PopPop & His Boo Boo Hurt All Better, reports area toddler

Oh, Internet Peoples. Thank you for everything this week, the comments and emails and positive granola mother earth vibes or whatever it was y'all sent out. You guys are the wind beneath my wonderwall, or something.

My dad is FINE. Once again he pulled through something that could have very well killed him in record time and was eating hamburgers within 24 hours and bemoaning the lack of extra ketchup. He was discharged late yesterday because of a never-ending string of last-minute MRIs and EKGs and heart-monitory things in futile attempts to figure out why he fell (we still don't know, which is very frustrating, but I'm hoping one of the bazillion follow-up visits and consultations we've had to schedule will eventually reveal something). But for now, he is home and healing and complaining of nothing but a headache (you know, from all the SKULL FRACTURES AND WHATNOT) and that TiVo cut off the ends of all his Phillies games while he was gone.

My mother originally ordered me NOT to visit, on account of my delicate with-child condition, and I immediately pish-poshed her and tossed myself and my kid in the car and drove up there, where I proceeded to live on pure adrenaline for two days before crashing in the aisles at Target, clutching my parents' grocery list and nearly coming to tears over the stress of choosing Band-Aids for other people when you don't know what kind of Band-Aids they like, and when did fucking Band-Aids become so complicated? Flexible Fabric? Sheer? Antibacterial? Activ Flex? Do they prefer the 40-pack with the oversized wound patches? Or the 80 pack with those tiny little square ones that are probably only useful to people who routinely stab themselves in the thigh with freshly-sharpened pencils? Spongebob?

By the time I got to the cough drops and discovered that Halls now come in no less than 17 different varieties and then audibly yelped after Baby Tivo kicked me square in the cervix for the hundredth time that day, I realized that I was, maybe, just a tad useless and a little more delicate than I cared to admit.

Let's see, what else...oh, so while I've always figured that Noah would prefer if there was not a public blow-by-blow record of his potty training, I would like him to commend him for thoroughly proving my mother-in-law (and her Many Theories of Potty Training and How Easy It Is) wrong. I mean, sure, I would have LOVED to have gotten him back from her care on Tuesday completely trained, but I did get a tiny bit of perverse pleasure from the shell-shocked look on her face over the Crazy Delicious Stubbornness she witnessed that day. And then I innocently shrugged and said I was surprised, because he'd been doing SO WELL with me and it was just happening pretty NATURALLY, much like she sat on my couch once and shrugged and said she didn't understand why I was having such problems with breastfeeding, it always went SO WELL and happened so NATURALLY for her.

Wow. I sure do hold on to things sometimes, don't I?

(For the record, we went the cold turkey to cloth pants route, with disposable training pants for naps and bedtime only, a complicated give-and-take reward system involving a plastic baggie of spare buttons and chocolate, and an epic battle of wills. So basically, Potty Training in Less Than a Day, rewritten to be the slightly more accurate and yet no less optimistic Potty Training in Less Than the Rest of Your Life.)

I am now going to sleep. For awhile or so. In my own bed, free from the fear of my bedmate wetting it (my mother-in-law DID do a pretty good job with Jason, I'll give her that).