Beanisms and musings

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Nuggets of joy gleaned from a 30-minute phone call from Bean

I hope you don't break both your legs, mommy.

I'm going to ask all the humans did you crash Paul? Did you crash Paul? Did you crash Paul? And if they say they say yes then I am going to crash them too because that's not nice to crash people!

And I'm pretty sure you're going to love me always mommy. Even when you're 100.

Can I come to your house mommy? I will take care of you. Every time you sneeze, I will bring you a tissue. But I can't take care of daddy and Miss O, too. That's a lot of people.

Miss O just attacked me. Apparently she wants to knock me over.

I'm going to put the phone down and go ask daddy. Don't talk until I come back, okay?

Well, my big girl definitely misses me. And talking to her really drove home how much I miss her, too. And her sister, but Bean is just kind of a force unto herself, you know? The things she says and does are so interactive and engaging and unique that being away from her for this long has been really hard. I miss the little one for the more obvious reasons: my baby girl, nursing, her consistent presence. But Bean is who really puts the life and dynamism into my home.

She initiated the always awkward mommy and daddy are divorced conversation. This one began with "you loved each other for a little while" kind of discussion. Sometimes I wish I had a kid who was just not interested in the world around her, you know? I wouldn't have to talk about dead people, wouldn't have to talk about divorce ... We could just talk about her and her ponies. (Daddy got her a "medium size" Toola Roola pony, with "sparkles on her butt-butt and on her nose and in her mane!" ... the girl loves her some Ponies.)

Somehow she drew the conclusion "you still love daddy a little". Ummm ... no. Caught off-guard, I replied "no, sweetie, daddy and mommy are just friends." She asked her daddy if we were friends, and he must have shaken his head, because next I heard was "Yes you are. Mommy said you are friends" and, in the background, Dave's "yes, we're friends."

This is a bit of a shift in verbiage; historically we've kind of made mommy and daddy just separate entities, and used 'mommy and daddy aren't friends anymore' as the reason for two homes and the divorce. But as Bean's understanding of things - and her social context - expands, it seems like we'll need to wrap our co-parenting relationship in different terms.

And since, in her social context at school, "not friends" is defined in terms of exclusion, meanness and scratching, it's probably best that she thinks mommy and daddy are friends. Thankfully, I'm not alone in my thinking, so friends is the new terminology. Of course, this was followed by Bean vowing "We will all be friends forever. Mommy and Daddy and me and Miss O." So I think there will need to be some nuancing of the term, over time, so she understands there are gradations of friendship, but for now, the 'friends' bucket seems a much better place for mommy and daddy's relationship than the 'not friends' bucket :)

On the health front, I think I'm past the feverish portion of the flu, but I still have a nasty cough and the general feeling of being run down by a truck. I was out for a little while today to mail a few things, return some library books and pick up my own mail, and found the 15 minutes of driving exhausting. This is after a good night's sleep. I ended up taking a two-hour nap and woke up about 4 hours ago, but I'm already yawning again.

Still no word on swine flu results. Looks like the first local school is closing based on 'probable' swine flu, so it's just a matter of time before the first positive shows up around here. Whatever version of the flu I have, it has definitely knocked me on my ass much harder than the flu usually does. Although I've never had the flu at the same time I was returning to work and putting my kids in full-time care, so I imagine that life itself was knocking me down a few pegs already :)

The girls are on the rebound from whatever non-flu issues were ailing them, so hopefully one or both of them will be able to return to school tomorrow. Dave has totally been a rock star, keeping them over there all week, and staying home with them while they're sick. It's not a huge shock to me that he's doing all this, as his daddy skills were never in doubt or question, it's just really, really nice that he's doing it - mostly to keep them away from me, but also because it gives me a chance to recover. And, ostensibly, to work from home. Which is easier said than done, as my already limited ability to stay focused has been shredded by the combo of illness-driven malaise and medication-induced brain fog. It's taken me all day just to type this post, and I've had to give up finding an appropriate quote to use as a post title because I keep getting sucked into all sorts of silly things ...
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