No sooner do I, .....

That child likes to make a liar out of me. Also, M warned me about typing anything related to her sleep. She woke up Thursday night with a fever and a cough, which naturally disrupted her sleep. I took yet another sick day on Friday, but to be honest, I needed the day off, too.

Yeah, I've been going nuts this week. Cursing this working mom crap. Angry at winter. Hating my students. Having a sick kid was exactly what I needed to refocus. Laurel was wandering around this morning, looking bleary-eyed, and rubbing her head a lot. We asked her what hurt. "Gogle gook," she said. I have no idea what that means.Then she brought over a bottle of tylenol and opened her mouth wide like a little bird. So maybe goggle gook means "I have a headache, please bring me some tylenol and put me back to bed"? She napped all morning after that.

I was reading the New York Times this morning and came across this piece on mom blogs. Mom blogs are all the rage. People either are passionately devoted to a mom blogger or they despise her and flame her blog with all kinds of hateful comments. This article is about how mom bloggers seem to attract tragedy, or sometimes the blog is born out of a tragedy. One of the bloggers cited just happened to be a victim of the Tucson shooting.

I was suddently very grateful for the lack of tragedy in our lives. For all the concussions and vandalism and burglary and traffic accidents of the recent past, we are all alive and healthy. I was in a terrible mood last night because someone stole the porch lights off the side of our house. Luckily my dad came to the rescue and put some new lights up. And then packed Laurel up and took her home with him.

I have a good dad.

M canceled his camping trip and we instead stayed at home and ordered a pizza and ate it right out of the box, both of us sitting in the armchair together with a blanket over our legs. We had a heart to heart about living here and life dreams and where we want to go in the future and what we should do with all the anger you feel when someobody screws with you or your stuff.

I have a good husband.

And even as I'm typing those words, a whole flood of other kind acts starts washing over me, and even though I'm sitting alone at the dining room table I suddenly feel like Patti and Karen and Sarah and Stephanie and my mom and Leah and Caveman and Marlene and David and my great aunts and the executive director from the Community Design Center of Pittsburgh are all sitting here giving me a giant hug. And then I feel like I'm at the Academy Awards making a babbling speech where I suddenly realize there's a whole lot of other people to thank, and the music is playing and I'm chased off stage.

So now I will tell you a funny story about Laurel. She is in that stage where she likes to find things and bring them to us. Or alternately, she likes to take things from us and stash them places. There are blocks and pacificers and pieces of toy trucks hidden in the pantry. When she finds crumbs or old cheerios on the floor she puts them in the little sauce pot on the bottom shelf, that is, if she's not hungry at the moment. On Thursday morning, as I was getting dressed she ran off with my glasses. I'm terribly blind without my glasses. There is no possibility of me being able to drive or function at work whatsoever without them. So picture a half dressed mama and daddy chasing a half dressed toddler yelling, "Where did you put them? Where are the glasses? Go bring the glasses to mommy!" And picture also Laurel running around with excitement because we don't usually have time to play chase in the morning and isn't this fun! And when we finally caught her and asked her again, she said "dadish" and pointed at the record player, and of course they weren't there.

Eventually, I found them under the radiator.