I’m going to say I’m recovering. I am still not operating at full capacity. Yesterday I took enough overnight cold medicine that I ended up oversleeping, and there was quite a bit of morning chaos involved. Really, the other members of my family are very competent. I don’t generally do all that much in the morning–by design–because I am so not a morning person. Yeah, in a pinch I’ll fill an occasional water bottle or do a couple of French braids, maybe. However some combination of my absence plus the Monday morning and the general illness/fatigue vibe going on in our house led to all sorts of missteps, including one daughter literally forgetting that she had a morning activity and then panicking so much that she left her lunch at home while another daughter forgot her backpack.
I am not one of those moms who refuses to bring her kids stuff at school because I want to teach them responsibility. Nor am I one of those moms who would be willing to drop things off a couple of times a week. I’ll pick up a kid’s slack, say, once every other month. Several years back one of the girls forgot items a couple of times in a row early in the school year, and I told her she only got two more rescues through the end of June. She was golden for the rest of the year. I am almost at the point of laying down that not-terribly-stringent law again with one of my kids this year, but yesterday my response was just to help everybody because I feel like I started the domino effect of morning chaos.
Even though I was about at 85% mentally, I kept busy with a lunch drop-off, grocery trip, backpack drop-off, ESL tutoring, Target run, quick lunch, WGGS meeting, track practice pick-up, slacker dinner (beanie-weenies, you guys: I’m not proud), and round trip soccer carpool. I managed to be, you know, a Productive Citizen. I had high hopes for today.
It hasn’t been going that well. I did manage a teensy smidgen of a workout and I put away the last of the Christmas decorations, but it wasn’t exactly a stellar, implement-your-resolutions kind of day. Not that I do New Year’s Resolutions. I have more of a rolling resolutions policy. But the rolling resolutions are suspended for the holiday season, and sadly, they have yet to resume.
I’m starting to think I have an ear infection. Which is funny, because when the kids were little and they had a lingering cold, I’d make an appointment with the pediatrician and sure enough, it would turn out that they’d have an ear infection. My kids were ear infection kids, not strep kids. But me? I haven’t had an ear infection in years (knock on wood), but if it’s not better soon, I think it’ll be time to consult a professional.
Even worse, my phone has crapped out. It’s divorced itself from my SIM card for no apparent reason. To make matters worse, it seems like my cell provider figures that the best way to deal with a $10 SIM card is suggest you buy yourself a brand-new phone. I think that perhaps this strategy works because people like to buy new phones. Like a shoe store where people say, “Gosh, you got a run in your stocking? You should probably buy a new pair of designer shoes. But I don’t like to buy phones. And I don’t like to buy shoes. After a couple of unsuccessful interactions with customer service I was just about to start rage-Tweeting and lowballing their Facebook page, but then someone relented and said they’d send me a new SIM card, which should take 7 to 10 days. Are you freaking kidding me?!? Well, I can do it. It will be painful, but I’m not, like, phone-dependent. I can do this. But today the whole try-to-make-the-phone-work-and-Googling-solutions-and-giving-up-and-emailing-and-calling-customer-service was a huge, huge time suck. It also gave me a headache.
But tomorrow is another day.
