Ten.Fifty-Nine

1. I want to make an apple crisp because it's a Monday and I think we need comfort food to start the day.  

2. I break my no-caffeine streak and make myself a cappuccino. I still have two lunches and two snacks to pack, 7 loads of laundry to fold, and a meeting with a teacher. 

3. The one who threw up the night before is still in pajamas and the oldest one is still coughing and wheezing and looks pained. Two kids home sick. I have to take the girl with me to the teacher meeting.  

4. I hate to compare, but it's so different. I need to let it be different. I will only make myself more upset by listing all the ways in which it's different, instead of appreciating what's here in front of me. But it's still so different.  

5. Errands.  

6. I start in on the seven loads and watch last night's Love & Hip-Hop and then The Conjuring. It takes me 2.5 hours to fold it and put it all away. 

7. I haven't met her yet but she offers me medicine and I need it, and so I take it and remember that this just might be everything I need it to be if I let it.  

8. I'm in the middle of making Chicken Parmesan and the oldest comes down to tell us he doesn't feel well. That he's going to throw up. I pull the trash bin out of the drawer and bring it to his chin just in time, dusting the underside of his face with flour. 

9. Sick day number two tomorrow. 

10. This is all that got done today. I am salty because I didn't even get to eat any of the apple crisp. I didn't get to edit the photos. Which means I didn't write the blog post. In my down time I ate leftover Greek salad and pita chips, drank tea and water, rubbed essential oils on my chest and took a mucinex, wondered how we're supposed to do all of this. Wondered how I get to do all of this. 

10.1 I am out of sleepy time tea and settle instead for very-hot-water with lemon and honey. I catch the last bits of sunset. Orange and gray and faded blue denim. I sometimes cannot handle all of the beauty and the pain.