One Week

The first week of January is gone, and I’m completely scattered, so here are some random things going on in the Boyhouse:

1) The boys go back to school tomorrow, and I am having my usual last-day-of-vacation mixed feelings: happiness about the return to routine, and melancholy about the fleeting nature of time, and what city will the kids go to university in, and will it be close, and god, I sure hope my future daughters-in-law like me.  Physically this manifests itself as me cheerfully filling in my calendar for the week with errands and appointments that are unpleasant or impossible to do with the children, and also me randomly grabbing and hugging the nearest child, or screaming “I LOVE YOU!” down the stairs where the children very patiently say “Thanks, Mom.”  THANKS MOM.  It’s like my life is a weird sitcom episode. 

2) My appetite, which has been absent all week, has returned with a vengeance, so in between my week planning and my melancholy, I am also thinking near-constantly about FOOD.  Let’s see, I should go to Costco on Thursday, and maybe make quesadillas tonight, I have to remember to make up the School Council agenda, should I maybe make some of that eggplant dip right now, hmmm…do I have any crackers?  Because the kids were disappointed that I baked brownies to take to a baby shower yesterday rather than for their own consumption, I baked another pan of them this morning, combining my food obsession with my over-indulgence due to the aforementioned fleeting nature of time.

3) Yesterday I actually got teary eyed watching Ray Lewis come onto the Ravens’ field for the last time.  I would blame hormones but I can’t really, which reminds me of the evening not long ago when I was lying on the couch, tearful with hip pain, with a heating pad on my back, washing down Tylenol for Body Pain with red wine and Christmas chocolate, crying to my husband about being sad, so very sad, since my incredible back and hip pain indicated that I would now have to spend the rest of my life in a chiropractor’s office.  I became annoyed with my husband for not being more sympathetic to my plight as a cripple.  Then I started googling chiropractors, acupuncturists, and scoliosis.  Maybe 2013 will be the year where I finally recognize ladies’ holiday symptoms rather than concluding that life as I know it is over and the rest of my life will be all about pain management and sadness.

4) Speaking of Dr. Google, I fell down the rabbit hole last night by looking up “rashes and stomach virus” since Jake had developed a rash on his stomach and chest.  Instead of concluding reasonably that Jake, being prone to rashes, simply had a bumpy red manifestation of the virus that we had – probably Norwalk – I started clicking links that were, frankly, terrifying.  Consulting Dr. Google is never a good idea.  I blame my undernourished brain.

5) If there is a bright side to contracting a virulent stomach virus such as Norwalk, it is that a post-Christmas cleanse becomes completely unnecessary.  Not that I was really contemplating a cleanse; I did the Wild Rose cleanse back in 1999 and although that is now nearly fourteen years ago, I still get the shivers thinking about it.  That cleanse was the reason why, whenver anyone tells me that they are doing a similar detox, all I can think is exploding intestines, and I hope you have a nice bathroom.  But in any case, being sick has made post-Christmas weight-loss plans unnecessary, which is a minor upside to a deplorable week.

How was the first week of January for you?