A Misadventures in Mommyhood Moment

Brought to you by the letter "P" for poop!

As you've probably discovered, I'm a new mom. I definitely don't take that job lightly, but it definitely has it's lighter moments. Here is a recent one.

So, on a recent morning I'm doing my hair in the main bathroom of our home. My husband and I have decided that we need to be better adults and maybe try getting up even before our son is awake as opposed to using him as our alarm. What happens when we do that is we tend to already be behind before our day even gets started, so we're both up getting things done. When my son wakes up we take turns getting ready and then switch so the other person can get ready for work. But, I digress.

I'm in the bathroom doing my hair and the door flys open and my husband is standing there with my son. I thought to myself, "What could possibly get them away from their morning Sports Center session?" Then it hit me. The smell of a little gift my son often makes for us. My husband usually brings my son to me when it's time for the big diaper changes and I don't mind but this became funny really fast. He was holding the baby horizontally and when he lifted him away from his body and pulled away the burp rag hung over my son's behind I could see that there was poo-poo on my husband's shirt and pants and all over my son's leg. After I stopped laughing I took over so my husband could go take a shower.

Now, for anyone who has ever dealt with a blow-out you know it's hard to decide where to start. These are zip-up jammies my son is wearing so in order to get the diaper in the first place I have to remove his feet from the little footies of the pajamas. Oh yeah. Not pleasant. So, I'm covered in it, he's covered in it and now my husband is laughing. But we get that all cleaned up and manged to get all wiped down and smelling good. I dress my son and the day goes on as planned...gather up, load up and head to daycare. On our way out the door we decide we need to soak the jammies and throw them in a sink after discovering our washer doesn't really have a soak cycle per-se. You can only imagine what my house smelled like by lunchtime. Let's just say I'll leave it at that!

The Almost Misadventure

So, my job is pretty cool. I host a travel show for a local public television station where we go to places in Illinois, Indiana and Missouri and do stories about interesting people, collections, places and groups. My assignment for this weekend was to chronicle a bike polo team. Yes, polo on bicycles. I know, I've never thought about it either.

Anyway, I get to the city where this club meets. It's known as a pretty crime and gang-heavy town so I drive in with all doors locked and pay attention. We always joke about "not getting shot" when we go there, but it can be a real threat so I was on alert, just being dilligent. I had directions to the park (a very nice little neighborhood park) where they play polo. I am following the directions and notice a street I need to take, but it's out of order compared with where I'm supposed to go, but I decide I'll give it a try anyway. I take off down this road and soon begin to realize I'm not probably in the right place, or a very nice neighborhood for that matter. That's about the time I see the man walking down the boulevard with a pipe in his hand, so I turn back to the main road and high-tail it. Needless to say, after going a little further than I thought it would be, I found the right road and made it safely to the park where I met the bike polo club and shot my story.

I guess that's why I am calling this an "almost" misadventure. It definitely turned out to be more of an adventure but it did get interesting for just a minute. And for those of you who are curious about bike polo, it was awesome. It's on a court about 100 x 75 feet or thereabouts and matches last 10 minutes or first to 5 goals and teams are 3-on-3. The people I talked to compared it really to hockey, because it's far less formal than horse polo and very much more "X Gamesy" if you ask me. It's fast-paced, there are wrecks and a whole lot of foul language, but I still enjoyed watching the competitiveness of it all and meeting the extremely nice and accommodating people there. They even spray painted their logo on one of my T-shirts for me. So I guess I'm honorary bike polo-er now, although I'm not sure I would ever be coordinated enough to play!

So that's my latest (mis)adventure. I hope to be back with another one really soon. And I'm going to start adding photos so you may want to page back through some of my blogs to check those out!

Misadventures in Health

The Pleasant Family is generally a healthy crew, well, at least they were until last week. I can honestly say last week may have been one for the stress record books. It really began on Monday, although we didn't know that then.

My husband, Tony, works in an office. Apparently he went to fix something on another computer in that office and misjudged a chair, we'll call it. You know, like when you go to step down off a step and it's further away than you thought? It was that, just with an office chair. This created a sharp pain in his abdomen he told me when he got home that day. Luckily, the pain went away that evening. So, he wakes up the next day and says he's a little sore, but nothing else.

Fast forward to noon the next day. After complaining of a few painful spasms, he calls me at noon and says he's headed straight to the emergency room. The conversation went something like this:

Me: "Hello?"
Tony: "Hi, I'm on my way to the emergency room."
Me: "Ok, are you okay? Can you wait for me to drive you?"
Tony: "No, I've already left home I'll just meet you there."

So, I jet off from work to the emergency room a little more than slightly worried, because for my husband to go to the ER, it must really hurt. He told me it felt like it might be his appendix. To make what could be an even longer story short, they do bloodwork, a CT scan and determine that it's not his appendix (whew!), but it could be kidney stones. So we wait a little while longer and they determine it's not that either. The diagnosis works out to be a severe muscle strain, from, yep the chair incident! It's not funny (okay, it's maybe a little funny), but they gave him pain killers and naproxen for the muscle spasms causing the pain.

Now, many days later, this leads to heartburn. The poor guy now has consistent heartburn and stomach pain so he quits taking the meds and goes to our regular family doctor (because 48 hours of persistent heartburn is not normal!) who informs him that the naproxen is causing that and it'll be another 7-10 days before that lets up. Needless to say, he will have to suffer some more, poor guy.

But, that can't be the end of this little misadventure! Two days after this little incident I'm sitting at work and my daycare calls me to inform me that my son has neither eaten or made a wet diaper since he's been there (he was dropped off at 8 am, it's now noon). So, I call his doctor and get no one. I leave work to go get him and the little guy can't even wake up or pick up his head. This has me scared to death, but luckily my husband shows up and we take the baby right to the doctor. No one is there (can they really send an entire office of pediatricians to lunch at the same time? Apparently they can!). We procede to the ER for the SECOND time this week. By this time Tyler is awake, but still groggy. They give him chest xrays, which he did not like, and an upper respiratory virus test, which he really didn't like.

All tests come back negative and it turns out he just has a chest virus. The grogginess was caused by dehydration from not wanting to eat. The worry is less, but the poor guy now undergoes saline nebulizer treatments and a whole lot of nose sucking to help relieve the congestion. He should return to normal in a few weeks. I also had nebulizer treatments when I was little and boy, have those machines come a long way! Ours looks like a little puppy now. When I was little, it was a big, scary box with a handle!

Anyway, that's the end of this misadventure, let's just hope we don't have to have anymore like it in the near (or far) future!

The $500 misadventure

You know when you're just having one of those days? I can definitely say that was me today. I came home from work for lunch, as I typically do. My husband and son were at home because my son has been sick and is out of daycare until later this week. I'm on the 17 Day Diet (more on that misadventure later), so I was cooking myself a few turkey burgers. Well, the chef in me knew just what I was doing because Bobby Flay told me that all I need to cook a turkey burger is some olive oil and a non-stick pan.

So, here I am seasoning my burgers feeling very Wolfgang Puck. My pan of oil is hot so I decide to drop the turkey burger in. If you guess that I splashed hot oil out of the pan and burnt my arm, you win! I now have a nice little splash  pattern all over my right arm. But that's not the biggest misadventure of today.

I managed to eat the turkey burgers without further incident. After playing with my son, Tyler, for a little while, it's time to go back to work. I say my goodbyes and hop in my car. I begin to back out of the garage and look to make sure I'm not too close to the side as I come out, just like I always do. After my initial check I continue to back out. BAM! I hit the side of the garage and tear off the driver's side mirror. Apparently I was crooked coming out, so my obligatory check was no good. I managed not to shatter the glass, but now there's a big, dangling mirror creating an eyesore on the side of my car. The noise was loud enough to bring my husband and son from the house. Bless my husband's heart, he took one look and said, "Accidents happen!" Definitely what I needed to hear over, "What did you do!"



Needless to say, I hopped out, loaded up into our SUV and went back to work fuming the whole way over a silly mistake. Upon arriving at work I called my car dealership and explained the problem. They explained the could get the part in a week, but it would come unpainted so that would have to be done too. I told them to order away! The grand total for the fix: $500! I would call this a very big misadventure and one I won't soon forget.

My husband's handy taping job!



View from inside



The moral of the story, look more than once before backing out of the garage. It'll save you from having your mirror duct taped to your driver's side window for a week!



Welcome to the misadventures!

A wise relative of mine once told me, "You need to start a blog and narrate all of these adventures (you've been having) lately." So, I got to thinking and decided, why not?

Sometimes interesting things happen to me and my family and there's almost always something comical or, at the very least, relatable, so why not share them with the world? That leads me to this blog. Here I am and the plan is to start logging these "misadventures" I tend to have. The title comes from my last name, Pleasant. I can definitely say I live a Pleasant life 99% of the time.

I'm the typical American for the most part. I'm married to my high school sweetheart, have 2 little white dogs, a ranch-style home with a picket fence and a nearly 5-month-old son. We like to travel, play golf and make an adventure out of every day. I'm a journalist and host a television show at a local PBS station in which the tagline is "Every mile is an adventure;" I truly believe that. You can make an adventure (or misadventure) out of anything. But when the adventures do turn into misadventures, that's what I plan to detail here. I'm a former newspaper journalist and passionate storyteller so I can't help but want to write about what I know.

Sit back, strap in and join me on my ride in the Misadventures of a Pleasant Life! I hope you'll stop back by frequently or subscribe to my posts so you can read up on what I hope will be awesome new (mis)adventures every week (and maybe even more often).