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I've been pretty mentally distraught the past five days, as our daughter is taking her conquest to a new level. She's surpassed the withholding of her feces and now has made her daily nap her next victim. For the past few days, the little free time I count on to get stuff done (or, to take a nap if I didn't get any sleep the night before) has been taken up by a clingy preschooler who is yanking on my sweats, complaining to me that her stomach and her bottom hurt.

This may not seem like much to people in the real world with real problems, but for the last month or so, I've been having  back pain that's been causing me sleep loss. I just can't get comfortable. To take something to aid sleep would mean that I would be groggy the next day. So, when a night of bad sleep is coupled with a day of whining preschooler who doesn't nap, that equals cranky and achy mother who needs a break.

Luckily for me, my husband is an angel. The second he comes home, he assesses the situation. If he sees me avoiding eye contact, then he knows it's been a rough day. If I look at him, smile, kiss him and dance with him in the foyer, he knows that our daughter took a healthy dump, took a nap and has been cooperative.

So, today, when he got home, I couldn't look him in the eye because I knew I'd start crying because he's such a sympathetic person. I explained to him the night and the day I had and he, of course, asked me what he could do. That's when the phone rang.

While he was talking on the phone, our daughter decided it was time to go poop...in her underwear. I tried to get her to the toilet in time, but she had already dropped the bomb, which fell out of her underwear, onto the floor and rolled onto the shag rug in front of the toilet. I was so tired, in pain, sickened and frustrated that I started to cry and said, "You see this? This is not ok.!" I was one step away from shoving her nose in it, but somehow I managed to keep it together, cleaned up the mess and dressed my daughter in an outfit to go to my mother-in-law's house for dinner. Needless to say, I didn't feel like going.

My husband sensed this and let me off the hook (because there is ALWAYS a hook with the in-laws). He said that he'd take our daughter over there for dinner so I could have some peace and quiet.

I'm going to call October 30th of every calendar year, St. Richie's Day.

Thank you my loving and fabulous husband!

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As I mentioned in my previous post, last year around this time, my brother passed away. His death was very shocking for two reasons: First of all, he didn’t look like a dying man. But also, because I had lost my mother at a young age, and then my stand-in mother (my maternal grandmother) when I was a young adult, I thought death would leave the rest of my small family (which consisted of my five siblings and I) alone until we were old enough to actually expect it.

I guess this was an unrealistic expectation. I was kind of a dreamer that way, but when my brother died, I finally woke up. I don’t take it personally or anything. I realize that everything that happens is a culmination of hundreds of tiny details, some known and some unknown. But regardless of the details, the result is still the same. Irrevocable and binding.

The weekend after my brother died, we had planned to make our annual visit to Bishop’s Pumpkin Farm. However, that quickly was forgotten in the midst of planning for his cremation, memorial and writing an obituary. The five remaining siblings gathered in my sister’s living room and collaborated on the words we felt best described our brother and we wrote them down on a piece of paper. It was so surreal, like I was watching us in a movie doing these things. We managed to make it through the week. However, my husband reminded me that we had promised our daughter that we were going to the pumpkin patch, which even though she talked about it every day, my mind couldn’t wrap itself around anything commonplace. My mind was enveloped in a world of tiny details that didn’t involve my own healthy, happy immediate family life.

My husband also reminded me that some normalcy would be good. I absentmindedly agreed with him and we found ourselves at the pumpkin patch, going through the motions for our daughter’s happiness. I tried to find the beauty, but everything was washed over and drab. I smiled when my daughter smiled, but it was reactionary, not fully felt. At the end of the morning, I was glad to be home again and away from the squealing and screaming of hundreds of other peoples’ children that fill the pumpkin patch on the weekend before Halloween.

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A year ago tomorrow, my brother David will have been dead for one year. I still can't believe this as I'm typing it, yet I'm typing it, so it must be real. Sometimes it feels as if he's still alive due to his previous sporadic nature of showing up every once in a while and making a guest appearance. That was his trademark for so many years, but for a year or so prior to his death, he was making more of an effort to come around and spend quality time with his siblings.

He was forty years old, which made him one year older than his mother and four years older than his father when they died. Bad genes, one might say, who didn't have all the facts. I say bad genes coupled with bad habits...the same bad habits that took our mother away at the age of 39.

I'm past the blame game. I don't care what took my brother away from us. The issue is, he's gone and nothing can bring him back. All we can do now is remember him the way he would have wanted us to. Irreverently.

He was the kind of guy who would say, "Fu**  'em if they can't take a joke," and the more I live, the more I understand, really, what he was saying. It's the whole "life's too short" thing. Life's too short to get caught up on little bullshit things. It's all about learning to let go. Let go of the little things.

This is the gift my brother gave me when he died. He taught me how to let go. But it seems as if he gave me another gift. Since my brother's death, one of my other brothers (I have three of them) has been coming around more and even comes over every Saturday night and plays poker at our house. This is what I've been wanting for a long time, to have an active relationship with my two older brothers (my youngest brother, I've always been close with), and I feel that my brother David wanted the same thing, too, before he died and knowing that is almost as comforting as if we actually did.

His death reminds me of life. Of what remains here. My husband, our children, my brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews, friends and acquaintances. How can I not be happy, today and tomorrow? He wouldn't want his death to overshadow a potential smile.

Laughter always follows tears.

The Walk to Cure Diabetes (pardon the overused phrase here) went off without a hitch. It was a leisurely walk with friends on a chilly October morning. We all stopped for coffee and chatted along the way. It was great!

After we returned to the steps of the Capitol, we were saying goodbye to some friends when all of a sudden, my husband asked if our daughter was with me. I looked at him, like he was crazy because I thought he was joking. We'd been playing pass the daughter all day (taking turns keeping a eye on her while the other was busy), but I could have sworn it was still his turn. Regardless of turns, I looked around and couldn't see her anywhere. My immediately felt like I was going to puke.

My first thought was that someone kidnapped her. I ran as fast as I could after one of our friends that just departed the group to see if she had been trailed by our daughter, but when I caught up to my friend, she was alone. I ran as fast as I could back to the point of origin and found that my brother had notified the Sheriff and he was on the prowl, too. For some reason, this made me panic even more, as if the situation has escalated to a McCanns proportion. I began to feel helpless and lost and like I was about to pass out. I stopped running and looked up and saw my husband's eyes and they didn't look wild, but rather, relieved, so I knew she'd been located. "She's with Sasa," he said. Apparently, she had tagged along with her brother to a concessions stand and neither one of them had the sense to tell anyone that she was going with him. As I cried and people patted me on the shoulder and reassured me that everything was ok, I felt numb. My legs were noodles and I couldn't feel my hand stroking my daughter's hair. Sensation didn't return until we were safely seat-belted inside our car and on our way home. I felt so mentally exhausted that I went home and took a three hour nap with my daughter. There's no place like home.

Monday, the group I belong to, the Sacramento Craft Mafia, was notified by Good Day Sacramento that they wanted to do a promo spot involving the group at a little Italian deli downtown called Sampino's (which apparently has great meat and cappucinos, by the way). Not a lot of advance notice.

At first, I didn't think I could make it. We had to be there by 7:00am, which meant I had to leave my house by 6:20am and with a sleeping preschooler, I didn't know how I was going to pull it off. My husband suggested dumping our daughter off at his mother's house, but the last place she wants to go at 6:00am in the morning is ANYWHERE! She's like me, she needs some time to acclimate. That's why I almost always wake up an hour earlier than I need to so I can have some tea/coffee and prepare myself for whatever's in the day ahead of me.

So, my husband came up with a plan, he could take our daughter to his mother's before work and go in at 9:00am. This seemed more doable for our daughter's fragile sensibility, so I agreed. He asked his boss to set back his morning meeting and it was a go! I told the girls I was in, picked out my outfit, set my alarm clock and was ready to become a craft star ;).

I got up, made myself a mocha and started to get ready. I was putting on make-up in the guest, bathroom as not to wake my husband, when my daughter came out of her room and she was coughing. Not just a cough, but a bark. I felt her forehead and she was a little warm, not freakishly hot. I held her for a while on the couch and then when it was getting close to the time for me to go, I woke my husband up to take care of her while I finished getting ready. After waking him up, I went to hand her over to him, but she didn't want to go. This was the real indicator that she was sick.

I tried a couple more times to do the transfer, but she wouldn't budge. I felt bad for my husband, that she didn't want to go to him, but he knew what it meant, too. We both stared at each other knowing that we couldn't send her over to Nana's house sick. I just held her in my arms and kissed her forehead while I contemplated any other possibilities. There weren't any.

So, I told my husband that he should start getting ready for work because if I wasn't going to the shoot, there was no reason for him to be late. He didn't want to leave me home, disappointed with a sick child, but he had no choice. I assured him that we would be fine.

We TiVoed the whole two-hour block in which they said our segments would be because we thought I would be there and wouldn't be able to watch it until later. It was during a break in Wonder Pets that I switched over to Good Day Sacramento. As I held my daughter in my arms,  we watched my group on TV. The girls did a great job making us look like the fun and talented group that we are. I pointed to the girls in the group that my daughter knows and said their names. And in between coughs, she repeated their names. I looked down at my little girl in her purple unicorn pajamas and kissed her head. I felt so lucky to be the one that she wanted and that I could be the one to make her feel better. The disappointment I felt initially was long gone and I knew I wasn't missing a thing.

You can see the Sacramento Craft Mafia on Good Day Sacramento by visiting our blog!

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I survived the first week of my daughter in preschool! She didn't melt down like I thought she would after spending 3 and 1/2 straight years at home with me during the day. What she did do was open up, like a bud into a blossom. She smiled at the sight of children her age, confined in the same room as her, unable to escape her insatiable desire to play with them and talk at them. I could tell by the way a few of them backed up at her approach that they knew she was a newbie.

Anyway, regardless of her outcast status, she seems to be enjoying herself and her teacher says she's a delight.

I'd have to agree.