Clara and Winton, Overheard

Clara: "Did you know Pink Blankie is six and a half today?"
Winton: "Oh.  No I didn't.  Was her birthday yesterday?"
Clara: "No, it was on Sunday."
Winton: "Oh.  Did she have cupcakes?"
Clara: "Yes.  And balloons with ribbons."
Winton: "Oh.  Is she three?"
Clara: "No.  You are three."
Winton: "Oh."

Thoughts on Pneumonia, 2

It curtails any New Year's Resolution zeal.
"I resolve . . . hack hack wheeze.  I plan to . . . . urgggggghh.  Maybe I'll be able to COUGH COUGH COUGH.  Oh, fuck it."

Thoughts on Pneumonia

Which, it turns out, I have.

It makes a good neologism: pneumonosyllabic.
It makes me feel resigned, delinquent, vindicated and lonely all at the same time.  In addition it makes me feel like I am harboring a small, belligerent, drooling alien in my left lung.
It reduces the scope of my parenting to smiling and nodding: how quaintly Victorian. 

How I hate this.

Gone Viral

Haha.  No, don't worry my dedicated readership of 5 or so people.  It's not going to get crowded here at momosyllabic. I am just into day nine of a flu that still has me hacking up my lungs most of the day and launching a seasonally appropriate fire of heat, unfortunately with my blazing fevery face, every afternoon between about 4 and 7.  I'm viral.

As I type, Winton is in his grandparents' living room demanding dinner.  It's 11 AM.
Grandma is playing with Clara's new interlocking gear game.  Clara is making her new toy inchworm navigate the tracks of Winton's new train set.  Grandpa looks grey from sleeping in the basement, and Husband is compulsively reading the TV guide, as one bored and seeking desperately to be transported to a place with a cup of coffee and a good weighty biography of a British politician.

Merry Xtide to you.

Clara: Party Foods

Clara got up this morning all focused on a pretend party she needed to throw for Pink Blankie before school.  On the menu: salty cake.  But, to be healthy, this was to be preceded by "Kale, because that's the most healthy food.  And asparagus, because that's the most healthiest food ever."

Flu and MLA humor

I have been flattened by the flu.  Full-on.  With fever.  Who has time for this?

While home with Flu, I have also been booking job interviews for the candidates to meet us at the Modern Languages Association Convention just after New Year's.  I have been on the interviewee end of so many of these phone calls that it is tremendously exciting to be the interviewer this time round.  It's nice to hear the excitement in people's voices when the realise you are not a telemarketer but rather a potential employer.

The MLA has a well-deserved reputation  for SNAFUS on the interviewer side of things.  Interviewees collect disaster stories like prized scars.  Once, for instance, I was interviewee when a fatigued interviewer, meaning to ask me how I intended to recruit students for my courses, instead declared "Well, you'll have to teach in a missionary position."

While merely phoning candidates, my friend Flu has been a great resource in furnishing such stories for the up and coming set of interviewees.  Yesterday, for instance, I told a nice-sounding gentleman  to please "knock-up a syllabus for us."  Sigh.  Professionalism, thy name is momo[phlegm]abic.

back to grumpy

I'm back to my normal mood of beleaguered irritation:

Winton would not confess to having pooped, and though I sniffed his diaper, I didn't realise until we were in the car en route to preschool that it was dirty.  I dropped him off and *horrors* did not change it myself, but rather left him miserably clutched in Miss Kim's efficient grasp.

Then Clara, on part of this same drop-off and acting, I presume, out of jealousy, insisted I take her to the bathroom before I left.  I did, grumbling under my breath the whole time that she was doing this to prove a point: she managed to get me to look after her ass, whereas her brother didn't.