Daring Young Mom

Laylee’s speech seems to be regressing this weekend. She’s picked up this really annoying version of baby talk that sounds more like a 23-year-old imitating a baby for a Saturday Night Live sketch or an idiot Munchkin that was too mentally slow to be allowed to welcome Dorothy to Munchkin Land in song.

I’m not sure if she thinks linguistically-deficient-demented munchkins are cute or if she just hopes this new way of speaking will scare us into giving her what she wants. It is rather scary. I had trouble explaining to her what “annoying” means but I do think she caught my stop-talking-like-that drift. She told me that she wasn’t doing it. It was actually her little yellow clip talking. Also scary.

Language is important.

I found that my doctor took me much more seriously this week when I used words like “concerned”, “acute”, and “localized”, rather than my previous visit where I said things more along the lines of “freaked out”, “it kills”, and “seems weird to me.”

I remember leaving the previous visit feeling invalidated and disappointed that she hadn’t taken my concerns seriously. I was ticked, dude.

This time around tests were done, recommendations were made and I have to say, BTW, it still kills, but I have a follow-up scheduled.

So, the moral of this post is, you get more from people when you speak their language. My doctor’s language of choice is not freaked-out-new-moma-ese. My language of choice is not developmentally-delayed-munchkin-ish. And I know the yellow clip is not culpable.

This has been sort of a motto (sometimes excuse) I’ve used throughout my life for my desire to see the humor in nearly any situation. At times it’s served me well, lightening the mood at a crucial moment, and at other times it’s gotten me into trouble.

This blog, often categorized as a ”˜humor’ blog, was created as an outlet when I was going through the hardest period of my life to date. I was in so much physical and emotional pain. What could be more natural than writing about my life in a way that would crack other people up?

The first time I remember this concept being discussed was at my grandpa’s funeral. He had died suddenly and it was traumatic for all the grandkids. On the way to the funeral, we stopped for some fast food. As we were loading the drinks into the van, my mom started it up and it immediately lurched forward, drinks exploding everywhere. Every surface of the van was drenched in soda, not conducive to a long car ride. We drove all the way back home, cleaned out the van, put tarps on all of the seats and started out again. Along the way we saw a rainbow and I remember my mom producing giggles by telling us it must be a sign from God that he would never flood the van with soda again.

At the internment, we found humor in the fact that Grandpa’s next door grave neighbor was named James Kirk. How cool to be laid to rest next to the captain.

After the family dinner, out of a clear blue sky came a large dark cloud that rested right over the house where we were staying. Down poured an amazing deluge of hail. All of the grandkids went nuts, running, screaming and laughing through the pelting storm, as sun shone all around the dark cloud. It was an amazing emotional release at the end of a dreadful day. We felt sure that Grandpa had requested the storm for us personally, sick of seeing his grandkids looking so forlorn.

At Aunt J’s funeral service, the tears were near constant. She is a woman almost impossible to hyperbolize. She really IS that wonderful, not in a “perfect” way but in a perfectly real and loving way. When my mother-in-law was discussing her talk for the funeral, Aunt J stopped her at one point in her list of attributes, semi-annoyed, and said, “DON’T LIE.” I love that about her.

At every step of the two-day funeral process, Laylee would ask us, “Is this the part where her body and spirit get stuck back together and she can move again?” Sadly, no, it never was. At one point, frustrated, she asked, “Okay. Then can she please PLEASE get resurrected tomorrow?”

Soon. Soon. Not soon enough for my taste, but I guess “soon” is relative.

Laylee had everyone around her cracking up during the funeral service. She got so bored halfway through when it became apparent that no Beauty-and-the-Beast-style fireworks would be coming from the “Snow White bed” where J’s body was lying, that she started distributing goldfish crackers up and down the church pew to friends, family members and complete strangers. On her second pass, she grabbed a handful so large, it was obvious she would be spilling them all over the place. Dan whispered to her, “Laylee. That’s too many.” She sighed, rolled her eyes, took ONE cracker from her bulging fist, put it back in the bag and continued on her mission. It took a lot of control for everyone who witnessed it not to bust out laughing.

We definitely watch too many movies on long roadtrips but it keeps us sane and it makes for some really good jokes.

At a rest stop, I washed the windows of the car and Laylee (having just watched Aladdin) asked, “Did you squeege these windows? Did you bring me here?”

At a restaurant in Sumpter, where a model train circles around several times per hour, Laylee got impatient for the train to make its next pass. She laid down in mock exasperation and began to sing the famous Snow White ballad, “Some day my TRAIN will come.”

Overall, the trip was a good one. The kids did really well. Heather took some gorgeous portraits of them in her new studio. We got to see friends and family and say “See you soon” to a woman we will never stop loving.

I’m funeraling and the family’s all together. I’ll be back in a couple of days. I don’t have much coherent to say about what’s been going on. Tons of emotion, very little sleep, much of driving, a few fun moments, mostly overwhelming.

Blog out.

Dan does not like to eat certain things, things that contain flavors, or as he calls them “tongue scorching flavonoids of misery and possible death.” (He has never actually said that with his lips. It’s more in the facial region of expressivity.)

I grew up having jalapeno-eating contests with my dad and drinking Tabasco sauce by the spoonful, like any normal child. Dan, on the other hand, shies away from many of the simple culinary pleasures of life.

Besides bypassing “cranky” foods (Laylee’s word for anything from Altoids to salsa), he also gives the thumbs down on squash, mushrooms, several sea-foods, pig’s feet and anything low-fat.

Until recently I have thought he was a bit of a wimp in the eating department, a strange departure from his usual manly, Rambo-like nature. Then I heard about Supertasters.

Supertasters are people with an unusually large number of taste buds on their tongue. They truly, physiologically “can’t take the heat.” He has not been officially diagnosed with this… disorder?… but I feel confident that if I blew up that picture and a picture of my tongue, he’d have a veritable gold-mine of the little buds in comparison to me.

The word Supertaster sounds like a heroic power, like he should be able to taste and enjoy food more fully than the average citizen. But in reality, it causes him to miss out on so much of life. He is literally crippled by his over-active taste buds, unable to perform even the most basic nutritional tasks, such as feeding himself Brussels sprouts. We weep for him.

But now the question arises — is he a super hero or just a poor handicapped guy forever doomed to eat bland versions of Thai food that could have been scrumptious, given the proper peppers and spices?

If he’s a super hero, hooray! Having a plethora of extra body parts beats the ability to eat scores of malted milk balls any day (until now, he considered this to be his only claim to super-herodom).

If he’s simply handicapped, then we should get one of those blue stickers for our car so that my super-power will grow to the point that parking spaces really can become the complete focus of this blog. How nice it would be if I never had to think of anything to write again. Every day I’d just post a picture of Vinny, parked in the special wife-to-the-severely-tongue-impaired parking spot at Fred Meyer and call it good.