So, time to write a blog post about the blog.

I was recently sent an email by a well-known company wanting to buy ad space on here. Well, that’s not allowed while I am here on wordpress.com. And I’m not sure if I would accept the ad even if I could. But it did bring up questions I had recently about switching to self-hosting, and buying a domain name.  Questions I was asking before the ad offer.

2010 is 6 years of blogging for me. About 4 years of that was on blogger, writing about living in England and then having a baby.  Then I moved here and cleaned it up a bit, once baby number 2 arrived.  Then Twitter came along.

I recently read a bunch of tweets that suggested the advance of Twitter was the death of blog comments. I guess that is true for people who are used to getting tens or hundreds of comments.  For me, it was the birth of my comments (ANY comments being totally awesome as I used to get none!) and a greatly increased audience (comparatively speaking; it’s still teeny tiny, really). I wrote for years with only people who knew me in real life, and a few others reading this.  My stats (limited by wordpress.com stats, which are lame compared to Google analytics)  indicate my page views are going up, and up.

Totally by accident.  I never tried to build an audience. It’s never been my purpose. If I have ads, will that have to change?

Should I totally change my model from free unencumbered journal, to a potentially sponsored costing-money-to-run journal? (aside: does that mean BlogHer conferences become business expenses?!)  I have no problem with reading blogs that run ads AT ALL. It’s just that I already have a job, and I always considered this totally a ‘hobby’ informal sort of thing.

As usual, I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I just like to write. Sometimes. Not very well, not for any purpose other than purging some words. So wise internets, tell me what I should do.

(PS: I mostly wrote this post on my iPod touch, for the first time, which was not bad at all)

It seems like most of the time we are holding things together pretty well.  The day goes as such: Mark gets up and goes to work; I get up and get ready; I get the kids up and get them ready; I drop them at daycare; I go to work.  I leave work to start making dinner at home; Mark picks them up; we are all at home (usually) for the rest of the night.  In the inbetween time, Callum’s in the toddler room at daycare, and Oliver has alternate days of daycare and Junior Kindergarten.  We juggle.  It sort of works.  Most of the time.  Well… It’s a house of cards, really.  So it just takes a small gust of wind, a sneeze, for the whole thing to come crashing down and for me to question why the hell we built it in the first place.

Oliver has to take a bus from daycare to school.  This, if I’m honest, has always worried me.  A three four year old riding a giant yellow school bus!  Ack!  But I can push that thought to the back of my mind.  He’s riding with a bunch of his friends, including older kids.  They’ll look out for him.  The bus drivers have loads of training.  Oliver got trained too (admittedly we were a little distracted that night as there happened to be TORNADOES destroying the neighbourhood the training was in) and clearly understood the rules (we quizzed him repeatedly).  The buses have safety features in case the awful happens and your kid is left alone.  So I can mostly mostly not worry.  Too much.

I wish I could drop him off and pick him up.  I do when I can.  It’s not very often – maybe 3 or 4 times since the school year started?  I wish we were walking distance from the school.  I wish we lived where we could have a nanny and he could get picked up from home.  Part of the worry is the middleman, the daycare – not because there’s a problem, but because it’s just another step, another player.

So it finally happened today.  He fell asleep on the bus (not surprising as he waited up until we got home from the movies last night and didn’t go to sleep until 10pm – nuts).  The bus stopped at daycare and he didn’t get off.  Some kid(s) apparently told the daycare staff he never got on the bus.  I don’t know why the bus driver didn’t clue in that he was on the bus.  But he pulled away and kept going.

Part of this is my fault.  A week ago I had to pick Oliver up from school as he vomited in gym class, and I forgot to call daycare to say he wasn’t getting off the bus.  It’s the first time he ever got picked up from school early and I just totally didn’t even comprehend that I needed to do it.  Daycare quickly called and asked if he was in my care, last Monday.  He was, and I apologized.

Today, just before 4pm, they called again.  And he wasn’t in my care.  And OH MY GOD where is my kid?

Daycare says they’ll call the bus company.  But he wasn’t on the bus, says the kids.  Maybe he’s at school?

I call Mark to tell him what’s up.  “Oh dear”, he says.

Daycare calls back.  Bus company is going to call the school.  I’m saying, surely the school would have called me?  To say no one picked up my kid?  Please LET NO ONE ELSE have picked up my kid!  Now I’m done with my normally cool/calm/collected in a crisis mode and I’m starting to cry.  I actually can’t even say goodbye to the daycare staff as she’s telling me he’s fine and this is going to work out.

Panic.  Panic.  Tweet.

Daycare calls back. He’s been found.  He was asleep on the bus.  The driver will finish his route and then drop him off.

Heart slows.  Deep breaths.  Can’t focus on work the rest of the afternoon.  Amazing twitter friends send amazing tweets of support, understanding why the hell I was freaking out so much.

And cue me spending the rest of the afternoon (the walk around the grocery store, the drive home) pondering the house of cards.  I am usually happy with my choice of working outside the home.  What if I shouldn’t be?  What if this isn’t good enough for them?  What if my choice puts him at risk?  Is moving house, so that we can live near a school and maybe have a nanny, enough of a change?  Can we afford a 40% drop in income?  Do we want to?

Have I put too many responsibilities on him, expecting him to be able to take a bus to and from school, to negotiate all those rules and roles?

Have I not put enough on myself?  That post explains that maternity leave makes me insane.  And I needed to go back to work.  But it’s different now.  They’re older.

I hate all this sometimes.

I’ll put the house back together for tomorrow, and try to protect it from the gusts and bumps and falls.  And I’ll talk to the other architect in this venture and see if we can do something differently in the future.  It’s all I can do right now.

As parents, we do the math whenever a kid (or two) gets sick. For us, these are our most common formulas:

2am + fever + vomiting + screaming “get the bug out of my ear!!!!!” = Oliver has an ear infection

Coughing ’till he vomits + asthmatic wheezing + runny nose = Callum has a cold or a virus, or allergy (e.g. cigarette smoke)

You can usually figure it out, right?  Even if they can’t speak much, the symptoms point the way eventually.  The fever doesn’t tell you a lot because it could mean ANYTHING.  It’s the symptoms that follow that determine the answer.

So last week, Oliver presented with:

Wednesday (feverish + lethargic + vomiting) = Hmm.  Must be a stomach virus. He lay on the couch most of the day.

But then I also remember:

Wednesday + Thursday (“my mouth hurts!” + back at daycare and doing fine + but crying out for us in the night A LOT) = Hmm. Weird virus, eh?

Then I was thrown another formula via Callum:

Thursday (low grade fever + kinda not acting like himself) = Was asked to pick him up early from daycare…so maybe he’s getting it too?

Then Friday came and both boys acted totally normal and went to daycare.  And I assumed the threat of the “you must come and get your children from school/daycare, and too bad your boss is pissed off at you” phone call was over.  We had a good weekend.  Oliver had a GREAT weekend.  He had his friends-from-daycare-and-school birthday party at an indoor playground.

The only thing that was sort of off?  You probably can’t see it properly, but Callum suddenly got a rash all over his face on Sunday.

It kind of looked like chicken pox.  But they’ve been vaccinated, so I didn’t think that was it.  I chalked it up to dry skin/eczema – which they get, which has flared up since we got back from the UK.  And, you know, THEY WERE FINE.  And happy.  And running. And jumping. And singing.

Monday morning at work, while they were at daycare and school, I decided to Google rash identification photos.  One page mentioned scarlet fever, but the photos did not look like Callum at all, and it’s not even meant to turn up on your face.  But it mentioned that it was the same bug as strep throat.  And then I remembered that Mark has had a sore throat for 2 weeks.  And that Oliver said his mouth hurt.

I take a trip to Wikipedia.  I suddenly have a new formula:

Oliver (sore mouth + fever + vomiting + chills + malaise + peeling skin on his hands and mouth)

+

Callum (swollen tonsils, oh yeah, those have been around a while + low grade fever + rash on his face that a blog post tells me is ‘scarletina‘)

= OH CRAP. THEY HAVE STREP THROAT.

A trip to the walk-in clinic last night confirmed the diagnosis – positive tests all around!  Which, you know, was vaguely satisfying.  That I could Google it and figure it out.

But you know what? Math would be a lot easier if one of these children would have said to me: “Mummy, my throat really hurts”.  I feel like I already did enough algebra in high school.  It’s sometimes so hard to put the formula together.  And I’ve probably managed to infect half of our town by not figuring this out earlier, and sending them to daycare and school.  Argh.

Today it’s doses of penicillin & antibacterial cream for everyone, after leftover Cars birthday cake, and at least it will be done soon.

Since we got back, I feel a bit like I can’t come up for air.  I couldn’t sleep the first two nights we got back, my body insisting that I needed to be awake at 4am.  Then the kids got sick – first Oliver, and now possibly Callum.  Not sure yet.  Just a low grade fever for him.  But Oliver had a fairly nasty tummy bug with fever, and spent most of Wednesday on the couch.

So I’m tired.  Exhausted, really.  There are literally 10 loads of laundry to do or put away (not an exaggeration).  There are dishes stacking up.  There is still another suitcase to be unpacked.  There is still Christmas crap everywhere, decorations and cards and tree.

Before we went away, I agreed to book Oliver a birthday party with his friends for this weekend. I didn’t anticipate how much stress it would be causing me now, to have to pull together a half-way decent celebration.  I also didn’t know that he was going to have a pretty decent party while we were away – I knew there was going to be one, but I didn’t know how much trouble my sister-in-law and mother-in-law were going to go to.  It was a great pirate birthday party.  So I really wish he wasn’t having another one this weekend.  It’s overkill.  And I’m overwhelmed.

All of these things are bloody petty, of course, when I get around to turning on the news. Haiti. It’s awful. I made a donation this week to Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders. What else can I do?

I’m floundering. Someone throw me a bone.

Here’s yours:  if you want to peek at our photos from our trip – click the image.

England trip Dec 09-Jan 10

You had an awful flight. I’m sorry.

It wasn’t even because of me or my kids. I mean, yeah, you sat in front of my 4-year-old, and he did bump/kick your seat a couple of times, but I threatened him with death if he kept doing it, so it was kept to a minimum.

Beside you was a mother and her son. I think it was her son. It could have actually been a girl. I thought it was a boy until he stood up and starting pawing at my tv screen on his seat back, and it turned out he had painted finger nails. However, the hair was short and the clothes were boy-ish, so I’ll stick with boy.

This boy, after his mother drugged him up with some Benadryl, managed to get sick all over himself and the seats around you.  After that was dealt with, he slept practically on top of you for most of the rest of the flight.  And when he was awake, he was crying or yelling.  Fun times!

I really don’t understand why the airport staff decided to put this boy and his mother next to you when there was opportunity to put them in two seats by themselves instead of a row of three, but then they put me and my kids in a three, and put my husband behind us.  That was kind of silly.  On both counts.

So you were trapped next to vomit boy, and then you had us behind you.  But we were good.  Mostly.

Every time my kids did something they shouldn’t on a plane (BE QUIET. STAY IN YOUR SEAT.), they were threatened with being thrown out of the plane. Yes, this is my sophisticated parenting method. I win! 

So the 4-year-old would start to argue with me about parachutes.  And the 2-year-old was like “what? As if.  I don’t care.”  Because 2 year olds on airplanes are LIKE THE DEVIL. I really did want to chuck him off the plane.  If the windows could have opened, they would have.  Just a crack. To show him I was serious.

But here’s the thing.  I’m sitting there, struggling to entertain and distract them with every trick in the book (tv.music.iPod touch apps.toys.crayons.)and deal with their need and desire to get up and run around and play while being trapped on a tin can, and I’m thinking — how the hell did people used to get their children to be seen and not heard?

My Step Father-in-law, whom we just spent a week with, raised his children this way and is clearly ANNOYED by my children.  My loud, rambunctious children.  Not bad.  Just playful.  He likes to get them to shut up.  He also likes to scare them with a growl or bark.

So, how did they do it?  Did they beat them?  Were they emotionally abused?  Did they lock them in cupboards?

Because these kids of mine do not do “seen and not heard”.  And I’m okay with that.  But I try.  I try to make them quiet and still so I don’t piss you off. (You already were pissed off with that other family.) So I don’t piss the other travellers off.

But you know what? Fly Business Class next time.  ‘Cause although I’m trying hard, I’m using some pretty pathetic methods to get my children to behave for a few hours.  We’re all hurtling towards Toronto on this tiny vessel with cramped leg room and bad food together.  It was only 6 or 7 hours of your life.  You’ll get over it.  So will we.