So I don't think I mentioned before that when I got sick, after the first couple days of fever and achiness, it morphed into a truly impressive hacking cough, the sort that would normally require a three pack a day habit for thirty years while working in a coal mine by day and asbestos removal at night. I lived with it for a few days, then decided when I realized that if I sat quietly I could hear my lungs crackling that perhaps I should take this one to the doctor. As it turns out, I have a lovely case of walking pneumonia. Groovy.

Pneumonia always sounds so drastic, doesn't it? Too many 19th century novels, no doubt. I suspect literature would have lost quite a lot if we could have tossed all of those tragic heroines a Z-pack 150 years ago. I mean, I've been functioning for the past two weeks. Not really well, but everyone's clean and well-fed, just not quite as well-nurtured by me instead of the tv as they might be. I will say that I don't feel so bad any more about my complete failure since we got home to live up to any of my ideals about providing lots of activities and an organized schedule. Now I feel accomplished for maintaining regular feedings and hygiene.

Anyway, after liberal applications of azithromycin, codeine and an inhaler, I'm starting to feel better. Which is good, because I started working my normal schedule at the online job this week. I'm slipping back into the old routine without much effort, although I'm actually hoping to improve on the old routine a bit. I had been in a bad habit of squandering my child-free time before and then being up late at night doing the actual work. I had high hopes of spending my first child-free day today doing just that, until I remembered that they had generously assigned us two more training exercises on top of our regular work, due today, so that's how my afternoon was spent and here I am, yet again, up obscenely late at night with another hour of work to go.

But let's ignore the obscenely late part of that last sentence and focus on the child-free! I managed to find a nice mother-daughter pair looking to start babysitting and willing to take both kids for a quite reasonable price. And they will happily pick K up from school once she starts, so the problem of what to do with her on Fridays when I'm working at the museum until 4 is resolved. I'm a little leery of the fact that they're just starting out and don't have any other kids, and just the fact that our record with home daycares and daycares found off of Craigslist is so very bad, but I'm so giddy with the idea of daycare again that I just don't care. As long as they last through the summer, that will be fine and I'll figure something else out. And if they do work out for the long haul, I'll be very happy, since I think right now, a home daycare is better for Alec. They're willing to do cloth diapers and to rock our finicky baby to sleep, so right now it's all good.