A Tale of Two Days

Tuesday

Tuesday started very early with Nathan waking up at 4:30 a.m.  The sun was starting to come up, and I figured he didn't have a prayer of going back to sleep.  Damn you, longest day of the year, I thought.  Then, miraculously, around 6:00 a.m., the boy went back to sleep.  This, of course, made waking him up for camp at 8:30 a bit difficult.  Blah, blah, blah, battle, yadda, yadda, yadda, "I hate camp!" ... anyway finally I got him there and all was well. 

While he was at camp, I worked out with weights.  Then I took a picture of my new zebra nails:

White polish with OPI Shatter topcoat in black.  And those scabs on my knuckles are from an injury I sustained while doing laundry.  Yeah. 

After camp pick-up, the fam and I went to Subway, en route to Target to buy another fan.  It was 96 degrees, and we were waiting on a call from the AC repair service to tell us they had our part in stock.  (Spoiler alert: It's Thursday and we're still waiting.)  This whole waiting thing feels like so many episodes from my youth where one of my friends or I was waiting for a boy to call.  Bill will come home and frantically check the messages, and when there's no message he scrolls through the missed call list.  "Why don't you call them?" I ask.  "No, no, they'll call," he replies.  Oh Bill, if only you had been a teenage girl, you'd know they never call.   

Since it was 96 degrees out, and since we had no AC, I told Nathan we were going to the pool.  The pool is just one of many places he claims to hate ("It's the WORST!"), only to have tons of fun once he gets there and be reluctant to leave.  

We stayed at the pool for three hours.  We came home and I threw together a gourmet hot dog dinner.  Now, in case I didn't remind you in the last four seconds, it was 96 degrees.  And since I figured Nathan wasn't going to go to bed until it got dark out, and, again, longest day of the year, we did something rare and went on an evening outing.  I got Nathan bathed and in his PJs first, because I just always feel more accomplished when he's done with the bath portion of the bedtime routine.  

And we all got in the car amidst ominous storm winds and went to the library.  Nathan got his summer reading club dollars and, miraculously, used them to buy something besides candy.  (It was a cheap plastic knockoff of a Bakugon; that detail becomes relevant later.)  Bill and I entered the weekly raffle for the adult no-reading summer reading club.  I asked for the weekly passport sticker (Ireland) for my souvenir passport, and the librarian said most people weren't asking for them.  I felt like a dork.  Next we got in the car to go home.  Then Nathan realized he had left his cheap plastic knockoff of a Bakugon in the children's DVD section.  At that point the storm winds were really blowing, and I pictured myself getting sucked up in a tornado in an effort to retrieve the cheap plastic knockoff Bakugon.  But he picked something that wasn't candy, I reasoned, and I made the trek.  It probably goes without saying that I didn't get sucked up in a tornado, or else this blog post would be a lot more interesting. 

As if not getting sucked to my death in a natural disaster wasn't good enough, the best thing happened when I got home.  We read our new library books, and then the boy went right to sleep.  I had nailed bedtime, you guys.  I actually got time to read on the couch for an hour and a half or so.  Then I was determined to go to bed at 11 p.m., and wake up right at 7 a.m. for some productive time before Nathan woke up.  

At 11:30 Bill came in and asked me to help him remove a splinter from his heel.  The efforts went on for about an hour, and I turned off my 7 a.m. alarm, and in the end Bill went to bed with the splinter still in his foot.  

Wednesday

The day started off perfectly for me.  I got to sleep in until 7:45, giving me half an hour to get stuff done before Nathan strolled into the kitchen, well-rested and pleasant, at 8:15.  Perfect timing for us to get him ready for camp and allow him to watch one episode of Go, Diego, Go! before we left.  He voluntarily turned off the TV when it was time to go, and then he willingly stood for sunscreen application.  What a difference a good night's sleep makes.  

After a completely drama-free camp drop-off, I went for a bike ride.  I read recently that people find outdoor exercise the most calming when they exercise in an area with plants and water, because those elements remind us of necessary, life-sustaining forces.  So I took my bike to the forest preserve.  I will say, it was awesome, and I actually had like a spiritual moment there.  It was one of those life-affirming moments where you take a deep breath, and you feel calm, and like you're the only person in the whole world at that moment:

The sense of being the only person in the world was, of course, a false one, given that I took this picture with an Internet-capable cell phone, meaning that I was still connected to the entire world.  That's about as close to roughing it in the wilderness as I'd like to get.  I should also note that I was not, in fact, in the wilderness, because no more than 200 feet from this bucolic scene was a Petco store. 

When I got home from the bike ride, I took a picture of my muddy legs.  Because I am HARD CORE:

But there's a cute pedicure underneath.

At that point it was time for me to call the doctor and ask if they could perform my husband's splinter-ectomy.  Fine, they said, come in at 12:45.  So I frantically packed up a lunch and preschooler entertainment items (a.k.a., the iPad), and we picked up Nathan from camp on the way to our afternoon doctor adventure. 

From 12:45 to 1:45 we had our obligatory hour of doctor's office waiting.  Bill got called in and I got excited, which is always a mistake because of course there is still the obligatory half-hour of waiting in the exam room.  Somewhere around 2:30 Bill emerged, having gotten a tetanus shot, but with the splinter still in his foot.  Guess where we had to go to have that removed?  Urgent Care!

So, continuing our weekly theme of Visits to Urgent Care for Pointlessly Minor Medical Procedures, we trotted over to the Urgent Care facility.  (I swear, when health insurance companies make employee training videos, our family is going to be the horrifying personal interest story vignette that they show at the beginning.  "This Illinois family went to Urgent Care and got x-rays twice in a 72-hour period, for what turned out to be a bruise and a splinter.  These are the kind of excesses our company needs to trim.")  

We were at Urgent Care until 4:15.  Somehow, through the magic of the iPad, Dinosaur Train on the waiting room TV, some cheap plastic toys/candy purchased at the on-site pharmacy, and sheer magic, Nathan's behavior was flawless the entire time.  And I finished the last 50 pages of The Peach Keeper, and half of the miraculously brand-new copy of Redbook that they had in the waiting area.  Plus, unlike our home, the waiting room had AC, so the whole experience wasn't that bad.

Eventually Bill emerged with a wad of Kleenex, in which the "splinter" was wrapped.  He surmised that it was not a splinter, but a small shard of the rose-colored Fiestaware, which happened to be the (discontinued) color of the plate I had broken the previous day.  Shit, my husband's injury was largely my fault. 

Unfortunately, when it comes to complaining about pain, men have difficulty eliciting sympathy because they aren't the ones who have to experience the pain of childbirth.  So our conversation on the way out of Urgent Care went something like this:

Bill: Man, it hurt to have that chunk of glass removed from my foot.

Me: Yeah, I had something surgically removed from me once. (Pointing to Nathan.)

Bill: The shot they gave me in my foot really hurt.

Me: Oh, I know, I had to have a shot in my spine.  ... So, do you want to grill that chicken tonight?

Bill: I don't think I'll be able to do that in my period of convalescence.  (Note he did have a joking tone here.)

Me: Yeah, you know what I had to do in my period of convalescence?  Take the thing they removed from me home, feed it from my own body, and get up with it several times in the middle of the night. 

Bill: But it was kind of your fault that the glass was in my foot.

Me: It was kind of your fault that Nathan was in my uterus.  [NOTE: I do understand that it takes two people to create a baby, and Nathan was very planned and very wanted.  Just go with it for the sake of the joke, okay?]

Anyway, let me note that my husband was being a good sport about all this, and he doesn't, in fact, equate the removal of a small piece of glass with a c-section.  And I do acknowledge that having a chunk of glass in your foot is disturbing.