Not Much Time Tonight

An hour prepping the Mexican casserole a'la Gloria for dinner.  An hour and a half at the football booster club election meeting for next school year's officers.  A half hour listening to my husband try and walk my mother-in-law through the set-up for her new laptop.  An hour playing an immensely satisfying nine rounds of Boggle (that would be a non-video/computer game) at my son's request!  An hour or more tinkering around with different layouts for my two blog sites.

That leaves less than an hour before midnight.  My windmill of a perpetual bedtime goal.

I have time to tell you with no small amount of despair that it appears my year of living caffeinated must come to a screeching halt.  It seems the large amounts of ibuprofen I've ingested over the past ten years to counteract the labor-like pains of my female cycle have caught up with my stomach.  Within the past few months, the discomfort of taking the OTC medication has begun to compete with what it so effectively wipes out with 800 mg doses every 4 to 6 hours.  Because of this, the acid in my lovely and euphoric coffee drinks is no longer harmless.  Alas, it now conspires with my ibuprofen, and I'm helpless against the power of two.  I tried cutting back.  Eating more before my drink.  Reducing my intake to once or twice a week.  But it's a no go.

There's only one reasonable choice to make here: experiencing the contractions meant for childbirth, with NO child at the end, more than once a month, causes even the trendy sophisticated fun of Starbucks to pale in comparison. And I really don't want to add another drug to the mix -- Pepto Bismol, Rolaids, Tagamet -- in order to keep coffee on board.  I'm not a Band-Aid kind of girl.  I like to let a wound heal, you know?  So, it's back to herbal teas.  For now.  So all you Gold Card members, have a tall soy latte for me if you can.  Send me a pic to prove and soothe.  Thanks.

I'm wrapped in a red plaid blanket my little sister made for Zachary many years back.  The computer room, which is intended to undergo a transformation into my study at some nebulous point in the future, is a chilly place these days.  So, in an impressive flash of parental manipulation, I cajoled my son into showing his deep love for his mama by bringing her one of the warm lap blankets from the living room.  Two minutes later he returns with this lightweight cover more suited to hanging over a nice chair or spreading out across the foot of a made bed.  It's too nice to use in my estimation.  There are beautiful pictures of my baby nephew and young niece, Gabriel and Grace, now deceased, stitched on the front of it.  One in particular of Zachary with Grace sits prominent and perfect.  I push it back, telling him to get an old one from downstairs.  "But mom," he says, handing it back to me, "snuggling up in THIS blanket is like having a hug from Grace and Gabriel.  Use it!"  Please refer to the opening sentence of this paragraph for my response.

What could I say to that?  Perspective.  Interpretation of a moment.  I think of that constantly.  How each of us looks at a thing, like the proverb of the blind men and the elephant, and sees something different but yet right because of who we are.  Even with that game, the Boggle dice game, where each player picks out connected letters to form words, both of us found common words, but each of us also discovered letter combinations that the other missed.  I love my son even more for bringing me his favorite blanket with his most beloved girl on it.  You can bet I'll find every excuse to wrap myself within it, too.

Good night.