When I think back on my married life, the year 2007 really stands out.
Why, you ask?
Because it SUCKED! (my husband says I shouldn’t use this word, but it really seems fitting in this case).
Oh, there were some good things about it. I had a brand new baby. Unfortunately, I also had the following:
-No more than 3 hours of sleep per night. Cakesie woke up every hour, on the hour, and would not accept a bottle or pacifier. She also barfed a million times a day, and cried all the time. If you tried to hold or cuddle her, she was so tense and irritable that it felt like you were cradling a 2×4.
-Mastitis in both breasts
-A myriad of other health problems. I lived at the doctor’s office.
-A stressed out, overworked husband
-Two children, instead of one. No one warned me about how much harder this would be.
-Stress and tension in my marriage. A new baby, especially one like Cakes, really changes the family dynamic. We were both completely exhausted all the time, and we took our stress out on each other.
Life wasn’t much fun. Bad stuff kept happening, and I wasn’t coping very well. I really, really needed a break. We decided that in March, we would drive 1700 miles to Florida to visit my in-laws. They could help us with the kids, and we could have a nice little vacation. In retrospect, driving was probably not the smartest choice we could have made, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. Before we left, we moved all of our furniture out to the garage, and arranged to have our hardwood floors coated with an additional layer of polyurethane, to protect them from kid damage.
We were relaxing in balmy Florida, and I had just begun to calm down and unclench my teeth from the tension-filled trip, when we received a phone call from the floor guy. He informed us that our furnace wasn’t working, (the igniter burned out) and it was only 42 degrees in the house. He went on to say that despite the frigid temperature, he went ahead and did the work anyway.
My husband was incredulous. Apparently this professional flooring installer didn’t realize, or didn’t care, that polyurethane can’t cure at such a cold temperature. My husband immediately started scrambling to arrange for a furnace repairman to get in the house, (without walking on the wet floors), hoping that if we got the house warmed up quickly, maybe the floors would cure and everything would be fine.
When I came out of the bedroom, where I had been nursing Cakes for the zillionth time that day, my husband relayed this news to me.
When I heard it, I think something in my brain just snapped. It was the last straw! I burst out angrily, “Well this is just TYPICAL, on account of us being the CRAP FAMILY and all!”
I stomped back into the bedroom and slammed the door, leaving my husband in the living room with a dumbfounded expression on his face.
I flung myself on the bed in despair. A few minutes later, my husband came quietly into the room, and lay down next to me. He put his arms gently around me and pulled me to him. Then, he whispered tenderly in my ear, “Did you just call us the crap family?”
I lifted my head from his chest, which seemed to be shaking, to find that he was laughing! I was indignant. “Quit laughing!” I shouted. “It’s not funny!”
“It is!” he wheezed in between guffaws. “It’s hilarious!” Then he started kissing me, and, well…I forget the rest (wink wink).
Since then, this has become a little joke between us. Whenever something bad happens, we always say, “Well, this is another episode of “The Crap Family Chronicles.” I even joked that this year, I’m going to write a Christmas letter called “Christmas with The Craps.”
Oh, and the polyurethane did fail to cure. A few days after we got home, and lugged all of our furniture back into the house, we discovered that the varnish was peeling off in sheets. It reminded me of when I was a kid, and I used to put Elmer’s Glue on my fingertip just so I could peel it off. We had to move our furniture out again, and have the floors sanded and completely refinished to correct the problem.
What do you expect? We are The Crap Family after all.
