Things students will do for paper extensions:

make me keychains out of their own hair.

I don't even know what to say.

When I was little, we just played with legos.

(the last video gets cut off right as Sam asks, "Are you going to put this on youtube, Mom?" And then a minute later, "Omigosh, Lily. You really hurt me.")

Things students will do for paper extensions:

they write kind notes in SWILUA's name.

and they do kind deeds in her name, too.

Things students will do for paper extensions:

paint me super stunning works of art such as this one entitled, "Abstract Christmas."

Things students will do for paper extensions:

Hug 11 trees.

this one is my favorite:

a strange thing has been happening to me ever since my second night in the hospital right after my skin graft

The first time it happened I didn't even know what it was. It was like... a vibration. In my throat? Where the air was coming from. It was soft, but it woke me up. Immediately, I freaked out and buzzed the nurse. "I think there's something wrong with my airway. What if I stop breathing--I've done that in the hospital before--what if..." When you're in the hospital and code blues are ringing all the time, you can get a little hysterical sometimes.

The nurse calmed me down by putting an oxygen monitor on my finger.

It happened again in the hospital, but I brushed it aside. If I was in danger of death, I was hooked up to the machines that would tell someone. This is a very comforting thing when you're in the hospital and it's all dark and you're all drugged and hysterical.

But then I went home. And... well... it kept happening. Sometimes the vibration would be really strong and sometimes it would even make a sound. Sometimes it would wake me up. Sometimes it wouldn't.

After about two weeks home I started to realize what it probably was. (In my defense, it took me that long because the sensation feels NOTHING like the sensation you get when you pretend to do it. And also, I was really out of it for a really long time.) I didn't tell anyone, though. It was something I had never, ever done in my entire life. I didn't want people to think I might keep doing it. Because I might not! It was probably just a temporary thing caused by the sedative effects of all the post-surgery drugs. Right?! It had to be that. Because I wasn't someone who did something like this.

But people. Oh, people. I took a nap again today. And three times--count them!--three times I was semi-awakened by "it."

So I can't pretend anymore. I have to confess. To come out publicly with an announcement:

I snore now.

I don't do it every time I sleep. But sometimes I do. I don't know if I'll ever stop. Or if when I finally finish healing from the super-annoying-skin-graft-from-hell (did you know it messed up my heart?! they just put me on beta blockers so I don't keel from a heart attack. I'm friggin 31!) I will magically stop.

But for now. In this place. At this point in my life.

I snore.

And it sux.

And I'm sorry.

Things students will do for paper extensions:

(yes, that's a tree on his head)(and Santa boxers)

Things students will do for paper extensions:

Lily, in a normal evening outfit

(Kick took the picture with her phone.  She said it was stuck in a "Retro Picture" form and she didn't know how to make it normal.  I kinda like it, though.)

Things students will do for paper extensions:

I think that the videos they make me are my favorite

Things people will do to switch around the genres of their Great Works papers:

(I think the kid in the blond wig with the cane is supposed to be me. My cane is way hawter than that one, though.)

Things students will do for paper extensions:

Eat a raw potato.  In front of us.

And also, did you know that Hagrid's long-lost son is living at our house?

Things students will do for paper extensions:

play connect-the-dots with their freckles in class.




ps: this game would be really, really hard if *I* were doing it. :)

Newsflash: BYU Students are a Little Sheltered

[it's classtime.  one of my students is reading his paper on why we should buy his maraca-made-of-a-sprite-can on ebay.]

boy's paper: "if you buy this maraca, you won't even need heroin to be a rockstar! you'll just need to shake your can a bit."

girl in class: "wait. I don't understand. why do you need girls to be rockstars?"




[if this doesn't make sense to you yet, consider: heroin vs. heroine. yeah.]

Morning Discovery: The Power of Johnny Test (and also, a little burgeoning chauvinism)

me: [stumble into the living room after waking up bleary eyed. try to sit down on the couch. step in something. something wet. look down. see this:]

me: "OMG, did I just step in pee?"

Sam: "Yup."

me: "OMG, WHY DID I JUST STEP IN PEE?"

Sam: [shrugs] "Lily."

me: "OMG, why is Lily peeing on the carpet."

Sam: "Well, we were watching Johnny Test and Lily didn't want to leave to go to the bathroom. So she got out her little toilet. But there was a problem."

me: "And the pee spilled all over the carpet?!"

Sam: "Yup."

me: "OMG, gross, gross, gross, gross!" [get up and go get the stuff to clean it up. start cleaning.]

Sam: [watching me scrub the carpet] "You know what, Mom? This. Right now. You are doing the hardest job a woman could ever do."

me: "What about a man?"

Sam: "Naw. A man could take it."

What Sam said to his Auntie Barb about being old:

"I have this one cousin who's REALLY old. You know how old she is? She's so old that she was born in the NINETEENS!"

Happy birthday to both Barb and "old" cousin Katelyn. We like you even though you were both born in the nineteens.

For the pee cream enthusiasts:

I'm out of pee cream. But here's a place that sells it for less than Amazon does. And also, they confirmed that product number 7567 *is* the same as 7566. So you can buy a big tube if you want. Hugs.

Things students will do for paper extensions:

pretend to be superman's girlfriend for a day.

complete with stolen cape:

Penicillin: Even More of a Miracle-Drug Than You Thought

Lily has been sick. Not in the good 'sic!' kind of way, even. In the strep-throat kind of way. She would wake up screaming seventeen times a night and when we took her to the doctor, she fell asleep on the floor and didn't even wake up when I transferred her to the doctor's table to be examined. I'm sure we would have heard all about how sick she was (she does not believe in suffering in silence) but her throat hurt so bad that, after a few final screams, she stopped making any sound at all.

It got really quiet here.

Fastforward to the Penicillin. We gave it to her right when we got home from the doctor, she took it and went to bed. In the morning, she woke up. I gave her a dose. She watched mindless TV. She was still not talking.

But then about an hour after the dose, a very strange thing happened.

Lily got up, out of bed. She walked straight into the living room.

And she started cleaning.

I asked her, "What are you doing?"

She didn't answer. Just pointed to her throat.

She picked up the toys. She put laundry in the laundry basket. She gathered all of the trash together and threw it away. She organized the Halloween candy and crawled around looking for stray wrappers and candy corn. She took dishes to the sink. Did a little dusting.

I stood there. So. Confused.

And then she walked back toward her room and I thought she was done, but she wasn't. A few seconds later, she came back--dragging the big, fat, taller-than-she-is vacuum. She unwound the cord. She plugged it in. She turned it on.

And vacuumed the whole room.

I totally want to give her penicillin every day now.

Am I going crazy?

or has blogger done something very weird with all my images?

I'm coming off a lot of meds, so I could be wrong.

ps: I'm starting to feel better. Knock on wood and stuff.

pps: Okay, just to weird me out as SOON as I posted this, they were FIXED. But I swear they were weird and messed up. I haven't even taken my morning medicine yet.

I dreamed that I accidentally slept through Halloween

which sounds about right. this week at least.

ps: Sam lost his SECOND tooth today. I was sleeping and he woke me up and handed it to me. It was covered with sandwich.

Tooth Fairy! Take Note!

I know the recession has you understaffed. And the fact that Utah has a birth rate on par with third world countries doesn't help, either.

But we have another house to add to your list.

Certain Offspring here have begun shedding their incisors.

Look for this box:

Inside it, you will find a tooth that looks like this:



If you wouldn't mind exchanging this piece of human history for whatever coinage is the current going rate, there'll be a very exuberant little six year old living here.

give my regards to the Easter Bunny.

hugs and kisses.

Things students will do for paper extensions:

create super awesome sculptures of SWILUA out of Starbust candy!

You know that book Frog and Toad?

The sweet one with the two amphibian BFF's?

This picture sort of reminds me of it.

(that's Sam and his cousin Charlie. in our misty cool backyard.)

Things students will do for paper extensions:

dress like a gangsta tigger:

bake and bring us all shortbread:

and bring me something called "poop soap on a rope." which left me speechless. truly.

I broke the "no online shopping on Ambien" rule and officially ordered the pee cream.

exciting, right?!

if you want a bottle, the cost came out to be $5.67/bottle plus however much it costs to ship it to you.

kisses.

It's PEE CREAM TIME!

So many of y'all were interested in the pee cream. And I feel really bad that the only link was to a 12 pack. They do have some other single products, but none had the exact product number. Which is important, because I did a test with the "active" ingredient--which is petroleum; aka Vaseline--and I put Vaseline on my heels for a week to see if it did the same thing. And it didn't. Not even close. So that means that it's the *inactive* ingredients that are making the magic--maybe in combo with the petroleum? But in any event you don't want to risk getting the wrong "inactive" ingredients by ordering something with a different product number. Because they may think it's the same thing, and it may work great for, yanno, incontinence, since it's the "active" ingredient that takes care of that. But we're prescribing off label here, people.

To sum up: I'll take the hit and order the 12 pack myself. If you're interested in one of the bottles, I'll give it to you at cost. Just email me. kerryspencer [at] byu [dot] edu.

Okay, people. Whose God WAS that? Seriously!

Y'all remember how ON FRIDAY (it was Saturday when I meant to start this post, due to the fact that it's 12:30AMish on Sunday right now, that WOULD have been only YESTERDAY if I'd done my blogging on time. but I digress) on just this FRIDAY I posted a call for people to pray to whatever kind of God they wanted (I was desperate; desperation leads to open-mindedness) for my open wounds to friggin start to close and not be open anymore already.

Here's the thing.

Overnight, they shrunk more than HALF. In HALF, people! OVERNIGHT. (in HALF!)

And these are wounds that had not shrunk at ALL for more than THREE WEEKS. And this happened OVERNIGHT. Within ONE DAY of asking y'all to pray.

So I want to know: Whose God was it?

So far our only confessors are my SIL, Barb (most of us know her religion) and my blog pal Majato whose body is his temple and whose religion is his beer.

Fess up. Conversion is on the table.

And also, thanks for praying. To all your Gods.

See, I'm just too lazy to be a billionaire.

They gave me this one ointment for my graft--they said that it might help any irritation. And it wasn't so bad. Not great. But not bad.

But it turns out that there was something better that it did.

I don't know what made me try it. Genius, maybe. But I put it on my *heels.* And something amazing happened. My heels went from looking like this:

to looking like this:

Seriously, people. My heels look good.

OMG, I thought. I could sell this stuff and be a BILLIONAIRE. Because nothing has ever, not even once, made my heels look this good. And I've tried *everything.* Because who wants to be the lady with the bad looking heels? I used to judge those ladies in my head all the time. And then I was one. And there was nothing I could do about it. Until the magic cream came along.

One problem:

The cream is actually *incontinence* cream. i.e., it's meant to help protect your skin from your *pee.*

That's right. IT'S PEE CREAM.

Which means that to be a billionaire, I'd have to either convince people that it's not gross to buy and use buckets full of pee cream, or I'd have to, like, do a massive re-branding thing. Or something. I actually have no idea. Which is probably why I am most definitely NOT a billionaire.

So, lazy girl that I am, I'll just give you the Amazon link. And since I get like 1% of whatever anyone spends when they buy something (anything!) after clicking a link from my blog, you could help me make $0.50. And, also, you'll have really amazing looking heels. Which is almost as good as being a billionaire, right?




ps: Just so you know, in two years I have made $2.35 from Amazon links! Oh, yeah, baby.

pps: sorry that the link is to a 12-pack. That was the only link that had the exact product number that I have on my bottle. but the cream is totally worth it and you'll use the 12-pack, I promise.

[post edit ppps: after I bought the cream they changed the price to $140! it probably is *that* magical, but WTF? good thing I ordered early.][but bad thing that I was going to buy another box for christmas presents. $50ish I can do. Not $140, though.]

I *think* this may be the same product, just a bigger size:

Steve says I should blog because I haven't blogged since, like, *Monday.*

There's a simple reason: I'm stoopid now. The first time I wrote blogged up in the title, for example, I spelled it bloggled. And it looked right.

The nice thing about being stoopid is that it means I'm not in pain.

The bad thing is, I'm not cranky enough to post rants. Which is kind of a bummer because I've got a modesty rant brewing.

I guess we'll have to wait until I'm less stoopid.

If you desire, send up a prayer to your own preferred divine being (depending, of course, on your personal faith traditions). Tell them that Dr. S is tired of having big fat open wounds. She is tired of looking at her skin graft and wondering when it will stop buzzing. (Yes, it buzzes. A nerve thing, I think. Or they implanted an alien device on me. Also a possibility.) And so Dr. S humbly requests that the skin graft close up, the buzzing stop, the stoopidness be tapered down, and life be calm and happy and full of blog posts and stuff.

Here's a funny thing: I think I might try to do yoga next week. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Things students will do for paper extensions:

make me supercute jewelry out of trash. 

In my continuing effort to keep posting while simultaneously avoiding anything with, like, *sentences,* (I'm talented that way) here are a bunch of supercute pictures of Lily

From Sam's Door

(thanks for the picture, Barb.)

This picture (of Sam's first day of first grade) prettymuch sums up Sam and Lily's relationship:

Lily: Adoration
Sam: (Reluctant) Toleration

ps: Sam is literally twice as big as Lily. (80 pounds versus 40 pounds.) But they're only two years apart. Crazy, right?

We told her that in order to have hair like this in real life, she'd have to stop giving herself so many do-it-yourself-cuts.

Lily and her new wig:

It's not unusual for Lily to lock herself in the bathroom.

But when she'd been there for forty five minutes, we were concerned. So Steve knocked.

"Go away!" she said.

Steve knocked again. "Are you OK?" he asked.

No response.

So Steve found the special screwdriver to unlock the door. When he opened it, he found this:

poor kid. we think it was something she ate.

The thing about being stupid

is that it's really nice.

I've been telling my students this, when I apologize for how stupid I've been lately, and they sort of laugh uncomfortably. That's OK. Students laugh uncomfortably around me all of the time.

But it is really nice to be stupid.

See, I've been on and off pain killers, waiting for my open wounds to close up. Sometimes my wounds are on the edge of getting infected and they hurt a lot so I have to take a lot of pain meds. But sometimes they don't hurt all that bad and I don't have to take a lot of pain meds. I get a lot more done when I'm pain-med free. Because the drugs really do make me stoopid.

But here's what's so nice about being stupid: you never get bored. You stare at the wall (sometimes literally) for an hour or more and you don't really care. You don't think about how you're trapped in bed or of what you should be doing. There's no room in your head for thoughts or anxiety. You're not really happy, but you don't really care because caring requires *thought* and having thoughts requires you not to be stupid. All of the voices in your head--the lines of books you just read that keep spinning around nonstop, the ideas for the story you're working on, the line from your last academic article that needs revision, the mental reminders that your house is a mess and that your children have not done their homework in weeks--all of those voices are gone.

It's quiet in your head.

Just quiet.

I think I read somewhere that there is, like, a linear connection between intelligence and general unhappiness. Having been smart and having been stupid, I think there might be some truth to this.

So the next time you run into someone that's really stupid, instead of getting angry at how stupid they are, or appalled, or determined never to be.like.them, the next time that happens just remember:

they're probably happier than you'll ever be.

Shameless Promotion of the Literary Ambitions of my Progeny

Sam has written a new Fastboy Story.  Fastboy is a character he created to battle all the evils in the alphabet.  Today's story is about Mr. T.  (We've been on Mr. T for awhile, but he's a particularly evil letter.  I mean, you thought *Mr. M* was bad...)  Check it out.

What my surgeon said after our planning meeting today:

"Think of it this way.  Your forties are going to rock." 

The Walgreens Has So Much Awesomeness!

I'm just overwhelmed with the awesome.

Buy it through this Amazon link and they'll give me like $0.20

which makes my life even more complete, right?

I'm glad we all agree on this. Such an agreeable evening.

What I found at the Walgreens.

I'm thinking that for $19.99, it will make my life complete. What a deal.