not the best day

It was a rainy morning. Which means I slept very well, and found it difficult to get up. In fact, I shut off my alarm and just lay in bed until Miles woke me up (which I knew he would do sooner or later). We were lazy in bed together until Eleanor joined us. I asked her to go potty, but she refused to do so without help, and I was just too drowsy. Until she started crying that she peed in her diaper, and - waddling like a bowlegged duck - finally agreed to go to the bathroom. Then I had to get up.

I skipped my workout (it was too late, after all) and decided to do creative projects with the kids: namely, I chopped up a cardboard box in to millions (actually 121) tiny pieces, and with their tempera paints, painted different colored numerals on each one. It was my intent to make a version of the "Math-It" game I played with in my homeschooled childhood, to encourage Miles to learn his addition facts. And the game creation went pretty well. The kids entertained themselves for an abysmally short time stringing beads onto necklaces with the new blunt needles I had bought especially for the purpose. Eleanor then went around whacking things with Miles' plastic ruler. And I kid you not, twelve seconds after I said, "Nora, please don't hit things with the ruler; it might break and you would hurt yourself," it happened. The ruler shattered, and one piece grazed her eyeball. She's crying, I'm panicking, and Miles is screaming his head off that she broke HIS ruler! Her eye bled a tiny bit, but she stopped crying rapidly, and it looked like just a scrape on the white part of her left eye. She seemed fine, but I dutifully called the pediatrician to see what he thought, and NATURALLY he said he thought I ought to take her to the ER to get checked out. We don't mess around with eye injuries, he says.

OK, fine. Miles is still howling about his broken ruler, while Nora is excitedly repeating, "We get to go to the doctor now? I get to see the doctor. He will look at my eye. Can we go now, Mommy? My eye is OK. But the doctor will look at it. Let's go to the doctor!" You get the idea.

IS there a good ER to go to with small children? I dread it. Swedish Covenant has a nice waiting room, but nary a toy or a children's magazine. The attractive fishtank amuses for a while, but not for an hour and a half, I'm afraid. Anyway, after 90 minutes of trying to keep my whining, overactive, and starving children from drumming on the backs of grouchy sick people's chairs, tapping on the fishtank glass, swinging on the velvet ropes marking out the place to stand in line, running laps around the waiting room, and slaloming around frail old ladies in walkers, we finally got in for our 30 seconds with the doctor. She looked at Nora's eye, said "She seems fine, right? I don't think we need to bother checking the cornea. It looks fine to me. Here's a prescription for some antibiotic eye drops just to keep infection at bay."

OK, my doctor could have done that. WAY faster. And cheaper. (Did I mention how long we had to play Ring-around-the rosy, London bridge, and "let's pretend we are seeds growing into plants" in the tiny cubicle before the doctor even showed UP?)

What a waste of a day.

Now I'm sitting on the sofa feeling VERY frustrated with my attempt to translate Mandan (an almost extinct Native American language). I'm supposed to be presenting my "findings" at a symposium in three weeks, and I don't HAVE any findings, and it's ruining the precious remainder of my spring break. Why did I sign up for this?