2 posts tagged “fatherhood”

If you can't write about your sex life when you're a faceless entity on the internet, when can you write about your sex life?

I'm going to take the leap.

We have three kids, right? So, our sex life should be non-existant, right? Well, normally it's not, but lately it has been. I don't know why, maybe it's because we're tired. Maybe it's because I've been sick with some sort of chest crud. Maybe it's because - having PCOS - I've had my first period in, oh, about 6 months. Maybe it's because the Lexapro I've been taking to thwart the crazies has affected my sex drive. Whatever the reason, yesterday morning I guess the planets were aligned, the cosmos was singing, and we were both home and we both felt like having sex.

The boys were awake, but they had had breakfast and were playing and watching TV in back of the house. D. was spending the night with Gran. So, I get up, lock the bedroom door, and we snuggle quietly under the sheets. Right about the time that things start getting interesting, Walker's phone rings. He's the boss so he has to answer, but I really feel like chunking the thing right out the window. This is not the first time that this has happened. He finishes the call, and things start getting interesting again, when the cat jumps up in the middle of the bed. Walker hates the cat. So, I get up and throw the cat out in the hall and re-lock the bedroom door.

Things start getting interesting again, when we hear it:

bang, BANG, BANG on the bedroom door.

"Mommy, K. won't let me up on his bed!"

"Mommy, where are you?"

BANG, BANG, BANG!

"Mommy!"

I give up.

Sooo, yesterday was my husband's 31st birthday. Happy Birthday, Dear. I asked the kids if they wanted to cook for Daddy or take him out to dinner. My little restaurant-addicts promptly replied, "Westauwant, westauwant, westauwant, Mommy!!!" at the tops of their little lungs while jumping enthusiastically up and down. Westauwant, it was.

My kids' current favorites are Chili's and The Olive Garden. Daddy is sick unto death of both. Daddy probably deserved a big, fat, juicy steak, but the idea of wrestling with the children at some fancy steakhouse was just not appealing to me (anybody else understand my reluctance?). So there's this Mexican food place that all of my local friends have been raving about, and I thought that would be a great compromise - Daddy loooves Mexican food, and so do the kids.

In hindsight, we should have gone to the danged steakhouse.

We hadn't been there fifteen minutes when disaster struck, in the form of the natural disaster that is our youngest son. Daddy had opened all of his birthday cards, we had ordered our supper, and we were drinking our tea and eating chips and salsa (you guessed it - we're from Texas!), when our four-year-old  fell out of his chair.

Here's the "Bad Mommy" moment: I snickered. At my own child. Unforgiveable, I know. In my defense, the first few times that my son fell out of his chair while wiggling around at the dinner table, I jumped up like a "Good Mommy" and scooped him up and checked for boo-boos and kissed all the ouchies. However, our little wiggle-worm manages to trip over his own feet, walk into a wall, or fall out of his chair at least twice a week. Natural consequences of doing ev-er-y-thing at 90 m.p.h. while paying not the slightest bit of attention to one's surroundings. I stopped snickering abruptly when my normally unflappable husband said, "No! He hit his head."

And boy, did he hit his head. On the concrete floor or the brick wall, we're not actually sure. So, as blood starts gushing out of our baby's head in the middle of a packed restaurant with tons of people trying to actually enjoy their suppers (salsa, anyone?), the manager non-chalantly strolls over in response to our son's shrieks and asks if he's going to be okay. Which, for those of us veterans of the food-service industry, translates directly into: "Could you please quiet your child, he's disrupting my patrons." I have to give Mr. Manager a little bit of credit, he scurried away for ice and a clean towel pretty quickly after he saw the blood. I've noticed blood has that effect on most people.

In the end, we decided that C. should probably be taken to the hospital. I volunteered to take him and let his Daddy and siblings eat their supper. We hadn't been at the E.R. for an hour when the three of them came in - the big kids refused to go home until they were sure that their brother was okay. My charming four-year-old held court in the emergency department like Liberace in Las Vegas. At one point, he had roped in the mother of another casualty, a clerk from the hospital, a nurse, and a paramedic. The highlight of the night's entertainment came when he announced to his audience, "I'm four, and I go to school at St. Paul's, and don't I have big feet?" Talk about your non-sequiter.

So, my husband got to spend the evening of his 31st birthday in the emergency room, getting our four-year-old's head stitched up. One thing's for sure: it's not a birthday he'll be forgetting any time soon. I think C. really capped off the evening when he sang his dad "The Happy Birthday Song" ~ while he handed him the bill from the hospital.