Mother's Day: Working a Double

The official shift began at 3 am -- middle-of-the-night store run for infant meds.  Gumball's (9 1/2 mos) temp was 102.2, and I had nothing to give her. She's the fourth kid this week to catch this virus, but add to that a mean staph infection in her diaper area....

I've been coddling her ever since, trying to keep the fever down, draining her staph at every other diaper change, nursing her pretty constantly. She's in so much pain and obviously worn out. Of all the stressors I'm dealing with at the moment, staph is the one that I cannot cope with. It just makes everything else seem impossible.

Major Stressors

• Gumball's staph & virus
• Sister's newborn I have not yet gotten to meet
• Debilitating tendinitis in (dammit, of course) my DOMINANT arm
• Impending educational deadlines
• Sibling rivalry at an all-time high (in the fashion of animalistic regression aboard a lifeboat in the middle of the ocean, when everyone else begins to look like hamburgers and hotdogs)

And I no longer enjoy Miner's long-distance support via Internet chat, because now, he's working on a rig from the Neolithic period; they still communicate with smoke and drums.

So I'm on my own with this mess. With one functioning arm. And the clock ticking. The only thing I'm not dealing with is a leaky roof in a hurricane, but I'm bracing myself.

I used to have a battle cry for times such as this, but I lost the range somewhere along the way. Not sure what happened to the Warrior.