spring is here

i'm doing a little better today, but for most of the last week my neck and upper back have been sore and the nerve pinching has been causing me dizziness / faintness / distraction in addition to pain...

gd's been doing much, much better since we've discovered that she's not / no longer allergic to cannabis. as in, her quality of life has improved dramatically. this is very exciting, and we're praying it continues like this!

tuesday:

i barely remember tuesday at this point. one thing of note was that i discovered that i received a digital gift card from my employer for the holidays, and that i'd missed two others from last year because my inbox was out of control, so it looks like we're going to be doing some serious home shopping over the next week or two!

wednesday:

half-day, partially successful but the main work still hasn't gone through (in large part due to loads of flaky tests).

picking up mr smear and doing some last minute pre-chag shopping along the way, that distinct relaxed spring feeling of pesachness was in the air.

driving to our cousins in lapid for a more-relaxed-than-usual seder, it was a lovely dinner, we all ate too much, and mr smear even jumped in a couple of times and that was awesome.

i needed two caffeine sweets to get us home safely, we all passed out as soon as we got home.

thursday:

most of the day was spent indoors, between my neck and generally being tired i was feeling pretty wasted. i got in a bit of a nap, but then gd woke me up to tell me that one of mr smear's friends was at the park and asked if i could take him. one slugged coffee later, we walked to park hayarkon and met up with a couple of other kids in his class.

there were a couple of cool things that happened there. first, mr smear handled himself pretty well with a bunch of different kids, even if he didn't fully understand some of the games his friend was playing. then he tried one of the kids' scooters, and even though he wanted to give up at the first wobble, i convinced him to give it another try and he ended up going (slowly) round in circles for a while and gaining a bit of confidence.

and then he blew me away by asking to sleep over his friend's house.

he's never done that before, so this was a big deal for us, but we gave it a try and gd and i ended up having an impromptu date night and finally watched a couple of episodes of the last of us.

yesterday:

we woke up to a very quiet apartment. after a slow and easy morning, mr smear's friend's mom dropped him off along with her two kids, and the next part of the day was a full house that was mostly quite cool (both kids are very sweet so it was very low stress). we then took all three to a park close by where a bunch of class parents had set up a picnic/bar while the kids entertained themselves, and the weather was amazing, and a good time was had by all.

we went to drop off mr smear's friend at home and the two of them insisted on continuing the playdate, so after the poor mother was browbeaten by both her kids into letting that happen gd and i enjoyed a restful couple of hours before heading over to pick mr smear up.

all in all, it's been a very good couple of days.

today so far:

we're about to drive up north to visit our kibbutz cousin, and then see urchin on the way back. mr smear's been enjoying matzah for breakfast the last couple of days but he's now over it. i'm still sore but i think i'm going to be okay.

here we go!