It was the spring of 2013 and my husband, Chris, and I were at Urgent Care with our 1 year-old daughter. She had started screaming inexplicably a little while earlier at a restaurant. Turns out, she had an ear infection. The doctor wanted to prescribe an antibiotic for her and I said no thank-you.

(Seven years ago, after eight months of ingesting antibiotics as an infant, my second child had tube surgery on his ears. I did a lot of research and decided that antibiotics aren’t the way I want to go for my kids. Unless they are at risk of death or severe injury, their immune system can fight off their ailments and get stronger. Antibiotics can actually interfere with immune system function.)

While our primary care physician would have been fine with it — and has even stated he wouldn’t initially give his own child antibiotics for an ear infection — my no thank-you wasn’t accepted by the urgent care doctor. He turned to me and said, “Well… in THIS country, we prescribe antibiotics for ear infections.” Not only was I assumed to be stupid because I didn’t want to use an antibiotic, but I was assumed to be a “stupid foreigner”. He looked at Chris, as if to reason with the only assumed-to-be intelligent person in the room and urge him to talk some sense into his “foreign” wife (who was actually born and raised in America). I was astounded. Chris agreed with my position (he doesn’t want our kids to have unnecessary antibiotics, either) and now we were both dummies in the eyes of this doctor. He continued to try to persuade us to use an antibiotic and we continued to refuse, saying we would give ibuprofen for pain and return if the ear infection did not clear up on its own.

The ear infection cleared up on its own without an antibiotic (as every other ear infection our four children have had for the past 7 years has), and I quickly forgot about being treated as a “stupid foreigner” (sheesh, I feel bad for those who are treated that way on a regular basis solely for being an actual foreigner).

Then last week my kids were exposed to strep throat during a play date at our house, so I took them all to Urgent Care for strep tests when I picked the older boys up from school. None of the kids had strep, but the youngest was diagnosed with an ear infection. I told the doctor I would give him some ibuprofen until it cleared up and I didn’t want an antibiotic. She told me that wasn’t possible and she was giving me a prescription. It went back and forth like this until it was an awkward argument, with her telling me I had no choice but to give the baby an antibiotic and me politely but adamantly refusing to do so. The awkwardness ended when the doctor said she was going to send a prescription to our pharmacy anyway, I replied that I would still not be picking up the antibiotic, and she left the room to move on to her next patient.

The baby’s ear infection cleared up on it’s own (I took him to our primary care physician to double check), however, the pharmacy’s automated service called and left messages on my phone for days that my prescription was waiting to be picked up, until I finally went to the pharmacy in person and explained the situation. They were fine about it, but it seemed like a whole lot of unnecessary action — on both the part of myself and the pharmacist — in order for me to refuse to administer an antibiotic, and I couldn’t help remembering the former urgent care doctor who treated me like a dummy for refusing an antibiotic.

I understand the pressure physicians are put under. Parents want immediate relief for their children and demand an antibiotic, hoping it will deliver that relief. Physicians were/are taught in medical school to prescribe antibiotics (many of those medical schools are sponsored by pharmaceutical companies) and medical treatment in the US is heavily drugs and surgery based. We all want a pill or procedure — we want our immediate fix, and don’t think about what we’re doing to our body’s natural ability to heal itself.

The overuse of antibiotics is getting a lot more attention than it used to, and that’s a really good thing. It’s great to be aware of other options. Our own kids seem to have developed really strong immune systems and we’re lucky they’re all healthy, but our second child does have pre-asthma/allergies. I can’t help wondering if all those antibiotics I administered to him as an infant are to blame (and thus feeling I am to blame for not doing my research). I’ll never know for sure. None of our other kids received heavy doses of antibiotics the way he did for such an extended time period.

If you choose to give antibiotics, be sure to give probiotics as well. They help restore the natural balance of bacteria in the intestines. And please don’t be afraid to make the decision to not administer an antibiotic. Most normal illnesses can be fought off by the immune system alone. Making the decision to keep our kids off antibiotics was the right decision for us.

Our one year-old has been waking up covered in caca lately. I don’t know what the problem with his plumbing is, but the last few mornings have been full of poop wake up calls. (I’m sure when he gets older Tristan will love me for writing that about him.) Into the bathtub he goes, which means his 2 year-old sister soon follows. If “Tristy” — as she calls him — is having a bath, Lainey wants one, too. Toys, and blocks, and bubbles… baths are just too much fun!

I’d just gotten Tristan washed, dried and dressed when the doorbell rang this morning. Carrying Tristan, I ran down the stairs to let the furnace maintenance man in, while 2 and a half year-old Lainey continued to play in the tub. Less than a minute later, I was back upstairs dealing with quite the debacle. Lainey had decided to climb out of the tub, grab the bottle of shampoo, and empty the entire contents onto the top of her head. “Lainey’s washing her hair! Lainey’s eyes have owies!!!” she screamed in anguish. The shampoo was the gentle kind that isn’t supposed to hurt, but I suppose an entire bottle dumped on one’s face is enough to cause an eye irritation. The next fifteen minutes were spent holding Lainey’s eyes under the faucet to rinse them (she really loved me for this), then getting her out of the tub and flushing her eyes with saline solution. Once she felt all better, her towel wrapped toddler body climbed onto my lap, snuggled into me, and said, “Thanks for fixing my owie eyes, Mom. Can you kiss them?” Awwwww. Poor thing. I couldn’t be upset with her — despite how many times I’ve told her not to play with the shampoo bottle and/or snatched it out of her hands just in time. I thought she was busy with her tub blocks, and didn’t realize she noticed the shampoo, nor did I believe she would leave her bath and venture halfway across the cold floor to get her hands on it… after the number of times I’ve underestimated what my children are capable of, I really should know better.

The phrase “curiosity killed the cat” often comes to mind when reminiscing about our children. Like the time then 5 year-old Wesley wanted to see what would happen if he put his arm against the glass on the gas fireplace — and proceeded to watch his snowboarding under armor melt. I screamed, but he wouldn’t pull his arm away. Watching the heat transform the synthetic material was far too interesting. Fortunately, I got to him before his skin started to melt! Or the time then 3 year-old Devin wanted to see if you could actually ride on a house cat. 6 year-old Wesley thought the neighbor might enjoy having a child climb on his garage roof. And 6 year-old Devin built a volcano, a fact of which I was very proud — until it exploded on my dining room table. You just don’t expect a 6 year-old to build an actually exploding volcano. (One of those underestimations of mine.) Also, there was the time 8 year-old Devin and 3 year-old Wesley led me down a Rocky Mountains black diamond run filled with trees and moguls the year we learned to snowboard. They made it down fine. I ran into a tree (curiosity killed the cat’s mom that time). 1 year-old Tristan is already fascinated by electrical things and more than once I’ve stopped the guy from plugging himself in via my laptop power cord to his mouth. And toddler Lainey spins stories of the monsters that live in our heating ducts, which has lately resulted in her pulling them open and seeing how far she can shove her head in (to the heating ducts, not the monsters).

When I tell people that I feel like a really good mom because I’ve kept all my children alive, they laugh and don’t realize I’m not joking. They don’t know what kind of children I have. Curiosity and intelligence can be a killer combination — particularly when you come from a mother who once flooded her parents’ basement building a habitat for a toad in their window well… and a father who spent part of his childhood running around the Congo wielding a machete (Mom caught on to that one after he thought he was going to hide his gashed open foot from her) when he wasn’t reading the dictionary because he wanted to know all the words.

Schools have to keep everyone in order, which is understandable — you can’t have 20 kindergarteners setting off exploding volcanos — but there’s sometimes not a place to foster all of a child’s curiosity there. And that’s okay… school is not meant to take the place of parenting. Despite the days I want to pull my own hair out of my head after disinfecting myself — when 4 year-old Devin handed me his “pet” bugs to hold — I’m completely okay with my kids exploring. What better teacher could they have than the world around them? (Along with a proper level of supervision for their age, of course!) I love it that they’re curious, I love it that they want to know how things work and where paths go — and I don’t mind helping them clean up the messes. We wouldn’t have advanced much as a society without a few messes and mistakes. Alexander Fleming, anyone?

Now, when I discover my growing children’s hands-on learning about their world — 2 year-old Lainey stacking objects from my china cabinet to climb over the baby gate in her way; 1 year-old Tristan standing for five minutes with his head upside down touching the ground (no, he’s not brain damaged, he’s trying to learn how to do a somersault); 8 year-old sweets loving Wesley engineering a bridge out of marshmallows for a school project; the robot nearly 13 year-old Devin built holding a marker and scribbling all over the floor in some sort of strange robo-meltdown — and my eyes get wide waiting for all chaos to break loose, our eldest turns to me and quotes Thomas Edison: “Mom… I haven’t failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work.”

So… my two year-old daughter, Lainey, is having a princess dress up/tea party luncheon tomorrow… and who does she want to be, but Mulan. I asked the person who works at Party City if they have a Mulan costume and they said, “No, but we have Pocahontas.”

Yeah… cause Mulan and Pocahontas are even remotely close to the same culture. (And I can’t really imagine the Barbie size boobs on Disney’s Pocahontas disguising themselves as a man and sneaking into the Chinese army.)

How am I going to turn my blond haired blue-eyed daughter into an Asian Princess? She might have to go with her second choice — Princess Merida from Brave. At least I can find a Merida dress. No one’s selling Asian Princess warrior outfits right now. Gotta say I’m loving her choice of kick butt warrior princesses, though 😉

I’ve been running around like crazy, of course, trying to get ready for said party. It’s the first time many of my friends have been to our house since we moved, and I don’t want it to look like the usual scene out of Where The Wild Things Are, complete with my very own set of four Wild Things running around.

So far… I’m not ready… and I’m not ready… and I’m not ready.

No one did the dishes after dinner tonight, and I still have to put decorations up, make the punch, get food set out, figure out what princess dress I’m wearing — I had this genius idea that the moms should dress up as princesses along with the daughters, which I’d like to smack myself for now since I’m running out of time and still not sure which princess I’m dressing up as — plus I have to guard the entire 3 floors of our house all morning from my 4 children and my husband so they don’t mess anything up before the guests start arriving. It sounds so simple in theory… oh, why do I do this to myself? I just want to have an awesome party. That’s all.

Oh, and here’s the kicker of all kickers… my husband — who recently earned himself a he-who-must-not-be-named status — signed me up to run a 5k with him in the morning… before our daughter’s party. Thanks, he-who-must-not-be-named. Let me add wake up at the crack of dawn, run a race, change my sweaty stinky clothes, shower, blow dry my hair, and get dressed for the second time of the day to that list of mine.

Okay, it’s for charity, and I really do like to run and have been complaining about not having time for it. So he-who-must-not-be-named scheduled some time for me to get my running in. On the morning of the day I am having a giant party. He-who-must-not-be-named has just been named on my list.

Hope you all have read Harry Potter. My hubby hasn’t.

Love you, honey!

PS. Where are some wizard powers when I need them?

Early October…

My husband calls me a “stress case”. I can think of something no human being has ever worried about before and have an anxiety attack over it. I’m having one about remembering to pick up items for Devin’s middle school social event this weekend (the items I became aware of when, after school one day, Devin announced, “The sign up sheet wasn’t full yet, Mom, so I signed you up to bring everything!”) As I write this, I’m having another anxiety attack over knowing that I never get enough sleep, but not knowing how to actually get enough sleep, because of knowing that my brain never. shuts. off.

I mean… I really can’t help being a stress case. I have one child (12) who’s aspiring to be a hacker (recently, the technology department called to tell me Devin knows more about coding than they do, but he needs to stop reprogramming his school furnished IPAD or they are going to take it away permanently)… I have another child (8) who’s a fearless daredevil maniac and loves nothing better than back flips (off the furniture, on his snowboard, on the trampoline, diving board… wherever). Wesley’s trying to set the record for number of trips to the ER during childhood… Oh, but it’s my 3rd child — and only daughter (2) — whom I predict will give me gray hair. (My 4th child just turned 1, so I haven’t figured out exactly how he’ll stress me out yet… he’s still 100% sweet and cuddly.)

Here’s a rundown of the last few days of Lainey…

My toddler daughter could not find some inconsequential piece of paper to draw on… it was the signed HUD settlement statement for our house closing that I needed to FedEx to the bank by tomorrow morning. Sigh. This is after she dumped an entire box of kitchen matches on the floor and yelled, “It’s happy birthday time!” (Those are getting put away in a much higher cabinet.) I really need her to not stop taking naps. I can’t get anything done. It was supposed to be naptime, but Lainey had to have pigtails, so of course Merida had to have pigtails. Next, she asked ever so sweetly, “Lainey brush mommy’s hair, huh?” She then proceeded to grab my hair and try to walk across the room in order to be near her brush laying on the floor. I was still seated and my hair was still attached to my head at this time. Although I didn’t know if my hair was going to be attached to my head much longer.

Last Saturday, she dumped an entire bottle of baby powder all over her room. She even opened each drawer in her dresser and dumped it on all her clean clothes. When her dad discovered the powder snowstorm, she looked at him, shrugged her shoulders and said, “I just knocked it over, Dad.”

“Not cool, man!” she yelled at her big brothers when they were arguing. Lainey doesn’t like to watch her brothers fight. They continued to argue, so she yelled, “You’re a big jerk!” at them. I wonder who she learned that from? Devin? Wesley? Bueller?

Tristan (1) was happily playing with a horse, until Lainey shoved him, explaining, “This is Lainey’s horse, Tristan.”

My husband — and his sense of humor — has taken it upon himself to teach Lainey to say, “Relax, Mama Bear!” whenever I’m having a moment of stress… when our older boys are trying to beat each other up… when nobody’s doing their chores and the house looks like a dump… when the baby pours an entire box of cheerios all over the kitchen floor so he can pop two in his mouth and crawl away… “Relax, Mama Bear!” I hear from this little peanut voice, whose head barely rises above the table. Thanks, honey.

We made it to church Wednesday morning… Wesley’s class was in charge of mass, and, like a good mom, I couldn’t miss him singing in the choir and carrying the gifts up. However, soon after we arrived, I had to take Lainey to the back of church because she wouldn’t stop waving and screaming, “Hi Wesley!” Seeing her own brother up there in the choir was just too exciting.

The back of the church was a reprieve for a moment, until Lainey took her shoe off and threw it a good 20 feet down the stairs (all in full view of the priest). Tristan chose this moment to trip and face plant into a flower pot. He didn’t seem to be bothered, and I didn’t notice he damaged himself until he was walking around for a couple minutes with his face full of blood. I was already looking like a stellar parent here — now I was raising Rocky Balboa with his mouth pouring blood toddling down the church aisle.

The next time I turned around, Lainey was letting Tristan out the back door of the church. She escaped as well, and started chasing him down the sidewalk. She was chasing him, I was chasing her, the circus looked to be in town, then I caught them both. On the way back into church, Lainey almost dumped the bowl of holy water on her head trying to bless herself. She got some water on her hand, patted the top of her head and yelled, “Father spirit!” (Her version of The Sign of the Cross — in full hearing range of the congregation.) The holy water was such a delight that she continued to dip her hand in it, smack herself in the head and yell, “Father Spirit!”

“Lainey!” I hissed. “Stop it!”

Remind me to thank my husband for our daughter yelling, “Relax, Mama Bear!” at me in front of the whole church.

A few more minutes passed and she tried to send her brother away on the elevator. Tristan wasn’t paying too much attention to her bossing him… “Come, Tristy!” …but as soon as the elevator door opened his eyes lit up and it was a mad dash to get on. As Tristan tried to board the elevator, Lainey took off sprinting up the center aisle. It was the end of mass, and a good thing the priest wasn’t doing a full exit procession, or she would have crashed directly into him and the altar boys. Mother. Of. The Year.

In trying to count my blessings… at least she didn’t attempt going down the stairs to the dark church basement. She told me a dragon lived there (no idea where she got the notion from, but I wasn’t about to tell her any different). Also, Wesley knew I was there supporting him — in spite of his little sister’s antics. Two blessings. Breath in. Breathe out. Mama bear is stressed out.

Late October…

The other night, I was again stressed because I accidentally shipped the kids’ Halloween costumes to our old house in another city. I had a migraine. Also, I hadn’t finished writing the second half of our wedding thank-you cards (we married in a civil ceremony, then had a church wedding and reception recently). “I have to get these done, Chris!” I told my husband. “Instead of knowing that I have four children and every time I sit down to write thank-you cards, they start climbing on me and needing things… people are going to think I’m rude and not thankful and I don’t even send thank-you cards!” It was a disaster in the making. Finally, all the kids were in bed, then I ran out of thank-you cards… so my husband volunteered to go to the store. He thought he was terribly funny when he came home with this…

Is he trying to kill my brain cells?! Dead brain cells… another thing to worry about…

Relax, Mama Bear.