The Gift of Being Intentionally Hard of Hearing

Well, we have started back to work, and Hannah has gone into labor.  Today is her due date, so that makes sense.  Both of her labors have started ON her due date.  Unheard of.  As I write this, she has just texted me to say that the contractions are still pretty irregular.  So now Sam will be staying with our neighbor while we work & Hannah acclimates to Life With Two.  When I asked Sam tonight if Mrs. Hannah was going to have a baby, he said, adamantly, "NO."

Not sure how smoothly his transition back will go.

Sam & John are both in pretty fun stages right now.  It's just that the stages do not go well together.  To be honest, I prefer to manage them separately.  In the morning, they play nicely, eat breakfast, and get read with no problems generally.  After school -- particularly during the dinner hour -- I put in my earplugs.

Have I mentioned that trick?  It's my newest Mom innovation, and it's brilliant:  LIVING WITH  EARPLUGS.  I got the idea from a friend, who was listening while I bemoaned the following traumatic states:

• Motherhood During Dinner Time
• Parenting in the Car
• The 13-hour Holiday Roadtrip

So my friend said, "What you need is to bring it down a notch." 


Exactly!  And that's what my Etymotic High Fidelity Earplugs do.  I got them in red and paid $10 to have them overnighted.

With my Etymotic High Fidelity Earplugs, I can still hear all most conversation, but it's like the volume is turned down.  And since John often speaks to me as if I am deaf, this is perfect.  I wear them pretty much constantly, and I am not kidding when I say that it has changed my life.  I'm not as reactive and sometimes I don't even notice when someone is screaming, bleeding, or paralyzed. 

The bonus is that I can play the piano and tune out all other annoyances.  Even when John makes up words to go with the tune of  Schumann's "Traumerei" and every other line in the song has "fart" or "barf" in it, I am mostly oblivious.  I just imagine that I am Beethoven in the early stages of his deafness. 

Additionally, when Brian comes home and they start the horrendous ritual of Wrestling Hour, I can go into my room and read on my John's Kindle Fire and not even notice that someone is bloody-murder screaming: I CAN'T BREATHE. MY RIBS ARE BROKEN.  I'M DYING. GET OFF ME DAD!!!!!

Please don't misinterpret.  We are guilty of neither physical abuse nor neglect.  The boys WANT to be pummeled into the carpet and furniture, and I WANT to not hear my children a lot of the time.  It's perfectly normal.

In the next post, I may see fit to actually write about the children's "pretty fun stages," which I mentioned earlier.  But now it's off to bed for me.  I have the terrible burden of a 37.5 hour work week this week and next, and although it happens only twice a year, it nearly does me in.

Onward & Upward (in silence),

k