5:07- Jack wakes me up over the baby monitor. He is now sleeping through the night in his OWN CRIB,,,wow, and only 2 years old! :) But he has started waking up sooo early. Ideally he would sleep until 6-6:30. He might be ready for a later bedtime, but experience has taught me not to be too quick to assume that kids need less sleep...very often they have a glitch like this for a few weeks and then go back happily to their previous schedule. I trudge downstairs and across the house to get him. The downside of being in our new master bedroom is this early morning hike. I bring him upstairs and nurse him, hoping for a little more sleep. This is the only time he nurses anymore, so I figure once he starts sleeping a bit later he will be weaned!
5:15- I hear John quietly get out of bed. I squeeze his hand and want to tell him Happy Birthday, but I'm hoping Jack will go back to sleep and don't want to talk.
5:50- Jack is really up. He nursed and dozed a bit, but there's no going back now. I give up and head downstairs with him. I have been sorting piles of toys in our old playroom turned new master bedroom and I don't want him undoing my sorting. We find John downstairs and officially wish him Happy Birthday. I put on coffee and soak some dishes sitting on the counter. They got backlogged yesterday when Maria was baking and dumped some flour into my soaking sink of dishes, effectively coating them with paste. Yuck.
6:15- John is leaves for work. I change Jack but leave him for now in his warm pajamas. It turned cold last night! There's no PSR this week so we can have a slower start this morning. I pour some coffee and sit at the computer to check my email and read some blogs. I find a friend's email coaching me on how to put links on my blogs and experiment with that for a while. Jack is happy to play with a basket of toys in the living room and watch Baby Doolittle.
7:15- Jack is no longer happy. I pour some more coffee and get him a banana and some milk and we sit to watch Elmo's World. Too much TV? Yeah well...it's a day of rest, after all, and I'm not up for much else yet. :)
I spend the next couple of hours slowly getting everyone fed, taking a shower, getting Jack dressed,,,,it's nice not to have to rush around. Usually I only have an hour or so to do all of this, and three kids instead of two! It does have the disadvantage that everyone *knows* we have more time and I have to kind of kick Maria in the rear to get her finally moving through her morning list...getting dressed, making her bed, cleaning up her bathroom.
9:40- We leave for mass...it starts at 10 but is just a couple of miles away. Maria runs ahead of me and Jack on the way in, hoping as always to get to serve. She's not scheduled to, but she likes to check in case someone didn't show. Today it pays off and she gets to serve so it's me and Jack in the pew. They have the children process through the church during the entrance hymn with palm branches, weaving through the ailes, lead by the altar servers. It was very cute. At the end Father, Maria and the other servers went onto the altar and left the children disoriented and searching for familiar faces in the pews. Jack is restless for a while, then falls asleep on my shoulder until the sign of peace when Maria comes over and plants a kiss on his head and wakes him up. Grrrr. Even when he wakes again he is content to lay on my shoulder quietly. I am grateful for this even though my back aches from holding all 37 pounds of him during the hour and a half mass.
11:30- Home again,,,lunch of leftovers accumulated during the week. Jack gets changed and I optimistically put him down for a nap, hoping he will still sleep even though he catnapped in mass. Maria mixes up cake batter for a Welcome Home cake for Kain while I do this. I come into the kitchen and find that the oven is not working!! The stovetop is working but the oven won't heat up. While I'm trying to figure out what to do with this information, my brother calls and wants to know if I've heard anything from Kain's mom about his arrival home today. I call Kain's mom's cell phone and she doesn't answer. This causes a flurry of phone calls between my brother, my mother and me. I'm all in a fit about this development and trying to figure out what is going on. Is she on her way or not? If not, is she just being flaky or pulling something? In the meantime I dump the cake batter down the sink and figure I'll just have to pick up a cake from a bakery and add the oven to the list of things to get repaired.
1:45- Still haven't heard from Kain's mom. I'm freaking out. Jack isn't napping either, although he has been quitely playing this whole time. We had an interesting moment of nursing intervention when the teenager acrossed the street wreaked his bike and I found him lying in the road screaming his head off. I helped him off to the ER with his mom and then came back inside to fold laundry and stew some more about the whole Kain situation. Also trying to decide what to do about our afternoon plans of going up to the hospital to say hi to John and bringing some birthday goodies...afraid to leave without knowing what is going on with Kain.
2:30- We go ahead and leave for the hopsital and leave a note for Kain's mom taped to the door. I stew the whole way there and back about all the possible things that can go wrong with the whole situation. A quick visit with John and we are heading back home again.
4:00- Still no Kain. Still no answer on his mom's cell phone. Jack is playing in the playroom and I am pacing around, venting via the phone with my mother and grandmother and starting to plan what I will do if she just doesn't bring him back. What possible reason could she have not to even call and let me know when to expect her? She said she would bring him back early in the day, and I don't even know if she's on her way at all!
5:00- I start fixing brinner...waffles, scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage...Maria helps a bit with the eggs. I make bacon on my new handy dandy griddle and it is a good thing. I want another, one for bacon and one for pancakes. I half expect Kain to stomp into the kitchen at any time demanding the first piece of bacon. I could just throw up from the knot in my stomach.
6:00- Dinner is served. Jack actually eats, even tries a bite of sausage. He loves the waffles.
6:30- Kain finally shows! His grandmother brings him with a some guy friend of hers....blows in the door and talks talks talks for 10 minutes about how his mother's ride flaked on her and plus she's sick and she left his sneakers at her house but bought him an outfit and Kain is doing really well here and is obviously happy and she's really not ever been a prostitute no matter what I've heard about her and yes she's had problems with drugs before but that was a long time ago and she doesn't even drink and her family tells everyone she's been in the Betty Ford Center and she doesn't even know where the Betty Ford Center is and she has her life together and Joy has her life together and, by the way, I didn't send enough Adderall for Kain because he ran out halfway through the week.....wow. Think she doth protest too much? I've never even spoken to the woman before, how many of you have the urge to spend 10 minutes convincing someone you just met that you are not a drug addict? I paste a grin on my face and nod my head and don't mention the fact that Kain is wheezing and his hair smells like cigarettes and I sent exactly 8 Adderall pills...I counted them three times...so someone is swiping them. I just want her to leave. Finally, she does. Kain wants to play with Maria and the boy across the street, so I send him off to play for a bit. It's late, but he hasn't had his medication and he's been stuck in the car for hours...I know he needs to blow off steam.
7:00- Time to get serious about getting these boys down. Kain tells me he hasn't had dinner so I dish him up some waffles et al...he has two servings of everything with a ton of milk...probably the first non-fast food since he left a week ago. I asked him what kind of stuff he ate at his mom's and he says "McDonald's". I pick up the playroom and get Jack ready for bed. I snuggle briefly with Jack in the rocking chair and read Goodnight Moon, fighting off the overwhelming fatigue that is setting in. Kain, Maria and I say evening prayers...candles are lit, Act of Contrition, Guardian Angel Prayer, Prayer to St. Michael, everyone invokes their patron saints. I pass out jelly beans for their jelly bean jars and we pluck a "thorn" from our salt dough crown of thorns. I then put Kain in bed and we read the dinosaur book Kain brought back with him. He cries because he misses his mom. Kain is not a crier and he looks embarassed and hides his head under the covers. I dig him out and hug him and tell him it's ok and he'll feel better in a couple of days once he gets used to being here again. He looks very tired and tells me he stayed up late a lot, once until midnight. I hug him and listen to him wheeze. I ask him if he's been getting his asthma meds while he's been at his mom's and he says no, his mom forgets a a lot,,,he says it hesitatingly,,,and then says he didn't want to tell me that because he doesn't want me to keep him from visiting his mom again. I wonder who planted that seed in his head. I sing Hush Little Baby and tell him I'm so glad he's back. I plan to let him sleep as late as he needs to in the morning, even if that means he'll be late for school. He needs to catch up and I'm worried about him getting sick if he doesn't get some rest. In spite of his big size, he is a rather delicate thing healthwise. I knew without a doubt he would come back wheezing and probably sick. He cannot handle being without his meds, bad sleep, bad diet, around cigarettes..... I wonder how many weeks it will take for me to get his lungs well again now.
8:30- John is home and steps in to say good night to Kain. I plow on, unpacking Kain's bags, washing dishes...Maria give John a card she made for him and she picks up the living room. Then we watch a bit of Jesus of Nazareth and I send Maria off to bed. We watch it together every Lent. We skipped her reading tonight since I let her stay up a bit late to watch more of the movie.
9:30- Hanging out with John even though I'm tired tired tired. It's hard to make myself go to bed when he's home and not working the next day.
10:45- Finally going to bed. I haul the rest of the clean laundry upstairs to fold tomorrow. I read very briefly from "What Went Wrong with Vatican 2" while John is getting ready for bed, then light's out, finally! I'm blessed to have all of my chickens under my roof again.
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