About the time I was thinking that the poor man was probably lying unconscious in my basement, overcome by the fumes, the repairman emerged to let me know he couldn't find a problem.
"But you can smell it right?" I asked.
"Uh....well...no," he replied, "but I did see some rice spilled on the floor down there. I thought you might want to know so you don't get mice."
Great. So now, not only does he think that I'm a crazy housewife who either overreacts or smells things that aren't there, he knows I'm a bad housewife. The rice spilled this morning while I was cleaning, but I hadn't yet bothered to take a broom down there to sweep it up. The repairman was polite and checked a few more things which all turned out fine and was on his way back to whatever real work he was pulled away from by my non-emergency.
The girls, fueled by a round of heat exhaustion, launched back into Frimonday behavior. Jocie is currently recovering from the day's excitement with a Raggedy Ann treasury and Meredith is serving time in her bedroom for misuse of a garden hose and fleeing from authority. I am feeling knocked down by embarrassment, another round of Frimonday, and some unfun events of this morning. Rather than dwell on all that, I thought I'd share a memory from nearly five years ago. Coincidentally, it also took place on a Friday.
Friday, September 3, 2010 was a busy day. Jocie turned one that day, I was preparing for her party the following day, my neighbor was holding a huge garage sale, and Meredith was fighting for survival against my plummeting progesterone levels. My levels had dropped shortly after I found out I was pregnant with Jocelyn too, but an early ultrasound showed she was fine and my levels rebounded at the next check. We assumed the same thing would happen with Meredith. The ultrasound showed a healthy baby, but when I started bleeding a few days later, my levels were rechecked sooner than planned. The results showed my progesterone was contining to decline. I was diagnosed with a threatened miscarriage and scheduled to begin progesterone injections first thing that Friday morning.
I was up early that morning to frost Jocie's cake while she hung on my ankles and scavenged for crumbs off the floor (I was a bad housewife back then too). I dropped a cupcake off next door with the neighbor holding the garage sale as it was her birthday too. I let her know that I was going to the doctor's office for about 30 minutes and asked that she not let people park in my driveway. We live on a busy street with no on-street parking and side streets that fill up fast. She agreed to keep an eye out for cars and since she was aware of what was going on with the pregnancy I trusted that she would protect my driveway.
The injection appointment was uneventful. The nurse warned me about injection site pain and how to deal with that. What she didn't tell me was that sometimes it takes your body a few injections to adjust going from progesterone levels of 13 to 200 in a matter of minutes. Maybe that's not the case for everyone. It was certainly the case for me, as I was about to experience.
As we drove down the the street toward our home, I could see a car pulled into my driveway. I was annoyed more than I might normally have been, but figured it was just someone who needed to pull up closer to the sale to load their purchases. I drove around a few blocks slowly before making my way back to our street.
The car was still in the driveway, but this time I realized that the driver was standing near her car trying clothes on her daughter. There wasn't any traffic behind me, so I put my blinker on and waited. She looked up, looked away, and continued with what she was doing. As that progesterone continued to spread a bit further into my system, my level of annoyance increased. Think in terms of terms of Bruce Banner's pupils narrowing to pinpoints and his skin taking on a greenish hue. Definitely an overreaction.
I turned my blinker off and drove around the neighborhood a little less leisurely this time. I had a cake that needed to be frosted and a house to clean and I was still trying to stay off my feet as much as I could until the bleeding stopped. I checked out the side streets for parking spots, but there weren't many and Jocie wasn't walking yet. I really wasn't feeling up to lugging all 20 plus pounds of a sturdy toddler a few blocks and then sprinting across the busy street when I had a perfectly good driveway that would allow me to lug Jocie only a few feet before depositing her on the kitchen floor to go exploring for stray stale Cheerios. The more I thought about my driveway, the angrier I became.
I turned back onto our street, pulled up even with the driveway, turned my blinker on, and waited. This time the lady was chatting with someone. She saw me again, and ignored me again. By this point, all that progesterone was coursing through my veins and it sent me into full-blown Incredible Hulk mode. I was not going to let this woman hijack my driveway any more.
I took my foot off the brake, applied it perhaps a touch too heavily to the gas pedal, and drove up onto my lawn. I manuevered around her car and into the top half of my driveway. I turned my car off, hit the remote to open the garage door, removed Jocie from her car seat, and stomped toward the garage as much as a woman trying to walk on eggshells so as not to miscarry can stomp. The lady yelled "Sorry!" in a tone that conveyed she was anything but, and then said that my neighbor gave her permission to park there. When I didn't respond, she proceeded to tell me that I had a serious attitude problem. While there were several comebacks running through my head, my progesterone-fueled rage couldn't overcome my introverted nature. Strangers make me feel awkward, even when channeling The Hulk.....though, come to think of it, I don't ever remember Lou Ferrigno saying much either. Usually he just growled and grunted. Maybe he was an introvert too. At any rate, I kept my comments and my growling to myself. I just closed the garage door and went into the house to resume the party preparations.
So there you have it. The progesterone story I promised you last week. I can't say retelling it has jolted me out of my Frimonday mood, but maybe it made at least one of you laugh today. And for those of you rolling your eyes and thinking to yourself "Is she EVER going to stop telling that story?", how about a cute picture of the little girl who was having a birthday that day? Here you go:
And a bonus photo because I ran across this one while looking for the first and it made me laugh.
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