11 years ago, I found myself pregnant at the age of 41. It was the loneliest time of my life and I am a congenital loner.

In February of 1999, I had a CVS done. I was a wreck, waiting for the results to return, for exactly one year before, after years of infertility treatments, I had become pregnant on my own and then lost my little bad luck baby, on Feb. 5, my parent’s anniversary. It broke my heart.

In an attempt to cheer me up, I was given a computer strong enough to go on the Internet.

Because I already had two children, I received little attention. Then I went online, looking for attention, for someone to talk to. And I found my baby group. It might have been a part of Parent’s Place then or iVillage, or the other way around. But I found a place to be, a place to share, a place to talk.

During my whole, successful pregnancy ( this was Baby), the only attention that I received was from this group. I remember going to the bakery, and she was pregnant at the same time, and everyone was all excited and jumping up and down and I felt very sorry for myself indeed. But I had my baby group, and they jumped up and down for me.

Imagine that, 11 years ago, and we are still together. We have shared our portion of scams, learned to tolerate our differences, learned to simply accept each other for what we are. They certainly have learned to accept me, for I have a tendency to be very flip and to cause trouble. Let’s see, the last time I did this was after hearing about how many of the children are so bright ( and they really are) that I suggested a contest for the child most likely to flunk this year ( The Boy) or the most obnoxious child. They just took this in stride.

We have met each other, in various places, still have meets, my children know a number of the families from this group. My whole family knows about my baby group.

And so that when I learned that one of the children from the group, from that same month as Baby, the same year, has leukemia, I was totally devastated. I have *known* this child since before she was born. I have followed her life for 10 years. This cannot be happening. I have no nieces or nephews, but I almost feel like she is what it would feel like to have a niece .

The Internet, the Internet. I would trust any of these women with my children. I don’t think that they would trust me back, but that is because I am so flaky on the board, and far too liberal with our cherubs.

But imagine that.

Maybe I simply remain a lonely person, a stranger in a strange land.

And I am so terribly upset about this little girl.

Yesterday, the day before Queen’s Day- a national holiday- it seemed to be Sports Day at schools all around.

First, there was Baby’s. She was supposed to bike about a half an hour away to another village ( the same one in which The Boy did his stage), do Sports Day and then bike back. This is never going to happen. She is not allowed to bike to school ( we live too close) and those Swedish granite cobblestones have been ice slicks for months. She has had no chance to practice. She needs a bigger bike.

So we drove her there. I knew the order in which the classes were leaving the school, and so, as we passed the first group, I said, there is group 7. They were being led by a teacher wearing a fluorescent green vest, and I remarked that it looked like a bunch of ducks, flying overhead, there is always that lead duck.

We next passed her group, look who the lead duck is ! I said. Then Group 5, I recognized that lead duck as well.

We parked outside of the sports field, and waited. Baby was getting very agitated. She doesn’t like her school friends to hear me speaking English and she didn’t like The Father’s choice of music. She was embarrassed. We are saying, no one from your school is here yet, we are inside a car, they cannot hear us, but she was jumping up and down.

And then I saw the first lead duck turning the corner. Duck coming, I said. Sure enough, there they came. Then we waited for the next duck, her group. I spotted that duck right away, here they come ! She doubted me, but I was correct. Here came her class. She was so excited. Led by one very tired looking duck. She jumped out of the car and ran to join them.

She had a wonderful day, her face is rather burned ( I did not even consider sunscreen, for this is The Netherlands). I walked into the fields to pick her up, for I did not think that her duck would let her go without a parent showing their face ( which The Father cannot do right now) and she hissed at me : what are you doing here ? I explained it . She really dislikes me speaking English in front of her school mates, although only Best Friend was nearby and has heard me speak English a zillion times. I was like, well, tough t*tty.

The Boy also had a rather sporty day yesterday : his class or his school was doing a sponsored 45 km bike ride to raise money for some place in Africa. Considering that The Boy bikes 45 minutes, each way to school, I am surprised that his tires did not explode.

The Girl did not have an official sports day, instead, she spent the day with her Grandparents, biking through the dunes.

Back to The Boy. So he has his group to bike with, including his 4 good friends and a guy who has reached high levels in the world of scouting. They have to bike through the dunes and the scout knows a way to cut 10 kms off of their journey. They follow him.

Guess who they see ? They see the girl in the 1956 Ford Thunderbird. The Boy waves to her.

The friends who do not notice his wave ask if the other guys saw that girl biking by.The friends who noticed his wave are stunned. You know her ? Yes, it is my sister. How can someone who looks like you have a sister who looks like that ?

The Boy came home with a bad burn as well. He went to bed at 8pm and we finally woke him up at 11am. He enjoyed telling The Girl about his friends reaction to seeing her and she loved hearing it, even though she sniffed and said, they are only 15.

The Father does have a ruptured disk of some flavor. The facial paralysis is not related, just bad timing. This is good news. I have a handful of new prescriptions I have to pick up for him tomorrow and next week, he has an MRI done. This is going to be a long recovery, but all of these drugs are keeping him at an even keel, in every way.

And today the two youngest cherubs started a 2.5 week vacation.

We can do this, piece of cake.

For all of her eternal complaining, The Girl really enjoys her work. A gossip monger like her Mother, she enjoyed filling Daddy in on the latest news at *The Office* at dinner this evening.

After the dinner dishes were cleared and Baby and Boy were walking the dogs, she and I and Father sat together at the kitchen table chatting. She was being very perky and extremely cute. Well, she announced, I know what I want for my 18th birthday.

Do tell.

She wants us to *Sponsor* a vacation for her and Boyfriend in that villa in Viarreggio that we stayed at 2 years ago. My jaw dropped down and I said, this is not an option.

She asked me to be quiet, she wanted Daddy´s opinion. Turning 18 is very special, she said.This is not an option, he said. But, I will be 18, a legal adult. Fine, I said, then pay for your own vacation. Father supported me whole heartedly.

Does this mean, she asked, that I will no longer be welcome on family vacations ? (Here comes the Catholic Guilt angle ). No, it does not. It means that if you want to go on a vacation without us, you pay for it. You work.

Moving on to the next tactic, when can Boyfriend spend the night here ? Answer, you are jail bait, Baby is uncomfortable when he is around… be quiet, Mummy, I am talking to Daddy.

When you are 18, we will talk about it. ( In this family, this usually means never).

It makes for different after dinner conversation now, doesn´t it ?

I will be very glad.. I hope.. when tomorrow is over, after The Father sees the neurologist. He is not improving, if anything, he is going downhill, not a lot, but other problems are popping up.

I am very worried.

Baby is at an odd age. She is in between. Cartoons are beneath her and the teenage stuff is on too late for her to watch. When she watches TV, she watches nature shows ( they cannot go to the grocery store, Baby, if they do not do this, they will die).

She and her best friend friend spend a lot of time on their computers, at a site called Habbo. They have met other little girls, around their age, whom I have checked out, making sure that we are not talking about some creep from Belgium ( this has turned out to be a very good lesson). I made her wait a long time before she told them about her Hyves site, her real name.

The May vacation is coming up, and 5 of them want to meet up at a …a… an amusement park. I am not against this, but I cautioned her, don’t get your hopes up too high. A responsible adult has to be with her and Best Friend ( The Girl and Boyfriend will do, given The Father’s rather precarious health, and I could do as well, although my Dutch stinks), and she and Best Friend have to be within sight every single second. That is how one does these things.

This morning, I told her, once more, do not get your hopes up too high. Any responsible parent is going to want to be sure that their child is not captured by pirates and taken to South America. She told me not to be so sarcastic.

She had a bag packed for the day. It has fallen through. I tried to reach a compromise, for one of the girls does not live that far away. We could meet in the middle, Best Friend and Baby. It is a start. You have two weeks of vacation coming up.

I got the full blown hysterics. Everybody hates her, she wants to run away, Daddy hates her, the whole wide world is against her. I stayed calm, but once she returned to school, all that I wanted was a nap. And a bacon sandwich. I wanted major salt.

7 hours later, they are already working on another date. This has blown over. Thank the stars above.

The Internet has given a new and different flavor to parenting.

Perhaps because we all laughed so much at him yesterday, The Father refused to take his pills last evening. This was a mistake. He could only stay upstairs until 3am and then had to move downstairs, and take a pain pill.

I saw him at 6.15am as I was picking up the morning paper. I could not understand what he was saying. In a way, this is funny, the partially deaf woman and the man who cannot speak. But I became very concerned.

So much so that I was ready to call the Doctor at 9am. In his case, the most common reason for his problem is all of the drugs that he is taking right now. This is my golden rule, go for the most common explanation. But I am not a doctor. Another possibility is that he is in a pre stroke phase. I wanted a doctor to handle this.

I could not figure out who to call, and then heard him moving about. I waited until I could see how he was doing. It is the same. If he takes his time talking, he can hit those s´s, but he cannot appear at a business meeting. As he said, he makes his living by talking. You cannot do this now, trust me.

He called the Doctor. It is the drugs. Good. I just needed to be sure.

The Boy wants to change his hairstyle. I will miss how he looks like a little hedgehog without gel in his hair, but it is his hair and he should enjoy it while it lasts. His genes are against him. Then again, all three of the cherubs should have brown eyes, like mine. Lucky them. So much for that long study of peas.

He wants his hair long again. He wants blond streaks in it. He wants it oiled. In short, he wants to look like a British football star. Or a Beach Boy.

We spent too much time yesterday trying to figure out what that oil business was. I was stuck at Brilliantine, but then got a link to Brylcream. He tried that today, wrong. We are going to cheat , we are going to have our in resident fashion advisor take him to whatever they call a Beauty Parlor these days and get advice.

It cannot be olive oil.

Another thing that I do when I am trying to fall asleep is to list all of the Mitford children. This is harder to do than one would imagine. There were 7 of them and they each had multiple nicknames.

A short time ago, I mentioned that all of our pets have nicknames. I called it Mitfordesque. I felt very clever saying that, although spelling control upon words that one makes up is rather difficult.

We have Alice The Vampire ( or Alice The Viper, depending upon her mood).

The other morning, I told The Father that I was tired of living with a political refugee from Cuba. I did not want Tony in our house any longer .

The Girl has had a nickname since she was an infant. I can’t remember how it came about, although I can guess. I can’t reveal it, for it is also our secret password, when some car comes by, attempting to get one of the kids by the story that we are both in the hospital. This is a nickname no one knows except someone who lives in this house.

I asked Tony if I have a nickname. Yes indeed, I do. I am The Nagger. I can live with this. I am paid well to nag. It is my job.

The Father has a new one : The King. Like Elvis. But having a dog named Elvis makes this complicated, so he is The King.

At 9.30 this morning, he sat across from me at the kitchen table and said, there is something wrong with my mouth. There was, I could see that. I did my ER. It feels like he has been to the dentist and had Novocaine, the rubber lip syndrome. I went through my 40 questions and the most likely reason is the Valium that he has been taking for the last two nights, to help him sleep. I read the four page flier once more, this could happen. It is a muscle relaxant, he is walking much better now, doesn’t seem to be in so much pain. Another option would be a minor stroke, but it is only his lips which are being affected. I did not laugh at him.

Then.

A few hours later, I was sitting with The Girl in the kitchen, going over how her evening was, and The King came in, sat down and snitched a smoke. Once he started talking, his lip problem really showed : he looks like Jim Carey doing an Elvis impersonation. His left upper lip is bouncing up and down. The Girl and I are dying here, we are laughing so hard. He looks like the bad guy in a spaghetti western. He can’t even get mad : he looks so silly when he tries that we laugh even more.

I told him to go the kitchen mirror and talk, so that he could see what we meant. The mirror was too low for him or he felt foolish and simply could not do this. He complains that he cannot whistle. The Girl says, good ! We are getting away with murder here.

I tell him that he cannot go to work like this. He wants to stop taking the Valium, but I am strongly against this. It is helping him. And me.

I did not mention The King’s mouth to Tony ( The Boy), but after three words ( count them) Tony started laughing his fool head off. It truly is like living with one of those Elvis impersonator’s from Las Vegas. That sneer is killing me.

I have stopped laughing in his face. I just gave him one of those pink pills and he really has to take that Valium. It is helping him and I am not a doctor. I am simply a pachinko machine, making an educated guess. On Thursday, he goes to a neurosurgeon, let the neurosurgeon figure this added twist out.

I laughed so very much today. Poor King.

I did not sleep well last night. What else is new . I had this horrible dream about a commercial for either a movie or a TV series called The Four Fear Fucks. Sorry. That it what it was called in my dream.

It was 4 little boys, from two and up, and something dreadful was happening to them. It was filmed well. Very intriguing. One could not tell if there was a gun held up to their heads or not. But these were some very upset little boys. They are puking, snot is running down their noses and the little one is in his jammies.

It turns out .. and this was filmed very well.. that the little boys had displeased their Father. It was late at night. They had to find their clothes and go outside. I cannot recall what they had to do out there, but they were terrified.

This is not a good dream.

I woke up at about 4 this morning. I really tried hard to sleep longer, but I could not.

I went to take a nap at about 3. This will work, I told myself.

And then I started thinking about what I would tolerate. I either saw some trashy movie or read some trashy book, where the husband kills the Iguana and says, cook this up.

She did it. I am saying to myself, I would rather die before doing this. This is my line in the sand.

I moved onto someone has slashed one of my dogs throat. Cook it ! I would rather die.

And then I moved on to a psychopath in my kitchen. What would I do . I would somehow get The Boy. I would talk to him in Alabama slang and tell him to get out of the house, get the girls and go.

But what if I could not do this. I realized that I would do anything to save our children. I would offer food. Let us go to the bakery… they know our phone number… better is to go to the butcher, for a woman who works there is best friends with a woman who works at the company. I figured this all out, what to do.

I did not take a nap today. I was wandering down these obscure pathways.

This might help me get back on a proper schedule of sleeping.