Resumption

Clearly things are way, way off schedule around here.

When last I checked in I was about to leave work early to head down to Williamsburg with the family so that my wife could attend a veterinary conference without leaving her little brood behind. The good news is that my wife successfully completed the credit hours of Continuing Education she needed, and everyone and everything survived – everyone being the four family members and everything including the car, the stuff we packed, the bonds of holy matrimony between my wife and myself and our respective sanity (though maybe just barely on that very last one). Other than that, though, it was a little brutal. Our little girl went from having some sniffles likely related primarily to teething straight on into a nasty case of bronchialitis, and between that and just not being thrilled about sleeping in a Pack-n-Play with a very thinly padded floor, she hardly slept more than an hour or two at a time at any point over the course of the weekend, including the wee hours of each night. And since we were in a hotel, it wasn’t as though one or the other of us parent-types could scoop her up and go to a far corner of the house to tough it out while the other one got some uninterrupted sleep. So that was trying.

One thing for which I was exceptionally grateful was simply the fact that the conference was in a town I used to live and know my way around fairly well. If we had been in some other random place three hours from home, in West Virginia or Maryland or the like, I can’t imagine how enervating it would have been to try on short notice to find the closest Urgent Care (as I did on Saturday afternoon) or, from there, the closest pharmacy for the little girl’s prescriptions. (I suppose anywhere we would have stayed would have been a hotel, probably with a concierge, but who wants a concierge judging them for not going straight home when an infant child is showing progressively yucked-out symptoms? Not this guy.) So the old stomping grounds from the college days were a comfort, at that.

Anyway, we got home exhausted and sleep wasn’t much easier to find there, unfortunately, but I dragged my carcass to work on Monday nonetheless, caught up on what I had missed Friday, and never found the time to check in here on the blog. Meanwhile my wife was taking the kids to the pediatrician and it was confirmed (whether or not it needed to be) that the little girl should probably take a few more days off from daycare. So I stayed home on Tuesday in order to let my wife get back to work (“let” may not be the best word there considering the somewhat adversarial position my wife’s job is starting to assume in her mental landscape but that’s a rant for another time) and we all know my track record for blogging on days when I’m playing hooky.

I was back at work again yesterday, after a night when the little girl finally started to turn the corner and sleep more soundly, but man was yesterday a miserable rain-soaked mess, which nowadays has the additional effect of stressing me out as I worry whether or not my train home will be delayed two or three hours by flash flood warnings or leaf oil soup on the rails or whathaveyou. The weather did not, as it turned out, have any effect on the VRE schedule at all, which was great, but it had tremendous negative impact on what should have been a simple drive from the station to daycare to fetch the little guy home, which was a drag.

And I’m in the salt mines again today, with the rest of the fam at home, little girl well on the mend and resumption of overall normalcy right on the cusp (insomuch as anything is ever normal during the Christmas season in our house). Tomorrow I’ll be back here again, for a little while at least until it’s time to head across the street to a catered departmental holiday party, so who knows if I’ll have time for a quick post or not. So rather than let a week and a half of radio silence go by, I wanted to check in. Still breathing, however belaboredly!