Catching up

With each passing day this week, I found myself falling a little further behind on my great plans for this blog. I have all these ideas that float into my head throughout the workday. I’ll quickly jot the idea down and go on with work, with the intention of writing a post based on the idea in the evening. However, by the time I help get the kids into bed and have some dinner and clean up a little bit of the disaster that is our house, I have no energy left for thinking coherent thoughts and putting them down here. With that in mind, I’ve got a grab bag of topics to cover in this post.

I’ve had to use 3 sick days over the past week or so to help care for various sick people in my family. Azure and Bronze have both been fighting colds. Add that to the fact that I invited the plague into our home by having my childhood friend come visit from 2 hours away with his kids, one of which got sick and was throwing up in the car on the way here, therefore cursing The Wife and Azure to a day and a half of throwing up from the stomach flu. I cannot begin to explain the guilt that I feel, even though the only way of avoiding this would have been to turn my friend Beege away and force him to drive 2 hours back home with his sick child covered in throw up. Just not possible.

Also this week, I had the pleasure of watching The Lost Room on SciFi. What a cool show. I mostly gave it a shot because of Peter Krause. I really liked Sports Night and he played by far my favorite character on Six Feet Under. I don’t know what, if any, plans SciFi has for repeats of this mini-series, but if you’ve got 6 hours to burn, I’d definitely recommend it.

Put it all together and you’ve got a wonderful recipe for a blog without new content for almost a week.

There’s one other thing I wanted to talk about this time. I was very involved in theatre in both high school and college, and a fair number of the dates The Wife and I went on in the early days of our relationship were to various stage productions. So, when she surprised me a month ago with tickets to see Escanaba in Love at The Purple Rose Theatre, I was very excited. We went to the show last week and had a wonderful time.

Making these kind of plans is a big deal for us. For whatever reason, we were the type of parents who forgot to be a couple once the kids were born. We’ve never had a regular sitter. Maybe twice a year, we’d get some family member to watch the kids so we could have an evening out. Needless to say, after 5 years, this has been a strain on us. Just recently, we’ve finally been able to establish getting a sitter once in a while. What a relief!

We were a little concerned about how the kids would react to having someone sit for them. The girl we found came by for a short visit (interview) and to meet the kids. Things went well, so we made plans for her to watch the kids so we could do dinner and a movie. After we told the kids, they wanted to draw pictures to give her when she arrived. We thought this was kind of cute. The big day arrived and the kids were so excited they hardly gave us enough time to go over things with her before they dragged her away upstairs to play. The Wife and I went into the garage to leave and I realized the sitter’s car was in the way. I ran back in the house to ask her to move her car to the side of the driveway. As I was approaching the room where they were playing, I overheard Bronze telling the sitter, “I love you.” Mind you, Bronze had only known this girl for about 30 minutes total!

It started to sink in that the kids are craving attention from other people. Maybe, just maybe, it’s even a good thing that we’re exposing the kids to some other influences. Gasp! Regardless, the most important point of the sitter is that I get to start going out with my wife again. I was nearly to the point of leaving the kids with some homeless guy on the street, just for the chance to be a couple again. Thankfully, they can stay with someone who we trust and we still get to have our fun.