Most of Friday is detailed here.
When the boys got home I pulled myself together and we headed over to the mall for the boy’s Santa visit. We timed it well; there was only one person in line ahead of us, and several piled up behind us while we waited. The boy chattered about what he was going to ask for, and instead of the train he’d been talking about for weeks or the airport he’d recently begun considering, he suddenly decided he wanted a racetrack. He uncharacteristically went shy when it was his turn, and we all had to coax him along to even begin talking to Santa; he wouldn’t sit on his lap but eventually climbed on the stool once he’d started talking non-stop. As always, the Santa and elf on duty were fantastic with the kids, and the photographer was great as well. In this miraculous digital age he took three snaps and allowed us to choose which one to keep.
While the photo developed at the one-hour place the boy and I took HRH to the flu clinic in the mall and left him there while we mailed a little package and went to Renaud-Bray to pick up a couple of small gifts. We were on our way to the car when we remembered the photo, and went to collect it.
Once home we baked some chicken nuggets for the boy and started decorating the tree. I was supposed to attend a cookie exchange party, but officially bailed due to dizziness and light fever (and in retrospect wasn’t that a good idea?). HRH put the lights on while the boy and I unwrapped all the ornaments and laid them out in like groups. The boy hung a handful of special ones (among them his Lightning McQueen ornament and the X-wing ornament MLG got me years ago) and then it was bedtime. Speaking of MLG, he agreed to stop by and take the yarn I’d spun for Janice and the Rice Krispie squares I’d been able to salvage from the Cricket-catastrophe along with him to the cookie exchange party, for which I was fervently thankful.
HRH ordered our traditional tree-decorating sushi dinner, we ate, and by that point I was so exhausted that I could only sit on the chesterfield and watch him hang the majority of the remaining ornaments. This is a big thing, because I’m the chief ornament hanger, and direct the show. Not this year. I was so tired I couldn’t even bring myself to worry about where things were going. We left the tiny ornaments that go on the ends of the branches and the wonderful icicles Jan made for the boy to finish hanging the next morning.
Saturday morning I got myself to the dress rehearsal for our annual holiday cello concert, which was excellent. Our duet got an appropriate impressed response from the other students (yay us!), and the group pieces were really nicely blended. Our teacher had made macaroni and cheese as a light lunch after the rehearsal was over (this was inspired by the fact that every time her two youngest students did an exercise perfectly she’d put five pieces of macaroni in a jar; the goal was to collect as much macaroni as possible before the concert!). I left feeling really confident about the concert.
When I got home I told HRH I wasn’t going to ADZO’s surprise party, scheduled for late that afternoon, and eventually he agreed to take the boy alone. I was cranky about missing yet another social gathering, but I would have been crankier if went, because I was tired and achy and had a nagging headache. (Again, in retrospect, an excellent decision, what?)
On to Sunday!
I’ve had an occasional dry cough over the past week. It got rather annoying last night, and today has developed into one of those when-you-cough-your-head-feels-like-it’s-about-to-explode kind of things. Then about an hour ago I developed chills, which led me to take my temperature, and hey, fever. Joy. And I have somewhere to be tonight, an event I swore up and down that I’d be attend come what may.
… whatever.
Yesterday went straight to hell when I left for cello. The lesson itself was great, but it was an hour-long bright spot in a three and half hour-long nightmare of hatred and traffic, the highlights of which were taking three times as long as it should to get to my teacher’s house (I’d planned for twice as long), and waiting twenty minutes on a corner at a stoplight in Ville St-Pierre until people on the street I was trying to turn on to stopped running the amber light only to stop almost n the intersection, and left room for me to turn onto the street I needed to be on. (I am leaving out the people who shoot along the shoulder of a road past a line of cars and then try to merge into the lane of traffic they just skipped because it was too slow for them [hello! you are part of the problem!], the idiocy of rerouting due to construction and not marking the reroute clearly, and the fact that it should only take fifteen minutes to my teacher’s house then thirty from there to pick up the boy.) The boy didn’t get to bed till eight-thirty; we were still eating at seven-thirty, his usual bedtime. The best part of the latter half of the day was snuggling in bed with him under warm covers in the dim room lit softly by his tiny glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, listening to Matt Haimovitz’s recording of Bach’s first solo cello suite while the boy rested an arm around my neck, tucked his head next to my cheek, and fell asleep.
The boy has officially grown two inches in six months. No wonder we had to get him new pants. He is in all respects quite healthy, and is inching up everywhere on the percentile graphs.
I invoiced. I also got a new assignment (150K words non-fic, gods help me; sure, some books need to be 150K, but not most of them).