OK. I’ve been remiss in posting but golly, the holidays are fraught with time-sucking activities — especially for those of us who are prone to trying to do ONE MORE THING. The only reason I’m able to find the time now is because Walker has decided that waking before 5am is the newest hip thing to do as a Toddler. This week I’ve been able to balance the checkbooks which had been woefully ignored (which makes me crazy), do some cleaning, and watch a lot of PBS Sprout “Sunny Side Up” show. Walker’s favorite show is Barney.

So much has happened in the last few weeks. The week before Thanksgiving we had our first baby stomach flu — complete with vomiting. I had been fearing Walker’s first barf. I wasn’t sure what I would do or how he would react. I’m way over it now. I had to pick him up from Sofiya’s early on a Friday afternoon after he had tossed his cookies three times. Along with the baby, I brought home three big bags of laundry because Sofiya’s dryer was on the fritz. Walker was in surprisingly good spirits and showed no signs of being sick through Saturday so we did errands and he ate like normal. All until Saturday evening when he was taking a small break and sitting with me on the couch. He coughed but it wasn’t a regular cough. He looked at me and BAAAAAARRRRFFF. He was scared and my first reaction was to catch it as it spewed forth. After cleaning everyone and everything up, we got ready for bed. Walker fell asleep quickly and about 30 minutes later, he starts to cry and we go in to find him sitting in his crib with yak all over. He looks up at us and yaks twice more. Sunday was a quiet day (not including the six operatic vomit-fests poor Larry experienced). Walker and I sat on the couch and dozed off and on. That’s when we watched The Jungle Book and found the benefits of PBS Sprout. (I wasn’t 100% but thank goodness I wasn’t incapacitated like my boys.)

Monday folks were on the mend. Walker felt fine despite explosive diarrhea. Larry wasn’t throwing up but still felt lousy. Walker didn’t go to Day Care because he apparently gave the gift of yak to Sofyia’s helper, Masha. That was not the birthday gift she would have hoped for. (She did appreciate the flowers we gave her a few days later.) We thought we’d make sure he was pooping a bit more regularly before we sent him to play with the other kids.

Walker came to work with me (and was a big hit). My co-workers are fantastic. All of them came out to play with Walker. He had SOOO much fun. We did a few errands and then I dropped Walker off at home for Larry to watch him while I went to the craziest jury duty I’ve ever experienced.

I arrive at civil court jury duty room. The judge comes down and swears in all 200 potential jurors. “OK. That’s not good,” I thought. And I was right. He had a personal injury case that would last 2-3 months. I successfully petitioned to get off that case. Then I got on a case that was apparently a relationship gone bad and the boyfriend didn’t move out so the girlfriend was trying to evict him for not paying rent. The boyfriend was representing himself and the whole situation was a circus. During jury selection, the boyfriend first asked us our opinion of rental law (not allowed), then tried to tell us about rental law (not allowed), then asked questions like these — “in a tenant/landlord relationship, do you believe the landlord is the LORD?” “Do you believe someone should be evicted for not paying rent?” and the kicker… “Do you think I should be evicted?” The judge laughed at the last one and told him he could ask the question though he thought it a bit premature. The entire experience, while very humorous, made me a tad anxious as I had many things I could be doing (but I did get a lot farther on my current knitting project). Larry powered through the afternoon and the boys had fun.

I’m running out of power and it’s time to fix Walker breakfast #2 this morning. I’ll catch up again more shortly.