The weather outside isn’t quite frightful, yet, but man is there a nip in the air! I’m snuggled up on the couch in one of my favorite sweaters, contemplating throwing one of my mom’s crocheted blankets over top of me for additional warmth. The tip of my nose is cold and my fingers are a little clumsy. Methinks it may be time to tell Hubster to turn up the heat. I wonder if he will interpret that message to mean, “Sit the kids down in front of a movie and carry me up to the bedroom, you steamy hunk of stud-love!” One can only hope. In the meantime, here’s this Sunday’s contentments:
Healthy children – Pixie came down with strep throat earlier this week, and boy was that ever fun. Not. Her temperature got as high as 104 degrees at one point, and she had more than a few crying jags and melt downs because she didn’t feel good. She stayed home from preschool two days, spending her time in a bean bag chair in front of the TV. Both evenings, she crashed on the couch, a sure sign she didn’t feel well. That kid doesn’t nap for anything! But now she’s up and running around, keeping pace with Princess, and in general driving me nuts.
“Mama! I’m sick!”
Mommy moments – one night, while Pixie was sick, I woke up at 3AM to hear her crying in her bed. I got up, took her temperature (this was when it hit 104), gave her a little Children’s Motrin and brought her into bed with her father and I. She could never quite settle down, but didn’t want to go back to her own bed. At one point, she turned to me in the dark and asked, “So how was your day, Mama?” “My day was just fine, sweet heart,” I replied. “That’s good,” she said, and then she finally decided she wanted to sleep back in her own bed.
Reading to my kids – I found my copy of “Where the Wild Things Are” this week and read it to Princess. She was fascinated with the artwork, and had all sorts of questions about the monsters and Max., then wanted to know if she could write a book of her own. She’s already written a couple of books, collections of drawings with some words scribbled in them. We staple them together, but I think the next time she does one, I’m going to scan it into the computer and make it a PDF to send out to family and friends. The Princess can claim she’s “self-published!”
Speaking of being published… Yes, work accomplishments are qualify as contentments in my opinion, and I’m very contented to note that this week I had four stories published with Logical Lust. What makes this especially sweet is that these are some of my best work ever, but two of the stories were usually rejected by anthology editors because the tone of the stories is rather tragic. Apparently not many publishers like to take a chance on tragedy, even when it’s well written. However, Logical Lust was more than happy to work with me, so these stories and two others (those two are comedies) are now available for sale. I hope they do well!
Local festivals – we missed the Greek Festival this weekend, due to the fact I wasn’t feeling so well yesterday morning, but we did get out to the local Egyptian Fest. It was much smaller than the Greek Fest (which is huge), and we got there pretty late, but we managed to pick up some food to take home to eat. Actually, what we did was go through their cafe line and wipe the whole thing out! The food was good, and exactly what I needed that evening. We had a friend over, and spent the evening eating falafels and kashta and stuffed grape leaves while watching the Virginia Tech game (VT lost, but oh well). A wonderful evening, if I do say so myself.
There’s lots of other things to be content about, like the art projects the kids and I have been working on, and the costumes we’ll be sewing later this afternoon, but I think I’ll stop here for today. I want to curl up with a hot cup of tea now and just enjoy a few moments of quiet.
