Finally Friday

It’s the last day of the longest week ever. It started out quite motherly, when T3 woke up with strep. I didn’t know it was strep at the time, but he had a fever, and he said his “mouth hurt.” I swung into action, fluffing pillows, utilizing the thermometer, bringing in drinks and ice chips. Since he’s five, I figured “mouth” meant his throat, so I called the doctor. Strep is, after all, always going around.

I got him all situated with his beverages, let him have a popcicle for breakfast, set him up in bed to watch 101 Dalmations. He seemed so miserable. I never bothered to check his forehead again, just waited for his afternoon appointment. So we made it to the doctor, Ee (who’s 2) in tow. When we got into the exam room, he mentioned again that his mouth hurt and he pulled it open to show me what appeared to be a canker sore. Freaking great, I thought, I’m paying three figures for a pimple in his cheek. (We have an HSA and haven’t hit our deductible yet.) At that point, he had no fever either, so I really worried that I was going to look like a looney mom. Turned out he had strep though. Woo-hoo! Was it wrong for me to be psyched that I wasn’t wasting time and money?

He went back to school on Wednesday. He seemed ready, but then in the afternoon, he was something else entirely. While he was there, I took the morning to run a few errands that had been on the shelf for the first part of the week. I took Ee to the mall, and she basically went insane there. First of all, she didn’t want to sit in the stroller, so she took off running. She was running in the racks, pulling out all kinds of crazy stuff and demanding I buy it for her. No way I’m buying an umbrella for a 2-year-old. Also, I’m not buying her Strawberry Shortcake underwear. She doesn’t even like Strawberry Shortcake, in fact, I doubt she even knows who the hell Strawberry Shortcake is. But more importantly, she’s not even potty-trained.

After school, I still had to make a quick trip to the grocery store, that ended up taking me an hour. I don’t know if you’ve ever taken a five-year-old and a two-year-old together to the grocery store, but if you haven’t had that “pleasure,” let me tell you, you might as well just hit your hand with a hammer, because it’s just about the same amount of fun. I went to the second-closest, and coincidentally also second-dirtiest grocery store in town, where T3 proceeded to bounce down the aisles like a pinball. He wanted this, he wanted that. Don’t you want this, Mom? Don’t you want that? I couldn’t hear myself think. At one point, he dropped the cap to the bottle of water I had gotten him, and after chasing it across the floor in front of the meat section, he picked it up and put it in his mouth. Aaaahhh!!! Just lucky he was already taking antibiotics. Meanwhile, waiting for cheese at the deli counter, I looked over, and there was Ee, licking the back of the seat in the shopping cart. Aaaaaahhh!! I wish I could tell you it got better from there, but basically the day was just a wash…of stress.

Thursday I was a little more “in tune” to what he really needed. He was so tired after school, that he just wasn’t making sense. I had walked to pick him up from school. I knew he’d want a snack and a drink, so I brought him water and a baggie full of goldfish. We stopped by to see his stylist down the street, who said she could squeeze him in for a cut if we could wait fifteen minutes. While we were waiting, I polished off my own water bottle, and he freaked out. “Thanks, Mom,” he yelled. “Thanks for finishing off my only bottle of water!” But he was holding his own bottle (3/4 full) under his arm. No amount of reasoning could make him see that it was there. He was just so out of it. I took him home and put him to bed, where he snoozed for three hours.

Overall, tensions were high all week for all of us, even with the good weather. We are finally starting to get outside, and we need that. We need outside, and we need our naps.

We’ll see what tomorrow will bring.