A Week in the Life

So how was your week last week? Get lots of work done? Play with your pets? Meet anyone new? Good, good. Glad to hear it. Well, we had a busy week. Here are some pictures that Miriam drew of what we did. Can you guess?


If you said "spent three hours in the emergency room on a Saturday evening" you would be correct!!

She was running. It had rained. It was muddy. She slipped. A rock or stick or something jumped up and bit her in the leg. It was deep. She screamed a lot. We cleaned it out and called the pediatrician, who recommended bringing her to the emergency room to check it out. So we had to put all our other plans on hold (poor Mr. Pickles had to cancel his "pizza and a guy movie" guys' night). Fortunately it was slow at the emergency room, so we didn't have to wait long for any one period, just lots of little waiting periods.

The nurses were very nice.


They numbed her leg with a special cream (see the poultice on her leg, pictured above), then cleaned out the cut with a nifty syringe thingy:


Then the attending doctor stitched it up (4 stitches in the back of her thigh). Sorry I don't have any pictures of that. But you can view Miriam's rendition, also above.

Miriam was a little trooper through the whole thing. After the initial trauma of being injured was over, she was very stoic, if not downright curious, about the whole thing. After all, this was her first trip to the emergency room. She was mostly concerned about how much the needle would hurt when she was being stitched up. (It didn't -- she was numb.) And then afterwards, she took great delight in describing the whole ordeal to anyone who would listen.

She got the stitches taken out this past Friday and everything is healing up nicely. Now we're just waiting for the bill.

In other financial news this week, we had to take the car in to get the rear windshield wiper fixed, after it had been mauled by a neighborhood kid. While it was in the shop, the rear brake lights stopped working for some mysterious reason. A one-day fix turned into a multi-day carless streak. They finally gave us a loaner after we whined and pleaded and begged so that at least our family life could function (you remember we have only the one car). The loaner was a "mini-minivan." So, technically, it could seat 7 people. In theory. And assuming they were all the size of Katie. As it was, the 3 carseats were pretty packed in there. And we had no trunk space. So no major grocery shopping allowed.

We FINALLY got the van back, all fixed, huzzah huzzah, on Monday. Mr. Pickles had to take off of work early, before they closed (we just missed them by 20 minutes the previous Saturday, rizza frazza grrrrr), since I had to run an errand that evening.

Meanwhile, I was trying to plan how to attend this year's big homeschool conference that I'd been looking forward to since I missed LAST year's conference. When I got the news that our car was out of commission, I despaired. How was I going to attend the conference AND get Miriam to the doctor, with no car? Or even with one car? Well, Providence intervened in the form of my cousin Martin who flew in to man a booth at the conference. (Yay JP Catholic!) He had a rental car, so I carpooled in with him, and Mr. Pickles hauled all the kids to the doctor's. But since I couldn't stay all day, I had to scramble around and beg for an early ride home, but again I providentially bumped into a friend just as she was getting ready to leave. The next day I had free reign with the car, went to the conference, spent lots of money (of course!), and brought home some great books. Oh, did I mention that Mr. Pickles was sick this whole time? He very generously and self-sacrificingly made it possible for me to attend the conference even though he was feeling lousy. Isn't he great? I don't deserve him. He handles sickness much better than I do -- I get so whiny and pouty!

Anway, speaking of whining, where was I? Emergency room, car, stitches, conference, I guess that's it. Oh, in good news, Joseph is a healthy 15-month-old, and he didn't react from his MMR vaccine on Monday, plus I found a swimsuit that I actually sort of kind of like that even fits and stuff, although it makes me look like the Queen of Hearts. But back to our regularly scheduled whining: this Friday I'll be bringing Joseph back to the pediatric dentist to make sure he doesn't have nerve damage from when he cracked his tooth (I already blogged about that, didn't I?). I've also begun the mad scramble to get ready for vacation, which includes, but is not limited to, errand-running, extra shopping, finishing up 3 sewing projects, conquering mountains of laundry, vacuuming popcorn and granola off the dining room floor several times a week, catching mice in the kitchen, catching gerbils in the living room (Joseph has discovered how to open their cage), making to-do lists, making packing lists, making lists of lists, and in general feeding 4 hungry people at various times throughout the day.

So now you all know why I haven't blogged in a while.

And why I plan to spend two weeks on a beach in California drinking Bellinis every day.


Or mimosas.

I'm not picky.