The Queen's Rambles

I hate having a poor, sick baby. It is so heart breaking to see her feeling so ill and yet be powerless to do anything to help her. I hold her, comfort her, try to give her ibuprofen (which she always pukes all over me and everything else, projectile style). But really? She is sick and it sucks and I want to fix her.

Ok, so that was written several hours ago. The day has not gotten any better. After going to bed at 2 am (yes, you read that right, she was quite a happy, sick baby in middle of the night) and having her cry hysterically every hour on the hour, she’s progressed from coughing and feverish to coughing, feverish, and clearly having stomach distress.

I thought she was just puking up her Tylenol because she didn’t like it, but now she’s just randomly puking. I was supposed to go to a holiday party tonight, but I don’t think anyone is going to welcome someone with eu de puke as their perfume of choice. I made a huge, lovely peppermint fudge cake, but I don’t feel comfortable serving anything out of my home knowing that stomach bugs are lurking.

Will the rest of us get sick just in time for Christmas? Or will we be safe since we have older, more mature immune systems? I’ve read that kids who eat their boogers have better immune systems, so Erik must have an immune system made of steel. Maybe we’ll all be ok. Cross your fingers!

In better news, today was a great mail day! We received more Christmas cards today than we had total bringing us up to a decent 16 cards. We even got a beautiful hand drawn picture of Erik from quiet contrary! Thank you! Erik was very inspired. He’s never seen art quite like that before, so now he wants to be an artist. He drew a picture of himself that he’s very proud of, though it just looks like squiggles to me. I’m all for anything that inspires the boy to sit down and do some art.

We also received school pictures of my niece and nephew. Erik decided he didn’t like them because the background was ugly (he wasn’t kidding. I don’t think the background could have been any uglier if the company had tried) so he crushed them up and ripped them.

Guess who was not a calm and graceful mother in that moment?

This was all exacerbated by lack of food for both me and Erik. Me, because I hadn’t had time to eat anything today between caring for cranky baby and changing pukey clothes and Erik because he flat out refused. He said he would only eat peppermint mousse, so I guess it wasn’t a total refusal, but despite my love of sweets I don’t find peppermint mousse to be an appropriate meal for a growing boy. Or anyone, really. Maybe a true Christmas elf, if the movie Elf is to be believed.

What else?

I had a pretty good day yesterday. My friend and I took a couple of hours and went to lunch and did a little shopping in a retail area. It was very nice to leave Mike in charge of the kids and have a couple of hours where I didn’t have to wipe any butts, listen to constant jabber and be expected to have a response, or do any math problems. This is all I hear all day long: What’s 65 + 54? How many zeros does 1000 have? How many quarters are in 51 dollars? Are you a million days old?

We had lunch at a fairly decent Mexican place (very rare in this area) and spent way too much money at Barnes and Noble. I need to take back some of the things I bought. I swear I have become my grandmother. She used to go shopping all the time just to have some company, then she’d return everything. I’ve just been returning things recently because it’s my new money saving technique. I don’t really like it. It’s a major pain in the ass. But? It does save money. I am a terrible impulse shopper, so lately I’ve been putting all my receipts on my bulletin board then if something doesn’t live up to all my impromptu hopes and dreams I take it back. This may train me out of impulse shopping because I hate standing in line to take things back. Customers at the service desks seem to be universally stupid, insane, or entitled.

And now it’s time to go cook dinner. Mike is home early. Yay!!!!!