The Plague House, Redux

Monday:  My poor, sick baby!  There is absolutely nothing worse than a sick baby.  Her congested breathing, her crying, her inability to sleep, her sweet little face covered in snot.  My poor little baby!


Tuesday:  I was so wrong.  There is nothing worse than being sick when your baby is sick.  My sinuses are exploding, my throat feels like a cheese grater has gone over it, and my sweet little baby still can't sleep.  Dear God.  This is the worst.


Friday:  Oh yeah.  Then there's this:

My child thinks my suffering is hilarious.  Of course.  


I hope none of you have the horrible virus we have!  I'll be back soon!  Miss you!


Hugs, kisses, and snot,


Sick Veronica & Sick Josephine

A Day in the Life at THE PLAGUE HOUSE

Remember how I was freaking out because I was sick and Jeremy was getting sick and I was terrified Josephine would also get sick?  Yeah.  Well, that's exactly what happened.

Let me walk you through yesterday.  It was a bit of a "cluster," if you catch my drift.  And I think you do.

The night before, I slept about two hours because of a combination of not being able to breathe and my little Bean being so restless that she was awake about every hour on the hour.  Poor darling.  At this point, she didn't have a fever and she wasn't coughing or showing any other obvious signs of being sick, but she wasn't sleeping well, so I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.

8 AM:  Josephine up, ready to eat.  Jeremy decides to stay home from work for the second day in a row and goes back to sleep.

8:30 AM:  I convince Josephine to take her morning nap!  Hallelujah!  Jeremy still sleeping.

10 AM:  Josephine is ready to eat again.  Yep, this kid is not feeling well.  Jeremy still sleeping.

12 PM:  Josephine takes a half-hour nap, so I get one too.  Amazing!  Jeremy goes and buys himself Dayquil and Nyquil (neither of which I can take), but he buys me a Cadbury Egg, so ... there's that.

12:30 - 4:45:  Jeremy sleeps.  I rock Josephine and cry off and on, because I am dying, Josephine is getting a fever, I have papers that aren't getting graded, and Jeremy is sleeping.

4:45 PM:  Josephine "accidentally" wakes up Jeremy.  (Heh.)  Jeremy decides he needs to go to the doctor.  I cry and tell him I am sick too.  He says, "Oh, I thought you were feeling better."  Summon remaining strength to keep self from hurting Jeremy.

4:46 PM:  We remember we don't have a primary care physician because we only lived here for four years, how would we have found time to get one of those?

4:48 PM:  Josephine starts coughing.  BTW, she has like, the CUTEST cough ever.  And she is still smiling and cooing at this point.  With a fever and a cough.  Precious.

4:50 PM:  Decide to go to Urgent Care.  

5:05 PM:  Get to Urgent Care and realize all the unwashed masses might make my baby more sick than she already is.  Shit.

5:15 PM:  Ask Jeremy to take Josephine over to look at tank full of exotic fish.  Six sick slimy little children follow, and get their germs near my baby.  Hiss ABORT!  ABORT!! at Jeremy.

6:00 PM:  Nurse says Josephine and I can stay together but Jeremy will have to go to his own separate room because of the "size of the rooms."  Get taken into the LARGEST exam room I have ever seen in my life.  With three chairs.  Hmmm.

6:10 PM:  Take a picture of Josephine.  Because this is her VERY FIRST trip to Urgent Care!  Must preserve memories!  

The fever makes me MORE crazy, not less crazy.  Who would have guessed?

6:15 PM:  Doctor tells me I have a viral infection AND a bacterial infection and Josephine has a viral infection that we should watch in case she also develops a bacterial infection.  However, he is nice enough to invade Jeremy's privacy by telling me his Strep test is negative and he has a viral infection.  I like this guy.  

He then proceeds to tell me I am "basically screwed" because I need rest to get over the viral infection, and he's guessing that's not gonna happen (he's a freakin' psychic), and I can't take Nyquil because I'm breast feeding.  At least he's honest. 

6:45 PM:  Drop prescriptions off at Meijer Pharmacy.  Am told Jeremy and Josephine were prescribed free prescriptions, but MY antibiotic is not free because I am allergic to penicillin and can't take Amoxicillin.  Feel discriminated against.

6:45 - 7:15 PM:  Buy fixings for chicken noodle soup and then get back in line to pick up prescriptions.

7:16 PM:  "Lady" at head of line is SCREAMING at pharmacy tech because she is trying to charge her $10 when she KNOWS FOR A FACT THAT SHE SHOULD ONLY HAVE TO PAY $5.  

7:19 PM:  She realizes she has given the pharmacy tech the wrong card.  Gives her a different insurance card.  Does not apologize.

7:22 PM:  "Lady" at register next to her (in riding pants and boots covered in what I can only hope is mud and not horse crap) is insisting that she not be given any pills that are "robin's egg blue in color" because they are "of poor quality."  Am unsure what this all means.

7:25 PM:  Am finally given prescriptions.  Have to sign a "Meth Check" card to somehow prove I am not buying Jeremy's Sudafed in order to make Meth from it.  

First "Lady" screams at her pharmacy tech because "that chick" (meaning me) "got her shit so quickly."  Flee Meijer.

7:30 PM:  Make chicken noodle soup while holding a sick baby and a sick husband walks the neglected dog.

7:30 - 10 PM:  Eat, feed child, cry, feed child again, pray for a swift death.

10 PM - 8 AM:  I rock Josephine while she wakes up every five minutes.  Jeremy sleeps.

FIN

But hey, look at this soup.  

Not bad for a dying lady, huh?

This All Ends With Me Praising My Husband, If You Can Believe That

Driving home from work today, I was doing what all the cool kids do -- listening to NPR -- when I heard BP was going to "solve" the oil spill problem in the Gulf of Mexico by putting a DOME over the broken pipe that is spitting oil.


Well played, BP.  Not only are you drawing on The Simpsons in the time of crisis,

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but you managed to ignore the fact that the oil is already all over the freaking place and floating on the surface of the water.  Way to go.


So, I didn't really have a whole post ready to go on this ... that was as far as I got.  You know, that I think that idea is stupid.  


But watch this:  Okay, the oil spill is a big, gross problem that is not being fixed.  You know what else is a big, gross problem that is not being fixed?  My HUGE SWOLLEN FEET AND ANKLES.


I have never seen such a thing is all my life.  I guess whenever I heard about swollen feet before now, I was always like, "Heh.  I bet that won't happen to me."  Burn, former self.  Burn.


I have a girlfriend who was mad about her swollen feet because she was angry with herself and irrationally thought there must be something she could have done to avoid it.  I am not mad so much as horrifically disgusted.  I can't stop staring at my feet, which look disturbingly like hams on toothpicks, and I get the major voms.  I am feeling the biggest vomity-vom-vomitness of all time.  

I am repulsed by myself.  I mean, you couldn't SEE my nausea every waking moment of my first trimester.  You can't SEE my stiff lower back.  But these Flintstone feet.  Oh, you can see them.  And I just want to hide in my house with my feet propped up on a pillow while I stare at my deformed body and cry.


So, much like the horror that is the oil spill, I am not finding a solution to the problem.  My dome is convincing my husband to rub my ham feet when I get home from work.  He is really racking up his sainthood points lately.  I mean, even *I* won't touch those nasty feet.


I guess the moral of this story is that my husband rocks the casbah.  Well played, Dimick. Take a bow.

Wherein I Cry and You Probably Have No Sympathy

Do you ever get the deads?  Because I have been having a major case of the deads lately.


You see, when I got knocked up, I arranged my schedule so that I could teach three super-long days instead of spreading it out into a five-day week. My reasoning at the time was that I would come home feeling exhausted no matter how long or short my day was, so I might as well only work three days and then have four to recuperate.


It backfired people.  In a big way.


I know, wah wah wah, I have to work three whole days a week!  Woe is me! You are probably pissed at me already.  But they are teaching days in which I teach for HOURS and HOURS and HOURS and ALL IN A ROW with not so much as a five minute break to sit down and cry.


And teaching is hard.  I am seriously "on" the whole time, walking, talking, answering, doing high kicks, and making developing paragraphs entertaining.  And with my schedule, that continues straight through the entire day.  Like, when I try to sneak out the door to the bathroom when my students are doing group work, someone will call me over with a question, and I will scream in my head SON, I am PREGNANT!! but then I rush over to do that teaching thing so he can do that learning thing and it is lovely, but then the baby (who I am pretty sure at this point is bent on my destruction) KICKS MY BLADDER and all I can think is that one day SHE will win the battle, and OH MY GOD, if I pee on a student ... I have no idea what will happen if I pee on a student, but I'm pretty sure it will involve bad things.


And the eating.  OH, the eating.  I want to eat all day every day, but I usually don't even have five minutes in between classes to scarf down a yogurt, because my students stay after and ask me questions, and I appreciate that so much because it means they care and they want to better themselves, but I pretty much get through the day by sneaking almonds out of my purse and shouting "Look over there!" to my students so I can eat in class.  


And then, in my last class of the day, I try to find five minutes to sit while my students are working in order to appease my feet that are, at that point, swelling out of my shoes, and baby is like NO WAY.  In order to sit up straight at my desk, I have to bend at the waist (heaven forbid) and apparently that is where she likes to hang out, and she does NOT appreciate me taking up her precious uterus space.  So she kicks.  And kicks.  And kicks so hard that eventually I will let loose a "Oooof!" and the only way to regain peace in my belly and my dignity is to stand back up, even though my feet are like, "Bad move, lady," to which I respond, "Listen, this baby is totally the boss of me, and she will only be happy if I recline, lay on my side, or stand up, and I can only do one of those things right now."  


"Oh yeah," my feet say, "Can the baby grow another size and force you to buy all new shoes?"  


"Touché, feet."


So, I get home, walk straight to the kitchen to make a late dinner, gorge myself, and then lay on the couch, crying, shouting that the lights are too bright and I will die at any moment.


Jeremy will try to think of a million things to appease me, to which I will always respond *whimper* "No." *whimper*, so he sighs, turns on the Tigers game, and probably wonders how this can actually get worse as I get more pregnant (but oh, it can) while I ask for another foot rub.


And THEN I wake up on Thursday mornings, stumbling and weaving like a drunk person, with a headache like only the worst hangover would bring, and my feet feeling as if I have been walking on metal spikes all night.  So the advantage to having three hell days?  Turns out, there are none.  And my husband maybe wants to divorce me and I am probably only days away from peeing in class and then I will be fired and poor.


BUT, I got a fun package in the mail, so I feel a lot less dead.  I know I kinda just ended abruptly there, but that's the end of my story.  Also, the story was probably lame.  I blame the deads.

I Bet My Husband is Still VERY Attracted to Me

Okay, I am sure most of my (highly intelligent, supremely loyal) readers now know I am knocked up. They also might know that I have started a baby blog. They ALSO might realize that some of the babyness is going to spill over here to my "humor" blog.  

I'm sorry.  Here is the official written warning:  I might talk about the embryo/fetus/child over here from time to time.  It's hard to avoid the bleed over. And if babies make you cry or retch and you need to unfollow me because of this, be my guest.  (Except, I just took a screen shot of my list of followers, and if the numbers shrink I will figure out who unfollowed me and then I will FIND YOU.  And MAKE you love me again.)  

But I promise you this: (I have one hand in the air and one hand on my cleavage) all of the schmoopy updates and letters to unborn children and pleas for advice will be over THERE.  Over here is the stuff that might make you laugh even if you are not a mom and are too attached to wine to ever be one (it was a ROUGH break-up, let me tell you ...).  So, you have been warned.

Moving on.

This baby is kicking my ass.  Big time.  

Today I thought I would trick my brain into thinking I am not dying, and I STOOD UP for longer than five minutes. (This whole tricking my brain thing is getting a little easier every day.  Like when I feel a wave a nausea, I tell myself, "Oh my! A cough is coming on!  You simply need to cough, not puke, self!"  and sometimes it works!)  

While standing up for longer than five minutes I did a bunch of heroic things like wiping down the counters and swiffering the floors and MAKING DINNER.  It was unreal.  Every time I felt like dying, I told myself, "Oh, don't worry, body.  That is not you about to pass out!  That is just the excitement from CLEANING!  Oh, how you missed it!!"  I felt like I had completed a triathalon when I was done, but by God, my microwave was clean again.

It really got me to thinking about those New Year's Resolutions that I was too busy crying to write and how I can still set goals -- I just need to do them from this exhausted and nauseated place.  When little things feel like acts of international importance, you need to keep that feeling alive!

So, here are some realistic goals for 2010.  I resolve to ...

Drop my baby less than 20 times.

Sometimes get dressed.

Leave the house twice a week.

Okay.  That's enough.  

I can probably do these things.  Right?  I mean, I cleaned a MICROWAVE today when I had every intention of staying on the couch all day and crying.  It's all a matter of motivation.  

My plan is the print these out and post them on the fridge.  That way, every day when I accomplish one of these goals, I will feel like I won the Nobel Prize or something.

I suggest you all do the same.  Happy New Year's a few days late!

I Have Nothing Interesting to Say Because the Baby Growing Inside Me is Slowly Killing Me

This has been me for the last few days:

Except when my mother and husband convinced me it would be good for me to get some fresh air and exercise by walking the dog.  This resulted in me puking in a neighbor's front yard and then running home crying.  Success.


Based on my calculations (which look something like this -- amount of horrific symptoms / weeks gestation X my ability to handle said symptoms = evilness of baby), I assume my baby currently looks a little like this:

Or this:

Or, perhaps, even this:

*SHUDDER*  


image sources: 1, 2, 3, 4


UPDATE:  Jeremy said he kind of likes the middle one because it looks "spunky."