(Beautiful trees grandpa photographed below the dam)Well, day two of the swine flu quarantine went well, apparently.
I say apparently because I had to leave to go to work all day, and left the children with my step mom and dad, and Daddy.
Wah. I miss all the good quarantine fun!
Let me tell you, they had a blast. I'm beginning to think we should rename this the swell flu quarantine.
There was a nice long walk along the dam, swimming in the spa, and bar-b-que.
Quite the pah-tee. (Mireya in Grandpa's GB hat)
Below is last week's crib notes, which ran in the Herald - Zeitung, an ironic foretelling of the week ahead...
Oh, and Mireya ended up with salmonella poisoning. I don't know where she got it from, we think a hot dog or pork chop, but in my frenzy/horror I threw out all the cutting boards except for one in the very back of the cabinet we hadn't used in a year.
Because in Comal county we specialize in over reacting. =:o
Share and Share Alike.
I have worked pretty hard to make sure my kids learn one important rule in life – share with others. This week I realized I went overboard. I should have placed some limits on this whole sharing bit, because now we’re all sharing the same cold.
This is despite a sneeze/cough/washing regiment that would put most hospitals to shame. But the air was just seeping with germs and it was just a matter of time before the invisible broke through the elbow sneeze rule and antibacterial soap defenses.
“Oh my God, I feel awful,” Mireya moaned. We concurred.
There is one upside to sharing a cold. It’s the found time.
Found time is that time you get unexpectedly in life, like a weird bonus round or overtime game. Time that normally would be spent trapped in traffic in the parking lot of the Friday night game, but is instead back on the field - where everyone in the stands is biting their nails until the end. It’s the time you never imagined you’d have because you had everything figured out well in advance, for weeks or months at a time.
Then you catch a cold and all bets are off.
The cold we shared gave us several hours of found time. Gone were the ambitious weekend plans, gone was school and work, and in their place, between naps and sniffles, was a little found time.
In one hour of found time we went outside and did chalk outlines. There we discovered our new puppy, Roxie, loves to bite at the chalk, particularly green, which made outlining her more challenging than anticipated.
Then Mireya, tissue in one hand and chalk in the other, grew a chalk garden, complete with sun and four types of flowers.
We tried chalk tinting on the puppy, but she was uncooperative. Roxie doesn’t like chalk THAT much, apparently.
(The best part of having a small dog is the really cool costumes. Grammy made this one)
In another round of found time (after naps and juice) we read every library book we had on hand and go through our unread magazines. We vowed to do at least five of the crafts – when we’re feeling better and can schedule time.
Nothing earth shattering happened in our found time. It had that precious quality of simply being there time, where you don’t save the world, don’t learn new things, don’t achieve greatness. We just got to be.
That was time worth finding – and sharing.
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