The nose knows

Today got off to a not-so-nice start. I knew it was going to be rough getting Monkey Man up with the time change and all, but I wasn't prepared for the meltdown that ensued.

Two weeks ago when we got back from Orlando, we rolled in from the airport around 11 PM exhausted. And of course, my loving husband decided that it would be a wonderful time to cut Monkey Man's fingernails. This is not something that Monkey Man typically freaks out over, but it isn't exactly something he looks forward to either - so of course this sent him on the downward spiral of horror and I had to scoop the remnants of him up and pour them into the bed. I remember vividly hissing at Joey, "Why the hell did you have to cut his fingernails NOW when he's exhausted?"

So this morning, waking up an already cranky boy, Joey decided once again that it was time to cut his fingernails. By the time he got the kid downstairs, poor Monkey Man had gone into severe emotional shutdown and wouldn't make eye contact or talk to us at all. I swooped him up onto the couch and snuggled with him for a few minutes and eventually at least got him into his shoes and to tell me a Pop Tart would be okay for breakfast. "Didn't you learn anything from the last time you cut his fingernails?" I asked Joey. At that point, he's lucky I didn't perform any Lorena Bobbit action on him with some toenail clippers.

So I got Monkey Man to school (this is usually Joey's job but I figured it was better to cut my losses and handle it myself) and things continued to go downhill. Monkey Man is typically happy as a clam to be one of the first few kids at school - today he got upset that two other kids had beaten him into the breakfast room. Yeah, I knew it was going to be a bad day for him of epic proportions. By noon, I had a phone call that he had pretty much cried all morning and wouldn't eat his lunch. I asked them to put him on the phone, tried to talk to him, and apparently he ate most of his lunch after that and promptly fell into a coma by 12:40 PM. Naptime starts at 1. So obviously, he was exhausted. And I was irritated - this is why we pay the big bucks, for them to deal with my normally happy-go-lucky kid when he has a bad day every now and then - not to mention that he needs to learn to deal with having a bad day and not being bailed out if he is having one. He wasn't hurting anyone, he wasn't disrupting the class, he was just on emotional overload and probably needed a little TLC. And I made sure that they knew by the time that I hung up that unless he was acting like the kid in the Exorcist or spouting blood from every pore, I didn't want to hear from them again.

So while all this was going on, I had some not-so nice news at the dermatologist's office. And I present, The Nose:

And this, my friends, is why you always, ALWAYS should wear plenty of sunscreen. Especially when you're close to the equator. And part Irish. And drinking a lot. Which has nothing to do with being part Irish in this case, but I digress.

Remember when we went to Cabo and I got that horrible sunburn (despite the fact that I was very careful)? Well, I've had a spot on my collarbone and a spot on my nose that kind of popped up a few months ago. Today was my biannual appointment with Dr. K and she took one look at my nose and pronounced that the spot had to come off immediately. Apparently it's something called Actinic Keratosis - kind of precancerous stuff. It shouldn't progress any further since we caught it early. And the spot on my collarbone was just another funky pore. She froze both off while I just about tore a hole through the exam table with my fingernails. That shit hurts. Not to mention the wound on my vanity is just about all I can bear, since everyone was walking into my office this afternoon and asking what the fuck happened to my nose.

So I guess my biggest hope at this point is that I don't end up looking like this at the end of the week:
















That's just wrong.

So Dr. K told me from now on that I'll have to pretty much stay out of the sun unless I'm using 25,932 SPF sunscreen and most likely wearing a hat too. I've always been very careful about sun exposure since I got sun poisoning as a freshman in high school, but I guess I've been pretty lax about taking care of myself versus Monkey Man, who is constantly being sprayed and slathered with sunscreen until the cows come home.

And my other dilemma is finding a hat that fits. I have an enormous head. Most "one size fits all" hats look like beanies on my head. It's downright embarrassing at times, because more often than not I end up buying my baseball caps in the men's department and when I found out that the men's Underarmour baseball caps have velcro adjustments in the back, I went out and bought one in all the major colors they had. It's that bad and that hard to find stuff that fits.

So when you see me at the pool this summer, I will be looking fabulous. If I can find something that looks like this:


The "Diva" Hat.

God help me.

Wear sunscreen, yo. Don't be a dork.