Post Christmas bloggage

Christmas was good. The toys were a hit. The kids are all finally well. I'm finally improving from 2 weeks of stopped up infected ear hell. Spaghetti and cheap wine for supper. Life is good.

Happy Christmas Eve!

I am as excited as a little kid about Christmas. I cannot wait until tomorrow. Only now, I don't care what I'm getting. I can't wait to see the kids open their presents.

We've had a bit of family dramah, but I've just taken the "I don't give a fuck" attitude about it, and we're having a good time at home with just us. The in-laws will be here later, but the manwhore will be going after wine, and I have hard cider, beer and rum for eggnog, so it can't possibly be that bad. lol

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday!

Someone please just shoot me

I have a cold. The umpteenth one this fall. This one involves a head crammed full of snot and two ears that are so full of said snot that I can barely hear. And they hurt. Especially the left one. It hurts enough that I drove home from lunch with the manwhore contemplating sticking a needle in my ear and popping my eardrum. Sure it would be excruciatingly painful for a few minutes, but supposedly a ruptured eardrum only hurts for a few minutes and then the release of pressure from behind it brings such relief that it doesn't hurt much anymore. Of course, it takes months to grow back and in the meantime you can't get water in your ear. But still, it might be worth it, if only it would make the side of my head stop hurting.

When runny noses attack

I try to act like a lady, really I do. Sometimes I fail miserably, though. I think today is one of those times. I have a cold and apparently my cold meds wore off on the way home from Xmas shopping, because my nose started to run. I mean like running down my upper lip type running. So, what is a lady to do? At first I wiped it on the back of my hand, wiped that on my leg and drove one handed until I found the hand sanitizer and cleaned my hand. Then it started up again. In total desperation, I grabbed Ellie's winter hat and blew my nose on it. Gross, I know. I picked the girls up from school, came on home and tossed the hat in the laundry. And as I was getting out of the van, I found a fucking napkin stuck down beside the seat. Of course I couldn't find it before I blew snot all over my kid's hat.


So, obviously I am not much of a lady. So sorry.

You people need to go buy some stock in Lysol

I'm going to hose my house down in the stuff. Yesterday, I started sneezing and the dripping nose crap. I can. not. handle. another. sick. person. Not even me. I can't handle me being whiny and cranky. I can't handle any more whiny cranky kids. Everyone has to get the fuck well.

The biggest positive to the kids all being out of school for 2 solid weeks is that maybe everyone will get well and the germs at school will all die, Die, DIE!!!

Christmas awesomeness

Is that even a word? Awesomeness. I guess so, as my spell checker didn't flag it.

Anyway, the awesomeness that is Straight No Chaser:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Fe11OlMiz8&feature=related

Pneumonia X 2

So, Sam's cold and fever thing? Pneumonia. He was starting to breath fast yesterday and last night he sounded like he was wheezing. We were on the phone with the oncall doctor at 10:30PM trying to decide if we needed to go to the ER with him. The go now point was 50 respirations per minute and he was at 48.

So, first thing this AM, we got him an appoint and the doctor listened for about 2 secs before saying that he had pneumonia. His pulse ox was running in the low 90s. He got a loverly antibiotic shot with the consistency of cold maple syrup in his leg, so he's been limping around all day.

Ellie, at least, is on the mend and was back at school today.

I will admit to being much more worried and upset about Sam than I was about Ellie, because she never acted that sick. I suppose she has was some people call walking pneumonia. Sam has "I'm sick and feel like shit" pneumonia. So, because she hasn't really felt that bad, I ASSume she's not as sick. But Sam is clearly much sicker and laboring to breath and all that. He slept in the bed with me last night and will again for the next few nights.

So, cast your spells, send good thoughts and prayers and put a fucking hex on the god damned germs, if you please. It's going to be a long fucking winter if the first illness we run through is pneumonia.

At home with two sick kiddos

So, Sam is sick, too. Not pneumonia. Probably just a cold, but he's running a fever so it could be turning into an upper respiratory infection or a sinus infection. He's cranky, El is cranky. They are getting on each others' nerves and getting on mine. And it is unseasonable warm here and it's hot in the house and I'm sweating, but I refuse to turn the A/C on in December.

And I'm going to have to drag two sick kids to the grocery store if we are going to eat tonight. Blech.

Go away germs!

All three of the kids have colds. El has been running fever off and on since the weekend and yesterday complained of an earache. So, off to the doctor to see if it is infected. It is. And she has pneumonia. WTF?!?!?!? How does my child have pneumonia and me not realize it?

She's had a lingering cough from the one after the other colds, so you would think the fever would have tipped me off. Besides, she bouncing around like she doesn't feel that bad. Except that now she's whining like a little buttwipe because she wants to sit in the chair and Em is in it. lol

But, my baby is sick. Poor girl. Go away germs! Away!

The Hair knows and Sex-dar

Yesterday afternoon, I met my parents halfway and handed over my three darling children and my minivan and watched them drive away, to be gone for the next 24 hours, more or less. I giddily drove home in their little suv (which unfortunately smells like an ashtray) and spent the next several hours primping for the manwhore's company Christmas party. Hair was curled, mascara applied, and slinky black dress donned. We were on our way, only to sit in traffic for 45 minutes or more, but we finally arrive. The theme was a nightclub, and there was much loud music, drinking and prime rib. Two out of three can't be complained about. Except there were no knives to cut the prime rib. I got happily sloshed on 4 glasses of cheap merlot (the free drinks) and we went home to a childless house. Of course we were pulling clothes off of each other before we made it through the door. There followed a lovely bit of time together that anyone who has kids can just imagine for themselves. lol

The next morning, we were planning a little encore and getting snuggly in bed when the manwhore's cellphone rang. It was work, with a problem. We can't escape the sex-dar. We get rid of the kids for a while and the fucking help desk turns theirs on.

Now for anyone who doesn't know, sex-dar is this thing that children come equipped with that causes alerts them anytime their parents are about to have sex and prompts them to interrupt somehow. It is strongest at birth and tapers off as they get older. In young infants, mom and dad even looking at each other with lust in their eyes will cause the sex-dar to ping and the baby will wake from the deepest of sleeps and cry. By the time baby is fed, changed, rocked and settled back to sleep, the mood has passed and the parents collapse into bed. As the child ages, the sex-dar weakens and they start sleeping through cuddling, hand holding and eventually quickies that last less than 5 minutes.

By the time the kid is a year old or maybe 18 months old, you might actually get 15 or 20 minutes of sex in. This is how little brothers and sisters are made. This starts the cycle all over again with the new baby. Eventually, though, you stop having younger siblings and the kids start to grow up and mom and dad can have some quality time after all the little dears are asleep. Hugging, kissing and other displays of affection that happen while the kids are awake still ping the sex-dar and cause kids to come running from the other end of the house demanding your immediate attention. This usually ends when the kids hit their teens and are so grossed out by the very thought that their parents might have ever had sex, much less still do it, they run from the house at the least little bit of affection between the parents. Of course, then you are staying up waiting on them to come home from dates and whatnot, so you still aren't getting any.

Apparently people who are on call have another sex-dar scanning them, only it doesn't work all the time. The result is we get interrupted by the cell phone only once every couple of months or so.

So, this morning, we got interrupted by the cell phone, and since we had to hit Toys R Us to finish up Christmas shopping (and I was hungry) we gave up. The manwhore asked if I was going to wash my hair, while eying it with some trepidation. I said yes, because I knew it was sticking up every which way and generally looked like it had been mussed up doing what we had been doing. He laughed and said "The hair knows!" Needless to say, I washed all of the hairspray and squashed curls out of it before leaving the house.

Deck the halls and all that crap

My house is all decorated for the holidays. I have a couple of things left to do, but really, the halls are decked with plenty of holly, and bows and greenery and stuff. As I was finishing up the the arrangement on the dining room table, I wondered why I go to all the trouble. Why not just throw up a tree and some lights outside and be done with it? No one is likely to see it but us. I spent days decorating just for us. When Christmas is over, I'll have to spend days taking it down, and its likely no one will have seen it but us.

Speaking of decorating, it think I'm going overboard on trees. We have 5, count them 5, Christmas trees this year. We have the big one in the living room. A 4 ft one in the den with the kids' ornaments from school and stuff (mil gave us this one. It was left over from her kindy teaching days.) The girls have a 2ft purple princess tree in their room. There is a 2 ft tree that I put in the kitchen, left over from my single, tiny apartment days. And lastly, a 1 ft felt one on the coffee table for Sam to play with. 5 trees. All decorated. Only the felt one doesn't have lights. The manwhore says we have a Christmas tree forest.