On Tuesday night I went to a meeting with a big piece of black bean (or pretzel or something) stuck in between my teeth and no one said anything and I smiled the whole entire time.

There’s that.

As I was leaving the meeting, I got a call from my husband who was relaying a call from one of my host families: a fresh air child needed to be removed from the host home ASAP due to behavioral issues. A number of phone calls and a detour later, I arrived home at 9:30 that night with a car full of groceries and a little seven-year-old girl in tow. We bedded her down on a pallet on our floor since I wanted to keep a close eye on her but that perhaps wasn’t the smartest idea because she spent the night confessing her crimes to Mr. Sandman (and us).

So there was that.

My oldest son’s friend who had spent the day on Tuesday, Tuesday night, and was slated to spend the majority of Wednesday with us, fell from the peak of the boys’ homemade zip line.

There is so much I could say about this, the gist of which is: Don’t use telephone cord for zip lines. I mean, HELLO WHERE IS YOUR BRAIN, O DEAR SON OF MINE.

I could be a paramedic. I was amazing. Look at this impressive line-up of ACTION!

I…

*RAN to the scene of the accident.

*YELLED at everyone to NOT TOUCH HIM.

*STUDIED him objectively and NOTED that he was clutching thistles and not minding the prickles, so obviously, he was in pain.

*QUIZZED him as to the specifics of the source of his agonious (new word alert) writhing.

*INSTRUCTED him, when he was ready, to gently lift his legs and arms and move his head, and then, not seeing any other option…

*LET HIM LAY THERE in his shady bed of thistles and pain.

I repeated the above sequence (minus the running) (the poor kid was about sick of the leg lifts treatment), made some phone calls, gave him water, and then when he finally said he was ready, hauled him to his feet and half carried him into the house. Several hours, a hot water bottle, an Ibuprofen, and some phone calls to his mom later, the kid was still not getting up off the couch so I called him mom one more time and said, “You know, I’m fine with him laying here and he’s doing really well and says he doesn’t want to go home and doesn’t want me to call you but I am anyway because I think something might actually be wrong. I’m worried.” So she came out and took him home and I spent the rest of the day in a swirl of worry.

There was THAT.

Right after our new Fresh Air kid’s ex host mom dropped off her stuff and Injured Kid’s mom came to pick him up, I finally got everyone situated in their rooms for rest time and collapsed on the sofa with a glass of iced coffee. And then the phone rang.

“Hi, this is 9-1-1 and we just received a call from this number?”

I moaned and shut my eyes.

“It sounded like a small child?”

I assured 9-1-1 that everything was fine, and the operator laughed cheerily and hung up. After which I promptly stormed off to the Fresh Air kid’s room and interrupted her happy coloring with a rude “Did you just call 9-1-1?”

She denied it adamantly, and I said, “ARE YOU SURE” while I stared at her super hard and my inside voice ranted, “Yeah whatever! You don’t have the best truth telling track record, so I’ve been told!”

And then another thought popped into my head, and that was that my littlest was taking his siesta up in my room and my room has a phone in it and …. OH MY WORD.

I barreled upstairs. “DID YOU JUST CALL 9-1-1?” I asked in my lowest, most terrible voice. Yep, he did. It was perfectly clear by his hidden face. So after I got done lecturing him and confiscating the phone, I had to go apologize to the Fresh Air girl, the poor dear heart.

And then I sat back down on the couch to wait and see what would happen next.

When nothing did, I could hardly believe my good fortune.

And that was that. The end.

Except that I have more to say about the fall and all that ick and worry.

1. I play it cool when my kids get hurt but I go THROUGH THE ROOF with worry when it’s someone else’s kid getting hurt on my watch. I was such a basket case that my friend actually LAUGHED at me. (It helped.)

2. While Injured Kid was reclining and my son was accompanying, I made a friendly observation (otherwise known as a mild talking to). “Boys,” I said. “You are getting older and bigger and stronger and more creative and BECAUSE you are getting bigger and stronger and more creative, you have a greater chance of DOING MORE DAMAGE AND GETTING HURT. So you also have to get smarter and wiser and think more carefully, right? Right?”

“If I learned from all my mistakes, I’d be a genius,” Injured Kid quipped dryly.

“That’s a famous quote,” I pointed out.

“Yeah,” he said.

3. I think my son needs a common sense lesson way more than his friend did because that evening after the friend had been gingerly transferred to his house, my son kept talking zip lines, wanting to try this and that and arguing that phone line should be strong enough to support his weight. His father and I were at our exasperated-but-still-trying-to-hear-him-out-and-rationalize-with-the-kid stage, but we were starting to sputter. Finally his father said something like, “Your friend is HURT and we don’t know how BAD so STOP ALREADY with the zip line!” And I said something like, “I almost wish YOU had been the one to fall!” Or maybe I just thought that? No, I’m pretty sure I said it because if I’d only thought it I would not have used the buffer word “almost.”

4. Injured Kid’s dad called us from the ER last night. The verdict? A hairline fracture in his pelvis. A BROKEN PELVIS? NO WAY! HOLY COW! OH MY WORD! And at the same time I was thinking, I’m so glad it’s just his pelvis and not a broken back and compressed vertebra and that he doesn’t have to have surgery to get a rod put in his back and deal with excruciating back pain for the rest of his life, hallelujah and take a deep breath NOW.

And then I said to my husband, “If they’re at the ER then who is taking care of their other kids? Do you think we should go in? Maybe they need us to take their daughter?”

And then I snorted, “Like they would want to send their daughter out here right after their son JUST GOT DONE BREAKING HIS PELVIS AT OUR HOUSE.”

5. Our friends have been exceedingly gracious and non-accusatory. They said clearly and directly that they do not hold us accountable for this accident. They mean it, I believe. And I know if I were in their shoes I would feel the same way. But I’m not in their shoes, I’m in mine, and I can’t help but feel bad.

6. So I made them a big pan of enchiladas and some peanut butter chocolate chip cookies. It was the least I could do.

This same time, years previous: a bout of snarky, sanitation and me, orange-mint tea

Ever since the Fresh Air girl’s truncated visit, I’ve been fixating on my own children’s bad behavior. Whenever they give me lip, say “no” when I ask them to do a chore, or fight with each other (and they do all of the aforementioned with embarrassing frequency), I find myself getting hyper-anxious. They’re bad kids! I’m a bad mother! I’m not working with them enough! WHAT IS WRONG WITH US!

The youngest ones, in particular, are coping an attitude, and while I’d like to say it’s the after effects of having an attitude-pumped Fresh Air girl around our house, I don’t think I can. I think it’s just them. Or us.

This part of parenting is what drives me crazy. I do everything possible to make our life run like a well-oiled machine—establish lists and routines, monitor and model, and explain, explain, explain—and still, someone is always squawking. I know (hope?) the hard work will pay off, and already there are gratifying signs of success, but still. Shouldn’t this be easier? It makes me blazing bonkers.

Perhaps some of my dissatisfaction stems from the Fresh Air Picnic where I met the mother of a family of twelve—eleven girls and a four-month-old baby boy. The middle school girls clustered around the mother while the older girls watched out for the youngers, and with their red hair and sweet faces, they looked like a whole pack of Anne Shirleys.

Their lineup made me think of an exclamation point.

But it was the mother who really caught my eye. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was tall and slender with not a single varicose vein in sight. Also? She glowed. And when she walked she glided. A halo hovered just above her head. I saw it.

At one point I went over to Mr. Handsome, poked him in the chest, and nodding in the direction of the saintly mother, said, “You know, if I had twelve kids I might look like that, too.”

He laughed and said, “But I wouldn’t.”

I spent the next couple days musing over this large family. In the process of musing, it occurred to me that mothers of smaller broods often seem more harried and stressed than mothers of larger broods. Has anyone else noticed this? Is it because the older kids are helping out more? Is it because the mothers are resigned to their fates and are fully immersed and unselfish? This is an observation that captivates me. It makes me marvel, and then I re-evaluate how I’m doing things. (But we are not having more kids. What Mr. Handsome said is true—he wouldn’t do so well with a full fifteen passenger van.) (And neither would I.)

Since that picnic and the ensuing days of bad kid behavior, things have mellowed out around here. It took several days of decompression, a supper at Ci-Ci’s, a movie or two, and lots of play time, but things are starting to look up. The cooler weather helps, too.

On Sunday evening I had a talk with the two older kids who had just returned from their second week-long trip (within the past month) and told them that the next day life would be returning to normal. There would be jobs and boring stuff and they’d have to listen to me. “You’ve done a lot of special stuff,” I said. “And it’s been great. But now it’s time to stop thinking about me me me and start thinking about the family. Think about how you can take care of other people, be helpful, do your work without fussing. And when you do that, your day will go much smoother and you’ll have more free time and we can all have fun. Okay?”

And miracles of miracles, it worked! They have been so much more agreeable and helpful and mature! We have exchanges like this:

Me: Hey kid. Will you please go hang out that load of laundry?

Kid: Okay.

Whoa, dude! Rock my world! Is that not totally cool?

Ever since my kids decided to (for once!) take my words to heart (hallelujah!), my stress levels have plummeted, I smile more, and sometimes when I look up I catch a glimpse of a halo hovering.

But just a third of one. I’d need eight more kids to get the real deal.

This post is not a reflection on the ethics of large families. I’m neither here nor there on the subject. There are all kinds of people in this world who live out their beliefs in different, very intriguing ways. It makes the world beautiful, I think.

Also? You don’t need a kid to get a halo. I totally made that part up.

This same time, years previous: how to can peaches