I was a little nervous about signing Lemon up for the class, since he and his contemporaries are at the stage where everything they touch goes right into their (disease filled) mouths. But, everyone in the CF community says not to raise your child in a bubble, and I fully intend to heed that advice even if it makes our nanny nervous, which it does. So, on Wednesday of this week, I made sure that there were plenty of disinfecting wipes in the diaper bag, and went off to music class. The class was really cute, and full of other women who are about my age with babies about Lemon's age. So, a totally perfect venue to make some new friends. Except that I'm that psycho first time mom who is wiping down every toy before allowing her precious prince to touch it, and defending the sanitized toys from the other babies when they try to grab them. I want to tell them all that I am so NOT this person, this hygiene-obsessed, over-protective helicopter parent. I want to tell them about the time when I was bike touring and I used a stick to spread peanut butter when I was hungry and couldn't find any utensils, because that is who I really am. I want to tell them this as I dip all of the toys around me in bleach, and then autoclave them. It's a conundrum. Because if I try to tell them that I am really not like this, I will have to tell them why I am acting like someone I'm not. And I don't want to begin a friendship with someone by having her feel sorry for me, or feel sorry for Lemon, because that is not who we are and what we are about. And while I was having this massive internal dialog, Lemon tried really hard to eat a paper bag.
I did sign us up for the rest of the session of the music class, which runs through the end of May, so I have many more chances to thoroughly impress my fellow moms. And, naturally, in spite of all my psychosis, Lemon and I both got a cold this week. Whether it actually had anything to do with the music class or not is impossible to tell. All I can really say is that we're doing chest PT 3 times a day and ordering more sanitizing wipes. And maybe a portable autoclave.
This weekend we went on our first big family road trip, to scenic Elgin, IL. Papa Bear's lab technician was really somewhat horrified to hear that we were going on a get-away to her childhood hometown, but we had good reason. Some of my dearest friends, who now live in Hawaii, were visiting family there. And here in the midwest, 100 miles away is basically next door, so of course we packed everything up (and I do mean everything in the literal sense) and drove down to Elgin.
There, we went to an alpaca farm owned by our friends' relatives. Lemon thought that the alpacas were the weirdest looking cats he'd ever seen.
We had an absolutely wonderful time visiting with everyone. It was great fun to introduce them all to Lemon, who immediately (and correctly) identified them as his people.
Papa Bear also got a taste of what our lives will be like in 5 years, when Lemon will want to play the same slightly pointless games over and over again while talking smack about his opponents using phrases like "purple-durple."
While I'm still intent on making some new friends in Madison some day, it is hard to imagine ever meeting such great friends as these--friends who you see far too infrequently, but that as soon as you're in the same room, it's as though you saw each other just the previous day, and not a million years ago. It is reassuring that they still seem to think that I'm the same person, even though pretty much everything about my life has changed since I last saw them.
