Tuesday Evening

I had to take Large Fry to her counseling appointment.  However, Small Fry wanted Hubby to take Large Fry so that I could stay home with her and her twin.

Apparently, after I left, she cried because I didn't stay home.  Hubby said he hugged her and told her Mommy would be home with her tonight because daddy had practice. She seemed to be okay with that.

Then...

Small Fry: I'm hungry.

Hubby: Well, what should we do about that?

Small: I want macawroni and cheese.

Hubby: You do?

Small: Thewre's some boxes up in the cupboawrd. It's my vewry favorite kind of food.

Hubby: Macaroni and cheese, huh? I was thinking maybe we would have pizza.

Small: We could have macawroni and cheese some othewr day because pizza is my very favowrite kind of food.

An Honest-to-Goodness Snow Day

Or, how to drive Mommy insane in three easy steps.

Actually, it's not been that bad, aside from Medium Fry wondering around 7:15 this morning if there was school (nope; it had been canceled 14 hours ago, before we saw a single flake), and then wanting to know if we could go sledding (not at quarter after 7, dollface).

Hubby's office is closed due to the weather (we have about 7" of snow, with the possibility of another 5 or 6 to come...plus another 3ish of wet snow overnight).

So far, the kids have only asked half a dozen times if we can go sledding.

Conveniently, the elementary school the kids go to, which is right across the street, has a pretty decent hill for sledding, so the plan was to do that anyway.  Hubby was also trying to figure out if he could pull together a last-minute youth group activity and go sledding with the big kids.  My only issue with that was that it probably wouldn't be across the street, and therefore I wouldn't be able to go home when the need struck...which would make it difficult for me to go along and enjoy myself.  Because, y'know, snow + arthritis and degenerative joint disease in my ankle = limping and aching today.

As it turns out, according to the youth group's Facebook page, sledding is at the school across the street, and hot chocolate at our house afterwards.  Yay!

Pictures to come later!

If I wasn't convinced before, I sure am now.

I ran down to the next town yesterday afternoon to get Large Fry's focus med prescription, then came back home to get it filled.  By the time I finished my short list of errands, it was around 5:30.

I walked into the den and found Small Fry sound asleep.

I took a picture with my phone and went to show Hubby.

He smiled and said that she had fallen asleep against him awhile ago.

I went to wake her up for dinner after Hubby returned with KFC; she'd slept the whole time he was gone, too.  She burst into tears in the kitchen, saying she didn't feel good.  I checked her forehead and went for the temporal thermometer.

100.7.

Okay then.  Clearly, Small would be missing out on Dr. Seuss Day in the morning.

I gently told her to go back to the couch, and she asked for a bowl.  I got one and followed her, handing it to her none too soon, since she promptly made use of it.

Yay.

I can handle lots of things just fine in the line of mom duty, but as I've mentioned here before, vomiting just is not one of them.

Thankfully, Small's tummy settled and she conked out on the couch again as we tucked in her sisters.  Small slept through several episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation before Hubby carried her up to bed.

This morning, she woke me up at 7 to tell me she was thirsty.  She was cheerier but still quiet, and she still had a low-grade fever, so I stuck by my decision to keep her home.

We spent the morning watching Disney Junior and part of The Sound of Music before I said we needed to stop the movie so we could both go take a nap.

After I picked up Large and Medium from school this afternoon, Small started complaining that her throat hurt.  I grabbed the small flashlight in the kitchen and tried to take a peek at her throat.  Her tonsils were very swollen (I need to speak to her ENT about that)...and streaked with white.

Sudden fever + vomiting + sore throat?

The usual recipe for strep throat in my kids.

We went to the clinic.

It was amazingly quiet for a Friday afternoon.  We got into the exam room, the LPN took Small's vitals (fever 100.3) and said she'd leave the strep test to the PA, and then Small climbed into my lap.  I wrapped my arms around her as she rested her hot little head on my shoulder.

In the five minutes it took for the PA to come in, she fell asleep.

She woke when he arrived.  He peeked in her ears while I described our chain of events, and then looked down her throat.  "My lord!" he exclaimed.

Yeah.  Her tonsils are really swollen.

He sent the antibiotic script off to our usual pharmacy, confirming my diagnosis, and sent us on our way.

As we approached the checkout counter, where I'd get the paperwork for today's visit, Small said quietly, "I don't want any stickers today."

Well.  That's usually the highlight of any visit to the doctor's office.

"Really?  No stickers?" I said as the receptionist reached for the sticker box.

Small, thumb popped in her mouth, shook her head.

She must really not feel well if she doesn't even want stickers.

Hopefully, by this time tomorrow, with a couple of doses of antibiotic in her, she should be feeling much better.

Facebook is good for something.

I have a number of teenage friends on Facebook, in part because of my husband's job as youth pastor (I love my youth group kids), and in part because I have friends who are now old enough to have teenagers themselves.  (Why, yes, I do feel old.  Thanks.)

I saw this tonight in my newsfeed, posted by the eldest daughter of my friend DocAwk:

Now, the green is her boyfriend.  The purple is me (I prescribed Oreos and hugs last night).  It wasn't until a few minutes ago that I saw the blue comment...her dad.

This, my friends...THIS is a good dad.

I hope Hubby will have this kind of relationship with our girls in another ten years, when they reach this young lady's age.

Doc, I am honored to call you my friend.

Tastes Like Chicken

I truly wish I knew how the subject came up at dinner tonight.  I honestly can't remember.

Innyhoo, Medium Fry asked about Pa'ani (otherwise referred to as The Weasel) came to live with us.

"In a bucket of chicken," Hubby said, completely deadpan...and almost completely serious.

"Did he eat da chicken?" Medium wanted to know.

"No," I said.  "He was just in a chicken bucket when he came to our house."

Which was 100% true.

It was mid-July in 2004, my best friend JJ had had her first baby in April of that year, and we were trying—with a spectacular lack of success—to get pregnant.  (And, somehow knowing this is about him, Weasel just came up and curled up next to me on the couch.)  A few days before, I once again knew for sure that I hadn't gotten pregnant.  Again.  We'd been trying for a year and a half with no luck.  I was heartbroken.

Our second-oldest nephew, K2 the Snoring Wonderboy, was visiting for the weekend, and he'd gone with Hubby out to Mville that Friday night, where Hubby had practice for the Southern Gospel quartet he'd been singing with.  So it was just me at home.  And it might have been Saturday.  Whichever.

And, no, I didn't tell the kids the story in this much detail.  Don't you feel spaishull?

Mville, by the way, is the middle of nowhere.  About an hour outside the nearest large city, it's a lot of farmland.  Home to a major grass seed and lawn care company, that's pretty much its claim to fame.  And more farmland.  Farmland means farm cats.  And at Hubby's friend SuperVoice's dad's house (the man could record demos of himself as a quartet and sing all four men's parts), where the guys often worked on their bus, there was nothing for miles around but fields.  It was summer, so the kittens were blooming right along with the flowers.

There was a little orange tabby boy kitten running around there.  We didn't have an orange tabby.  We only had one boy kitty.  Yes, we had enough kitties.  Yes, all of ours were older, fat, and lazy.  No, none of them would welcome a kitten.  I still wanted this little guy, though.

But I refused to beg.  Hubby had said no, and no matter how much my heart wanted to take home even just this one kitten (I would have taken them all if he'd let me), I was going to abide by it even if it hurt.  Badly.

Hubby also knew how badly I was hurting over the fact that we, once again, were not pregnant.

When he and K2 returned that night, I was downstairs in the basement doing laundry.  K2 lumbered down the steps, with Hubby following him, holding a KFC bucket.

I kid you not.

K2 shoved the bucket at me.  "Here.  Tastes like chicken."

Weasel and Twinkles

In the bucket was that little orange tabby farm kitten.  There were tears and squeals (from me) and hissing from most of the felines already in residence, and temper tantrums from Koa, who felt that he disrupted her plot to overthrow the free world.  The little dude had something of a deathwish; he would want a playmate, so he'd scamper up to Popoki (who handled his arrival best), bop her in the nose with his paw, and skitter away, waiting for her to give chase.  Most of the time, Po ignored him.  If he got too persistent, she'd whomp him on the head, and he'd go find someone else to bother.  And when none of the other cats would play with him, Pa'ani would make friends with the stuffed kitties in the house...and play with them.

That part of the story sent the Fries into giggles.

"How did Popoki come?" Medium wanted to know next.

I explained how we'd heard of a family who needed homes for their litter of kittens, and there were four: two brown, one orange tabby, and Po.  Then Medium asked what our other kitties thought.  I explained that Po was our only kitty at that time.

"How did Ke-Ke come?" Medium wanted to know next.

So I told that story: neighbors in our apartment complex had a mommy kitty, a daddy kitty, and now a litter of five kittens.  And when we went to see them, Keiki hurled herself at the armchair Hubby was standing by, clawed her way up to the seat cushion, traipsed to the back of the chair, pulled her way up that, then launched herself at Hubby and climbed up his clothes, all the way to his shoulder...where she curled up, exhausted, and took a nap.  (Ke was the runt of her litter, and would fit easily in my hand at 4.5 weeks old then.)

We went through the others, too: how we'd fostered the mama cat and litter of six kittens that Koa and Minou came from, and I'd watched Minou be born; how we'd gotten Mika at a farm, too, to help ease my hurt after Papa C (Hubby's dad) passed away.

When we got home, I went looking for the box of old pictures that I have.  I can't find some of the earliest shots of Pa'ani, including the staged one I took of him in his chicken bucket, but I found some of them.  And I found pictures of Koa and Minou's litter when they were babies.

I think the Fries will love seeing them tomorrow night.

Best Friends

I've been meaning to write this post for about two weeks now.

As I've been recuperating, I've made sure to surround myself with my closest friends.  Friends cheer you up and send you chocolate (or, like Springrayn, they send you silly T-shirts with sitcom catch-phrases on them and then kitty slippers from another sitcom) and cards and generally remind you that they're still going to love you even though you're grouchy, hopped up on pain meds, and don't move much because all you want to do is sleep.  They pick stuff up for you when you can't bend over to get it yourself.  They bring you meals.

The big flaw in my slaw has been that my best friend JJ lives six hours away.  She's been recovering from surgery too; hers was on her thyroid.  It would have been nice if we could've hung out while we were both stuck at home recuperating!  Her surgery made it difficult for her to talk for very long, so while we talked several times a week, we tried not to talk for long, since I didn't want to stress her throat.  If we'd lived in the same general area, we could have gotten together.  I know I could have talked enough for both of us.  I've done it before.  We read through a series of seven books together, me reading out loud to her.  (You might remember that JJ is blind.)

But that brings me around to my other best friends...the ones that live quietly in my home, on my shelves, just waiting for me to pick them back up.

My favorite books.

When I went to the hospital, I tucked three of my favorite books into the bag I was bringing.  These were books I'd read many times over (something my dad still doesn't get), and opening them up to read again was like visiting friends among the pages.  One of the books was the one my husband refers to as my favorite "feel better" book—the book I pull out when I'm really worried or concerned.  He says he always knows I'm feeling scared or just off if I bring that book out.  The night before the surgery, I brought up the books in my favorite historical romance series.  (Hubby just gave me an indulgent, humoring smile when I explained the piles of books on the bed as wanting my "friends" nearby.  At least he understands me.)

So.

I didn't feel like doing much for the first week that I was home from the hospital.  I took over Hubby's big oversized, chair-and-a-half in the living room as my recuperation spot.  I had my tablet and my phone if I felt the need to email.  I had the TV.  I had my books.

I had been reading The Guardian in the hospital, and continued rereading it after I got home.  Second in Dee Henderson's famed O'Malley Series, it's one of my favorites.  The action starts fast and the suspense rarely lets up.  Within the first 50 pages, there's a murder (a federal judge), a search for the shooter (who remains at large), and a very angry mob boss.

I turned the page to where the angry mobster makes his first appearance in the story as an actual character, not simply a referenced person.

And I jumped back in time, in my own memories, to sitting in JJ's loft den, taking a sip of Dr Pepper before reading on.

"You killed a federal judge!  Just like that...poof! I will kill a federal judge!"

I remembered the intensity I injected into the words as I read them aloud.  It wasn't often, in the books JJ and I had read together, that there was this kind of invective speech. The mob boss was livid, and it was fun to shout out his lines of dialogue as he railed at the shooter.

In that moment, although I sat alone in the living room, it was almost as if I was sitting with JJ again.  I whispered the words aloud in a fiery hiss, and giggled.

Even though we were hundreds of miles apart, my dearest friend had never been closer to my heart than in that moment.

The F Word

Scene: Our kitchen, this morning, as the kids are putting on coats and shoes and getting ready to walk over to school.

Medium Fry: Lawrge, dat's not nice.  You shouldn't say da "F" wowrd.

Hubby, who had been merely waiting for the Fries to be ready, perked up at Medium's somewhat hushed words.

Hubby: What?

Medium: Lawrge said da "F" wowrd!

Large: Did not!

Hubby: What is it?

Medium: Lawrge said da "F" wowrd!

Large [looking somewhat guilty]: Did not!

Hubby: What is it?

Medium: Not a'posed to say it.

Hubby: You need to tell me what it is.

Medium [softly]: Fat.