By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

The Rockwood family microwave, affectionately called “Mike,” died suddenly in the home on August 6, 2015 while attempting to reheat day-old pizza. It was 10 years old.

The microwave is survived by two adult roommates, three children and a matching dishwasher, stove, oven and refrigerator. It also leaves behind two bags of frozen chicken nuggets, several cans of soup and a pantry full of microwave popcorn.

Born into the family during the Great Kitchen Remodel of 2005, the microwave served admirably during its decade-long life, heating everything from baby food to bacon. Its kitchen timer ticked steadily through years’ worth of mandatory 20-minute piano practices, while the family’s mother listened from the next room.

“How much longer does the microwave say I have to practice, Mom?”

“Twelve more minutes. Now keep playing.”

The microwave witnessed many family milestones – baby’s first bite of solid food, first steps, birthday meals, Christmas cookie baking, and weekly Sunday lunches lovingly prepared by the family’s Memaw, who always knew just how to push the microwave’s buttons.

As the kids grew, it was “Mike” that taught them the valuable lesson every child must learn the hard way at one time or another: Never put aluminum foil in the microwave. (The children will never forget the shower of sparks they saw that day.)

The family has been dealing with the shock of this loss for many days now. It’s even worse than the Ravioli Explosion of 2009 which left the microwave looking like a crime scene. The mother and most loyal user of the microwave has been stunned by its sudden departure.

“I just didn’t realize how much we needed it until it was gone,” she said. “We haven’t been able to eat microwave popcorn since the day it happened. We just can’t do it.”

The microwave was a devoted appliance and avid re-heater, known for its accessibility and easy-going personality. It wasn’t like most microwaves that slowly rotate their trays. This one defied cultural norms with its side-to-side “gliding tray,” an innovation the family had never seen when they brought it home 10 years ago.

When the family’s children learned to cook, it was the microwave they leaned on most in their time of hunger. Jack, the middle child and most enthusiastic cook in the household, was recently overheard saying, “I keep going to the microwave to put something in there, and then I remember. It’s gone.”

Even the family cat has been lost since the appliance’s passing because the microwave’s over-the-range nightlight has gone dark, leaving the fat feline to eat her Fancy Feast cat food in a pitch-black kitchen.

The family has survived by relying on old-school methods of food preparation, like boiling hot dogs on the stove. The kids said it was “weird and takes too long,” proof that their grief is still palpable. Good old “Mike” will be deeply missed.

The family said the best way to celebrate the microwave’s life and service is to welcome a new appliance into the home and continue the tradition of heating, timing and night-light shining. So it is with great joy that they announce the birth of a new microwave that arrived on August 17^th, measuring 2.1 cubic feet, named Maytag or “May” for short. May’s sing-song chime which signals that the food is heated has brought happiness back into the kitchen.

Even so, the family will never forget “Mike” and the many times it heated up leftover lasagna. They hope the machine has found its rest and that its signature “gliding tray” might still be floating side-to-side in a much better place.

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To check out Gwen’s book, “Reporting Live from the Laundry Pile: The Rockwood Files Collection,” click HERE.

By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

If I had a business card for my job as a mother, the job description would read “Finder of Things.” Because that’s what I do. I find things.

I love my husband and kids but they’re terrible finders. And I wouldn’t mind it so much if they weren’t also excellent losers.

The most frustrating part of the problem is that I consider our house to be somewhat organized and generally tidy – certainly not “eat off the floor” tidy, but it’s what I’d call a “someone could stop by the house unannounced and I wouldn’t die of embarrassment” level of tidy. Chaos makes me anxious, so I organize things to make it easier for us to find and keep up with what we need. I’ve never met a storage bin I didn’t love. Clear countertops make me happy. And I own and use a label maker even though I’m fully aware of just how geeky that sounds.

Yet despite the strategies and the storage and the customized labels, we lose stuff. Regularly. I’d guess that something goes missing about every third day – a hairbrush, a belt, somebody’s gym shorts, that paper for school, her dance tights, his retainer, and a receipt that Tom swears he put right here on this counter. But then poof! The thing is gone. Vanished into the void.

Sometimes the thing is missing for only a few minutes and sometimes it’s gone for good. How long it stays gone is usually in direct proportion to the person who’s doing the looking. I won’t name names, but some people – and you know who you are – have woefully inadequate searching skills. What some people call “looking for it” is more of a cursory glance around the general area.

If I send one of our kids to the pantry to get a can of green beans, they might tell me we’re all out of green beans. Because if the green beans do not leap off the shelf into their hands, there are no green beans in the house. And if a giant, blinking, neon arrow doesn’t magically appear in the pantry and point directly to that can of green beans, then there are no green beans in the house.

When looking for something involves moving things out of the way to see it, there’s a 99% chance the thing is going to stay lost – until Mom starts looking. Kids use moms like most of us use a GPS: “In 200 feet, make a left turn at the living room. Extend your free hand and make a sweeping U-turn motion under the sofa cushion. You have now arrived at your remote control.”

To avoid being used and abused as the Official Family Finder, I’ve started putting a price tag on my finding services. Yesterday one of the kids swore to me that there were no more hot dogs in the fridge.

“No hot dogs? Are you sure? Did you really look?”

“I looked, Mom!”

“So you looked behind things and under things and on every shelf?”

“Yep. I looked everywhere.”

“So you’d be willing to bet a week’s worth of extra chores on this? If I go in there and find the hot dogs, you’re gonna be busy this week but not in a fun way. You feel that confident about the missing hot dogs, right?”

“Well… maybe I’ll go look one more time.”

“That’s what I thought.”

The moral of this story? A wife and mother is a person with stuff to do, not a homing device with ovaries. And sometimes terrible finders just need a little extra motivation. Pass the hot dogs.

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To read previously published installments of The Rockwood Files, click here. To check out Gwen’s book, “Reporting Live from the Laundry Pile: The Rockwood Files Collection,” click HERE.

By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

I did something the other day I’m not proud of. I’d just come home from taking the kids to school on one of the coldest mornings of the year. Raindrops from the night before had frozen in mid-drip off the patio table. The sun had called in sick, leaving behind a bleak, gray sky, and the piercing cold seeped directly into my bones. I couldn’t shake it.

I crossed my arms and hugged them to my chest to conserve body heat. The heater couldn’t work fast enough on the drafty house. With goosebumps all over, I shook off a shiver and trudged toward my desk to start the day’s work. Halfway there, I had an idea: “I could just get under the covers and put my feet on the heating pad until I warm up.” Yes, that could work.

So I scurried back to the bed I’d left an hour earlier. I turned the heating pad on high, burrowed under the covers and waited for warmth. For the first few minutes, I checked email on my phone. Then I read the news while the heating pad’s warmth started to thaw my frigid feet.

At some point, I must have blinked too slowly or closed my eyes and then – nothing. Blackness. Pure unconscious bliss.

Sometime later, my eyes snapped open as my phone pinged somewhere under the covers. “Oh my gosh! How long have I been out?” I asked an empty room.

I scrambled for the phone when it pinged again and looked at the time. An hour and a half had gone by in what felt like only 10 minutes. I checked the new text messages, one of which was from someone who wanted to know if I’d received her email.

There were a few possible answers to that question: 1) “The email is probably in my inbox but I wouldn’t know because apparently I’ve turned into a toddler who needs her warm blankie and a mid-morning nap. I’ll answer your email right after I have some Goldfish crackers and a juice box.” 2) “Sorry! Didn’t hear the phone ping!”

I decided to go with Option 2, which was technically true. It is, in fact, nearly impossible to hear your phone ping when it’s buried under blankets and you’re in a coma-like sleep.

I threw back the covers and went straight to my desk, feeling equal parts guilty and lazy about my secret slumber. We Americans are supposed to be busy making our super-productive dent in the universe and documenting it on Facebook, right? There’s no time for napping.

But the truth is… I liked that nap. Loved it. It felt amazing – like a little vacation from real life. No wonder people look forward to retirement. When you’re retired, you can take a nap without an ounce of judgement or self-recrimination.

Perhaps retirees know something we should all learn. I Googled the benefits of napping and found a WebMD article that says “Getting rapid eye movement or REM sleep, usually 60 to 90 minutes of napping, plays a key role in making new connections in the brain and solving creative problems.” And it’s true! After my nap, I connected my backside to my office chair and solved a “creative problem,” like coming up with my next column idea.

So no more feeling guilty for an occasional daytime snooze. If your brain needs a boost, perhaps you’ll find what you’re looking for on the backside of your eyelids. Maybe we should all dare to dream – literally. It worked for me. (This week’s column brought to you by “a long winter’s nap.”)

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To check out Gwen’s book, “Reporting Live from the Laundry Pile: The Rockwood Files Collection,” click HERE.

By Gwen Rockwood, newspaper columnist and mama of 3

All I wanted was a new paint color. That’s it. But that one little wish pushed over the first domino in a long line of chore-related dominoes that landed me neck-deep in paperwork.

I blame the color brown for all this trouble. My home office, where I’m supposed to be creative and whimsical (on a deadline) was painted a horrible shade of brown. Inside the brown room was a brown desk. The built-in shelving unit on the wall? Brown. And guess what color the carpet is. If you said “brown,” you clearly see why something had to be done, right? I was bombarded by brown, and it was bringing me down.

“Honey, we have to paint this room,” I announced with conviction. “It’s sucking all the sunlight out of the room along with the energy out of my soul. It’s a depressing cave in here. I can’t take it anymore.”

Tom, who is used to these kind of far-flung excuses for why I’m having trouble writing, admitted that the room was dark. He even agreed to do the painting for me.

“That’s great!” I said. “I’ll get it ready to paint.”

I began moving things off the desk and into cabinets so they wouldn’t be exposed to paint splatters. But there was hardly any room in there because the cabinets were already full. I sat down on the floor and pulled out an overflowing basket of papers.

“What is this stuff? Do we even need any of this?” I asked, but Tom had conveniently vanished. As I leafed through the dusty papers, I realized most of them were paid bills, receipts, bank statements and tax assessment papers from more than a decade ago. We had at least three cabinets full of “just in case we need it” paperwork.

I asked Google how long I needed to keep these kinds of documents, and the IRS website answer was somewhere around three to five years. So that prompted what has become “The Great Sort of 2016,” which soaked up most of my weekend. By the time I finished, there was a huge pile of papers that will soon meet their fate in the fireplace. Perhaps we’ll roast marshmallows as the electric bills from 2007 go up in smoke.

One of the cabinets I purged was filled with photos from back in the time when we had to actually print photos if we wanted to look at them. I even found a bag of photo negatives from our wedding 17 years ago. Photo negatives seem downright prehistoric in this Instagram age, but a woman doesn’t toss wedding negatives. Back into the cabinet they went.

The last cabinet I tackled is home to a large box of mystery wires and adapters which seem to fit absolutely nothing that we still own but that Tom insists on keeping because “you never know” when he might need one. (Please note that, even if the mystery box does indeed have a cord or wire he needs one day, it would take more time to untangle that cord than it would to fly across the ocean to a Chinese factory and make the cord himself. Still, he was not swayed by my argument and insisted on keeping his beloved box of wires since I was stashing a 17-year-old bag of photo negatives.)

Despite an unglamorous weekend of sorting, purging and painting, I’m happy with the results. The walls lightened up to a crisp, icy blue, and the cabinets shed several pounds of paperwork. I’ve banished the brown and feel brand new in blue. How about you?

Gwen Rockwood is a mom to three great kids, wife to one cool guy, a newspaper columnist and co-owner of nwaMotherlode.com. To check out Gwen’s book, “Reporting Live from the Laundry Pile: The Rockwood Files Collection,” click HERE.