$1,500 Pimple?!

Yeah, my sentiments exactly.

Apparently after being married 7 years and birthing two children I have just hit puberty. Good times. My face has been breaking out for the first time in my entire life in the past few months. I'm not big on makeup, but have actually had to wear CONCEALER!!! Ick.

So I get up Thursday morning and without any warning, there's a new one. This is no ordinary pimple. Oh no. This has taken over my chin. I'm not exaggerating here. It is literally the size of a half-dollar and my entire chin is shiny from the skin stretching. I look like Jay Leno. No joke. I finally get up the nerve to touch it and I almost passed out from the pain.

The best part of my new-found treasure was when Spruce took his toy car and ran it over the pimple. I honestly almost hit the floor. It was absolutely the most incredible pain. Later, Beaux told daddy that "Sprucey thought mommy's ouchie was a speed bump!" If it hadn't hurt so bad, I would have laughed.

.....

Now, I'm not a 'let's see the doctor' kind of girl. I go when things get bad enough that others say, "you should see a doctor." However, this one seemed much more serious. Hell, I had to take Motrin to talk! So I call the dermatologist. October 1st is her next available!!! I told them that my entire face would be paralyzed by then (or the Motrin would have killed my liver) and they put me on the cancellation list. They called two hours later and had a spot for the next morning. Hallelujah!!!

I get there and sit in the waiting room for the longest hour. I could feel all the eyes on my face. It was mortifying. I was the guy in the drive thru with the lazy eye. People would make eye contact with me and do their best to not look at the chin. (My neighbor even asked who hit me...) Great. So an hour and a $1500 bill later, I'm leaving...in agony. She numbed it and lanced the bad boy. Yeah, sounds as bad as it was. As I'm walking to the checkout reading the enormous bill in my hand I'm thanking the Good Lord that we have great health insurance. Well, that lasted about as long as the numbing medication in my chin... The receptionist kindly let me know in her 'all-knowing and could-give-a-shit-less" attitude that my insurance only paid 1/4 of my last bill and I had a $400 balance already!!! I about died. If they only paid $100 on my last visit, what would they say to a $1500 pimple?!?! Holy shit. I really almost puked then. If the car and the lancing hadn't done me in, this was going to.

So here I sit with the remnants of my mortgage payment sized pimple (which is just half it's original size but is very much still there) and mull over the conversation I will have with the insurance company on Tuesday. Good thing they aren't open now...mamma's got on her beer muscles. (What?! It goes great with Motrin!)

Sticks and Stones

So we're in the car bringing mams to our house to babysit. We are having an in depth conversation about how electronic toys are inhibiting both of my sons imaginative play. (Which is actually something I had been thinking about, but it all comes down to having the time to play with a wooden toy with them. You know?) Mams starts in on the 'when I was a kid' tyrade and we are all pretty intrigued. "My father took old soup cans, punched holes in them, tied strings to them and we wore them as stilts." Wow. That's pretty impressive honestly. I'm trying to imagine balancing my 5'10" frame with size 10's on a tin can. Not a pretty sight even in my head. "Then we'd play kick the can. Someone would kick the can and everyone would run and hide." Sounds like 'hide and seek' but I still can't find a use for the can. However, it does have me wondering about how much soup they ate.

Beaux, sitting attentively while mams recounts her childhood, finally pipes up and says, "Mams, Daddy only had leaves and sticks to play with when he was a boy. Sometimes, if he was really good, his daddy gave him some rocks."

The entire car goes silent. I look at Steve, who is pretending not to hear...