ha, ha, it got worse

 we're calling it "chaos week" at work, and my personal life isn't feeling less chaotic.

friday:

i was very relieved that it was weekend. i commented as such on a few occasions, not knowing that i was shortly going to be eating those words.

gd and i did a big grocery shopping, which was heavier than usual and i wasn't feeling great. i felt shit, to be honest. and i was on a half a cup of coffee to boot.

then we picked up mr smear, and sat down with the teacher. we were pleasantly surprised to find her welcoming and appreciative of our (and the other parents') situation, and we officially had approval to let him bring food and snacks and no sneaking necessary.

so that was good.

then we got home. and i saw a message from my boss asking me "what's up?"

not the kind of "what's up?" i would appreciate on my weekend. it turned out that the scripts i'd manically built and run the day before needed an overhaul, with four hours to go. there went my friday afternoon. i managed it in six, and was still running the damned thing while my family waited for my to say kiddush.

that really sucked.

saturday:

i woke up tired, and spent the entire day feeling sick. except for the half hour or so that it took to decide to take mr smear to the beach - we quickly got ready, walked a few blocks, and realized that we were about to be hit by massive, grey rainclouds. we made it back home just before it began pouring. i spent the rest of the day either watching adventure time with my family or lying in bed feeling ill.

by the time i got into bed i was convinced that i wasn't going to be able to work yesterday.

yesterday:

positively, i woke up feeling alright. not great, mind, but functional. i had a bunch of things to take care of in the morning after dropping mr smear off at school in the light rain, but due to the rain decided to stay home.

good call.

it got much wetter.

yesterday was a weird day. it was bursts of working hard tempered with weird periods of downtime.

in the evening i went to pick up mr smear, and while we were leaving the school i got a call from my boss informed me that we were about to start working 24 hours in shifts for the next week. i told him i prefer the midnight - morning shifts. i felt my heart sinking while i said it. i mean, it's true, it's just that i don't wanna.

good thing, though, is that it means my on-call week is now being shared about the team when they're on shift, so that's good.

the evening was the evening, i went to bed tired and late, but not too late because i had a strong suspicion that i'd get a call in the night.

i wasn't wrong.

today:

so last night i ended up working about three hours in the middle of the night after a long day of work after working hard or being sick all weekend after a long, intense week.

i got up feeling pretty wrecked this morning. it didn't help that i'd seen an email in the middle of the night from mr smear's teacher informing me that he'd "gone on strike" yesterday. she'd moved a girl in his class to his table, a little girl who disgusts him because she doesn't wash her hands after eating, and he flat out refused to do anything he was supposed to until the teacher moved him. she's not going to move him, so he just sat and played with his pencil box the entire school day.

i'm equal parts mortified, amused, and almost proud. like, i'm embarrassed and proud at the same time. it's weird.

so this morning we had a family meeting before school, and he was not happy to have both of us explaining to him in no uncertain terms what happens to kids who grow up without learning how to play the social game. it would take the entire walk to school to (somewhat) calm him down, to find an analogy to help him understand that loving someone doesn't mean letting them do whatever they want. (i found one - if a puppy wants to walk into a busy road, do you save it?)

along the way, i crossed the road to talk to our neighbours who were kindly offering us a ride, and i signalled to him to walk on towards the pedestrian crossing. he misunderstood my signal and came rushing into the busy street, which is when i automatically found myself yelling "no... no... NO!" so that the whole neighbourhood must have jumped.

our neighbours awkwardly drove slowly right behind me until we got to the pedestrian crossing, with the people behind getting so frustrated that they angrily overtook at the crossing and almost wiped us out.

so that was a fun morning.

the mental wellness institute wasn't answering their phone today. i tried a bunch of times over a course of hours. no answer. bloody brilliant.

today was another day of hard graft, minus a short break to pick up mr smear early because he was crying with stomache pain. they couldn't see him at the clinic but booked an appointment for him in the morning, at which point he went to the toilet and then his tummy felt fine again.

*$#!ing kids, man. anyway, we need the appointment because he's still got an ear infection so it works out.

about two minutes before we arrived at the clinic i started feeling dizzy, sick and faint, and i suspect it was my heavy on-call backpack pushing on my nerves. it took me a little while to get back to normal after setting the bag down. fainting sucks.

gd did a grocery run while i did some snooping at the hospital's emergency unit to figure out how we're going to do our own private allergy test. we have a plan.

i got home with the heavy backpack and the shopping just in time for a meeting with my boss that never transpired. i managed to get through a productive afternoon, finally firing up the scripts (with a few last-minute modifications, of course) just as gd served dinner.

i'm bombed. i needed to get this all out before crashing. i'm very grateful to be off-call until 8am. and to all, a good night.