A Really Bad Week

This post was originally supposed to be titled, "A Really Bad Day," but it's like the bad days just kept coming. Well, till Friday or Saturday or so, and by then we were worn out.

Oh, don't worry too much about us. These were all first world problems. Nobody died or got hurt. Starvation of any kind did not exist. Our A/C didn't even go out. But, it was still a crappy week.

Monday I took Savannah to the store to go school shopping. (I also registered her for kindergarten--yup a little late). She has been really nervous about school and I thought school shopping would help. It did. She's a little more excited now. But. But, those stupid supplies (no clothes yet people, just supplies) cost $100 and I was being skimpy. But with three kids and all the demanded supplies, it gets expensive quickly. One teacher wanted doubles of things so they could have one packet of art supplies in the classroom and one in the art room. Like, can't they just walk their stuff to the art room. I think it's really disrespectful for the teachers/school system to say, "We can't afford this stuff and tax payers can't/won't afford this stuff, but we're going to assume that you parents can afford doubles of this stuff just because we couldn't ask the little dears to carry their bag of art supplies to the art room." I mean, I guess they're thinking, "What's $10 extra dollars?" But multiply it by three and then add the already intensely hefty (over $100/kid) book "rental" fee that we have to pay every year and, wow, the beginning of the year gets expensive. It's already a hard/sad time for me and often that expense just pushes me over the edge and I'm ready to pull everybody out and home school.

Anyway, that evening Bec gave us some bad news about one of her friends, which made me sad, even though that sounds weird since I didn't know her well.

But that was our good day.

The next day, I was weeding. Which I normally don't mind, but the squirrels and raccoons have eaten most of my vegetables this year, so weeding hurts a little more than usual. And I had, like, three hours of it. And Kip came and told me that our favorite duck was missing. And then he told me that the other one was hurt. I got up to go see and he said I shouldn't--that it's beak was chewed off. I don't know why an animal would do this, but one did. I assume it was a raccoon, since nothing else could climb well enough to get over the fence (we'd thought the ducks could swim deep enough into the water, but apparently were overly-naive/confident). Kip had to kill the beakless duck because there was no way for it to eat and it would just slowly starve. Not to mention the fact that it was probably in pain. Kip is not Mr. Hunter Guy and it broke his heart to have to kill the duck, but it broke his heart more to leave it to suffer. Lose lose. Anyway, it was just awful and sad.

The good news was that that night when our kitchen sink got clogged, Kip (after a good hour of effort) got it unclogged.

Except, wait, that Wednesday morning it was clogged again. Completely stopped. The kitchen sink. So we called a bunch of plumbers, but the cheapest, best one couldn't come out till Thursday morning.

Wednesday night Mark had his first soccer practice and after that I was supposed to take him and his friend to scouts. Kip called 15 minutes in to say that the tire on the truck was spewing air out and that he needed me to come home so he could take the van to work. So I called my friend and asked her to take Mark and Elizabeth to their activities (which involved two different locations--her kids were going to those locations too, but still--big favor). She kindly and graciously did. And I went home.

And then the little girls and I just relaxed and played because we couldn't do anything else like the dishes or kid pick-ups, so it was--in it's way--kind of nice. That night I did my work and took a bath and went to bed. And then I itched and itched and itched. I'd drift off to sleep and dream of itching and wake up and itch. It was weird because I didn't have bug bites. I thought maybe I hadn't gotten all the soap off of my body and that I was reacting to it. So at 3:00 in the morning I went into the bathroom and had these big irregular shaped welts all over the underside of my arms and along my waistline and on my thighs. I took a shower with no soap and some benedryl and went to sleep.

Thursday the plumber came. He was actually very nice and competent. But he bore bad news. Our 65 year old pipe needed to be replaced. So instead of $100 we'd be paying $600. The good news about that was that when he told me what he needed to do I thought it'd be $1000. Then when Kip woke up, he got to work fixing the truck tire. Only it ended up that the truck needed new tires and new rims. He spent the entire afternoon (and more $ than expected) working on it and told me I'd need to get a ride to enrichment (with my 4 kids, right)--the enrichment I was in charge of and had a part to teach, but he ended up fixing it just in time, so that was good (and I was grateful to him for trying so hard). I was in charge of the enrichment activity and it had plenty of bumps getting ready, but it went fine and I felt better. But again at about midnight (and this time with no bath to blame) my body broke out in these weird welts. I took the world's ugliest stomach picture (which I will not share here) to prove to Kip that I really did have these mysterious night-time welts (although he said he believed me anyway) and that I wasn't a crazy schizophrenic hypochondriac. Then I took benedryl and all was well.

Friday was better. Mark had a friend over, but he was a nice friend so it was fine. I did have two days worth of dishes to do and a really sticky, dirty floor to mop (such is the case when you don't have your sink for 2 days), but that was the worst of it. That night more welts. They were starting to freak me out.

Saturday was a good day. And I was so glad. And that night I only had a few tiny welts, so maybe they'd been stress-related, but is that really a thing? I don't know. I'll let you know at midnight tonight.

Today was good too. And I'm grateful our problems revolve around ducks we don't need for food and pipes we can make do without (for a few days anyway), but it was still a bit rough.