That First Week

So.

Lillian woke up excited on the first day of school, but was over getting up early after that. (Violet on the other hand, is an old pro at first days at this point so was marginally excited and then, promptly, also over it.)  Every day she proudly told me how much or little she talked to other people because she was worried, I think, about having to do so every day. Plus she was super excited about having two recesses a day and snacks. I mean, who wouldn’t be?

And every day when she came home she would quietly get her lunch box out and make a little place for herself on the couch where she’d neatly finish whatever she didn’t eat. It was kind of adorable.

She started complaining that she just “didn’t feel right” sometime in the middle of the week, but with everyone adjusting to the new early schedule, no one was feeling great.

That weekend we went to the shopping center where they just added a Five Below store, which is basically a glorified Dollar Store with a ton of candy from the 80’s and toys so the girls lost their little heads, so much so that Violet slipped and fell, landing wrong on her finger. Nothing swollen, but she was sore.

Like good Southern citizens, we also popped in some department stores to see if Fall had arrived yet. It HAS.

The next Monday, Husband face was getting four teeth pulled. I had some lovely stress nausea from having to drive him out to Metairie, but planned on poking  around the nearby Target while I waited for the teeth ripping process to finish.  Now, the dentist said it would be an hour and a half, but I knew that translated to AT LEAST three hours, so I had plenty of time to calm the hell down among the clearance racks.So, of course, of course, Lillian woke up that morning with a fever and sore throat.

I still drove to the dentist, but instead of relaxing after,  I pushed my sickly child around Target in the cart while dodging roving gaggles of Target Moms. There was no avoiding them once I decided to stop in the store Starbucks. They all were all tanned with shining, manicured nails, wore workout clothes with spotless sneakers, had kids named things like Porsche and Mercedes and they smirked when they would look up from their phones. I had the (probably) odd notion that they were texting each other.

Did I mention we were there for three hours?

The next day, I took Lily along to Violet’s check up and it turned out that she had strep throat. One week. She’d been around other children for one week, and she got strep throat. This bodes well for the rest of the year.

Oh and Violet’s finger turned out to be fractured, because broken bones are an annual thing now I guess. And speaking of bones, Lily chose this as her bedtime story:

We were almost to the end when she got an epiphany.  “WAIT. Go back a page,” she proceeded to point at the ghost character. “That ‘s a dead person. Right there. Dead people make ghosts. That girl is dead. Wait, the skeleton is also a dead person. This…this is a dead person story.” I am perpetually unprepared for the level of her realism.  

That  trip to the shopping center had been mainly to go to the pet store to buy a fish. We had two for years and one had died, so we got a zippy little fancy tail with black eyes that Violet named Coraline. But because she named it, it died three days later, taking our other fish with her. We are now fishless.

And finally,  our cat broke. Not sure why or how, but he’d been limping on and off all week. I don’t have a picture of the limp, but I don’t want to end on a downer, so please enjoy this face: