It wasn't a bad Spring Break though, which is probably confusing. So allow me to explain.
In life, everything is about context. I swear I've written about this before, but I'm too disheartened to go looking for it now. But as I said, yes, in life, everything is about context. So then, with context, it can make sense for me to say that a good spring break was the Worst. Spring Break. EVER. Clearly then, this is the part of the show where I give you the context.
First, what this Spring Break was in terms of "happenings": it was a jaunt down to my family's house in da L.P. for a few days of R&R. We ate at the Pixie and Blackjacks Pizza, celebrated a couple of birthdays (of which yours truly was one), got the Easter party started a couple days early, spent some time with my long-lost sister (wait- you mean she's been in Grand Rapids this whole time? Yeah I don't think so), and got ice cream from Doozies. Oh, and I took more naps this week than I have in all of 2012. Good start, right?
And these are just some of the specifics- there were many more familial interactions throughout the week that contributed to the goodness of the trip. Because any time me and the fam get together, magic happens.
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| The Face of magic, on the back of some dude's head |
Truthfully it hasn't been as bad as it could have been. I had Christmas break in December, and then some other days off in January and February (in-services, snow-days, etc.), so I haven't had an over-abundance of 7-day work weeks. Then March hit the calendar, and like an endless stretch of wasteland it loomed over my soul. I couldn't look at a calendar with a sigh, gulp, or some combination of the two. Because I know that barring a miraculous snow day, there would be no days off in March for me. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
The one gentle thought, my shining light and beacon of hope was Spring Break, which came right away in April, and I allowed myself to hope and believe that if I could just get through March, then I would have that week off in April to reboot and be back in business. So even as March dragged on...and on...and on, and I dealt with repetitively inane situations at the school, I was always able to hold onto that little flicker of Spring Break that was always coming closer at the close of every day.
Wednesday, March 28th was when I pretty much reached my limit, both physically and mentally. Fortunately, the next three days I only had to work half-days, and then an 8 hour shift on April 1st...and then home. HOME!!! I made it. March had not destroyed me. Sure, it had sliced open my chest, ripped out my heart, gnawed on my ankles, and left me for dead. But dead I was not- instead, I was longing and aching to set foot in my old stomping grounds where I would be renewed and rejuvenated as had happened many times prior.
Except fate, it seems, is not without a cruel sense of humor, and Delaney started to develop a cold during those last days of March. And the day we went down her eyes started to turn pink. And goopy. Because one of her classmates must have had pink and goopy eyes sometime the week before Spring Break. Pink Eye. Ugh. The most annoying, least destructive blight on mankind had showed up to drop its little eye boogers of contagion all over my parade.
If that was the only thing that happened though, I think it would have been alright. It would have been a blemish on the week, for sure, but not anything too insurmountable. Of course, as you have already surmised from reading this far, it is not all that happened- it was merely the harbinger of things to come.
Because that very Monday night, after making the 6+ hour trip downstate and then having to go into the out-of-town doctors office to get some Pink Eye medicine...as I was sitting in the living room watching RAW with my mom, brother, and sister, I started to get The Throat Feeling. You know that feeling you get in your throat when you're not sick yet- but you are going to be sick very soon? Uh huh. That's the feeling I got on Monday night. That's when we started to veer straight into Worst Spring Break Ever territory.
We didn't actually reach that territory until Wednesday, when Shane started coughing. And nasally draining. And pink eye gooping. Oh, and just for kicks, let's throw in an ear infection. Awesome!
Yes friends, the week I had been looking to for over a month as this sacred oasis in the desert of my working life, the trip that was going to restore me to physical and mental health- instead saw me become a one-man zombie triage unit, alternating antibiotic eye drops into unwilling eyes between cough-riddled fits of sleep (both my own and the kids). If you've ever had young children with some sort of infectious disease, then you know that the more contagious the disease, the more often that children will touch the contagious area and then immediately look to touch something else. Times that by two, and then divide by 8 (since my ability to be hypervigilant was severely impaired by my own physical ailments) and you pretty much get....well, I don't know what you get, because there aren't any real numbers to work with. Just know that it's vile and horrible and not even a close approximation of what I thought my Spring Break would be.
Again, I want to reiterate that in and of itself, this was not a terrible trip. It was, by many accounts, a very fun and memorable trip. It's just that I hoped for some solid mental decompression and relaxation. Not that I could every wholly take off my parenting super-cape, but I certainly wasn't planning to don the parenting haz-mat suit either. Next week, I start back to work. Back to seven days a week. Every week (mostly). I don't know what April and May look like- but I can't imagine there's too many April days off, since we just had Spring Break, and May is probably solidly booked until Memorial day. Sure, June is only a week of work until summer break- it's just that I may break long before then.
Pic- http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/f/f2/Voldemort_in_Movie_1.jpg
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