A Frantic Friday

It’s been awhile, in fact, a long while, since I’ve posted one of those slightly unbelievable, yet entirely true, stories. Actually, it’s clearly been ages since I’ve posted anything and you probably wonder what’s up with us. Well, needless-to-say, I’m back in the blogosphere, but unsure as to if I have any remaining followers. So, I’ll fill you in on the what’s up in another blog. Today, I have one of those unbelievable tales to tell. And it’s a doozy.

(For the record, this is a very long story, not my best writing, but you WILL feel pity for me when you're done. At least, you better feel pity for me.)

Last Friday started off much like any other Friday morning, except that my mother called to tell me she’d take me and the children to get the swine flu shot if I wanted. Okay, I was partly sick (head all clogged, coughing, etc. ) and cranky…okay, truthfully, I was mostly sick of hearing about the swine flu shot and how we all NEED to get it. I usually listen with the utmost respect and patience to my mother (well, don’t count much of my high school, college, and single adult years), but the swine flu suggestion got me all worked up. I went off for about 3 uninterrupted minutes about why I wasn’t going to get the swine flu shot and why the children weren’t either. I rather nastily told my mother I wasn’t going to waste my limited funds and buy into the mass hysteria created by the pharmaceutical companies for their own monetary benefit and allow my precious children to be test cases for a shot that hadn’t been out long enough to thoroughly investigate the long term effects of the mercury in it. Obviously, I’m rather impatient and overly opinionated when sick and cranky.

As soon as I spewed my angst, I realized it came out all kinds of rude. I immediately apologized to my mother for jumping down her throat, let Gideon and Scarlett talk to her, and then…BAM. I was in the middle of retrieving the phone from said tiny southern belle, when she, in a moment of childish depravity, tried to keep the phone attached to her ear and away from my hands. I had to forcefully rescue the only method of communication we currently own. But, it was too late. She’d done her dastardly deed. The screen went black.

I panicked, but then remembered I’m somewhat of a techy…somewhat. I turned it off and on. Still black. I took the battery out, put it back in, and turned it on. Still black. That was the extent of my cell phone techy-ness.

I did manage to figure out that I could make phone calls, IF I happened to remember a person’s number. And I could receive phone calls…only, I’d have no idea who was calling.

Grumbling about this inconvenience, I shared my frustration with my sister-in-law and her two daughters, who come over every Friday morning for play time. The small children played. We talked. Things were looking up. Jeff could surely fix the phone when he got home, right?

Just as my sister-in-law was getting up to leave around 11:00 a.m., I heard a tell-tale beeping.

“What’s that”, she asked.

“That’s Gideon. I think he hit a button on the security system again. He’s done it before and it just beeps once or twice and that’s it.”

Mind you, friendly reader, we’d never received the code to the alarm from our new landlord. The system wasn’t monitored and we really didn’t care and didn’t bother finding out if it worked or not. We didn’t get a home phone, we had no internet, and only one car, which was with Jeff at work. When I say the cell phone was our only method of communication, I mean it was our ONLY method of communication.
And then the beeping STARTED IN EARNEST. All of those above thoughts were jumping around my head.

Gideon had climbed up on a chair and, according to him, “only pushed (a certain number).” ( I won’t tell you because that would be a security breach).
That’s when I really panicked. We all huddled around the key pad in the kitchen listening to the type of beeping that tells you when an alarm is being set.
I’m frantically pushing buttons. It’s nothing like the alarm system we had at our other house, so I’m pushing blindly. Nothing happens. The beeping gets louder and closer together.

Meanwhile, the guilty party is holding onto my leg and peeking around to see what mischief he’d wrought. He wrought a lot.

I opened the back door and set the alarm off. You know how your heart starts pounding and you freeze up when that gosh-awful noise blares in your ear. It’s bad enough when it goes off while in the midst of deep sleep, or so I thought. It’s worse when you haven’t the foggiest how to turn it off.

Gideon starts crying. Yes, it’s loud. Scarlett comes running in to tell me she “tee-tee’d” on herself. I knew I should have kept her in a diaper, but I was trying to economize and save ‘em.

While I’m realizing that I can’t call our landlord because the only place I have his number saved is in our cell phone, I admit out loud I don’t know what to do, Scarlett’s all wet and crying, Gideon’s scared and crying, and I’m just about to lose it. I do manage to pull myself together enough to run Scarlett to the bathroom, strip her down, and plop her on the toilet. (Okay, so she’d already completely finished her business, but I’m not ALL there, remember…that alarm is driving me to distraction).

I come back to the kitchen where my sister-in-law and niece are punching buttons…my dear sweet 4.0 college graduate sister-in-law ( I will let her remain anonymous) is even punching in her own code, and I hear my older niece saying “Mom, our code isn’t going to work on her system.”

I get the bright idea to call my pastor because he’s got our landlord’s number, but I don’t know my pastor’s phone number because it’s lost in my phone. I called Jeff instead, at work, and he’s like, “honey, what am I supposed to do from here?” He’s got no phone and no numbers, either, but….

Wrong answer, my love. I am a damsel in distress. He’s supposed to at least pretend to be handling things for me…this is the one time I need him to “fix” my problem and not just listen.

I’m running back and forth through the house as if that were going to solve the problem. I can’t just stand there and listen. It’s worse in the hallway because that’s where the noisemaker is posted. I run back to the kitchen to get away from it.
I called our church secretary for my pastor’s number. When I called him and explained what was going on, he started laughing. Normally, I would have joined him, but I wasn’t quite ready to laugh at the situation. That un-blessed alarm was still piercing relentlessly in my ear. He gave me the number I needed, and told me to call him if he could help in any other way. He also offered me terrible advice on how to fix the phone.

And then, the terrible, horrible, very bad noise just stopped. Though my ears were still ringing, my innards came back to life.

“Where’s Scarlett?”

“Oh, no.” I left her on the toilet. Totally forgot about her.

She was back there crying on the toilet half naked and afraid, but of course, I couldn’t hear her because of that dreadful racket emerging from the box on the wall in the hall.

Somehow, though, even in the midst of that chaos, she managed to poop. Go Scarlett!
Because the noise had stopped, my sister-in-law felt it was safe for them to leave. She left me with a few phone numbers I might need, told me to call her if anything else happened, and away they went to meet her parents who were just arriving in town.
I took my pastor’s advice and completely powered down the phone, took the battery out, and left it out for 10-20 minutes. Wrong thing to do.

The alarm had us fooled. We thought it had beeped itself out. It was merely taking a break.

It started again, and once more, that inner agitation and frantic flustered-ness took over.

I know why the security people make that alarm so loud and so annoying. It gets one all kinds of muddled and confused and if I were a burglar, it’d scare me away right quick. I didn’t know what I was doing. I had not yet called our landlord because I thought the alarm had remedied itself. Mistake #2. I put the phone back together but it wouldn’t dial, wouldn’t call, and wouldn’t do anything but light up. Useless piece of junk.

Now, I was overwhelmed. What to do? What to do?

We live 8 houses down from our church. My next cognizant thought was to strap the girls in the stroller, grab Gideon, and hoof it down to use that phone to call the landlord and get some help.

It was the first pretty cold day we had. I bundled the children up, stuffed the important numbers in my pocket, tossed the girls in the double–stroller, and pushed it out of the garage. (Please don’t forget that all this time, the alarm is maddeningly and incessantly shattering my logic and sensibility to pieces).

Something happened to the front wheel. It was bent to the left. I’d push it two steps and I’d be headed back off the road, and if I kept it up, I would just be pushing in circles. In the middle of the road, I tried to push it back in correct mode. Weakly, I might add. There’s no upper body strength left in these frazzled arms. I couldn’t fix it, and I just wanted to sit down on the cold ground, have myself a good cry, and go back home.

But, I couldn’t go back home because that infernal high-pitched screeching would be my constant companion all day. The children wouldn’t be able to nap. I wouldn’t be able to think, and I’d probably lose my mind within the hour.

So, I did the next best thing. I dragged that half-broke stroller back into the driveway, left it willy-nilly, picked up both girls, placed one on each hip, told Gideon to hang on to my pants, and we boogied to the church.

When I say boogie, I really mean, shuffle. The girls are 6-months and almost 2. They were slipping out of my arms, and poor sad and ever-so-sorry Gideon was holding onto my sweat pants so tight, he pulled them down to where the cold air was nipping at my drawers. At that point, my whole jiggly rear end could have been exposed and I wouldn’t have cared. I just needed to stop the noise that I could still hear ringing in my ears.

We get to the church and faithful Melba wasn’t at her desk to beep us through the glass doors. And she’s ALWAYS there. Now, I’m more than close to tears…my eyes are smarting and my nostrils are flaring because my last hope was dwindling. Gideon and Scarlett start beating on the doors saying “let us in” and I’m too miserable and emotionally drained to correct them.

I hear Melba say “I’m coming. I’m coming.” And as Gloria Estefan sings, I felt like I was “coming out of the dark.” She, Melba (not Gloria Estefan) hurried down the hall, buzzed us through, and brought us to the office and her desk.

She took Lexi-bug from me. In between trying to gulp air and fight tears, I raggedly explain the situation, and get on her phone. I called and left a message for our landlord and then called my mom. While on the phone with my mom, Melba pours Gideon and Scarlett some water from her water bottle into two little Dixie cups. Sneaky Gideon (handsy boy) decides his cup isn’t good enough for him. While Melba is trying to pacify Lexi (who is hungry and in need of sustenance), Gideon grabs her water bottle, unscrews the cap, and naturally, spills it all over her desk and all over her paperwork.

Mom’s advice (happily taken this time) is to call the security company and ask them how to override the system.

I try to mop up Gideon’s mess, and then decide to take the children down the hall to the toddler room to keep them from ruining any more of Melba’s work. There’s a phone in that room, so I called the security people.

I guess I sounded sincere enough for the lady on the other end because she told me how to unscrew the battery from an outlet, and find a box (not the electric breaker) to undo some kind of wires. I wrote it all down and then called my mom back.
She called my dad at work, sent him over (he had to excuse himself from a lunch to come to my rescue), and he arrived just as we walked back into the house. By now, it was past lunchtime and past naptime. I slapped some peanut butter on bread for the two older children, stuffed some baby food in Lexi’s mouth, and somehow managed to ignore the alarm, almost becoming immune to it. Almost.

I gave my dad the instructions, found the battery to unscrew, and then set about to hunt for the “box.” The only place I thought it could be was in the hall closet which, true to the nature of the rest of the day, Gideon had managed to lock a couple of weeks before. We had no key to it.

My father must have been a most mischievous little guy. He told me to bring him two steak knives and like McGuyver he opened that closet door in two winks. I was too disappointed to be amazed. The “box” wasn’t there.

After hunting through the whole house with Gideon hot on my heels, I finally found it. He was telling me “it’s okay, Mommy. Don’t worry about it.” I guess the alarm wasn’t upsetting him anymore. And then he started saying “I’m sorry, Mommy. I’m sorry.” Though I knew he should be, I couldn’t punish him after all of that. We’d all suffered enough.

My dad expertly unwired the appropriate wires and completely shut down the system.
Finally, the peace I had been waiting for…about 3 hours later.

Dad left. I put the children in bed. And I crawled in myself for a VERY LONG and QUIET nap.