Another Snow Day, Etc.

Monday Thea was off from school for the MLK holiday. Since her best friend Emily goes to a different school they rarely get together to play. We (Thea and I) called Sunday and left a message to see if Emily wanted to come over for a playdate - and luckily, she did.

We had snow again, so Ela called to cancel Micah's session - and it would've been a whole day of entertaining my children and refereeing their squabbles. The solution was occupying one child with a friend. And fortunately this friend has a younger brother around Micah's age, so she's tolerant of having someone small want to shamelessly adore her and constantly try to horn in on their fun.
The girls shut themselves in Thea's room to make a mailbox decorating project. I had hit the sale bins at Michael's so I had notebooks for them, one with a "T" and one with an "E", stuff for them to decorate mailboxes for their Valentines, and Post-Its in the shapes of the letters "T" and "E". That stuff plus a round or two of Candyland kept them busy until lunch time.
Then Micah went upstairs for his nap and they occupied themselves emptying all the wooden play kitchen foods into various baskets and containers. We've had that stuff since Thea was little, and I don't know what possessed me to buy it. It was just so darn cute - all organized into colorful containers and cannisters. Until there are a thousand little pieces all over the floor and then I question my reasons for thinking the little tins of wooden potato chips, beef stew, champignons, and green beans were somehow a necessity. When it's all back together again, I do love the wooden kitchen and all the accoutrements so much better than the plastic ones. When they've outgrown it, I am going to store it all away for Thea's or Micah's children, so they will have all the fun of sorting it all out some day.
Since we had fresh snow, two toboggans and one saucer, going out to play in the snow was almost guaranteed - and 90 minutes into Micah's nap, the girls were itching to get their snow pants and coats on so by 3:30 pm I was encouraging Micah to wake up a little. Then it was all the fun of getting three children into snow pants, jackets, gloves, hats and scarves and dragging the toboggans and saucer up the hill.
It was a powdery snow that didn't have the nice icy crust that made the toboggans really fly last weekend, but they seemed to have fun. I even took the saucer for a ride down the hill. The girls made snow angels, Micah got to ride on the back of his toboggan with Emily steering, and everyone had fun trying to pound the one person who didn't have snowpants and much else in the way of insulation with snowballs.
We also went to our neighborhood park, after the toboggans started to get a little old, and surprisingly, snow is not a deterrent to getting on the swings, going down the slides and climbing on the monkey bars. Which is what Emily's dad found them doing when he walked over to the park.
Poor Emily, her face just fell, and instead of 'Hi Daddy', Adam got hit with "But I haven't even had a chance to have hot chocolate yet!" So Micah and I trudged home to get him out of his snowsuit and start the hot chocolate.
And that's what I was doing when the telephone rang with Steve calling to say he'd gone to the ER to get the chest pains and tingling in his arms checked out. I took Emily's cue and told him that we were in the middle of a playdate and I had two cold wet girls coming back to the house.
We followed Adam and Emily home (after the hot chocolate, and each girl drank two cups to warm up) and the children stayed there for dinner so I could go to see what was up in the ER. This was my first trip back to the ER ER, Micah's little mishaps have landed us in the Fast Track. Steve was bored enough to request his reading glasses and a SuDoKu book from home (sorry, I was not up for driving the icy, slippery backroads; I did go to the Gift Shop to get him something to read.) He was on a low-risk cardiac protocol so he had to wait for a second set of enzymes to be drawn six hours after the first set (which were drawn while I was there and was more than 90 minutes after he arrived). This meant he wasn't going to be getting released until after midnight, and he'd left his car at the office.
So I made another trip back to our former neighbors' home and Adam went with me to retrieve Steve's car and put it in the hospital parking lot, then back to fetch the children - who were annoyed that the second phase of their playdate was being interrupted.
Segue to Tuesday night, after returning from a long day at work capped off by conscripting two of the front desk staff to hold Micah down to remove his stitches (helped out by my putting his coat on backwards with his arms at his sides), after the children have gone to bed and I'm back at the computer working on my charts, there is still charts to be done. There are also a few of tropical Tootsie Pops sitting on the counter. Perfect! One lime one helped me think so well that I had a second, which led to trying a lemon one - and all three helped me finish 20+ chart notes, 10+ lab/radiology letters and other tasks in the EMR.
Then I went upstairs to brush my teeth and go to bed. In the course of puckering my mouth to brush me teeth I notice these two enormous swollen blobs on the inside of my upper lip. It was freakish - and my tongue was fine, the lower lip was unchanged. If this was some sort of allergic reaction to some dye or ingredient in the Tootsie Pop, it was a bizarre one. I popped a dose from a leftover Medrol Dose Pak and hoped for overnight improvement. No more lollipops for me.
And whatever weird karmic cloud I'm under, I wish it would blow away.