Mizblog

The girls left last night from LAX. They called me as soon as they boarded (first ones, thanks to the small child). Saranya was extremely excited about being on an airplane. She had her own video monitor on her own window seat too. Sangeeta’s greatest fear was that Saranya would misbehave on the plane. I can’t wait to find out how it all went. They should be landing tonight.

I’m taking the opportunity to clean the apartment. I’ve already made huge improvements in every room. Originally I thought I’d divide the task into areas, then sub-areas, but instead I’ve been skimming off the obvious tasks, or whatever strikes my fancy. I put old shoes in a box, put old sippy cups in another box, etc. It’s also liberating to not have to ask if I can throw things away! So while I’m walking around the house, whenever I see something that says “I don’t go here”, I either put it where it does go, or in the trash, or on Sangeeta’s desk for her to decide. I’m sure you’re already envisioning a heap of things with a desk underneath, but let me assure you that I have also allotted her two full closets for questionable items. :)

I managed to punch a hole through Saranya’s toy collection that’s big enough to see the carpet underneath. The sheer magnitude of the toy problem is almost unfathomable. I’m going to have to shift them into some living space while I clean one room, then shift them back to do the other room. Some of them might get lost in the process, and all of them will get temporarily organized and packed into as small a physical space as I can manage. And I only have a month to do all this!

The breeze was warm tonight. Saranya and I went out for a walk. She’s been getting sick the last couple days and has stayed home from school, but the coughing hasn’t dropped her energy level noticeably. I felt like T2 walking after her as she ran around the block away from me. I tried to stay close so I could grab her quickly if she started to do anything dangerous (like run into the street or into rose bushes) but her most perilous acts were to run down a sloped driveway and stumble into my knee, or to pick up rocks and try to get me to eat some of them.

Saranya woke me up by licking my face. When I spluttered and looked her in the face, she proudly shouted “I’m dog!” and started panting.

I was doing pretty good this year. Last year I got sick 8 times, but so far this year I’d only been sick once.

Until last week.

Last week I got a sinus explosion. It wasn’t bad. It actually reminded me of times when I was sick in elementary school, when I could stay home and work on things that I wanted to work on instead of going to school and endure the ridicule of my peers. Fond memories.

Then on Thursday Saranya got the pukes. That was a scary time. We weren’t sure what was wrong with her or how serious it was, and we stayed alert for signs that she was getting worse or that the vomiting was a sign of a more serious condition like meningitis or a bowel obstruction. Fortunately, she recovered fairly quickly and we were able to relax a little.

Yesterday, Sangeeta and I got whatever it was Saranya had last week. We didn’t puke, but for 2 days we were pretty sure we were about to let loose. It was awful. We had to lie down all day just to take the edge off. Oh it sucked. That was not a pleasant illness like the one I had last week. This one was incapacitating. I found myself wishing for time to pass; wishing to sleep for 48 hours and let my immune system do the cleanup without having to experience the altered consciousness of the disease.

Coming out the other side of it, I see that I wouldn’t have a weight problem if I always reacted this way to food. A little food is all I can handle, and eating more than that makes me feel nauseated. Usually, however, eating a little food makes me want to eat a lot of food, and I can’t stop until I feel uncomfortably full. Hmm, feels like a poorly adjusted regulator in my brain…

My daughter is really getting on my nerves.

She woke me up this morning. 3 hours after I went to sleep, I woke up to find her pouring cold water on my ass. I jumped and yelled at her, and she dove onto the pillow and pretended to be asleep.

20 minutes later, when I was trying to get back to sleep, she tried to kill me. Luckily, her head landed on my jaw and not my temple. She had been standing on the bed and let herself fall backward to land flat on her back on the bed. Unfortunately for me, my jaw was where her skull landed. The bleeding from my mouth has stopped now but it’s swollen and throbbing.