The Perfect Storm

January 14, 2010 at 5:27 pm | Posted in Uncategorized | 9 Comments

If you’re looking for an uplifting read about rainbows and kittens and marshmallows, stop here.  Cute baby pictures?  Not today.  Sorry folks, this is real life…and sometimes real life is…how shall I say it?  Less than perfect.

Still with me?  Here goes.  This afternoon was probably the worst experience of my mommyhood.  Let me begin by setting the stage:  I am tired.  I haven’t been sleeping well ever since getting sick…my sleep cycle got messed up by all the middle of the night suffocating coughing and I haven’t had a good night’s sleep in about ten days.  My peak tiredness for the past few days has been at about 3 pm, at which point I feel like I could fall asleep regardless of where I am or what I’m doing.

Where was I at 3 pm today?  At the doctor’s office.  With Mary and Lila.  Without Kevin.

I’ve blogged before about the fact that when M&L have a doctor’s appointment, Kevin and I both go.  It’s stressful taking both babies in for a checkup, filling out the paperwork, keeping them happy, undressing and redressing them, and dealing with crying and shots and all the other fun stuff at the doctor’s office.  Unfortunately, Kevin couldn’t come to the appointment today, so I put on a brave face and did my mommy duty.

Back to today.  It’s 2 pm, M&L are packed up in the car (I should mention that they usually nap from noon-3ish, so we were skipping naptime for this appointment), I’m driving down 35th through the POURING rain and considering detouring to a drive through espresso stand because for once I’m actually running ahead of schedule.  Then, out of nowhere, a realization hits me…the stroller is in KEVIN’S car.

Side note: I ALWAYS use the stroller when I take M&L out in public.  First of all, there’s two of them.  They each weigh over 20 lbs, and then there’s my purse and a diaper bag.  Do the math.  I don’t have four arms, people!  And it’s not like I can set them down and expect them to walk…Lila walks fairly well, but she falls a lot and also likes to knee walk and crawl at times.  Mary can walk, but not far distances, she falls even more than Lila, and definitely prefers to crawl.

So…back to my story.  I’m about a mile away from the doctor’s office and hysteria sets in.  HOW in the WORLD am I going to get these girls into the doctor’s office?  I swear, the rain started coming down even harder at that point.  I pull into the parking lot and it’s packed.  Awesome.  I end up parking about as far away from the main entrance as you can get, turn the car off, and try to hold back the tears.  Should I just cancel the appointment?  What do I do?

After a minute or so of self pity, I got out of the car (and in about 10 seconds, I was so wet it looked like I had just gotten out of the shower), got Lila out of her carseat, and set her in the driver’s seat.  Then I slung the diaper bag and purse on my right shoulder, unstrapped Mary from her carseat, pick her up and hoist her onto my right hip, pick Lila up with only my left arm (at which point she started crying because she wanted to continue playing with the steering wheel), and somehow managed to lock the car and karate kick all of the doors shut.

I trekked about 2 miles through a monsoon before arriving at the main entrance (which thankfully has those handicap buttons you can press to open the doors) and make it into the waiting room, which was packed.  Whatever.  My arms are about to give out so I put the girls down on the carpet in front of the fish tank and got in line to check in.  As usual, I was given a huge stack of paperwork (which I have to fill out separately for each girl, even though the answers to pretty much every question are exactly the same).  I sit down to fill out the paperwork, relieved that M&L are entranced by all the big kids in the waiting room.  Seriously, they were just standing there staring at the other kids, and every few seconds, they’d wave or clap and then look at each other and smile.  If I hadn’t been so stressed out at that point, I would’ve been able to appreciate how cute it was.

Eventually we make it back into the exam room, where a nurse and I wrangle the girls out of their clothes to weigh and measure them.  We start with Lila, and as we’re trying to get her to sit still on the scale, I hear a crash and a scream.  Mary had tripped on the “big kid” scale in the corner, fell on top of it, and bonked her forehead.  By the time I reach her, I can already see a huge bruise forming…ouch.  The nurse finishes up with Lila and puts her down, and then we begin with Mary.  As we measured Mary’s length, Lila managed to empty three drawers full of blankets, diapers, and gowns onto the floor of the exam room and was attempting to crawl into one of the drawers.  While we were trying to weigh Mary (who was busy trying to climb out of the scale, making it nearly impossible to get an accurate weight), Lila pushed the doctor’s chair (you know, the little stool on wheels?) across the room, climbed partway on top of it, and pulled the measuring board down off the wall.

Thankfully, we had a great nurse and she took it all in stride.  She was so enamored by Mary and Lila (“They’re so beautiful!” she kept exclaiming) that she just laughed about how “curious” and “active” they were.  Those weren’t exactly the same words that came to my mind as they wreaked havoc on the exam room.

After we finally finished getting Mary and Lila’s measurements, the nurse left.  Then we waited.  For about 10 minutes, Mary, Lila, and I were alone in the exam room (which was approximately the size of a handicap bathroom stall and I think the thermostat was set to 108º).  It was at this time that I realized the doctor’s office was one of the most UN-babyproofed places we’ve ever been!  They attempted to pull plugs out of outlets, they emptied more drawers, Mary got into a box of Kleenex and started ripping it apart, Lila found the roll of exam table paper under the table and tried to shred it…it was awful.  They were whining (let me remind you, they were about 3 hours overdue for a nap at this point), Lila kept stealing Mary’s pacifier (we couldn’t use her clip because she wasn’t wearing any clothes, so there was no stopping Lila!), they kept bumping heads in the small space, I had no where to even sit down because the two dinky little chairs were covered with all of our luggage…

Finally, our doctor came in.  Let me take a break from my rant to say that I really like our doctor, and so do Mary and Lila.  At least there’s that, right?

During their exams, the doctor gave each girl a tongue depressor to keep them entertained.  Mary managed to give herself a paper cut on the nose with the wrapping on her tongue depressor and started to cry.  While I was trying to comfort Mary, Lila got into the drawers again and slammed her hand into one of them, and then she started to cry.  Could it get any worse than this?

Oh, yes.  Much worse.  Shots.  Four per baby.  Two nurses came in to administer the shots.  We decided to get Mary and Lila completely dressed (coats, shoes, and everything), and then one at a time I pulled their pants partway down so the nurse could give them their shots.  Of course, they were both screaming and crying at this point and it was all I could do to keep it together.  I couldn’t adequately comfort either girl, because I was trying to help them both at the same time.  Can you say guilt?

So, when it was all said and done, I hauled the crying babies, the diaper bag, and my purse through the waiting room, out the door, through the hurricane in the parking lot (where there was now about an inch of standing water as well), and into the car.  Oh, and on my way out of the exam room, I knocked over a chair and a full jar of qtips.  Sweet.

Eventually, the babies were strapped into their car seats and I was buckled into my seatbelt.  I just sat there for a minute with my eyes closed, trying to get up the energy to even start the car.

It’s over.  We survived.  Mary and Lila are napping and I’m recovering on the couch.  Stats will have to wait…I’m too exhausted to get the papers out of my purse.  I do remember that the girls had the exact same head circumference, Lila was 1/2 inch taller than Mary, and each girl had matching height and weight percentiles…Mary was 25 and 25, Lila was 50 and 50.  They’re both healthy and the doctor is happy with their progress.

I’ll post pictures and happy thoughts later.  Maybe tomorrow.  I need to be in a more rainbow-kitten-marshmallowy mood to do that.