Yesterday morning, my seven year old son was playing in our back yard. I looked out the window to see him talking to himself…non-stop.

I watched for a few minutes then I walked outside and asked, “Who are you talking to?”

He replied, “My friends.”

“What friends?”

He held out his arm and pointed toward the garage, “The cars. The cars are my friends.”

I found this oddly comforting. Not the fact that my son was going all David Hasselhoff on me, but because these friends of his were real objects.

When my daughter was young, she had an entire entourage of imaginary friends. Friends we couldn’t see. We would get in a lot of trouble when one of them was sitting on the couch and we didn’t realize it. For the record, you can smash something that isn’t even there.

Her favorite friend was Simba. Simba went everywhere with us. Simba ate with us, watched TV with us and even ran errands with us.

And, one time, we accidentally left Simba in a church pew.

After Mass, as the entire congregation was beginning to exit the church, we stood at the back of the building trying to comfort our crying daughter who was throwing a fit because we were leaving her friend behind.

Trying to talk sense into her did no good. Our little girl was crushed. So we did the only thing we could think of doing. People watched as my husband walked back to our empty pew, grabbed at the air, “picked up” Simba and delivered him to our daughter’s waiting arms.

Now do you see why I’m happy about my son’s new friends? You can’t take an SUV to church. Though I will say, his friends do cost more to feed.

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Last Saturday, my 10 year old daughter and I woke at 4:00am to volunteer at breakfast for the Special Olympics. My daughter worked, literally, like it was her job. Running from table to table, wiping them down, pushing in chairs, throwing away trash.

She worked so intensely that she was sweating, and at one point a man pulled me over to his table where a group of people told me they “had never seen a kid work as hard as the girl in the blue shirt”. When my kid walked over, they gave her a round of applause. I got to puff up my chest and tell them she was mine.

My seven year old son’s defective heart has been acting up lately. He’s been complaining of a “funny feeling…like a butterfly” and yesterday his cardiologist hooked him up to a monitor. He has five large leads stuck to his chest and he wore the monitor over his shoulder all day as he ran and played yesterday. He has been a perfect patient. I’m proud to be his mom.

My husband has been working like a maniac. Long, long hours at the office, then hours more from home in the late evening. He often doesn’t eat dinner until 10:00pm, and stays up until the wee hours on his laptop. Then he gets up at 6:00am to walk both dogs, rain or shine, sleet or snow and on the weekends he spends lots of time with his kids. Everything he does, he does for his family. He is a good man.

As for being proud of myself? Well, at least I have that whole being able to hang a spoon on the end of my nose thing.

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The other day my seven year old son came in the room where I was reading and proudly announced, “I just peed in the bathtub!”

I put down the newspaper. “What? Why?”

“Because my sister was using the toilet and I needed to pee really bad.”

This conversation would make perfect sense…if we didn’t have two other toilets.

The next afternoon, he was eating some grapes when he dropped his entire bowl on the floor. Because we have two dogs, there is no such thing as a five-second rule in this house. My husband told him to go wash off the grapes before eating any more of them.

After a few minutes my son returned with any empty bowl.

I asked, “Where are your grapes?”

“I put them down the drain.”

I hesitantly asked, “In the kitchen sink?”

“No. In the bathroom.”

My BBQ skewers have never come in so handy.

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I was sick yesterday. Really sick. Dizzy and exhausted with a horrible headache that is still lingering today. I thought, maybe, it was the case of beer I drank while camping over the weekend. Until my daughter came down with it too.

My daughter rarely gets sick. She is going into the fifth grade and hasn’t thrown up since March of her second grade year. And, I better not have jinxed myself by typing that.

The fact that she doesn’t get ill very often makes this story even worse. This one event guarantees I will never win Mother of the Year.

In August, 2003 my husband won a fun-filled, family trip from his employer. He received four nights in a nice Cleveland hotel, four tickets to Cedar Point (the world’s best amusement park…just sayin’), eight tickets to Sea World (which meant we got to go two days in a row), four tickets to an Indians game and a fully-paid dinner at an expensive restaurant.

We drove up to Cleveland on Wednesday, August 13. The morning of the 14th, as we were preparing for our hour-long drive to Cedar Point, my daughter complained of a stomachache. By the time we got to the amusement park, she had a fever. I gave her some Tylenol and she did her best to have a good time.

Late that afternoon the power went out at the park. Luckily we all had our feet firmly planted on the ground and because we had been there for over six hours, my daughter was sick, and we still had two days at Sea World ahead of us, we decided it was a good time to leave. We hopped in the car and started to look for a gas station, as our car was nearly on empty.

Only problem? Every gas station along the highway back to Cleveland didn’t have power either. And, when we made it back to our hotel on the fumes of the gas tank we realized there was no electricity there…oh, and no water either.

By this time, my daughter was feeling very, very ill. A friend who lives in Cleveland brought us a small amount of gas and despite my daughter’s stomach pain, headache and fever, we dragged her to Sea World (they had power) the next day in hopes it would take her mind off of it.

We did the same thing the day after that, even though she was still feeling sick. We went to the restaurant that night and she wouldn’t eat a thing. We then went to the Indians game, where we stayed for maybe two innings before leaving because she felt so bad. That evening, she was pathetic and so horribly sick that we almost took her to the hospital.

On Sunday morning, as we were returning to Columbus, she was feeling better, but I started to feel sick. By the time we got home two hours later I was in such pain that my husband took me to the emergency room. I had all the same symptoms as my daughter, but I was only sick for a short time before I knew there was something really wrong.

After a couple of hours and a few tests, including a spinal tap, it was determined that I had viral meningitis. Not the kind that kills you, but still. I spent the next four days in a dark room until my symptoms improved.

That’s right, we had been dragging our daughter around amusement parks for three days, in the August heat, during the great blackout of 2003, making her stay at a hotel that didn’t even have ice or a flushable toilet and she had meningitis the whole time.

It’s six years later and I still feel guilty.

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