An Open Letter to Thanksgiving 2012

I am unimpressed with you, you bastard. How dare you let my husband get sick? You're his favorite holiday! If you were a person, I would punch your face.

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Seriously, I'm super-mad at the world this year. Z. and I are just barely getting over our crud--Z has the eye and ear infection along with a cold--and we've already pushed Thanksgiving dinner back a day because my mom has a massive sinus infection ... now Scott has come down with a fever and was vomiting last night.

I don't want Scott to be sick. He loves Thanksgiving. He loves to cook, and frankly, I don't think we want him cooking if he's been puking.

I also don't want myself or the boy to get sick again.

My last, wistful thought ... I really could have used an actual break.

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So I slept on the couch last night, and this morning I was joined by the Zweeble, who got snuggled up with me and chattered for a little while about how we've done this before when Dad's been sick, and how we tried to do naptime like this once, but it didn't work very well (I can't believe he remembers that). Then we put Sophia the First on the TV and he watched that while I dozed. It was a nice, quiet way to start what will likely be a rough day.

Thanksgiving 2012

Scott is improving; Mom is death warmed over. Not sure what's going on tomorrow, yet, but I have plans and contingency plans because that's how I roll, y'all.

Today was actually nice. Also kind of not--I kept getting overwhelmed now and then by this feeling of total isolation. Which makes sense--in a country of 300 million people, I'm sure we weren't the only ones not doing the giant feast thing, but you wouldn't know it. Z. didn't seem to notice or care, so that's good. I just, every so often, thought damn, it would suck to be a single parent without family.

Anyway. The day was really, really quiet. Which was wonderful--look, I don't want my husband to be sick, and it sucks, but one thing I've learned this year is that when you're not happy with a situation there is still nothing wrong with finding and enjoying whatever you can out of it. (I'm not super-keen on my work schedule, but I am allowed to enjoy the writing time it gives me.) Usually on days when we're all in the house, there's stuff from Scott's computer, or he and Mom discussing his homework, or lots of chaos in the kitchen, along with the TV or the computer games Z's playing, and it's noisy.

Today was not noisy.

My son also listened to reason. A lot. I explained that I was going to take him to the park today, but that we should wait until the afternoon so there would actually be kids there since it was Thanksgiving. He was cool with it. He was great about going to CVS for cleaning supplies. He was great about helping me Lysol everything in sight (though I figured that would happen). He played in his room while I cleaned it and did not hinder my progress. We painted pictures, made Scott a get well card, watched TV.

When we went to the park, he was bummed because there weren't any kids there his age who wanted to play, but after some moping about it, he took me up on my offer to play. He pretended to be an alien from Jupiter and crashed his spaceship, and then we went around the playground looking for the parts he needed to fix it. Then he was a baby velociraptor who had traveled through time to hatch at the park, and his egg was a time machine. So we traveled through time to find his siblings. (Let me tell you, I am extremely happy we have reached this stage of play. I can play pretend like a mofo.)

After the park we got meat and juice and came home. We had dinner, played "Who? What? Where?"--which is basically charades for kindergarteners. My favorite of his was he had to be a dog, bowling, in an igloo. He walked around pretending to shiver and sort of half-assed bowling a ball, and when I said, "How do I know you're a dog?" he threw out this tiny, frozen, "Arf?" His favorite of mine was the Queen doing karate in a swamp. So I hiked up my "skirts," kicked stuff, did the Queen wave, and smacked my neck like a mosquito had bitten me.

When I went to clean the kitchen up after we ate, he drew me pictures--also in the kitchen. One of them was a fairly respectable crab.*

We watched some TV for couch time, and he was falling asleep on me as we read books for bedtime. He was out like a light ten minutes after he was in bed.

I had forgotten the shape of our days, back before he was in school and I was working every weekday. And this wasn't exactly the same (I would have killed for naptime around 3:30 or so), but it was nice.

*Dudes, his handwriting and drawing skills have gone through the roof since he started kindergarten. Apparently he's still not quite up to snuff with the literal writing yet--his teacher told us that it's fine and not hurting him academically, but he just needs some more practice--but as I told her, I'm really pleased at how much he's improved in a few months. I'm cool with her sending him the extra work home and practicing with him, absolutely, but damn. In addition to this, he came home with an "abstract" crayon drawing of a himself that he did in art class--the teacher was teaching them about abstract art generally, and Paul Klee specifically. Paul freaking Klee. Whose name, the Zweeble informed me, is pronounced "Clay." So I of course went and checked ... and it is. I've never been so tickled to have my pronunciation corrected in my life.