[pool photos taken with our Canon PowerShot D10]
I guest posted over at SmonkYou yesterday, did you see? If you dig on blogs about parenting, you really should visit SmonkYou – it’s my favorite Dad Blog {which is like a Mom Blog written by a Dad. Or if you ask Kenny, he’s a male mommy blogger. The first ever actually. Which is pretty cool. Or weird. Whichever. Anyway, pay him a visit. And if you missed my post, here it is, in it all it’s awkward, guest-post-y glory.}
So, Kenny asked me to guest post. And I said yes. And then I promptly passed out. Okay it didn’t happen exactly like that. But both of those things did happen. And, they both lead me to a flux capacitor type moment in which I all at once knew what I should post about on Kenny’s Blog. See, when Staci was in labor Kenny tweeted asking for last minute advice. Naturally I responded with the sage-est advice I could muster from my labor experience: “If she has bangs, and she starts sweating, and they’re standing straight up, and you’re gonna take pictures? For the love of god man, get her a hair clip!” I’m not trying to brag or anything, but Kenny said it was the best advice he’d gotten to date. So with that in mind I’m going to talk about something that I’m pretty sure all Dads can benefit from: My hair.
Men who read Smonk You, (there are men who read Smonk You, right?) everything you need to know about your wife, you can learn by looking at her hair. I’m not even really a high maintenance kind of woman, and I still wear my emotions on my head. Like when I was in the seventh grade and my boyfriend Scott May broke up with me and my Grandmother died on the same day and I shaved the bottom of my head from the top of my ears to the base of my neck like an effing Samurai. Or in college when my future hubby and I broke up and I dyed black streaks through my bleach blonde hair to match the blackness of my cold black heart, obviously, and then used so much Czechoslovakian peroxide on it that it fell clean out.
When I was 26 and getting married and life was all around sunshine and roses, my hair was shiny and windswept and generally fabulous, and when I lost my job last year I chopped all that shiny fabulous hair off in favor of a muddy brown bob a’la Audrey Tautou…or possibly someone much more miserable and less cute.
Point being – when my hair started to shed like the dickens (Is it obvious I have no idea what “dickens” are?) and then tie itself in crazy knots, and finally make like a banana and get split ends (like, crazy split ends) I should have known something was up. My hair was speaking to me. Even as I grew it out and coaxed it back to it’s natural color in an attempt to reclaim my pre-baby ME {the aforementioned windswept and fabulous version} my hair, my eternal mood ring, was flailing it’s little hair arms, and screaming at the top of it’s little hair lungs “SOMETHING’S AMISS!!!”
But I paid it no mind. And the other day when Delilah was at my Mother-In-Law’s, and Scott was playing the drums downstairs, I sat in the bathroom digging rats nests out of my once shiny hair (or possibly doing something else completely) – and I started to feel dizzy. As the room started to buzz I vaguely remember my hair whispering “I told you so” before the blood drained from my brain and my head hit the floor (but not before my face paid the open bathroom drawer a visit on the way down.)
In no uncertain terms, I passed out cold. I don’t really remember waking up – I just remember that it took a long time for me to figure out what was going on. That I was lying face down on my bathroom floor and that the loud beat I was hearing wasn’t coming from some weird club (my first thought was that I was drunk somewhere behind a club…which I honestly can’t tell you the last time that happened) but was in fact my husband down stairs. That I hadn’t laid down because I was drunk, I had fallen, blacked out, and HOLY SHIT WHAT IF DELILAH HAD BEEN PLAYING ON THE FLOOR IN FRONT OF ME.
After I called Scott enough times that his cell phone shimmied off the shelf he’d laid it on and on to his tom tom he found me standing at the top of the stairs shaking a little and rubbing my head. It wasn’t pretty. It freaked us out something fierce.
Long story short, I was dehydrated. Badly dehydrated. From breastfeeding and sweating and some other less pleasant things that I’ll refrain from discussing here for fear that Kenny will never let a girl step foot on his blog again. That, and I’m wired weird so this nerve in my abdomen accidentally sent a message to my heart to stop thereby cutting off blood flow to my brain and causing me to pass out. (At least, that’s how I understand it. My online medical school wasn’t totally clear on that.) I was given IV fluids, and about a million tests, and wow, I just realized that this post has taken a turn for the serious, but the point is, it was a wakeup call. My daughter is nine months old and she’s amazing and I’ve thrown myself into parenting her with reckless abandon, but I’ve been so busy taking care of her, that I completely forgot to take care of me. But parenthood can do that to you. Which is kind of incredible when you think about it. That you can fall so madly in love with this little thing that you can completely forget about your own needs. But you should try not to. Because happy parents make a happy baby. And…Kenny rules. L’Chaim.
