I feel I am riding that line again. That schizophrenic line between loving my job as a parent and wanting to flee the scene.

Here are some things that provide me with relief:

Maya thinks that everything snow is a snowman." When she walks through a parking lot, boots sticky with snow, she says, "snowman." When it falls from the sky? "Snowman." As in, "Coconutty is out in the snowman. Ha! Ha!"


Ella asked me if we could please go to Florida someday. I told her yes we could. She said, "Yeah, but not yet because we all know that Maya got lost in the elevator at the hospital."


Maya was acting delirious in her exhaustion when we put her to bed last night. Sandi, giving her a mini-mental status exam, asked, "If you throw a stone into a lake will it sink or float?" Maya replied, "I tooted."


Ella asked yesterday if she can control the words that come out of my mouth or if her brain does that.

Maya LOVES the word no. These days she walks around the house saying, "no, no, no, no, no." We read books and she tells me all the things the characters are not doing or not wearing, "No dance. No hat. No run." She scrunches her nose up at us and accusingly says "No!" even though we might just be sitting sipping tea. Maya said to me, "Cereal (seal-e-ul)," which had been sitting in milk for half an hour, "Crunchy. No."

Ella told Maya to stop pushing buttons on my insulin pump. "Maya stop touching that! Momma needs that or she will die." Ummm... maybe I was a little to specific in the explanation?


I heard myself say this morning to Maya, "No! We don't put our forks on people's feet and then put them in our mouths!"

This is the zoo I am living in today while Sandi had the nerve to go off to work and take care of those pesky critically ill people and it snowed, and they cancelled school and Ella has developed an aversion to the day care at the gym. ("It is my most unhappy place.") Who stole my good mood and can I have it back please?