This morning Charlie woke up crying and saying he didn’t feel well. Then he sat at the table and ate four pieces of French toast. And then he started crying again and insisted that he was too sick to go to school.

Wade and I were not terribly sympathetic, because how on earth could he still be sick?!? He’d been on antibiotics since Saturday, and even though he cried and complained every single time he had to take the medicine, he took it all.  He had spent all day Sunday acting just fine, and yesterday he acted sick just until we dropped Henry off at school; after that, he spent the entire day telling me that he was boooored and asking if I would take him to school.

But he was such a mess this morning that there was no way he could go to school. “FINE,” I told Wade, “I will take him to the doctor! But there had BETTER be something WRONG WITH HIM.” (I don’t know why I was snipping at Wade; he was totally on my side. But you can’t really get snippy with a sobbing seven-year-old. Or not too much, at least.)

I called the pediatrician and of course they could see us this morning — at the EXACT SAME TIME that I was supposed to be having my hair cut and colored. (Aside: If I told you recently that I was growing my hair out, I clearly lied. And if you know me well at all, you totally saw that coming.) I had showered at 5:30 this morning but not done anything at all with my gigantic floppy mass of hair because hello, haircut at 10:00! So I put on a ball cap and took the boy to the doctor and tried not to be sad that I would have to live with this crappy hair for at least one more day. But I was a little sad, because I was skipping my hair appointment to take a PERFECTLY HEALTHY kid with a bad attitude to the doctor.

Also before we left the house, I bid on something at eBay; no one else was bidding on this particular thing (no I’m not telling you what it was — it’s Christmas, after all!), which was great because clearly the auction was going to end while I was sitting in the examining room with the boy, who had better be sick because I would be missing both my much-needed hair appointment AND the end of the eBay auction for this. But at least I was going to win my auction, which might redeem the day.

Or not.

Charlie’s ears were clear, but his throat was still not looking right, so the pediatrician swabbed him … and lo and behold, he still has strep!  Apparently, his hatred of the first antibiotic was so strong that he willed himself not to get better, which is really impressive.

Then again, he really was sick, and not just out to get me. So there’s that.

My phone stopped working entirely while we were in the examining room, which meant that I didn’t find out until an hour later that I’d been outbid in my auction because I was so distracted by the not-sick kid (who turned out to really be sick) that I didn’t think my bidding strategy through properly. Whoops, there goes Christmas! Of course, I’ve spent all the Christmas money on co-pays for doctors and antibiotics, so maybe it was good that I lost this particular auction. And by then, the whole day was such a wash that it was hard to really even care.

This afternoon, after I had given up completely, I texted Chris: “I am treating my ever-worsening cold thing with wine. Also, we have no groceries and the breakfast dishes are still on the counter. And the table is covered with crap from Charlie’s art project.”

“Wow,” she said, “You are living my life. Right down to the dishes.”

“In order to put them in the dishwasher, I would have to unload it first. And that’s just too damn hard.”

Then we talked about how we were both out of groceries, and she told me that she had been compelled to make muffins at 5:00 am for her kids’ breakfast. “You’re a better mom than I am,” I told her.

“Nah,” she said, a better mom would have done it with a happy heart, instead of begrudgingly.”

“A happy heart?!?”

“I was trying to think of a word that meant the opposite of angry with lots of swearing under my breath at children who put away empty cereal boxes.”

That I get.