Tuesday, October 11, 2022

It's a Sick Day (and ten other random facts)

Fact #1: Zoe is home from school today with a recurring cough she gets every 4-6 weeks. Luckily, I don't have anything dire on the schedule, other than IEP meetings for my two youngest, but Scotty will be home in time for me to go to those. It's nice to not have to rearrange anything. I'm a fan of "convenient sickness." Now hopefully she gets feeling better quickly. I'm patient about it today, but I'll be annoyed by it tomorrow. 

(Update: it’s now “tomorrow,” and Zoe’s doctor said she can return to school today, but at the time I’m writing this, she is still asleep. Zoe is on two inhalers. She didn’t cough at all last night, but I want to see what she sounds like this morning before I send her out into the world. You can label it asthma, but if you’re the person in the room coughing, no one cares about the reason. They just hate you). 

Fact #2: I just want to point out that my youngest child is seven, and I still can't go to the bathroom uninterrupted. 

Fact #3: While we were in Florida last month, I discovered two interesting things about myself. 

Thing 1: I get in and out of bed in a really strange way. I discovered this because I fell out of bed twice at our vacation home. It turns out, the way I get out of bed doesn't work on that bed. I didn't know how weird my bed exiting strategy was until I found myself on the floor. I wasn't sure what went wrong until it happened the second time. When I get out of bed, I do a strange maneuver with my leg that brings me to a sitting position. At home, I have a log bed, and there are logs around the base of my mattress which I now know are pertinent to my method. 

After becoming aware of my strange bed exiting method, I noticed I also have a very weird way of getting into bed. I don't really have the words to describe the procedure, but essentially, I roll into bed. It's slightly acrobatic. The other day I decided I was going to force myself to sit down on my bed and then move to a lying position. It felt uncomfortable and forced, so I immediately went back to my rolling technique. 

Now I want to see videos of how everyone gets in and out of bed. I'm going to have to create a Tik Tok challenge. But the thing is… when you’re thinking about how you get in and out of bed, it’s hard to do what you normally do. So my Tik Tok challenge has already given us one more way to misrepresent ourselves online. 

Thing 2: I make compulsive, repetitive finger movements when I'm walking. Always. I've never even known that I do it, but one day in Florida I had something sticky on my finger, and that's when I noticed it. Now that I'm aware of it, I realize I do it any time I'm walking without something in my hands. And heck! I'm doing it right now in between typing sentences, which makes me wonder if I do it just as much when I'm not walking, or if I'm doing it because I'm thinking about it. 

Fact #4: Today I feel like a good mom. I don't say that to brag. I just notice that I swing from feeling like, "I'm doing just fine! I've got this!" to "I am the worst mom ever." 

Today, I'm doing just fine. I've got this. Tomorrow? Who knows. 

Fact #5: One of the employees at my pharmacy will never give me my receipt. Instead, she says, “Don’t forget your receipt,” and then I have to reach over the register and take it myself. Don’t forget? Don’t forget? So you’re telling me to not forget to do your job? 

Fact #6: Likewise, there’s a clerk at a grocery store I frequent that I go out of my way to avoid because he’s always bossing me around. He wants me to position my cart his way while I unload my groceries to the conveyor, but what he doesn’t realize is that his way requires me to squeeze my large body between the cart and the wall of the next cashier station. He says if I do it his way, I won’t have to walk so much, and I’m thinking, “Why do you care? Just let me take steps, bro!” 

Self check-out doesn’t save me because sometimes he’s running the show there, too, and he’ll come up to me and tell me how to put my stuff in my cart or how to bag my food. 

Dude! Just let me do my thing. I have a system!

Fact #7: I’d love to be a fly on the wall one day, and watch him interact with everyone at the store, because I imagine he spends his whole shift bossing the customers around, and I can’t be the only person who finds it irritating.

Fact #8: I wish that could be a hobby or a part time job - being a fly on the wall. There are so many people I would love to just observe for a day. 

Fact #9: Nicky has spent the last several weeks growing a mustache. I’d describe it as more of an “unmaintained upper lip” than a “mustache.” There was hair there, but it wasn’t super visible. 

On Sunday night he decided to shave it off. He spent the next hour expressing how naked he felt and how different he looked. 

Ah! The vulnerability of shaving your mostly invisible mustache! 

The kid cracks me up.

Fact #10: He took picture of his little mustache hairs in the sink. You can see them when you zoom in really, really close.

No comments: