Something wicked this way comes.

My girlfriend asked me to take one of her kids to basketball practice last night as her first grader (at Luke's school) came home with a screaming headache. While we were there my friend told me about her kindergartner (at Luke's school) who was just diagnosed with Strep ~ they found it because of this strange twitching head motion that he had been compulsively doing. Turns out that he is a strep carrier, and the strep had gone to his brain (WT actual F??????) ~ they are heading to the neurologist on Friday. So this headache and fever thing and maybe a side of strep is on the loose, and Luke was in my bed crying at 11 pm last night with a fever, headache, and stuffed up nose, etc. I got out sleeping bags, dosed him up and went and slept on the couches with him, thinking that being upright might help.

He stayed home today but I didn't take him to the Dr's, because I am a bad Mom  I thought it was just some residual coughing crap and would go away with a day at home. It didn't and now tonight he is crying, his jaw hurts, Julia has the fever, no amount of the rubbin the Tussin on it is fixing it, and off we will go to the Dr's tomorrow. Got a note home from Julia's teacher that 6 kids (of 18) were out sick today (one is in the hospital) ((Again, W T Actual F?) and two more friends from Luke's school have sick kids.

I hosted 3 friends from the teacher training program here today from 9:30 till 2 to practice teach/share ideas/give constructive criticism etc. It was lovely. A portion of my basement has been turned into a makeshift yoga studio, and its a great space for the 4 of us to meet, great floors, good lighting, and good acoustics. Luke even joined us for a bit of our practice. The girls worked on their practicum and mirroring, and I worked on teaching Vinyasa Flow, which was good for me. There is something to be said for having attended 1,379ish vinyasa flow classes over the past 20 years.....while I won't be perfect at it, and I will need some practice with timing, amount of repetitions and all that jazz, the basic words, the basic flow, the basic rhythm of the practice comes out of my mouth with (relative, mostly, kinda sorta) ease.

I'm ashamed to admit how disappointed I was to miss my usual Wednesday night class. Due to clingy people who really just wanted to be coddled, fed frozen fruit bits, and read to I didn't even run through a personal practice tonight. Luke is sleeping here beside me in my bed and I'm calling it a day, expecting to be up with both Julia and Luke at some point as the Advil wears off. I will miss tomorrow mornings Vinyasa class so that the four of us can swoop off to the pediatricians office (Nate is in Cali for the entire week), but I have a Brooke coming tomorrow night so that I can do Danielle's level II class followed by Sue's inversion class.

Yoga IS a privilege. Tonight as one child was crying because they were actively, definitely sick, and another was deciding to maybe? cry because maybe acting sick meant frozen fruit? And another was slipping into fever and illness and determining how HARD to cry because maybe that would mean that she, too could sleep in my bed? And I have stories of brain strep dancing around in my head as Luke (my tough guy who very rarely cries) was crying, hard, in pain and saying this very strange, very specific spot on his jaw hurt so badly that he was doing a bit of writhing? And I was on the phone with the on call after hours Ped talking about abscess and meningitis and weird strep things and potential ER visits with three kids solo as my Mom and Dad are out of town and my Sis is out of town (and its her 30th birthday) and its my brothers 35 birthday and I know he's out to dinner and at a movie....and I have sitters coming tomorrow night and my neighbor and friend was out and even then I don't want to dump my getting sick kid on her as she has a 6 month old baby.......I was grateful to have been practicing my deep breathing these past months. Some deep breaths. For all of us. Everything got better. Luke got it under control. Jules reigned it in. Jake ate the frozen fruit. I stopped playing out worse case scenarios (not lying when I say that part of me is remembering this time last year, and what we went through with Jake. A good friends called me Friday as her son was having a T&A on Monday and wanted me to go through the whole story again. Its very close to the surface right now. I'm jumpy).

I can't even write that without crying!

Talking to a friend who is going through a very hard time, upheaval, tumult, change, etc......Thinking about as much as the hard times can be SO HARD. They can suck SO HARD and they can forever change us and leave raw spots in our hearts.....without them we can't have the depth of gratitude that we have for the calm times. I couldn't appreciate this time of relative smooth sailing that we have enjoyed since Nate's graduation in the way that I am without the trauma of the hip, of Jake's incident, of the MBA going on through all of that.  I think that its just hitting me, literally right now, that I'm hunkering down right now because this was when all of the bad stuff happened with Jake,  a year ago. And its so ridiculous ~ he's right in front of me, my beautiful, healthy 3 year old ~ so happy, so healthy ~ but when you come within inches of losing your child, when you see how thin the place is between here and just......not here anymore.......I think that maybe a year and a month or two of therapy isn't enough. I think that maybe the raw spots are more raw than I realized.