Hello friends (waves hand slowly, while yawning over large tumbler of coffee).
I love to start Monday morning bright-eyed and bushy-tailed!
But, alas, this Monday morning you get bleary-eyed ole me.
The most immediate contributing factor was the 1:30 am wake up call. Sweet eldest boy climbed into bed with us (which is none to easy to find with the remodel) to report tummy pain. This report quickly expanded to, “I think I’m going to throw up.” Since we now have no bathroom anywhere near our bed, I urged him to hurry to his toilet. I quickly followed but heard the retching from the hall.
After quickly losing all Sunday’s food, he laid back down in his own bed while I rubbed his back and drifted right back off to sleep.
I could NOT go back to sleep.
I remembered, vividly, the occasion when all five of us got sick at the exact same time. Brutal. Nothing bonds a family likely all throwing up at the same time. That was when we had TWO FULL bathrooms.
We are currently down to one. That is the reason for much of my other bleariness, more to come.
As my imagination ran away with me, I popped out of the little twin bed I’d folded into so I could collect receptacles. I put plastic bags in the kids trash cans and set them by the kids beds just in case.
Then I laid there and thought of all I have to do and how tired I was and could not go back to sleep.
At 5 am, the youngest woke up for no good reason. And stayed up. And tried to wake the sleepy sick man. I nearly flew at him to relocate him to a space far away.
Bray had to leave early for his long commute to work and I had to be at the office. We had a discussion about options for the eldest. He had NO symptoms other than coming home from the movies yesterday saying the milkshake he ate make his stomach hurt. That, followed by throwing up, and zero other symptoms led Bray and I to figure that he had some sort of food poisoning and could go to school.
Now, regardless of whether it was food or a bug, I had NEVER sent a kid to school the next day. My friends have done it but I always had the option of a nanny or a husband. This is a new scenario for our family now with both parents working far from home but no nanny. We’re just living like every other working family now. It’s hard. I put my mom on call in case he couldn’t stay.
So I dropped the kids and rushed to work later than usual, voxing my best friend about my utter bleariness.
The other contributing factor for my general exhaustion and constant headache is being in the midst of a pretty messy remodel. Everyone warned me. And thousands of Houstonians are doing it for far less optional reasons, but WHOA.
We signed a contract to remodel the back of our house the week Hurricane Harvey hit. Then, after a couple of weeks of the world being upside down, we met with the team and offered to give our contract to someone who flooded and needed it more. They said that in mid September no one was ready to go because their houses were still drying out and claims were being processed. So off we went.
This week is the start of week 4. The first two weeks came with minimal disruption because they worked only on the mud room and laundry room on the side of our play room. But at the end of last week we lost our washer and dryer (hopefully to return to connection tomorrow!) and they demo-ed our master bathroom and laundry room down to the studs (before and after):
Which basically means we don’t have the back half of our house. It’s under large sheets of thin plastic paper taped from ceiling to floor.
There are bugs everywhere. We all have mosquito bites because, well, in Houston in mid October it’s humid and 90 degrees.
Trash heaps line our driveway and backyard.
We can’t find anything. Kleenex box? Nope. Piano practice book? Who knows. My underwear? Most of it is trapped in a drawer under plastic somewhere.
We have had several snafus. A few fights (between spouses and between us and the contractors). Certain things don’t look like I thought they were supposed to and there are still a lot of unknowns.
Half of my wardrobe is on the dining room table.
Five of us are using the kids small-ish bathroom.
First world problems, I know, but it is keeping me awake.
Is he coughing in the other room because of the dust? They recommend fluorescent lights for the laundry room – do they make cute ones? I think my light fixtures are more modern, will they go with the room? Where are my black flats? Do we have enough clean uniforms?
And on and on.
So I’m bleary-eyed, but at work.
And oh, the nurse called. He needs to be picked up from school. My mom to the rescue. He made it an hour and a half. Life. It’s a rollercoaster.
Leave a Reply