A Day Well Spent.

Today we met up at the park with a friend and her son. My friend recently returned from Poland where she spent about 2 months with her family. She sounded quite happy with her time at home, and she is starting to settle back into her life here.

The park was full of 4th graders today who were enjoying a day out of the classroom. Their teachers were there, of course, but they were free to play however they wished. Fortunately, they took an interest to E and K, and G and I had time to chat. While it's a little frustrating to see 4th graders trying to carry around our kids, and wondering if they could carry someone more than half their weight, they seemed quite happy to play with little kids. They just wanted to play and try to be big brother or sister to them.

Here are a few pictures from today's outing.

The Nearly Naked Chef.

Someone really likes helping me make things in the kitchen. Recently she's operating the food processor for me, mixing, or eating bits that I'm chopping. She also enjoys washing dishes which I have to "accidentally" spill something on and have to re-wash them after she's moved away from the sink. Good times.

Illness II

I have a cough that's been keeping me up at night. Yesterday I broke down and went to the doctor seeing as how I am off to Switzerland in less than a week. I didn't want to have to stand in the drugstore and try to guess as to what might be good and listen to the drugstore's recommendations.

Medicine I wanted, and medicine I got. When the doctor checked me out she said it was a cold, which is just as I expected. She told me she'd give me 5 medicines and a breathing treatment to go on. I inhaled the moist oxygen with E by my side. A woman of ninety came struggling in under her own steam and laid down on a bed in the treatment room with me. The doctor was walking through and told me the lady was 90. Her daughter or daughter-in-law sat at her side while the old woman laid down, shaking. Parkinson's, I wondered. It was sort of a shock to me in the room that smelled of sour sweat. After I finished my breating treatment, out to the lobby I went while they prepared my drugs.

I left there with 7 medicines. Usually I google the names in order to learn what it is that I'm given, but I didn't bother this time. One is supposed to make the phlegm a little thinner, and that's about all that I know. I could look up the rest, but why bother. I took my 4 pills with dinner along with liquid syrup and am starting to feel a little warm and sleepy at this point.

It's been a long time since I've had a bout of laryngitis, 12 years or more, best I can remember. And, a gnawing pain in my side has returned from about a 10 year absence as well. While it might be triggered by the volume of medicine that I'm taking, I'm suspecting it has more to do with the amount of things I seem to have myself caught up in and am stressing over.

Dinner has been eaten. E fell asleep on the way home from daycare. And, F is still working at 8:30. I'm watching Dr. Zhivago as I type and am thinking about calling it a day just because I can. The dishwasher is going, and a pile of laundry needs ironing, but we'll see. I think I'll take out the contacts and lay on the floor in front of the tv. Lots more things need doing, but I am but one mortal.

Illness.

E appears to have hand-foot-mouth disease. Quite an uncomfortable condition at the moment, but she's happily esconced in front of the tv watching the same Playhouse Disney programs that we watched earlier this morning. It will probably be a day spent like yesterday: watching tv and doing whatever she feels like doing just to try to minimize the discomfort.

Last night I started with a fever of my own. At first I thought it was the glass of wine I had that had me feeling off. But, as my mind started racing and I generally felt unwell, I checked the temperature and it was elevated. So, I started thinking about what that would mean for class on Thursday and decided that I'd have to work regardless. And, I'm basically right as rain this morning except for feeling like I have a cold starting. No problem.

E will be going to her grandparents' house tomorrow instead of daycare while I work. I do not usually consider this an option because they live 35-40 minutes in the opposite direction of where I work. Because I am teaching an afternoon class, it does not require me to wake E at an unheard of hour. And, I don't really want her to be at daycare while being ill. Her cousins have a calligraphy class after school and possibly even dance practice, so hopefully that will minimize their contact time with her. We don't need to be spreading our germs any more than necessary. I have an inkling that her aunt will probably skip dance practice though in order to watch her, so I'm trying not to feel guilty about that.

Trying to be patient Mommy but it doesn't always work. Especially with broken sleep, it reminded me of when she was a baby. I don't know if I was more patient then or just had no expectation that it would be different. Because she has sores in her mouth, her pacifier is not capable of pacifying. That would require sucking which is far too painful at the moment, so we went for a drive last night in order to drift off to sleep. When I mentioned a drive, we had to gather her wallet, a bee toy, her drink, and her pacifier in order to just get out the door. Those were her requests. We returned 30 minutes later with a sleeping child and bated breath that we could get her down on the futon without waking her. It was not entirely successful, but with a few more moments of holding her and disentangling myself from the sleepy little girl, we were down for about an hour before the next crying jag. I expect more of this for the next several days, but this is the stuff of memories. Unexpected drives, worries about fluid and food intake, and generally a lot more text messages about how she's doing and if I need anything.

Not all bad.

On the emotional gerbil wheel...

Seeing as how I post so frequently here, I took a minute to look at my last posts: one for this year and one late last year. The one written for late last year is indicative of the place I find myself in yet again.

Insert the deep sigh that is best performed by mothers who do not wish to verbalize their disappointment or dissatisfaction but yet make it known nevertheless.

One would think that at the ripe age of 35 one would sort of have some things figured out, squared away, settled. Not me, I'm on the rent to own plan. I prefer debilitating analysis rather than the humble acceptance that I am a mortal--a broken human being who puts on a brave face to make things right for everyone else. And, when things cannot look okay or I feel I can't find that silver lining, well, it's time to hunker down.

Last week I went to my routine doctor's visit to have my prescriptions renewed and thought as I was walking along, "When you know what to do to make yourself feel better, why don't you do it? Why don't you take better care of yourself instead of pushing yourself?" When I relayed this to my doctor, he pronounced me erai. Erai in this sense is sort of a phrase meaning "great, or capable of doing many things".

While it's nice to be praised, it does not sit well when you do not believe it about yourself. I have been trying to figure out when this started, and I can't pinpoint it. I was disappointed when I turned 16 and then 17 because I hadn't "accomplished" more. (Roy, can you hook me up with the end quotes?) All the faults, mistakes, and not being able to answer email in a reasonable time because I can't get my shit together because I need to have happy shining stories to make everyone okay, it just wears on me. I guess I'm an average human.

Apartment's a mess, but I did manage to start packing away winter clothes yesterday. I did get some things mailed off and picked up at the post office. I grocery shopped, got a crockpot going for dinner, and even made E's dinner that she ate at daycare this evening when I dropped her off at 1:30. She fell asleep on the way home so I've been eating, cleaning out the inbox, and generally mulling over the current state of affairs.

Let's go to the house, boys.