This week

OK, I've sworn off blogging about my life in general. But this was one crazy week and I need to capture it somewhere so that when I think I'm having a bad week sometime in the future, I can look back here and realize that things are going OK.

I guess we'll start with last Saturday, since that is exactly a week ago. What has happened so far? Well, we just got finished throwing a big wedding party (reception, you might call it) for my sister and her new husband, who had been married a few days before. We had family come to the party who had never seen our house; in many cases they'd never been to Boston at all. It was exhilarating and exhausting at the same time. That had happened a week ago. My sister was out of town visiting friends now, due back in a few days. And Jim, the kids and I all had a pretty bad cold involving a lot of coughing.

On Saturday morning, Annie wakes up with a stomach bug it seems. We have her rest for a few hours and she seems fine, so we decide to lie low and go for a ride to our favorite farm, where they have an open barnyard day. We put sunscreen on the kids, but we neglected to check the weather to see that it was actually going to be really hot and sunny outside. Well, suffice it to say that open barnyard didn't last long. It was so hot and as we were walking back to the car, Annie gets sick again. Poor kid. The rest of us, by the way, are hacking up a lung. Really stinks to be sick.

The kids fall asleep in the car on the way home, and we get home. Jim packs to leave for his business trip to Chile. The kids wake up and Annie seems to be feeling a lot better. Her appetite seems to be coming back and stuff. We take Jim to the airport. He's coughing and stuffed up and feeling sorry for himself.

Here's where Jim gets off of my crazy, bad week. As it turns out, he gets upgraded to business class for his entire trip down to Chile. He has interesting business meetings with powerful Chileans, eats chacareros everyday, and goes skiing in the Andes. Yeah, he also has a cold. Did I mention he can see the Andes mountains from his hotel room window?

OK, back to my reality. We drive home from the airport. Both kids are crying and missing daddy. We have dinner, which came out well because it involved no creativity on my part (grilled fish, rice, salad).  The kids go off to bed. An hour later, Annie wakes up, all itchy and hot. She has hives on her legs and arms. I can't figure out what's going on. First we try the Caladryl but that was useless; next we tried Benedryl which was better. I can only come up with two guesses as to what happened. Either she's reacting to the new bottle of sunscreen I used on her (she has had a bad reaction to sunscreen in the past); or she's got f*@$ing poison ivy. And we were at the farm, remember? Where Annie sat down in the grass a couple of times to get a rock out of her sandals. And I look on-line and they say that poison ivy lasts at a minimum 10 days. Yikes.

Annie wakes up a couple more times during the night, but by morning, the rash has gone away. Must've been the sunscreen. Phew.

Sunday was relatively harmless. Poor Annie now demands to see photos of her daddy before she goes to bed because she misses him so much. I think it's mostly the stall tactic of the day for bedtime, but there's also a sweetness there. Business trips do take their toll on the little ones.

Monday, my sister and her husband get back from Corning and find out that there's been a decision on my sister's visa! Due to some discussions we have that evening, right before bedtime, I can't sleep all night, going over stuff again and again in my head.

Tuesday, my sister gets her visa, packs up all of her stuff, buys a next-day plane ticket to France, and leaves for Providence with her husband about half an hour after dinner. (They were dropping her car off with a friend, spending the night, and then taking a bus to New York the next day, where they were flying out). Not sure when I'll see them again.

Wednesday, I finally decide to see my doctor about this cold, since I have now been sick for 3 weeks and my co-workers have diagnosed me with everything from asthma to tuberculosis. I have tended to go into a coughing fit right when I'm on an important phone call or with a client. The client, of course, thinks that they're going to contract some hideous disease, I'm sure. So time for the doctor.  But, on my way back from dropping the kids off at daycare, I hear a horrible scraping on the pavement. I look around - whose car could that be? Then I realize that it's me! Of course it is. My muffler pipe has dislodged and is scraping along, under my car. The car is also, shall we say, LOUD. Luckily, we have a Meineke at the corner of our street so I bring the car down there. The guy at the desk smiles and says that he heard me coming and doesn't need to ask me why I've brought my car in today. I get that all fixed up for the low sum of $700. (My car is nearly 11 years old with 138,000 miles on it. Trying to figure out when the time will come when a $700 investment means it's time to buy a new car. Not yet. I can't handle car shopping). The best part was when, after the guy told me the cost of the muffler job, he then tried to sell me on a headlight cleaning kit that "only" cost $40. What?

I mostly slept and did laundry on Wednesday. The doctor couldn't find anything wrong with me except the remnants of a virus.

Thursday morning, I'm starting to feel better. I get ready to go to work, put the kids in the car, open up my car door, and realize that someone has rummaged through my car over night. The glove compartment is open, papers everywhere. My parking money is gone. Someone has broken into my car. Though not really broken into, since the doors were not locked. Low and behold, the same happened to Jim's car. I forgot to lock his doors too. The jerks got a grand total of about $10 from us. Nice work. (I think they were looking for GPS devices). The saddest part was Annie asking if the "swipers" took her toys or her wading pool. (The only easy way to explain theft to a 3 or 4 year old is to tell them the person is behaving like Swiper the Fox on Dora. Annie understood immediately). But seriously, who breaks into a 10 year old Corolla with 2 large car seats in the back and toys strewn all over the car? Isn't that evidence enough that I'm totally broke? The most valuable thing in my car is Ian's Winnie the Pooh phone! Why waste their time? (The Pooh phone was not stolen, by the way. Darn.)

I was so rattled at this point, but I was really wondering what was going to go wrong next. Because, you know, when you think things are bad, they can always get worse. And I did nearly lock my keys in the car at the grocery store on Friday with both kids still buckled in their car seats in the car, though I think Annie would have figured out how to open the car door if I needed her to.

Friday, I took my Zyrtec like my doctor told me to (she thought that maybe the cold was partially exacerbated by hay fever or other allergies). I immediately lost all of my energy and got nauseous. Instead of realizing that these are probably side effects of the drug, I start wondering if maybe I'm just going to always feel like this. Maybe this is what getting old feels like. But then, I'm like, WTF? I'm only 36. I have to chase my kids around for a lot more years. I can't lose all my energy now! It seems that as the drug wore off during the day, I felt better. I have stopped taking the Zyrtec now - the cold seems to be dissipating and I really need energy with my kids.

But things have been going OK since then (knock on wood). Jim gets home tomorrow morning. Let's hope that when I wake up in the morning, he will be nearly here.