E is for Easter. And Early. And Ear infection.

The plague continues apace and respects no holidays. The four year old is still wheezing, even after steroids, and is now complaining of ear pain. My husband is terribly congested and being quite stoic about it, which makes me feel both sympathetic and guilty, since I have NOT been all that stoic the past few days. I am feeling much better myself after the removal of the giant tumor-like nastiness from my tonsil, but we are all suffering from one degree or another of sleep deprivation. Last night, my husband had to go to work to fix something at 11:30. I went with him to keep him company, thinking it would be a quick trip. We got home at 3:30am. I fell asleep right at 4 and was awakened by excited Easter children at 4:22. In the course of trying to convince the children to go the fuck back to bed for a bare minimum of three hours, I rendered one shrill and shrieky with the injustice of not being allowed to sleep in my bed if he could. not. be. quiet. and the other began grabbing his ear and writhing in pain, requiring that I go downstairs, navigate the 30 pieces of poo the dogs left in the kitchen, and get him medicine and drink. I got back to sleep at 6:15 and we restarted the day as a family at the much more reasonable hour of 7:45. The big kids searched for Easter candy, the twins shook Easter eggs and ate candy off the floor like dogs, and I resembled the cryptkeeper with my sunken orbits. Happy Easter!

Want to see something really nasty?

I'm gaining new medical knowledge already, and I haven't even applied for med school yet! This beautiful picture is of a tonsil stone, also called a tonsillolith. Sadly, this is just an internet image and not a picture of the actual stone I removed from my tonsil today, but it gives you an idea of the nastiness (mine was much more impressive but shriveled a bit after extraction and is no longer all that photogenic). For those of you who, like me, had never heard of tonsilloliths, they are calcified ick (I believe that's the technical term) that grows in the "crypts" of your tonsil (no part of a body should be called a crypt, in my opinion, seems sort of morbid) and forms a pearl-like stone. Like an ice berg, mine was more subterranean than terranean and left a sizable hole in my tonsil after I extracted it with a QTip. I can't overstate the relief I feel now that it's not rubbing against the inside of my mouth and throat every time I swallow or breathe or eat. Don't say I never taught you anything!

The Easter Pig

We're not religious folk, but I like Easter. I like that it is a high holy Christian day but follows the most pagan and bizarre of calendars (how does the crucifixion have anything at all to do with the lunar cycle or the equinox)? Besides, what's not to like about unlimited candy, fancy dresses, and messy coloring of eggs? We've all been ill and it's starting to look a bit like The Shining around here, so today we dyed Easter eggs, in part to compensate for missing yet another outing due to wheezing and aching and general pestilence. Boy twin was mostly interested in picking up completed egg artworks and talking to them in his own sibilant crazy language, but girly got very involved in the dyeing process. I love this picture - besides showing her joy at the strange thing I was letting her do, her personality just shows through here:
























Of course, her personality is also pretty plain here, where her pouty little pissy face clearly objects to having had her picture taken the first time:

























Lastly, for your viewing picture, I present my piglet's imitation of an egg. I can only guess that this is based on the dragon egg in the critically acclaimed Backyardigans film Tale of the Mighty Knights, which quacks throughout the movie:

Spring Break

Wow, has it been almost 2 weeks? I sure do slack. Let's see, what's been doin'.

I had midterms in both classes last Wednesday (still no grades back, but I think I did well). Today, I gave the midterm in the hideous atrociousness that is the class I'm teaching - enough said about that. I have off from taking classes this week, off from teaching next week, and the kids are off next week too. A friend is in town for 2 months (or longer! she could stay longer!) and we have grand ambitions for projects while she's here. Today would be a good time to start on those ambitions, probably, but I don't see getting out from under this blanket on the couch any time soon. The 3 little kids are all varying degrees of ill, with the 4 year old in the lead with what he calls "group" but really seems to be regular but asthma-inducing virus. He hasn't wheezed in so long, I'd hoped he'd given it up. That boy, always has surprises up his sleeve.

In other news, I'm older now, and had a lovely birthday weekend with friends and the zoo and parties and cake. Lots and lots of cake. I am straining to put on pants that were loose not long ago. I am sadly having to contemplate cutting back to 1 or 2 desserts a day and maybe even exercising. How wretched.

This is dull, but life is pretty routine right now - a good routine, but nothing too noteworthy or exciting. Aren't you all glad I wrote?

He really IS an alien

I took the 4 year old with me to pick up the big boy from school today. Big boy read his reading homework on the drive home, while 4 year old quietly listened from the back. All of a sudden, and apropos of nothing at all (not what big boy was reading, not any previous discussion, not a TV show, nothing), the 4 year old yelled out in evident frustration:

"When am I ever going to get my tail????"

Opportunity Cost

All this high-falutin' book-learning is going to my head. Although I am studying physics and not economics, all the random never-used trivia I picked up somehow during my first try at college (how, I'm not sure, as I rarely went to class or read a textbook) is coming back to me at odd moments. Just now, for example, I was weighing (get it, weighing?) my desire for potato chips against my desire not to be fat to the point of resembling a marine mammal, and I realized that the opportunity cost of NOT eating the chips is just too high. I want the chips more than I want to fit through doorways, apparently. Surely self-knowledge is a good thing.

So little to say, so little time

My thoughts are fleeting at best, and mostly interrupted with fragments of physics equations that I can never quite follow to the answer. I often marvel at the fact that I managed a bachelor's degree at all the first time around, with the atrocious study skills and lazy ass class avoidance habits I had - I haven't missed a class this semester and I do my homework days in advance and STILL I find physics to be as close to incomprehensible as I'd imagine arabic or hungarian or russian to be.

My lovely husband tivo'd Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves for me, and we're watching it now. It's a bit of a disillusionment to see how god-awful it is - I was 15 when it came out and thought it the height of romance and good story-telling. I remember riding around with my friends and listening to my cassette single of the awful theme song by Bryan Adams, and just hoping one day I'd find love as true as Robin and Marion's. I suppose my husband will have to do.

What else is happening? February has flown and March always feels like the real start of the new year to me. The zoo is reopened, and the four year old is looking forward to seeing real tortoises in action ("I'm a little nervous," he confessed, but he still can't wait). We have birthdays and spring breaks and Easter upcoming, longer days and shorter nights (the nights seem plenty short already, I'm beginning to look forward to the twins' departure for college as the next sure time I can sleep through the night).

I also have a new theory about why women live longer, on average, than men. If the last years of a full lifespan are spent gradually losing your context, then men have at least a decade's head start. My husband (and sons, too, actually) couldn't find the couch he's sitting on without a map, for example. My mother, who is not old but aspires to be, is getting to be almost as bad. She opened the freezer yesterday to check our stockpile of butter and grumbled as she closed the door that she can't find anything in there - I opened the door myself and was immediately confronted with a bright yellow box reading "BUTTER" in big letters on the side. Crazy old bat (I say that with love).

Things are all so comfortable and pleasant, I half-fear that the other shoe will somehow drop, but it's hard to sustain paranoia when life feels so good. It does leave less to complain about, though - I'll try to find more to write about despite the absence of grievances.