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At the moment I am hiding in my office. In a minute I’ll go upstairs, round up five children (three of mine, two borrowed) and take them for a promised jaunt to the pool. Swimming is not what I want today. I want to sit someplace quiet to watch a movie until bedtime. Oh well.

Some days are just muzzy, muddle-through kind of days. I’m pretty sure I got stuff done. I think some of it was important. Hopefully I can acquire a good night’s sleep tonight and have a more focused tomorrow.

On vacation. Trying to stay away from the internet because it just makes me stressed.

I pull into the cul de sac and peer toward my house. The front room light is on, but the bedroom lights are out. There is no evidence for any of the catastrophic imaginings my brain began to supply when the kids did not answer my phone call to check up on them. This bodes well. I park and walk into the house. The sweet smell of home hits my nose. It is another bit of evidence that all is well. I walk into the kitchen and it is a wreck. The counters and table are covered with boxes, dishes, and debris. Odd though it may seem, this is also reassuring. I can see that they ate dinner and that they had a bedtime snack. I find the kids themselves asleep in beds. Link is in my bed. He obviously fell asleep while trying to wait up for me like a good babysitter. This is likely why he did not answer the phone call. The two fly swatters next to him are a mystery, I’ll have to ask tomorrow. All is well. More than that, every evidence I have is that they took care of each other and followed the script I walked them through before leaving. This is good and a lovely contrast to the last time when there was weeping and yelling for me to sort out upon my return. I kiss all of my children and am glad to be home.

I think that any day where I get to participate in a panel, do a signing where people actually buy my books, read out loud to an attentive audience, go out to dinner with marvelous people, sit around talking for hours, and am not interrupted by phone calls from crying children, can count as a really good day.

Everything went well. I am glad. Now I shall sleep.

The sore throats are not strep, or so the doctor says. However there were enough swollen tonsils, fevers, and assorted other symptoms that she decided antibiotics were merited. So now we have prescriptions.

We’ve also got epic levels of cranky. Early bedtimes are in order. Hopefully tomorrow will be better.

I knew the day was not going to go according to plan when we had 5 out of 6 people awake at 4am. All of the kids stayed home from school sick. Patch probably did not need to stay home, but everyone else did. Link, who was the one not awake at 4am, slept until almost 1pm. Gleek had a bad sore throat and spiked a fever by late afternoon. Kiki went to school for a class she couldn’t afford to miss, but felt tired and overwhelmed.

Tomorrow: Doctor’s office visit.

Home home home home home home home.

It even smells right.

Although the decision to turn off the heat while we were gone appears to have been a mistake. It began blowing snow shortly after we departed. Things were a bit chilly on our return, but they’re warming up nicely.

Also.
Home.

Tomorrow is retrieve the kids day.

My day contained tulips, suitcases, new books, a house filled with small friends, and snuggles.

Tomorrow will have school, packing, and hours of driving.

Thursday I will spend on a plane.

I’ve been looking forward to this week and now I need to slow down and absorb it.

My head is buzzing full of things. They’re all zipping about so quickly that I’m having trouble forming them into a coherent story. So I’ll just dump them in here at random, which will hopefully clear my head enough to let me sleep.

Today I ran down to the LDS Storymaker’s Conference in Provo so that I could participate in the recording of a Writing Excuses podcast. The episode is called “Living with the Artist” and it is me, Dawn Wells (Dan Wells‘ wife), and Kenny Pike (Aprilynne Pike‘s husband) talking about what it is like to be the spouse of a full time creative person. I’d never participated in a podcast before, but I think the recording went pretty well. I’m sure that when I get to listen to it I’ll find something I wish I could fix, but that is always the case with a finished project.

Speaking of finished projects, the digital page proofs for Resident Mad Scientist arrived today and they are beautiful. Plotter’s proofs should arrive on Monday and then the project is ready to go. We should have advance copies in our hands the middle of May, at which point we’ll open pre-orders and my life will be crazy busy again.

Howard and I ended up staying for dinner at the conference. We hadn’t intended to do so, but we stopped by to say hello to a couple of people and they urged us to take the empty seats. I’m so glad that we did. I love how much laughing I do when I hang out with local writer friends.

The kids spent the evening watching netflix movies streamed through our Wii. That system gets two thumbs up.

And now to bed.

I’m having deja vu. Last year Spring Break was rainy and I was under high pressure to finish a book before the end of the week. This meant I had little attention to give to the kids and they were all trapped indoors.

Guess what today was like.

Forecast says there will be sun later this week. I’m hoping for work to be done too.