Edgy Mama

Basements are black holes, sucking unloved, unneeded items into their dank, dark, musty maws, and only releasing the items when their masters venture down with whip in one hand and cleaning supplies in the other (and the phone number for Habitat for Humanity).

Here are just a few of the random items I found today while attempting to tame my beast of a basement: two film cameras and five rolls of expired film, 11 Sesame Street and Barney VHS tapes, an ancient bag of pretzels, 80 egg cartons and 15 shoe boxes (might need for craft project one day), a framed photo set of me as a chunky debutante with a horrible haircut and too much makeup, a 12-pack of Corona (yay!), lots of beat-up kids’ shoes, several over-sized mutant crickets (alive and irritable), a vinyl tent to go over a bunk bed (although we don’t own a bunk bed), an aluminum fish roasting dish with the handle burned off, never-used heart-shaped ramekins, and three shredded dog beds.

Sheesh. What’s in your basement?

I knew something was wrong last night when my 5-year-old boy came upstairs at 6:45 and said he was tired and wanted to go to bed. He was asleep about 15 minutes later. Typically, he’s bouncing on the bed, pestering his sister, yelling boisterously, and generally bursting with pre-bed spaz energy from about 6:00 p.m. until he passes out.

He is the original wind-up toy–one of those little tin monkeys that claps it’s cymbals together spasmodically until it stops completely in mid-crash. My boy is like that–crash to comatose in 1.2 seconds.

Sure enough, 11 hours later, he crawled into the bed with me and said, “Mommy, I’m so tired.” His little body radiated heat. “You’re not tired. You have a fever,” I said.

I put him on the Motrain (greatest kid drug ever). It helped initially, but his fever came soaring back after a few hours, at which point, he wanted to snuggle in the bed with Mommy.

As I warmed my cold nose against the frying pan of his neck, he asked if he could go back to school tomorrow. “I don’t think so,” I said.

There was a pause. “If I don’t go to school, are they going to put you in jail, like those guys told me?”

I guess the truant officers have been putting the fear of God and prison into the pre-Kindergarteners.