Another photo gap (this time not my fault)

I had photos to share, cute photos, of Jack and Ki playing at the park together. Ki has finally started to relax around me, and while he still needs to be held a good deal more than Jack does, he is now comfortable enough around me to let go and romp around the playground and bang on the slides and pull himself up on the poles, and of course Jack wants to do everything that he does. I took a bunch of photos on my sidekick, of them being adorable last Wednesday, and meant to email myself the photos, but a combination of unforseen events led to the sidekick being put out of commission and the photos remaining trapped on it. The reason the sidekick is no more is because we got i-phones. The reason we got i-phones is because I thought I had appendicitis, and then didn't. The reason I thought I had appendicitis (or the reason the doctor thought I had appendicitis) was because of these awful stomachaches I'd been getting this week. And the reason for the stomacheaches, I think, is the nanny. We need to back up.

So Tuesday morning was the debut of MY lesson plan, my first one, which I called The Bug Jigsaw, which I was quite proud of, but also a little nervous about pulling off because there were a lot of moving parts and I wasn't sure these students could handle it,  but knew if they could, it would be so cool. And if they couldn't, it might be a little bit of a disaster. I had a lot of things I was trying to keep straight in my head that morning when Sam, the mom I share care with, called me and asked if I'd gotten the nanny's email. I said no, and she told me the nanny, who we employ on Tuesdays (the day that I teach, the day I have the least flexibility in my schedule that I absolutely need reliable care for), or who we supposedly employ on Tuesdays but who had bailed on us the previous week because of a car accident she had had on Saturday but somehow failed to need to go to the doctor until an hour before she was supposed to take care of our children, and had taken her first week off to go on a silent retreat for her birthday, so had really only worked for us twice since she started, was quitting. She was fleeing the state to join an intentional community in Oregon. She really is a nice girl but she has been nothing but one big belly ache. Literally. So I panicked, because the emergency care I had used the previous week was not available to me this week, but she reassured me, the nanny would work that day, but was just giving notice. So I relaxed for two minutes, and got the rest of Jack's stuff together to head out the door, when the nanny called to tell me she and Ki were at the park and I should just meet them there. "Which park?" I asked. "The one closest to Sam's house," she replied. "Which one is that? Where is it?" I asked. "Oh, it's by the public library." "What's the name of the street it's on?" "Oh... I don't know..." Are you kidding me?? I tried calling Sam back but she wasn't answering, so I had to call her husband, who was driving and kind of distracted and couldn't remember the street names either but gave me landmark-based directions that seemed very hazy to me. I looked at my watch and saw my prep time for my lesson slipping away, and that was really the first time that this working mom thing has made me actually want to cry. Stupid nanny! I found her eventually, but by the time I handed Jack off, I had a debilitating stomachache. I made it through the lesson, it went okay (actually the first class was a complete failure, but I blame the students because they are kind of awful, and the second class was better than I could've possibly expected), and then spent the rest of the day fighting off and ultimately succumbing to a fever that kept me tossing and turning all night.

Long story short (too late!), I thought I was coming down with something, but Wednesday felt magically better, except the stomachache returned in the evening, and the following evening as well, and then turned into nausea and dizziness so that by Friday, Danny insisted I go to the campus urgent care. It was there that the doctor diagnosed me with appendicitis, sent me to have a CT scan (and I don't even want to think about what my 20% of that will cost), which turned out negative, but had already forced Danny to skip his morning meeting to take me and take the rest of the day off in case I needed surgery. So at noon we found ourselves with no surgeries, no baby (he was with Sam, thank goodness it was her day to take the boys and not mine), and no work since we had both already blown off what should've been very busy days. What should we do with ourselves, we wondered? As though the stars were aligning, our friend had just sent us an email about a great deal on i-phones the day before, and our sidekicks had mysteriously stopped working. There was a nation-wide sidekick outage, we found out when we tried to call T-mobile customer care and experienced Longer Than Usual Wait Times.

So, longer story shorter, we took life by the horns and got ourselves very expensive new toys to celebrate keeping my no-surgeries track record clean, even though I still don't know the cause of the illness and hope it was just a virus and I won't have to deal with it anymore. And we had a VERY relaxed, low-key weekend to recover. And I already found someone to take Jack on Tuesdays, a friend who lives just down the street who I adore and who I wish I'd just worked up the gumption to ask if she'd be up for it in the first place. Because having a stranger take care of your baby is just a recipe for an ulcer. Or that's what I seemed to have learned over the past week. :)