KathySRW

Pass the chips.

Saturday, June 09, 2007

Thursday I worked 1/2 day. Then I had to go to the pulmonologist to get the result of my sleep study. I stopped by the house first. The phone rang almost as soon as I got home. It was my 8 year old son's school. It was a 1/2 day at school, so they got out at 11:30...but he had refused to get on the school bus. He had inisted to the staff that his dad had told him that his mom would pick him up after school. I have no idea what was behind that. But I had to take a side trip to his school, pick him up, bring him home, where his middle school sister had already arrived, and THEN went to the doctor's in Robbinsdale.

Later that night I checked my voice mail and heard a series of frantic phone calls from an old friend who I had listed as my son's emergency contact. The school had been trying to call her too. It was that bad! I'm glad I stopped by the house before going to the doctor. I would have missed the call entirely!

My sleep study showed moderate snoring, but no sleep apena, based on the oxygen content in my blood. Is that too much information? He referred me to a dentist who makes custom mouth guards that prop the backs of people's throats open to make more room for breathing. Beats surgery.

But he asked me a bunch of other questions, and freaked right out when I told him I go to bed at 11:00 pm and get up at 5 . I think compared to a lot of other working moms, that's acutally doing pretty good. He wrote "sleep deprived" on the form he was filling out. He pulled out his prescription pad where you would normally write the name of a drug, and wrote "get at least 7 1/2 hours of sleep per night," and he told me to hang it on my bathroom mirror, so my husband could see it, as if it might be his fault I like staying up to watch John Stewart and Steven Colbert, and chose to work the early shift, at work.

So last night and the night before I actually went to bed at 9:30. It went pretty good. I don't know that I'll be able to keep that up for long, but it worked for me the last two nights.

Yesterday, Friday, we had our annual last day of school party. Every year the last day of school is a 1/2 day. The first few years my daughter was in school, she'd just invite over her closest two or 3 neighbor girls and we'd have pizza and they'd play beanie babies. Now that my son is in school, we've included a few of the next door neighbor boys. But this year my daughter just graduated the 7th grade and my son graduated the 2nd grade. My son had over the 4 next door neighbor boys who spend all their time over here anyway, plus one more. And I just told one of my daughter's friend's moms, I think she walked down the hall at school and invited everyone she passed. She 6 friends over, 4 girls and 2 boys.

I bought $60 worth of pizza, pop, water, juice boxes, chips , paper plates, a watermelon, cookies. We had a proper kid-feast. I sugared up all the neighbor kids. There for a while various combinations of them were at the park 2 blocks from here, and there's only one of me. So I did spend quite a bit of time walking back and forth, going to the park, doing a head count, coming home, doing another one. At one point the pre-teens were at the park, I stopped by to check on them, and 3 were missing! They had gone into the grocery store "to buy an eggplant." It was something they had threatened to do on their way there and I had told them not to.

At another point the pre-teens were walking back from the park, and I was walking towards the park with a pack of my son's friends, minus my actual son, who could not be dragged away from the Nintendo. We arrived at the park and found the 6 year old just coming out of the porta potty by himself. The pre teens were going to forget about him and leave him! So, yeah, I let it get out of my hands a couple of times.

I was grateful when all the parents either came to pick up their kids or called to ask them to ride their bikes home, because it doesn't always work that way. Everyone was gone by 6:30 pm. Then just the 4 of us ate dinner at a local restaurant and read our son's report card . As usual all his academic categories were "3's" (excellent) and all his behavior categories such as "respect for school property" and "does not disrupt class" were all "1's" (needs improvement). We let him read aloud to us the very kind note written by his teacher about his good sense of humor and his hard work and progress during the year. I hope he gets more like her in the future.

Tomorrow my husband and I spend all day selling hambergers and brats at the Lions club tent at a local carnival. So we only have today. I probably shouldn't be taking time out to write this.

We still have our ill friend's cat. He still calls from the phone in the hall of the locked psych ward of the county hospital. Moments later his weepy voiced mother often calls us, because he calls her and then she calls us. He still thinks thieves stole art off his hard drive. He still forgets which items we told him we were able to pick up from his old apartment with our Saturn sedans, and what we had to leave behind, even though we told him. He believes people have stolen items out of his hospital room, but 'finds' them later. And his mom, out of state, is so vulnerable she believes what ever he said last, and we can't always talk her down.

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