another day

Posted on May 3, 2007
Filed Under another dread disease, kids, parenting | 9 Comments

Because y’all are really too kind and supportive to abandon, I’m back here at the keyboard typing away, ignoring my children and the stack of bills and the screens that are lined up in the basement awaiting the day when I will get around to washing windows and preparing for warm weather. So, yes, I blame you all for all the things I won’t get done today.

But seriously, I’ve got a bit of free time because now BOTH kids have fevers and aches and coughs and put themselves to bed without supper or, more importantly, dessert. (I know they are dangerously ill when they can’t even lift their little heads to ask for ice cream.)

And, maybe sympathetically or maybe for real, I am beginning to feel a tickle at the back of my throat, a slight headache coming on and the tips of my ears are burning.

G played with abandon all afternoon and came home dirty and exhausted to collapse in her bed. This is MOST unusual. The norm is for G to come home and talk incessantly while playing with the food on her plate and leave the table undernourished to have a bath wherein she will splash and play and refuse to get out until we threaten to take away her bedtime story and then she will leap out of the tub, all sopping wet, and run to her bedroom to pick out the book, dripping bathwater and soap suds down the hallway. She’ll spin and twirl and jiggle while we try to make a cursory pass with the toothbrush and then she’ll bounce on her bed while we read Bedtime for Frances for the one thousandth time. Tonight G went down silently, two hours before the sun.

And O has been sleeping since 4 o’clock. He’s passed out in his bed still wearing his Miami Dolphins shirt and filthy jeans. I didn’t even attempt to wake him for dinner or nightly ablutions. The kid’s too sick to speak much less brush. I have almost forgotten how the healthy version of O eats two helpings of dinner and always has room for dessert. His convalescent self has eaten next to nothing since Friday.

So I’m turning in, hoping that adequate rest will stave off this dread disease and anticipating that one or both children will be up in the night.

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