Heat Waves, Hot Dogs & Adventures in Motherhood

I've been uncharacteristically quiet for a week, thought I'd check in so y'all didn't think I got heat stroke and fell unconscious. I'm alive and well and blogging from an undisclosed air-conditioned location in the north suburbs of Hotlanta.

It's about 102 outside according to the thermometer in my gas-guzzling SUV. Look - I'm not exaggerating. (For once.)

I wanted to take a picture of Trumpet beached and panting on the driveway to post here, but didn't have the heart to put him through it. I borrowed the above picture from the Internet. Our first wiener dog, Winona, looked like the bathing beauty you see above.

So here's my favorite heat wave story - twelve years ago this summer Chicago suffered such blistering temperatures that people were dying by the dozens! I mean, the city had to bring in big refrigerated trailers to serve as extra morgue space since the regular morgues were full. So if you know that my twins are going to be 12 in October and have done the math, you will realize that at the time of this famous Chicago heat wave, I was pregnant with my boys. On bed rest, vacillating between profoundly uncomfortable and utterly miserable.

In August 1995, Mark and I lived in a 50 year old brick ranch on the near south side that needed everything from a new roof to new plumbing. It had one bathroom. Mark was tearing out the old floor tile in THE bathroom when he discovered that the sub floor around the toilet was water damaged and dangerously soft. He told me that he was going to have to repair the floor which required REMOVING the toilet.

I was a little upset at this news. You know----hormones, record heat, underpants the size of a paint tarp. So Mark's way of soothing me was this: "Cher, if I don't take out this toilet and fix the floor, some day you are going to sit down in the bathroom, but wind up in the basement picking porcelain out of your backside." I was convinced. Especially considering the size of my prenatal backside. It could hold a lot of porcelain.

Out comes the toilet. For. Three. Days. Need I reiterate? I had two babies and Winona the wiener dog laying on my bladder. It was rough, kids.

My neighbor gave me her house key on a ribbon which I kept around my neck. I would walk across the street to her house EVERY TIME I HAD TO PEE, which as you may imagine, was a whole lot. I remember it vividly: waddling down the sidewalk and fighting back the nausea as I watched the heat rising in shimmering waves from the blacktop and thought loving thoughts about my husband.

Well, it all worked out. I didn't kill Mark so he was able to fix the floor, the weather eventually cooled off, and the boys arrived early but are just fine now.

There's probably a moral to this story, but I'll invite you to leave your proposed morals to my little tale in the comments.

Yeah, it's hot. But I been hotter. And bigger too.