Surviving

Posted: August 6, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: All's Well That Ends Well | 1 Comment

Hello, all…we are still alive here.

Did you know that driving 2,000+ miles in 36 hours – with colds and a toddler – is actually not fun?

I learned that recently.

But, now we’re all back happily at home, and home never felt so good. There are extra rooms for when I want to sleep in the morning and the Romgi wants to be awake doing stuff. The Bwun has more toys than he knows what to do with. Our kitchen may not have an oven, but it does have more than 4 plastic plates and a cheap Walmart pots-and-pans set. And the bathroom is equipped with not only two vanities but a jetted tub that you can actually soak in and a shower that does more than just drool on you. (The water pressure in our Greensboro shower was ridiculously weak sauce.)

We have had a few unexpected and unpleasant events since we got back: it turns out that all of our car’s brake pads were…well…non-existent, and that’s a costly problem to repair. Also, the poor Romgi has had a killer toothache for several days; it’s gotten so bad that we decided to pay out-of-pocket to get it checked this morning. Looks like it will probably need a root canal, so now we have the fun task of figuring out how to get him the expensive dental care he needs between now and when our new student loans come through at the end of the month. We definitely can’t put the root canal off that long – I think the Romgi is suffering enough that he’ll pull his own tooth out in the next week or so. No fun!

In other news, jr is doing well, and we’re down to just over 3 months before she comes along to really throw a wrench in our lives. (But it will be great. We will adore her.) The Bwun likes to ask to see Baby, and today he generously tried to share his food by pushing bread onto my belly button. Nice thought, right?

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Scratch that

Posted: August 1, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Gulliver's Travels | 1 Comment

The entire time we were in Greensboro, there was a horrendous heat wave. Heat + humidity = I want to stay inside all day. I was fortunate to have found an apartment that included utilities, so I did my part in ruining the earth by keeping the air conditioning on most of the time. But outside it was usually at least 95°F and often into the 100s.

…Until yesterday. On our last day in Greensboro, the heat wave broke (can you say that? Like a fever breaking?) and it was a comfortable, even pleasant, 80°F. It was also a LOT less humid.

When I woke up yesterday morning, my throat was killing me and my nose was stuffed up. By early afternoon I had a massive headache and (don’t take advantage of this opportunity to tell a joke at my expense) my face hurt. So much. After we left for Raleigh that evening, my ears were starting to ache and I was wishing I could just take a plane back to Utah instead of spending a week on the road.

Tylenol helped some, and we had some children’s Benadryl that I took to help me sleep. It worked until about 3am when I woke up with (possibly) the worst headache of my life. More Tylenol, a few more hours of sleep, and my favorite little boy was woken up by a door slamming down the hall at 6:30. Sigh.

When I brought the Bwun into bed with me, hoping he’d go back to sleep, the Romgi woke up and said now he was feeling miserable too. We talked about what to do, since neither of us wanted to try spending hours in the car and then being tourist-y in Washington DC when we felt like this. The Romgi suggested waiting until after breakfast and then seeing if we could stay another night in Raleigh (and cancel our reservation in DC). And, you guessed it, we weren’t any better when we finished eating, so the Romgi booked us for another night here while I canceled the hotel in DC. Then we all went back to sleep.

Instead of taking 7-8 days to travel up through Washington DC to where the Romgi’s dad grew up in New York, and then to Palmyra, Nauvoo, and finally back to Provo…it looks like we’ll spend today resting and then go back the way we came, through Colorado and all those boring states in the middle of the US. It will be shorter and we’ll probably drive longer every day.

Update: another day in Raleigh. I eventually got a good night’s sleep, and felt ok when I woke up just before noon (the Bwun was still asleep too, so it was fine to sleep in so much), but the Romgi felt worse. He seems to be a day behind me with this cold, so with any luck we’ll all be doing better tomorrow and ready to head home. Maybe we’ll do 3 12-hour days. Not fun, but at least we’d get home quickly!