I have been living somewhere in the Twilight Zone the last few days. Mostly foggy, kinda teary, sometimes sleepy, and always off balance. The symptoms of my concussion worsened on Sunday evening. After hearing ringing in my ears, I got this head-rush sensation where I feel like I’m about to fall over and black out…and it won’t go away.

But, amidst this haze I have one thing I can clearly see, that I have friends, family and neighbors who are there when I need them. My husband is away and it has been impossible for me to run this house in my condition. So the people in my life have stepped up and helped me muddle through.

I’ve had two kids shuttled to two different schools by three different people, and a best friend who had just gotten dinner ready for her family, then dropped everything to take me to the hospital last night. My neighbor brought me groceries, and Mom’s from my daughter’s school have offered to bring us dinner. Oh, and I can’t forget my RN friend, who nursed me and woke me during the night after my head was hit to ask me if I knew where I was. My sister has sat with me, my Mom has sat with me, my niece and her roommate took turns watching my kids, then spent the night here in case anything happened, my daughter took over some household duties, and lots of friends have called to check in. What’s comforting is that I’ve barely skimmed the surface of the friends and family pool.

So, despite the pain, nausea and dizziness, I’m feeling pretty good. Having a support system like mine takes some of the pain away. My thanks go out to all of you.

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If this post begins to ramble and make no sense, it’s because I am recovering from a concussion. I won’t go into the embarrassing details of what happened. However, I will say it had something to do with my annual girl’s weekend, a hammock, and some vodka.

Although this incident was not really my fault, you will never hear me say that I am, in any way, graceful. As a kid, I was famous for spilling, dropping, breaking, tripping and falling…and not much has changed. I am a klutz. I am a gargantuan doofus. I am a clumsy, butter-fingered, fumbling oaf.

It’s partly because I’m quite tall and have feet so big that I envision getting a call from the circus telling me the clowns want their shoes back. I also have limbs so long that a teacher once dubbed me orangutan arms, and my brain is pulled in so many directions at once that sometimes I just can’t concentrate. Put these together, and you have the perfect storm.

So, it shouldn’t have been any surprise that I single-handedly put a halt to this weekend’s festivities. In a matter of hours we went from having a party, to something resembling a knitting group. No lie. As we debated whether or not I needed to go to the hospital, we slowly went from drinking beer to making pot holders, from happy to glum, from laughter to yawns. All while I held a bag of ice to a knot on my head, which was so big my friends could’ve cut it out and played volleyball with it.

I didn’t know it when I named this blog, but Urban Dictionary lists synonyms of “Momo” as dolt, blockhead, and numskull. How fitting is that? I unknowingly created a blog name which refers to my true nature. Coincidence? I think not.

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Near our back door, we have a rather large basket full of shoes. Lots and lots of shoes. All of which belong to the two kids. Yesterday, I told my son to go get a pair out of the basket and put them on for school. I was folding laundry in the other room, and kept yelling, “Did you put your shoes on?” He would reply, “Not yet!” And, I would say, “Well, hurry up! It’s time for school.” We did this over and over before I finally went to check on him.

I found him in the back hallway, completely surrounded by shoes. He had dumped the entire basket onto the floor. But, that wasn’t what surprised me. He often dumps all of his trains, cars, and books all over the house, so why would shoes be any different?

I stood there silently and watched him hold a shoe up to his face and smell it, then put it down, pick up another shoe and do the same thing. After he did this a few times, I asked, “What are you doing? Why haven’t you put your shoes on yet?”

He looked up at me with a disgusted look and said, “These shoes all smell like Michigan.”

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Friday brought disaster #756 to the Fali household. What really burned me up, is that Friday is the day I actually get stuff accomplished around here. We often have weekend visitors, so I save the piles of dog hair and kitchen counter crumbs to be cleaned up on Friday so our guests will walk in and say things like, “Your house is always so clean!” AH, HA, HA! I feel like an evil genius when that happens.

This past Friday was no different. I had managed to move the entire dining room around, mostly because the area rug has left a mark on the floor and I want to even things out. My thought being that maybe people will think we designed the floor to have a sun-faded wring around all the edges. In addition, I managed to do some dusting, sweeping, mopping, and bathroom cleaning. Because, scrubbing other people’s poo off the toilets is just another wonderful thing about being a homemaker.

I had run the dishwasher and done four loads of laundry, when my daughter went into the basement. I heard a dreaded, “MOM!” from downstairs. The type of “MOM!” you hear when someone is about to projectile vomit, or the kind where someone other than the kid yelling has broken something very expensive. Either way, I knew it was bad.

My daughter ran upstairs and said she had stepped in a puddle. I thought, “No problem!” because, last week after a morning of diarrhea and vomiting, our dog was confined to the basement while we were out of the house. When I came home, I found she had peed on the floor down there, which was a pleasant surprise considering what I was expecting to find. So, in this case, I was thinking the dog had managed to sneak downstairs and pee. Because, well…our dog is old and the basement is chilly. I can just see her dog brain thinking, “Ugh. The heat, the humidity…I’m not going out in that sweltering grass.” And, again because, “MOM!” usually means I’ll find something resembling pea soup on the walls, dog pee was not a bad alternative. This was not a big deal.

But, I couldn’t be so lucky to have dog urine on the floor. Instead, it was covered with four loads worth of laundry water, as well as what was run through the dishwasher. The toilets had backed up too, but thankfully no one had pooped since I started the laundry. There was only #1, which had been diluted by tons and tons of water, soap and bleach. But still it was a mess. One wall to the other, the entire floor covered with two inches of water. After a three hour clean-up, my husband called the plumber. I didn’t want to call, because the last time they came out, he brought a bucket into my kitchen and said, “Look here. This is what was causing your back-up”, and showed me a BIG wad of a certain, supposedly flushable, feminine product. Oh, that’s not embarrassing. I mean, what was I supposed to say? “Well, where in the world did those come from?” I may as well have passed gas right there in front of a complete stranger.

But, knowing that I had not flushed anything of the sort since that day, and because I couldn’t bear the thought of having sewage come up into our basement, I was happy to hear they could come out the next morning.

After lots of snaking, and having a plumber pull a tree root through our basement floor, we were back in business. And, let me tell you just how nice it is to be in business, when you have a family of four who needs to do their business.

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