10 Things I'm Grateful For When I'm Sick

1. Flannel sheets

2. Popsicles - especially banana flavored ones

3. Constant Comment tea - with lots of sugar. Well, Splenda, now. And a splash of milk.

4. A warm, soft down comforter

5. Ricola cough drops - have to be original, though, not lemon.

6. The kind of Kleenex with the lotion in it. Just don't try to clean your glasses with them. Bad idea.

7. Lite canned peaches and toast.

8. Aspirin. It's white magic.

9. Michael's touch. I think he was a healer in a former life, I swear it.

10. Leftover antibiotics. (I know, I know! But I always get sick on the weekend, when I'd have to go to the ER to get any, or suffer until Monday - so thank goodness for penicillin I forgot to finish!)

Dustbin Blues

The worst thing about having kids?

I can handle dirty diapers, crayons on the walls, broken keepsakes, peanut butter in the VCR, apple juice all over the keyboard...

But the thing I hate most... is germs.

I've been sick more since the beginning of September (when the kids, coincidentally, started school) than I was all of last year! That's a year's worth of illness packed into three months. What do I have to look forward to for the next seven, I wonder?

Right now, it's strep throat. Yay me. *sigh* A hundred and two degree fever, an all-over body ache and a throat that's on fire. Don't ya wanna be me? Just in time for the weekend, too. Perfect.

Yesterday, I was a cleaning maniac. Today, I'm Cameron in Ferris Bueller... "I'm dying...!"

"When Cameron was in Egypt's land... let our Cameron go..."

Michael made me tea (Constant Comment, my favorite) and toast and brought me aspirin. Looks like I'm going to spend the day in bed. Which, really, isn't necessarily a bad thing, when I think about it. Would be nice to catch up on sleep.

"You're not dying, you just can't think of anything better to do!"

Well, he's got a point. What do I have to do? Hm... so much for those Christmas decorations. Oh well, there's always next weekend.

Besides, I'm still recovering from the annual room cleaning fiasco. Four hours of cleaning, sorting, holding up tiny pieces of plastic and asking, "What's this to?... Do you have that toy anymore?... Isn't that the one you buried in the sand at the old house and then forgot where you buried it?"

What did I discover? Here's the top ten:

1. Six marbles to the chinese checkers game. Glued into the underside of Legos. I didn't, however, find the actual Krazy Glue. Yet.

2. Seven socks that I've been looking for forever tied in knots and made into a "rope" hanging from Zoe's dollhouse bedroom window (which faces the wall - no wonder I didn't see it!) Apparently, she did it during "fire safety week" at school.

3. A naked Fairytopia Barbie with two amputated feet (dog victim, I believe, from the markings) but Michael said, "She's still hot."

4. Zoe had the paper punch, two pairs of scissors, the stapler and four rolls of tape. It took me fifteen minutes to vaccum all of the "confetti" she'd made out of her school library book. I wonder how much I'm going to have to pay to replace, "Miss Spider's Sunny Patch Friends"?

5. Eight dollars and twenty-nine cents in change.

6. Four spoons, a very bent and deformed fork, and lots of peanut butter sandwich cracker wrappers.

7. The dog's leash (I wondered where that was!)

8. A line of McDonald's french fries along the baseboard behind the dresser leading up to a peach pit. It was like the perfect ant-highway!

9. A bottle of nail polish. Red. Thankfully, they couldn't get the top off.

10. Two pairs of tweezers, a slew of bandaids put on various stuffed animals, and last but not least, and empty contact case. I'm pretty sure they DID have contacts in them at one point.

Okay, I have a date with Ferris Bueller, a box of Kleenex, and a down comforter. G'nite!

Why Haven't They Made a Vaccine For THIS?!

We're getting satellite Internet. The wireless-connection thing isn't working out. It goes out constantly. Drives me crazy.

The guy called yesterday to set up installation for this afternoon.

Of course, this morning, I woke up with the stomach flu.

And Michael had to go to work--had something he couldn't miss.

So I changed the cat litter, did the dishes and vaccumed, in the midst of breaking out into a cold sweat and puking. How fun.

The guy said he'd be here by noonish. I called his cell around 2pm, and he was all confused. "I think I mixed you up with someone else when I scheduled with you."

Oh. Great. So he's coming out tomorrow.

At least the house is clean for tomorrow, even if I had to practically kill myself in the process.

Except the dishes.

Michael's making dinner for himself and the kids. (I'm not eating. The thought of food at this point is about as appealing to me as signing up for an 8 am Calculus class is to a college student.)

But I know better than to expect him to put a dish in the dishwasher. *sigh*

When anyone else is sick, they get everything done for them--usually all by me. But when I'm sick? I get the equivalent of "Walk it off, ya baby!"

Oh well.

If I die before tomorrow morning, someone please tell them I want the following on my tombstone:

"I told you I was sick!"