The Best-Laid Plans

This morning was to be my first morning to myself in three weeks. Two weeks ago was spring break, and suffice it to say, Mommy did not get to the gym. Last week was a plethora of appointments, including the scheduled surgery of my nine-year old dog. Max had a grapefruit-sized fatty tumor on his side that we opted to remove while he was still in good health and before it got any larger and his gait any more lopsided. What is normally a routine surgery turned a bit when they discovered an infected mass behind the tumor. Max was, and will be, fine. The incision is quite longer than they expected, and included a plastic tube to drain infection. Which sounds perfectly agreeable, especially since it was all covered up with a dog-sized band-aid.

Which, at Friday's follow-up appointment, everyone discovered had impeded the flow of infectious goo, which now flowed freely onto the vet's floor in a widening puddle. Max was left at the vet's for the afternoon to muck up their floor, not mine, and returned home that evening with no covering and instructions to apply a warm compress three times a day. Somewhere in the chaos, Bella announced she didn't feel well (really, who would), and her sniffle and cough sounded a bit more pronounced and she acted a bit more groggy. Saturday, while shuttling a dripping Franken-dog between the confines of my tiled kitchen and the confines of his crate, Bella projectile vomited all over her floor.

My life, it seems, has been a series of cleaning foul looking and smelling stuff of my floors, and rotating dirty rags through my laundry, keeping and eye out here and there to make sure animals and children are respectively quartered in places to minimize mess. Plans for dinners were scuttled, trips to the grocery store waylaid. (No, I'm not a single parent, but Mr. ABF had scheduled work into this series of set backs, and Saturday we were all to report to community service, but I was trapped indoors and he was left to represent the Awfuls, who really were.) Yesterday, I finally freed myself from the quarantine for a lovely trip to the library. This morning, after a good night's sleep, and a usual brief kiss goodbye at school, I finally drove myself to the gym wondering if I could remember how to work the program on the stationary cycle. No sooner had I set myself up, than "The Politics of Dancing" was interrupted with a phone call from Bella's teacher: She was crying over inane things, and asking for her mother. This is NOT her, not even remotely. She must be sick. Please come and get her.

And so here I type, from the floor of my daughter's room, where she putzes around sans fever, slight runny nose, no redness in her throat, glands seemingly unswollen, appetite up, me wondering what signs I'm missing and when in hell I can get out of this house and have a good few hours to myself. I started writing a post last week on a beautiful quote from a beautiful book, but have picked it up and put it down so many times now, it's starting to feel like that term paper that you keep putting off until you finally have to turn it in and hope the teacher doesn't notice that you phoned in a good deal of it. It will have to wait.

I'd like to say I see a break of daylight on my horizon, but tomorrow morning, after a scheduled visit to physical therapy at the asscrack of dawn, Max is to get the tube and staples removed. I have a slightly queasy feeling that more floor cleaning and dog herding is in my future, probably with a runny-nosed toddler by my side.

But how are you?