Two sisters, One pair of pants

A few weeks ago I had to fill out a little survey about myself for church. I spend time each Sunday attempting to open up the exciting world of Christian spirituality to a group of fourth and fifth graders, who as far as I can tell, are concerned primarily with
a. telling me what they did the previous week,
b. asking me if I brought treats, and
c. requesting permission to use restroom during class. (In that order.)

Each week during the children's Sunday School, also referred to (by me) as "The Show", there is singing and storytelling and lots of adults telling the kids to "shhh" and "pay attention" and "this is very interesting actually" and "stop flipping your eyelids inside out - it's gross". Also, (and this is the kids' favorite part of the whole fiasco), there is "The Spotlight". Hence, the aforementioned survey.

Most of the time during The Spotlight we learn a little something about one of the children, but every once in awhile they like to shake it up and feature random facts about one of the adults in the room. What I learned from answering The Spotlight survey questions, which I can only assume were designed to show that I really am cool and interesting and not just old and bossy, is that... I am totally uninteresting. The most exciting things that I could think of about myself were that I like chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and that I work as a labor doula. (If you think that explaining the doula lifestyle to an adult is challenging try the 8-12 year old crowd. I felt like I should've had a signed note from their parents with an explanation letter detailing the course syllabus. In retrospect, I think I should've told them the story about how after we moved my husband couldn't find the case for his contact lenses and so instead put his last pair of contacts in two cups next to the sink. It is his contention that he told me what was in there, but clearly under the impression that they were His and Hers matching drinkware, I apparently downed the entire contents of the "Hers" cup during the night and now he only has half a pair of contacts. Not remotely useful... or so he tells me. Regardless, I'm pretty sure that the 10 year old boys would think that me swallowing a contact lens was very gross and therefore very cool. Oh well.)

One of the other things that I told them was that "I am the oldest of four sisters and that we don't have any brothers." My dad used to joke that even the dog was a girl. Our house was a house open to all the girlie issues. Our father was so comfortable with the girlie issues that sometimes I think he forgot that not all men are so comfortable with the girlie issues. Example: Once he was shopping and needing to stock up on girlie supplies. (Teenage daughters require a lot of supplies.) Unfortunately, stores tend to keep the girlie supplies way up on the top shelf where a man in a wheel chair cannot reach them. Fortunately, my father was met in the hygiene aisle by people that he knew and could ask for help with the reaching of the girlie supplies. Unfortunately, those people were the missionaries from our church. Poor 19 year old boys - retrieving industrial sized boxes of tampons in the name of Christian service.

My mother-in-law was also raised in an all girl house. There were five of them. A couple of weeks ago the youngest of the five died. It made me very sad for her that she had lost one of her sisters. I wondered about what it was like to see someone that you had known in every stage of their life come to the end of theirs. I wondered about what you do when someone that is part of the definition of yourself dies. I think it must be different than a parent dying. You expect that your parents will die before you and although it can be tremendously painful, it seems like a natural progression somehow. I have never lost one of my children (thankfully), but I think it must be different than that as well. When I think of my sisters dying I picture that scene from Back To the Future where all of Michael J. Fox's siblings just sort of fade from the family photo and then he starts to fade out too. I think it must be something like that. Fading.

I started to think about my sisters and what the death of any of them would mean to me. When I was a little girl, the only nightmares I can remember having involved something happening to my sister K. (mostly someone taking her and me not being able to stop them. Hmmm.) She is 17 months younger than I am and I don't think that I have a memory in my life where she is not in it. After she was married, she moved away from me for a short period of time. I remember watching her drive off down the road and I was sobbing and crying like those women in the Middle East that you see on the news after a road side bombing. I laid down on the couch and cried for so long, that the back of my head hurt. To me, we seemed very far apart, but eventually, she came back home.

I have to admit as well, that I was a little bit stunned when I realized that I was thinking in terms of "what I would do" when really, eventually, it will be "what I will do". We joke all the time about what we will be like when we are old, and our husbands are dead, and none of us can remember anything- except that there's something important that we really need to remember. Here's what we've never talked about though- eventually, one of us, and then another of us, and then another of us will die. Eventually, one of us will be the last sister to have said goodbye to all of her other sisters... the last one that remembers our childhood homes, and our father's smile when he was young and our mother singing "Oh Holy Night" at Christmas... and then she will be... sisterless and sort of alone. I do not want to be the last sister, but I also don't want any of my other sisters to be the last sister either. (I'm pretty sure that it will hurt a lot, and I'm not such a big fan of pain. ) I'm not sure what to do about that. It seems like a problem that doesn't really have a good answer. (ps - my mother's convinced that she is going to outlast all of us, so maybe that's the solution. Poor Mom.)

The other thing that bothers me about this whole sister thing, is that I'm about to give birth. To a boy. My third boy. My last baby (and I am totally serious about that.) This means that my daughter will never have a sister of her own. I have tried to spin this as a positive thing, but really it's just a big fat lie. It's lame that she will never have a sister - and no matter how I try to help build excitement about the prospect of holding her third brother, who is due to arrive any day (or week knowing me), she knows it's lame. The birth of her brother will be the death of her chances at a sister, and even though I know that she loves her brothers, and that she is very blessed to have female cousins that help fill the void... she is sisterless and sort of alone.

Getting ready to give birth to my baby and the death of my mother-in-law's sister has made me think about all the changes that come with shifting a family, and about how those changes are very much the same, whether you're coming or going. Birth and Death are indeed the sisters of life. They look very much alike and sound very much alike. They both have a rhythm and a pattern and tears and suffering and blood and exhaustion and relief. They both have a job, and the job is to help someone change places from where they were to where they are going. To shift a family. One is the first page. One is the last. One is the winding up. One is the winding down. They cannot be separated from each other. The one helps to define the other. To give her boundaries. To give her purpose. No matter how many times we experience them and feel them and act apart of them, like true sisters - even when they seem very far apart, they always come back home. These are two that will never be sisterless - and I guess once you've had a sister, you will never, ever be truly sisterless either.

My pants are marooned

If I was writing a message in a bottle/marooned on an island diary in the sand.

Last week...
Moved.
Pregnant.
No internet.
This week...
Boxes.
Pregnant.
No internet.
Next week...
Pregnant?
Internet.
Finally.

Send help and cookie dough.

e

A Gypsy in Snow Pants

Women have children for many different reasons. Some women want a baby (This is a classic bait and switch ladies. How they start out is not how they end up.) Some women want to be mothers - sometimes even after they truly know what that means. Some women just want people to stop pestering them about when the baby is coming already. Here is a confession - one of the main reasons that I had kids was to dress them up in super awesome Halloween costumes. In my mind I saw my little trick-or-treaters marching into the night clad in thematically inspired clothing designed and executed by their super creative and capable mother. (Me.) The actual trick-or-treating would be done with their father, because October's too cold for me to do that kind of craziness and also, someone has to answer the door and dole out candy. (Also, this was going to be the time when I could judge all of the other mom's efforts to see if they were as good as mine.)

As you can see, my plan was foolproof. In my mind. Then I had children... and my children had opinions. These opinions included ideas about what they would and would not wear at Halloween. Mostly these opinions revolved around what they perceived as "cool" or "not cool". Also, these opinions tended to change the night before Halloween...after I'd completed their costume. So now it's store bought costumes and no matching. (Who's being judged now? )

Too bad, because I had some good ideas too. Some of the better ones that were summarily dismissed were:

• Marie Antoinette and some random French peasants. My daughter just didn't get this one and she hated the wig. What kind of girl hates a huge white wig, I ask you? If I could wear a big old powdered wig to the grocery store I would totally do it... and I might or might not yell "let them eat cake" when I walked past the bakery.
• Little Bo Peep and her sheep brothers. I'm not sure why my four year old son would not want to dress up as a sheep to coordinate with his baby brother and be herded by his older sister's crook while I took pictures, but it totally ruined a good photo op. that would've been very cute in one of those graduating senior slide shows. Whatever.
• A family tribute to "The Wizard of Oz" - again foiled by: a. my sons, who felt that they could've made a lot shorter work of the Wicked Witch of the West if only they were allowed to use their light sabers at the church trunk-or-treat, and b. my husband, who had no interest in going out in public dressed as a member of The Lollipop Guild. Go figure.

Personally, my favorite Halloween costume when I was a little girl was a gypsy. When you live in the Rocky Mountains the idea of being a gypsy is about as exotic as it gets. I had visions of being decked out in a white peasant blouse, huge gold hoop earrings, a festive head scarf with fringe all around the edge, and a red skirt that would fly up in a huge circle when you spun around on your heels. (One of the best parts of being a little girl is a twirly skirt. Fun.) I would of course need lots of bangles and beads and bracelets and baubles - because I was pretty sure that those were the things that made a gypsy's life so great... and I'd seen pictures. Oh, also, I'd need a tambourine.

Yep, that's what my costume looked like... in my head. However, as I recall I usually ended up wearing a read bandanna, lots of cheap, beaded necklaces, and some lipstick. (I realize now that essentially my costume was a biker chick at Mardi Gras.) The things that really gave it that authentic Mediterranean flair though, were - snow boots and a winter coat. The sad truth was that Montana at the end of October was no place for twirly skirts and peasant blouses. No place for a gypsy- unless the gypsy wanted frostbite.

I look back on my gypsy obsession now and have a couple of thoughts. Firstly, I'm totally unclear about whether it is or is not okay to allow your child to dress as a gypsy for Halloween. It seems a little... racial. I think it must be alright, though. I mean, I would let my kids dress in lederhosen (another thwarted family costume theme: "The Sound of Music" - I wanted to be that Baroness lady), or in kimonos or ninja wear. I would let them dress like Cleopatra and other Egyptiany people. So...

Secondly, I didn't know that one day I would come dangerously close to living the gypsy lifestyle with my three children and hugely pregnant belly. Living like a gypsy, with the constant moving around, is less glamorous I've found, than dressing like one. We are on the move again after just one year. Our rental house was sold and the people that are buying it actually want to live in it. Rude. At first I did not think it was going to be a big deal to find housing. We wanted to "downsize" anyway and we were pretty open to whatever came along. (By the way, the word "downsize" might sound neutral and consoling, but in reality- it's pretty lame. I'm hoping to leave the "downsize" part of life behind us really soon.) Too bad for us, finding a rental that allowed us to keep our kids around people they know and didn't force us to revisit the last school year with our daughter (an experience just as enjoyable as a daily bikini wax) turned out to be asking a lot. Particularly when you're trying to "downsize".

With about 10 days to go before we had to move out we still had no place to move... in. What I learned next was this: Necessity might be the mother of Invention, but the mother of Necessity is Poverty. That's when I hatched my plan. Yurt. Or maybe a tent. At a campground. Homeschooling and cooking over a fire. Apparently Poverty is also the mother of Crazy. My family was not impressed. I told my sisters that a lot of people live that way. They told me that those people were called "homeless" - or "scary polygamist kidnappers on the run from the law". They told me that I needed to find somewhere to take my soon to be newborn baby that did not include communal showers and exposure to random mosquito borne diseases.

Fortunately, God knows that despite my willingness for adventure/borderline personality, I am not exactly cut out for camping and that I would last about two minutes in a Yurt homeschooling my children and beating my clothing against a rock. After that, there would just be a lot of tears. From me mostly. So... although I was looking forward to a big adventure, we have successfully found a place to move our family... that includes a permanent roof and flush toilets. Now with exactly two days to spare all I have to do is come up with a way to move all of our stuff. Maybe, if I can find one that fits over my belly, I'll wear a twirly red skirt and a huge powdered wig during the whole fiasco and hope that the new neighbors recognize a gypsy (at heart) when they see one... and since it's August, I won't even need snow pants.

What kind of pants does a doula wear?

If you are curious about what I really do as a doula, read this. It was written by a mom whose birth I had the privilege of attending. Women rock.

PS- I am not loving the picture of me. Just remember that I am very pregnant and had just done several hours of labor support. It tends to be hard on the makeup.

It's a miracle his pants survived

Animals are interesting things. Some are beautiful but not useful. Some are useful, but not beautiful. Some are not beautiful, and not useful. Some are just so stinking annoying that you don't even notice if they're beautiful or useful. (I'm just now realizing that this applies to people too. Hmmm.) Falling squarely in the "stinking annoying" category are: our dog (don't ever let Santa bring your kids a dog - ever), woodpeckers that mistake your roof for a giant red wood tree, Nancy Pelosi, (seriously Nan, I can't understand what you're talking about 99% of the time, and I'm pretty sure it's not me) and ... moles (any size, any kind).

Moles are the Howard Dean of the animal kingdom -ridiculous looking and without any apparent purpose other than to agitate the landscape and drive self-respecting suburban property tax payers to the very edge of sanity. Also, there is no way to get rid of them. You think they're gone and then... they're back.

My family's obsession with mole eradication is one of the things that binds us as a people. There are four principle mole hunters among us and they have had varying levels of success.

1. My husband: We used to live in a house that was situated on a large corner lot. Behind us was a huge field (good for privacy, not so much for vermin control). When we moved in, the entire property was overrun with knee high weeds, and creeping vines and very aggressive flora of every other sort. My husband worked for a long time on that yard and finally got it looking really lovely. It had green grass and everything. He was proud. He was a content lawn gardening putterer. (You know - he went out and dug around in the dirt and admired his tulips and lilies and whatever.) Then came the great mole plague of '05... and '06 and '07. My husband turned into a hunter. It was a little scary.

The first thing he tried was to drown them. I was skeptical of this technique as I didn't believe that one could actually flood real life mole tunnels like might be done in an episode of Winnie the Pooh. (All I could picture was that little mole guy with the miner hat and the lisp stomping up to angrily confront my husband about the goings on in his tunnel system and how he was behind schedule now.)

Next he went for the "stalk and smash" approach. I found him at 2am in the back yard with a headlamp and a shovel, poised over a section of earth which he had determined as the spot most likely to host the mole's next appearance. I was pretty certain that the only people (other than my husband) that wandered around in the middle of the night with a head lamp and a shovel were those that made a living farming the kind stuff that gets them thrown into the pen, and since I didn't fancy seeing myself on the next episode of "Cops" made him go back inside the house.

Some of the other things he tried were - chewing gum down the holes (I think this operates on the same concept that your mom had when she told you it would sit in your stomach for 7 years if you swallowed it), maybe poison of some kind, and these strange devices that he borrowed from my brother in law. They were like cylinders that you'd bury down their holes and then at random intervals (both day and night) would vibrate and hiss. Apparently I have better ears than the mole. The "audio deterrent approach" made me want to leave my husband, but the mole was willing to go into counseling to save their relationship.

(Just for the record the only mole I think we ever caught was caught by me. And when I say "caught" I mean I found it dead on the driveway and picked it up with a shovel while saying "iiih". I suspect he may have caught a glimpse of my husband in the head lamp and laughed himself to death.)

2. My sister A. I'm not sure that her mole capture should count in the family tally as it was actually her rat terrier that made the kill. Poor mole. What he learned that day is that you can't outrun good breeding. (Also, I think this is the only reason that she keeps that dog. Santa got her too.)

3. My mother. She actually caught a mole with her bare hands. Or rather a cup that she was holding in her bare hands. Moles might be fast with the tunneling, but with the running - not so much. For reasons best known to the mole, this one was making an above ground dash for my mom's flower beds when she trapped it in a cup and then, as any logical woman who suddenly found herself holding a cup containing a live mole would do, flushed it down her toilet.

From there on out, my mother hired a mole removal service.

4. My brother in law. My sister and her husband own a piece of property that is like 3 acres or something. 3 acres can hold a lot of moles. My nieces actually came running inside the house one afternoon yelling that there were 2 moles wrestling on the lawn. My sister and her husband were skeptical, but upon closer inspection actually found 2 real life moles wrestling around on their lawn. (They weren't doing that kind of wrestling. They were actually wrestling - a territorial dispute I guess.) In a move that I think made my husband a little bit jealous, my brother in law grabbed a shovel and - there's no easy way to say this- bashed the little suckers. He does admit to being slightly concerned at the impact that this act of brutality might have on his little girls, who were onlookers to the attack, but don't worry - they cheered him on. Literally.

Like I said, moles don't leave. I'm not sure if it's reincarnation, resurrection, or reproduction, but there's always one ready to step up and take the place of its fallen comrade. So... despite the shovel incident, where he got two in one blow, the mole problem persists and my brother in law has resorted to traps. Lots of traps.

Which brings me to... mole karma. The mole traps are usually covered, for obvious reasons, but yesterday they were uncovered so that my brother in law could mow the yard. My 3 year old was taking turns with his cousin (waiting for his turn actually) riding the lawn mower with his uncle and I was sitting talking to my sister. That is when I looked over and saw my son, holding in his beautiful man sized hands, a fully armed mole trap. I yelled. He dropped the trap, but because he is going to be a valedictorian some day, leaned over to pick it back up. I yelled again and went over to pick him up before he succeeded in losing at least 7 of his 10 fingers. (At this point my sister said to me "Don't you pick it up". Apparently she thinks I'm a valedictorian too.) I explained to him in as graphic language as I could think of why picking up a mole trap was a bad idea. (I didn't feel like it was a time to wax poetic.) Unfortunately for him he's three, and his uncle was coming back toward him with the lawn mower. He thought that it was his turn for a ride.

In reality my brother in law was coming to disarm the mole trap. My son ran toward the spot where he would traditionally wait to swap with his cousin ... right toward the still fully armed mole trap. I screamed for him to stop. He kept running. He stepped on the mole trap. The trap snapped. The trap missed.

Call it what you want. Call it luck. Call it a miracle (I do). Maybe it was because my husband never actually executed a mole and therefore its blood did not cry out for vengeance. I grabbed my son and hugged his trap free foot/ankle/leg, made sure he was okay... and then I yelled at him about obedience and listening and how hard it is to run with crutches. I yelled. I yelled loud enough to scare those pesky little moles into saying to each other "Man, that girl's crazy. C'mon, I heard some guy's trying to flood us out two doors down. I could use a laugh."

And if I can get rid of moles, I'd consider myself both beautiful (most days) and useful.

Always have a spare pair of pants

Here's something you need to know about boys: every boy knows everything about something.

My oldest son knows everything about oceans and all the stuff that lives in them. Want to know what color an octopus' blood is? Ask my son - (also, you can ask him why it is not the same color as your blood, if you're interested.) Want to know which sharks give birth to live young? Ask my son. Want to know how barnacles eat? Ask my son. (My kids and I actually saw this at the coast last week - it was pretty cool, if I do say so myself.)

My second son knows everything about Star Wars. Apparently this is something that lots of boys know everything about. I learned this lesson when I went to the park with three of my very good friends and their children. Between the 4 of us we have 14 children ages 10 and under. The families break down like this 4 boys, 3 boys/1 girl, 2 boys/1 girl/1 boy on the way, 1 girl/2 boys/1 boy on the way. That's a 13:3 boy-girl ratio, in case you're counting. You'll never see anything more wonderful and potentially dangerous than a pack of little boys roving free range through a park hitting each other about the head and shoulders with multiple colors of plastic light sabers. At one point one of the little Jedis ended up saberless. Sad. I pointed out to him that one of my sons had two light sabers, and because he was raised right, I was certain that he would willingly give one up. If hope had a face, it would've been his. However, when he turned around and figured out who I was talking about he explained (to a girl who was obviously in need of some serious Star Wars education) "Oh. Yeah, he's General Grievous. He's in Clone Wars episode three. He's actually supposed to have 4 light sabers." Apparently he was a Star Wars purist, and so settled for a blaster rather than further compromising the aforementioned Grievous.

You might think that when boys grow up, they no longer know the everything about the something that they knew as children. Not so. Totally not so.

My husband, for example, knows everything about cars and always has (according to his mother.) He too likes to share his knowledge with me. Before I met him, I knew where to put the key and the gas. I now know terms like "continuously variable transmission", "holly four barrel carbs" and "dual exhaust". Before I met him, I used the terms "wheels" and "tires" interchangeably. Now I know that wheels and tires are not the same thing, and you cannot call them the same thing. I also know that they come in different sizes. I even know what size tires our car takes.

I know this last little gem, because when you are 8 months pregnant and you are driving on the freeway to a baby blessing on a 95 degree Sunday afternoon with your three kids in the back seat of the car in their church clothes (complete with little man neck ties) and suddenly your car says "low tire pressure" and then "hey hope you are close to a cute little boutique that sells tires because your spare is already on the car and it's gonna be hard to drive on three wheels - even if they do do it in the movies all the time", you get to hear your husband telling the people that he's managed to reach on his cell phone over and over again what size tires you need followed by "a special tire order isn't going to help me - I'm literally sitting here with my kids in the car... (fill in the explanation from above here)." Also, I learned that the only people besides our family that observe the Sabbath anymore are the people that were already at the blessing (cell phones in the car, not the church) and the Les Schwab Tire Company - who slightly deflated the miracle of loosing a tire at the freeway exit by a tire store, by not being open on Sundays.

Other things that you should know about cars with flat tires - if you pull into a gas station, don't expect anyone that works there to give you any kind of helpful information, except how much a car wash costs, and also, if you buy your kids and yourself an ice cream treat to stop them from saying "stop putting your hand in my section" and "I can hear you breathing too loud through your nose" it will taste slightly of petrol, Valvoline and trucker stink - just like everything else you buy from the Chevron quick mart. Yum. Oh, and the patrons of the Chevron will keep asking your children where they are going dressed like that on such a hot day and then look at you like you're some kind of fundamentalist loony because you dared make your children change out of their camouflage shorts and Crocs before going to get religion.

Every boy knows everything about something, but every girl knows something about everything. The something about cars that I know is this -they break - but fear not, eventually someone will answer their cell phone, eventually you will come up with a plan to rescue your stranded family and eventually someone will be able to sell you the part you need...and then - who cares what it's called, if they sell a spare, buy one and keep it in your car.

Sometimes it's ok for a man to wear the pants.

Every person has good parts of their personalities and bad parts of their personalities. Most of the time they are the same parts of their personalities. For example...

I am a fairly independent girl. I was raised by an independent girl - and an independent boy. For those of you that know my parents, enough said. For those of you who do not...

My mother was raised on a farm in one of those towns where they could've filmed the movie "Hoosiers". Except the town was in Montana, not Indiana. It's one of those quickly disappearing rural communities that no one knew existed in the first place. As a matter of fact, I don't know if it's there anymore. Anyway... she was raised on a farm with 6 brothers and 3 sisters, and when I say she was "raised" I use the word as loosely as possible. My mom was "free range" long before they started applying the word to really expensive meat and dairy products. Let's just say that when your mom has 10 kids, and a farm and works a job at the post office to help ends meet, you aren't exactly sitting around waiting for her to make your lunch. If you need food, you fix it yourself. If you need clean clothes, you wash them yourself. If you need to get your dad from... wherever farmers are... during a snow storm... uphill both ways... because your mom's in labor, you drive the car yourself, license or no license.

It stuck with her I guess, because, for as long as I've known her, if my mother needs something done, she does it herself. (Except polish her toenails. That girl likes her pedicures.)

My father, on the other hand, was raised by a woman that would've been happy to take care of him for his entire life. Not that I blame her. He was in and out of hospitals and clinics and doctor's offices a lot during his childhood and adolescence and she learned, sometimes the hard way, to guard her son. Too bad for her, my dad wasn't super interested in being guarded.

Eventually, because of complications from his disease, he ended up in a wheel chair (I don't remember him any other way). I think it would've been very easy for him to have other people do lots of stuff for him, but like my mother, if he needed something done - like changing the horrible, awful, greasy, pulley wires on the lift for his van, or making sure his daughters had a decent softball coach, or curling the hair (and sometimes burning the ears) of 4 girls everyday before school - he did it himself.

Which brings me back to me - and a clogged pipe. I went down to the basement of the house that we're renting and the utility sink was overflowing with, what can only be described as, pipe vomit. Yep, vomity smell, vomity appearance... vomity reaction. So, because I am who I am, I got my utility vacuum and starting sucking. A couple of things about utility vacuums - they eventually fill up and then they must be emptied. Our vacuum holds 16 gallons of pipe vomit. Pipe vomit weighs roughly 8 lbs per gallon. Now, I'm not that great at math, but what I found out is that when you're 30 weeks pregnant, pipe vomit is really heavy, even if you're only lifting it into the bathtub where it will hopefully run into the sewer and not the basement. I filled and lifted and emptied that stupid thing 4 times. I'm not going to lie - it hurt, and I sounded a lot like those men in the Scottish Highland Games that throw that big log thing.

After clearing the water I proceeded to get under the sink (admittedly with some difficulty), disassemble the plumbing, snake the pipes, locate and snake the clean-out-hole-thingy in the wall next to the sink, locate and snake the clean-out-hole-thingys in the ground outside, locate and snake the clean-out-hole-thingys under the deck, reassemble the plumbing...and then, because all of my snaking was for naught, purchase what I can only assume to be one of the main ingredients in chemical explosives, to dump down the drain.

The pipe stayed blocked.

Like I said, I am an independent girl, but having exhausted all other options, I did something that I despise above almost anything else. I asked my husband for help. Now, I am very well aware that if this had been one of my sisters, I would've welcomed the rescue, but... what I'm pretty sure that this boils down to is ... my husband is a man, and asking for man help makes me... very unhappy - like the time that I drove to church for a big meeting, and there were so many cars that the usher guys wanted everyone to back into the parking spaces, presumably to make it easier for the worshipers to make a quick escape in case they got bored. (Which I'm pretty sure I did.) I had to get out of the car and let my husband park because I cannot back a car in a straight line. Rrrr.

So... when he got home from work, my husband opened up the clean-out-holey-thing in the wall, pushed the snake through

and - WHOOSH. Unclogged pipe.

I tried to be annoyed, (since he did exactly what I had done, but apparently his plumbing voodoo is better than mine), but between having a husband that could solve the pipe problem and knowing that I could safely shower and get the pipe vomit out of my hair, I was so happy, I just had to hug his neck.

So much for independence... or maybe just pride.