Friday, May 25, 2012

Shut My Mouth

You may think you always say the most inappropriate thing, but you’re wrong. I do.

 It’s one of my gifts. It stems from the fact that I have no filter, and also that I am generally inappropriate, which is a really bad combination. At least the people who know me well tend to overlook it, but perfect strangers don’t have any warning of what they are about to experience. Even when I am trying to keep things light and make chit chat, I still come up with some real doozies that escape my mouth before my brain can register that my thoughts should be kept inside. It’s not just that I say the most horrible things inadvertently,  it’s also that the person that I say them to must somehow muster a response that balances out whatever I have let fly, or just allow my words to plummet to the ground, lead balloon style. I don't mean to put people in that position; I just can't help myself.

Why, just yesterday, I unleashed my bizarro self on my hair dresser. She was painting my hair its one time natural color, and I engaged in small talk in order to keep myself awake. I asked her if she had any plans to travel in the summer, and she said not yet, as they were expecting a family member to pass away, and she did not want to be out of town in case the worst happened. She then proceeded to tell me this horrible story, which I will now relate to you. It was one of those stories that you always hear at the hairdressers, but rarely happens to anyone you know, for which we should all be grateful. The reason she can’t go out of town is that her family is expecting her sister-in-law to die any day.

 About a year ago, this young woman of twenty one was driving home from her job at a restaurant on a rainy Saturday night. It was late, after midnight, and she texted her boyfriend to tell him good night as she drove. The literary term for that is foreshadowing. She drove along, not really paying attention, when her car began to hydroplane. She slid off the road, and her car flipped over about three times before coming to rest upside down in a ravine near a small bridge.

Did I mention she was not wearing her seat belt?

 Her family and boyfriend assumed she had made it home safely, as it was late at night and no one was expecting her. Her car was not discovered until the next day. She had suffered multiple traumatic injuries, and the lack of immediate medical care worsened her condition to the point where her family was not sure she would make it. She was in intensive care for months, and with treatment, rallied to the point where she could return home, under her parents’ care.

She was not the same girl. She could no longer walk. She could no longer talk. Her ability to communicate, to care for herself, to comprehend, all were gone. Any time she made strides towards recovery or stabilization, she would get an infection or have a respiratory issue, and back in the hospital she would go. And each time, where she had to be resuscitated or just receive other inpatient treatment, she would return home again, a little weaker than before.

 She was on a feeding tube. Her parents had to hire round the clock caregivers to help keep her alive. Every few months,she would end up back in the hospital. The family would brace for her death, which would seem like an inevitability, and she would respond to care and get better and everyone would breathe a sigh of relief and go on with their lives until the next episode.

My hairdresser told me her sister-in-law was back in the hospital again, and with all the weight loss and breathing problems she was having, she seemed like she wasn’t going to pull through this time. She told me how hard this has been on her in-laws to watch their daughter slowly die before their eyes, to think that every few weeks her time had come, and yet, by some miracle of modern medicine, she would recover just enough to stay alive. She told me about how her mother in law was making decisions based on emotion and not realism. And she told me about how the doctors were constantly amazed when she would improve.

It was a horrible story. Just horrible. As a parent, I cannot imagine how painful this would be for her family to go through, to maintain their spirits and their faith and hope for the best when what they were faced with was the worst they could imagine, and then to have to keep experiencing that same pain over and over again for a whole year, knowing that no matter what happened, their child was still going to die.

Instead of expressing any of that to my hairdresser, I said this instead: “I bet your in-laws wished she had died in the accident.”

 And, because that wasn’t bad enough, I followed it up with this: “It would have been cheaper.”

 Lucky for me, my hairdresser works with the general public and knows not to get too riled up by anyone’s words. So she politely agreed with me and continued to cut my hair. I remained silent, the damage already done, and tried to let her concentrate on making me look good instead of my insensitive remarks or the eventual death of her sister in law.

 Someone needs to invent an external filter for people like me, if indeed there are other people like me. It could look like one of those electronic voice boxes used by smokers with cancer. I could hold it up to my throat whenever I was about to speak, and the box would somehow transform the atrocious thing I was about to say into something socially acceptable, preferably in that computerized voice.

Actually, that’s not a bad idea. It could start with cancer survivors, and then go on to people suffering from foot in mouth, but eventually could have applications for folks with trouble making small talk or even men uncomfortable with their emotions. One of you engineering types needs to start working on this right away, because my next hair appointment is coming up soon. As horrible as it was for me to say what I did, it would be just as bad to not ask a follow-up “how is your sister in law?” and who knows where that will lead.

Hopefully not to a new hairdresser.

Saturday, May 19, 2012

Tough Love

I consider myself a patient mother, but Jesus, do I have to repeat myself twenty times for my kid to do some pretty basic things? It’s not like I expect them to remember a detailed multistep process, like how to reproduce nuclear fusion in the kitchen out of a rubber band, a paper clip, and an old potato. Just the basics, like get your shoes on before we leave the house, or take a jacket because it’s below freezing outside, or brush your teeth, or don’t forget to pack your lunch, since we eat lunch pretty much every fucking day of our lives.

 Yes, it’s true. We do eat lunch every day. It’s one of the three main meals in which we indulge, to nourish our bodies. And we do it often enough so that it should be routine, second nature really, like breathing or peeing or watching mindless television. I take the providing three square meals a day thing pretty seriously. I make sure we have lots of fresh, wholesome foods on hand. I give my family a healthy breakfast and a hearty dinner, chock full of nutrients and fiber and free of chemicals. As far as lunch goes, however, it’s every man and child for him- and herself. At the ages of ten and twelve, my daughters are old enough to be responsible for their midday meal on a school day. Clearly, they have choices, two of them to be exact, eating at school or packing a lunch. It’s not an overwhelming decision, is it?

God forbid my children eat a cafeteria lunch. They firmly believe that filthy insects without hairnets are preparing school meals. It doesn’t matter if it’s a slice of pizza or a chicken nugget or steamed broccoli or a banana; whatever the food, they wouldn’t eat it anymore than they would chew used gum from the underside of a table. My younger daughter, S, will occasionally eat a grilled cheese or mozzarella sticks, since it’s hard to mess those up. The tween, however, is convinced she saw a hair in her soup back in the fourth grade and hasn’t purchased a school lunch in almost three years.

Every school night, after dinner, I get up to put away leftovers and clean up the kitchen. And every night, I remind my daughters to pack their lunches. S doesn’t need to be told twice; she gets up from the table and picks out a balanced assortment of foods to sustain her for a full day of learning. The tween, on the other hand, does not have the attention span to persist at a task like lunch packing. She requires constant reminders and still cannot remember that every day she needs a fruit and a protein and a starch and a dairy item and a beverage. I check behind her most of the time, either pointing out that a six month old baby eats a bigger lunch than what’s in her box, or when I am feeling extra beaten down, just finishing the job myself. It gets old, you know?

 Last night, as usual, I reminded my daughters to pack their lunches. S complied, as she normally does. The tween wandered into the other room, texting furiously. She decided later to take a walk. I reminded her to pack her lunch before she left. When she came home, I asked her if she packed her lunch, knowing full well that the answer was no. She said she would after she practiced piano, another part of the daily routine she hates. Before she went upstairs to shower, I reminded her to pack her lunch. If you are keeping count, that was four reminders to pack her lunch. Which is also part of the daily routine. And that’s the part I am getting really tired of.

So last night, I stopped reminding her. I stopped enabling her. I left her alone. She went upstairs and got ready for bed, even coming back downstairs for more water, and still she forgot to pack her lunch. I went to bed and didn’t give it another thought. This morning, when we came downstairs for breakfast, there she was, eating her cereal. I took out her sister’s lunch box and put an ice pack in it before setting it on the kitchen table. The tween didn’t notice that her lunch box wasn’t on the table, like it is every day of her life. I brushed my teeth and got ready to drive the girls to school. S put her lunch box in her back pack and walked out to the car.

The tween grabbed her shoes, then looked in her back pack and noticed her lunch box. “Did you put that in there for me?” she asked me.
“Nope, I haven’t touched your lunch box in days,” I told her.
She turned around and asked my friend MJ, who had spent the night with us, if she put it in her back pack. “Not me,” MJ said. MJ doesn’t pack her tween’s lunch either. MJ barely feeds herself lunch. She is not known for her lunchtime skills.
The tween didn’t find it peculiar that her lunchbox was inside her back pack. She just shrugged her shoulders and got in the car.

 On the way to school, I asked her how she would get her lunch in the cafeteria if she needed to buy it. She said she had no idea because she had never bought anything in the school cafeteria. I knew for a fact she had over twenty dollars in her account, so I said nothing. I wanted her to learn to be responsible for herself. I dropped her off at school and told her what I do every morning: make good choices.

Around 10:30, the time the tween eats her lunch, I commented to my husband that she was, at the very moment, realizing she did not remember to pack a lunch. I was feeling both guilty and proud of myself for teaching her a lesson, even if I couldn’t be there to see it. I couldn’t wait to pick her up from school in the afternoon.

When she got in my car, she was in a happy mood, chatting and telling me the daily stories of who got in trouble for what. I asked her how lunch was and she just smiled. She said she had to borrow money from her friend for a slice of pizza because she couldn’t remember her account number. Plus, the computer system was down, so they couldn’t access her account if they wanted to. She ate, as I knew she would, but I wanted more details. I wanted to know what she thought when she opened her light lunch box and found it full of yesterday’s smelly food wrappers. She would not give me the satisfaction. She also did not seem scarred by her lesson in responsibility, although she did admit it got her attention.

When you have to teach your child a tough lesson, sometimes letting them discover it on their own is the best way. Ultimately, the tween knows she has to do some things for herself, that her mother will not always be there to protect her from the world. Seriously, it was just a slice of pizza, not a terrorist attack. I doubt she will even remember it by Monday night, when I again will have to remind her four times to pack her lunch.

Friday, May 11, 2012

Abstinence Makes the Heart Grow Fonder?

I shouldn’t be shocked by what passes for sex education in South Carolina, and yet, I am. Electric chair shocked. The tween has been “learning” all about human reproduction in her physical education class for the past two weeks, and I have already had to supplement her lessons twice. It’s not that they aren’t teaching accurate information; it’s that the abridged version of the information is so conservatively skewed that they might as well call it sexual mythology.

For starters, why is sex education always taught by physical education teachers, or rather, coaches? You would think that human anatomy and reproduction should be covered in science classes, since it is, after all, science. Instead, the people responsible for grading your ability to change your clothes are the ones who misrepresent reproduction by instructing you to keep those clothes on until marriage. Maybe that’s not fair; it’s not like they created the curriculum, but still, maybe we should leave ball throwing to the PE teachers and let the science teachers talk about actual balling.

 The first week, the class covered anatomy and function of the reproductive system. The tween didn’t really want to talk about it much, but the day they covered male anatomy, she was a little squirrely when she got home. I asked her what they learned, and was it just penis and testicles. She told me not to say penis, and also that her friends ran down the halls yelling “testicles!” in an effort to lessen the embarrassment. She then told me she already knew all about the cock and balls, which I didn’t really believe.

“Well, then, what did you learn? Did you learn about the seminal vesicles?” I asked her.
 “Gross,” she said.
 “What about the prostate? The vas deferens?”
 “Stop it, Mom,” she said.
“How about this? Which male part sounds like a spell from Harry Potter?” I asked her.
She blinked at me.
“Spongeosum!” I said, waving an imaginary wand at her.
“Go away!” she said back.

 The next week, she came home and told me, “Today we learned all about the STDs and the HIVs.”
“The HIVs?” I laughed.
“You know what I mean. They told us all about the diseases and how to treat them and how to prevent them.”
“How do you treat them?” I asked.
“Medicine,” she said.
“Well, more specifically, antibiotics, for the most part anyway. How do you prevent them?” I asked her.
“Abstinence,” she said. “You should wait until you are married.”
 “And that way your new husband can infect you with an untreated STD? Are you serious?”
“What, Mom?”
“Nevermind. Did they talk about condoms?”
“No, but I already know about them because Condom Boy brought one to school. Remember when he got in-school suspension?”

She had already told me about this boy in her French class who was suspended for bringing rubbers to school, earning him the nickname Condom Boy. Have you seen a sixth grade boy lately? I don’t think they could find their dicks unless they can hold an Xbox remote, like an elephant trunk. While sixth grade girls look like they are fifteen, sixth grade boys look like they are nine. But back to the more important part of the conversation.

“What do you mean they didn’t show you a condom? They didn’t even talk about it?”
“No, they just said to wait until marriage. And I don’t think that’s very realistic, do you?”
 “No, sweetie. They should have said college, at least.”
She rolled her eyes at me.

 I was pissed. This wasn’t sex education. It was morality legislation. If you want to educate a kid, tell them about sexually transmitted diseases and what they can do to you. Frame it with a little history. Who doesn’t want to hear about the madness of syphilis or watch a military film about venereal disease? And then whip out some Trojans and show these kids how to use them. I’m not saying you should pull a volunteer in front of the classroom and roll it on his Johnson. But seriously, we don’t live in 1950. Kids don’t neck and pet; they hook up. With all the sexualizing of our society, why would we decide the best way to educate our kids about sex is to pretend it doesn’t happen?

 That night, I decided to do what the school wasn’t willing to do. I took out a condom and showed it to my child. “Look,” I said. “This is the package a condom comes in.” I ripped it open and took it out of the package. “See? Do you want to touch it?”
“No, Mom, gross!” She turned her face to the wall.
 “Turn around,” I told her. “I want you to see this. This is what a condom looks like. It smells like a balloon, doesn’t it?”
 “I don’t want to smell it!”
“I mean you can smell it from there, not to put your nose in it.” I unrolled it and held it up for her to see. “It rolls over the penis so when it ejaculates, the sperm will stay inside the condom. And also any STDs.”
The tween turned twenty shades of red and giggled. I put my hand all the way inside the condom to show her how it could take some pressure and still not rip. “It’s pretty durable,” I pointed out.
“Please stop that!”

 After I finished stretching it all about, I balled up the condom and threw it in the trash. “Those shouldn’t be flushed. Just like tampons. They belong in the trash,” I said.
“I can’t believe you just stuck your hand inside of it,” she said.
 “The things I do for you. Besides, it’s not like it was used,” I replied.

 We sat down on my bed and I asked her if she had any other questions.

“Well, one. The teacher told us that we have something called a hymen and it tears during sex and also if you use a tampon. Now I’m really scared to try one.”
  “You learned about hymens? What about the rest of your parts?”
“I already know the other parts,” she said.
 “Did you learn about labia? And the mons pubis?”
 “What are you talking about?”

Oh lord. Not this again.

“What parts did you learn?”
 “Nothing I haven’t heard before,” she said.
 “But they didn’t tell you anything! Did they teach you what a clitoris is?”
 “What’s that?” she asked.
 I sighed. “A clitoris is, um, a very sensitive part of your female anatomy. It has a lot of nerve endings in it, and it helps make sex pleasurable.” I thought that was vague but accurate enough.
“Nasty. Do boys have a clitoris too?”
“No, all their nerve endings are in their penis. Everything pretty much works through the penis.”

Yeah, the whole world revolves around it. Including sex education, apparently. I found it very odd that they would learn very detailed male anatomy but nothing of their own.

 “Well, why do girls have one?”
 “Think about it. Sex is about reproducing, but if it doesn’t feel good, no one would want to do it. If it’s all ripped hymens, we would die out as a species.”
 “You have a point,” she said. “Can we stop talking about this now?”
 “You got it.”

 As angry as I was and still am that the educator's answer to preventing disease is abstinence, I am just as angry that the curriculum would go into great detail for male anatomy but only concentrate on the hymen for females. So in South Carolina, sex education is all about keeping your hymen intact and waiting until marriage. What the hell? Do they get an envelope to open on their wedding nights with the all the details that they weren’t allowed to learn at public school? And this coming from a state with one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation. Gee, I wonder why.

If they want to make these kids wait until marriage, why not really teach them about STDs? With pictures. I guarantee if middle schoolers could see a penis covered in genital warts, chances are pretty good they would all keep their pants on and legs closed. But giving teenagers inadequate and incomplete information isn’t going to prevent anything except ignorance. They need to be armed with good information about how their bodies work and what the risks are for certain activities. Why even call it sex education?

I read a year or two ago that some kids who make abstinence pledges engage in anal sex because they don’t think that counts as losing their virginity. Do we want our sons and daughters butt fucking because they think it’s a sin to have regular intercourse? How’s that for some twisted logic? As uncomfortable as it was to have that conversation with my daughter, at the end of the day, I know I did the right thing. She knows I will give her good information, and that I will tell her the truth. She also knows she can ask me anything. And the best part is, she is so freaked out about the whole idea of sex that I know I have a few more years before we have to talk about it again.

Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Sloppy Seconds

I think I accidentally made love to the cat.

Before you throw up in your mouth, let me add I was not an active participant. It just sort of happened, kind of like a one night stand in college.

 A few weeks ago, my husband and I decided to engage in consensual marital relations, and we closed our bedroom door so as not to disturb the children sleeping in their rooms or the neighbors or anyone else who might happen to walk by at that late hour. Normally, we sleep with our bedroom door open because both my cats have Houdini genes and can open any interior door in the house. Instead of us listening to a cat hanging off the doorknob until it opens, we allow the kitties access to our bedchambers at night so we can maybe catch a little shut eye. They have a system. The crazy girl cat, Yoko, opens the door, and the stupid male cat, Moshe, flies in the room and settles down on the bed. They work together as a super annoying team.

In the cat’s defense, Moshe isn’t used to being excluded from the room. Normally, he hides under the bed or behind the chair while we are fully in the throes of ecstasy. When we finish, there he is, watching from the nightstand, judging us silently. When he gets the all-clear signal, he slinks to the foot of the bed and goes to sleep. And knock it off; you all know you do it in front of your dogs.

This time, however, the door was closed. We did it, and then my husband got up to open the bedroom door before we nodded off to dreamland. Well, who comes bounding in the room but Moshe, and he’s really pissed off that he was left out of the fun. He hopped right up on the bed, not even waiting for my husband to get back on his side of the bed, and he starts making biscuits in my armpit.

Making biscuits is that thing when cats knead their paws and purr. Moshe is a big boy, a good fourteen pound tom cat, so he can’t very well climb on my tummy and make biscuits, lest he rupture my spleen. So he settles for my right armpit. I generally don’t mind because I exercise a lot and my shoulder and upper arm muscles get pretty sore. Plus, he was declawed after he turned my sectional sofa into a cat condo at the young age of four months, so his little cat fingers are strong but not sharp. A little cat massage helps work out those kinks.

He picks the right side of my body because my husband sleeps on the left side of the bed. My husband does not like his sleep disturbed by overly affectionate cats in the middle of the night, and Moshe is fully aware of this. One time, when my husband came to bed late, Moshe decided to start loving on me. My husband knocked him out of the bed and said, “Bitch, please,” which made us both to laugh for a good twenty minutes, because where did that come from?

Anyway, Moshe was working hard at my armpit, and I didn’t move. His moments of affection don’t last that long, so it’s better to be still and wait till he finishes. Otherwise, he has to start over again, and I rather just get it over with. I lay still, and he pumped his little paws in my armpit, just purring and kneading and happy as can be. Then he made the weirdest noise, sort of a half meow/ half yowl, almost like he was in pain, and everything stopped.

Yes, I thought it was creepy too. He got out of my armpit and started sniffing around on the bed in the general area where his backside was. Satisfied, he curled up and fell asleep next to me. I wasn’t about to turn on the lights and see what happened because that would have been an acknowledgement that something had indeed happened. Also, turning on the light would have alerted my husband to the possibility that something happened, which was not a good way to end the evening. I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, and I too went to sleep.

The next morning, neither my husband nor I nor the cat discussed what may or may not have gone down in the bedroom the previous night. In fact, I am kind of hoping my husband doesn’t read this blog. I don’t want him to think I enjoyed it or anything, or that I plan on letting it happen again. Although, I have to admit, my shoulder felt great the next day, even if I did feel a little cheap and used.

Thursday, May 3, 2012

Baywatch



Last weekend, I did the unthinkable: I went to the beach with a dear friend, just the two of us. It’s known as a girls’ weekend, and while I have been lucky enough to experience it once or twice in the past, I have to admit, it’s been a very long time since I have done anything that only required packing my own bag, let alone leave my family to fend for themselves. But the opportunity to have an overdue and uninterrupted conversation with a long distance friend was too good to not make it happen. 

When we first talked about going out of town together, my friend KC, who lives out West, and I tried to think of a good place to meet, sort of a middle ground . But halfway between Colorado and South Carolina involves a lot of flat land, frequent tornado warnings, strong conservative values, and not a whole lot of exciting touristy stuff. She suggested a Texas beach, but I nixed that because no one ever said, hey, the beaches in Texas are fantastic, let’s drive from the East Coast to see it! We both decided that Chicago wasn’t necessary. New York was breezed over, and Florida was too far. Which left us sort of quiet and embarrassed. Neither one of us gets to travel much outside of visiting family, so we couldn’t come up with any good location. 

We decided she would fly into my town and we would drive to the beach here in South Carolina, which has yet to experience an oil spill and is therefore still pretty lovely if you overlook the rebel flags and rural poverty on your way to the coast. Driving in my state was claustrophobic for KC, who has grown accustomed to the wide open spaces and broad horizons of the West. She is used to mountains in the distance, not an overgrowth of scrub and pine trees. We talked and interrupted each other and talked some more, and no one asked for a snack or a juice box or a new DVD to watch or a grocery sack for puking. It was a great drive.

We got to the beach condo, unloaded all of our stuff, and headed out for a walk on the beach. I am fortunate that I go to the beach about four or five times a year. KC has not gone to the beach since she moved to Colorado seven years ago. She was as happy as a little girl to be romping on the beach. Lucky for us, it was low tide, the best time to look for all the critters and shells. KC carried a bucket with her to hold whatever treasures she might find. 

She started by collecting the most ordinary shells you’ve ever seen. You know the ones I mean, the orange and cream colored bivalves, some average clam shell, too boring to even have a name. She found beauty in them all, and kept stopping to pick up shells that had been passed over by most beach goers. Then we happened upon a large olive shell, half buried in the sand. KC picked it up, and glory be, the snail was still alive in it! Have you ever seen an olive snail? It’s a freaky little animal. It has a slimy mantle that sort of separates and covers the outside of the shell opening. Let’s not beat around the bush; it looks like fairly pronounced labia. 

KC: I have to take this shell home to my son!
Me: It’s going to stink. More than it already does. You can't put that in your suitcase.
KC: Are you sure? It's beautiful.
Me: I don’t want to look at that anymore.

She added it to her bucket. While we walked along, she found many other rocks and shells with pretty colors and markings, until we stumbled across a living whelk. I don’t mind whelks as much. They don’t look like vaginas. She dropped it in her bucket.

As we walked along, KC was disturbed by the number of jellyfish that washed up on shore. I commented to her that all the overfishing has led to real problems with the ecosystem balance, leading to an overabundance of jellyfish. Jellyfish used to have a season, but now, no matter what time of year you go to the beach, the shoreline is littered with their dead bodies. The idea of jellyfish beaching themselves and dying out of water distressed KC to such a degree that she began tossing them back out to sea if they still showed any signs of life, which we referred to as “blooping.” “Blooping” is that thing when the jellyfish still moves a little even when a wave doesn’t initiate the movement. If we saw one that still looked round and firm and shiny and full of life, such as it is, KC would stop and bend over and chuck it back into the water.

KC: I am the jellyfish whisperer.
Me: They don’t even have a brain. It’s just a brainless ball of snot. And I am pretty sure they are going to wash back up on the beach when you walk away, just to spite you.
KC: I'm saving their lives. I can't just let them die.
Me: Sure, you can. Watch me walk away.

When we returned to the condo, KC still had her living creatures in her bucket. We Googled the best way to get them out of their shells. It turns out that experienced shell collectors recommend boiling.  KC got out the Caphalon pot and filled it with water, then put her still living shell dwellers in the pot over high heat, with the lid on, because guess what stinks really bad if you cook it? 

Me: Don’t you find it ironic that you are killing those beautiful shell makers yet saved the worthless life of every still twitching jellyfish you saw?
KC: But these shells are for my son! He is so jealous he isn’t here with me.
Me: Snail killer.

After hard boiling the snails and whelks, we let the pot cool on the stove and went out for dinner. When we came back, the condo smelled like we had been cooking fishy road kill. We took the pot, its contents, and a grocery sack out to the parking lot, where KC coaxed the cooked crustaceans out of their homes with a fork. The smell was ungodly, but the shells were perfection.

Before our weekend was over, KC managed to single handedly save the lives of at least twenty jellyfish. She also managed to slaughter another whelk and some hermit crabs, which for the record do not slide easily out of the homes. It was a real circle of life kind of moment. I concentrated my efforts on looking for shark’s teeth when we walked and trying not to complain about the smell when we relaxed in the condo. 

I hope her collection survived the baggage claim at the Denver airport. It would be a shame if all those critters died in vain.