Surgery means daddy’s in charge

When my girlfriend came to visit yesterday, she assured me from the bottom of her heart that I did not want to see what my living room looked like. Or the kitchen. Or the dining room, come to think of it.

My husband yesterday brought me my morning yogurt with a large tablespoon to eat it with. When questioned as to why there was no teaspoon, he muttered that we were out of them. Apparently, he’s still working out the nuances of loading and starting the dishwasher.

Our four-year-old proudly told me he was able to eat eleven chicken nuggets for dinner last night, which was even better than his record of ten chicken nuggets from the night before. The baby lives in her pajamas all day long, and her pink and white crocs. The croc shoes are normally too big for her, but apparently they fit perfectly over fluffy, footed pajamas. She only removes her pajamas on bath nights, at which point she promptly dons another cleaner pair of pajamas.

My stepdaughter has been hiding out with me in the bedroom, sitting next to me on the bed, sometimes doing her homework and other times just giggling and talking and hiding from her siblings with me in my king-size, pillow-top prison.

Yeah, I’ve been sentence to bed for a week following surgery last Friday. I’d had this same surgery on my left leg in December; three months later it was my right leg’s turn. My right leg was thrilled to be chosen at last, as you can imagine.

The pain from the surgery is negligible and both cats are absolutely, positively thrilled to have a warm, captive body for them to sleep on 28 hours a day. However, the week I have been sentenced to bed rest is slowly driving me insane because the sheer and utter boredom of it all.

I am a somewhat active person. Okay, a very active person. I run around to meetings and organizations and take my children to classes and thrive on the chaos of daily life. This past week, I haven’t been allowed to move much at all, unless it was to remove a cat paw from someplace no cat should ever have a paw.

The first time I had this surgery, dozens of friends from church worked out a schedule so that meals were provided for my family every single day. My husband had only been home from Iraq for nine days prior to my imposed bed rest, and he was thrilled to simply spend time with the children and get reacquainted with our lives. My wonderful church community recognized this and proved to be invaluable during that tumultuous time of my husband getting reintroduced to regular family life.

This week, he is firmly ingrained back in our lives and the daily running of them. He is expected to cook and occasionally even run the dishwasher. The kids have events going on and the teenager needs to be pick up from school and the four-year-old has gymnastics and swimming and the baby has play dates and my husband is, to be frank, exhausted.

He misses the quiet of Iraq, marred only by the occasional rocket fired into his base camp. Life was, apparently, more predictable there. However, he does admit that things are definitely more interesting here, since he never knows what is going to happen from day to day.

He also gets more kisses here. Granted, some of them are incredibly sloppy and sticky and gooey, but he doesn’t seem to mind too much. He even looks kind of cute with grape jelly and ketchup smeared across his cheek.

To make things even more entertaining for him, the baby decided this week to import an ear infection from her big sister that necessitated a doctor visit in all her daddy’s free time. Daddy now also has had the joy of discovering that his baby girl does not care for the taste of prescription antibiotics and that Amoxicillin stains are quite difficult to remove from carpet.

The worst thing I’ve had to deal with is being bed bound, being forced to be dependent on everyone else for meals, phone calls, and my very necessary chocolate fix. The chocolate fix I completely owe to my dearest girlfriend who recognizes, as all girlfriends must, that when one is bedridden, chocolate is as necessary as breathing.

Other than that, the only other thing I’ve been forced to realize is that tablespoons do not fit into Yoplait yogurt cups.

On the other hand, my husband has realized that three kids on three different schedules take up a lot of time, and that dinner cannot always be on the table at the same time each night. He’s realized that his son has a hilarious sense of humor and an imagination that runs away with him. He’s realized that his youngest daughter is possibly the most stubborn human on the planet, and at times the most loving (and manipulative) and he has acknowledged that his oldest daughter is possibly one the calmest, kindest and most helpful teenagers to be found. He’s also realized that most families are lucky to have one like her in a generation, and that no one ever lucks into two children with her temperament.

Lord knows we didn’t.

He’s also learned to run the dishwasher when we run out of teaspoons.

I can honestly state that I think my husband has learned a lot more than I have this week.

But I’m still ready to get out of bed.

Tiffany Horvath is the mother of two and the stepmother of one. Her husband, Drew, was deployed to Iraq and returned home in December. She writes every Sunday about life at home as a wife and mother.