Weekend Recap

Welcome to Monday.

My cube looks the same as it always does...the lone bit of cheerfulness that I see today is my Provence calendar and a couple pictures of Munchkin. There isn't much in the way of work, but I still feel guilty about reading news articles and gossip blogs.

Actually, I need to restate that. There is some work to do but I feel like avoiding it by reading news articles and gossip blogs, thereby supposedly putting off the pain of dealing in minutiae for a while.

Life with Munchkin is one big busy day. I am sort of an anomaly in the working stiff population...I do not like weekends. Sure, I like to sleep in on weekends. That's nice. But I do not like how unstructured they are. Especially with a child to deal with.

Friday night was alright...same old, same old. I remember the distant memories of going to the Friday night fellowship meetings that I used to enjoy so much.

Saturday was good. I slept in. It's nice to have a school-aged child and not one that you absolutely must wake up with. School-aged children usually know better than to spread raisin bran all over the floor, jump off of balconies, crack eggs on the floor because they like scrambled eggs, etc. They will usually come to you and be like, "I'm hungry, can you make me some breakfast?" They'll also come to you and ask you if they can watch TV, which, while absolutely mystifying me as to why she would do that, is also comforting, because then I know what she's doing, even as I try to catch another fitful hour or two of sleep.

On Friday night, I made butternut squash soup. I am fascinated by butternut squash lately. I'm not sure why. This particular recipe calls for six cups of squash and a whopping 16 ounces of cream cheese. Crikey. I used low-fat cream cheese, but the "soup" can now be eaten with a fork, is very rich, and has the texture of cheese, not pureed butternut squash. It's still good soup though. Less cheese next time. Definitely sticks to the ribs...

...and creates great green clouds of gas. Man, I was so bloated and so, ummm, windy on Saturday. It was horrible.

I invited a friend over for dinner with Munchkin and I. He came over and only then did I start planning the meal or fixing the meal. To my credit, I did manage to thaw the pork chops first. We were having Asian Sesame Porkchops. They are delicious. But they call for green onions.

So my friend, whom we'll call BalloonGuy, because he makes balloon animals, comes over. Munchkin adores him right off the bat, probably on account of the balloon animals. I announce that we must go to WalMart and acquire green onions for dinner. We arrive there and I then realize that, hey, I can get some Gas X while we're here!!!

We head off to the pharmacy department. I'm tooting like Thomas the Train Engine.

Behind me I hear a hilarious yet mortifying conversation going on between Munchkin and BalloonGuy.

"I think S tooted. S, did you toot?" Munchkin asks.

"It's rude to ask people if they tooted!!!!"

I think I may have heard sniggering coming from BalloonGuy.

Anyway, dinner proceeds uneventfully. We head down to the fountain downtown and go for a walk. It feels good.

Sunday
Sunday is uneventful as well. Munchkin seems fine.

We go to the Sunday night meeting. I'm a little perturbed (read: pissed) that there's no sitter. Also, no one seems to care that there's no sitter. We start leaving but then a kind soul volunteers to babysit for the first half.

After the meeting, Munchkin is all, "I'm sick."

Thinking about last week's conversation about little kids staying home and watching TV all day, I say, "No you're not. Don't lie."

She keeps insisting, so we head out to the car and I say, "Well, little girls who are sick need to go to bed so they can get well."

We head home and Munchkin does indeed go to bed. She doesn't even change out of her clothes.

Uh oh.

I fix her some tomato soup and toast, and I check on her a little bit later. She didn't eat much soup and only half of her piece of toast.

An hour later, my insistence that she was lying is rewarded with a splashing sound coming from her room and the wafting fragrance of barf. Next up, Munchkin says, "You lied. See? I told the truth."

"Yes, you did, honey. I'm sorry."

We get her cleaned up. I plead with her to be brave because she will have to go to the store with me for children's tylenol and a thermometer, and she weighs 65 pounds so I can't carry her. She decides she can be brave and off we go. I take her temperature and find she is not running a fever. That's a relief. I make her bed with clean linens and she's back in bed in no time flat.

I'm up till midnight doing laundry and wondering if I'll need to buy a new pillow for her because the existing one now has some barf liquid on it. I think I'll probably spring for a new one. She is not my poor relation. She is my much-loved Munchkin, and a pillow is not that expensive.

This morning, she was feeling fine, so off we went to school after a little snit about not wanting to get dressed. It was a bit challenging to get her to dress herself, and she's 65 pounds, so you know I'm not going to be able to force her. I was a little inept this morning, but we did ok.

And that's the weekend folks!!!!