Elizabeth’s Journal

One Little, Two Little, Three Little Mummies

Today has been a busy, active day. Before taking Jonathan to Lunch Bunch at 11:30 a.m., I did a fair amount of weeding in the back garden & vegetable garden, and then we watered all the container plants, which were looking a bit droopy with the recent 90-plus-degree weather. Then we had to find time to change Jonathan, who had managed to water himself as well as the plants. He’s turning into quite a gardener—he shouted out to me at one point that he was just going to pull the old ones off, and proceeded to deadhead the daisy bush.

While Jonathan was at Lunch Bunch, I went down to the Veloway in south Austin and did an 8-mile time trial (34 minutes and 50 seconds, for those of you wondering). When you add in the 6-1/2 mile warm-up and warm-down, I went close to 15 miles. Unfortunately that left me with not enough time to shower before picking up Jonathan, so I had to be smelly in the gymnastics front room.

After collecting my son, I figured since I was already about as stinky as I could get, I might as well mow the lawn. So as soon as the two of us arrived home, I set Jonathan up in the back of the big car with his cash register and I went about it with my electric scythe. After a while we moved to the back garden, which had been mowed less than two weeks ago and was already over my ankles with all those little pollen stalks, and I did that as well. At no time, of course, on either the bike ride or the lawnmowing, did I consider applying sunblock. Naughty mummy! I just hope the redness of my arms fades before Dale and Glen return tomorrow afternoon so I don’t get told off too bad.

My goodness, I was very dirty at the end of all that. Jonathan and I had a shower and took ourselves off to Joe’s Crab Shack for dinner. And to those of you familiar with Jonathan’s eating habits, sit down—he requested popcorn shrimp for dinner, and when it came he ate about 15 of them! Blew me over. He also got the waiters & waitresses to dance, and thus turn on the ball of colored lights on the ceiling. He was quite gleeful about that and kept saying, “This is fun, Mummy! This is fun!”

Now I’m sitting here, having gotten sucked into an English movie called Maybe Baby. It’s about a writer and his wife, who have primary unexplained infertility. Part of the reason I started watching it is that Hugh Laurie is the male lead, and I truly love him from his role in Blackadder. He’s pretty good in it. Looks a little older though. I was glad I kept it on—Rowan Atkinson has a fantastic cameo as the doctor, and not a very sensitive one either. From someone who has had two miscarriages but also has a wonderful child, I laughed out loud at quite a few points. Some of them reminded me of stories a friend I used to work with at Dell told me about the things she & her husband, whom I also worked with, were going through in their attempts to conceive. Sean (her husband) had quite a sense of humor, luckily for them. I would NOT, however, recommend the movie to anyone who was in the middle of infertility problems—might be too raw. It did a great job, I thought, of just depicting all the indignities a woman can go through in any kind of gynecological situation, whether infertility or something else.

Throughout the whole movie, and this entire evening ever since I got Jonathan ready for bed, I keep having a huge smile creep over my face. Why? At the thought of a little nekkid Jonathan, about to get on the toilet to do his nighttime widdle; I was sitting on his stepstool. He looked at me and launched into a song that I have never heard him sing before—you all know the tune, but he sang, “One little, two little, three little mummies, four little, five little, six little mummies,” etc., up to 10 and then back down to 1. The middle verse was “one little, two little, three little uncles”, and he closed it out with “one little, two little, three little daddies”. I love him to pieces and yet it breaks my heart, thinking of the child abuse stories I read in the paper this morning. How can some people’s hearts be so dead inside that they could be cruel to a child? The smile he brought to me this evening will stay with me for years to come.