Success

Lab results are in. The cancer is gone.

The robotics

My oldest son is in the middle school robotics club. What that normally means for me is that once a week he stays late and tinkers with a robot with a couple other kids. What it means for him is that a month ago, he was at a local competition. Apparently I didn't write anything about it, it was so low on the radar. But his team qualified for the regionals, and that was yesterday. 

From 6am-4pm, he was at the Oncenter in Syracuse. I rejoined him at 9, when the competition began. Or rather, the sitting around.

Alright, I get it. It's pretty normal for these types of events. They have a match, their robot competes, they're scored, then they go back to their staging area and plan for the next match. There wasn't really a spectators area, so I joined them at their table, which had plenty of space for me. I was there for just over seven hours, and there was about an hour of actual event.

But don't get me started on the food.

I'll do it anyway.

There's a food vendor there that has a monopoly on the one spot in the building. No outside food or drink allowed - they check your bags. A previous convention at the same location informed me that you're not even allowed to park a food truck outside. Meanwhile the nearest alternative is a pub I'd rather not take a middle schooler into.

The food at this was pretty much what you'd expect. Extremely overpriced, dumpster grade slop masquerading as lunch. The actual counter was a joke. There were a handful of fresh faces up front happily taking your money, but in the back I could see what looked like a batch of drug addicted crackheads slowly torturing the food.

So yea, next time I'm in that building, movie theater rules apply. Whatever I can smuggle in using cargo pants and a fake beer gut pouch.

Slow and sore

I got Becka home around 4:30 yesterday. She ate a stack of saltine crackers and a tall glass of water, and immediately went to bed. My old friend Mindy came by and brought dinner, which was incredibly helpful as I didn't have any time to cook. As I was working the kids through the evening, Becka woke up and asked if it was 7am or pm, which was about all she could do before turning around and falling right back asleep. All in all it was pretty uneventful.

This morning, I was about as normal as possible. I went to the gym, but came home instead of heading to work. I go early enough that nobody's really awake when I go, so few were up when I got home. She was, as titled, sore and slow. Couldn't move her arm much, still had some of the drugs swimming through her head. I stayed home long enough to get the kids ready and out the door.

I almost felt bad leaving her when I did go to work, but she was cozy on the couch, no kids jumping on her, and covered in her fluffiest blanket. As a mother of four, she relishes her alone time, so rather than think she needed me to dote on her, I went to work.

Removing the problem

The tumor comes out today. So does the nearby lymph node. She gets dropped off in the wee hours of the morning, then I leave and I'm on call the rest of the day. Should take all day. Theoretically I could go into work once the kids are off to school, but she asked me to take care of rearranging some things around the house. That and I doubt I could focus on anything more complicated than rearranging furniture.

I shouldn't be this worried.

Happy not-quite

 

 

Next year sweetheart, next year.

8 hours

So there I was, staying up too late and suffering in the morning. Five hours of sleep meant I was tired and groggy. Then the weekends would come, and I'd sleep in. Ten hours of sleep later, and I was still groggy. Too much is as bad as too little.

So let's show some self-discipline. Set a bedtime, same time every day. Set a wake up time, same time every day. Hold myself to it. Then I get that magic number, eight hours of sleep.

But I did it wrong. I slept on the wrong side, I breathed too hard, I had a bad dream. Good sleep is a casualty of my 40's.

Built in sitter

So my offspring are getting old enough that they can be left alone for longer periods of time. We started experimenting with leaving the older ones home alone awhile ago, but recently I've been leaving the younger ones in the care of the younger ones, and it's been succesful.

So far.

Every time we leave the kids alone for any real amount of time, I get worried that one of them is going to try some food prep with a knife and things go sideways, and-

I'll stop there. My imagination runs wild, and I honestly don't give them enough credit. They're smarter than I realize, and I get nervous when I actually trust them.

I didn't expect the growing pains to be mine.