Some interesting anniversaries here...
This is the longest I have not been pregnant in the last 8 1/2 years.
It has now been one year since any one in our house has had anything contagious. To be precise... Jared had a sore throat one evening a year ago, so he drank extra water, took a vitamin c, and went to bed. In the next few days all three kids had a 24-hour fever with a runny nose in this order: Lazarus, Anne, Laurel. And I never felt ANYTHING, which is very odd. So I think it was the flu. The kids and I had been vaccinated, but not Jared. He must have brought it home to us and the kids vaccinations made it short, and mine made it nonexistent. And Jared never actually got sick, as usual. All of the illnesses we have had in the meantime, during Covid precautions, have strictly been food poisoning (toddler ate something in the yard) or stress-related. I have never gone more than a few months without a respiratory or intestinal bug in my whole life, so this is distinctly awesome. Masking for life might be worth it!!!
And almost a year ago was the last time we taught in our cabin before moving our work 100% to the outbuildings and taking over our tiny space just for family. It's been amazing.
...in the "not in anniversaries" category...
Recently a friend posted up a picture roll of awkward kitchens and kitchen design fails, saying they made her head hurt. I looked through those and without a doubt, my kitchen as it currently stands, would easily fit the rubric. It's totally annoying, but that us neither here nor there...
Yesterday night, my bathroom went through a rearrangement which makes it similarly annoying, but hopefully more sanitary.
As you may already know from reading my blog, we have a slope in the bathroom floor which goes back under a corner of shelving. It is always problematic, and I had just been thinking about getting up the nerve to clean under there again, when at actual bedtime, my two youngest suddenly decided to bail out their bath onto the floor using the cats' water dishes. I won't go into all the grossness the clean up entailed, other than to say it took an hour and deserved the phrase "Gag a maggot." Now, the black industrial shelving sits directly next to the tub, which is accesses by a twist and a turn past the toilet and round the sink, and the two toddler potties are in the low point. I hope, that despite it's absolute lack of any feng shui, it should keep down the lakes and pond scum, to put it politely.
Jared had to go to bed early last night due to his class this morning, so I sent him into his own bed, our bedtime rituals in the kid's room notwithstanding, and volunteered to get the Chaos Monkeys down on my own. Because at this point, the evening was truly late and had devolved into pure chaos. I normally tidy the kids bedroom during their ablutions to make it passable for responsive and responsible adults in the night, but see previous paragraph, and instead, every possession of theirs was in an uneven mound on the floor. Two of them has been running about the cabin for 45 minutes unclothed except for a large blanket over their heads, whooping and crashing into things while I removed pond scum and lakes and soggy garbage from the bathroom. So I closed the door to their bedroom, turned off the light, and sat there in club-bouncer mode until they got dressed and lay down Somewhere, Anywhere. After everyone calmed down, probably after another 45 minutes in the dark, all four of us and Nutmeg wound up in Lazarus's bed. Eventually I transferred sleeping Laurel to her bed, and Anne went up to her bunk, where I lay down with her until she went to sleep...and then I went to my own bed and it was 1:15 in the morning.
You win some, and you lose some. And you win if you don't lose your temper. So I scored a whole lot of points while breathing just like they taught you in the birth class and calmly reminding people I would lie down with them once they were lying down themselves (and I was sure they would not be playing with the lightswitch and running out of the room trying to wake up Jared). And today is another day. It was a crummy way to end Sunday, but I am really proud of how I handled all of it.
In other news, last week was midwinter break, and Anne busked five evenings at the light rail station and made enough to pay off something big she owed.
And... friends and relatives in Texas and Oregon are still without power or water (or are under boil water orders) variously, having found modern life and winter storms quite incompatible.
