I truly want to extend my deepest regards and heartfelt thanks for the unexpected joy you’ve brought into my life.
I recently (last night) was on the road for over eight hours driving from Florida to Alabama. As my daughter has your product prescribed, I planned to give her a dose to knock her butt outmake me not want to abandon her at a rest area alleviate the coughing issues she’s been having.
I had been warned by both the prescribing doctor and the cute little label on the bottle that it would make my child drowsy and sleepy.
It did neither, thankyouverymuch.
However, I cannot be angry for the lack of sleep, because you know what it did do?
It made her high as a kite.
Completely and totally.
How do I know this?
Because for 20 uproarious minutes she sang a tuneless song about a bat, in a language that I think she made up on the fly.
Followed by a vicious diatribe to Ruby (from Max and Ruby, a cartoon reference which, if you don’t have a small child, will make no sense to you) about how she “is NOT the boss of Max, and she needs to stop being mean and a bossy sister or else!” I do believe your drug has, in fact, loosened a beast of anger transference on Ruby that should be rightly targeting my middle child.
She then had a complete conversation…there may or may not have been some imaginary tea involved…with the girl in the window…that being herself, in case you weren’t following the story properly.
So, thank you for this enlightening experience.
Now, if you could just make it actually work on the coughing issue, that’d be great.
Yours truly,
Anissa
**P.S…Some people said some really nice things about me. I didn’t even have to pay them! Not kidding. There were also some other people they said nice things about too….and they all deserved it WAY more than me, but I love them to pieces for adding me to the list of mommyblogger love.
Smooches, Trish and the gang! I’m honored.
So, go check out the list of the top 50 Mom Bloggers (there is some mad good reading to be found on that list) courtesy of MomDot and if you leave them enough love maybe I’ll crack the top 20 next year. HEH!
**P.S.S…and in case you’ve got nothing else to do with your time, don’t forget to check out what I wrote about appreciating the good over at 5 Minutes for Special Needs.
There I am, watching a commercial about the BEST ENERGY DRINK EVER!
In fact, one of the greatest selling points is exactly how little time it takes to ingest.
Marketing geniuses, I say.
After a full sixty seconds of energy drink propoganda, they close it up by announcing that you can purchase this product at all “these fine stores“.
These fine stores include Walgreens, Rite-Aid and 7-11.
Seriously.
I muse aloud to Peter how I might not shop at the highest end stores in the world of consumerism, but even I don’t think 7-11 qualifies as a fine store.
These words come out of my husband’s mouth….wait for it!…”Ya know, I’ve been pretty impressed by some of the stuff you can find in 7-11.”
I have got to get this man out of Valley, Alabama.
I’m transported to a night over two years ago when I woke up to hear Peyton crying in her sleep.
“I hurt, mommy.”
Those three words foreshadowed pain and sickness and disease.
I didn’t know it at the time.
It would be the last nights I would ever be able to listen to her cough without wondering “Is it now?”
Is now the night that cancer will creep back in her body?
Is now the moment that we start over again?
Is now the beginning?
Or the end?
The days between blood tests will stretch into eternity.
I know that we have a lifetime of coughs and aches and midnight awakenings to fevers and sicknesses.
I hope we do.
The leap from a simple cold to cancer seems far-fetched.
Except we’ve done it before.
I lived with my daughter going to sleep with a random illness and woke up to cancer.
Yeah, I go there.
Sometimes its days between the thoughts.
Others it’s minutes.
It never really leaves.
It makes me feel crazy.
I don’t want to be crazy like this.
Seriously, I don’t chose to be consumed by my fears.
I just am.
No amount of pep talks about how it’s over keeps every fear from crowding in when I lay awake listening to her cough, sniffle, hurt.
It’s a cold. I know it is. Just a cold.
It doesn’t stop me from visualizing every white cell her body is producing to fight off this cold.
Please grow normal!
It only takes one microscopic cell to grow wrong.
PLEASE be normal!
To spread throughout her body and try to take her away.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t mutate and become a cancer cell.
It started with just one the last time.
please don’t do this to us again
I feel ashamed because I’ve watched it happen to so many others.
Why not us?
We talk about the survivor guilt…oh, I have it…I hug my friends who have lost a child, who are dealing with a relapse, who are my worst nightmares walking…and I do feel guilty.
How can we feel confident it won’t be us?
How DARE I feel relieved that it’s not Peyton?
If we say we prayed so hard and THAT’s why Peyton’s still in remission, am I saying that they didn’t pray enough?
If I say that we are so blessed to have her healthy and whole, are we saying that God chose NOT to bless them?
Is it easier for me to drown in the anxiety that it will happen to us than to try to find a way to express how relieved I am that it’s not?
All over the universe there are lists, lists of things that made us happy, lists of things that pretty much blew, lists of lists.
So, of course, because I’m so terribly original, I thought I’d do some lists of my very own!
This is probably the most random and scattered list you’ll ever read, full of the monumental and the definition of trivial, but still uniquely us.
On with the list of proof that 2008 did, in fact, NOT suck for us.
1. Peyton ends treatment – that really doesn’t need an explanation. I threw away the left over meds, suffer from day-to-day aftermath anxiety and am still reeling from the reality that is life without chemo….but STILL? It’s awesome and we are so very thankful.
2. Twilight – Is there any way I was going to highlight the bests of my year without a mention for the glorious obsession that was Twilight? Even though I was a hot mess of disappointment at the movie, I still spent a wonderful two weeks with Edward and the gang, braving near-fatal papercuts at the speed with which I was turning pages. Good times, goooooood times.
3. The Wii – Peter braved the backwoods of Alabama to find an ever-elusive Wii this year. This is actually as close as he got to big game hunting while living in AL and as scary as it is to face down a fellow Wii seeker when the truck is about to arrive at midnight…he’s my hero. The Wii got an awesome workout from the kids this year and, amazingly enough, gave us a fairly good workout in return. Just a word of warning for anyone who hasn’t experienced it: Wii tennis elbow is a FACT not fiction.
4. Independence – While, I have fond feelings for freedom in general, this one is actually about my kids getting their act together and stepping up to the plate in the morning. This is the year that all three of my kids…count ’em, THREE…kids learned to pick out their own clothes (HEH, uniforms, thankyouverymuch), get through the basic grooming and pack their own lunches for school. I KNOW! Skillz? Dey haz em.
5. Twitter and Facebook – my inner geek met up with my inner prom queen and they duked it out on the social networking playground. Some fantatsic new friends have been made and some old ones crawled out from under rocks.
6. Blogging – This would seem pretty self explanatory as well, but WOW how it changed this year from the past two. The blog has grown amazingly, it’s opened me to some AMAZING people, driven me to work harder and allowed me to have some pretty interesting experiences. *cough* Oprah *cough*
7. The gas prices – With Peter living in Alabama and driving home every two weeks to spend time with us we all REJOICED when he was able to stop donating organs to afford gas. His liver was starting to sweat a bit.
8. The election – Being in the pro-Obama side of the room made the results a happy thing for me, but I have to say that what made it not suck was Tina Fey, Jon Stewart and the whole slew of political funnies that accompanied the circus.
9. Did I mention that my kid is cancer free? I did? Well, it’s worth mentioning again!
10. The dog moves outside – the events that led up to the dog moving outside SUCKED beyond all human bearing…think diahrea + wagging tale + every square inch of my house…but having the dog live outside has turned into a wonderful pet experience…no more dog hair deceiving people into thinking we have wall to wall carpet and no more waking up to a dog butt rubbing on my blankets. Both a SCORE in my opinion.
11. The Crackberry – Thank you, Blackberry phone makers, for allowing my addiction to run smoothly, without interruption because you know us addicts get a little testy when we CAN’T GET TEXTS!
Ok, well, that was totally irrelevant to human existance, but made me think of so many things that made me smile this year.
How about you? I’d love to hear about your own personal 2008 non-suckage!
