Roller Coaster of a Week…

I was talking to a friend of mine once, and she said that she knew it had been a busy week because I had not blogged at all. It’s true. Whenever life gets a little rough and tumble, I have a tendency to put off blogging as a “C” priority item. But I know that it does help me to make sense of what is going on with our lives, whether it is mundane or not. I find it incredibly cathartic to “vocalize” what I’m experiencing in an uninterrupted fashion. Most conversations I have are punctuated by any number of “kid interruptions” – questions, crying, potty breaks, marker-covered hands…whatever the emergency is at the moment. Last night, for example, we went to Olive Garden for dinner with the kids (the first cloth napkin restaurant we’ve attempted in a long time) and I spent the meal trying to keep Parker placated and avoiding getting macaroni and cheese smeared up and down my clothing and hair while Ben was doing all the kid activities with Madi…not a lot of meaningful conversation, that’s for sure.

But for now, Madi and Ben are in the basement playing some version of football (Madi suddenly became intrigued with why the players on TV fall down all the time) and Parker is still napping, so I’m shirking my other responsibilities to write for a little bit. Ahhh…

So, yeah, it was a roller coaster of a week. Parker was running a fever for a few days, which meant I spent two nights sleeping on the couch with a feverish, sweaty kid laying on top of me. I must be getting old or something, because I felt like I had been hit by a Mac truck when I got up in the morning – all stiff and discombobulated. We thought maybe he had a bladder infection, but thankfully he started to bounce back before we had to take him in for a sample via catheter. (Sounds lovely, doesn’t it?)

I’m also having some uncertainty with work – don’t know how it is all going to play out yet, but it is just something else on my mind these days. And you know, it is fantastic to work from home the majority of the time, but there are moments where I miss having a nice quiet office to contemplate my next move. I had one of those moments this week where I was trying to draft an important e-mail that needed to be sent right away, one that could impact my future workload, and it was tempting to go shut myself in a closet for five minutes so that I could just think straight about my response.

But there were some incredibly sweet moments this week too. Madi decided that we needed to have a birthday party for her Bitty Baby, so we went all out. We hung streamers, blew up balloons, made a cake, wrapped up toys and books for “presents”, dressed up in party outfits, and had her friend Hannah over to help celebrate the occasion. It was really cute, and ALL Madi’s ideas. She must have enjoyed it, because she is already planning her next party…seriously.

We put up our Christmas decorations this weekend, which is always a fun time for me, because I adore the Christmas season. The kids were all about it too. We have a little tree with soft nativity ornaments and a Fisher Price nativity scene that the kids can play with, so that is exciting for them. Also, they both got into hanging the ornaments. I’m still deciding whether I should even out the spacing of the ornaments so they aren’t all jammed on the bottom of the tree or just leave it and try to not think about how uneven they are placed.

Well, Ben and Madi are done playing in the basement and I think I hear Parker crying, so my solitude is over. But, I’ll leave you with what Madi said at dinner last night. We were talking about how Parker has been throwing a lot of tantrums lately (which is very true and very frustrating) and she proceeded to philosophize that (in her own words) “When I have tantrums, then I go backwards; but if I don’t have any tantrums, then I move forward”.

Here’s to moving forward…and whatever that means for this new week…