Juicy topic, isn't it? That's to drag in the stragglers after not posting for nearly two weeks.

It's not my fault. I had my birthday and the first week of school and the second week of school and two committees to sit on and a bathroom in the middle of renovations and no washer or dryer for a family of five.

Then, just as things were starting to settle down, I nearly died.

Potentially.

Sort of.

I was standing at the bottom of our wooden playstructure, which was built to expunge the energy out of rowdy gremlins. It has two swings, monkey bars, a slide, a climbing net and it is made of wood. Lots and lots of four-year-old wood, delicately re-assembled in our new backyard into the spitfire slowdown machine. One such little spitfire by the name of Gutsy took a bottle of water up there last Friday. He then took a sip out of it and left it up there for ants and earwigs to drown in.

Normally I wouldn't care about opened, barely-consumed water bottles, but this has been going on for far too long. Gutsy is the champion of waste. I regularly follow in his wake, putting cups and containers back in the fridge until later before they spoil.

But this particular water bottle was out of reach. It sat there, taunting my chubby, Spawnling-holding self in all its barely-used glory. I could just grab it, I thought to myself. Grab it and put it back in the fridge. Or drink it. It's not right that it's up there; perfectly good water in an environmentally-shameful package, going to waste like that.

But maybe you shouldn't go up there, my smarter side intervened. I mean, you're carrying a baby. And you're not exactly small. and this is a child's playstructure for, you know, children. Children who are hopfully less than 200 pounds. And you are rather, well, fat. And it's just a little water bottle, Maven. You recycle all the time. You can get Gutsy to grab it later and he can put it and the earwigs and the drowned ants into the bin. Done deal. Don't do it.

But it looks so... tasty. And it's so damn hot out here, holding a baby and looking at a water bottle straight out of a Coke commercial. Or, at the very least, a spring water commercial, but with beads of condensation on the bottle like Coke.

Maybe you should just go get yourself a Coke, Fatty von Fattenheimer.

No. Coke is full of calories and the white death, AKA sugar. You can't call me names and then say 'Just go have a Coke, Dumb Maven Side'. You're such an enabler sometimes. What I need to do is pick up Gutsy's water and drink its earwiggy goodness.

So the earwiggy goodness won over and I stepped on the first wooden step leading up into the fort. No problemo.

Then I heaved my portly self and The Spawn onto the second step.

The second step, it turned out, didn't appreciate my heaving. It broke in an awesome display of rotten wood. Spawnling and I found ourselves standing on step number 1 again. Spawn looked the same. I looked the same except for the long scrape on my leg.

No problem, Maveymave. 'Tis but a fleshwound!

Um, no problem, except for the fact that it was made by the biggest, rustiest screw you've ever laid eyes upon.

It's really no big deal. The scrape isn't even bleeding.

That thought lasted for about 3.6 seconds until I saw the blood start oozing out.

My next thought will stay in my memory forever: Say...When was the last time you had a Tetanus shot?

And with that, the entire dynamic of my evening changed. My weekly AA homegroup meeting came a distant second to the joy I experienced waiting in a busy hospital ER for a booster and a lecture from the nurse about how dangerous Tetanus is, and how everyone needs to get vaccinated at least every 10 years, and how she's seen two people die from it, and how all they can do is pack you in ice and watch you die, and how it's truly horrible, and how you can get it not only from rusty metal but also from regular metal and dirt and small scrapes and all sorts of unexpected ways, and how I was smart and lucky to have come in right away instead of waiting a couple of days because that might of killed me, and have I ever looked up Tetanus? It's not just lockjaw, you know.

And so I looked up Tetanus when I came home and experienced a mighty bout of hypochondria as I wondered if the booster actually helped and if I was going to die a horrible, grinning death through clenched teeth and wide eyes, all Joker-style.

You know, I used to be only marginally for routine vaccinations. I used to grudgingly have them done because I figured it was slightly better than not getting my children's shots. Mercury buildup, suspected links to autism, learning disabilities, blah blah blah.

I'm not renewing my membership in the crunchy club. Instead, I'm going to join the moderately mushy jump all over those vaccinations (well, except the chicken pox one. I think that one's a bit stupid, to be honest). To hell with mercury poisoning. I'll take my child potentially having a hard time learning simple addition over sweating out every little scrape and cut they get. I am a changed woman, and all it took was getting a rusty screw in my leg and my good friend, the scary, scary, everything-you-look-up-means-you'll-die internet.

The truly crunchy will tell me I've been misled, misinformed and that The Man, AKA the drug companies (and the nurse they pay though medical conventions held in tropical resorts), have me sufficiently scared to keep shelling out the cash (or tax dollars, as it may be) for their useless preventions.

That's ok. They can think that. But it was actually Wikipedia's fault. They have a very nice summary on Tetanus with some scary ass pictures, to boot.

Maybe Wikipedia is run by The Man, too. There's a new and exciting conspiracy theory for people to um, theorize about.

Maybe, because of my previous comments, I am going to get strung up in a communal orchard, bound with twine and flogged to death with sacks of organic potatoes.

This may be a good time to mention that I co-sleep and breastfeed for extended periods of time. Potatoes hurt.