What a Day

Okay, for a start, Mo was up and wired for sound at 3:30 this morning. I debated giving her a Benadryl to get her back to sleep. This is not a decision lightly taken: it can make her hard to wake up when it's actually time to get moving, plus I've got enough white-bread suburban upbringing in me to still feel guilty about 'giving my kids drugs.'

It was actually the first drug we tried, at doctors' encouragement, when Mo started getting up for the day at 1:00 am, and when it was a crap shoot whether she'd go to sleep at all come bedtime. It's not the best tool for the job, it's just obvious, easily available, and considerably less scary than some other options.

For a while, it was Tenex that was prescribed, and it worked pretty well at first. Weirdly, it was a twice-daily drug, you took it in the morning as well as at night. It's a drug approved for blood pressure control that is also widely prescribed (though not FDA approved) for ADHD.

Melatonin ended up being the bedtime fix. I take it myself if I have any doubt I can fall asleep. The beauty of melatonin, besides it being over the counter, technically a vitamin pill (from a regulatory standpoint), and inexpensive, is it works. You can just about set your clock by the gap between 6mg of melatonin and Mo diving into bed to be tucked in. Fifteen minutes, 99% of the time, and she's out.

The other one percent, well, she may be baying at the moon and have you wondering if she somehow ditched the dose.

But melatonin only helps you fall asleep. It doesn't keep you there, or it didn't keep Mo there last night.

Last neurology visit, I had the chicken-and-egg discussion with the doc (again), about her sleep patterns relative to her seizure activity. If she's up in the night for a few days, she's far more likely to seize, we know this. But we don't know if she's up in the night because a seizure is building, or if she's up in the night and the lack of sleep contributes to her susceptibility to a seizure.



3:30 is borderline on too late for the Benadryl auxiliary parachute, but I decided to try a half dose. I reasoned it's quickly metabolized, only effective for four to six hours, so it'd mostly be worn off by the time she got to school. Plus, it wasn't a full dose.

By 4:15 I was back in bed, relieved. Until it came time to get Mo up, at which point I paid for my precious two and a half hours of additional sleep with the frantic race to get the kids to school on time with an uncooperative Mo. Uncooperative, but so addicted to her routine that even when I was ready to send her to school dirty in the interest of punctuality, she stripped and got in the shower.



So that (sorry, a long rant) is the beginning of my day. Yikes.

Not long after I get to work, my boss discovers a $4,000 print job is screwed up, and while he's still venting about it, I realize it's my fault. It was an easy mistake to make, and it did turn out that one of the four sigs was correct, but 'only' screwing up three fourths of an expensive job is no small beer.

Mistakes happen, to be sure. But I hate making them myself: there's never a good explanation for why you didn't have someone else check your work, why you didn't slow down and question it harder. I had run a dummy out and checked it against the original, but if there's two page fifteens and no page ten, I couldn't have done a very good job of checking it. I'd much rather have my boss pissed at me for something he shouldn't be: then I can at least be indignant about it. This kind of thing, I gotta say, 'Yeah, I'd kick my ass, too.'

I nuked the veggie chili I'd brought for lunch, but then realized I really wasn't hungry enough to eat it.



I left work at 6:00, confident that the hour I had to get to Em's musical was plenty. Traffic is usually no factor that time of evening, so if anything, I figured I'd be early. Then new construction activity on 435 jammed me up and I got there just in the nick of time. At one point, as I sped down 35 trying to make up for lost time, I realized there was a Sheriff's Deputy in the lane next to me. But before I could drop the fifteen miles an hour off my speed it would take to get me legal, I realized I was being passed by other drivers who apparently hadn't noticed Smokey.

I pictured trying to beg the cop to not make me late for my daughter's musical. I haven't had a speeding ticket in Em's lifetime, but back when I got them, I learned that cops figure a long, slow check of your license and insurance is the best way to give negative reinforcement to someone in such an obvious hurry.

I figured as long as I was being passed, I was probably not going to get nailed, but I gradually eased back to something approximating the speed limit.



I get to the school and it's just starting to sprinkle. I'm that shithead, the last parent to enter the auditorium, but at least the stage is still empty.

The show was themed on world peace, and at one point the kids with speaking parts stiffly delivered the scriptwriter's left-wing bashing of gun rights. My Dad whispered to me that the school might get a call or two on that one. And I thought, 'Yeah, from people like me,' even though I don't own a gun.



Then an asshole in the next aisle was talking on his cell phone during the show, and I whispered back to my Dad that this is exactly why we need automatic weapons.

Em had told me she had a 'speaking part' in the production but wouldn't tell me more. When she was down and grabbing the microphone, it happened so fast I almost missed it. I got one blurry shot of her before I realized, 'Shit, I need video of this!'



Then, right after her number, the tornado sirens went off and we had to evacuate to the keys. This is the part of the school that is furthest from fenestration. The auditorium would be good, too, I thought. It's near the edge of the building, but it has no windows at all. Maybe it's roof isn't much, but none of the building has that much roof to it, as far as I can tell.

Outside it had that greenish cast, the one you always hear about in tornado stories. Except I've seen it more than a few times and I've never seen a tornado.

After the all clear, we went back for the rest of the production, which barely got over before another tornado warning sent us back to the keys. The Feebster (as Em call's the vocal music director) is famous for getting standing ovations and getting the kids to do goofy orchestrated final bows, and the tornado warning was a wet blanket on that.

So then I get home and I can't pull into the garage. Well, I can, but it's flooded badly enough it'd mean soaking my one halfway supportive pair of shoes and their inserts (I'm trying to heal up some plantar fasciitis that's been plaguing me). This means, of course, leaving my liability-only ride out in the driveway for potential hail in a severe thunderstorm.

I put on a pair of wrecked sneakers to wade out and blast the floor drain in the garage to try and get it flowing again. And I let the poor dog in.

Barley, the Dog-Faced Boy, used to get to lounge around in the comfort of our home while I was at work. Back when I worked two and a half miles away and could come home and let him out when I was going to work late. Back before I commuted an hour plus each way for work. Back before I got fed up with cleaning up when he shit in the basement or pissed on the carpet.

Barley was as wet as I've seen him, and his dog food was floating on a full bowl of rainwater. He looked at me like he'd had some trials today, and I was like 'Tell me about it.'

Except I wasn't. Because seeing Em up on the stage having fun, getting a speaking part (she's always jealous of the other kids getting those when she's "just in the chorus"), all that, I couldn't say it wasn't a great day.

Here's what everybody else saw:



Here's my perspective: