So my week has felt like I am on some single-parent
challenge episode of “Survivor”. A.J.’s
hours are peaking again- well that word gives one the illusion that they will
be getting shorter sometime soon and that is not true. But there are weeks when the hours get to me
more than others. Enough of that rant
though, I am grateful he has a job that he is good at and overall likes and
that I can be home with my little monkeys.
This week on top of the long hours, he had to go to Connecticut to pack
up his grandmother’s apartment which he found out very last minute. Thursday night he left and he is currently
enroute back here with one of my brothers-in-law who we flew up to Connecticut
for the day to help A.J. finish packing up the pod that will be taken to a
storage place. A.J. will get home late
tonight then heads out to Denver on an early flight in the morning for the next
five days for work. And in a genius move
on my part, this is also the week that I scheduled a mini art camp at my
house. Only the main living room/kitchen
area that needs to be kept really clean and the bathroom of course. I can do this!
A.J. and I are once again looking for options to expand our
space, options that would be a temporary bandaid until we can do the one major
addition that is our ultimate goal. I am
also hoping to slowly grow my open studio idea and thus whatever space we are
able to add, I am hoping to also use for this purpose. I can’t explain it completely, just feel that
now is the time to get my studio off the ground. I hope to teach a couple classes from the
house/whatever space we come up with and then would love love love to begin my
open studio for kids and adults affected by medical illnesses, at least in some
small capacity. So over the past couple
weeks, we have been exploring the options from a funky sort of shed converted
into a studio to a gazebo that would be able to be used three out of four
seasons. This past Tuesday evening A.J.
had scheduled an appointment for a contractor to come out to give us an
estimate on a sunroom where our current carport/porch area is. In a perfect world, A.J. would have been home
for this meeting or even arrived a few minutes late. In our chaotic world, it was me, the four
kids, and the crotch sniffing coonhound meeting with this gentleman. He did actually ask at one point if I wanted
to reschedule the meeting for another time when A.J. would be home. “No, sir, let’s just continue this highly
informative little meeting while three of my children climb up my legs or yell
in my face and yours and the dog sticks her nose in your private areas”. A full hour later, all I got was that the
sunroom idea is way out of our current budget and my kids were beyond starving
for their dinner.
Thursday brought our quarterly visit from Cameron the Ant
Man- yes, we are on a first name basis.
Shockingly the ants usually don’t take up camp in the kitchen or dining
areas of our house- based on three sets of sticky fingers, this would be no
surprise to me. Nope, the ants
apparently like the bathroom and the well closet in the basement. They tend to make their debut in the spring
as it gets really damp outside. The
night before and the morning of our ant man visit, A.J. and I move furniture
and toys and shelves of toys away from the basement wall and I do my best to
give the appearance of keeping a semi-clean house. The boys get super-hyped to see the ant man
and his cool truck. The ant man comes in
and I go over the areas in need of bait and spray, he takes care of that and
then I herd Moxie back inside while he goes to do the outside treatment. This time I make sure I have shut the
basement door since on one of the ant man’s last visits, I wasn’t paying close
attention and Moxie bolted downstairs and by the time I found her she was
licking the entire perimeter where he sprayed. I immediately called the pest control place
and was reassured that she had not consumed enough poison to do any
damage. On this visit, the ant man found
the nest from where most of the ants seemed to be travelling from to our
house. It happened to be under one of
the caps of our gate on the side of our house. WOOHOO! You’d have thought he had struck gold by how
excited I got over the news that the nest had been located and obliterated.
Friday afternoon the boys, Moxie, and I picked Josie up at
school and headed to my parents’ house where we were going to have a sleepover
and also help watch my sister Nikki’s kids so she could go out with her husband
to dinner for her birthday. Except that
after being there for all of ten minutes I felt Jimmy’s head and he seemed
really hot. All four of the kids
currently have this cold, cough, runny nose thing, but now Jimmy looked super
droopy. Took his temperature and sure
enough 102.4 degrees. After scrambling
as usual to get things figured out, I reloaded the dog and boys and left Josie
to have a sleepover with my parents and headed home to quarantine. This also put yet another cramp in my plans
for tonight as I was supposed to head to Josie’s school auction, the auction
which I had busted my butt to help with her class’s basket as well as the class
craft. I had accepted that due to having
to take care of his grandmother’s stuff, A.J. wouldn’t be able to go. But I was so looking forward to getting out
and hanging out with some grownups and just kicking back. My sister Yvette and her husband were going
to keep the four kids for me. Now that
Jimmy was sick, that option was off the table.
Now to pray that A.J. would somehow get everything done and get home in
time so I could at least make an appearance even if that meant getting there a
little late.
After a very sleepLESS night with all three of my buddies
and Jimmy complaining about his throat hurting, I decided today that I should
probably take Jimmy and Sawyer to one of those Minute Clinics. Got there and was excited to see that there
was no one waiting ahead of us, but then I saw the out to lunch sign on the
door and realized we had 20 minutes to kill in CVS before the nurse
practitioner would be back. Twenty
minutes of free time by myself would be glorious and I’d probably just browse
the magazines or makeup aisle. Twenty
minutes with all three of my boys meant dragging Bart who was in the snap n go
stroller along behind the tiny CVS cart which was filled with Jimmy and Sawyer
in a noisy caravan around the store. The
contents of my cart by the end of those twenty minutes: paper towels, lots of
antibacterial hand soap, 5 boxes of tissues, infant Tylenol, kids’ motrin and
cough medicine, one medium sized bouncy ball, one toy train, one nerf gun, a
kids’ crafts magazine, and a decorating with flea market finds magazine. Yep, that is my life. Turns out that I knew the nurse practitioner
from when I worked at the hospital which was awesome because I didn’t feel
quite the strong compulsion I usually do to apologize for my little
monsters. Though I am sure the student
who was observing the nurse practitioner thought we seemed like some silly circus
act. Three ear infections between the
two older boys and one negative rapid strep test later, we headed over to the
pharmacy dropoff window. Sawyer tried to
bounce his ball over the dropoff counter and thankfully did not succeed. He did succeed at bouncing it into the entire
rack of reading glasses. Grabbed the
medicine the second it was filled, paid for it, then headed towards the front
of the store to stock up on Gatorade and milk and the candy bars, a couple
grubby little hands grabbed along the way.
Fast forward through the medicine administering, medicine
charting(no way I could keep track otherwise with four kids and colds and two
on antibiotics), hang out around the house afternoon and evening. A long pause
in the middle of my blogging to feed the kids and keep them occupied. A.J. just got back around 10:30 so I spent my
Saturday night home with my sick peeps.
Spending some quick bonding time with my Hunky while he packs then will
be praying for patience and serenity to get through the week til Thursday when
A.J. gets back. May the force be with
me!
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