Monthly Archives: September 2011

September 19, 2011 · 3:09 pm

The Best Broken Heart I Ever Had

When I resigned from my job at Casa Valentina (an amazing organization helping boys and girls – and soon mothers! – who age out of foster care) to stay home fulltime, my colleagues gave me a heart-shaped glass paperweight with the Casa Valentina logo etched in the glass. It meant a lot to me and has been a fixture on my desk since the day I brought it home.

A fixture and a magnet.  The boys, especially Riley, love toplay with it.  When Riley was younger I would flat out take it away. “No touch,” I would say. Lately, I’ve been less strict. I let him hold it but I tell him to be careful. “That’s Mommy’s special heart and it will break if you drop it,” I say.  “Okay, Mommy,” he replies. 

This morning, Riley broke my heart.  I was folding towels in the laundry room when he walked in holding my heart.  Before I had a chance to remind him to be careful, it slipped out of his hands, fell on the tile floor and broke.  I looked down at the little pieces of glass around our (bare!) feet and said, “Riley, you broke my heart.”  Then I laughed because he didn’t break my heart.  He broke my heart-shaped paperweight.  It was an accident…and a paperweight.

What happened next was remarkable.  Riley looked at me with his big blue eyes and said, “Mommy, I’m sorry I broke your heart,” and then he hugged me.   Dylan, who was just a few steps behind Riley when the paperweight broke, started to cry and yelled, “Riley, you broke Mommy’s heart!”  I shooed the boys and their bare feet out of the room to clean up the mess.  While I swept and vacuumed, Dylan sobbed and told his brother over and over that he broke Mommy’s heart.  When I put some larger chunks of glass in the trash, Dylan tearfully insisted I take them out.  “Daddy will fix your broken heart when he comes home,” he insisted.

If you didn’t know we were talking about a paperweight, you would think something dreadful happened to our family.  When everything was finally cleaned up, I sat down with the boys and told them not to be upset.  I told them I was disappointed that the heart broke, but I wasn’t sad.  I told them my heart was happy. Beaming, actually.  Riley knew he did something wrong and apologized immediately, and even though Dylan over-reacted a little bit (my emotional creature!), he expressed perfectly just how much he knew the heart meant to me.  I told them it was the best broken heart I ever had and then we got dressed for school.

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September 16, 2011 · 5:05 pm

Blah Day

Today is a blah day.

I didn’t win the CBS Miami Most Valuable Blogger Awards.  Blah.  It’s okay.  I didn’t really expect to win, but it would have been fun and it would have made today a lot less blah. 

Regardless of the results, whether you voted once, twice or everyday, thank you!  I have to give a special shout out to my mom. I think she wanted me to win the award more than I did.  She’s a reference librarian, and during the voting period, she voted for me every day from her computer at home as well as from every computer in the library where she works, which was sometimes as many as twenty times a day.  She definitely outed herself as a Crazy Mama, but that’s exactly what a mother’s love is.  Crazy.  I hope I’m as much of a Crazy Mama to my boys as she has always been to me.

Okay, more blah.  I took Riley to the dentist this morning for another check of his front teeth.  His gums look healthy, but the right tooth is still mobile and starting to get discolored in the back.  A second x-ray also revealed a change in the left tooth upinside the gums.  Our dentist is taking a conservative approach, so we’re on permanent watch and will head backfor another check in a few weeks. 

And some more.  Dylan woke up this morning with a headache and a severe case of the grumps.    Mike noticed that his pupils were extremely dilated, too.  Of course I googled “toddler and headache and dilated pupils,” which was not a very good idea. (This is an example of Crazy Mama in a bad way.)   After reading about all kinds of pediatric brain tumors and neurological disorders, I stepped away from the computer and had another cup of coffee (a glass of Pino Grigio at breakfast would have been inappropriate).  Instead of hightailing it to the Mayo Clinic, I gave him some ibuprofen.  He stayed home from school and I’m keeping an eye on him.  So far Ihaven’t noticed any neurological problems.  In fact, he’s demonstrating an impressively high level of balanceand coordination with the Xbox remote, the DVD player and his cheddar bunnies.

Finally, I’m making meat loaf for dinner.  Sounds blah, doesn’t it?  Actually, it’s a turkey meatloaf recipe with sun dried tomatoes and feta cheese from Giada DeLaurentiis, so I’m hopeful it’s not going to be blah at all.  

If I can take the blah out of meatloaf, maybe I can take the blah out of this day.  I didn’t win the blogger award, but I did get some new traffic to my blog as a result of being listed on the CBS Miami Web site.  Riley’s teeth are loose, but they’re still in his mouth!  And Dylan may not be feeling well, but one of the games he’s busy playing is the LeapFrog “Letter Factory.”  He’s as excited aboutlearning his letters and sounds as he is about buying “Cars 2” on Blue-ray onNovember 1st.  And that’s not “b” for blah at all.  

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