Collapsed Lung

The doctor suggested on Thursday that Maggie blow up balloons. Those little exercise machines are boring to use. Coughing (as a lung exercise) isn't any more fun. But balloons ... ah! The doctor said blowing up balloons always used to be recommended for helping the lungs after surgery. But nowadays balloons are dangerous and evil; they aren't allowed in the hospital because it would be a choking hazard. So we bought 12 dozen balloons on the way home from the hospital on Thursday.

Maggie has to blow up each balloon over and over, until it's too easy to expand, 3-5 times per balloon. I just figured the balloons would get thrown away after that, but nooooooo. Someone decided these balloons needed to be tied up and saved for playing with. When the living room floor had been entirely taken over by balloons, the plan morphed. Balloons were conjoined into tetrahedrons, pyramids, and cubes. Eventually all balloon configurations became cubic, simply because more could be jammed into a smaller space that way. But eventually the living room floor was being obscured by Balloon Cubic-Art. Someone else came up with a new notion: stacking them. The squareness of the configurations allowed the sections to interlock and stack. So we then had towers of red and yellow balloons, like stalagmites growing out of the carpet. Someone posited that we forego the Christmas tree this year, and simply decorate a balloon-tower or two. Youngest child recognized that the ornament hooks might possibly "do in" a balloon tower prior to Epiphany. So we knuckled under to the power of tradition and bought a tree anyhow.

Unfortunately, by this time of the season, there's not a lot of choice left at the cut-your-own farms. Andrew and I chose a tree that had a decent shape and was as short as we wanted. Boy, it was prickly! I'm used to the firs I had been growing on the north side of the property. But my homegrown firs have all been used up for Christmases past, and now I have to pay someone else for a tree. This one was a spruce. It was so pokey and sharp that we used leather work gloves while stringing the lights.

One of the kids asked on Friday night what we were going to do with ALL these balloons. I had said that I never intended for them to be tied, but rather that they just be thrown away flat. So we'd probably just get a pin and bust them when we were sick of having balloons everywhere. After finishing up altar-guild duty at church today, I arrived home to find children thowing balloon configurations at the tree. The needles are so sharp that they instantly pop the balloons. And it's really cool to throw six balloons at the tree, all tied together, and hear the pop-pop-popping as the branches snag those balloons. The kids say it sounds like a machine gun. If we keep throwing balloons at the tree and leaving broken bits of red latex on the tree, maybe we won't have to hang the traditional ornaments....

This stunt could end up in family legend with the delightfully noisy time the kids got to ride bikes over yards and yards of big fat bubble-wrap.