Last week, Abby had an allergic reaction to something (we think it may have been a lotion she used). Her face turned bright red as if she had a bad sunburn. The next morning, her face was completely swollen. The swelling so altered her appearance, she looked like someone else.
The clinic had no open appointments, so I drove to the military hospital emergency room in dread of what awaited me. My past experiences in the emergency room have not been good.
I expected to enter a crowded room of people and wait and wait and wait. I expected to take a prescription to the pharmacy and wait and wait and wait. Four hours waiting while suffering with a kidney stone; four hours waiting with a child with croup.
I prayed on the way. “Lord, please help this not be 4 hours of waiting.”
When we arrived, there were only three people in the waiting room. The nurse called within minutes. We went back to see the doctor within a half hour. Abby was scared. He was funny and made her laugh.
Her tests for strep came back negative. He gave us a prescription to decrease the swelling and relieve the itching. The pharmacy wait was less than a half hour.
Praise the Lord! We were home again in two hours.
The swelling took 4 days to go down completely. Abby returned to school with her face still slightly swollen and bruised. I told her she would be asked about her face over and over again throughout the day, and she needed to be ready with an answer.
At school, everyone wanted to know what happened to her face. She told them quite sincerely, “I got in a fight.”
My “For the Health” routine had a bit of a set back. I started to develop pain in my shin. Initially, I figured I’d just add this pain to all the other aches and pains I feel when I run, but shin pain is apparently one of the pains you cannot ignore.
The solution to shin pain is STOP RUNNING. My body and my lazy self were glad of the news, but my will was irritated. I had finally forced myself to run and my body was defying me.
I did not run or walk for a week, then I walked a mile for only three days the next week. I experienced no shin pain after my two week hiatus, so I ran on Saturday.
During that run, I felt almost as bad as when I started this effort a month and a half ago. I was back to the run-walk-run-walk pattern. I rested on Sunday and ran again yesterday, but I fear it may be awhile before I make it back up to running a mile without walking.
I have been lifting hand weights and doing other exercises to vary my “For the Health” routine. Hopefully, when Spring fully arrives, I can add cycling in as well.
Newton’s Law of Motion says: “Every body persists in its state of being at rest or moving uniformly straight forward, except insofar as it is compelled to change its state by force impressed.”
My body wants to persist in its state of being at rest and is resentful of being compelled to change its state by the force of my will. Who knows what my body will come up with next in order to stop me from moving uniformly straight forward.
Dale had a lovely week last week in sunny Florida. He brought back sand dollars and shells he found on the beach in an attempt to appease me. “See, Honey, I was thinking of you,” he said. I, in cold Virginia, was thinking of him all last week too, but not with the same degree of fondness.
So, as tradition demands while Dale is away, I cooked from the alternative “Dinner without Dad” menu.
Things went fairly well until the last night before Dale’s return home. I was in a foul temper and refused to make dinner. At 4:45pm, I told the kids to scrounge in the refrigerator and find some leftovers to eat.
To these instructions, Gabe replied, “Wait…We’re having a Grandma dinner?”
Middle school projects are so much easier to direct, because the teachers give the students milestones to meet along the way. In high school, the student is told when the project is due and expected to create milestones for himself. Josiah’s milestones consist of: “The project is due tomorrow. I guess I’ll get to work.”
Abby is brilliant at making poster board presentations. She color coordinates the items, determines the correct font, and spaces the layout before she glues items onto or writes on the poster board. She can complete a poster board presentation quickly and efficiently.
Josiah’s poster board presentations are never quick and efficient. He starts at the top and by the time he gets to the bottom, he runs out of room. He miscalculates spacing, writes with permanent marker in the wrong place, and becomes frustrated by 930pm because “everything won’t fit!”.
He was given 6 projects at the beginning of this semester. Instead of working on some of them during his two weeks of snow days, he decided to use the time for book reading, t.v. watching, internet surfing, and video game playing. I gave reminders (he would say I nagged him) about the benefits of working on projects in advance. His defense of leaving the Spanish project until the last minute was “it’s just a time line.”
He went to bed at 230am last night.
The Christian comedian Tim Hawkins makes fun of mothers and their habit of yelling “Careful!” immediately after their child has done something unsafe. He points out the absurdity of yelling “Careful!” when it can no longer do any good. I am one of the countless mothers who says “Careful!” a moment too late, and cannot stop myself from saying it.
We Manrys have been watching the winter olympics these last couple weeks and my children are constantly told which sports their mother will not let them do: No luge, no bobsled, no skeleton, no moguls, no snowboard halfpipe, no snowboard cross, no ski cross, no freestyle skiing, no ski jumping, no short track speed skating…
How can the mothers of these athletes bear watching their child navigate the narrow ledge between success and disaster? I am too big of a wimp. Just watching Ovechkin check Jagr so hard in hockey that he flies across the ice, added “no ice hockey” to the list. (Lucky for Abby, Field Hockey is still o.k.)
The sports at the olympics are dangerous, but nothing compared to the x-games madness. Zeke has decided snowmobile jumping is for him. One kid jumped his snowmobile off a giant ramp, let go of the handle bars, flew to the back end, caught himself, and climbed back on. It was one of the craziest things I’d ever seen.
I’m sure his mother yelled “Careful!” in the midst of it. How could she not?
