...on the fly!

 Life is a tactile smorgasbord of events, ideas, creations, places and people. Hap-hazard at best and almost impossible to plan. The only true pieces that work in sequence are the beginning and end. The middle is just one big muddle.

Here's a normal event and my counterpoint. The first person you are usually introduced to is your Mother. Stands to reason, sometimes your Father, what with drugs, c-section whatever.
However, one of my sisters got to meet me first. Mother preferred "a Southern" style of birth. Drugs...all of them! On this occasion Max had "celebrated" too early and the nurse refused to let him hold the baby, so Mary Margaret welcome to the world!

Later I was explaining this to some neighborhood pals and one of the stunned girls asked, "What does your Mother do when she isn't having little girls"? There is a rather obvious answer, but I replied, "she has little boys"!

Unfortunately my memory bank works in parallel with life, haphazardly. That is why if you are trying to follow along here you'll need a GPS. Here goes another wild pitch. Max was an old school dad, obey me or else. Sometime around age 13/14 I flipped. "Anger management" wasn't coined yet, what I had was a tantrum. Full scale, on the floor, kicking, screaming,blah, blah, blah! He was amazed, must have been, he didn't hit me. Think that they both walked away snickering. Me? Embarrassed, damn embarrassed! I got up and slunk off to regroup. Today I think there is some kind of Spock-like approach where the parents are "concerned", they are embarrassed and the kids empowered! Don't you love progress? That's one reason to send your kids to Med School.

If memory holds true those last two blurbs should be transposed. Just before I held M-M, etc. Boy was she was lucky!

What goes around, comes around. Naturally, I had to follow the pattern. When Kim was born my sister Liz was the first person she met. I had taken Mary Ellen to the hospital and then left to drop Karen at Brenda's...I think! Of course Kim couldn't wait, so I got a call telling me that I should return to the hospital. I do not remember how or where that call went too...no cell phones then. At least they let me hold her when I got back.

We took Kim home. She apparently didn't like that choice as she cried until she was two. We may have been the only parents that thought the terrible twos was an improvement! She's a teacher now...hope her students get to see this!

to be...