Letters from Pemberley

Today started at 4:50 am, when I woke up thinking about all the appointments we had today, all the things I needed to do, and all the appointments I needed to schedule. So I got up and made muffins so that the kids would actually eat something for breakfast (also because baking soothes me), quickly wrote out assignments for the four big kids in their planners that they could do with Daddy, and headed out the door at 8 am with Annie. The 101 at rush hour is a really special experience.

At 9, we got to Reseda to pick up her new leg braces. The shoes I had brought didn’t fit.

At 10, we went over and did OT with Megan, our secondary occupational therapist at the medical therapy unit. Annie was not interested in trying to put on clothes, but she did try to eat the magnets. The OT and PT there insisted on me scheduling out appointments through the time we leave for Notre Dame. Guess Derek’s driving her to Reseda twice a week after her birthday, when the Santa Monica therapy expires…

At 11, we saw the pediatrician at the MTU to order Annie a walker to keep (since ours is borrowed from our great PT, DNA). The idiotic staff members there told me that Annie will be losing special vision services because she doesn’t need surgery (um, no, she has three different impaired vision diagnoses, two of which are neurological. Pretty sure she has severe special needs in the vision department, even if they’re not fixable by surgery), made me sign a waver to send a document to the DCFS office (who legally are Annie’s guardians, not me, so have more access to her medical records than I do), and generally were as incompetent as I have come to expect from this location. I was more upset at dealing with these two morons than I get shopping at Costco. And you know how much I loathe Costco…

At 11:45, we got to the park down the street where we were supposed to meet Maria, our Junior Blind vision therapist. She was running late because of traffic on the 405. There was a homeless man sleeping next to the only shaded picnic bench. I started to feed Annie there, anyway, since it was too hot in the sun, and she pulled the tube out, spilling formula all over herself. I did my best to wipe her up and change her with the six wipes left in my diaper bag. Maria ended up getting there 45 minutes late, at which point Annie was done with the swings and just wanted to get in her carseat and take a nap, which she told us repeatedly.

At 1:50, I arrived back home to try to transfer Annie to her crib. It didn’t work.

At 2, I left with Susie to go see her ENT in Thousand Oaks. (We couldn’t get in right away with Dr. Luxford down at the House Institute, so I thought we could expedite things by having Dr. Tseng order her a new hearing test.) Turns out her hearing is bad enough that she for sure needs to have another surgery, so we don’t need to bother with a hearing test and can just go back and see Dr. Luxford and schedule the surgery. Dr. Tseng was great and reassuring, but I just felt like we were both leaving in a fog. While we were in TO, we picked up Annie’s prescriptions from the pharmacy, a library summer reading program prize from the library (and searched unsuccessfully among the 50 copies of Rocket Men, the library’s big community read, for the copy that Tommy lost and I now owe $38 on), and bought a couple pairs of shoes for Annie to try with the new braces. We also went to Starbucks (this was my second latte of the day, but I had been on the go for 8 straight hours at this point) to regroup, so that all really counted as a Mommy-daughter date, right?

At 5, we got home to Derek making dinner before leaving at 6:15 to fly out to somewhere (I’ve lost track–DC, maybe?). I tried really hard not to cry and reminded myself that Rachel Jankovic says when you’re so overwhelmed you want to cry, give yourself 15 minutes of just doing your duty and see if you’re still feeling the need to cry. She had four kids under four and was nursing twins, so she should know. I had to push through two more hours of feeding Annie, trying on the orthotics some more (she can pull them off, and the shoes don’t really work, but I pulled them apart to get the orthotics in, so I can’t return them), baths, nebulizer and little girl bedtime, cleaning the messy house, dealing with laundry (Annie pulled out her tube in the high chair twice today in addition to the time at the park), before collapsing on the couch at 8 to watch a So You Think You Can Dance with the big kids. I was so tired when that was over that when we talked through our game plan for tomorrow and prayed and sent them off to bed, I didn’t have the energy to cry anymore. So I guess the push-through-your-duty advice worked.

At 9, I sat down to schedule out all of the kids’ homeschool co-op classes, French lessons, piano lessons, and hockey practices. Much budgeting of our charter funds and juggling of schedules as I texted all their teachers and glanced overwhelmed at our fall calendar. I spent two hours putting all the requests through the Inspire enrichment website.

At 11, I remembered that I needed to text Dan and Shawna the picture of Annie in her new orthotics (and hopefully give them a little push to follow through and call their lawyers and tell them to stop the appeals). I didn’t get around to lesson planning for tomorrow, but since I have to take Annie to OT in Santa Monica from 8-10:30 and have the psychologist coming here to do therapy from 11-12 and have DNA coming to do PT at 3:30, we won’t really have much time to do the science project I’d hoped for, so we’ll just stick to math and English and Latin and call it good.

Now it’s midnight, and I have to get up early and single mom it all day up to and including the big girls auditioning for Ragtime down at the music building tomorrow night, because nothing says nice start to the weekend like taking five kids down on campus at bedtime to try out for something that would involve more work for me for the whole semester, right?!