Ocular Melanoma, Forget the flowers, saying the word autism is hard, and a solution for bath fear

Hi friends,

It’s (really late) Sunday night.  Isn’t it strange how that happens?  It’s like all of a sudden BAM it’s Sunday and another week’s passed in the ever more escalating aging-I’m-growing-more-wrinkles-by-the-minute process and holyshit I have an undone to-do list.

Oh…this doesn’t happen to you?  (Liar.)

I promised a quick recap from this week.  But first, I want to talk to you about something important.

Have you heard of Ocular Melanoma?  Me neither, until recently.  Although we didn’t share it a lot (as in I haven’t written about it), when Tucker was three weeks old, Robert had to have a 4×4 inch patch of skin removed from his upper back/shoulder area due to a melanoma.  He had a renegade mole that went flat and black and became obviously bad really really quickly (check your skin, friends).  Of course at the time, having a brand-new three-week old baby, we freaked out and haven’t really finished doing so (me, not him).  Anyway, ocular melanoma is – from what I understand – sort of kind of the same kind of thing but IN YOUR EYE.

I know.  Right?  Anyway, one of the moms I’m getting to know from Tucker’s preschool has ocular melanoma and was in a race Sunday to raise money for research.  How can you help?  There’s a website that you can donate to right now.  Please be sure to click on her name (Gayla Timm). Yes, they met their goal of $5,000.  But let’s face it.  The more money we can throw at cancer research, especially when it involves children and the mothers of children who really need them to stick around, we can’t lose.  Show my new friend Gayla some loves?  She’s on Twitter and Facebook and this is a super amazing awesome cause.

Here she is with her family on race day:

Donated?  Thank you!

Okay so here’s a random wrap-up from the rest of this week.  Do you remember when I told you I was terrified of the upcoming cicada invasion?  I was interviewed by the New York Times for that.  We’ll see if they chose to use any of my bug neurosis for their bug phobia article.  I’ll keep you posted.

Last Sunday, I asked that my husband forget the flowers for Mother’s Day and just give me some time alone.  While he did take Tucker out, they came home an hour and 45 minutes later.  Also, they purchased something for everybody in the family except  me.  Happy Mother’s Day.  (“But you just wanted to be left alone and come on, you didn’t really want me to buy you clothes from Target, right?”).  Right. And wrong, too.  I was mildly annoyed and later forgave him as he busied the boy for most of the afternoon so that I could get some work done and be here with you, my real cyber family.

I then talked with you guys about music and how it has the power to instantly transport us to another age, another life, another town and another moment.  It’s magical and amazing and strong.  You were able to see photographic evidence of the fact that Tucker will likely not inherit his dancing abilities from aliens and instead do the awkward white boy dance of misguided frat boys everywhere…although it does look like he’s snapping those baby fingers of his, so perhaps he inherited some rhythm from somewhere far up the ancestral branches.  Maybe.

We dissed about making bath time fun again which is one of those sounds-sortof-dumb-things that is huge in real life.  I am not joking when I say that Tucker went from hating bath time to actually enjoying it because of this one simple thing.  Intrigued?  Check it out.

Finally, I confessed that I missed an opportunity to bring Our Land closer to reality.  Because I am awkward and dorky and want to keep Tucker’s issues away from my workplace (mostly), I experienced shakyawkwardsmile and pit stains.  Fun.

In other news, Saturday night I had a mom’s night out with the most party-on excellent (party on, Garth) mom friends from Tucker’s class.  So much awesomeness.  I think it’s safe to say that we all had a blast although it was a little different from the I’m not-a-mom-yet blast I had when somebody should have been arrested and nobody (as far as I know) was shooed off of a stoop at 4am or accidentally given a ride home by a maybe shemale.  It was awesome.

Finally, I hope you all have a wonderful joy-filled Monday (is that even possible?).