Ugh

Good news! I checked and The Baby has HAD her chicken pox vaccination, so I can relax about one of my kids.
We didn't end up taking The Girl to the doctor - I'm still ambivalent about whether that was the right decision, but she got hysterical when it was brought up, and in the absence of infection or a high fever, I don't see what they could do for her. She's still very uncomfortable, but nothing seems to be getting worse. I have one of those clenched-stomach feelings when something is wrong with your kid and you're not sure what the right medical course of action is. Sigh.

Update: she appears to be feeling a lot better. She's pretty spotted, though.

My poor baby - The Girl. The Baby herself actually appears not to have the chicken pox, which makes me think I maybe should check her vaccination status - is having a horrible, horrible time with the chicken pox. She has them on the INSIDES OF HER EYELIDS. She has them in her throat. She is horrifyingly uncomfortable.

I'm calling her dad home from work. We're going to take her to the doctor.

Here's a punchline for ya - we were going to get the kids vaccinated against chicken pox at the end of the school year. The Baby missed the beginning of routine chicken pox vaccinations by a month or something, and was so doctor-phobic at the time that we never brought her back in.

I had a mild, mild case of chicken pox when I was six - a few spots and a fever for a day or so, and it looks like The Boy and The Baby are following my lead. My brothers, at 13 and 3, spent a miserable summer with the worst cases of chicken pox that I'd ever seen, thousands of spots EVERYWHERE and high disorienting fevers and misery. And my poor Girl is following THEIR lead, and I am regretting SO much not bringing them in months ago to get vaccinated against this because my child is suffering.

We're making do. My dad dropped by with vanilla ice cream and they're watching cartoons and reading Family Circus books. I read one yesterday - bleh! - and there was a cartoon where Dolly is telling one of her younger brothers that "Colouring Books are dead and you hafta bring them back to life by colouring them." FREAKING YIKES. And I have a bad cold, but I think I'm over the worst of it. It's hard, though.

We interrupt this illness....

My Kitchen Party post is up! And yes, I know it's not Monday, but the process of getting the new site up and running hasn't been hassle free. I hope you'll go have a look at my post, which is about dealing with being diagnosed with Celiac Disease. If you have experiences with that, or other extremely restrictive diets, I'd love to hear from you. (or hey, I'd love to hear from you, whatever you eat.)
xo
Very Sick Beck

A Pox On My House

So I got really sick yesterday - feverish and brainless and runny noseish - and was sort of looking forward to a lazy pajama-clad day on the couch, reading detective novels and whining. But my older two kids woke up feverish and I resigned myself instead to a day playing Florence Nightingale. Then The Girl showed me something on her back.

Oh great! 2/3 of my kids have the chicken pox. The Baby says to tell you that she is healthy and sassy and full of badness. The Girl has a book of personality tests and she keeps reading them to me: what is my style? am I honest? what kind of guy do I like? and her class starts EQAO testing this week and much of the hopes for a passing grade for her group were resting on her thin shoulders. Sorry, guys.

Update: all three of them have it now, and The Baby dropped a jar of jam on her foot. I give this day a D-.

Tuesday AT LAST

When I say that was a LONG weekend, I don't mean that in the good sense. Aside from my Wild Shopping Trip on Saturday, I've spent the past several days trapped in my house with my three squabbling children while it rained outside. My mom - also husbandless - would come over several times a day to relieve me, but every night I'd wake up in the middle of the night and know that I was it, that I was the lone adult on duty.

The guys were late late late getting back last night and I spent the afternoon with a worried knot in my stomach, feeding the kids and bathing the kids and eventually remorsefully tucking my disappointed kids in, sorry that I'd promised them that they'd see their dad that evening. And then at 8:30 the house was full of men, smelling of woodsmoke and sunburned and the kids came barrelling down the stairs, incredibly excited that their dad was back. He'd brought them back tons of military MREs, a gift from my cousin the soldier, and so this morning my kids delightedly brought military foil packs of stew off to school for lunch.

This weekend, The Boy found what looked like an old furniture caster in the bush behind our house, but he insisted that it was a stamp, and when I looked closer I found out that he was right. In faded, reversed letters, it says the old name of our town from its brief moment of importance at the turn of the last century, when trains used to stop here and be loaded up with lumber and passengers embarking and departing and now the trees have grown back up through our town full of closed buildings and The Boy found an old ticket stamp in the bush, thrilled and waiting for the moment when he could put this treasure in his dad's hands and watch his dad's eyes light up with the same recognition. And his dad, back from a weekend of canoeing through the improbable wilderness, held the stamp in his hand and told The Boy what he'd been waiting to hear all weekend, that he'd indeed found something WONDERFUL.

Mutton and lamb

It is May Long Weekend this very weekend. My husband is off on a camping trip, which caused me to walk around in a black, sulking funk all last week but it's actually been a surprisingly nice weekend and it's been raining and cold, which has caused me no end of smirking glee. That'll learn him.

My friend Bonnie and I abandoned our children - in my case, to the doting care of my mother - and went to the nearest city for a day of shopping for ourselves, which felt pretty wild. I bought some much-needed clothing - phew! nudity has been averted! - and Bon looked for a business suit which made me really wonder about how stay-at-home mom's dress these days. I mean, I just head straight to the casual clothing section and spend my life in jeans and t-shirts, essentially, while working women have grown-up clothing - suit jackets and tailored pants and shirts with buttons on them, clothing with a weighty gravitas. Not so long ago - only a few generations back - there was a clear line between how you dressed when you were a child and how you dressed as an adult and now I find it very hard to figure out what a 35 year old woman should wear, outside of the obvious boundaries of the working world .

Whatever you like, some might answer, although I don't think that's quite true. I saw a woman out shopping with her kids yesterday and she was skinny, skinny, skinny - quite thin enough to pull off the revealing Junior's department clothing she was wearing, but her face was deeply grooved with tanning booth wrinkles and the effect was jarring, this old face between her long bleached hair and her bright clothing. It was actually kind of pathetic, really, her obvious desperation to cling to youth and her youth obviously being long over. And at the same time, there's also something kind of pathetic in me spending my life slouching around in cords and hoodies, in this fashionless, sexless uniform. I feel like I'm five seconds away from getting a short, practical haircut and wearing pants with elastic waists and vests from Northern Reflections. So someplace between THOSE two extremes lies the answer, I think - but finding it makes for tricky shopping.

I remember reading something - Rebecca, I think, by Daphne du Maurier - and the young narrator, barely 20ish, wishes that she was a sophisticated woman in her 30s, with knowledge and a black satin dress. Of course, that was back in 1938, back when adults still existed, and it's hard imagining a contemporary young heroine wishing that she was in her mid-30s. We all want to be young girls forever now and everyone listens to music meant for 14 year olds and we watch stupid tv and run around in sneakers and striped t-shirts like a nation of toddlers, like we're all 15 years old and our parents are gone for the weekend.

This Post Is Pretty Much About Nothing.

I am dyeing my hair RIGHT NOW while I type and when I am done, my hair should be the reddish-brown colour of expensive furniture that middle-aged moms buy when their kids leave home, which is not really a colour ever seen in nature.



I was a bonehead for ALL of yesterday, and kind of a jerk to a variety of people. Being a nice person and being able to write nicely about certain things aren't always the same thing, you know, although I think that generally I'm nice enough and all that. But thanks for all of the luv - it actually did make me feel quite comforted as I held my Festival of Self-Loathing.



And with that, I am going to go to bed. I have some good posts in the works but this is NOT one of them. Good NIGHT.