Baby Got Back (Ache)

Every year around this time, when Texas starts getting really hot and the skeeters come out, I try to stand by the decision I made a couple of years ago when I first started geocaching. I have to repeat it like a mantra sometimes - "I will not risk life and limb to pursue a geocache, nor will I do that to my children". It seems like a really simple thing to live by, to not put yourself or your children in danger to play a game, but geocachers, speak out here, how many times does our obsession overrule good sense?
Sometimes going after a cache doesn't seem harmful, but then you get out in 100 degree heat or suddenly get swarmed with mosquitos potentially carrying West Nile while walking to it. We are not quite at that level just yet, but we do have the danger of snakes. Why, just a couple of weeks ago I was caching in a park with my children, and later read the logs that almost everyone had seen a copperhead right near the cache, where both my children were. Just yesterday I got scratched all along my legs by little briars going after a cache that I didn't even find. That was frustrating.
So far this year, though, the worst crime I have committed against my person in the name of the game was the weekend before last. Just hours after that pedicure that I last wrote about, our family was out in this nature preserve, and I did something incredibly stupid. My husband wanted to fish with the oldest son, and I wanted to go after the geocache that was a quarter mile further down the trail. They did not want to be bothered with my younger son, who was really in need of a nap, and insisted I take him. I thought it would be no big deal, that he could certainly walk that far. We would just take it slow and easy.
We had gotten five feet on to the trail when I realized it was not going to be that easy. He refused to walk, and was crying, hands up, like he does when he is asking for me to pick him up. I did not want to not get the cache, but knew if I took him back to my husband, I would run that risk. Heck, I'll just carry him, I thought.
Carrying him on my hip was slowing me down, so I lifted him on my shoulders and carried him that way most of the way there and back. Occasionally there were low hanging limbs so I would have to lower myself to a squat to get through without clocking him in the face with a branch. I was energetic and eager, and even ran a little along the trail. The cache was located about 200 feet off the trail into the woods, so that part was a little taxing. My hair was becoming plastered to my face with sweat, dirt, and baby weight.
When I got back to our fishing hole, my husband remembers me saying "oh, that just killed my back" before sitting down in the chair. I forgot all about it and the next day was running around with Lara and our dogs hunting more caches, bringing groceries in, carrying the baby around, and generally doing all the active and energetic things that are a part of my life.
The next day, I was sitting in a chair at work, just sitting working on a task, and when I got up, my lower back was aching. It got progressively worse during the day. I kept thinking that it was just from overexerting myself and it would go away after a little while.
Well, it's been a week now, and still hurts. I was really pathetic for a while last week. I was all laid up. I still went to work every day, but when I got home, I was useless. I usually attempt to have the house picked up and dinner going when my husband comes home, but we ordered out twice last week, and Mama wasn't doing any housework.
By Friday, my husband was grumbling that the house was a mess. This is where I jump in with my half-joke about how women's lib really bit us in the ass, because now we have to work AND take care of the house. We didn't get out of our old job just because we joined the workforce. My feeling is that if he thinks the house is a mess, he can clean it, because we both work the same number of hours a week and that is just not fair, especially when I am gimpy. (He says I should mention that he did do HIS chores, including taking out the trash and the laundry).
I spent all week debating about whether to call the doctor or the chiropractor, and could never decide, so I did neither. It got a little better every day, which also stopped me from picking up the phone. The first few days, painkillers in the morning and muscle relaxers at night weren't even touching it. After a good back rub by the hubby, I could almost walk normally, not hobbling around like grandma, but if I didn't step exactly the right way, my lower back was wracked with spasms of pain.
I am doing better today. No painkillers and I am walking with not just my normal gait, but my normal fast pace as well. It still hurts, but not enough to keep me from getting eleven caches over the weekend (and hiding three over the past two days).
It really makes me think, though, about the things we take for granted. Between my broke down car and my broke down back, I've had a lot of realizations about things I take for granted. We just assume that when we turn the key in the ignition, the car is going to start, that it will get us where we are going safely. We don't think about people who live in constant pain, or suffer poor health, when ours is good. We don't think about how often we use our back in our daily movements until our movements are impaired. I am just thanking my lucky stars that I am not working with dogs anymore. My job does involve lifting, carrying and pulling heavy objects, bending down, and reaching up, but I am so thankful I am not carrying sixty pounds of anesthetized dog back to a kennel, or lifting one hundred pound Rotties up on the X-ray machine. My job is awesome.
For Mother's Day, my husband was really sweet in that instead of a bouquet of flowers that would die in a few days, he instead presenting me with two flats of flowers to plant in the yard. He told me that since I said I wanted to do more things as a family, he got me these so we could all plant them together as a family and I could have flowers every day.
This afternoon we planned to do the spring planting. As it turned out, he had the urge to mow the backyard instead, so our family flower planting turned into me and the two kids in the front yard. The older one was helping me (he's the more experienced of the two of us in flower planting), but sometimes helping me involved simply keeping brother in the yard.

End result: six Wax Begunias and eight Portulacas are planted in the front yard, and I am planted on my rear, or else hobbling around like ole grandma, hand on the small of my back, muttering under my breath.

Baby Got Back. Ache.