crazedparent

Cabin fever in a hot zone...

The crazedparent house is a hot zone of germs. Take your pick: hand/foot/mouth disease or the stomach flu. We've got it all.

Apparently hand/foot/mouth disease has been on the up tick in the county where we live, causing health officials to ask all pediatricians to report every seen case (read: epidemic). On Monday, our pediatrician told us she saw 30 cases of it in September, which is rare. She said for every 30 cases, there are likely 300 other cases where parents don't even recognize the symptoms. In mild cases, a child may have a sore throat and cold-like symptoms. Parents may not see the blisters in the kid's throat. So the kid goes to school...contagious.

If your kid has hand/foot/mouth disease and your doctor tells you that it's okay to send your kid to school so long as he or she is fever-free, don't. It's not true. So long as the kid is still getting blisters, he's spreading the virus. And you don't have to tell me how hard it is to keep a kid home for what could be two weeks. Or how hard it is to work while the kid is home. Be responsible and keep your kid from spreading this nasty, highly contagious (and gross!) virus.

Q.'s been home for a week. Five days into his recovery, his pops caught it. Do you know how hard it is for adults to get this disease? Now he has to stay home until he's no longer contagious.

Mid-morning on Thursday, I got "the call" from Six's school. Oh no, he didn't throw up in class like he did last Halloween. I found him curled in a ball on the little bed in the school's office. He was trying so hard not to cry. And then he threw up in the car on the ride home...the day before Halloween.

For the second year in a row, the crazedparent fam will not be trick or treating. We have fabulous homemade costumes. We have cool neon lights to wear around the 'hood. We have a party to attend. Alas, not a chance. We're starting to think we have a little Halloween curse. I feel the worst for Six, who hasn't attended his school's Halloween parade yet, and he's only in first grade. 

I won't say whether I'm healthy or not for fear of jinxing my immune system. But being in a house with three sick males? Please. Just pluck my eyelashes out one by one.

I'm thinking a week away, all by myself, should be sufficient payback.

Just do it...on Nike's terms...

I've been meaning to write about this for days, since I first read this column by C.W. Nevius.

San Francisco played host last weekend to Nike Women's Marathon. The biggest story out of the race should be that Arien O'Connell won, running faster than the "elite" racers who started 20 minutes before her. But here's the nasty catch: Even after being the fastest female runner in a group of 20,000 women, O'Connell didn't even place in the top four. And Nike dared to only call her "a winner." Get it? She's not the winner. She's "a winner."

The winner was officially 11 minutes slower than O'Connell. That's right. O'Connell beat the official winner by 11 minutes. She flat out passed her.  But, the winner was officially part of this "elite" group. And if you don't register as part of the "elite" group of racers, you can't qualify to win the marathon. Why? Because the elite runners don't know that the non-elites are could actually be competitive and try to run a solid race.

Seriously?

Nike, how pathetic. Especially when on this very same day, your press release said that this marathon was "one of Nike's proudest examples of how we're committed to fueling the power of sport in the lives of women."

And forget this business of calling Arien O' Connell a winner. We all know she won the race, fair and square. Sure, she ended up getting a trophy and a prize. But only after Nike was under a firestorm for not doing the right thing (and even this took several days). They were getting a bad PR rap, and they knew they needed to stop it.

And for the love of pete, what a story it could have been if they had declared her the winner from the get go. Isn't that what you'd call good sportsmanship?

Nike, you can take your glossy, girl-power commercials and your swanky stores with women's athletic gear. Take your PR quotes about empowerment and celebrating female athletes. And try to get someone else -- like those elite runners -- to believe you.

I'll take my ASIC running shoes and running cap, my Adidas running pants and random jerseys, and run like the wind.

And guess what? I don't need you to tell me to just do it.

A movie that makes me weep...

I landed in Boston this morning at 6:30am and since I didn't sleep much on the flight, I imagined I'd be exhausted enough to crawl in my hotel bed and sleep soundly until an hour before my presentation at BlogHer Boston. But the the sun was just peeking through and the city looked welcoming. I was soaking in the fall colors and architecture. By the time I arrived in my room, I was wide awake. I ordered breakfast. And then I did what I always do when I arrive in a hotel room at a decent hour. I turned on the television.

Perhaps it was my already emotional state of mind of being away from my boys (all three of them). But within two minutes of the movie August Rush, I could feel the tears coming. I could tell this movie would make me sob. My only moment of disappointment was the ending. But this movie, a true fable, was such so sweet and so fantastical that I couldn't help but be swept into it. (And Jonathan Rhys-Meyers isn't too hard on the eyes either.) There I sat, all alone, weeping like a silly fool in my hotel room as I watched a movie about an orphaned boy looking for his parents. A boy who believed music would lead him to them. The only thing that would have made it perfect is if my sister had been with me to watch it, passing the box of tissue to me. Pathetic. But I'm putting this DVD on my Christmas wish list.

BlogHer Boston was so wonderful. It was energizing to meet new bloggers who were so anxious to learn more and more and more about blogging. The next wave. More later...

Words and sounds that make me smile...

..."Mommy, we're talking about the Taj Mahal." (scene: two boys huddled on a top bunk with a flashlight looking at a kid's geography book."

..."Mommy, look! I drew the Rialto Bridge!" (scene: backyard patio with a bucket of chalk.)

..."Mom -- I'm going to fold the laundry today. No. Don't help me. You can take a break." (scene: in the garage while the Six pulls laundry from the dryer and actually starts folding clothes.)

..."Yay! He threw the heat!" (scene: the boys cheering as we huddle on the coach watching Rookie of the Year.)

..."I don't want guapo hair." (scene: mom trying to brush Q.'s hair before school.)

...Hearing the first few bars of "All Blue" by Miles Davis (on the album "Kind of Blue")

...The chirp of crickets late at night...in October.

...The sound of the garage door opening every night, shortly before dinner or the boys' bedtime.

***

I'm on my way to BlogHer Boston and BlogHer DC. Yahoo! Shine is a sponsor and I'm on tap to chat about how to get more readers to your blog. So if you're attending either event, please say hello!

I love Boston, especially at this time of year. It's been nine years since I've been on the East Coast and e last time was over Columbus Day weekend as the hubs and I contemplated a move to the Boston/Cambridge area. The city put its best foot forward, as they say, and we swooned. But my dad grew up in western Massachusetts and his only response to us when we talked about moving was, "I've lived in San Francisco since '50s. There's a reason. Snow." Enough said. And we're glad we stuck around in the Bay Area.

But the past few weeks have been frenetic and moving slightly faster than I dig. And while I get to have three whole days sans kids, I'm not all that jazzed about. Truth be told, I'd rather hang out with my boys all weekend. Busy-ness just makes me want to cuddle up with my family. Monday night -- and home -- can't come soon enough.

For now, I'll be thinking about these words that make me smile. 

What words make you smile?