Of elves and shelves

 Almost a decade ago, my wife unknowingly committed us to spending all of December for the next 15 years trying to remember to move our very own Shelf Elf from place to place each night. We did pretty well when it was new and fun and—crucially—when we only had one child. 

But as we’ve gotten worse about moving the elf, we’ve gotten better at concocting stories to explain the elf’s failure to move. 

This morning when my 5-year-old woke me to come down and make her breakfast, it occurred to me that I had failed to move it and—as our 11-year-old collaborator was at a sleepover and my wife is less-than-mobile with her broken ankle, the elf had not been moved. And, in fact, it had only moved once in the last week. My wife's explanation to the kids has been--since she's in the room with the elf--that it's her fault the elf hasn't moved, because she's stayed up too late. And it seemed like we were going to have to keep up that pretense yet again.

But then a window of opportunity opened: she stopped to go to the bathroom there on the 3rd floor. So I rushed downstairs to move the elf, only to be stymied by our 9-year-old emerging from the 2nd floor bathroom and following me downstairs. 

However! As she proceeded me into the living room and sat down on the floor, entranced by a screen, I saw that the window had not, in fact, closed. I was next to the shelf with the elf (literally, she was on a bookshelf), one child was facing away and the other was still upstairs. So I surreptitiously moved to the bookcase and yanked the elf off one shelf and crammed her into to a different shelf. 

And then I went to the restroom myself, mission accomplished. 

Except for one thing… the 9yo had already been downstairs and seen that the elf had NOT moved. Then her sister comes down and says "Look! Minga moved last night!" and her sister's like "No she di...!!" My wife said that the look on her face was priceless, though she was almost as surprised as our daughter, since she hadn't seen me move it either.

I had to stay in the bathroom a bit longer to get my face composed, I was laughing so hard at the whole situation. 

So now, apparently, the elf can also move at times other than the dead of night, and the Elf on the Shelf lore continues to grow. 

I don't always go to Starbucks, but when I do...

 I’m not a big Starbucks guy, but I’m also not not a Starbucks guy. And during the holiday season, I like to stop in and get… the same non-holiday drink that I get every time: grande flat white with heavy cream. It’s probably 1000 calories of pure fat lovingly wrapped around 1000 mg of caffeine, and I love it. 

That said, I don’t go out of my way for it. I'm happy to save $5 and make it myself. 

But... when I drop my kids off at school there is a Starbucks right there. Right. There. It’s almost cheaper and easier than not stopping at Starbucks. Especially since I can order through the app, barely ever wait, not talk to anyone, and theoretically earn rewards.

So on Monday, when I was tired and pressed for time after dropping them off, it just made sense  But for the first time, the store I usually order from was “not available for mobile ordering.” What??

It’s amazing how something that a few years ago was an amazing advance in food and drink logistics is now something I expect, to the point where I’m more than a little pissed off and baffled. How dare they expect me to come in and wait in line and order. So I just went home.

But then on Friday, after a full week of lousy sleep, I was again taking my kids to school, checked the app, and it let me order, no problem. I got an extra shot of espresso for good measure and was once again caffeinated and content.  

Scattered Thoughts

Just a few scattered thoughts on a Friday:

**

 Last night I took A., our fourth grader, to elementary school wrestling practice, which lasts an hour and a half and takes us 30+ minutes to get there from home, so I was hanging out in the athletic center, mostly just walking and listening to an audiobook. And considering how much I'm not moving lately, that alone was pretty good. Just walking, wow: it's easy to lose track of how much better it feels to be moving enough. But I also found a quiet spot and did just a little yoga-like stretching and man did that feel good. Magic. Why did I ever stop doing yoga regularly? I did some today during my lunch break too. Note to self: I'm getting old and stiff and it's not good. 

**

Speaking of old and stiff, our beloved upper is getting up there. Fifteen and her age is showing more and more. And because L is sleeping on the downstairs couch, we're even more aware of what she's up to. Apparently she sometimes pees on a dog bed or the floor (we knew that) and then licks it back up, which Dr. Google indicates might be a sign of Cushing's Disease. So we need need to manage a vet visit on top of everything else. But also L. wakes me up in the middle of the night to take care of the mess the dog has made and the mess that the dog is. Which, to be clear, is totally fine, she can't deal with it for obvious reasons, but I also haven't had a good night's sleep all week. 

**

Speaking of sleep, it's amazing how priorities change. Like, when I was in my 20s, even my 30s, I didn't value sleep that highly. In college it was a mark of pride that I spent one semester getting between 3 and 4 and a half hours of sleep each night (I can be that precise because I was operating under a theory that sleep should be in hour and a half increments) while doing way too many things, taking too many classes, and still getting A's. In my 20s, I thought nothing of staying out late partying or staying up watching a movie or whatever. Now I just want to sleep more, and between kids and pets I never get as much as I want. 

** 

By the way, this is why we become fertile in our teens--so we can coordinate our who-needs-sleep years with our never-gonna-get-it years. I should be a grandparent or dead by now (44)--either way I could reasonably expect to get enough sleep. But no. 

Deck the Halls

When I was a kid, I loved preparing for Christmas almost as much as Christmas itself. From avidly combing over the Sears and JC Penny catalogs to make sure my parents knew everything I wanted (which was just about everything) to digging out the Christmas albums we had on vinyl, I loved it all, but I especially loved decorating.

My mother was a retired elementary teacher, which is one reason why we had so many Christmas decorations: for years she had decorated both a home and a classroom. I suppose a lot of the decorations we had were a bit odd, in retrospect, precisely because they were originally intended for a classroom. Like, a hundred Christmas-themed things that were laminated that I hung on every pane of glass in the house. We had a giant door-sized Santa Clause thing that hung on the door behind our Christmas tree every year. 

And then there was the tree itself. For most of my childhood, we had an absolutely god-awful fake tree from (I assume) the '70s. It was green, but not any natural green. It made no pretense that it might have been a live tree of any species. Fake fake fake. And I loved it. It was soft. It was familiar. And what did I know? Nothing but that tree. I loved hanging the lights and the ornaments and had all sorts of ideas about how best to decorate the tree. Some years I tried new things--all white lights! one color of garlands and ornaments!--but most years it was pretty comfortably the same as every other year, a ritual of recreating that holiday ambiance and feeling. 

Our nativity scene was old, kind of perpetually dirty and shabby, and--I dimly felt--better represented the idea of being born in a barn than any crisp, clean manger scene could manage. Plus a nativity scene is kind of right in a kid's sweet spot, being basically a playset. Castle Greyskull with different characters. I remember taking great pride at one point of my childhood in being more theologically accurate and setting up the shepherds and their sheep at some distance from the manger itself until Christmas, when they could finally come ooh and ahh over the kid, while the wise men were off in another room, gradually moving closer, waiting for their turn on Epiphany. 

I'm less into decorating these days--seems like a lot of work. Fortunately my kids are taking on more of it. Our 11 year old (T) in particular was ready to start decorating for Christmas as soon as Halloween was over, and with L down for the count this year, T got to take the lead. Granted, this meant a lot of early enthusiasm that petered out before the decorating was completed. But she got the tree done, and my wife has a great view of it:

Of course, a great view actually means that she's spending all day looking at what a haphazard job the kids did spreading out the ornaments and wishing she could get up to fix them, but so it goes. 

Thanksgiving recap

Did I intend to eat turkey and stuffing, mashed potatoes and gravy, and every pie from pumpkin to pecan on Thanksgiving? I did. But did I eat any of those things? I did not. And that wasn't the only thing that was unintended about last Thursday.

Was watching Ohio State lose to its rival up north on Saturday a painful experience for my wife and me? Yes, but not even close to the most painful thing that happened to us over the Thanksgiving break.

Around noon on Thanksgiving, I paused from cooking for our family's 3:00 gathering, relaxing up on the third floor with some me time when the screaming started. 

Now, with three girls between the ages of 5 and 11, screaming is not an uncommon sound. But there are subtle differences in screams, and these were neither fighting screams nor playful screams, and certainly not excited screams. These were oh-shit-something-serious-is-wrong screams. 

I raced downstairs and out the back door to find my wife L writhing in pain on the rain-slicked stones, her right foot pointing in very much the wrong direction. Call 911, make her as comfortable as one can be with a broken ankle in the cold November rain, calm down the kids... it's a bit of a blur, but the paramedics arrived quickly. Neighbors arrived almost as quickly to check on us and offer any help they could, and my sister-in-law arrived soon after to take the girls while I went to meet L at the ER. 

Long story shorter, she had a dislocation and trimalleolar fracture, which is relatively rare. I always knew my wife was an uncommon woman, but I didn't think that meant everything about her. After being released from the ER Thursday night, we ended up back again because of pain the next day (the unfortunate answer to which was basically "yes, this is a painful injury), about 7 hours each day, but in the days since we've gotten surgery scheduled and L has gotten better able to transition from the couch that she's taken over to the wheel chair that we got from someone on her Buy-Nothing group on FB, and she's largely able to take care of herself. After a few days with their grandparents, the girls are back home and mostly trying to be helpful--while occasionally succeeding. 

It's a long road to recovery from here. After surgery it will be 6-8 weeks or 10-12 weeks until she can put any weight on it, depending on what they see during surgery. It will be several months until she can drive, and she'll have to miss the jury duty she was scheduled for next week. But we're fortunate to have family and friends who will help us, not to mention understanding employers, great doctors and reasonably good health insurance. 

In short, we still have a lot to be thankful for, even if Thanksgving was fairly terrible and far from what we intended. 

This is not the old man aches and pains blog...

 but I do feel like I need to follow up on that post from 2 or 3 weeks ago (I really meant that as a beginning at writing regularly--maybe next month).

But anyway, my knees. Soon after writing that, I saw a friend on Facebook mentioning his weight loss on a keto diet, and it got me thinking (keto, if you don't know, is extremely low carb). 

I don't have any weight loss goals, really, but I've dabbled in low-carb diets in the past, sometimes for an extended period of time. I haven't been strict on a low carb diet in years, but I like to think that it's affected my dietary choices, that I don't eat as many carbs as I might if I was just eating whatever. 

Of course, when you're not strict about these things, it's easy for bad habits to sneak up on you. Anyway, it occurred to me that I'd heard once upon a time that low-carb diets are anti-inflammatory, and since my knee pain likely involved some level of inflammation, maybe a low-carb diet would help. So while we were still on vacation I started cutting back and following a bit of candy on Halloween, I was strict for two weeks.

The result? My knee pain all but vanished. The left knee has been totally pain free. The right knee has been much, much better. Barely ever any pain. 

And then, last weekend, I was celebrating my in-laws' birthdays and watching the Ohio State football game and my father-in-law offered me a Great Lakes Christmas Ale, and I hated to say no, so I said yes. which was the beginning of a lot of yesses: chips, cupcakes, pecan pie, another beer... GIVE ME ALL THE CARBS.

And you know what? I woke up in the middle of the night with pain in my right knee, so I was right back on the low-carb wagon Sunday morning and have stayed there ever since. 

About your warranty…

 I’m 44, and apparently my body’s warranty just expired. It was a good run, but apparently it’s all downhill from here. 

I thought I was in pretty good shape. No major injuries, not a ton of wear and tear from high school athletics or anything. But all of a sudden, my knees are calling it quits. A year ago I was squatting or deadlifting or running pain free. Now if I twist my right right knee even a little getting in or out of the car, it’s agony. 

And I guess my left knee was feeling left out because after a few weeks of the right knee’s nonsense, this one has a twinge if I take a wrong step—not that there’s any way of knowing in advance what will be a wrong step. 

I kind of wish there had been some dramatic event so at least I could say “yeah, in retrospect, I probably shouldn’t have tried to sumo wrestle that cow.” Somehow “I probably shouldn’t have gotten out of bed that one time” is a lot less satisfactory.