Chasing the white dress

Since I primarily shoot weddings, I hear a good number of horror stories about bridezillas. I've been lucky. I really can't remember a single wedding where the bride freaked out - at least on me. In fact, almost all of my clients are gracious and fun, and allow me to work without interference to capture their day. Click the picture to see the highlites from my most recently completed wedding.

This is Ridiculous

It makes no sense and yet it's perfectly logical that the fullest time in my conscious memory is also the least recorded one. There is so much going on, I don't even know where to start. I think about starting, I try to start, but then I look up and see Stephen Colbert on the TV screen and decide multi-tasking doesn't so much work for me anymore. I'd rather listen to someone else mock tragedy and pretend there's no choice, hahaha, ho hum let's just accept the way things are because people and their choices are stupid and harmful, also, where's the wine, anyway?

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I keep telling John to take pictures of the new house, but he always sighs and rubs his forehead and takes his glasses off before saying cheerfully, pretending sighing and forehead rubbing don't exist, "Okay, I'll do it this week!" Everything is this week, people. Let's talk about credit card debt and the budget. This week! Let's figure out the enrollment process for the kids' new schools next year. This week, totally! Let's get groceries so we can at least pretend that the "nutrition" we offer our kids consists of more than organic Tostitos. Definitely, definitely by the end of this week. I mean, what gives? Just because I'm brain-fried when I get home every night and just because the kids are abnormally high-maintenance and just because John is a month behind on his precious income-providing "photo shoots," he can't seem to make the time to document the recent move. I'm blaming him for my lack of documentation. I wanted to post when I had some photographic justification for the stultifying slow-down around here. What have we been DOING, anyway?

It's sad, really - after years of no cable TV, I caved to the pressure. The kids have a TV in the upstairs gameroom. All my good intentions have gone out the window in favor of the pleasant surprise I got when I sacrificed my expectation for pop culture resistance for the ecstatic 30 minutes of peace I'm awarded while the kids' eyes glaze over to the din of SpongeBob. This extra downstairs peace and quiet is typically filled with a healthy half hour of perusing the latest DVR recording list. I don't only watch Comedy Central - I've actually spent untold hours in front of the HD beauty of the Discovery Channel's Planet Earth series and National Geographic's Dog Whisperer (Cesar, go to my mom's house and fix Truman. Please.).

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When I'm not getting my money's worth from the TV, I'm at work practicing my deep breathing and dealing with a healthy mix of People I Love Working With and People I Could Do Without. The first category consists primarily of good communicators; the second category consists primarily of corporate alpha males. My body is thanking me for the big swings in reactivity by throwing me curve balls like temporary lopsided hairline recession and spot acne. We won't talk about the extra several layers of jiggle resulting from the new home routines and the lack of trips to the gym.

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Life has changed dramatically since the move. Last Friday night we took the kids for a walk through the neighborhood and met three families. We talked to them for an hour while our kids caused minimal damage to their kids' toys. Neither of us felt pressured to run away screaming and commit ourselves after five minutes of conversing with other human beings. We ran into a co-worker who lives in the neighborhood and toured her house; the kids played peacefully and entertained her nine-month-old daughter while we had a conversation. A conversation! This neighborhood holds monthly game nights and something compelled me to go to the women's Bunco Night last night. I. Played. Bunco. When I first walked into the hostess' house, I felt that old familiar discomfort and self-defense mechanism perfected in Junior High, but even though I walked in feeling like I'd just entered the set of Desperate Housewives, I walked out feeling simultaneously relaxed and surprised at the acceptance I'd seen extended to everyone who showed up.

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Several years ago I noticed a tiny hard cartilege-like movable bump on the back of my jaw. I thought it was interesting, but never mentioned it. Several months ago I realized since it was now the size of a black-eyed pea and not the size of a pinhead, and I might want to do some research. I did my research and found a slew of information, but deduced that most likely what I had was a cyst on my parotid gland. Luckily 80% of these are benign, but are hard to evaluate without removal, which is not uncommon but risky due to the proximity of the facial nerve to the parotid gland. I went to my doctor after my self diagnosis, she ordered a CT scan to get a better look at my sinuses due to chronic allergies and sinus infections and with the side result of getting a better look at this odd lump under my ear on my jaw. When her office called to tell me the results, the nurse said something non-chalantly like "It's just some swollen lymph nodes" to which I said, "no it's not. I know what a swollen lymph node feels like, I know I HAVE swollen lymph nodes, I didn't need a CT scan to tell me I had them. What's the lump on my jaw under my ear?" After talking to two robot-like nurses who refused to have the doctor call me back, I found the radiologist who wrote the report and talked to him, and furiously started taking notes when he said "I remember this one. I know I put a differential in there about something on your parotid gland." Since I couldn't get my general physician to call back, I made an appointment and went in today. "What's going on?" she said defensively when she walked in. I walked through the history: "I came in two weeks ago for this lump, you ordered a CT scan, when I got the results from your office, they didn't make sense and I pushed for an answer and didn't get one, and finally called the radiologist, which is how I learned that in fact there is a cyst on my parotid gland, which is EXACTLY WHAT TOLD YOU I THOUGHT HAD WHEN I CAME HERE THE FIRST TIME. How did this happen?" She fumbled around, obviously trying to decide what her stance should be. First she played dumb:

"What do you want me to do?"

"Acknowledge what I'm saying. Why didn't someone tell me this when I specifically asked?"

"I don't know."

"Okay. ???"

"I didn't think the parotid cyst was what was going on with you."

"Well if you know it's not a lymph node since you established that verbally with me when I was here the first time two weeks ago, and you're saying you don't think it's a cyst, then what do you THINK it is?"

"I don't know. I'm not an ENT. That's why I offered to refer you to an ENT."

"Yeah, the nurse said you'd 'be glad to refer me to an ENT if I wanted - how do I know? You're the doctor - I expect you to put two and two together. You examined me and know it's not a lymph node. The report explicitly states the possibility of a parotid cyst. Seems like the next step would be determining where to send me or what to do about that possibility. RIGHT?"

"What do you want me to do?"

"I want you to explain why I didn't get this answer when I asked for it."

"I don't know. What do you want me to do? Do you want to go to an ENT?"

"I want you to acknowledge what I'm saying."

"I'm listening to what you're saying. A 'cyst' isn't necessarily pathological."

"Great! Fine! Why not TELL ME THAT when I ask over the phone then? Why not HAVE YOUR NURSES tell me that when I'm specifically questioning them about this very thing? Your message to them and to me was that 'there was nothing there' which is blatantly false, and I now know that since I've talked to the radiologist."

"What do you want me to do?"

"Kill me now."

"I'm sorry if you feel you've lost confidence in me. If you want to get a new doctor, let me know."

"Great apology. Thanks."

Medical community, you've been blacklisted.

Transition

Bryce
The Under Six crowd has been pushing the limits like nobody's business around here. We thought, par for the course, that Bryce had been saving his best tricks for us, but his teacher stopped John after school one day and literally said, "what's up with Bryce's attitude?" John blinked twice, distractedly mumbled something like "I have no idea what you're talking about, Bryce is the model citizen, I am insulted," and then ran away.

Bryce's spunky new "I refuse to acknowledge my confusion over this transition and will instead scream my every demand at you" attitude is mostly a painful high-maintenance addition to his already high-maintenance self, but it's made for some entertaining moments, too. At dinner the other night he crunched heartily into a tortilla chip and then gagged dramatically and loudly slurped down the nearest glass of water. Heaving in and out as if his airways had almost collapsed, he announced for everyone's clarity on the situation, "that chip stuck into my throat the way a sword would stick into the side of a mountain!"

Quinn
The bedtime madness has drastically decreased since the kids have had separate bedrooms in the new house, but that is only because Bryce miraculously stays in his bed and goes to sleep. Quinn, on the other hand, is bound and determined to re-live the glory days of puppet master night time control. He gives up more quickly and easily than he did before, because Bryce sleepily tells him to leave his room every time Quinn sneaks in there to organize a rally, but he's up later than Bryce in his rebellion.

The first few nights in the new house, Quinn woke up around midnight with what I can only assume, based on my experience with him and this condition as a baby, was reflux. John and I came up with all sorts of theories about the reflux, and methods for dealing with the reflux, but basically we walked around like idiots with big question marks over our heads until a friend of mine asked if we thought the reflux return might have anything to do with the move. When she asked that, I had a flashback to one of the "reflux" nights when I walked into Quinn's room and he was (while sleeping) sitting up in his bed, wringing his hands, and crying, "I don't want this. Take it away!" Earlier that night at bedtime he'd asked to have his old baby furniture back. Um, yeah, I think the reflux could possibly be stress-related. Maybe, just maybe the changes of losing his pacifier, going to underwear at night, moving out of his toddler bed, moving into a big bed, and moving out of the only house he's known since birth (all in the past six months) is taking a toll on this kid. Most of the time the toll is paid with screams and tantrums on the stairs when I unreasonably request that he come downstairs and ask humanely for help returning his sock from inside-out position rather than screeching and stomping his feet - but occasionally it's paid with night time reflux.

The House
Despite the (expected) challenges, we can't complain about this place. It's huge. John thinks it's enchanted, actually. The other morning while I was in the bathroom getting ready for work, he walked in to get something out of the closet and we rejoiced in the fact that we could both be in the bathroom simultaneously without bumping into each other, or having to wait in line for access to a sink or drawer. "And the food cooks better here!" he said jovially. I looked at him skeptically, but I knew exactly what he was talking about, because I'd noticed it too. He continued, "the clothes dry faster, too! I mean, the way things are going, pretty soon we'll start getting younger and thinner!"

Maybe. But if the enchantment ends with kids incapable of screaming or acting out their deep-seated displeasure with life changes, that would be enough for me.

Busiest Week Ever

We haven't dropped off the face of the earth, but I don't know how capable I am of giving an adequate update, either. The main points are these: 1.) Monday, we closed on the purchase of our new house. 2.) Tuesday, the movers a.) couldn't fit everything onto their truck and b.) requested custom-made Subway sandwiches for lunch and c.) got exactly what they asked for due to my ulterior and insane motive of being completely moved in and settled by my return to work next Monday and the resulting necessity that the movers not leave the vicinity of the truck(s) or our house. 3.) Also Tuesday, my mother-in-law asked me as she walked through our newly built bigger house if it "felt like getting out of prison" to be here, and since she was agreeing to sacrifice her sanity and watch our kids all day while we moved in and unpacked, I just let the remark go and assumed outwardly that she meant only to compliment our new house, not insult our old one, the one we'd lived in for eight years and the one we'd completely transformed since moving in. 4.) Wednesday, after spending the previous day and night unpacking and prepping the kids' rooms, I temporarily returned to work for mandatory training (weee!). John stayed home and let the cable company in - something that should have taken an hour or two, but actually sent him into a time warp, or a fourth (fifth?) dimension from where he did not return until well after I arrived home from work to find our new house entangled in countless multi-size and multi-color wires. 5.) Thursday, we closed on the sale of our old house, then breathed a collective sigh of relief that our real estate experience was ending fairly painlessly. We're still in legitimate shock over that one, actually. 6.) Friday, as the pile of empty boxes grew and our attempts at personal hygiene and patience sorely diminished, the kids' constant demands for "commercials" (their term for cartoons) resulting from the newly "installed" cable (and by installed, I mean "punched into our walls and then knotted into oblivion on a visible and reachable shelf in Quinn's closet") pushed us into some realm of dysfunction typically occupied by Jerry Springer guests. The kids ended up outside riding bikes on the back patio, screaming at one another and then being screamed at by us to - what? - stop screaming, obviously.

There is more to say (as always), but my eyelids feel like thick, heavy sandpaper, and I think I now understand why they say sleep is some sort of requirement or serious recommendation for good health, or survival, or whatever.