Big events for a Little Person.

So not much happens in my world, except for my nonstop, super-stressful job of avoiding wedding planning at all costs.  For instance, today my mom facebook chatted me.  She had sent me an e-mail earlier this week about some wedding stuff, and of course I didn't respond.  I e-mailed her about that stuff LAST week, what does she expect?!  Anyways, she asked me what I thought of her e-mail.  This seemed a pretty vague question to me, so I told her, "I don't know, A-minus."  And THAT, my friend, is how you avoid wedding planning.

But I do also do other things.  Really.  I totally just finished both seasons of Better Off Ted.  In like...two weeks.  Okay, it was one week.  Don't judge me.

Also, update on my face.  Don't worry, I can still make my livin's off of it.  I went back to the emergency room on the specified date, only to have a nurse look at me and say, "Well, I don't know if we should take them out yet.  We better have a doctor look at it."  Thanks, nurse-babe, for your expertise.  So I sat in the waiting room for an hour and a half, for a doctor that may or may not have wanted to take the stitches out.  Thus, in order to not waste my Saturday in a waiting room full of vomiting, limping people that looked like they were shooting germs out of their eyeballs, I left.  A couple days later, I took the stitches out myself.  And you know what?  It took like five minutes.  I still have a small bump of scar tissue that looks kinda gross.  And it hurts when it gets bumped by Fiance  because he's a dude and not very aware sometimes when he gives hugs.  However, the true damage appears to be internal, for I now have a debilitating fear of ice. 

I walk outside for any reason, and I'm staring at the ground looking for ice.  Now keep in mind, it's still winter, so there's lots of it around.  And when I SEE ice, my insides seize up, and I automatically go into old-person mode, where I walk with my arms out to keep my balance and I take small, scooting baby steps.  Yeah.  It looks ridiculous, but at least I'm safe.  BUT as I'm walking, and staring at the ice, which looks back up at me menacingly with its faceless, cold look of death, my mind plays back a slow motion reel of my face hitting pavement, the taste of the sidewalk and blood, and the pain in my chin.  At which point I have to take deep breaths and go back inside.  I may just need to invent an all-over body mattress cushiony thing that would prevent one from hitting the sidewalk with any kind of hurtful impact.  Pair it up with a football helmet, and you're ready for a painless night on the town!  I may get my friend Whitney to invent and patent this idea for me.  She's good at things like that.

This is, apparently, the life of a 22-year-old procrastinator who's taking time off school and only works part time.  My accomplishments are few to none.  BUT, I know a 9-month-old who accomplished much this week, so I'd rather talk about her.

My part-time but very fulfilling job is that of a nanny to a little baby named Ari.  She's pretty much awesome.  That's right.  I totally skipped over those typical baby adjectives like "cute" and "adorable" and went straight to awesome, because she is.

Today, my last workday of the week, she did something awesome.

Her dad Charlie comes home from lunch every day, and when he does, he of course takes time to say hi to Ari and snuggle her, oftentimes against her will.  Ari loves her dad but she doesn't like him kissing her with his prickly beard, and I think she also just doesn't like having her play interrupted.  Today Charlie came in and bent down to have her "walk" to him.  Ari walks by clamping onto any grown-up's fingers and leading them around the house.  She has not, to this point, walked on her own, but she CAN stand for a few wobbly seconds.  Anyway, I was holding onto her fingers, Dad was a couple steps away, and she started to walk.  I slipped my fingers out of her hands, and she took two steps ALL BY HERSELF and fell into her dad's arms.  Charlie and I looked at each other, completely agape.  We must've both gasped, because Ari looked truly alarmed.  We called her mom Rhonda into the room and tried to get Ari to demonstrate her newfound skillz.  However, probably because of our gasping combined with our persistence and shoving combined with Ari's annoyance at interrupted playtime,  Ari pulled the jell-o legs move on us and just sat down to crawl instead.  It's much safer nearer the ground, after all. 

So Ari, this week, learned to walk.  I learned how to continue avoiding wedding planning, and also how much time can be wasted in watching addictive shows.  Sorry, Mom.  I'll do better next week, I promise.

I'm told you can't have a blog without posting on it.

So here's to you complainers like Whitney and Rachel.  What if I wanted to maintain my hidden identity and just post on people's blogs undetected?  Seriously.  I think it's an important thing to have a secret identity...there is, after all, a chance that one day I may need to protect my loved ones from some deep, dark, secrety...thing...from my past...

I digress.

So here it is.  My first post, in which you learn a bit about me, Liz, aka the Captain, and possibly my greatest and most noticeable feature:  I am clumsy.  As an example of said clumsiness, I present you with the most exciting thing that has happened this week (so far...it IS only Tuesday after all), and you can already tell it's going to be amazing because of these spoilers: BLOOD and FUTURAMA.

You see, I live in the midwest.  Which means that last weekend it was fifty degrees out, and then yesterday it was like twenty degrees with freezing rain.  All.  Day.

So I got home from my nannying job, did my yoga, ate a sammich, and then when my roommate got home (she is the Keeper of the Mail Key), I retrieved the Mail Key.  For, in the mail, I was expecting.....the first disc.....of the new season.....of Futurama.  GLORIOUS!

I had my whole evening planned out.  I would wait for my fiance to come over after he finished work, and we would stay up and watch the entire disc!  And it would be SO fun!  And oh, how we would laugh at the exploits of Bender!  And those other funny-but-less-so characters!

Alas.  It was not meant to be.

I stepped out on my front porch, carefully positioning a brick in the door frame to keep the door propped so I wouldn't get locked out, and then started to make for the mailbox.

Swiftly, of course, because it was cold.

Only....I was wearing moccasins which have no tread.  And the sidewalk was a sheet of ice.

I can still picture it in my brain, although it happened so quickly I didn't really know what was happening until I was on the ground, on my face.

My head bounced off the pavement and I saw my glasses skid across the ice.  And, being the practical (and practically blind) girl that I am, my first thought was, OH NO!  NOT MY GLASSES!

I reached for my glasses to save them from their impending doom and destruction, only to realize that my glasses were fine, but my face....OH no.....where is this blood COMING from?

If you're like me, and have had innumerable years of orthodontists doing mean, mean things to you, like giving you retainers that make you schpeak like you got a mouthful o' schpit, and tightening your braces until your face feels like it's in a vise, and giving you rubber bands to put on your brackets so your jaws are all clamped down....and THEN, you think of breaking one of your perfectly straight and in-line teeth...you probably have an idea of the panic that was coursing through my mind.

Also, did I mention I'm getting married?  Like, in May?  Yeah, so...a bride with no front teeth?  No....fricking...way.

So of course the first thing I did was check my teeth.  Shaking with cold and the fear that I was going to feel a mouth full of broken teeth, I gingerly fingered my mouth.  Oh, thank God!  No broken teeth!  I pulled my hands away....so....much....blood.  At which point I went into hysterics.  "Oh my God....Oh God....Oh my God....."  They were definitely prayers at this point, I wasn't taking the Lord's name in vain.  I can't think of anything WORSE to do than to offend God right at a dramatic point  where you MAY be speaking to him very intimately very soon.

At that point, I saw the mail key lying on the ground and reached to pick it up.  A thought crossed my mind....am I okay enough to go get my Futurama?  I thought about it for a moment until blood dripped all over the key, and it seemed obvious that no, I must go inside.  So, leaving a rather noticeable trail of blood all the way to my door and up the stairs to my apartment, I walked in, sobbing and holding my face.  My Roommate realized something was wrong when she heard the crying, so she walked into the living room and said, "Are you okay??".....and then she saw the blood, and heard me crying, "GET A TOWEL!!!" and she realized that, no, things were definitely NOT okay.

So we went in the bathroom and I washed my face to try to figure out where the blood was coming from...and amidst a flurry of obscenities and weeping and bleeding, we finally got my face looking less like that of a stab-wound victim and more like a very bloody, teary Liz-face.  And we finally made the discovery.

"It's your chin, it's your chin!" Roommate Key-Keeper informed me (because in an emergency, it's protocol to say everything at least twice to get your point across.  I'm pretty sure I repeated myself for hours following this incident).  We examined the chin-wound.  You know how it looks when your dog slips and skids on a rug and makes it wrinkle up like an accordion?  Picture that...on my chin.  And my skin is the rug.  Or, as Roommate later put it, "You have a second mouth!!!"

Roommate, upon making this discovery, immediately looked close to vomiting, and said, "We have to go to the hospital."  I, already in hysterics, began to cry like a five-year-old, "NO!!!  Not the HOSPITAL!!! I don't wanna go THERE!!!!!"  Because I knew I was going to have to get stitches (or reconstructive surgery???  or skin grafts???????) and that was scary.  REALLY scary.

However, Roommate Key-Keeper managed to calm me down enough to convince me I HAD to go to the ER.  And I was in delirious five-year-old mode, so I really couldn't argue.  Also Roommate called my parents and they told me I had to go, to.  Alright then.  Off we go.

We got into the car to begin our trek.  I was finally calm, and the more I thought about it the more funny the situation seemed...so my reaction now was to tell jokes.  I can remember two instances that called for a "no pun intended," which is something that should probably NEVER be called for anyway.  But at the time, and in my delirium, it was hilarious.  So Roommate and I giggled all the way to the hospital, and finally I was checked into the ER.

The next part is all pretty boring.  We waited in the ER for four hours.  That's right.  11:30 p.m. was when they finally called me back to a little curtained room with a bed and a TV.  I got to lay there and watch TV while doctors popped in and checked out my second mouth (and possibly snickered at my clumsy mishap) and kept saying, "We'll be in to stitch you up shortly."  But "shortly" in doctor-words actually means "one more hour," so that's how long I had to wait until a nice little black lady came in to stitch me up.

And that's how Liz got a Frankenstein chin.  So kids, watch your butts out there in the snow.  And your faces, as well.

Oh, yeah, this is me with oh-so-supportive-and-worried Fiance.  I'm lucky I didn't lose all my teeth.  Or my nose ring, for that matter.

And P.S.:  The new season of Futurama is not as funny.  That is possibly the saddest part of all.