Alive, Getting Well, and Turning Gray...

The last week and a half has pretty much stunk.

Good News: The Burgess Bunch is still ALIVE!
Bad News: The entire Bunch has been sick with something EXCEPT Ian! I am convinced he is the carrier rat.

We have battled stomach bug, nasty colds and strep throat in our house for the last week. What a great way to usher in the school year. I hate sickness and germs. But sickness and germs apparently LOVE me and my house. We spent last November thru March constantly sick. I do not want a repeat of that cycle again this year. My kids are great at sharing, especially their germs. So I spent the entire weekend cloroxing, washing, and lysoling everything in our house. Maybe I can get the germs to leave. I sure hope so.

Our pediatrician (despite her less-than-stellar office staff) is so wonderful. We were her first patients on Saturday morning. She welcomed me with a hug and said, "I was afraid I would see you again this week." I practically live in her office. She gave us another script of antibiotics and told me to call her if Ian needed one too. So far, so good.

Antibiotics make Will bounce off the walls. Literally. The kid gets the jerks if you try to make him sit still.  I kept him home from school today just to be sure he was better. He talked my ear off. He has also learned that sick=mommy feels sorry for me=all the ice cream and Popsicles he wants=even more hyper child. I felt like I had the jerks by the end of the day.

In other news, I noticed last night that my hair is now more gray than whatever is my natural color. I don't mention this because because of vanity. I mention it because of how shocking it was for me to notice. Josh changed the lighting in our bathroom and it made the gray far more obvious than the dimmer lighting we had before. Bring back the dims, please! My parents are both beyond white-headed (sorry I outed you Mom), so I knew it was going to happen. I just didn't know it would happen before my 30th birthday. I blame my kids.

And maybe I blame Ian's schoolwork.

2nd grade is hard. Far more difficult than I remember it being. The teacher sends home gobs of instructions and charts and graphs for me to record our reading, writing, math AND even more stuff for me to sign. I realize it isn't her fault. She has to deal with government accountability and slack parents who don't even look in their kids' backpacks. But all of these rules and charts and graphs give this perfectionist Momma heart palpitations. Seriously. I already went to visit the teacher on Thursday so that we could talk through all of it so that "we can ensure that Ian isn't getting overwhelmed." Insert Momma for Ian. I think I got a handle on it but it is a lot to keep up with. And it is all very time consuming.

I am sure it is for all parents. But for us, especially, because Ian has dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia. Basically, he struggles in reading, writing and math. He is super smart and can remember just about everything, but I have to take the work she sends home for him and rework it in a way that works best for him to understand. This afternoon, we spent 3.5 hours doing homework. I try to make it fun; we play word games and do math drills with yummy treats but it requires a lot of me. And him.

And as if spending 3.5 hours of my afternoon doing math drills and word blends wasn't enough, Maggie pulled my laptop off of my desk and Will dropped my Droid into the bathtub...filled with water. My laptop seems OK, although the screen blinks occasionally. I am not sure I will be able to say the same for my phone.

Oh well, I can replace it. Just like I can pay to hide the gray in my hair. But I can't pay to get the moments back of "Uh Oh" when my laptop crashed to the floor, or Will's "Oh Man" when my phone went for a swim, or even the many hours I spend with Ian agonizing over reading, writing, and arithmetic. It was a bad week but along with the sniffles, I got a lot of snuggles, and "I love yous" and "You're the best Mom," as bribery for more ice cream. Believe me, as hard as it is to live sometimes, these really hard moments are some of the most rewarding of my journey in motherhood. And although I am not loving the gray hair part, if I have to have it in order to have these kids, it will be worth every trip to the salon.