the working mother's nightmare

So, I have a kid, a job, a dog, and a husband.

And at 2am on wednesday morning, I have a sick kid (feverish and hacking up a lung), an important meeting at 10am that I am meant to run (and no-one else can), a dog (asleep and so far no problem), a husband who has to be at the airport at 9:30am to usher the Prime Minister and his contingent (huge contingent) smoothly out of the country, and mostly no sleep.

Crap.

This isn't quite what I signed up for.

Oh well. So, at 5am I cancel the meeting via email (because our new computer is lacking the handy dandy phone list of everyone I know - it dissapeared into some computer-esque nether world), and hope that everyone gets the email (all but two do). I drug up the kid (which doesn't really help all that much), and manage to get an hour's sleep (wahoo!). Get up at 8 (Steve is already on his way to the airport), call the neighbor's nanny to walk the dog, and spend a day with my sick kid.

Which is actually kind of nice, in a way. He's 8, and I figure I only have a few more years of cuddles, and nothing is cuddlier than a sick kid. We read together, snooze, watch a bad movie, eat soup.

Maybe it is what I signed up for, after all.

who'd want to read about your boring life?

asks my son, Sam (currently going by the name "Calvin" in our house), when I explain to him what a blog is.

Well, that is the question, isn't it.

Why are we calling him Calvin, you might ask? Well, the other morning, we got a call from Molly's mom (some of you may know Molly from Sam's little you f*cking son of a b*tch incident, where he got in only the smallest amount of trouble...), asking us to tell the bus driver that Molly wouldn't be going to school on the bus in the morning. So, I asked Sam if he could remember to tell the bus driver that Molly wouldn't be on the bus, and that he wouldn't have to wait for her. And Sam said...

wait for it...

"Oh, I tell him that every day."

great...

So, Steve figures that Molly is the Susie to Sam's Calvin. And I would have to agree.

And, in the wake of the tsunami and on our way to a new year's party, Sam was kind enough to inform me that "Japan is one of the countries doomed to destruction." You know - earthquakes, volcanoes, typhoons, tidal waves - we have it all here.

Our happy little family...

"what you eat is yourself"

which, I think, is a direct English-Japanese-Engrish translation of "you are what you eat". I saw it on a poster in a restaurant I frequent, and it cracked me up. A nutrition seminar, perhaps?