(1)
I think my brain is de-stressing. Mark and I saw his parents off at 5:20 this morning, then went back to bed. Soon I fell back to sleep and promptly had a detailed dream about applying for a library card.
(2)
I was amused by this. Summary in bullet points:
- Solo ultralight backpacker's wife suggests that the two of them take up car camping in order to foster togetherness and have fun together.
- Unsurprisingly, this leads to the need to BUY MORE GEAR!!!
(3)
Speaking of gear. After I tucked the seven-year-old into her own bed for the first time in a week and saw her off to sleep on a dose of pain medication, I told Mark that I kind of missed the beeping machines. "I think it'll be hard to sleep without wanting to get up and check on her breathing," I said. "I almost wish I had a pulse oximeter."
He got an evil-genius look and said "Reeeeeeealllly?"
I wasn't really thinking of the model from Brooks-Range Mountaineering, to tell the truth.
(4)
My nine-year-old turned ten near the end of his sister's hospitalization. The night before his birthday, I sat him down and had to explain that we had not done anything whatsoever for his birthday, neither bought any presents (or thought of one) nor prepared to bake a cake nor planned a special outing.
And no, this was not a setup for a surprise reveal on the big day, either. We are last-minute people when it comes to holidays and birthdays, and we had nuthin'.
"You'll have to wait a few days for us to pull something together," I told him. "Probably when the weekend comes around."
He put a brave face on it, but his eyes were wet. Poor kid.
(5)
I did manage to get the younger kids' Halloween-costume supplies ordered while I was keeping vigil in the hospital over my sleeping daughter. The girl wanted help with her "Egyptian cat" costume; I ordered a cat-ear headband and tail and some black clothes for her, and some yellow fleece to make a golden neck collar/shawl type thing and some glue-on plastic gemstones.
Amazon Prime has revolutionized Halloween costumes for me. With free two-day shipping, I can order stuff faster than they can change their mind about what they want to be. And I don't have to take a number at the fabric store.
My 3-year-old, when asked about his costume, had announced he wanted to be an "orange knight." (Last year my then-seventh-grader, having been immersed in the tales of Sir Gawain for some weeks, went as the Green Knight; I'm assuming this idea was related.) I agreed quickly before he could change his mind, because "knight" is easy. I ordered a cheap set of plastic knight accessories and some orange fleece.
When they arrived yesterday, I draped the orange fleece over him to check size, cut out a rectangle and a long narrow strip, cut a hole for his head in the middle of the rectangle to turn it into a "tunic" (really more of a scapular) that hung down in front and in back, tied the strip around his waist, and then opened the Amazon box and gave him his helmet, shield, and sword.
Unspeakably happy boy.
This has got to be a costume-making record. It took me about four minutes, not counting two-day shipping. I didn't even need the hot glue gun.
(6)
This has been a wonderful object lesson in how homeschooling forces you into a different pattern than the common one. Better or worse, it does not really matter, but it's definitely different. If my older boys had been in school, they'd have gone on with most of their normal routines and kept up with their schooling; and we'd have had less worry about who was going to "watch" them, since they'd be occupied in a school building part of the day, but there would still have been the getting them to and from on time.
As it was, school was entirely suspended for them on the first day of the crisis (as it was for the homeschooling family who took care of them for us). The second day they had some assignments cobbled together from my hastily-scribbled list and from the things that the other family had on hand. After that, my thirteen-year-old, lacking specific assignments, went on with Algebra by trying to select problem sets for himself that looked like the sort of mix that I would have selected. My nine-year-old (ten now, gotta get used to that) went on with his math with the standing instructions. Both read books. Their grandpa taught them to play five-card stud.
The lesson here is that our lifestyle choices are designed to make us interrelated. We work together. They stop working together. We can adapt, but it takes time. We are not an "institution." We are a family. We live like a family, and we learn like a family, and that means that sometimes we have a crisis, and it affects all of us, and we all have to pitch in, and -- even if we would like to -- we cannot pretend to make life "normal" for the other members of the family until the crisis is over. It would exhaust us to try. So we don't.
Anyway, all the public school kids in the state were off for a couple of days last week because of a gigantic statewide teacher's union meeting that cancels school in Minnesota for two days every single year. I figure that if my kids operated on 60% power for a few days, they aren't any worse off than the rest of them.
Comments