Weekend at Carowinds

My weekend really started last Wednesday. We were supposed to go to Carowinds (a Paramount and Nickelodeon based amusement park that sits on the NC-SC border) last Wednesday. Well, lucky for me, I decided to go online at the last minute and print out directions so that Tradd wouldn't have to. When I Googled and pulled up Carowinds, I saw a big, red pop-up box that said, Carowinds Open October 6 & 7. Hmmm...I said. Does this mean it's not open on Wednesday, October 3rd? I went to their calendar and very clearly saw that at this time of year, Carowinds is only open on the weekends and weekend nights for Scarowinds, their halloween thing. The day-time activities are family-oriented though. So, I call Tradd to let him know what I discovered and ask him why he never paid any attention to the huge, red, box. He had no specific recollection of the box out of the 20-something times he had looked at the site this past week. Okay.  So, we agreed it was a good thing I avoided a Wally World because it is a 3-hour drive up there. 6 hours there and back with three kids in the truck and no Carowinds to break the trip in half would have been suicide. We then agreed we would go Sunday, as soon as Tradd got off work.

Thursday was fairly uneventful. Friday, Tradd worked. Since it had been pouring rain here for 3 days straight and Storm had been home all day, every day, for her Fall break, I kicked the kids outdoors when it stopped raining in the afternoon. 3 hours later they had walked all the dogs (including 1 that's not ours, but we timeshare him when the firefighter who owns him is working.) Where did they walk them, you ask? Just around the back yard. In the couple of times I dared peek outside, I witnessed leashes on each of the three dogs, leashes on trees, leashes on table and chairs, leashes hooked on fences, leashes hooked on clothing, and the kicker: a leash attached to clothing while the wearer of the clothing jumped off the dog house only to discover that when the other end of the leash is hooked on the fence, it will stop your jump abruptly. (I'm sure you can all guess who that was...Kacy!) At this point, I pulled the plug on leashes. When all 6 leashes (I swear to you I never knew we had 2, much less 6!) were back on the porch, I threatened Storm and Kacy with death if they touched ANYTHING on their way to the shower.

This command was necessary because somewhere in the middle of all the leash play, they decided to "scrub" out the dog house. They used the hose and apparently sprayed the dogs and the dog house while they ran the dogs in and out of it to scrub it with their fur. I say this because the dogs were all wet and I assure you that the dog house was no cleaner. It might have had something to do with the big-ass mud puddle that the dog house was floating in. Somehow, the girls made it into the shower without dirtying up my house too much.

I was in the process of starting dinner and washing dishes, when I heard them fighting in the tub. I did my best and loudest mommy-stomp all the way in there to tell them off. When I was done breaking up the fight, I noticed that Kacy had a large, red scrape down her right eye and a purple bruise on her left wrist. I hadn't seen these under the layers of mud earlier.  It turns out that our timeshare dog, Buddy, who is still a puppy, regularly nips at her wrist to get her to play, and also jumped up on her and raked his claw from her forehead down to the middle of her cheek. I cleaned her face off, told her I would put Neosporin on it after the bath, and then scrubbed her hair so no mud would get back in the cut.

When I was done with this, I walked back into the kitchen, thinking, “What the hell is that sound?” As I rounded the corner, I had an epiphany and remembered that I had been filling the kitchen sink with water to wash the dishes when I left to tend the loving little darlings in the bathtub. The sink by now had enough water for the dishes. Suds were halfway up the window and water was cascading off the counter and splashing into the well-formed puddle on our fairly new hardwood floors. This was the cause of that unfamiliar sound. Amidst a serious bout of expletives, I turned off the water, yanked the plug, grabbed anything in site that was absorbent and threw it on the floor. Cameron thought the water was great fun! She followed me into the kitchen squealing with delight and proceeded to stomp around in the water. Then she discovered that she could help this decent-sized puddle expand its territory and see new horizons. It became fun for her to splash it, sit in it, kick it, lick it, and then walk out of the room with soaking wet and muddy footprints behind her until she eventually ran out of mud and needed to return to the kitchen for some fresh supplies.

After about 40 minutes of sopping up, mopping up, wringing out, removing the drawer under the stove to get the water under there and removing the bottom cover on the dishwasher to get the water under there, I was finally finished. Honestly, I don’t remember now what the hell I did for dinner that night. I don’t even remember if the kids ate. Whatever…they still woke up the next day.

So, on to Saturday. Again, the kids were thrown outside in the afternoon. While they were playing, I decided to make them macaroni and cheese for lunch. I was trying to do work on the computer while watching Cameron indoors, keeping an eye on the girls and the dogs in the back yard, and cooking. I couldn’t figure out why I didn’t hear the damn water boiling yet, so I went to check. In the kitchen, I smelled that something was hot, but it wasn’t the burner with the pot under it. Nope. It was the burner behind it. Of course, there had to be something on it, right? I have a large cast-iron dutch oven that I bought at a yard sale. I had been trying to remove the rust and season it so I can use it. I’m only about halfway there. Well, this was on the back burner. But, since I haven’t had time to work on it lately, I did not remember that I had stored a bowl of bacon grease in there for seasoning purposes a while back. When I moved the pot off the glowing red burner, I heard this bowl move and thought, “Shit.” I carefully removed the lid to the pot and saw that the oil was boiling! It was actually bubbling and spitting! But as I stood there and looked at it in rapt fascination, it started to turn a funny shade of gray and smoke was rising. Shit, shit, SHIT!

I grabbed the longest tongs I could find and removed it from the cast iron pot so it would cool down. As I moved along the kitchen counter to set it down in the sink, I tripped over Cameron, who was apparently as fascinated with the smoke as I was with the boiling motion of the oil. Luckily, I knocked her to the side and managed to keep my own balance, only to discover that I had no place to set the bowl because the sink was full of dishes that I never got the chance to wash the night before, due to flooding. Why can’t I just whip out a pot holder and set it on there? Because every damned last pot holder, towel, dish rag, etc. was currently on the floor of the laundry room, probably molding, because I had not washed them since mopping up the previous night’s flood. I finally settled on balancing it on the one inch span between the two sinks and hoped it would not spill and melt all my Tupperware in the sink or go up in flames, as it was still smoking heavily.

Knowing that I would have to get up early Sunday morning and get the girls ready to go pick up Tradd from the firehouse and head on to Carowinds, I went to set coffee that night and discovered that my coffee pot was cracked straight across the bottom and was leaking. I swear to you I considered super-glue or duct tape, but decided against it, solely based on my luck over the past two days. So, I went to bed Saturday night, knowing that 5:30 was going to come way too soon Sunday morning and that I had NO COFFEE to face this reality. Damn!

I had been fighting off a cold, yet I was so frazzled that I couldn’t fall asleep, so I gave up and swigged some Nyquil at 11:30 pm. Somewhere around 4:45 in the morning, Kacy was in my bathroom, in her loudest whisper saying, “Mommy, my dress is wet!” As if she was surprised by this fact, she continued to say this until I eventually dragged myself out of my Nyquil and childcare induced coma long enough to ask if her panties and bed were also wet and if she had ANY idea how this could have happened? (She hadn’t wet her bed once in the past 3 months.) I was too tired to do much about it and I wanted my last 45 minutes of sleep, so I threatened her with death if she should pee in my bed. I then woke Storm up so she wouldn’t end up in Kacy’s pee and put her in my bed, too. I honestly think the alarm went off the second I pulled the sheets over me again.

Just before we left the house Sunday morning, I went to brush each of the girls hair into pony tails for the day and discovered gum in Kacy’s hair. GUM!! She didn't chew gum for breakfast!  She didn’t go to sleep with gum in her mouth!  She didn't have gum last night.  In fact, she hadn’t had gum since before lunch on Saturday. Before the smoking oil! Before her bath and hair scrubbing! Before she went to sleep, got gum on her pillow and pissed in the bed! Removing it gently was definitely not an option at this point in my sanity. The gum was well-fused to most of the hair on the right side of her head, but the scissors cured that problem in a jiffy.

At 7:05 AM, I showed up at the fire station, minus the smile, but packing a travel mug and my favorite creamer and proceeded to pour myself some coffee while the firefighters laughed at me. I would have given them the finger if the kids weren't staring at me, trying to guess the precise second that Mommy would explode. Somehow, in the 10 minutes it took to get there though, Cameron had managed to wet her outfit. Her diaper was totally dry, but her shorts were soaked, which of course, transferred to me as I unsuspectingly carried her into the fire station. 6 hours of riding ahead of us and Cameron is able to directionally pee out the side of her diaper in the first 10 minutes. I changed her outfit, left her diaper alone, and threw her dry ass back into the wet carseat for the ride up to friggin’ Carowinds and our Wally World adventures.

Actually, the ride was uneventful: thank God! Carowinds was really fun, too. But, does the fun ever really end with us? No. One of the main attractions for our kids was a foam bubble area. It was a couple of wooden ghosts that at regular intervals, spit tons of bubbles out that the kids then got to play around in. Our demur little angels are so timid that Storm bowled over smaller prey (mostly Kacy) and went to stand right under where the bubbles poured out so that every time they started up, you couldn’t even see her. Kacy did everything short of backflips in the bubbles. I kid you not, she was actually on her stomach, swimming through the bubbles, while dragging herself through the mud underneath. All the other parents were laughing at my kids. Kacy was so covered with bubbles that each time she went to wipe the bubbles off her face, her hands would put a fresh layer of bubbles back on her face. When she discovered this wasn’t working, she decided to yell for us to help her, but every time she opened her mouth to yell, she would suck in bubbles, choke, sputter, try to wipe, get ticked off, open her mouth to try and yell again, suck more bubbles, choke, sputter…it was an amusing cycle, but I eventually ended it by grabbing one of the paper towels provided for the kids and wiped her face off. As soon as I got her face clean, she grinned from ear to ear and said, “I want to do it again!” Off she went.

Finally, the girls were soaked straight through to their underwear and we decided to make them go experience something else. Tradd, John (the firefighting owner of our timeshare dog, Buddy,) Storm and Kacy all got in line for one of the kid rides. John’s girlfriend and I stayed with Cameron. I was trying to communicate something to Tradd, while they were waiting. Kacy was playing around on the metal bars that you zig-zag through for the line, when her slippery, soaped-up body met the concrete with a hard thud. She was actually still for once in her life, and then she began to cry. I knew she was hurt because Kacy never cries from pain.  I dont' think Kacy usually feels physical pain. I thought it was her knee, Tradd thought it was her head, and I didn’t discover until about an hour later that it was her elbow. When I saw the bruise, I had her bend her arm, turn it over, straighten it out, and then I lightly touched it. This warranted a cry of pain from her and she begged me not to touch it again because it hurt too badly. This did not, however, stop her from going on any of the fun rides, so I let it go.  Later in the day I saw that her elbow was also bruised on the under side, directly through her arm from where the upper bruise was. At this point, I figured it was broken, whether she admitted it or not, but she wouldn’t let me touch it at all.

Just before the last ride of the day, the big kids wanted to go on some insane, prone, head-first roller coaster, while I watched the girls. All was well for the 45 minutes it took the adults to get through the line. Storm saw them all on the coaster itself, so I knew they would be back soon. Then, Kacy screamed and started crying again. What the heck now!? I asked her what happened and she said she touched the black thing on the ground and it was burning hot. I looked at her hand and saw the blisters forming. There was a fountain nearby, which is what had drawn the girls to this particular area in the first place. The water was dyed red for Scarowinds, but it was cold, so I shoved her hand in there to cool the burning. I ordered her not to remove it, yelled at Storm to run and get Daddy since I saw him in the distance, then grabbed Cameron football style under one arm and went to look at this black thing. It was a colored light that provided decoration for Scarowinds. The entire light fixture was covered in black paper. Since we were in the area behind the light, all Kacy saw was the black paper and reached around it and touched the bulb itself, which had apparently been on all day, even though Scarowinds was not happening on Sunday night.

After about 7 minutes of soaking her hand in this fountain, we decided to go to the first aid station. When we got there, the EMT almost flipped because Kacy’s whole hand was bright red. I had to explain that I had stuck her hand in the water fountain that was dyed red. They had to document everything though, so I’m fairly certain that someone will recognize us from the large “Do Not Admit These People” and “Lawsuit Central” posters next time we show up at Carowinds. The ride home went well since all the girls passed out.

Monday, we took Kacy to the doctor, to ask about her elbow. The nurse, then the doctor too, was extremely concerned with the wrapped and bandaged hand, even though we were there about the possibly broken elbow. Thank goodness the gash over her eye and the bruise on her other wrist from Buddy had faded some in three days. I don’t think the doctor believed us about the red dye though. She took alcohol wipes to Kacy’s hand to see if it was going to come off. I think, due to Kacy’s physical condition, she was actually questioning if we had dipped her hand. (This is a practice that, as a paramedic, Tradd has seen before, where parents dip various body parts of their children into pots of boiling water as a form of punishment.)

When the doctor saw red all over the alcohol pad and Kacy had tripped over her own feet 4 times, fell off the chair twice and even had the doctor catch her once in the 10 minutes the doctor was in there with us, I think she decided to hold off on calling child protective services…for now anyways. She thought Kacy definitely broke or fractured her arm, so she sent us to the hospital for X-rays. Surprisingly, they were negative…for now. But, her life is still young. I’m sure we’ll be good friends with a local orthopedist soon enough.

Oh, and Kacy is getting her hair cut on Saturday. It will be short, but at least the left side will match the right.