Huxley acting strangely, maybe he's sick!

My house is usually chaotic at 6 pm, people need to be fed and bedtime awaits right around the corner. Anyways after we battled or I battled through the evening and into the night, well by the night we weren’t battling anymore, I knew that my little monster just didn’t feel well, it was either he was upset from the epic temper tantrum I forced him to have in his room or was just plain sick. And just as I drifted off to sleep at 10:30, maybe 30 minutes after he finally did, he woke me up howling in his bed and he was covered in barf. Poor gaffer, he has NEVER barfed before so was horrified. So I bathed him while Geoff de-barfed the room and changed his sheets and he sat in the bath shivering saying “I okay, mommy cean it all up, it all better now”. At this point given the flurry of activity and tears and running bathwater Lux was up sobbing that she couldn’t sleep through the racket and took herself downstairs. He barfed once more about an hour later cuddling with Geoff in a chair, had another bath and hair wash, PJ change and finally fell asleep at midnight. No more barfing. But I did hear him maybe at 1 or 2 in the am singing “Old Macdonald”. He seems perfectly fine this am, but full of stories from his epic night. And he went to his “music party” as he calls it and at the end marched right up to the teacher to give her a hug and said “thank you, see you next week”.

a few weeks in

and lux seems totally adjusted to being back at school. i would say that the mandatory snack in the classroom and her eating her WHOLE lunch each day is making things better/easier for her. although she eats me out of house and home when she gets home.

she happily jumps into her homework, we usually do most of the week's worth on mondays so the rest of the week we don't need to worry about. she will have a hot bath, put on her PJ's and we sit and do her homework and then her and huxley play and we eat dinner (this is after her 30 minute swim team practice from 330 to 4 when she swims i bet no less than 30 lengths of the pool). then she passes out in bed at 715. AND then we tackle huxley and his bath and bedtime routine, which some nights is pretty tricky, like tonight at 850 pm when he sat in tears in the living room with me in the dark, not sure what he wanted. either he doesn't feel good or he's upset that he was sent to his room and wasn't allowed out and a massive tantrum ensued. likely not the best move on my part but i try my best and it was either having a blood boiling tantrum in his room or in any other part of the house.

nite nite,time for a bath and my book. i've been sleeping so i'm keeping a pretty strict routine for me to see if i can maintain it.

i'm sick!

i've been in bed for two days, today i'm worse than yesterday. i have a cold and i feel fevery and every joint and muscle in my body ache. and huxley when he sees me in bed shouts at me "get up". i know buddy its disconcerting to see one's parents in bed sick when you are 2, i get it, parents don't get sick days, when we do everything is upside down. a day or two in bed used to be a treat, magazines, ice cream, cokes...now its a dread of the laundry i'll face when i get out of bed and what will everyone do for dinner and what about lux's lunch? but the fridge is full of leftovers and geoff can make a lunch and presumably the laundry and vacuuming will still be waiting for me, when i do decide to get up and out of bed. i think, or know geoff thinks i'm crazy that i worry or think about these things, but my house like his job is a precarious balance of things always on the verge of not working, a day or two off of grocery shopping and house work could really send me in a panic, like a day or two of missed deliverables would for him (and i work too, so i know this, so there, put that in your god damned pipe and smoke it). and lux needs new ballet shoes and at least 2 new good fitting, quality swimsuits and googles and i the swimsuits need to be purchased, well by thursday ideally, as do the ballet shoes for sure and i know its only monday but when will i get to this if i have a mountain of grocery shopping, meal planning, house work, lunches, planning car pools in front of me?? and a few big work deliverables that i don't even know how or where to start.

i don't know how moms that work fulltime out of the house manage, i don't, either they don't sleep or their houses are a wreck or their husbands vacuum. i feel grateful that i work a bit leaving me lots of time for the other senseless stuff called life. and no one told me (mom) that life is a lot of work and its not a good idea to spend two days concurrent in bed, or at least it does have consequences on the other side.

i didn't mention and it would be unfair to miss mentioning that i had a date tonight with some pals to see The Help and i can't see it now with them that i am sick, thats disappointing.

operation freedom over...maybe

possibly returning to work fulltime, like real work, like get up in the am, get dressed and go to work work, like people are looking for me to do things work, like 40+ hours a week work that really is 50 and consists of the important part of my day 8-6 and bleeds over.

totally unsure if i'm ready or want to do this, if i will ever be ready again.

what happened, was "work" that fucking awful or is parenting that meaningful. probably both, i left fulltime work burnt out, exhausted, dis-enfrantished, uninspired and a whole bunch of other things. that was 1.5 years ago and since then i've become VERY accustomed to my life. my family has become VERY accustomed with my life (unbenounced to them - can someone tell geoffrey this...). but part of me feels ready to leave the nest, at least temporarily. dependant on killer child care and a schedule that not only works for the x's but for me too.

these decisions are never easy for me, well most decisions aren't easy for me, consequently i make very few of them, at least the hard ones.

but i call this operation freedom, maybe its operation "avoid making any challenging decisions and continue to work a little and raise my kids alot and seriously what i want to do with the next 20 years of my life".

too lofty for 10:13 pm for an on and off insomniac.

We're back, well I'm back

I didn't go anywhere but I'm back to writing on this, because I know if I don't I will have only fleeting memories of my kids. Even now that Huxley is 2 and Lux 6 I wonder, was she like him?? 2 is a cute age, my kids by 2 or a little after 2 seem to become normal human beings, well Huxley does, it seems if memory serves me correctly Lux has always been relatively normal. But he is hitting his stride, revealing himself to us and although I believe him to be much less complicated than his sister, what you see is what you get, to say we have struggled with him is an understatement. Gawd you must think we're awful parents demanding perfection - we're not - we're older parents, busy parents, parents without a real safety net of the kind of uncomplicated support that family would provide where and when we could say, not ask "watch the kids on saturday we need to clean out our garage". Nope we don't have that, but we get by and life is full of choices (I remind myself daily). So back to kids, what this is really all about, not me bitching that that I'm breakfast, lunch, dinner, bathes, and bedtimes everyday! So 2 and 6, pretty neat ages, toddler and grade one'er. My grade one'er back in school for a week today, she has adjusted, day one was TERRIBLE, day two marginally better, three through now, pretty good. Night one was a heap at bedtime with tears not quite or actually able at all to articulate her general feelings of insecurity. I could have said "I hear ya sister, I feel like that most days" that the stars didn't align perfectly and someone looked at her funny and she was unsure who to sit with and even when to sit and that summer break was OVER (that in and of itself is a pretty crushing concept and reality to absorb at 6 or at 41), and that maybe her lunch wasn't quite right or maybe her outfit or maybe the teacher or maybe dad or mom. I worried to the point of making myself sick, Geoff braced me, I had a good conversation with my mom and I'm better now and more importantly so is my star, my best gal. My two'er - funny kid, HUGE big personality, fills a room. He has a big boy hair cut and a very big vocabulary, I understand everything he says and he seems to understand me, awesome, we're communicating! When I say no, I know he thinks fuck you but he says to me "okay fine" and thats pretty good because I seem to say "NO" alot. Here are a few of his other funny sayings: whata me noise (what is that noise) pick you up (pick me up) i feezing (I'm freezing) fine (he gets from his sister) okay so (he gets from me) got it (he gets from his dad) He likes books now, Toot and Puddle (or Toot and Cuddle), he LOVES to play with his Thomas Trains and cars. Do all boys lie in their cribs, beds, floors for hours with a car going zoom zoom back and forth? He loves to play kitchen and picnic with Lux's dolls and his teddies "you want milk, you want cacker". His is very responsive to a routine and seems to fly out of order if we adjust it, without notice. Bedtime in particular, bath, "mommy pick you up" - at that time of the day means mommy put me to bed, 'bider (itsy bitsy spider), 4 cock (1, 2, 3, 4 oclock rock), a few books and few cuddles and down. Only until I return back to his room 30-45 later and quickly re-do the routine until he is out, like a light, by that time its close to 9 pm. He likes to sleep, but can rally for a late night, something his sister has never been able to do!