Hello Reality

5 days away from home.

No meals to cook.

No school to teach.

I won’t lie – that was pretty great.

But we knew it was a fairy tale.

Not real.

As we boarded our last flight to home, Kevin and I joked about crossing over from fantasy to reality.

I knew it was coming.

I just didn’t expect it to be such a crash landing.

Approximately one hour (or the length of time it took to wash and dry one load of laundry) after arriving at our cozy home my husband and partner-in-parenting-this-mess-of-children-we-have-accumulated repacked his bag and headed north-ish with his co-workers for their annual staff retreat.

That was okay.

I knew the trips were stacked up against one another.

But here’s what I didn’t know.

I didn’t know that five out of six children would be physically ill upon our return to reality.

Nor was I aware that merely fifteen minutes (or less) after our kind friend Lauren waved goodbye after spending the week with some of the kids I would step down upon a nail sticking out of a wooden box in our sunroom.

How could I have known that nail would pierce my heel?

Or that upon closer examination that nail would prove to be ridiculously, laughably in fact, rusty.

I did not know that I would suddenly realize that my last tetanus shot would have been received circa 1991-ish.

I could not have predicted that I would spend the better part of Monday, five and a half hours to be precise, waiting in two doctor’s offices and a pharmacy and receiving a shot, with five children under the age of seven.  All at varying degrees of illness.

Awesome.

Dear Reality,

I knew you were coming.

You needn’t slap me across the face.

(Nor poke me in the heel.)

Let’s not be friends any longer.

Okay?

Sincerely,

Me.

The medical shake down at our house of chaos?

Piper needs basic infection-fighting medicine.

London and Mosely can just cough their way back to health minus medication.

Bergen has bronchitis.

And Otto Fox has croup.

I have a sore upper arm.

Kevin will be absent four days.

Awesome.

But here’s the we’re-really-going-to-be-just-fine reminders.

Thank goodness Target has this color-coded medicine container system.  My counter looks like a drugstore so I need all the obvious reminders I can get that Berg should not consume Wilder’s medicine and Piper should not drink Bergen’s.

The kids have all been drinking their syrup-filled syringes like pros.

Or addicts.

Berg said, “My medicine tastes like cherry at first but then at the end it tastes like garbage.”

And Otto demands to hold his own dispenser and suck it dry.

I’m pretty confident that he would take seconds if I was offering.

And all this forced staying-at-home-to-avoid-contaminating-our-friends-with-our-sickness business makes it easy to catch up on missed school work.

So.

On second thought,

let me recompose that letter.

Dear Reality,

Whatever.

You’re not the boss of me.

Sincerely,

Me.