seconds to realize……

…that this woman was Carl.

And another 1.32 seconds to think a bunch of weird stuff….

And then I had to abandon that thought process in order to decide what on earth to say.

Man, I had no warning!  Give a girl some warning will you?!

Should I say “Congratulations!” Or nonchalantly act like I don’t know who he/she is?!?!?

But man it had been like 4 seconds since she spoke to me and I was starting to look stupid.  I was finally all….

And I decided that J would D love.  So I hugged her/him and told her/him how great her/his hair looked and then she/he proceeded to tell me about the 10 years of surgery he/she had gone through and how she’d/he’d lost friends and sometimes he/she would curl up in a ball and cry.

Just about broke my heart.  Not that he/she had switched seriously valuable reproductive tools, but that anyone would have to go through their life with the kind of angst that would make them go through years of pain and public ridicule just to MAYBE be comfortable in their own skin.

I have to say that as soon as I got a good look at her, her face made sense.  She was dressed modestly and didn’t have gobs of makeup on. She looked naturalish.

And she was still totally my favorite customer.