Another Day In

The schools are back open today, and huge blocks of snow are falling out of the trees as it warms up a little. On the way to the bus stop this morning, Addie (bedecked in her princess/ballerina costume and snow boots) noted that we could see a little blue sky peeking through.

But I'm still homebound today. Nolie woke up at 3 in the morning because the power went out, turning off her nightlight and white noise, and she was burning up and complaining that her legs hurt. Her cheeks are a flaming red today and she's got an oogy sounding cough. So I'm catching up on email, thinking about everything I need to get done in the next few days before three weeks of travel begin, and just trying not to unspool too much over the weirdness of this week.

Yesterday had its tough moments--it was our second snow day, and some of the first day's strategies were stale and tired by the second. What's funny is that we were our own jailers--though there were two feet of forbidding, slushy snow out on our own street, all of the major streets and highways around us were pretty well plowed and driveable (a friend saved us in the afternoon by coming over with her adorable little boy; we might not have survived the day otherwise). So, we could have gotten out, even in the slippery little Hyundai, but didn't, because we didn't know we could. Silly us.

I've been doing a lot of pilates on these slow days, and yoga, and also trying a new strength-training regimen for back pain. I wake up every day creaking and groaningand in pain, and I am disappointingly grouchy until I work some of the kinks out. And I'm wondering if this is just a particularly bad time that I'm working through, or if this is my new life, to be sore and uncomfortable for much of the day. N. wrote a brilliant post about her struggles with R.A. here, and reading it calms me a lot. So we'll see how the next few weeks of sleeping in strange beds and hours sitting on planes and in airports go. I may be mainlining ibuprofen and doing cat/cows on the concourse.

Eric's supposed to be home in a few hours, and I hope a lot of my dis-ease will dissipate then. It's been surreal being here, in all this snow, with our house creaking and moaning and snow clunking all around in the night, and the lights going out and my little one burning up, and my shoulders and neck screaming at me, without him. Beneath it all has been a little tinge of the threatening, because I'm alone and responsible for all of this somehow, and I've had to shoo off the what-ifs. So I'll be glad when my partner is back and we are in it together.