Pink Eye

I've been sick for a week.

Other than when I was pregnant with the twins, where I was ill for about five weeks, I don't remember another time when I've been ill for so long.  I caught this particular ... disease.... from Ty Ty Baby last Wednesday.  He had a fever and felt lethargic for under 24 hours; I've had a fever for the last seven days.  Aside from anxious and behind in work, this makes me feel old.

Indeed, sickness seems to have hit our house in spades over the last two weeks as we found out this morning that Henry has pink-eye.

Great.

Whenever I hear, read, or say the word pink-eye, my eye starts itching uncontrollably.  George feels the same way and we now have bottles of hand-santitizer sprinkled throughout our house.  I think I must have washed my hands about fifteen times since hearing the news.  And, I took a shower.

At first, I thought that Henry got pink-eye from Playspace, but it turns out that the twins down the street have it and that, quite frankly, makes me more than a little upset.  Almost every time Henry and Tyler have gotten sick, it's been the twins down the street.  In fact, this very illness that I have right now, right this very minute, which has cost me days and days of productivity, came to me via Tyler via the twins down the street.

They're little menaces.

And I wonder about their parents.  I mean, these aren't the only kids that Henry & Tyler pal around with, but they do seem to be the ones who get them sick all the time.

Don't they realize that by letting a child with a suspiciously puffy eye out of the house is generally not a good idea?  Do they think the same about a child with a fever?  A child with runny nose?  Where does the line get drawn here?  Am I being too harsh?

If the entire house comes down with pink-eye less than a week before our vacation, I'm not going to be happy.  In fact, the more I think about it, banning the twins down the street is sounding like a better and better idea.

In Which I Have a Life

My whole working life was up-ended, rather casually, last week by an older woman who came to the coffee house.  She brought her computer and was there for a long time, just like me.  At first, she sat down near the front of the store, but eventually, she moved toward the back of the coffee house, back where there were fewer outlets and where the conversations of other folks couldn't be heard as loudly.

And, last Friday, when I arrived at the coffee house, there she was.  Sitting in my seat.

It would be gentle indeed to call me a creature of habit.  Like my dad before me, I'm a devotee of routine.  Once I find something that works, I stick with it until forced by unimaginable pressures, to change.  Since I was small, I've brushed my teeth with Crest, worn my hair long, and gotten up fairly early in the morning.  I've read myself to sleep almost every night since I could read, buying a tiny flashlight to account for George's odd need to fall asleep in the dark.

I've been working out of the coffee house almost every day, sitting in the same seat in the back, so you can imagine what upheaval this caused in my world.  I argued with G on Sunday night, trying to convince him that I had to leave the house early, early, early, before the nanny arrived to take care of the twins, just so I could claim my seat.

It didn't work.  When I got there early, she just got there earlier.  There just wasn't anything I could do, so, as a last ditch effort, I tried to talk to her.

If I ever doubted that I was a little on the odd side, I was proven wrong the minute that I tried to talk a woman out of sitting in "my" seat in a public coffee shop.  It turns out that she likes the seat, too.  She gets there every morning just so she can sit there.  If I wanted to sit there, she suggested, why don't I just get there earlier.

But I just can't, because, you know, I actually want to give the twins their breakfast, to get them up, to dress them, and to play with them in the morning.  Even if I didn't want to do these things, I would do them because to shirking them would be to risk a bit of quite justified frustration on G's part, which would make my life much more difficult than not having my favorite seat in a coffee shop.

It turns out that I do have a bit of a life.

Unlike that other woman.  Ha.

Monday Mission: Travel Guide Entry

Playspace:  A Museum for Children

After running the gamut of diaper bags that hang on the walls by the entrance, the unprepared traveler steps into an alternative universe built for and run by children.  A fake grocery store, overflowing with plastic bread, fruit, and vegetables abuts a fake kitchen where children can prepare an imaginary meal to be served on a child-sized table.  Children can also use the computers at a fake bank or put out the flames at an imaginary house using the hose attached to the fake fire truck.  Although visually overwhelming, please be warned that this alternative universe is also extremely loud.

Although children who frequent this hang-out will vary greatly in size, age, and ethnicity, their parents can easily be classified into three groups.  On any given day, but especially on rainy Sundays, Playspace will by populated by a mixture of the following types of people:

Quality Timers - Identified by their casual clothing, Quality Timers come to Playspace in order assuage their niggling guilt at spending the week apart from their children.  They will show tell-tale signs of being extremely tired, sometimes nodding in place.  Although not always playing with their children, these types of parents will generally attend closely to their offspring, following them from area to area.  Quality Timers usually closely manage the interactions between their children and others, occasionally telling little Jack or Emily to share toys and mind the smaller ones. The only men in Playspace exist as part of a Quality Timer couple.

Meet Up Mommies - These women can be spotted by their expensive and trendy clothing as well as an overall polished appearance.  They also tend to lounge in groups on all possible surfaces in Playspace, playing scant attention to their children while they discuss their progress in school, ballet, or language classes.  Meet Up Mommies also tend to chat about other Meet Up Mommies who are not present at the time.  Because their children wear elaborate or designer clothing, they can also be easily identified and traced as belonging to a Meet Up Mommie.  This connection will generally be an important one to make as the offspring of Meet Up Mommies tend to be unsupervised. 

Happy Snappers - Among the most dangerous of parents inhabiting Playspace, Happy Snappers can be identified by sometimes large and unwieldly digital cameras.  In an effort to catch the perfect snapshot of their offspring, they will not hesitate to trip over anything that gets in their way.  Therefore, it is essential to scan for Happy Snappers and clear any children from their path before an accident occurs.  Any grandparent or other relative in Playspace will usually be a Happy Snapper.  Although single-minded, the Happy Snappers are nice enough.

It is hoped that knowing these characteristics of Playspace that you will have a happy and incident-free visit there with your children, who will usually return home exhausted and sleep well that night, which is the main reason that visits to Playspace are recommended.