Party Hearty

My parents were visiting us all through this week. I successfully concealed all information about how one of our neighbor’s sprang out his balcony to his death just the week before. They spent most of their time inside the apartment, recovering from their long trip, so there was no danger of them overhearing anything. 


They also had not read this blog due to much denied technical issues getting onto the internet, so our secret was safe. One whiff of the news about the suicide (not to mention the shooting and other domestic abuse issues in this building), and my mom would insist our ghetto fab apartment is haunted and we have to move out. As it is, she is feverishly praying that we will find a better place to live. As are we. 

Any old how, they heard from their friends about my whimsical vignettes on my new life here in Canada, and insisted on reading a few episodes. I skillfully clicked on the one from about two weeks ago that compared my poor sister to a menopausal seal and asked my mom to scroll down from there. She just assumed it was my newest entry. Whew.

My mom adamantly insisted that she knows how to use the computer, after all she has watched every single episode of ‘Bones’ online. She just kept scrolling down, never suspecting I was trying to mastermind a major cover up of the horrific entries right above what she was reading.

Lanes, our three year old, was so happy to have my parents visiting. She was not pleased with their sleeping and bathroom habits though. Almost every morning she pounced onto their bed with her drums, attempting to hammer them out of bed. When that failed she just put her bony elbows into my unsuspecting mother’s stomach and bladder while attempting to cuddle with them (if you can't beat them, join them) and that got her up and about real fast.

On the first day they were here, it was not such a good idea since we had one of our numerous water cuts. My father refused to drink anything until the water was restored, and my mom was using the bathroom with a vengeance.

Meanwhile, on that day of all days, my sister e-mails me a picture of a new commode she has installed in her house. Yes, of a commode. I mean it’s not like she bought a boat or grill or something. Who takes a picture of the throne—a plain boring old white one at that? She even called and insisted that I pass along the picture and hand out some compliments to her on it.

Considering my father and I were holding our bladders all day and we were both a lighter shade of blue from our efforts, it was the absolute last thing we wanted to see. Thankfully, the water was restored two hours sooner than scheduled, and they had water for the rest of their visit. Lanes was free to press on bladders to her hearts content.

She was more gentle on my father, with whom she is on a first name basis—no calling him ‘grandpa’ here. I think she instinctively knows that he is not well. One day she stroked his hair, which had fallen due to chemo and stroked his blackened fingers and asked him about them. He has also been fed various concoctions of ‘medicine’ from her tea and food sets.

If he stays in the bathroom more than five minutes she would come tell my mom that he has been there too long. Lanes would hover menacingly over her until my mom went to check on him, because she is under the impression that my father needs to be taken care of by my mother.

This is really true. He would wake up before my mom but would refuse to eat breakfast until she came out. That’s normally ok, but he needed to eat to take his medicine. Then one day she took an extra long shower and he went into the bathroom on the pretense of really having to go, but sat there talking to her the entire time.

I guess it must run in the family because Lanes does that type of thing. Whenever my mom or dad went to the toilet, after awhile she would open the door and say she needs to use the potty. They would get all excited and scramble out of the loo in a hurry, only to be captured by an enthusiastic Lanes who has decided its play time.

I think they had a lot of fun together, even after my mom sat on the ‘rocket’ Lanes had made in school from an old toilet paper roll. She announced to everyone she met how grandma broke her rocket, much to my mom’s horror.

On Wednesday we invited my mom’s friend of 60+ years and her husband to lunch. Lanes was going limp and fighting going to school, trying to stay home and play with her grandparents, and after I wrestled her out and made a stop at the grocery store, I only had 1 ½ hours to cook, set the table, clean up, and take a shower. I managed to pull it off by some miracle.

Luckily, the appetizer and meal turned out well and everyone had a good time—so much so that the party went on till 8:30pm at night. Lanes was so delighted to find my mom’s friends (who P and I think of as our friends now) in our apartment when she came home. She flirts unabashedly with my mom’s friend’s husband.

On Friday and Saturday we had dinner parties to go to. The first friends we met in Canada had invited us over. So after all the sleeping that went on in the first half of their visit, the second half turned out to be really busy—but in a good way.

My parents left on Sunday afternoon and I was left to deal with the carnage that is a preschooler’s angst. Lanes was really sad that they left, she tried to bargain with me to keep some relatives when my sister and her brood came up to pick my parents up. Then she tried to wrangle a deal to go to Seattle with them, but that fell through for her as well.

Luckily, my nutty sister came brought along a mini-science kit when she came up. When everyone left, my anal nature (92%) took over and I did a quick cleaning of the apartment and put a load of laundry in. Then, I sat and did an experiment with Lanes in a valiant attempt to distract her. We did one that involved putting a penny in water and a penny in lemon juice to see which one comes out shinier.

Supposedly the one in the juice is supposed to outshine the other, but in our experiment, the penny immersed in water outshone the penny in the lemon juice. It figures. It brought back bad memories of lab experiments in high school. I did a quick switcharoo and Lanes was none the wiser. It helped that at that time she was trying to pick her toes out with the tweezers that came with the set.

She wants to do more experiments when she comes home from school today, but they require things foreign to me, like celery and food coloring, none of which I have handy. I was thinking of using her paints instead of the food coloring. Will see how that goes!

Tomorrow I am supposed to go to Lanes’ school play and after P gets home I am to be let loose on the streets. I will take my first driving ‘lesson’ and I’m on pins about it. It’s raining and I’m going out during rush hour. If you live in the area, stay home!! I hope I stay on the right(no pun intended)side of the road. At least it all makes for a crazy episode next week…