Bonding with Jordan through Volunteering

“This is where we usually keep the puppies, but we don’t have any in residence with us right now,” the shelter director explained, “but that’s okay because summer brings us plenty of kittens, and they’re using the space right now. The next room is kittens and cats, and our adult dogs are down the hall to the left in two separate rooms. Feel free to look around.”

The Joliet Township Animal Control Center is responsible for sheltering stray or unwanted kittens, cats, puppies, dogs and various other furry and feathered critters and placing them in forever homes, as well as assists in locating lost pets and recovering loose and stray animals to ensure public safety.

Located in a converted ranch-style home, the lobby is bright and cheerful, and visitors are immediately greeted by the sounds of ringing phones, busy staff members and a rambunctious tortoise-shell kitten climbing the sides of a four-foot play cage.

Jordan has wanted to volunteer at the shelter for the past two years, so I promised her this summer she and I would volunteer one day a week together. We completed some basic paperwork to help the shelter figure out how to best put us to use, and the director told us they would be in touch in a few days with our volunteer assignments.

Rather than leave right away, Jordan and I decided to get our kitten fix and spent a half hour visiting the fuzziest little ones to the eldest of statesmen, one more loving than the next. Just as I would kneel down to pet the cats in the lower cages, my ponytail would suddenly be flipping in the air as the residents in the apartments above were whacking away at it with their paws, vying for every bit of attention.

It was a symphony of meowing, chattering and purring, as Jordan and I took turns reading the cage tags to determine if our newest friend was a boy or a girl, if they already had names and their ages were known, and if they had any particular likes or dislikes (“Grace, 18 months, very affectionate and loves canned cat food”).

Of course we each fell in love: Jordan was convinced the twelve-week-old black short hair boy would make a perfect friend for Sparky and Alle back home, and Grace’s affectionate nature almost had convinced me one more cat would be welcome in our home. Stay strong, Laura, the idea is to find forever homes for the shelter residents in other people’s residences, not ours.

We moved into the adult dog area, and the din of the barking dogs bouncing off the concrete walls was almost deafening. The majority looked friendly, with bright, shining eyes and tails wagging so fast their bodies were wiggling. A few were timid and sat patiently at the front of their pens, waiting to sniff our hands and receive a pat on the head.

We were just about to leave when they caught our eye: Two dogs off to the side in the corner, sitting quietly and patiently awaiting their turns for some TLC. Their pens were yet unlabeled, but one looked to be a white-faced Saint Bernard and his neighbor a full-blooded mutt with a beige coat and terrier base.

They were the sweetest and gentlest dogs I had ever met. As one of the staff members came through the room to return a resident to his den, she gave us two dog treats for our new found friends. As Jordan and I each fed our friends simultaneously, they each responded in kind by spitting their treats back in their food bowls, returning our gaze and waited for us to continue petting them.

We spent an additional ten minutes with our new found friends, and Jordan and I joked that if these dogs were able to talk they would both sound like Dug the Dog from the Disney-Pixar movie “Up” (“My name is Dug, I have just met you and I love you”).

Just from our first visit I knew that Jordan and I would constantly lean on each other to be strong when gazing into the loving and grateful eyes of the puppies and kittens, dogs and cats, and to remind ourselves that our job was to find permanent homes for these wonderful animals because they deserved it.

I know this will be a great bonding experience for Jordan and me, and we’ll have the opportunity to meet and make many new friends this summer with both two and four legs.

And when I grow weary, and my logical strength is sapped by the power of puppy breath or a cat’s motor boat purring, I will fall back on my mantra: "This creature’s forever home is not my home."

Who Taught You to Paint?

“Who taught you to paint?” is technically a trick question, because funny enough you may not have the same answer to two seemingly similar questions: “Who is the first person who allowed you to paint?” or “Who is the first person who expected you to know how to paint?”

I was sixteen, my sister was fourteen, and my dad picked the hottest June day to paint our two-car garage. Neither one of us had ever held a paintbrush and had no clue how to paint. I think Dawn and I were allowed to paint for fifteen minutes before my dad became aggravated and told us to go swimming or go shopping, or go do anything else besides try to help.

We were painting the wrong way: Putting too much paint on the brush, not coating the boards evenly, not putting enough paint on the brush, not paying attention to what we were doing. We could not paint to save our souls, based on the one minute of intensive instruction we had received just moments before our first attempts.

My second attempt at painting was more than ten years later. I started small by painting our first apartment’s guest bathroom, to draw the observant eye away from the hideous plastic tiles that covered eighty percent of the room. There was so little wall space I used a paintbrush to cover the entire room, and never had the opportunity to use a roller.

Jim’s introduction to painting was similar to mine, with less instruction. His dad handed him a roller and can of paint right around his eighteenth birthday, walked Jim into a bedroom and said, “Paint this.”

Jim remembers being taught how to paint correctly by our friend Bob, who had helped us install a decorative window in our townhouse. Bob showed Jim the correct way to “cut in” or apply paint where the walls meet the ceiling, the proper way to hold paintbrushes and paint rollers, the best way to apply different types of paints, and the importance of quality paintbrushes and PATIENCE.

As Bob was a professional carpenter and painter, he had such a steady hand from years of practice that he never taped-off wooden trim or where the ceiling and the walls met, and encouraged Jim to paint the same way. And once Jim was taught to paint as a professional more than twenty years ago, we have both loved to paint ever since.

I wanted to paint Jamie’s room solo today, but Jordan kept asking if she could help. I knew it would end up taking me twice as long, and I really wanted to get around to painting both the walls and the ceiling in one day, AND get the first coat of paint on the kids’ bathroom walls.

Jordan watched intently and waited patiently while I cut-in and painted the first big wall. I explained every single step I took and why the wall color wasn’t matching from section to section as the paint dried.

I then loaded the paint roller and handed it carefully to Jordan, reminding her to paint the letter “W” and then fill in the spaces with nice even strokes. As the room had only been painted two years ago, one coat would thankfully do the trick, and Jordan’s even paint strokes were quickly transforming the boring beige and baby blue walls to a more tween, dude appropriate Porpoise Grey.

Jordan helped me paint two entire walls, leaving the last full wall for her brother to finish. Before arming him with a roller, Jamie watched how Jordan painted, and Jordan then stayed on to offer pointers.

One coat of paint, two children, a half-gallon of Porpoise Grey and six hours later, Jamie’s room looked fabulous. While I’ll probably wake up early tomorrow morning and bang out the ceiling by myself, it made me smile to hear Jordan and Jamie proudly telling their friends that they painted Jamie’s room.

Next stop, the art of the shovel and digging out dead shrubs once Mom is done painting.

The "To Do" List Beckons

I promise to be back tomorrow, but today the "To Do" list has a few too many items on it, and we have a family birthday party right around the corner.

Today my son's former bedroom will be transformed from little guy Spiderman to tween rad skateboarding den, and the ugly white walls in Jordan and Jamie's bathroom will finally be covered in two coats of ice sky blue.

Wish me luck in keeping the paint out of my ponytail --- Have a great day!

Thanks for Coming Along for the Ride!

When I decided to start blogging in February of this year, I had no idea where the activity would take me. I knew I would enjoy it – putting my thoughts on paper, if you will, and sharing my posts with whomever would take the time to read them.

What I didn’t expect was success. While I knew some family members and friends would follow along as time allowed, I didn’t expect people to consistently follow along (75 total posts officially today), with The Zen Shark averaging almost eighty daily readers.

And I certainly didn’t expect The Zen Shark to be read world-wide, and yet this blog has been viewed in more than eighty countries as of yesterday: Algeria, Angola, Aruba, Australia, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Belize, Benin, Bolivia, Botswana, Brazil, Burma, Cameroon, Cambodia, Canada, Central African Republic, Chile, Congo, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Estonia, Ethiopia, Finland, France, Germany, Ghana, Guinea, Guyane, Iceland, India, Iran, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Kenya, Laos, Latvia, Liberia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malaysia, Mexico, Mongolia, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Netherlands, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Peru, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Senegal, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sudan, Sweden, Tanzania, Tunisia, Turkey, Uganda, Ukraine, United Kingdom, United States (all 50!), Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

So to everyone, everywhere, who continues to read my blog, THANK YOU! I’ll keep writing, and I’m always open to your suggestions.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Expiration Date Exasperation

Thanks to a past health class lecture, I believe it was in both Jordan and Jamie’s kindergarten years, they are obsessed with dying from food poisoning by eating expired food.

And kudos to the physical education teachers who taught this topic, because the somewhat exaggerated safety lesson has stuck with both Jordan and Jamie for five years.

Go ahead, laugh all you want. But I am not remotely joking when I tell you that at least twice a day I am asked by each of them “Is this expired?” “Is this bad already?” “Is it okay to eat this?”

It doesn’t matter what type of food product it is – from a loaf of bread to fresh fruit to canned veggies to deli meat. What’s worse, it doesn’t matter if they personally placed these same exact items in the shopping cart the day before when they helped shop for groceries: If they can’t find and/or translate the expiration date on the product’s label, they will ask Jim or me to confirm the food’s safety.

And in the worst-case scenario, the kids find the expiration date, determine that the food is safe to eat per the label, yet still insist on asking for confirmation. I swear the unspoken epicurean rule of thumb between the two of them is ‘trust, but verify.’

According to the USDA’s Food Safety and Inspection Service, except for infant formula and some baby foods, product dating is not required by Federal regulations. And while this factoid means nothing to my personal Food Police team, it seems a bit of an oxymoron that the Food Safety and Inspection Service doesn’t concern itself with healthy versus spoiling food.

In our house, if the food in question has one of the six date labels on it, that is when it expires, and eating it means you will die instantly. In case you’re curious (and happen to be cleaning the pantry one day), here’s a quick guide as to how little food safety value these labels provide once we as consumers bring the food home:

“Best if Used by (or Before)” Date: This date has nothing to do with food safety, but refers to when the product is at its peak for best flavor or quality.

“Born On” Date: I have personally never seen this label before, but it appears most commonly on beer bottles, and refers to the product’s date of manufacture. For those apparently in the know, beer has a fridge life of about twelve weeks, and then starts to lose its flavor quality.

“Guaranteed Fresh” Date: Again, food products with this label (most commonly baked goods) are still safe to eat after the posted date, but will not be at their absolute best.

“Pack” Date: This label is usually placed on canned or packaged foods, but can sometimes make things more complicated for the user by using the Julian calendar versus the standard day-month-year format.

“Use By” Date: As determined by the product’s manufacturer, this date again refers to optimum taste quality. The food is still edible, but it is not at its peak taste level. 

"Sell By" Date:  Maybe the most useful label for consumers, "sell by" tells the store how long to display the product for sale before they physically remove it from the shelves. Again, like all the other labels discussed, this labeling and/or the pulling of products past the printed date is not mandatory. So as a rule of thumb, always select the “newest” item for freshness and taste.

So in the end, it comes down to common sense when determining the freshness and safety of the food we feed our families; let’s face it, we’ve all encountered at least one item in our fridge that was a little too stinky or had grown fur that we felt safe throwing directly in the garbage.

And in my research travels, I did find the following bit of information that across the board will be the most useful factoid to families near and far:  Milk is usually fine until a week after the “Sell By” date; when in doubt, use the smell test. 

The Return of the Dandelion Slayer

While the recent weather has not exactly been conducive for outdoor summer activities (unless of course you enjoy frolicking in driving sheets of rain and dodging bolts of lightning), it has been incredibly helpful in the resurrection of our dandelion and clover-choked lawn.

Our work in progress ...

As I mentioned earlier in the week, after one chemical bomb application of weed eliminator by the Dandelion Slayer less than four weeks ago, and Jim and I following the maintenance plan to the letter, our lawn is almost completely without the offending weeds.

Sir William the Dandelion Slayer returned to our castle grounds again today, timing his visit perfectly between the sporadic rain showers. As you can see, the lawn has taken a 180º turn from where we started barely a month ago. Sir William agreed that the lawn looked impressively better, sprayed magical lawn potion once again, and bestowed a puppy treat upon Buck Buck the Magnificent prior to his departure.

And as I stared out the window and watched the next thunderstorm roll in, I wondered if it were true that the nitrogen in lightning really did make the grass greener after a storm.

The official Landscaping 101 answer is a qualified ‘yes’ via a quick chemistry lesson:

Electrical energy emitted by lightning is strong enough to break apart nitrogen, which makes up almost eighty percent of the Earth’s atmosphere. These broken nitrogen bonds immediately link to oxygen to form nitrogen dioxide, which easily dissolves in water to create nitric acid, which then finally breaks down to form nitrates.

Nitrate-filled raindrops then fall from the sky and are absorbed by the soil, helping boost the growth of chlorophyll which gives grass its green color.

The two questions yet unanswered quantitatively by science is how much the electricity in lightning affects the green color of the grass; specifically, 1) how much nitrate actually forms during any given storm, and 2) how much nitrate is captured by raindrops and reaches the ground versus the amount of nitrates that are formed and simply blow away before they can ever be captured in a rain drop and reach the ground.

Quantitative science be damned; my positive firsthand experience tells me the recent Thor-like bolts of lightning coupled with Sir William the Dandelion Slayer’s magic elixir have joined to create a lush lawn I am no longer ashamed of.

And once it stops raining, I might even be able to go outside and walk on it barefoot without fear of sticker weeds between my toes. 

Read, Clip, Copy and Share, File, Repeat

My favorite college professor told me if he didn’t learn something new every day, then he felt like he had let an unknown opportunity pass him by; that he had taken his time on the planet for granted that day.

As a broadcast journalism major, I was a news junkie, reading multiple newspapers and magazines a day and viewing feeds of both broadcast and cable news television stations to prepare for the student-produced nightly cable newscast. I consumed information like others consumed food; stuffing my mind with vast quantities of knowledge in an effort to create a balanced, newsworthy and entertaining twenty-eight minute program on a nightly basis, five times a week. 

As a writer, the news junkie transitioned easily to the research geek, and I continued to consume even more information in its evolving, electronic-based and easily accessible forms. My professor would be proud – I couldn’t help but learn something new each day, whether I wanted to or not.

But this desire for knowledge left me with an odd quirk that I haven’t been able to ditch since college: I absolutely CANNOT throw away a magazine in my possession unless I at least scan it cover to cover, clip articles and/or photos I find interesting or may need for future reference, copy and share articles/photos that family members and/or friends might find useful, file the paperwork, recycle the remainder of the magazines’ skeletons and repeat until the stack next to the bed is gone.

The range of publications are equally varied; as comforting as “Better Homes and Gardens”, “Midwest Living” and  “Parenting”, to “National Geographic”, “Newsweek” and “Time” for a brief overview of international and national features at hand, to “Aviation Weekly”, “Thrasher” and “Action Pursuit Games”, which all hint to past-life projects that I never quite lost interest in.

Oddly enough, my mom and sister have the same funny quirk, so we are constantly trading articles whenever we get together, or mailing them if the information is timely and pressing. This burden we carry, as creatures compelled to read and share information with others, is completely befuddling to my brother-in-law, who would gladly throw a lit match to our collections and free us of our shared responsibility.

As I am still on my summer house-cleaning binge, today I made it to the bottom of my magazine stack, a small bin next to my reading chair filled to the brim with clipped, glossy pages. Tomorrow evening I will sort, copy and file, and cross this item off my master “To Do” list. 

The First Day of Summer 2011

As a lifelong Midwest resident, nothing gets my attention faster in the spring and summer months than the sound of the neighborhood tornado siren.

Growing up in Niles, Illinois, I can still remember tornado drills at Oak Elementary School: Moving from the classroom single file in a calm and orderly fashion into the hallway, where we immediately knelt down in front of our lockers, ducked and covered our heads with our hands, and were expected to wait quietly and patiently until the ‘all clear’ bell rang.

There were a total of two tornados that came near our house in my younger years – one that struck during a school day and one that happened over a weekend, and thankfully neither ever touched down. At home, my sister and I each grabbed our favorite stuffed animals and rushed into the basement, while my mom and dad raced around the first and second floors opening windows to help equalize the house’s pressure and save it from destruction (who the hell ever thought of that wise idea?).

As an adult, I heard the Niles’ tornado sirens shrieking on a hot July afternoon while I was working at Baxter Healthcare’s V. Mueller division, which manufactured ring-handled instruments found on surgical trays. As the building’s designated safety coordinator, it was my job to rush everyone from the front office and manufacturing floor into the employee locker rooms, the safest places in a building filled with millions of shards of stainless steel waiting to impale all of us.

Jim and I have spent the bulk of our dating and married lives residing in Aurora, Lisle, Naperville and Plainfield, all western suburbs of Chicago rather accustomed to ferocious thunderstorms and occasional tornados, including the deadly August 1990 Plainfield tornado that killed 29 people.

Tornado sirens sounding once a week during the spring and summer months quickly turned from terrifying to me to the weather norm for our new neighborhoods. As a matter of fact, what prompted us to move to Plainfield was the fact that our Naperville house did not have a basement, and an overactive spring tornado season convinced us our family’s long-term safety was at stake if we were going to remain in the western suburbs: We needed a basement for our future safety and current peace of mind.

As we watched the weather forecast after dinner and took a quick peek at The Weather Channel’s radar maps, both sources made it look like Plainfield was in a relative safe zone, with two separate storm systems skirting by us to the north and to the south.

But the practical views out our back kitchen window and out on our deck told a different story: The air was still and ungodly hot and humid, and the sky was a sickish green-gray. Within a fifteen- minute span, our county went from safe to thunderstorm watch to thunderstorm warning to tornado warning.

As everything was happening so quickly, Jordan and Jamie had little time to react, and were rather calm until they heard the tornado sirens, both close by and in the distance. Jordan immediately grabbed our cats, Jamie grabbed Buck, Jim grabbed a flashlight and cell phone and we headed for the basement, my laptop tucked firmly under my arm.

Within minutes, Storm Central was setup in our unfinished basement: While I listened to National Weather Service broadcasts on our emergency radio, Jim and Jordan scrambled around with cables and cords, assembled a folding table and hooked up my laptop as well as a small television to the spare cable connection. As Jim and I took turns running up to the first floor to look out the windows, Jamie flipped between The Weather Channel and local television stations while studying an Illinois county map on my laptop.

The temperature must have dropped at least twenty degrees, the weaker winds were strong enough to bend our twenty-plus foot backyard trees like rubbery dog toys, and the stronger gusts were powerful enough to knock me off balance. Lacy fingers of lightning competed with bolts that lit up the blackened sky, briefly revealing menacing clusters of towering clouds.

Once the warnings passed, everyone’s first stop was the kitchen, as apparently waiting out a tornado builds hearty appetites. Jordan and Jamie ranked this evening as the scariest Plainfield storm they remember because the lights kept dimming in the basement and the loud sirens blaring in the wind made it creepier because the alarms made it feel like a tornado was just around the corner.

Happy First Day of Summer, everyone …

It's Finally Time to Garden

My Fantasy Garden 2011

I’d like to take a moment to remind all my maniac master gardener friends who feel June 20^th might as well be as late as November for taking the first trip to the garden center or placing the first flower in the ground: While all of you were busy in early May picking the perfect geraniums or splitting your hostas, I was busy waging an all-encompassing war to take my lawn back from the offending armies of dandelions, clover and sticker weeds.

And in great news, after one chemical bomb application of weed eliminator by the Dandelion Slayer, and Jim and I following the maintenance plan to the letter, our lawn is almost completely without the offending weeds, freeing me to move on to the more enjoyable task of shopping for colorful outdoor embellishments.

As July 4^th marks the seventh anniversary in our Plainfield house, Jim and I spent the first two summers un-landscaping the house, pulling out beautiful yet dangerous rose bushes, over planted flower beds and shrubs that were more brown and dead than lush and alive, and generally ugly perennials that had outlived their beauty.

With every summer we ‘completed’ one side of the house, planting hundreds of tiny perennials and re-establishing flowerbeds that were all well researched to benefit from the varying pools of sunlight and shade around our home that faces east/west on a pie shape cul-de-sac lot.

Oh, and let’s not forget the mulch, the bags and bags of chunky cedar chips. I hate the colors, shapes and SMELL of standard mulch, never liked lava rocks or quartz stone, and one summer I fell in love with cedar chips when I saw how beautiful it looked (and smelled!) in an East coast bed-and-breakfast perennial garden.

So after the slight time delay of the dandelion slaughter, Jim and I are ready to finally finish the fourth side of the house. As I have a horrible habit of losing spatial perspective the moment I walk into a garden center, prior to ever picking up my car keys I pick up a tape measure and sketch-out an almost scale drawing of the area I’m working on.

For some reason the former owner stopped the house-flanking flowerbed ten feet from the end of the deck on this side (?), so I will be spending some time digging out grass and completing the flower strip. In lighter news (pun intended), as this is the side of the house that bakes from sunup to sundown, I’ll have an almost unlimited selection of perennials to choose from and fill the space.

As the weather does not look too promising in the days’ ahead, I may spend my time outside in short bursts, trimming tree branches and shrubs and digging out the single shrub we lost to last winter’s piles of salty snow.

Regardless, I know the next two weeks will be busy, both inside and out, as we prep for our family’s annual 4^th of July party when we celebrate Jordan and Jim’s birthdays (as I have always believed, if you really want motivation to finish honey-do items around the house, throw a party).

And while I logically know I won’t have time to strip and paint our pathetically peeling backyard deck prior to the party, I’ll instead try to steer everyone’s eyes upward with a series of hanging baskets, party lights and fireworks, complemented with VERY small pools of light provided by citronella candles and torches.

Who wants to see everyone else’s feet, anyway?

Father's Day 2011

Growing up, I remember my dad not liking Father’s Day, calling it a pretend holiday created by Hallmark to make money. As he wasn’t close with his own dad, but my mom was close with hers, the family would spend Father’s Day Eve with Grandpa and Grandma B, and the actual holiday with our mom and dad.

Our celebrations were fun and simple when I was little, usually spent fishing and canoeing at Cedar Lake and grilling on the beach for dinner. Gifts and cards were always hand made, even though Dad would tell us each year he didn’t want anything; he already had everything he wanted or needed.

This year, as in years’ past, my Dad as well as Jim told us they wanted nothing for Father’s Day, and as in years’ past, Jordan, Jamie and I ignored them both. Jordan and Jamie created cards by hand and with computer assistance, and with the held of PhotoShop I created a photo collage for Jim and Dad with a handful of my all-time favorite family pictures.

We arrived at Mom and Dad’s for a late afternoon barbeque to a picture-perfect garden -- both of them had obviously been very busy over the past few weeks, creating flowerpots and hanging baskets and planting summer fruits and vegetables to convert their enormous backyard patio to a beautiful summer oasis.

Topics of conversation ranged from Dad’s healing eye to Jordan’s recently-removed arm cast, family gossip and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s taste in women. Jamie brought his skateboard and demonstrated new tricks, and I think we convinced Mom and Dad to rent both “Black Swan” and “The Boxer.”

I shared that my blog was doing well, and had established a solid following in twenty-one countries, recently adding India, Ukraine and Mexico to the list. Both asked how I came up with my ideas, and in exchange gave me a boatload of new topics and material that I could use in the weeks and months ahead.

After a great afternoon and early evening before the mosquitoes arrived to eat us alive and/or carry us away for future meals, we gave kisses goodbye and headed back to Plainfield for the night. And as I noted the smiles on Jim and Dad’s faces as they exchanged goodbye hugs, I knew both dads had the Father’s Day they really wanted, spending the day with their families.

A Fascination with Those Who Hoard

My name is Laura, and I am ashamed to admit that I am a devout viewer of The Learning Channel’s “Hoarding: Buried Alive”, and am counting the days until A&E’s “Hoarders” season debuts next Monday evening.

For those of you with more mainstream viewing habits, TLC describes its series as one that “takes viewers into homes cluttered and packed by people who are obsessed with saving items in large quantities that most people would discard in the trash,” while A&E explains “each 60-minute episode is a fascinating look inside the lives of two different people whose inability to part with their belongings is so out of control that they are on the verge of a personal crisis.”

I loved these two shows from the first episode of each, yet I am hard-pressed to explain my fascination with either of them, as the programming descriptions are at best kind if not almost outright untrue in their clean language.

Let me start by explaining I personally feel there are two different types of hoarders on these shows: There are those who truly have some type of compulsive disorder who cannot see the obvious craziness of cramming nine-thousand square feet of QVC purchases into a twelve-hundred square foot house; and then there are those individuals who simply lost their garbage cans twenty years ago, never bothered to find or replace them, and simply use their home as one large dumpster.

When the producers cut to a shot of a refrigerator filled with rotting, oozing food products, Jim can barely control his gag reflex and buries his head in a pillow. I instead stare directly at the screen, dumbfounded at how any person could live in that situation.

“You know I would never deny you watching a program you like,” Jim said from behind the pillow. “But what the hell do you get out of watching this show? Half of these scenes put me on the verge of an anxiety attack, and I can’t understand why they don’t bother you.”

And after much soul searching I determined I have absolutely no good reason whatsoever for enjoying this show. I can’t even call it a guilty pleasure, as that term is specifically reserved for the act of watching Jerry Springer for one segment just to make myself feel better about my own life when I’m having a down moment.

Maybe it is the complete cycle of the show itself that I appreciate: The sad beginning of someone in great distress, the arrival of family, friends and therapists in the middle to help address the glaring issue at hand, underfoot and God knows where else, and the happy ending of someone with their emotional affairs in order and a clean house to provide them with a fresh start.

Sounds good, doesn't it? That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Our Children Have Discovered Sleeping Late

Like Jim and me, Jordan and Jamie love to stay up late and watch movies with us, or not sleep when they are hosting sleepovers, so apparently there is a vampire gene.

On weekends and special occasions when they were little, Jim and I would allow Jordan and Jamie to stay up past their bedtimes, but we were always very strict about naptime schedules the following day.

Unfortunately, as most parents know, toddlers and younger children who stay up past their bedtimes do not sleep in. They rise and shine at their usual time, full of happiness and sunshine, and sometime between one and two in the afternoon turn into the spawn of Satan. Cranky, crabby, hissy and damn-near rabid, they are inconsolable until their sleep clocks can be reset that evening, or even during an afternoon nap if you are one of those lucky parents.

But this summer has marked Jordan and Jamie’s transition to tweenhood, with non-stop appetites, growth spurts, chockfull social calendars and internal clocks that seem to have switched overnight, no pun intended.

After years of being accused of laziness for the amount of time teens spent time in bed under the covers, studies finally revealed that teens’ internal biological clocks, or their circadian rhythms, temporarily reset due to a specific hormone release. This release of melatonin later at night during the teen years gears their bodies to fall asleep later and wake up later, making it difficult for them to fall asleep at a healthy and/or socially-acceptable bedtime.

I have always held the firm belief that your body will tell you what it needs if you take the time to listen, and Jordan and Jamie are generally tuned-in to how they’re feeling and what they need to do to be at their best.

Yesterday morning, they apparently needed more sleep than the usual hibernating black bear. Eight o’clock passed, nine, ten, eleven (?!), at which point I crept quietly into their rooms and checked for pulses and fevers: Both munchkins were out cold, and eventually staggered out of their rooms minutes apart just before noon, confused but very well rested.

Brunch waffles with whip cream and strawberries soon made their way to the kitchen table as we all sat and watched the early afternoon thunderstorm put on a lovely display of heat lightning and sideways waves of torrential rain. 

This Does Hurt Me More than It Hurts You

The first few weeks of summer break at Casa Dralle sometimes seem less fun and more structured than when the kids are in school: Dralle summer school, intensive house cleaning and doctors appointments initially fill the family ‘to do’ list so we can clear the decks for the rest of the summer.

It initially started with what should have been a straightforward dental checkup for Jamie. We had seen a little grey speck on his back lower molar, and suspected he probably had his first cavity. I thought he would have his standard x-rays, cleaning and exam, and we would schedule a near-future appointment to handle the cavity.

No such luck for Jamie. Our dentist had time in her schedule, and she determined the cavity was quite deep and serious, and should be taken care of right away. 

I could see Jamie tensing up in the chair, as I had had NO time to prep him about everything that was literally about to happen in the next two minutes. Beautiful Dr. Samantha explained every single step to Jamie, comforting him, patting his shoulder and continually referring to him as her handsome and brave ‘buddy’.

Jamie asked to see all the instruments (including the needle), asked if there would be any side effects from the shot, and if the drill would hurt, because it looked sharp. Dr. Samantha admitted the first shot would pinch, but he would feel nothing after that.

I held Jamie’s hand as he received his first injection, and he took it like a pro (I personally wanted to die when I saw the size of the needle, and calculated that I could probably take Dr. Samantha in a fight if she hurt my baby).

The fifteen-minute procedure went off without a hitch, and Jamie got a kick out of playing with the ‘spit sucker’, how numb the right side of his face was, how his cheek and lower eyelid were both puffy and droopy at the same time, and how fat his lips felt.

I arrived home long enough to share Jamie’s adventure with Jim, and then head back out to pick up Jordan for her orthopedist appointment. Her left wrist, which she had broken six month’s earlier, was swelling again and hurting badly.

We arrived early for our appointment and waited almost an hour to see the doctor, as Jordan became increasingly anxious and convinced herself her wrist was broken again.

As Jordan’s name was called, we were greeted by a kind and grandfatherly doctor, who immediately brushed the hair away from Jordan’s eyes when he saw she had been crying.

As Murphy’s Law would have it, the doctor’s office had failed to order an x-ray prior to Jordan’s appointment, and our insurance would not cover an x-ray if it were taken in the doctor’s office, only at the hospital next door.

“I am ordering an emergency x-ray, and you are going to run as fast as you can next door to get this done, and be back here within twenty minutes with a copy of the disk, because I absolutely must leave the office at 5:20. Think you can do it, Mom?” the doctor asked.

With Jordan in full-blown tears, and the clock ticking at 4:53, we flew down a series of interconnecting hallways, and with the miraculous help and speed of all involved parties at the hospital, from admitting to imaging to building security, we were back in our doctor’s office by 5:12.

The x-rays were inconclusive, but Jordan’s pain was intense. For safety and comfort, the doctor ordered a mid-arm cast to isolate her wrist for ten days, and hopefully new x-rays would reveal the swelling was diminished and the bone was fine. Matt, Jordan’s favorite orthopedic tech, stayed late to cast her arm in a stunning lime green sleeve.

I raced at breakneck speed so I could get Jordan home, fed and dosed with painkillers to bring her some relief. Driving home during rush hour on a Friday afternoon, I pegged the speedometer at a whopping thirty-five miles an hour with a daughter in the passenger seat begging me to shoot her.

By 8:00 p.m., both Jordan and Jamie were out cold, exhausted by their medical adventures. I found myself sitting in my comfy bedroom chair, staring at the television that you could not pay me to tell you what I was supposed to be watching. I was emotionally crispy.

Jim and I have been blessed with two amazingly healthy and active children, from birth forward. When our other friends’ children were in diapers and projectile vomiting and spiking four hundred degree temperatures, Jordan and Jamie never suffered a single ear infection or scary trip to the emergency room.

While Jordan took three trips to the emergency room prior to the age of six for falling down a single stair and biting her lip, falling out of a backyard tree fort, and spiking a 106º fever, Jamie (knock on wood) has never seen the inside of an emergency room and only once hit a fever over 105º. I thank God every day for their health and well being.

HOWEVER, the flipside to this blessing is Jim and I are not remotely experienced in seeing our children in pain. And even though we are arguably two of the most calm, laid-back people in times of high stress, nothing prepares a parent for seeing their child suffer.

So yesterday I stood outside an MRI tube for forty-five minutes while Jordan’s arm was scanned, and she only panicked slightly at the beginning of the test due to the outrageously loud noises.

The tech came back into the room, calmed her down, and repositioned her in the “Superman” pose, flat on her tummy with her arms outstretched in front of her, padded everywhere with pillows of all shapes and sizes to keep her comfortable.

As the tech pushed the button and the skinny platform slowly rolled back into the tube for one final test, I gently rubbed Jordan’s legs and wished more than anything that I could somehow take her place.

Summer Cleaning with the Kids

I know this probably sounds like a total buzz kill, but within the first few weeks of Jordan and Jamie being home on summer break, we take a day or two (okay, sometimes longer, depending on the damage) to clean their rooms in preparation for the summer season.

We start the process with the dumping of Jamie’s overstuffed backpack and Jordan’s bulging book bag and Pendaflex in the center of the guest room: All usable school supplies are packed away for the upcoming year, and I take the time to review each and every piece of paper to decide which ones make it into the memory boxes for the past school year.

Some of the best advice I ever received is to take digital pictures of all your children’s artwork as well as odd-sized class projects that will be difficult to store for the long haul without risking damage to them. Depending on volume, these individual photos can then be converted to an artsy-style coffee table book of all your children’s work by grade level.

Next we move on to their closets and dresser drawers: At the end of each summer I make the same mistake and assume my children will not outgrow 99% of the clothing I pack away for them for the following summer. I must admit, though, if Jamie ever wanted to join the Village People, his sleeveless t-shirt that barely covers his chest would help him fit right in.

After all saved clothing is tried on and placed back in a new bag marked ‘donate,’ we move on to all the current clothing hanging in the closet and various shoes that should no longer be seen in public due to permanent stains, larger than life rips and tears, personal graffiti and general outgrowth and pitch them directly in the ‘do not recycle’ pile.

With all these bags moved out of the way and packed in the minivan or the garage, room is now available to back in the bulldozers and clear walkways on the floor for Phase III – A Place for Everything and Everything in its Place.

Beds are stripped down to the mattresses and summer blankets and sheets take the place of fuzzy flannels. All flat surfaces are cleared and dusted, and miners’ hats with lights are donned to clear out the clutter temporarily ‘stored’ under the beds.  Clothes that remain go back to dresser drawers and closet hangars, new pictures go on the walls and this year each bedroom will be treated to a new coat of paint.

Jordan and Jamie’s goal for the remainder of the summer is to then keep their bedrooms as close to Phase III as possible, with beds made every morning and books, toys and general mayhem kept in their appropriate bins.  With so much free time on our children’s hands over the next few months, every parent should set the summer bar high and dream big.

What? No, I have not been snorting sunscreen. 

What Are Normal Sleep Habits?

I knew it was going to be one of those weird sleep nights – while sitting in my much-too-comfortable bedroom chair I started to doze off around 9:30, WAY too early to turn in for the evening.

That of course led to a second wave of energy, which kicked my brain into high gear and didn’t allow me to crash until well past two in the morning.

My brain settled in, fittingly enough, on the topic of sleep, and all the different things I need and patterns I must follow to get a good night’s rest.

For starters, the room needs to be cool, if not cold, and I am not by any stretch of the imagination someone whose temperature runs high. But as Jim and the kids have thermostats set on nuclear, I’ve grown accustomed to sleeping with penguins dancing through our room.

If I do find myself sleeping in a warm room at someone else’s house or while traveling, I always sleep with a sheet or blanket pulled up all the way under my chin, as vampires will leave you alone if they do not have easy jugular access.

And then there’s the topic of body position: I always sleep on my right side, curled in the fetal position, because not a single body part can EVER hang off the side or end of the bed. Let’s face it, everyone knows zombies can’t grab you if your entire body is safely within the perimeter of the mattress top (I watched a lot of scary movies when I slept over at my grandparents’ house as a child).

I must always wear WHITE socks to bed. Seriously, one night I actually went down to the laundry room to pull a pair of white socks out of the dryer because my puffy purple socks were distracting me.

As Jordan, Jamie and I always sleep on the right side of the bed, if they crash in our bed during family movie night, I end up sleeping on the right side of THEIR beds, as I know better than to wake a sleeping Dralle child.

Another interesting nocturnal feature, Jamie sleepwalks into our bedroom at least once a week, eyes wide open and talking about something obtuse as he comes through our door. We’ve learned to simply walk him back to his bed, tuck him in, and he immediately drops back into a coma.

And as an added bonus, Jordan, Jamie and I talk incessantly in our sleep, and Jim snores, which now explains why our pets sleep so soundly during the day, because the house is so damn loud during the night.

All family pets generally end up trying to sleep in the master bedroom: Our dog who somehow still manages to jam himself under my side of the bed (next to the monsters), our elder cat who sleeps at the foot of the bed on my side, and our kitten who still enjoys sleeping on my head and fluffing my hair.

I used to enjoy falling asleep with the tv on, setting a timer to turn it off by a certain point in the morning, until I read this wasn’t a healthy way to allow the brain to relax prior to sleep. I also removed the actual alarm clock from my bedside, and now use my cell phone instead. This change now prevents me during insomnia periods from doing “sleep math,” i.e., “if I fall asleep within fifteen minutes, I’ll get a whole two hours of sleep before the alarm goes off.”

My eyes are finally getting heavy and it’s time to claim the right side of Jamie’s bed, as the little monkey konked-out in my spot hours ago. I place his dangling leg back on the bed, cover him and kiss him goodnight. One can never be too careful in the witching hour.

Dralle Summer School Opens This Week

Let me start off by saying I am a huge fan of summer break. I love spending time with the kids at the pool, taking mini vacations around the area and hosting our fair share of friend sleepovers. I especially enjoy the total lack of scheduling, having the freedom to be spontaneous, to stay up way too late and sleep in even later.

However, seventy-plus free days without any academic input I am firmly convinced leads to brain drain. From basic math skills to spelling and punctuation, sharp minds turn to oatmeal if the brain remains unchallenged.

Hence, Jim and I founded the Dralle Summer School program a few summers ago in an effort to seal the Swiss cheese knowledge holes generated by sunscreen fumes, chlorine and barbeque smoke.

As Jordan and Jamie love to read as much as I do, weekly trips to the library over the summer are never met with protest. Sometimes we participate in the library’s formal reading program, other times we simply utilize the reading list to find new authors and books to spark our interest.

Daily journaling tends to be free form in nature. Sometimes I offer a topic suggestion or two, other times they choose to write about their summer adventures in progress. Spelling and punctuation are checked to keep skills sharp, and every so often Jordan or Jamie will opt to throw in an illustration or two for fun. I’ll return the favor with a word search or crossword puzzle.

And then there’s math: Rather than cover any new territory, we spend the summer reviewing all lessons from the previous year, focusing most on areas that gave Jordan or Jamie the most challenges, and always taking the time to pull out the flashcards and drill, drill, drill the core basics.

Yes, on the days that we are in town we hold “school” every day: Worksheets I either create or download from the internet are left in a folder for each of them on the kitchen table the night before with their journals, and are expected to be completed before we go anywhere for the day. A half-hour of reading is up to Jordan and Jamie to squeeze into their schedules, whether in the car, at the beach or before bedtime.

Just for the heck of it, we log the books they read so Jordan and Jamie have a record of their summer accomplishments, as well as their ‘grades’ on their worksheets to track their progress.

While this may sound like a lot of work, it takes less than fifteen minutes an evening to pull work packets together for both kids, and another fifteen to review their journals and worksheets. And as the dog days of summer wear on, I like to believe the kids actually appreciate the small amount of structure these activities provide.

It’s difficult to tell from Jordan and Jamie’s first quarter grades the following school year how much of a difference Dralle Summer School makes, but I know it makes me feel better to know that over the long hot summer we try to be as equally educational and entertaining as possible. 

Grillin' Guys

One of the things I love about summer (other than this season’s rather unusual temperature swings) is dinner on the grill. Tonight marked the second evening that Jim and Jamie barbequed dinner for the family.

This is only half unusual – as I have explained before, Jim is one of the most amazing cooks on the planet; I am a genius in the appetizer and dessert departments. Together we are the perfect dinner party team.

However, the past two nights Jamie has asked Jim to show him how to use the grill so he could cook dinner for us by himself. And being Jim’s son, he wasn’t interested in hotdogs and hamburgers, so Jamie’s first meal consisted of grilled rib eye steak, garlic-roasted broccoli and double-baked macaroni and cheese.

Dinner was beyond fabulous, and I’m not sure who was the most proud of Jamie’s first summer meal, but I know none of us left the table hungry. 

As Jordan was at a sleepover this evening, Jamie scaled back slightly on his menu with simple bratwurst and grilled-butter corn on the cob. Tomorrow he wants Jim to show him the proper way to flip cheeseburgers, and eventually wants to learn how to make a whole chicken on the rotisserie.

Summer Chefs 2011

Not to be left out of the fun, Jordan has asked if we can start making special summer desserts to go with Jamie’s dinners. While I told her I thought it was a great idea, Jim and I just figured out we’ll need to add a few more laps at the neighborhood pool and walk the dog a few extra blocks each night just to keep up with all these great meals to come.

Not a bad price to pay for two personal summer chefs …

Happy Birthday, Jordan!

June 9, 1999: Our alarm clock went off at exactly 5:00 a.m., as I was expected at the hospital for my pre-scheduled delivery at 6:00 a.m. As my first pregnancy was incredibly healthy and uneventful with the exception of gestational diabetes, my OB/GYN did not want me going a single hour past my due date.

I remember dying for a cup of coffee, but had been told no food or drink after midnight. I kept walking through our house, remembering something my mom said about how strange it was to come home from the hospital for the first time with this little stranger who would change your life forever.

We arrived fashionably late to the hospital, as it was my theory they couldn’t technically start without me anyway. Within minutes of arrival, I was dressed in a fashion-forward hospital gown and hooked up to an IV and some contraction measuring machine which Jim was having way too much fun playing with the readout tape. “Wow, do you feel THAT one? It’s huge!”

Within an hour of arriving, my doctor made the surprise discovery that in the past seventy-two hours Jordan had rotated and was now presenting breach: A new team was transferred to our room and an emergency C-section was scheduled. A flurry of activity and four hours later, Jordan Alexandra Dralle made her world debut at 12:13 p.m. at Edward Hospital.

Flash forward twelve years and for some strange reason I was awake just after five this morning, watching the storm and trying to grasp the fact that Jordan was turning twelve in a few hours. I crawled quietly into bed with her and watched her sleep, dumbfounded at how much space her five-foot frame occupied the bed, remembering a time when she barely filled a car seat.

Our Baby Girl ...

Jordan awoke high on birthday joy and stayed there all day: Armed with birthday money and gift cards, we bundled up and hit the mall, shared lunch and gorged ourselves on Baker’s Square pie and funny stories about French fries, prowled the aisles of JoAnn Fabrics for Jordan’s new pillow covers and bedroom accessories, read birthday wishes on Facebook and enjoyed a roaring rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung by Grandma Sandy and Grandpa Bobby on the phone, and ended the evening with dinner at Jordan’s favorite restaurant. 

Birthday booty included all things pre-teen: Graphic tees, blindingly-neon tank tops, enough body washes to remain scented through Christmas, and the OMG of the day, crackle nail polish in both hot pink and blueberry blue. The sweetest part of the day was the graciousness and gratitude she shared with every gift and every happy moment together.

While I was pregnant with Jordan, and during the first year of her life, Natalie Merchant’s song “Wonder” always seemed to play when we were in the car together. The lyrics became her theme song of sorts, and I’ll be damned if the song didn’t play on the radio today when we were alone together:

“I believe, fate smiled and destiny. Laughed as she came to my cradle, know this child will be able. Laughed as my body she lifted, know this child will be gifted. With love, with patience, and with faith, she'll make her way." 

As I shared the song’s story with Jordan and wiped away a stray tear or two from my eyes, I realized she was doing the same. Our time together, as enjoyable as it was, was passing much too fast.

Happy Birthday, my wonder girl.