St. Thomas at Seven

My daughter’s longest break in the school year is over winter.   She has two weeks off for the holidays in December and then does’t go back until the end of January for her “track” in the year-round school she attends.

Last week her class wrote about what they did over the holidays and this week the completed work came home with her.   It’s been a while since we were in St. Thomas over Christmas and New Year’s holidays but when I read my daughter’s recounting of our vacation it was so cute I had to post it.  

Her memory on what happened for each day is quite accurate.   It does make it look like she spends a lot of spare time on the iPad.   We made a bit of a mistake and didn’t bring much in the way of toys on the trip.   She doesn’t like spending time on her iPad for the most part, but she got a good bit of show watching in while we were in St. Thomas as the adults talked spent time together.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is still sick today.   My daughter is better, so hopefully he’ll be over the fever by tomorrow.   He’s had almost no appetite, which has been in stark contrast to his sister, who ate more than normal while she was febrile.   He spent several hours asleep on the hardwood floor today.   Even though he’s feeling poorly, he’s been enjoying watching some television and resting on the couch.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been obsessed with the time in Norway lately.   She’s doing Norway conversion time, letting us know that if it’s twelve-thirty here, it’s six-thirty in Norway right now.   This is because my husband is playing Fortnite with some friends he met online.   One of the friends is a lady named Maya, who is a teacher.   Maya says she doesn’t like playing on European servers because as soon as guys figure out she’s a female, they get “creepy” on her, hitting on her and making it not fun to play the game.   She says American men are much nicer and treat her as another player, not just a woman.   This afternoon my husband was taking a break and jumped into a Fortnite game.   My daughter heard a woman’s voice on the headset so my husband put the headset on her head and she got to say hello to his teammates, but in particular, Maya.

Sleeping Household

My household was largely asleep for the day today.   My son came downstairs in the middle of the night with a fever.   I got him some ibuprofen and asked him if he wanted me to walk him back up to bed or did he want to stay in bed with me?   It wasn’t deep into the, “middle of the night” meaning my husband was still downstairs watching something on the television, giving plenty of room for my son to stay in bed with me if he wanted to.

He decided that he didn’t want to stay with me because he had a better idea: he was going to go lie on the leather couch in the living room because it would be cool.   He took off his shirt and did just that. A hour or so later I got up and put a blanket on him.

My daughter woke up and still had a fever, wanting to lie in a ball at the foot of the bed by my feet.   She loves to take the dog out in the morning but had no interest in anything other than lying still.  I got up, got ready, took the dog out and then headed to the chiropractor because the thing that had happened where I had a hard time moving without a lot of pain in my lower back was back.  Not as extreme as the first time, but still significant.  

I took orders for McDonald’s breakfast from those that were awake and said I’d be back shortly.  When I got home my son’s second dose of ibuprofen had kicked in so he’d turned on YouTube videos of Fortnite Fails and ate his breakfast watching from the table.   My daughter didn’t want to get up, and stayed asleep on the chair in the living room.

My husband was in bed doing a capital job of snoring inbetween helping the children when they needed water, another blanket, watermelon or anything else.   I had a dental cleaning mid-morning and when I left my daughter was asleep on the floor in the bedroom, sprawled across the carpet.   She asked for her iPad so she could play music.   Before she fell asleep she sang the songs out loud that we couldn’t hear playing on her iPad.   My husband slept on.

After getting my teeth cleaned I called my husband to find out if I should bring something home for lunch.   He told me my daughter had just woken up and had been eating the breakfast I’d brought her and my son was asleep.

My son was asleep on the floor of our bedroom in almost the same spot his sister had been in a few hours before.   He said he was hot so he didn’t want a shirt when I offered one, but he did want to be covered up by a blanket.   There had been a dog digging issue while I was out so the dog got a bath while my son slept. When I let the dog outside thirty minutes later I found my daughter asleep again on the chair.

For several hours the house was very quiet with both children sleeping in different spots.  My son had relocated to the floor of the bonus room, still without a shirt.   Neighbor children came to ring the doorbell but we sent them away.

I’m heading off to dog training class shortly.  My son is still asleep.   My daughter is awake, but not budging from the chair she’s spent most of her time in for the past two days.   She’s listening to audio books she checked out from the library for the blind.

It’s not like my children to be so lethargic.   They’re both pleasant, kindly asking for help when they need it.  It’s not a painful or uncomfortable sickness, just a tiring one it would seem.   Rayan, one of the neighbor children, came over earlier.   He said hello to our now-clean dog and told me his sister had the same thing last week for three days.  Hopefully both children will be feeling better by tomorrow based on that information.

The Big Boy Update:  My son loves watching YouTube Fortnite videos.   He laughs out loud and comments on what’s happening.   He likes it when someone’s discovered a glitch in the game that makes something unexpected happen.   He also loves watching when people die from mistakes they make, usually falling to their death.  It’s kind of fun to watch; I got stuck for ten minutes watching before I realized I’d even sat down.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been wanting to do a grocery store trip with me for two days now.   Just to do some shopping for things we have on the list.   We’ve had to put the trip on hold until she gets better though.  Hopefully we’ll be able to go tomorrow.

Sixteen Candles

I feel a little like the main character in Sixteen Candles today.   Only before we go any further, in a good way, not in a bad way at all.  

This morning my husband and I were trying to sleep.   Our children and dog were most definitely not trying to sleep, they were, instead, playing games with the dog on our bed.   Squealing was followed by one or two children trying to get under the covers while a happy dog tried to get to them, lick them, sit on them and play with them.   My husband is pretty talented at sleeping through the most intensely loud situations.  You can tell, because it doesn’t even interrupt his snoring.   But this morning was too much and we had to get up.

My daughter wasn’t going to school today because of a fever she developed yesterday.  Fever and malaise but otherwise she was fine.   The morning was busy though because I had a doctor’s appointment and my husband had a dental cleaning.  What to do with the sick child?   Bring her with one of us.   She said she’d like to see dad get his teeth cleaned and my appointment was mostly talking anyways and that was boring.

My husband made breakfast, the children got dressed, I got in a hot tub and worked on getting moving.  At eight my son and I went to his school and then I started the long morning of working with the doctor and pharmacy on what our next plans were to deal with my new insurance company declining multiple medications I’m prescribed—including the alternative medicine they wanted me to take instead.  

Coordination with the pharmacy and the doctors office took two more trips, then to the Chiropractor at almost noon on the dot when I got a text from my son’s Integrative Therapist about us still being on for our noon conference call?   I told her I’d call in ten minutes and she said that worked for her.

An hour call there followed by a second hour call about the new endowment fund we’ve created in honor of our retiring head of school, followed by a second call on the same subject because one of the attendees had a conflict and couldn’t make the first time slot.

About to hang up from three hours of phone calls and my best friend messaged me saying she thought I was coming over an hour-and-a-half ago and was everything okay?   Damn.   She and I had messaged about that last night but I got pulled away from the phone right in the middle and didn’t confirm with her (on my side).   Drat.   She and I got to catch up for ten minutes though as she drove to school to pick up some of her children.

When they got in the car I mentioned that my family had completely forgotten my birthday so far today.   Ellie said, “oh, just like in Sixteen Candles!”  I laughed and said, “you’re so right.”   But, I told them, I wasn’t sixteen, I was now forty-nine.  

By the time you get to almost half a century in age, birthdays seems much less important to celebrate.   Or perhaps they’re grow in importance to some people.   In our family it’s never been much of a thing unless you’re a child and want cake, ice cream, presents and a party.   We’ve never done much in the way of celebrating birthdays other than a dinner and a birthday call.   My mother had sent me a birthday email, complete with one of her famous Word documents sporting clip art depicting characteristics or interests of yours.

We’ll celebrate tonight with dinner my husband makes for the children.  And we’ll sing the birthday song.   That’s about all it takes to make me happy though.   I don’t mind at all that they’ve forgotten my birthday.   What would be nice though would be to be sixteen again…

The Big Boy Update:  My son has taken a small dose of Benadryl for the past several days before he goes to school.   It was an idea I had to calm him just a bit so he could hopefully drop his energy level down, making it easier to do his work.   He says it’s helping.  It’s not a long-term solution, but it’s something to try.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter still has a fever.   One of the children near us had the same thing and it took a few days to pass.   She’s sleeping on the chair in the living room now, listening to Ninjago on the television.

Yearly Playlists

Back in the day there were records.   They were round and flat and scratched.  But they played music.   My first recollection of music on demand were the forty-fives I played on my little record player.   My parents recorded me on audit tapes when I was young.   I have two of them still in the attic today, although the quality of the recording has degraded with the magnet strip tape after all these years.

Then there were CDs.   I remember my first CD player and first CD.   I thought I was buying a lot of CDs, but when I look at the totality of the music I collected after high school, college and beyond, it’s really not that much music when compared to music collections today.

For a while there was iTunes or Napster once music was more easily stored and played electronically.     Enter the era of the MP3.   I collected music during that time, some of it was my own music but a huge portion of the music I had was from other people or sources on the Internet.   My collection got larger and larger.   There was so much it was hard finding what I liked, what was okay and what was not at all to my tastes but had somehow gotten into my library.   It was an organizational mess.

But it was my collection.   Once I started storing things in iTunes, which was fickle to say the least, I was able to categorize most things.   I was still collecting, but by then there was so much available to collect it was overwhelming and almost not worth the bother.   If I really wanted a song or album I could find it pretty quickly.

But I did keep a playlist of the songs I liked the most.   These were mostly big hits or albums where I liked most of the songs.   That playlist, named, “All New” so it would sort alphabetically at the top, would get bigger over time.   Hits would become old hits in my mind.   Each year at the beginning of the year I’d make a copy of the All New playlist and rename it to the year just past.   Now I had a playlist from, 2012 or 2013 or 2014, etc.   Then I’d clean out All New and start fresh for the new year.

Only we don’t really have music collections any more today.   Music is all streaming-based and on demand.  You can play a station of top hits or alternative hits or Lindsay Stirling songs.  You can even do it by just asking Alexa to play something for you.   If you like a song you can have it played over and over and over again (not that my children would ever play the ‘Poop’ song repeatedly, no sir, not my children).

Collections are gone.   I don’t even know where my music library is that I worked so long and hard to collect and coordinate is.   Somewhere on my computer, but why bother looking for it, because I can just ask for, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes by Paul Simon” and have it play three seconds later.  

On demand streaming is nice, I just don’t know what is “my music” versus everyone’s music anymore.

The Big Boy Update:  My son came home with his work plan today with two things crossed off.   He explained, quite vehemently, that he didn’t agree to do those work things (giving reasons why that netted out to him not wanting to do them).   We had a conversation with him about how it was his teacher’s responsibility to be sure each student gets a complete education and that sometimes he would have to do things he didn’t want to do or didn’t agree with them.   Tomorrow he has a chance to make up the lack of work today by completing his full work plan as well as the two items he didn’t want to do today.   Why did he not want to do them?   There were sentences to write that he didn’t want to do because he didn’t want to waste paper to save the trees.   He didn’t want to do the word problems because they were “so easy”.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came home with a fever today.   She’s on the bed now, listening to a show on her iPad.   She always wants the dog to be with her but Matisse rarely wants to lie up against her—except now she does.   She won’t leave my daughter alone, trying to get as close to her as possible and chew on a bone at the same time.

Taller?

My parents live in the same house today that they did when they brought me home from the hospital as a newborn.   Well, they live there during the winter months.  Fortunately for me, that house is only about five miles away.   They’re available to watch the children during these months, which is a wonderful thing.

I go over there from time to time for different things.  My children love to come over to spend time with Mimi and Gramps.   Today I went over to work with my mother on a few things on her phone and computer and something struck me—I was tall.

Or rather I felt tall.   This was the house I grew up in and I suppose a good portion of the time I lived in the house I was less than my fully grown height.  I’m effectively forty-nine at this point so there have been decades I’ve been at my current height, but for some reason, today I felt taller as I walked through their house,

Maybe it’s because we have ten foot ceilings in our main floor in our house here and their ceilings are eight feet.   That could have played a factor I suppose, but regardless, today I felt more “grown up” in their house than I have in a long time.

The Big Boy Update:  My son just got sent to his room for the rest of the day.   We had a long family conversation about what things were non-negotiable in our family.   Threatening people is never, ever allowed.   In short, we had an hour-and-a-half conference called by my son’s teachers.   The conference involved the head of school as well.   My son came to school mad (due to poor planning in the morning on his part) and he threatened to kill me upon arrival and said, “she’ll regret it”.   They were concerned.   There were other things in the conference, but that precipitated it.   Things that are never allowed in our house are any threats to harm anyone.   My son wanted to play with the girls just now but didn’t do so in a positive manner, more of a bullying way, and as a result of that and his past interactions with them, the girls didn’t want him to join them so they went to another house.   My son said after they left that he wanted to kill them.   So he’s now, “in jail” for the rest of the night and won’t have dinner.   He says, vehemently, that he didn’t mean it.   I explained that an adult could, in a fit of anger, hurt someone and say they didn’t mean it.  And that person would still go to jail.  He’s very upset.   I’m glad he is.   I wanted to help him with the girls and told him to come talk to me and I’d help him, that I was on his side and thought he should be included.   But instead he tried to bully his way into the room with the girls and, well, you see what happened.   He fought and fought and fought us on about fifteen different fronts, threatening, pleading, demanding, avoiding blame, etc.   We didn’t give in on any of them and suddenly he’s normalized again.   I brought the dog up to the room and he’s happily playing with her now.   Children, will I ever figure them out?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter played a game of Battleship with her father over the past two days.   The game can be played fairly quickly, but when you’re new at it and you have to find every peg with your hands instead of your eyes, the game takes a little longer.   They started last night and broke before bed.   When I came home this afternoon from helping Mimi I heard they’d just finished a very close game, with her father winning right at the end.   Was she a good sport? I asked her.   Her friends, who had been watching the end of the game, said she was.   She’s been working on her sportsmanship.   Losing isn’t fun, but she knows it’s not fun to play with a bad sport.

Locked Up

Something happened to my back late yesterday afternoon.   Sometimes my back does this.   I don’t know what causes it, but things can just go haywire.   I was resting and when I got out of the bed I cried out because a deep almost sharp pain happened in my lower back.  But we had an escape room to escape from and then dinner following (should we manage to escape) so there wasn’t much I could do about my back at the time.

As the night went on it got worse.  I was having to hold myself a certain way in the booth seat at the restaurant and by the time we were left dinner just getting into the car took a good deal strategy to not fall down in pain.

When I got home there was very little to do in the way of cleaning because my mother had been watching the children and unlike a sitter, the house was in better shape when we returned than when we left.  And this was a wonderful thing because I couldn’t really bend down to pick up the eleventy-twelve children’s toys that typically litter the floor after a good night with a sitter.  By then, bending down took planning and sitting was a careful endeavor.   I ended the night with a hot bath and a muscle relaxant and got in bed…carefully.

I had written two blog posts the prior day, dating the second one ahead to post last night so I didn’t have to do more then get in bed and turn out the light.  But sleeping was going to be a challenge.   Changing positions (which I do during the night) jarred me awake.  When I woke up this morning I had to slide off the bed, turn around and brace myself to stand up because things had gotten worse overnight.

I texted my chiropractor asking if he was free today and did he perhaps want to have that playdate with our dogs because I could bring mine to his house if so?  Oh, and I had wrecked my back.   He said come on over as long as the dog wasn’t going to go to the bathroom in his house.   I promised him I could make no promises on that front and that I’d be over shortly.

When I got there I went to the side yard gate to let my dog into their back yard before going in their house.  Just at the gate, Matisse pulled on the leash.  I wasn’t expecting it and wasn’t ready to brace myself for the pain.   I crumpled down, fortunately not dropping my purse with my laptop in it, but I did spill my coffee and lost hold on the dog’s leash.  I said something aloud like, “what a pathetic human being you are right now” while I lunged forward to step on the leash and stop the dog.  I think I got to her in only six swear words time.

Dog deposited in the back yard, I went inside.   I knew something was up with my back and I knew it was alignment-related with my spine.  It was the worse situation I can remember ever happening like that.   One of those things where someone says, “I bent over and then couldn’t stand back up.”   That type of thing.   And yet I wasn’t concerned.   If I didn’t have the long experience I do with chiropractic; if I didn’t know this could be fixed; and if I didn’t know what was happening to me, it would have been scary.   But I wasn’t worried.   I knew it would settle out quickly after being adjusted—and it did just that.

My left SI joint, T12 vertebra, T12 rib and L5 were all out of alignment—which is a lot.   The distance between T12 and the SI joint is a pretty big span.   Things had sort of locked in place and when I moved it was putting pressure on the nerves.  My muscles were in spasm and there was a lot of inflammation.  

Ten minutes after arriving, my chiropractor had adjusted my spine, putting the bones back on the proper track and things began to calm down.   An hour later and I was in a much, much better state.   I’m sore now from the muscles spasming and inflamed, but it’s better.   So much better.

While this was going on, my dog and their larger dog, Izzy, were playing in the back yard—and Matisse was loving it.   They played for a good while until Matisse figured out she could wedge through their gate, thus ending the unsupervised outside play.  Inside, Matisse investigated all of Izzy’s things, including her cage, food and water bowls and toys.  Izzy was respectful to her, never being territorial.  She was almost motherly.   The dogs kept getting on Izzy’s bed together, although by the time we got the picture Matisse had fallen off the back.

My back is no longer locked up from the unknown insult that happened for no apparent reason yesterday and my dog is tired, sleeping in her cage.   It’s a good Saturday afternoon here.

Best Girlfriends:  My dog loves the girls.   There are several other children that come over to play at our house.  The ladies like to take Matisse into their bedroom and play all sorts of things along the lines of “family” with the dog included.   They’ll bring up all her toys, make a bed for her with a towel or blanked, get her water in a dish from the kitchen play toys and even bring her treats and food (which we’ve said isn’t allowed in the bedroom but they somehow keep forgetting, so they say).  Initially the dog wasn’t so sure about being shut into their bedroom but now she expects to be part of the group—getting upset and incensed (whining) if she’s not included.  We put her in the cage a bit ago because they wanted to play a different game and I have never heard so much prolonged whining from her.   Usually she’ll give up after less than a minute and go to sleep, but not this time.  To give you any indication of how much she loves playing with the girls, she abandoned a game of fetch—outside—to go inside to be with them.   This dog never wants to go inside.

The Big Boy Update:  I had been out for a while the other day.   It wasn’t that long, but my son had missed seeing me at bedtime because the meeting I had went long.   My son was so kind the next morning as he greeted me saying, “Mom, you must have gained some weight since I’ve last seen you."

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My parents had a special day planned for my daughter today.   They were going to take her on a train ride to a nearby city, have lunch there and then return.   My mother had prepared for the trip well, going to the train station to find out everything they needed to know including parking and what might be close to eat near the destination station that would work for the one hour window they had before the return train departed.   Only things didn’t go as planned.  My parents picked up my daughter at 8:45am to get to the station in plenty of time for the ten o’clock departure but something was happening downtown.   They think it was road work although it seemed like an accident at first.   They tried to get to the train station from as many alternate routes as they could for an hour but had to abandon the trip when they realized they wouldn’t it in time.  My daughter is disappointed, but she got to play at Mimi and Gramp’s house instead, which she always enjoys.

Death Cream

My children are very good sleepers.   They don’t expect or even want to sleep with us, but sometimes things happen in the middle of the night and a child comes downstairs to our room.   For a period of time it was my daughter saying she’d wet the bed.  Good news in that with the low dose antibiotic that specifically targets her kidneys and bladder, she hasn’t had any incidents at night.

Sometimes my son would come down and have a hand that was, “tickly hand”.  He’d fallen asleep on his arm and needed help to work through the waking up and pain of a limb coming back into feeling. This also happened in a while though.   That leaves nightmares.

Both children have them sometimes.   They’ll come down and wake my husband or me up.   We tell the child to get into bed and ask if they want to talk about the dream?   Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. Then, after a few minutes have passed, we walk them back upstairs or they go on their own.  They want to go back to their beds, they’re the most comfortable there.

Last night my daughter had a nightmare that she did want to talk about.   Usually she’s the one that just needs to feel safe but doesn’t have a need to talk it through.   This nightmare scared her a lot though.   She said her brother had a cream he was trying to rub on her that would kill her.   She said she kept wiping it off but he kept putting more on.   I told her that definitely sounded like a scary dream.

And then I must have fallen back asleep almost immediately because the next thing I knew it was hours later and she was gone.   She’d gone back upstairs all by herself.   I like when one of them gets into bed much.   It’s a very sweet time in the middle of the night, giving them a hug and making sure they feel safe and loved.

The Big Boy Update:   At the pediatrician’s annual wellness check she asked my son if he was feeling okay and if he had any concerns.   He said, “I’m okay, I have 900 hearts.”   We laughed and told him there were no respawns in life though.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Mimi was explaining double negatives to my daughter the other day.   She asked her, “what would it mean if I said, ‘I don’t want to not go?’”  My daughter thought about it and then said, “it means you want to go."