Daily humdrums...

I spent most of this morning sitting in this very chair reading a blog that I just found, and I literally read for hours... Needless to say, I ended up really cold, so my thermostat is set a little higher now :) If you want to check out this blog, grab like 50 boxes of tissues and go to audreycaroline dot blogspot dot com.

Miss Priss just got up from her nap and I can't help but laugh as she is still trying to master the English language. She has a nasty cold today, so with stuffy and runny nose, and her "pappies" (pacifier) tight in her mouth, she came running out of her little playhouse jabbering something that sounded like "whats up man", followed by "spicy wessum sissy pumons". NO CLUE what that was, but it's cute none the less. The most hilarious thing of it is that she can talk very clearly when she wants to, and is extremely smart but wants no one to know it. A few weeks ago, I had her on my lap reading a book her. It was the Moncure "My A Book" ("Little A has a box. It was a big box. What will Little A put in her box?"). Anyway, as I was reading, I was pointing to the "a"s as we went along, Miss Priss not really looking at the book, but at me, kind of smug like. After a few pages, she gives me a condescending grin and proceeds to point out the letter a, capital and lowercase, in every word on the next three pages, saying "a", "a", "a"..... then tilts her head to one side, and snaps the book closed. Yep, she's gonna be a handfull!!!

While Miss Priss was napping today, when I finished my blog reading tear fest, Lady M and I played Cranium. It's a fun game if you haven't ever had the joy of being involved. We always play this together, even though you are supposed to play with teams. Anyway, the game requires that you pull a card from the specific box of the color you last landed on, and either answer the question on the card, or perform a specific task. One of the card headings is "Humdinger", as it gives you a tune to hum, while the other players on your team have to guess the tune. Lady M and I play where the person drawing the card hums the tune, and the opponent guesses the tune. It could get very ugly if we were terribly competitive.

Anyway, I ended up with a "Humdinger" card today, and the song was "You are My Sunshine". I knew she would get this one, because I remember singing it to her all the time when she was little. I hummed, she guessed and of course, got it right. I told her I knew she'd get it right, because it was one I sang to her all the time. She then said, "yeah, remember, I sang it to you when you were in the hospital."

Lady M was just a little older than Miss Priss is now when I had the first brain surgery. According to her pediatrician, whom I spoke with before the surgery, she should have no remembrance of anything prior to her 2nd birthday, because that's just how the human brain works. People just don't remember pre-2. But Lady M remembers EVERYTHING about me being in the hospital. She remembers the long drive down. She remembers the really big parking deck. She remembers being in the little room with the doctor talking to her mom while he was wearing surgical scrubs, eating peanut butter crackers and telling her mom that she was going to need surgery. She remembers going down to the kids floor of Duke Medical Center with her Uncle Wesley to look at the huge fishtank, and seeing the kids' artwork on the walls.

She remembered singing You are My Sunshine to her mom, when I was unable to hold her, when I was lying in the bed with my head bandaged up tight. And I feel guitly because I don't remember.

I don't remember a lot about Lady M when she was really little. Talk about feeling guilty. I know it's just how things are when you've had your head cut open twice with things removed, and had beams of radiation shot into your brain to kill the "bad stuff".

We don't have cable or satellite, so we installed a digital convertor box last week, and found out that we now have access to two 24 hour kid channels, PBS kids and Qubo. We were watching the other day when I saw two different shows, one on each channel, that I know I watched with a kid. But I cannot for the life of me tell you if it was Lady M, or my niece Kaitlyn, who my mom babysat while I was in college and living at home. My memory is limited to the things I can correlate with factual time lines, and it's TERRIBLY sad to know that I've lost a lot of my first daughters' life in my memory. I look through photo albums, and truly do not ever remember some of these times. I couldn't even tell you if I was the one behind the camera.

It's saddening, but it also makes me want to appreciate my kids and the time I have with them. No one is guaranteed a tomorrow, so I am trying to remember to live in the now (right Vanessa?) and not get caught up on the future or in the things I can't recall. I need to remind myself that I can make memories today, and they will be just as valuable in the future as the ones I cannot recollect now.