A Missive from the Diseased

It’s the beginning of a very busy week, and I have just caught a terrible cold.  Both boys have it, too.  The only thing sadder than an exhausted toddler half-heartedly crying in the night because he wishes he could stop coughing and go to sleep, is an exhausted newborn trying hard to breathe through a blocked nose while nursing.  The Professor is doomed, I think, both to catch it and to deal with the three of us while we suffer from it.

I suppose there is rarely a week when I would welcome a cold, but this is a week when I particularly needed to be ship shape.  I am on the Moot Court Board and the Maritime Law Journal, which are two commitments that have uneven time requirements – aka it’s either a busy week or nothing at all is going on, unlike my slow and steady reading for class.  Anyway, for both this is a busy week, adding about 30 hours to my normal load.  Unfortunately, I haven’t gotten the stuff to work on yet for either one, so I’m sitting in the library waiting til I can pick it up.  I was in a big old motivated sniffly nosed hurry to get out of the house today, and all for naught.  Precious time is ticking!  I need those appellate briefs to grade!  Chop chop!

We just returned from a short jaunt north to attend a very special birthday celebration for my mother in law.  We managed to surprise her when we showed up on her porch last Thursday, and then again when another family member drove nine hours to see her the next day, and a third time when she walked through the doorway of the restaurant where we were “taking her to a birthday dinner” and discovered that it was a surprise party, attended by all of her dearest friends.  It was fun to do nice things for this woman – a loving mother and grandmother, a tireless artist, and beloved wife.  A close friend of hers read a tremendously moving poem, and ode written in her honor, and I will admit that while listening to it, I hoped to inspire such love and creativity in my group of friends one day.

We arrived back home at dinnertime last night, to see that our upstairs neighbors were having a birthday party.  They invited us up for the cookout, bless them, and though our fridge remains empty at least last night we didn’t have to relegate ourselves to another fast food meal.  I half unpacked the suitcases, and then laid my stuffy head down in the bed, only to be awakened less than an hour later by baby Liam snorting and horking up snot in his crib.  An hour after that, Jack was weeping pitifully in his room.  What a trio we make.

Wish me luck recovering quickly from this ill-timed cold, and getting unpacked and groceries bought and children fed and beginning the half marathon training session in earnest and reading for my classes and accomplishing the TMLJ and Moot Court stuff I need to do.  Without keeling over.