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Friday, March 11, 2005
reflections from a sick person
A few facts about me and sickness:
- There are muscles involved in coughing that I didn't even know I had.
- I buy tea bags at Costco. This week, since my new "comfort food" seems to be tea and toast, that's a very good thing. (actually it's because I go through about thirty bags a week in the summer, making sun tea, but it's also convenient when I'm making a cup of hot tea every forty-five minutes. Now if I could just keep track of my cups so that I don't have every coffee cup in our house dirty at the same time, that would be progress. Also, I heart my teakettle. Anything that whistles when it's done to remind me that I'm using it has my stamp of approval at this stage.)
- We buy the not-terribly-soft-but-long-lasting 1000-sheet rolls of Scott toilet paper. (wow, bet that just made your day, finding that out.) Remember in a previous post, I mentioned that I could not find a box of tissues, so I was using a roll of toilet paper instead? I just finished off the roll. So it lasted, hmm, about thirty-six hours.
- The underside of my nose should have its own Crayola named after it. "Rachel's Raw Nose Red". Catchy, no? It's so very attractive.
- From the time I had LT up until last year, other than hospitalizations for c-sections and some complications from C's birth, I was never sick enough to have to drastically change my daily routine. Everyone else in the house would get sick, everyone else in the COUNTY would get sick, but I was fine. I think that this was God's way of making sure that someone in the house could take care of everyone else. I'm serious, I really do. And now that the kids are old enough to take care of themselves a bit better, I guess the germs are making up for lost time.
- Last night I reached the point where I was unable to envision a time when I would ever not be sick. I would be hacking and sneezing and feverish at the kids' college graduations, that sort of thing. Today, however, I am at the point where I feel like it's patently ridiculous that I've let this alter my behavior for so long, and if I just snap out of it, I'll be fine. Not sure which is less realistic.
- Ice cream is no fun when you can't taste it. What a waste of six hundred calories.
I'm going to go answer the siren song of the couch now.
P.S. My brain is so, um, absent -- that's it, absent -- today that I posted this to the wrong blog and then had a little rant at Blogger when it kept not showing up where I thought it was supposed to. I think maybe I should not be allowed out of the house today.
Tuesday, March 08, 2005
[cue Energizer bunny] ... still coughing.....
I have had this really obnoxious cough hanging on to one degree or another for more than a month. I had the full-out cold back I think at the beginning of February, maybe late January, and ever since then this cough just refuses to leave. It gets better and worse but it doesn't go completely away. Last night it was so bad that I was keeping T awake (for the second night in a row, since C was coughing like this the night before) so I went and slept on the couch. And today it's just gotten worse. Finally tonight I consented to take some Day-Quil (since we have no NyQuil and T pointed out that I wouldn't be sleeping if I was coughing anyway). So now I have a really bizarre disconnected buzzy sort of feeling, as well as, um, a really really bad cough. See, T? SEE? My chest hurts. My abdomen hurts. My head hurts. And because I am so clever, I did not replenish our supply of ordinary cough medicine today, and anyway I'm not sure I could take any since I took the blasted worthless Day-Quil.
Please pardon me while I through a pity-party hissy fit over something so inconsequential as a cough, while real people have real problems on such a scope as to cause my problems to completely disappear. To even be pleasant.
Also please pardon me while I stay up all night jiggling my foot and twitching my head back and forth to feel if it's still attached. NEVER AGAIN WITH THE DAY-QUIL, HONEY. NOT HAPPENING. EVER EVER.
Monday, February 28, 2005
Stupid Thing Number Five Gazillion
I don't make nearly as many stupid mistakes as I used to. Really I don't. But tonight I did a doozy.
I was at community chorus rehearsal and the director was going over some instructions for an upcoming concert. I was sitting next to a homeschooling friend of mine, and we were already clear on the instructions he was giving, so we were being Underachieving Troublemakers, and chatting (as were three-quarters of the rest of the group). I mentioned that I was tired because T had had to go in to work so late last night and I'd stayed awake till he got home.
(At this point I have to interrupt myself and explain something. T's dad has exactly the same name as T. T's dad lives in our town and for the past year or so has been a real estate agent. EVERY SINGLE DAY someone will come up to T at work, and frequently to me as I go about my business around town, and make some comment about how T must be really busy with a full-time job PLUS a real estate business. This is small-town life for you. Anyway, we are really tired of explaining this situation. Back to the story.)
So my friend said, "Well, T is a realtor, right? What's he have to do in the middle of the night?"
I rolled my eyes, kind of snorted, and said, "That's my FATHER-IN-LAW, my FATHER-IN-LAW," in this semi-mock-annoyed tone of voice.
Right as the rest of the choir fell utterly silent and everyone including the director was staring directly at me, being the really bad (and loud, now that the room was silent) underachiever who was talking to her neighbor instead of paying attention to the teacher. It was really embarrassing. They probably think I run with scissors and waste paste, too.
Saturday, January 29, 2005
you really would not believe how ill I am
I am so, so ill.
OK, so I'm really not that sick. I'm even feeling a good bit better now than I was this afternoon (I think I was dehydrated and that didn't help). But by golly I am going to milk this for all it's worth. So what if it's just a sinus infection? I don't get lying-down-in-the-middle-of-the-day privileges very often and I'm not going to let the opportunity pass me by. And any work I do in this condition is just extra brownie points, which are always handy.
So. I am so, so ill.
Also. Did you notice the sidebar? I am done with Villette, -- just finished it before I started writing this entry -- and I found that I liked it better as I got nearer the end. Which is probably why I plowed through about 250 pages of it today. (see above re: lying down in the middle of the day. We also watched "Anne of Avonlea", and it's been so long since I read the books that I was actually able to enjoy it. I will, however, be doing a good read-through of that entire series ASAP. Watching adaptations always gives me book cravings.)
I am going to go smear myself with VapoRub and talk like the guy in the NyQuil commercials (or, at least, the guy who was in NyQuil commercials last time I saw any commercials, which was years ago), for the extra sympathy factor, before I go to sleep. Good-dight.
Tuesday, December 14, 2004
late-night ramble, ack
"Are you ready for Christmas?"
You can't get away from that question in the month of December. It's a conversation starter -- it takes the place of talk about the weather, and just as any pregnant woman is seen as fair game for such questions as "when are you due?" and "Do you know if it's a boy or a girl?", it's simply a given that any time you encounter anyone during the first three and a half weeks of December, from the post office clerk up to your close friends, the conversation is likely to open with "Are you ready for Christmas?" And, God help me, I answer it every time with, "Yes, almost done with the shopping." It just comes flying out of my mouth. I should come up with something witty, or just smile, or maybe I should be super-spiritual and expound on how we're preparing spiritually for this celebration of the incarnation of Christ. But I don't, I take the easy way out and give the expected response about (gack) shopping. I was never brave about it when I was pregnant, either. I always wanted to come up with smartass comments: "[sigh] No, I'm not pregnant. I guess I really need to lose this weight." Or "The next person who asks me that will feel the significant force of my wrath. Beware." I never even made the t-shirt I always joked about, with all the pertinent information, so as to avoid having to answer the same-three-questions over and over and over. It's easy to shrug philosophically now, and figure that people don't mean to be annoying; they just like to know what to SAY to a person, and dang, an obvious pregnancy makes it really simple. It was not so easy then, as any woman in late pregnancy will attest. It's the same trap with the Christmas shopping line, except that I do feel a faint sense of spiritual betrayal when I cave in, because after all, aren't I contributing to the crass commercialization of this holiday when I take the easy way out? Ah well.
As an aside, we are doing something nice this year, and we did it last year too. We made up a set of ornaments last year, each with a date (1 through 25) and a Bible verse reference having to do with the birth of Jesus or the reason for it, written on it in gold paint pen. Each night LT looks up the verse and reads it, and the kids take turns hanging the ornaments on the tree. It does help to focus us, at least once a day, on what this is all about. It's not just shopping, or cooking, or even family and togetherness and generosity. And it's certainly not just about Mommy spending three hours on the roof, risking life and limb and getting sore muscles on Sunday afternoon putting up Christmas lights which now look really cool, although she's mighty proud of that (go girl power!).
******Possibly Boring/Mildly Bragging Homeschooling Blurb Follows********
Speaking of LT and "proud of that" -- he surprised the living daylights out of us the other day. He was quizzing C on math problems, asking her things like 5+3 and 4+4, things that she has the barest grasp on (because, hey, she's not even halfway through kindergarten!). So I thought I'd teach LT a little bit of humility and even the scales a bit, and I presented him with a scrap of paper with "3x=6" on it, and asked him, "What's x?" I thought he'd be stumped. He didn't even THINK about it, just said, "Two." So I gave him some harder ones, and he got them all. This is, you have to understand, an eight-year-old boy who "hates math", who adds with his fingers, who probably wouldn't know how to calculate "fifteen divided by three" if you just presented it to him in those terms. So his father and I are giving really basic algebra problems, like 5x+4=44 or 8x-6=50, and he's nailing them all. This is both a homeschooler's dream, and a homeschooler's nightmare (well, nightmare is too strong a word. It gives me a thrilling, excited, challenged feeling like a roller coaster, not a horrified, ominous feeling like a bad dream), because hello, now the rubber actually meets the road and I have to do what I've always said is so great about homeschooling: work up a customized solution. For a person whose grasp of concepts is advanced, but whose practical working-out of grade-level things is average. Fun and rewarding, and definitely possible, but challenging too. He's shown signs of being able to grasp concepts that he couldn't explain since he was a very little boy -- things like knowing how many animals would be in each group of you divided 25 into 5 pens when he was in kindergarten. But it took much time and effort to get the multiplication tables into his head, and he still doesn't have them "memorized to automaticity" -- heck, he doesn't even have addition facts to that point yet. I am thinking he's strong on concepts and not so strong on memorization -- which, hey, if he has to be weak in one area and strong in the other, that's the way I'd want it to go. I asked him today how his brain solved those problems so fast -- what did he think about to get the answer? It took him a while to be able to slow it down enough to tell me, and he says that he knows that the 5x has to be 40, so the x has to be 8. He says that he does not think about subtracting the 4 from both sides, which is of course the "proper" way to solve the problem, and the way he'll have to learn when he's older in order to be able to move on to more complicated equations.
While I'm on the subject of school, I should put in that C is also doing really well. She finished her kindergarten math book a couple of weeks ago, so I'm having her go through the homework workbook that goes along with it, as a review, and then I'll move her on to the next grade's book. She is the opposite of her brother in learning styles -- she has a very good visual memory, and when she's read something, it stays in her head if she wants it to. She is also at the age where she is always coming up with little sayings that sound very funny to her parents, but which bore the pants off people not related to her, so I won't torture you with expectant punch lines here.
OK, OK, one story, I can't resist. But only one, I promise. We were watching footage online of elk damaging vehicles and chasing after people in Yellowstone National Park. The elk in one video would make his high-pitched yelling sound just before charging at cars driven by people who had stopped to look at him. C's cheerful, matter-of-fact comment about elk was: "Well, they make cute sounds. Buuuut, they're evil." I cannot possibly duplicate her expressiveness in type. See, I told you. I don't expect you to gush so don't feel guilty if you don't.
Good Lord I should never update this thing after midnight. I get so stupid. I'll probably delete this in the morning.
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
the conspiracy of depraved inanimate objects
The conspiracy on the part of inanimate things, against me personally, has progressed to an outright rebellion. Today, if it could slip between my fingers, it would. If it could fall in the butter at dinner, it did. And needless to say, whenever it was possible for something to spill, smash, shatter, or explode (OK, so maybe 'explode' is a bit of an exaggeration), it did. In spades. Even my nice cozy jammies snickered at me every time I tried to wipe my hands on their acrylicness and got, instead of dry hands (I have discovered, by the way, thanks to these jammies, that I wipe my hands on my clothes, um, way too much), that shuddery wet acrylic feeling. I shudder again now, just thinking about it. And the refrigerator has become especially crafty. I've had an ongoing feud with it for, what, a year? And tonight T pointed out that I needed to defrost it. Now. Not tomorrow, when our milk has been sitting at 55 degrees for another eighteen hours or so, but now. He wasn't so forceful about it as it sounds, he just kind of guilted me into it. So I played the martyr card -- "OK, you just go on to bed while I stay up for two more hours defrosting the freezer. You didn't know it takes that long? Well, it DOES, and if it weren't MY SOLE RESPONSIBILITY to do this task, you would have known. Go, go, off to bed, I don't need you resenting me on top of the lack of sleep and everything else, go on." (Yes, as a matter of fact, I did say every word of that. Not all together. But still. Cripes.) And then it only took ten minutes to defrost the freezer, thanks to my patented "Two Liter Bottle Filled With Hot Tap Water And Fitted With A Squirt Lid" method. So I had to putter around in the kitchen doing a lot of other stuff so that T (who probably was still awake when I finished) wouldn't hear me come over here and start typing after such a distinctly un-martyrish expanse of time. And of course it was all the refrigerator's fault. Cocky piece of... machinery.
And now the B key on my keyboard is acting all sticky. Fantastic. Now I can add that to my list. Nothing like having to spend an entire data entry paycheck on our, what, fourth ergonomic keyboard in thirteen months? so that I can keep doing data entry (and, well, everything else too, to be fair).
While I was going about my beleaguered existence today, I had the most fantastic ideas for my NaNoWriMo book -- which, by the way, is still laughably short. It's the data entry, see. Maybe if someone was paying me, what, about a quarter of a cent per keystroke? I'd be more motivated to spend time working on the novel. Anyway. I had all these great ideas and I thought, I can't wait till the kids are in bed and I can sit down and actually bang out a few thousand words, and then as soon as I sat at the computer, the whole defrosting saga began. And now that I'm at leisure to sit here if I want to, and it's "only" almost 1 AM, the ideas are fleeing my brain like it's the site of an impending nuclear attack.
On a more serious note, I'm starting to actually worry about C's hearing. The medication they gave her cleared up her congestion completely, and very quickly. She no longer has a stuffy or runny nose, or a cough. The thing is, though, that her hearing is almost no better at all. So my worry is that the hearing thing may be completely unrelated to the congestion and maybe she needs to get into a specialist, like, NOW, before it gets worse. The pediatrician thinks it's just a lingering infection (note: C has no pain or feeling of pressure in her ears) and wants to try another round of stiffer antibiotics before we move on to a specialist. I am giving it five days. If she is not 100% better on Monday she's going to an ENT whether her ped (whom, by the way, we like a great deal; she's been the kids' doctor since LT was born; in fact, she was the pediatrician in the room when they removed him from my body) thinks she needs to or not.
I'll close with one picture:
This is a self-portrait: the back of my head after spending about fifteen minutes at Salon Chez C, who says (at least while she's at it) that her "very favorite thing to do in the whole world is fix Mommy's hair." Who could say no to that?
Tuesday, November 09, 2004
the joy of middle age: comfortable clothes
I have discovered the secret to happiness. It's middle-aged-lady clothes.
I have a large extended family (each parent has six siblings, for those of you who are new) and on my mom's side, we are big on hand-me-downs, or hand-me-arounds might be a better term. Kids' clothes get passed from one cousin to another (and frequently, to another and another). If someone gains or loses weight she'll give her clothes to someone who has just shrunk (or grown) into the size she used to be -- which, with six sisters between the ages of 41 and 60, and so many adult female cousins that I've lost count, is pretty much constantly going on. So yesterday I inherited two bags of things from my aunt. In one of the bags was a two-piece set -- I think the proper term is "loungewear" -- which is the closest thing I have ever seen to a footed blanket sleeper for grown-ups. It's wedgewood blue. It's fuzzy. It's warm. The pants have an elastic waist. C was quite convinced that I made it out of the blue fuzzy blanket from my bed until I showed her that the blanket was still whole. And I think I may never wear anything else again. Except, of course, when I actually have to, you know, leave the house. sigh.
Tuesday, October 12, 2004
the key to happiness in day-to-day life is to be easily amused
Remember Mad Libs? Such a clever idea -- not least because they are fun for everyone: prudish grandmothers, groups of friends, teachers and students, gutter-minded thirteen-year-olds (I remember with disgusting clarity the Mad Libs session that went on in the seats behind me on one particular seventh-grade trip to Roller Land), parents and children. We just spent an extremely funny two hours here -- first just LT and myself, and then when T came home from a meeting, he joined in. I don't know when I've laughed so much. Now we have to buy some actual pen-and-paper ones, to take in the car -- so that I can relive yet another of my many beloved family memories from when I was little. And I was always annoyingly proficient at parts of speech, too, which was entirely the fault of those many car trips spent in the company of Mad Libs (on one memorable occasion, 'he drove off crazily in his sports mattress with his makeshift wife' had my mom laughing so hard she could barely drive).
In other news...
We got a new (used) washer and dryer today. These are in very good shape, pretty new, very clean. We found them thanks to an ad in the paper, placed by a woman who'd just combined households with someone else and hence had an extra set. We paid $200 for them. We had decided not to go into debt to replace our dryer, and to pray and see what the Lord did to provide a functioning one for us, and then the total money I earned this past weekend doing web design and data entry, added to the $10 check I got for my winning fair entries and the $18 we got out of our old dryer, very nearly made up the entire $200 required to buy the set in the paper. So we took that as our answer and had a strenuous morning moving the old ones out and the new ones in. Yay God. :)
And also: C at ballet today and LT sleeping just now. Such beautiful, wonderful people; it is amazing that they started out growing under my skin.
Tuesday, May 04, 2004
kid questions
Today I took the ten kid question from Art Linkletter's humor classic Kids Say the Darndest Things.
What are some things you do that get you into trouble?
LT: Destroying some things of C's. [Why do you do that?] I don't know.
C: Disobey. Being bad. Biting.
If I gave you five dollars right now, what would you spend it on?
LT: Go to the 99c store and buy five things.
C: Something that costs five dollars. A dolly.
Tell me about your pets.
LT: Our fish like to just swim around, and our cats like to eat food and sit on people's laps.
C: They are fun. They're cute. They like to eat cat food and drink water and milk.
What kinds of things would you do if you were a doctor?
LT: I would drive the ambulance.
C: Help people by making them better.
How would you settle an argument with another boy/girl?
LT: Say "Stop it. Now believe me!"
C: Stop talking.
What do you want life to be like when you're grown up?
LT: I don't know. [Use your imagination]. Good. [OK, then, what are some things that you DON'T want to happen in your life?] Going to war. [Anything else?] No.
C: Happy. [What would make your life happy?] Having pets, and still being able to ride my bike. A bigger one, though.
How does television work?
LT: From the television station. Because of the video.
C: I don't know.
How can you tell if a person's smart?
LT: If he knows how to build an AT-AT.
C: Because they do what they're supposed to do without being told to. And remember when I made my bed all by myself?
Where does the sun go at night?
LT: On the other side of the world.
C: Down.
What would you like to tell the whole world?
LT: Never to buy My Little Pony stuff. I said that one because C was right in here. She'll never say that one.
C: That I can do things without being told to.
--------
Friday, February 27, 2004
haikus
sorry I cursed you
cheap thread causing all our woes
now can we be friends?
to my digital camera
how much I miss you
wish your fix was so easy
oh well, you were free
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