Posted on 1 Comment

I was asleep but NOOooo! She wanted a damned blanket…

Stress wears on the body as well as the mind. This week I peaked. And I crashed. Promises of staying up late with my wife for adult..um..conversation were broken. Just before my head hit the pillow, blackness engulfed me. I never felt the pillow. It was as if a blackhole sucked my total being from my body. Perhaps the HLC finally became operational and the world ended.

Our bed is Disneyesque. I don’t mean that it is a canopy bed with glorious antique wood bedposts extending to the ceiling nor a frilly thing with more pillows than bed space. Our bed more resembles Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory or Bedknobs and Broomsticks only we don’t fly ours that often. Typically I hit the sack first as Cathy finishes cleaning the upstairs and readying the children’s backpacks and clothing for morning. One or two hundred pound German Shepherds join me. Cathy comes to bed shortly after the dogs and complains that she has no where to put her feet. She wrestles the covers and nudges dogs hoping they roll over onto me which often they do. Having large dogs sleep on your legs is like having a stack of electric quilts and a boat anchor holding you in bed only without the electricity or the boat. It certainly does not encourage getting out of bed, rolling over, or doing anything conjugal. Next the cat wanders into the bed room. Both dogs stretch their necks pondering a chase but inevitability decide chasing the cat is not worth losing their valuable real estate on the bed. The cat then jumps onto the bed typically settling on top of my head ala Davy Crockett’s coon skin cap. Sometime between midnight and 2:30am, Evan sleepwalks into the bedroom, climbs over his mother, and cuddles up between the two of us. Later Amy comes into the room, shoves a dog more to the center of the bed, takes one of my two pillows, moves to the corner of the bed beneath Cathy’s feet, pulls the hospital corner out and gets under the covers between one dog, and Cathy’s feet. Flipping over, stretching legs, or working cramps out are out of the question.

Last night, that was our bed and I was dead to the world. For all I knew, I was alone. Until the shriek! The dogs and children had managed to short sheet us and it was cold! Cathy whined, no, almost screamed, "Give me a sheet!" I mutter under my breath and pretend to be asleep assuming a grown adult can get her own damned sheet. "AhhhahHHH! Get me a blanket!" she cried. For better or for worse. In sickness or health. For richer or poorer… Where the hell did it say anything about waking me from the deepest, best sleep of my life to walk to her side of the bed and cover her with a blanket?! I glowered at her; she writhed, whimpered, and cried and I caved but not without letting my displeasure be known. I rose with a grumble, squealed as my feet missed my slippers and landed on the cold concrete floor, muttered as I stomped to the chest of drawers on her side of the bed, cursed under my breath as I recovered a blanket, and said loving words as I covered her noting that I was still short sheeted and exposed to the basement chill. I returned to my side of the bed, pulled a dog over me, and blacked out.

Posted on 5 Comments

Pulling a tooth

I feel like a failed parent when my children suffer a health issue. We are a remarkably fortunate family when it comes to health. We see very little sickness. Granted, we have a bug going through the house right now but it really is not terrible. Everyone is taking turns so only one person has it at a time.

Evan has a tooth that grayed a while back. We took him to the dentist and everything was assessed as fine. The tooth whitened and seemed fine then died. We attempted to extract it at the dentist but the twilight drugs made Evan too loopy and uncooperative. A surgery was scheduled but the anesthesiologist flipped out when she saw his older brother is diagnosed with Von Willebrand disease (which the doctor thinks is a misdiagnosis) and canceled the surgery until Evan had blood work. Why this wasn’t noticed on his paperwork the month prior to the first surgery attempt is beyond me.

His second surgery attempt was scheduled for March 19th but we got a call yesterday that an opening had come available. "Don’t give him anything to eat or drink after midnight. Your appointment is at noon." Huh?! That’s a long time for a 3.5 year old to go without food. In a different phone call, clear liquids were okay’d until 9am. Cathy and Evan will be off to the hospital shortly. I will remain home with a feverish Amy and working on programming and talking to bureaucrats on the phone. I hope all goes well. These things worry me so much.

Update: Surgery canceled. In the same post I talked about be blessed with decent health, I get to say my child has pneumonia.
Update 2:08pm: Apparently he had pneumonia and is at the end of recovery so they are proceeding with the surgery. Lungs still rattley.
Update 3:30pm: Evan out of surgery and in recovery.

Posted on Leave a comment

Day in Review

Today began at 1:30am. I awoke probably as Evan wandered into our bedroom to sleep between Cathy and I. I have a vague recollection of going upstairs and trying to convince myself to stay up and get to work but falling back asleep.

Now it is 5am and I decide that an hour’s rest will serve me better than an hour’s work.

6am- I am already up, walked the dogs, done sit ups and push ups, and begun working on fixing coding issues on a project. I have but one objective today and that is continue making up for the lost programming time from the unproductive weekend to please a client and receive a check to immediately sign it over to someone else. The best-laid plans of mice and men/often go awry.

6:30-7:45 I help children ready themselves for school and carpool the elementary student.

7:45-8:00 I follow the overflowing creek to discover a broken water main under S Northshore Drive.

8:03am I report the exact location of the main to FUD who knew they had a leak but had not pin pointed the problem.

8:15-3:00pm I work on debugging code and making changes for clients with breaks to be amused by the traffic redirected through the neighborhood including helping a truck driver back out of our deadend street.

2:47pm – I flag down the elementary school bus as it reaches the end of the street and beg, for their safety, the driver to let the children out instead of taking them all the way up to their stop and having them walk in all the traffic.

3:00pm – My wife disappears and returns at 10:15pm. During this time I split my attention between the children and knocking out code. Fortunately, Evan mostly sleeps, and Amy and Noah entertain themselves. Turns out to be a very productive coding session..

4:30pm – wife reappears (briefly) with pizza only after officer lets her skip ahead in the deadlocked line of traffic waiting from an 18 wheeler to back out of our neighborhood.

10:30pm – I blog about the day as miniature people play tom toms in my head and my eyes bleed. I avoided a stroke today but think I’ll have it tomorrow. Not looking forward to the phone calls I will have to make explaining why I failed to keep a commitment I had made for today. Oh, tomorrow, Evan goes in for his 3rd attempt at a tooth extraction. No food after midnight. Appointment, noon.

Posted on Leave a comment

State of Me

All super secret personal stress tells indicate that I am very deep in the red on my pressure gauge. If my maximum depth is 150 meters I’d say I’m currently running on quickly depleting batteries at roughly 245 meters and rapidly taking on water.

Good things to avoid saying to me today, "Could you…" "The deadline needs to be sooner…" "The tree finally fell on the house" and "Guess who’s pregnant!" and "Hello." – not that any of those have been said mind you.

Posted on Leave a comment

Mental Weather Forecast

This weekend’s mental weather was bad. It was a very important weekend to me and couldn’t have gone more wrong. However, it was a productive weekend and in that rewarding. The weekend had a bizarre dichotomy of suffering and pleasure.

Today’s forecast: mental collapse with occasional screams of agony and afternoon showers of salty tears.

Tomorrow’s forecast: stroke.

Posted on Leave a comment

From the mouths of babes

Evan, 3.5 years old, points at the Russett potatoes on the food shelf: "I want the gun."
He relates potatoes to a potato gun!

Amy: "Can I go to A’s house?"
Dad: "Sure. Wear a jacket."
Evan: "I want go to A’s house."
Dad: "No, you are sick."
Evan, crying: "I not sick! I want go to A’s house with jacket."
Dad, feeling like a cad.