(First of all, let me say that there would have been a post up yesterday afternoon, had Blogger not decided to ingest it. RIP, post that never was. Someday it will turn up tucked into the archive, all dessicated and mutated looking, like when one twin absorbs the other in utero. Yes, well...)
First off, more pictorial evidence of why we are moving in a few weeks:
(Fortunately, not our car.)
I wish I could tell you I had to look and look and look for a car with a broken window, but the fact of it is that a few cars get broken into every week around here. Also, the assaults and the stabbings and the fact that when we left the house last weekend there was a police squad slapping cuffs on some guy right outside our door. Nice. So long, wrong side of the tracks. Three more weeks to go.
(Here is the part where I try to regenerate the post that got vaporized.)
I love having kids and I would not trade the two I have for all the tea in India, because what would I do with all that tea? No, but seriously, sometimes I envy my friends who don't have kids, not so much for their disposable income (well, a little) or their fancy travels (again, a little) but the very fact of how much time they have for themselves. I don't make a real effort to have "me time," (that started to sound hopelessly indulgent right around the time that I started my intern year) but I do get the feeling between work and home that my whole life consists of careening from the service of one set of needs to the other. Imagine what people do when they don't have kids! I can barely even remember. This is all somehow sounding very pathetic but you have to understand that I wake up for work at 5:00am and spend the few hours after getting home from work packing lunchboxes and giving baths and putting people to bed, until it's finally time for my own bedtime, usually around 8:30pm.
(Actually, I'm going to abort this post regeneration. Reading it again makes me realize how utterly boring it is to read about the minutiae of the ostensibly SO BUSY! SO HECTIC! life of the working mother. Wah wah, tell it to Joy Behar. Followed by some canned banter and Whoopi Goldberg drawling something borderline off-color.)
All of us have been a little sick this week, except for Joe, unless you count the myocarditis. Cal had some sort of flu (whether swine or otherwise I know not, nor does it really matter I guess, it's not like we would have been rubbing him on babies and the immunocompromised regardless) and Mack had one of those mysterious baby illnesses that manifests purely as a high fever with no other symptoms whatsoever. Is there anything worse than waking up in the middle of the night with a glowing hot baby beside you? His little hands and feet felt like mini grill pans, and his head felt like a giant light bulb.
I used to feel guilty every time Cal got sick as a baby, so certain that he was sick because I had brought something unsavory home from the hospital, clinging to my clothes or my hair like some miasma of infection. But now that Cal is in school I think that he can claim his share of the blame for bringing things home. As for me, I haven't had a fever or any specific symptoms, but I've just been feeling a little punky (Pediatricians would have you know that this is a clinical term) and have one giant lymph node blown up on the side of my neck. Nothing else. I'm not even sure if the three of us had the same thing or if we just happened to all catch three separate illnesses at the same time. Oh epidemiology, you mystify and intrigue me. Maybe we need a blackboard so we can draw lots of circles connected by dashes and lines. TV tells me that this is how medical mysteries are solved.
OK, have to put the kids to bed. Alcohol-based hand sanitizer, people. Buy yourself a bottle today.