Step Into My Thimble

I had to park it in my parents’ garage and hold the hair dryer to the lock for a half hour to make it work again.

Suppose your kid seems really really tired around 7:15, so you start the bedtime ritual.

Suppose then that your kid resists sleep until 10:30, pacing back and forth transporting crayons between bedrooms one at a time for almost an hour without stopping.

And then suppose the kid only sleeps until 1:30, waking almost hourly until 4:30, and then thrashing around until you finally give in and get up at 6:30. Because you still have to sleep in the same bed with your kid, otherwise you really would never get any sleep. (And suppose the night before was pretty similar, only at one of the wee-hour wakeups, you realize you have just been dreaming about sleeping in your own coffin with the cataloger from work.)

After that, suppose you finish the morning prep ritual on time, only to head out to the car and realize there’s six inches of snow on it, with a layer of ice underneath, and nobody had time to shovel the driveway either.

And then suppose you make it to the day care location (grandma’s) and have a successful dropoff, only to arrive at your place of work just minutes beyond the time when all the parking places are totally filled, forcing you to park a really long way away from your building.

And then suppose you get to your office, sit down, and realize that the breakfast you packed that you never have time to eat during said morning prep ritual is actually your child’s breakfast, and she has yours, meaning you have to make it through five hours of work on a third of a cup of raisin oatmeal.

Then suppose that at work, you and your growling stomach have to sit through an all-staff meeting that includes a segment on flu pandemics, and not “if” but “when,” and find yourself overcome with self-pity over how you are going to die at 45 in a horrible plague that wipes out 60% of the world’s population. Those people from 1918 and 1919 you’re occasionally asked to research don’t seem so abstract anymore. Then suppose you recognize that you have a child, a young, innocent child in front of whom a huge world of possibility lies, and then you get doubly overcome with fear and dread. Flu pandemics are totally not cool.

And finally, suppose you get home and chat with your husband about how it seems things are crawling on you, only to have him agree, and then you realize that the flea problem from last October that you both thought was taken care of really isn’t. (And you also realize that in your family of three plus cat, you’re still the only one the fleas are actually biting–including the cat. Isn’t there a neurotoxin for people too?)

There were some other high and low points mixed in there, but that was pretty much my day.

On these kinds of days, I avoid mirrors, because the odds are high I’ll have snot on my shirt or in my hair, or something on inside out.

Oh 2008, on what a thrilling note you begin!

I am knitting Maeve another sweater, and I’m going to set up a sewing station to work on a patchwork quilt for her. I am trying to sort out day care and increased work hours, and to buy a car. I have giant new projects at work. My mind is barely managing all 9 million details. I have answered a meme, and provided a Maeve update, below.

A new picture of something better than my visage will be here, eventually.
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