33 and a Third

Some people seem to think I’ve been swallowed up whole by work. Well - I’ve been regurgitated for the moment. I’ve had e-mail from Debbie, worried that something was wrong because I haven’t blogged in a while. And Andrew is obviously deeply concerned, too. I just got this e-mail from him…

You haven’t updated your blog/webdiary in a while - since Feb 26th to be exact. And we don’t even know about the state of your thyroid. My guess is it didn’t like the radioactivity, mutated and grew arms and legs, moved to Hollywood where it had a brief movie career starring with Julia Roberts in “Four Thyroids and Pancreas” but that success quickly lead to a serious crack iodine problem and now its only mention is in the New England Journal of Medicine’s “Where are they now” column.

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Things have gotten extremely busy again. I remember this from by pre-sabbatical time. Get home from work, start making dinner, eat, clean up, collapse on the couch, yell up to the kids to get off the d*mn computer and go to bed. OK, so that’s not quite what happens every night. I also yell at the kids to help with dinner and with cleanup. And Reid does absolutely nothing, right Reid??

My thyroid is slowly dying a painful death. Not painful to me, really, just to itself. It takes a few months for the thyroid to notice that we’ve poisoned it and it should stop producing thyroid hormones soon. My doctor has to actually wait until the bloodwork shows it’s dead and gone before giving me replacement thyroid hormones. As for more serious health issues… my flare up of colitis has ended. I’m completely off steroids - yay!! I have a few leftover problems, like what seems to be arthritis, but I’m hoping that will be temporary. This can be useful at times… “Honey?! Would you please do the laundry, I can’t go up and down the stairs,” or “Gee honey, I can’t vacuum today, could you??”

Ronnie (who’s 7) is pretty good at spelling. Lately, the teacher has been letting him choose his own spelling words. One would think this would be ridiculous since he would just pick words he already knows, but I just got through a session with him practicing the words he chose. Why he would choose words like Mediterranean, Guadalajara, Grenadines, Reykjavik and Mozambique is beyond me. He had a very hard time with the “nean” in Mediterranean, and “dines” in Grenadines. I can’t understand why he would have trouble with that and not Reykjavik. I have to say it’s the very first time he’s actually had to learn his spelling. It took half an hour and he was pretty upset about it. Usually, he gets words like “Olympic” and he barely bothers practicing.

I got a big kick out of this list of words he chose one week:

Encyclopaedia (that one’s a dare amongst his spelling friends)
champion
empires
conquerors
Koreans
Persians
civilizations
gladiator
amphitheatre
myth

Can you tell this child has been playing Age of Empires, Conquerors?

Michael, my older son, is turning 12 tomorrow!! Wow! The parties have begun to get smaller, and there’s no more loot bags! Yay! He’ll have a few friends over, have pizza, go out to play laser tag, then come back home for ice cream cake and a movie if there’s time. Hmm. Sounds like great fun - even for an adult. Perhaps I should plan something like this for Reid’s birthday. He’s turning 40 in September.