You Know, Just Your Basic May

My sister (Des) was famous (in our family) for starting nearly every sentence (for a time) with the phrase, "You know, just your basic..."

So I now borrow her phrase to describe our May so far. Because, really, it's been pretty normal. Just your basic May.

We're doing all the things one does in May.

Grilling out. 

Sixteen inches of snow. In May.

Enjoying the new spring greenery.

Sixteen inches.

Playing on the slide. 

Did I mention that it's May?

 When one is trapped spends any amount of time indoors with small children due to freakishly inclement weather and a refusal to put snow tires on in May for any reason you find yourself stretching out normal activities and doing things at odd times. You find yourself thinking "Surely it's time to start the evening routine. Oh wait, it's only 10 AM." 

Still, you're ready for a bubble bath? Why not? 

Addie is not a fan of a mere bath. She only wants to take a 'nice warm cozy bath".

Graydon is my splasher. Unsurprising.

Wet little kiddie eyelashes are the best.

Dress up? Yes. Let's do this. All of us.

You would expect Sydney and Addie to enjoy tutus, right?

Bet you didn't expect that Graydon would also love some tutu time. 

But he does enjoy a good game of Ring Around the Rosies in a nice skirt.

And why not?

What else do we really have to do?

Tutu cute, if you ask me.  Love this punkin.

Love this sweet little muffin too.

And also this one. Sweet outfit, Ads.

Want to stick your head through a cat door? Absolutely, kids. Absolutely.

Good clean fun.

Graydon kept trying to either a) shove her out of the cat door

or b) pull her through it by her hair

Lots of movies have been watched whilst consuming highly processed snacks. Listen, don't judge unless you too have been snow bootin' it in May.

Chilling. Literally chilling.

 Fortunately, the snow has finally all melted. Not without first flooding our basement, but hey...the good news is that this single snowfall was so wet that it solved the drought in SE MN. So a wet basement floor is not too high a price to pay for a nice high water table.

And, much like denizens of the Arctic Circle, now that we are becoming reacquainted with that glowing orb some call the "Sun", we are ready to celebrate. And we may never spend a daylight hour inside until snow once again forces us indoors. So, I'm thinking we've got until at least September, and I plan to make the most of it. 

We're more than ready to turn over our soil and grow some stuff around here. Bye bye Old Man Winter. Don't hurry back!

The Sick Locker

Sick, and yet still cute. Only kids can manage this. This was after a fever broke during nap.

"Man plans. God laughs." ---Yiddish Proverb

Touché , Jewish folk...touché. 

I did indeed have large plans for blogging and life-ing but we got a visit from our old foe, RSV, and we have been shut inside the sick locker ever since. 

I hate the sick locker. We use the word "hate" a lot in our culture...you know, we hate Ke$ha, we hate idiots that write condescending articles about moms with iPhones, we hate the word "moist"...or maybe only I say I hate those things? However, I actually really do HATE being in isolation with sick kids. 

And I am not talking about a runny nose and a slight cough. That's what I like to refer to as "winter" and since it lasts an ungodly amount of time here you just learn to buy the industrial size of Boogie Wipes and move on with life as usual. 

I just told him that Puxatawney Phil was a false prophet and that winter would last sixteen more weeks.

 I might have mentioned a time or ten that winter decided to stick around.  This is from my friend Catherine's FB profile, and it's too good not to share.

Even the natives have dropped their usual scoffing at the soft "cake eaters" in moderate climes and are now restlessly eyeing the forecast

 An extension of winter means an extension of "winter illness" season. So two weeks ago, Addie went to bed perfectly happy and then woke up at midnight choking and unable to breathe properly due to a nasty attack of croup. An ER visit for an emergency nebulizer and some steroids fixed her right up, but she was quite unwell for several days after that with persistent fevers and a nasty cough and a general malaise which she explained as "Mom, I'm getting really slow."

Asking to go to bed at 7 PM one night.

 During a follow up visit to family practice, they mentioned that her croup might have been caused by RSV, which actually relieved me. Because you know, Graydon already had that as an infant so I thought he'd sail right past it.

Stupidly, I forgot that Addie also already had RSV, which is why Graydon got it as a three week old.

As soon as Addie started to recover, G man went down and he did not fare so well. Addie is robust. She gets sick very rarely and when she does get sick, she doesn't stay down for long. I'm not going to get into the whole saga, because he's fine now, but it took us a few doctor's visits and worried nights and a set of chest x rays and some antibiotics and a home inhaler to get over it.  And that's the short version.

We  had the humidifiers on blast in the kids rooms.

Frankly, it really sucked. It's hard to see your kids suffering, even when you have confidence that all will be well in the end. But when your kids are that ill, you can't see anyone, you can't go anywhere, and you can't really DO anything to take their minds off of how bad they feel.  There were a great many sleepless nights especially when Graydon was sick. I slept upright with Graydon on the couch for several nights with the humidifier beside us and I had a lot of uneasy dreams about being on a lifeboat in the ocean. All of which makes sense when you consider that I usually woke up to find water beaded up on the couch and our blankets. 

Poor little G man was not feeling so super at this point.

Long story short, it was tiring and scary at times, but I think we are now healthy and caught up on sleep. We have been released from the isolation of the sick locker and it's amazing. Just being able to run errands during the day feels like a privilege. And you know what? It IS a privilege. Too often I forget that for a lot of people, the sick locker has to become a way of life.

Resting together

So I am newly grateful for health and wellness and energy and rest. 

And, as an added bonus, the weather has been really nice the past few days. Granted, it is supposed to be quite chilly again for the forecastable future, but we do have flowers springing up in our yard.

Spring is about to break out of the sick locker too, and not a moment too soon. I think everyone is ready to welcome a new season.