Friday, May 02, 2008

Our Long National Nightmare is Over

Well, mine is anyway. I suspect that the rest of you are screwed until January 20, 2009.

Reha the Extra Special and Wonderful Spouse of Love comes home today!

For a treat, give yourself a little mental picture of me over here doing the “Happy Joy Dance.”

Generally, when I do the “Happy Joy Dance” I’m only wearing a pair of white tube socks and a stocking cap with fuzzy yellow antlers that stick out at crazy angles, but in this case I’ll give you a pass. I’ll be over here doing The Dance fully clothed and not stinking of sweat and covered in antler fuzz.

I usually do OK when Reha is out of town, but this week just hammered me down to component parts. Carrie got the most horrendous case of strep throat imaginable and her throat would balloon out like a rain forest tree frog whenever she took a breath. We made fun of her and drew funny faces on her expanded throat, but then she threw her penicillin bottle at my head and stabbed me in the face with the broken shards. It stopped being entertaining at that point.

Seriously, she was really sick the whole week and taking her to Instacare and fetching prescriptions and ice cream and rice pudding and EVERY LITTLE THING her heart desired at the drop of a hat (note: not the antler hat), all that stuff took a lot of time.

Toss in the normal “get whiny delightful children to gymnastics, band practice, dance classes; help with homework, book reports and practice spelling words; make dinner and get the little goobers in bed at a decent hour” duties and I was utterly spent.

And plus work stuff was kind of insane this week. Like, “holy crap we are all going to die!” insane.

Anyway. I’m not complaining really. I just want to say that I never want to be a single parent. It’s really hard. Kudos to all of you who make that happen.

Important safety tip! In order to pull off the appearance that you have kept things under control while your spouse is away, implement the following helpful hints. Learn from me, kids, I’m a pro!


  1. Dispose of all take out food containers and dirty up some pots and pans and plates so it doesn’t appear to a casual observer that you had take out food every night while she was gone. You don’t want to leave the kitchen a disaster, just enough that it looks like you made “real” food.

  2. Bath the children the night before she comes home. Make it a “soaking bath” because magic marker is hard to get off.

  3. Pay the cleaning service people in cash so there isn’t a paper trail (you did reserve a cleaning service, didn’t you?)

  4. Force the children to sit down and write little notes of affection to the returning spouse. This will distract her from the marker stains on the children’s hands and feet.

  5. Bribe the children to keep their traps shut about how things went down during the spouse’s absence. Plan on going to Toys R Us, the bookstore or the video game store while the cleaners are at your house.

Reha comes home today and since everyone in the house has been holding his or her collective breath until she finally shuffles through the front door of the Deal Family Compound, we all look forward to being able to finally and with great relief, exhale.

Jon scribbled this mess on 05/02/08 at 09:01 AM, best we can tell it fits in the category of Regular Post. This many folks had something to say about that, The permanent home of this entry is here: Link

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