Business trip, New York trip, and home again

Wednesday morning was my first board meeting for the community foundation. I'm excited to get involved, even though it's already turning out to be more of a commitment that I anticipated. Every day I get at least a few emails requiring my attention, and next week there's a committee meeting to discuss a complicated legal issue.

JW left for OmaHAAAA on Wednesday afternoon and returned Friday night. Wednesday night we went to the neighbors' house for dinner, Thursday I had friends over for dinner (and abandoned them for about forty minutes while putting the kids to bed), and Friday we recovered. X became uncharacteristically fussy while JW was gone -- do you think he's old enough to actually miss his Daddy? I think he's old enough that he's starting to prefer his parents to other people, or maybe he's just more used to us.

Saturday we attended an outdoor birthday party for one of K's classmates, immediately followed by an outdoor town party sponsored by the foundation, immediately followed by us loading the kids into the car and driving to New York. JW's grandmother is in the hospital and the family converged on the Bronx to visit her. We spent most of Sunday and Monday at her house, taking turns going to the hospital (the kids were too little to come). Which reminds me, I need to learn about assisted living facilities and other end of life and elder care issues, partly because I want to be able to help or at least understand what's going on, and partly because I know I'll have to face this one day with our own parents. Anybody know of any good resources?

All day Sunday I felt even more like a zombie than usual, after driving half the night on Saturday and then staying up the other half of the night with X in my brother's Manhattan apartment with glaring lights, sirens, and horns going all night. Sunday night we stayed at my parents' place on Long Island and I got to sleep in until 9 a.m. Then I took an hour and a half nap with X in the afternoon while JW was at the hospital. I had another Flowers for Algernon moment -- for the rest of the day, I actually felt human again. I even drove back home without my eyelids drooping once. But then we went to bed around 11 after arriving late, and I woke up at 11:30 to feed X, 1:15 because K's radio alarm had gone off for some reason and a sports radio guy was shouting at him about Albert Pujols, 3:30 to feed X again, briefly at 5:30 to give JW a shove and ask him to check on the baby, and then up for the morning at 7. At least I didn't have to get up for good at 5:30 like I did when JW was gone. But that awake feeling went away so quickly. This morning JW told me to put cream on the rash on X's left cheek, and I just stood there staring at the baby trying to figure out which side of his face was the left. X is around 15 weeks old. Most women are back at work already after taking their maternity leave. How do they do it? Hardly any babies sleep through the night at this age. I haven't recovered my short-term memory and my brain is functioning at maybe 80%.