Me vs Trying to Write With Kids Around

I'm sure a bunch of you have kids. And a bunch of you don't. For those who don't, I'm going to share a little tidbit with you....having kids is fun and awesome, and also a time-sucking endeavour.

Today I'm lucky enough to have an extra kid over at my house. More kids? How does that give you any extra time? Because they entertain each other and I don't have a leg-leech begging me to entertain her 24 hours a day. 

I love playing with my kids, but occasionally I also like to pee by myself. Or write. Both of which are completely impossible when kids are on the hunt for attention that they imagine they are lacking.

And so for the next little while I can sit down and write. 
Now to think of something to write about....
One problem at a time, right. :-)

Me vs Mudder

Tough Mudder. It's tough and there is an ungodly amount of mud.

Before I started, I really believed that I would do ok....whatever I thought that meant. I guess I should have taken off my rose coloured glasses and considered the fact that I am not a specimen of elite prowess when it comes to running, and that has never been made more abundantly clear to me than during the absolute circle jerk that was this event.

This all began when a friend asked if we would be interested in signing up. She denies this and says I asked her to do it, but she's wrong. This was her idea. Don't let her tell you otherwise.

We formed a team called the Raging Wombats. Nothing less likely is possible in the animal kingdom. Wombats don't look capable of irritation, let alone rage, and they are the least athletic animal I've ever seen, with the possible exception of the manatee.

After mentally reliving the Spartan race we did the year before, which was 7 kms long, I figured that this event was totally doable, despite being more than double the distance at 18 kms. Really, the obstacles were supposed to be the hard part...if I got tired, I could just hike rather than run the distance. 

I was so, so tragically wrong.

Apparently my delusional thinking was on point that day. I have no idea what on earth possessed me to think that 18 kms of anything was a fucking reality. I think the last time I even hiked that kind of distance was when I was a hormone driven teenager showing how I could keep up with the boys....which mostly meant hiking by myself through the woods hoping not to get eaten by a cougar, because the guys were much faster hikers and way ahead of me.

So yeah, this was an idiotic decision.

To deepen the hole I had now dug myself into by agreeing to this lunacy, I decided that I would train for the event (good decision), but I would train for the obstacles, and not the running, because I hate running (a categorically stupid decision). In hindsight, this was the exact fucking opposite of what should have happened.

As race day approached, the looming idiocy of what I'd committed myself too became more and more apparent. I coped with this by eating chocolate instead of training. By the time we arrived in Whistler to actually do the race, I'd taken about 3 weeks off my "training" regime...in the interest of saving my strength, of course.

On the morning of the event, the plan was to get an early start and be done early. Ha. We did get up, but we were in no way a well oiled machine of speed and organization. To make things worse, we all jumped into our van and then nothing happened. The Delica, in an attempt to warn me off the race in the only way it could, wouldn't start. The battery, which was later discovered to be 15+ years old, was totally dead. Fortunately (or unfortunately) other vehicles were found, and we were eventually on our way.

Me before my legs refused to obey
simple commands

Once we started the course, I actually felt ok. I wasn't winded, I could keep up a (really) slow jog fairly consistently, and the first few obstacles we came to were a lot of fun. I got up and over things without embarrassing myself, I crawled through a really small space which is something I hate, but I did it anyway, and I didn't break my foot off my leg falling off a wall! (I wasn't aware that was a problem I needed to worry about until my lovely teammate told me stories of the year before)

To the Tough Mudder team's credit, overall the obstacles were awesome. I loved the ones I did. They were challenging, but fun, however I really wish that some of the bigger ones had been nearer the front so I could have tried them before the desire to just lay down and die set in. 

When I started to feel like I needed water, I'd turn a corner and there was a water station. When I felt like I was going to eat the person in front of me because it had been hours since I had consumed anything with calories, some helpful event worker would hand me a banana. 

I made it to the 8 km mark feeling like I wasn't going to die.  And then my knee started becoming more insistently unhappy, followed quickly by my shins.

Quick back story....due to a number of skiing accidents, followed by getting out of a chair while pregnant and doing it wrong, my knee has much less cartilage in it than it otherwise should. It hates running more than I do. Which is quite a lot.

Despite being in some pain, I still felt reasonable. I trudged on with fewer intervals of running, and my team mates getting further ahead of me with each passing minute.  To Husband's credit, he would come back and visit me from time to time, and as I got more pathetically distant, his visits back to the slow team (read: me) lasted longer, until he pretty much gave up finishing with any real speed.

Then my hips gave out and it became impossible to run. 14 km mark.

15 km mark. And then it started to rain. Not a nice refreshing shower, but arctic cold hate falling from the sky.

Because I couldn't run, I couldn't get warm. It was all I could do to get one leg in front of the other, let alone move with any real speed. I stopped doing obstacles because I was too cold. My brother in law joined me in my little hate-trudge, as his hips were complaining too. As time went on, I kept hoping that we were close, or that one of the event fairies would come by and give me an emergency blanket like other people along the trail seemed to have gotten. Looking back, I was probably well on my way to hypothermia. I was shaking for so long, and shivering so hard, that I couldn't even stand up straight.

The members of Team Wombat
that actually did all the obstacles

Eventually we found a bridge and tried to wait out the rain and let our team mates (who were not skipping every obstacle they came across) catch up. After what seemed like forever, we gave up waiting. Sadly, however, we failed to realize until too late that they had the car keys and the bag check tags, so even making it to the finish line didn't provide anything other than more waiting in the rain.



We shuffled down the hill. Really truly shuffled. At this point my hips were so sore I could barely lift my legs up to put one foot in front of the other. Coincidentally, it was around this time that I decided my lack of any running prior to this nightmare was perhaps poorly thought out. People running past us (read: assholes) would stop to ask if I wanted them to call a medic. No. I'd made it this far, and so help me I would cross that bloody finish line and get the stupid t-shirt.

And I could see it. THE END. It was right there....on the other side of EST.

EST. Electro Shock Therapy. Basically electrified wires hanging down that you run through. Or in my case, that you are forced to move slowly through because your everything hurts and refuses to obey your commands to move quickly.

Now, to be fair, I could have opted out and gone around, but for some reason that just didn't occur to me at the time. It's possible I'm a bit stubborn. I didn't particularly relish the idea of being electrocuted, and I wasn't really looking forward to what I imagined would be a large number of wires hitting me while I limped my way through. I took my first few painful steps in. 

I had been told by people who had done this before that you couldn't avoid the wires; there are too many, too close together, and the best bet is just to run. Not an option. 

So that day I became a candidate for Cirque du Soleil. I contorted, bent, ducked and generally kicked serious ass the whole way through and did not hit a single wire. I may have even picked up some speed.

Me as a Ninja. That is some serious
concentration I'm pulling off

I was a fucking NINJA.

And then I was finished. Sweet, sweet, painful victory. I shuffled my way over to a table in the beer garden, in the rain, and collapsed into a shaking mass to wait for the rest of the group. I was even given a pity jacket by a stranger because I was shivering so hard and turning blue. It was pretty definitively the coldest I've ever been.

In hindsight, I think that despite the incredible pain in my hips and legs, the worst part was the cold. If I hadn't been shaking so badly and for so long, I probably would have done a little better. As it was though, it took me 3 hours, a hot shower and a prolonged soak in the hot tub to bring my body up to a reasonable temperature again.

Basically Tough Mudder was great until it became a terrible death march to the finish line. I blame the rain, my incredible lack of foresight concerning the distance,  and an utter lack of preparedness.

And then I signed up for next year. Go Wombats!

Me vs A Step Stool

Ever had one of those days where you're cleaning up after dinner and trip over your kid's step stool even though your kids aren't home and aren't using it but they didn't put it away when they were done with it?

And then while you were tripping over it, you smashed your toe into it really, really hard? Then you hopped around like an idiot for a few minutes waiting for the pain to subside but it didn't, so you ice it, take some pain killers and spend the rest of the evening hoping that you haven't ruined your vacation week by breaking your foot?

Then the next day when it still hurts you pretend that it's ok because you still want to go horse back riding, which you do anyway despite your now obvious limp, but then ride like a boss and don't fall off this time?

And finally, when you finally give up and go to the doctor to check to see if it's broken, because at this point it really hurts and is probably broken, and then they take x-rays and your poor little throbbing toe is actually fine but still hurts like a bitch for no reason other than it just does?

Yeah, didn't think so. 

I hate that stool.

Me vs A Swimming Update

I've posted a couple of times about swimming. This is mostly because it's the one actually active thing I'm currently doing, so it stands to reason that it makes for entertaining stories.

Besides my inability to kick, I've added to my resume a decided lack of coordination in relation to the butterfly stroke, and what I can only imagine are flip turns that present the audience with a good old fashion comedy routine (read: parents watching their kids are likely laughing at me).

The butterfly is a special kind of awful for me. Oddly, I love the kick (when I get to wear flippers). I get to live out every  little girl's fantasy of the late 1980's of being the Little Mermaid. I mermaid flipper kick my way down the pool in a wave of awesomness.

And then I add the arms.

When I try to coordinate the arm movements and lift myself out of the water (ostensibly to breath, but mostly to suck water into my face hole), I look more like a finless whale with a gross lack of motor control who's having seizures, than a graceful mermaid who wants to be part of your world.

To make matters worse, I'm picturing how ridiculous this must be to onlookers, so during the entire length, I laugh like an idiot. Even underwater. This does very little to help with my breathing. Mostly I just slowly drown the whole way down the pool.

Doing flip turns isn't much better. Again, while I look ridiculous doing them, I actually have a lot of fun trying.

Flip turns should, in theory, be pretty straight forward. Get to the end of the pool, do a somersault, swim in the other direction. The difficulty arrives when you can't use your arms to propel yourself around. Chin down, flip. That's it. Or, more accurately in my case, chin down, face plant into the water, get water up my nose.

After many attempts, I did eventually get something that could be passably recognized as a flip turn. Great. Now swim a length, flip at the end, swim back, but because I'd been practicing at the shallow end up until this point, I didn't really plan for what would happen when I couldn't touch the bottom.

I swam, I flipped, I pushed off the side of the pool, I jettisoned out to start my length back...I realized I was a lot deeper down than I'd intended. 

Like this, but less subtle

Rather than pushing off the side of the pool and straight going out, I had angled down and gone deeper than anticipated. This resulted in having to swim up a lot more than originally expected. I imagine that from the stands it resembled the surfacing of the Red October, though far less impressive, and with far more gasping for air than one usually sees with a submarine.

Well, today we move on to diving. I think I can dive....but then I also thought I could swim. Should be interesting. :-)

Me vs Doll Craft

Once upon a time there was a mother who didn’t want to wait in line to get her daughter a Cabbage Patch doll. It was the 80’s and the peak of the Cabbage Patch doll hysteria. As a mother now I get it, but at the time, this refusal was the most inhumane thing a parent could do to a child.

For those of you not familiar with this point in time, it was similar to the stage in history where normally sane people showed ludicrous desire for the oddly disturbing Tickle Me Elmo. People were stupid for these things. They spent absurd amounts of money to own this toy. This toy that frightened my child, as well it should have (and no, I didn't buy one...someone else I knew did, and that was crazy). Nothing in nature laughs like that.

I digress.

Cabbage patch dolls. These things were pretty creepy if you really look at them. Immovable plastic faces, weird puckers for joints, butt stamps. But none were more creepy than mine.

My well meaning mother, who refused to cave to the vegetable-doll marketing machine, decided to go another route. She would make me a bloody Cabbage Patch doll. Like a boss.

What actually happened was that instead of being taken to a toy store to pick out the promised doll, Young Jamie was taken to a craft store.  Young Jamie didn’t understand why she was in a craft store. Craft stores did not have the doll adoption centres. Craft stores had crayons and paper.

Craft stores also had bins of heads.

Instead of getting to pick out my brand new baby Cabbage Patch doll, I got to pick out a disembodied head out of a tub of what I can only assume were off-brand Cabbage Patch doll heads (Kale Field Kids?). Not quite the same as the original.

As a child, picking out a head from a bucket is somewhat sinister. But the fun didn’t stop there….we also got hands. Arm-less, body-less hands. The FUN just kept on going!

You can't see it well, but there is a bald spot on the right of
her head, and she only has about a third of her bangs.  

Now credit where credit is due, my mother can sew. She took these amputated doll bits and turned them into a very serviceable doll, albeit one who’s head was obviously not originally attached to it’s body. Think Frankenstein.

I played with it, dressed it up, and I even had a soother for it.

Enter my dad. He was concerned that I would lose the soother. Frankly he was probably right to think this. And so, in a wave of handy-man brilliance, he attached the soother to a ribbon, and safety pinned the ribbon to the doll’s shoulder.

Now, as any good father knows, safety pins are a misnomer, and in no way actually safe.  The solution? Clamp the safety pin closed with enough force to virtually weld the metal together. That fucker is NEVER coming open and stabbing a child, so help me.

And it didn’t. It also didn’t keep me from losing the soother. The ribbon and soother separated themselves from the safety pin quickly enough, and became lost in the ether of kid toys laying around the house. The safety pin, however, has remained steadfastly welded into the shoulder of the doll for what I can only assume will be the rest of time.

I've always wanted elf shoes
permanently affixed to my feet!

Over the years, this well loved, yet slightly resented, doll lost much of its hair. Its weird little hands stretched out the fabric they were attached to, giving the doll multiple elbows. It had yellow elf booties, no real feet, and either one or two knees depending on how you counted. But the part that really gave the doll that special something was the attention paid to it by our cat.

Only 4 fingers on this hand. And something
about the length of this arm just
isn't right.

For whatever reason, our cat liked to eat plastic. Barbie feet were regularly chewed off, and their fingers were mangled. But this doll suffered the most. The cat, Kimba, tried to eat its face, and consumed one of the doll’s fingers, leaving a gaping hole in the hand.

The doll now appeared to have been attacked by a lion. Ironically Kimba was named after the TV show Kimba the White Lion, so I guess she lived up to her namesake.

After all this time I still have the doll. I’m sure it originally had a name, but I now refer to the doll as Frankenpatch. It’s the most appropriate name that’s ever been given to anything ever.