The Puke Story. or Why I'm never going to be ready to be a mom

When we built our new (and by new I now mean it's over ten years old) house all my friends thought it was the bomb because the stairway is built so that you can walk down from the platform into either the kitchen or the living room with my mom's bedroom facing the platform.
Holy crap, a stairway with options! These people are SO modern!

Such architectural genius was slow making its way into Huron County.

Really, my mom is just that: a mom. The way the stairs are built force the nary late-returning child to walk directly in front of her bedroom. And did I mention my mother sleeps as soundly as a colicky newborn? It was preventative mothering because essentially if you broke curfew, she knew it.
You knew she knew it, and she knew you knew she knew you knew it. You know?

And you were hosed.

Being the perfect child that I am, this was never a problem. (Suppress giggle here.) because I, too, am plagued by lightsleepitus. The smallest things will wake me up; honestly, sometimes it feels like I never actually fall asleep at all.

Which would bother some people to no avail, but I'm used to it. What really sucks is at camp that makes me numero uno in the go-to category if something is wrong in the middle of the night and everyone else is too difficult to wake up.

This last session I had a cabin of my own, shared by another lady. Actually we ourselves shared a cabin and our girls were in two others surrounding the area. It wasn't so bad, for some reason kids seem to take a great liking to me, which I have no idea why. Perhaps it has something to do with the language barrier because even when I don't understand I shake my head and acknowledge I'm listening. I've gotten really good at pretending I'm listening while I'm desperately trying to form sentences into logical communication in my head. Or maybe everyone in the world is really good at it and I've just figured it out. Can't decide.

Other times a little knock comes at your door at three in the morning and you wake up to a child shaking and sputtering and you're at a loss for everything.

Let's face it, at three in the morning I don't think that anyone is at their best cognitively, and toss in a second language and we're bound for a journey.

"Ich hab'gebrochen." Small German lesson for you all. That translates into a few things. Or in the very least it's a tricky sentence if you're not paying attention...Which I wasn't after just being jolted awake halfway through the night thinking, "Jesus, a thief!" Yeah, right, Rebecca, a very polite thief is just knocking at your door after trying to what, steal your sleeping bag?

Anyways.

"Ich" = I . "hab"' = have. and "gebrochen" can = broken.

So my first thought, after realizing there wasn't a thief at my door was, "How are you broken? You don't look broken?"

And then I inhaled.

I can still remember being little and padding into my mom's room late in the night, feeling very ashamed, trying hard not to wake her but still knowing I needed to tell her that I had just thrown up.

It's small child protocol. She needed to wake up and put the sheet over the couch and bring the puke bucket (every household has one.) out into the living room so I could go back to sleep. But I was always so ashamed.

The smell of vomit is so very distinct. Sour and acidic, it whips through the back of your throat instantly and presses against the pit of your stomach. Hard.

Damn it. 

"gebrochen" can also mean "to vomit." How could I have forgotten? In those milliseconds before my eyes saw the caking on her shirt, and the wetness on her shorts, I had smelled it and my brain made the connection before any sort of logical linguistic could.

We took her back to her cabin and I had her change her clothes and leave them in the shower while I assessed the damage.

War zone.

She was sleeping on the top bunk, and had leaned over the back edge over shoes, backpacks, sleeping bags, clothes.

Not even her roommate below her was spared.

An hour of cleaning, I'll spare you the details, but know it consisted of a full mattress change, and finally she got back into bed. The poor thing, myself and the camp supervisor were the only ones who could manage the smell. Honestly, I wasn't even the girl's counselor, but hers walked into the room, put her hand over her mouth and whispered to me, "Ican'tdothisI'msorry."
Because no matter how much you love someone, you will always step back when a puddle of their vomit creeps too close. And let's face it, I had only known this girl for a few days.

But I nodded and continued to mop up what I could with my own bath towel. I think part of being a grown up means dealing with puke. That's it, guys, I've made it!

So that was the beginning of my second camp experience. Me thinking, "Holy carp, my mom is a saint. All moms are saints." mixed with a bit of, "Ha, that'll teach them, I'm never having kids!" and a reflection on how you always throw up at night? Is there something your stomach has against sleeping soundly?


Scumbag stomach.

The rest of the week spiraled into me getting my first tick bite. Whoohoo!
Two girls trying to break out of their cabin to sleep with the boys. Whoo. hoo.
And, here's the kicker. Seriously, I almost pee'd myself laughing at this one: I got voted most attractive counselor by the campers in their unofficial poll.

I think I can die having lived a complete and fulfilling life. Without any more puke, please. 

Hitchhikers Guide to Germany

 Germans are stereotyped for many a thing: they are not actually humorless sauerkraut-eating Lederhosen wearing people but they are, however, for sure one thing. And that is punctual.

It's not as though  I can drive here in the D-land, I mean, yeah, I could legally and all that, but with tiny stick shift cars, super narrow streets, and curves that would make Marilyn Monroe jealous, I prefer not to. That means some how I have to get to work after my breaks. When a camp session ends I can't just chill out in my cabin for five days, so I generally laze in a nearby town and come back when the next session ends. Someone picks me up at the train station. ...Unless I'm late.

Can you feel where I'm going here? Long story short, I misremembered the time I needed to arrive for my ride to pick me up and I was fifteen minutes late. Or, in Germany time, like, three hours late. I stood at the train station for two hours in the hope that they would come back to pick me up. Just maybe.

I tried calling the camp, and otherwise paced a path in the ground in front of the train station, thinking, 'Oh hamburgers.' repeatedly.

Just add a suitcase and backpack

Nearing ten at night, I figured they weren't going to pick me up. Which left me with literally one option: to walk.

So there's this thing about summer camps--generally they're, you know, in the woods. Where you camp. Not near main train stations. Nonetheless, I figured I could make it there on my own. It's not too terribly far; just up a mountain in the middle of a German forest at night.

No big deal.

I started walking. And walking, and so on and so forth, trying to remember exactly how many stop lights we drove by and at which street we turned off into the mountain. Actually, I was doing pretty good until the sidewalk ended halfway up the mountain and I realized why it's called the Black Forest.

As I was sweating (dragging a suitcase and a backpack full of clothes up a cobblestone mountain path is difficult!) and digging my reading lamp out of my suitcase for a flashlight, a car rounded the curve and began to slow. They stopped ahead and me and asked if I was okay. I said yeah. Because I'm an idiot and don't like asking for help.

Right now I'm really glad he said, 'Are you sure you're okay?' because no, I was not okay and yes, I would really appreciate a lift out of this little jam I was in and no, I really didn't want to get eaten by a wild boar.

Christian and Marika were just driving home after grocery shopping (I will never question those who shop in the middle of the night again) and had heard of the Wald Piraten camp. They would be happy to drive me the rest of the way. Honestly, they thought it would be a great opportunity to practice their English.

At this time I'd like to make a silent prayer to those who decide to study English, because nervous embarrassed Rebecca's German sounds something like a dog trying unsuccessfully to lick peanut butter off of its nose. Bless you, every one.

At the camp, the gates were locked, so we threw pine cones at the grounds keeper's window to wake him up. He greeted me happily at the door and let me into my room.

HA! Gotcha! He laughed at me and the next day everyone knew that I had to hitchhike back to camp.

To my mother, who is currently having a miniature heart attack. I'm fine, alive, and very much safe. I wouldn't tell you this story if I didn't think you could handle it. Plus, I can honestly recount this as one of the craziest things I've done, so I'm pretty sure that means you've succeeded as a parent on my part.

There is no Try. Only Do

Kids, I'm trying...

So this here is the gist, I work for ten days and then I get five days off. Really, I get three days off and two half days. I suppose I could just say I get four days off, but that's not entirely accurate either. The moral of this story truly is that I'm here now armed and ready with a now-empty bottle of red wine and a big ol' bag of 750 grams of gummy bears. (What's 750 grams in American? I have no idea, probably like a bah-gillion pounds of gummy bears. Just trust me; the bag is huge.)

So I don't want this post to be a huge recap of ten days of summer camp with a bunch of German kids, and as of yet I'm not totally sure how to go about it. I haven't actually gotten my head around the whole experience, and it's only just begun. My story sort of comes out in random intervals as I remember it in spits and sputters.

Every night the counselors would take our camp mascot "Hugo" to every cabin with a basket of candy to wish the campers goodnight and to ask them how their day was.
 Not that we did it, Hugo the Parrot did. Hugo is a cool guy. He's learning English too, so we have to speak a bit slowly for him otherwise he'll get confused.
 The older kids still wanted Hugo to come because he brought candy, but it was interesting to listen to them tell my hand disguised as a German-speaking parrot their thoughts.

"Hugo, today the swimming pool was the best. We learned how to play Chicken and Rebecca and Julian carried us all on their shoulders"

"Hey Hugo! Today we went mountain biking before we had a camp fire and made bread over the fire. Yeah, toss me a Lindt chocolate, please"

The younger campers would whisper secrets in Hugo's ear about their stay; who their new friends were, what they wanted to do the next day, who their new boyfriend was. Many were surprised to learn that Hugo was a really good secret keeper, so you also have to whisper it in Rebecca's ear or he wouldn't tell her. What a champ, that Hugo.

After all the kids were asleep the "adults" would unwind outside together, mulling over the day, and otherwise enjoying time as grown-ups again. It's amazing how quickly you get used to a dozen interruptions in your meal from a light tap on the shoulder and a quiet, "I have a question..." One thing I haven't yet gotten used to is how little, if at all, we discuss cancer. Without my handy-dandy camper information sheet I don't know how often I could guess which camper was a "sick kid" and which was a "sibling kid". If nothing else, we leveled the playing ground there and everyone is just a kid. Some of them were good kids, some of them were not so good kids, but over seeing a game of ultimate frisbee they were all indistinguishably kids. I like that.

 Check us out. We made the evening news, I mean, I didn't, but the camp did. That day I was leading a mountain bike tour, you can kind of see us biking away at one point. For all you non-German speakers, it's essentially about a woman who donated a butt-ton of time and money for the camp. So go ahead and check out the camp, and I'll try and be back as soon as I can.

Right now I need to eat something else besides fruity gummy bear goodness.

Quick, where are those little heart paddles? The ones George Clooney uses.

I almost made it. I was so close...
The entire weekend I spent in a classroom surrounded by Germans and came within two hours of leaving before they figured out I wasn't German also. So...close...

And I knew I was caught the second he walked in the door. It was the last segment of my spontaneous first aid course and no one, beyond the girl who sat next to me and ate lunch with me, knew I was American. We had moved through all the theory and anatomy and whatnot before we actually started practicing things.

Sure, I practiced CPR on those creepily realistic dolls that breathe and whatever, but that doesn't require much speaking or outwardly announcing that my German isn't up to par with the natives. Oh no, not until you make me practice making ambulance calls does it truly become evident that I don't know how to say, "The victom is experiencing severe abdominal pains and a shortness of breath."

The teacher looked over the class and chose three people to act out a scenario. One to be the victom, two for the emergency helpers. First time through, three people volunteered. Success!
I didn't realize there would be a second time through.

And no one would volunteer.

Now imagine that you're sitting in a room full of complete strangers for close to twelve hours. You're laughing at their jokes and completely comprehending what's going on. Now you've been called out and it's time to prove that, yes indeed you can speak, but only at the level of a grade schooler.

The teacher pointed to me and another girl to be the helpers. I just said, oh man. And he laughed and thanked me for audibly volunteering. The girl next to me, however, refused to come to the front with me. Oh, really? I didn't realize that was an option. I want to refuse, too.       Too late.

Thankfully my lunch partner came to my aid. So there we were, the victom on the ground in front of us and we're told we're at the gym and we hear yelling from the room over. What do we do?

Well, if you're me, you mumble, "Crap." and the class laughs at you. I sort of stumbled our way through the roll play with Steffie, the goddess she is, making the "emergency call to the police" while I poked at the kid in front of me, asking him in halting German if I could roll him over or give him a blanket to feel better. If laughter is the best medicine, then call me Patch Adams.

All in all not the weirdest experience of my life, until he passed out. So we check to see if he's breathing, and he is!

Until he whispers, "I'm supposed to stop breathing now." and we have to do CPR.

Greeeeaaat...

The teacher rolls out one of the dolls (thankfully) and I start pumping and breathing away, feeling like a dork, as we're told "to continue until the EMT arrives."
Yeah? And who is that going to be? Evidently no one. The teacher tossed us a defibulator and told us to sally up because the ambulance is stuck in traffic or some nonsense. Really? Imaginary traffic jam on highway You've Got to be Kidding Me.

Did you know the portable defibulators talk to you? Yeah, it's nice. So we followed the instructions in order to give our poor dolly a jolt of juice and it goes well enough. Honestly, it took a bit of effort not to whip my head around and scream, "It's not working. 15,000 voltz! CLEAR!"

I'm giving you all I've got, Captain.

And then we were finished, the entire class is laughing, and I sort of mockingly bow before we're released for a cigarette break. And by then the cat was not only out of the bag, but it was hefting its leg in the air to clean its belly.

And I would have made it, if it weren't for you pesky meddling kids!