Days of Rest

Christopher started making me nervous Thursday afternoon, because he didn't look good at all and was very low and tired. Friday morning he got up and made breakfast, but then he just shook his head and said he wasn't going to make it, so he laid down on the couch and just stayed there until Saturday morning. I was edgy and having trouble concentrating all day as I kept going in to check his breathing as he slept and take his temperature every time he woke up, but his temperature didn't start rising, and by Saturday noon he was fine again.

Maybe this is where we are now. It has been ten weeks since the last episode of meningitis, but if all it takes now is a "day of rest" that is obviously far easier for everyone to deal with.

I was quite relieved that he was all right again, because I had been counting on going to a party Saturday evening to celebrate twenty years of a cultural organization. Since the party was in a town outside Linz, I was concerned about leaving him alone and not being able to get back quickly. It went quite well, though. I had a great time at the party, and when I got home about one (considerably earlier than I had originally expected), I was impressed by the state of the kitchen and the living room. Apparently Christopher had a number of visitors yesterday evening and did a very responsible job of cleaning up after they left. I was less impressed by the way Patrick had neglected to take care of the laundry, but despite the weather forecast it is not raining, so we can still get it dry in the garden today, and Patrick is impressively organizing DVDs today, so there appears to be hope of clearing the clutter on the shelves after all.

Now it is Sunday, which is supposed to be a "day of rest" too, and I don't really feel like working, but I still need to catch up on what I didn't finish on Friday. And since Peter is still in Japan, I also have to cook today, which is a nuisance. I will be glad to have Peter back tomorrow evening (not just so that he can take over cooking again).

Our studious household

This morning the boys and I managed to get up and get moving on time, which is always difficult after holidays, but in a way it feels as though it is hardly worth the effort for such a short week. Tomorrow they only have the first two hours of school, because all the teachers (apparently in the whole city) have to go to some kind of pedagogical conference. In other words, we have to get up at six in the morning, just so that they can be home again by ten.

They both have tests in those two hours tomorrow, though, so ours has been a very quiet and studious household today. Paddy has a math test, and he has been getting more and more enthusiastic about it, even though I keep reminding him that it is a relatively futile endeavor to try to explain math to me, he has to explain it to his teacher, who is actually interested. Since he was having so much fun studying math, he was also quite amused by a story that has been circulating through various mailing lists today about the alleged arrest of an "Al-Gebra operative", with which he intends to entertain his math teacher tomorrow, while the class is enjoying the test (I suspect there are not many kids in his class having as much fun as he and one of his friends from Ghana are, but that kind of thing generally tends to escape his notice).

Christopher has a French test, so he has been busy filling up a separate notebook with conjugation tables. It would be nice if he could manage to just pass this one, but we'll see.

I feel as though I have been working hard all day too, but it is a bit frustrating to see that I really have very little to show for myself. I have mostly been doing background research, so I ended up reading far more pages than I actually translated. This would be a good time to go out for a drink with Peter, but Peter isn't here, and I don't really feel like going out by myself.
Hence this post.

Somewhere over Central Asia ...

... that is about where my husband should be now, hopefully sleeping peacefully in a comfortable business class seat on his way to Japan.

A friend came to drive him to the airport this morning, but since an eleven o'clock flight to Frankfurt is considerably easier to face than the usual six o'clock flight, Patrick and I went along too. The problem with eleven o'clock is that there is more traffic – on the ground, in the air, everywhere. Peter's flight was delayed, because the plane that was supposed to fly from Linz back to Frankfurt had not even left Frankfurt yet and was not expected until after the flight from Frankfurt to Tokyo was scheduled to leave. The airline had to re-book Peter (and quite a few other people as well) through Vienna, which would not have been particularly complicated, if he were not taking an instrument with him to show at an exhibition in Japan. Peter's instruments do not normally fit into overhead compartments, so he had a special arrangement with his reservation about the instrument. Unfortunately the plane from Vienna to Tokyo was smaller and very full, so apparently the best solution turned out to be that Peter and the instrument were moved to business class. I am convinced that these kinds of things only work because Peter can be so very charming, but I have always hated traveling with him with an instrument, because it is always complicated.

After Peter told me about this on the phone from Vienna, I was remembering when we first thought about taking a family holiday to Greece when the boys were little. When we explained it to Christopher, he was so excited that he ran out onto the balcony to shout out the good news to Patrick down in the garden. "Paddy, we're going on vacation!" he shouted over the balcony. "Do you know what a vacation is, Paddy? It's when you go somewhere else, and you don't take any instruments with you!"

By definition, Peter is not on vacation, but I'm sure a week in Japan will be very good for him.
I miss him, though.

Quiet Easter, quiet afternoon

Sleep is good.
It was obviously good for Christopher to go to bed at 8.30 in the evening the other day, because he got up the next morning looking more refreshed than he had all week - and promptly entered into major battles with both parents about having to "work so hard". Yesterday evening when I spoke with Jim and Sara on the phone and they asked how he is, the best I could say was that we haven't strangled him yet.
After we all calmed down a bit, we had a nice quiet Easter yesterday. Although the Easter bunny no longer leaves trails of candy eggs all the way down the hallway, I felt I had to do something special, so before I went to bed I set the table with a tablecloth and our best dishes and put out a few special sweets that I got for Easter so that it looked nice. Once again, Peter couldn't stick to the "no presents" rule and had gotten books for each of us (an audio book for me to rest my eyes), which was lovely, except that the consequence was that Peter was the only one without a little wrapped present next to his plate. I'll have to think of something creative to rectify that.

I spent the day reading (not listening to) a novel, Peter made Wiener Schnitzel for lunch, and it was a nice quiet day. In the evening Christopher went to a concert, and as we had agreed that he can stay out later than midnight once a month until he turns 16 next month, this concert was this month's choice and we agreed that he would be home by 3 a.m. Patrick has recently been engaged in a debate on the Internet Movie Database forum about how to spell the sound that a light saber makes, so he offered to keep me company waiting for Christopher and we watched "Star Wars - The Clone Wars" together until I heard Christopher's key in the door at exactly 2:59.

Now Christopher, having allegedly studied all morning while I was at the office, has gone off to visit a friend, annoyed with me because I said he couldn't stay out until midnight tonight, and Patrick has gone to spend the night at Vedad's. They hardly see each other at all during normal school weeks, but I'm glad they still spend much of their school holidays together. Peter has gone to the workshop to pack, because he is leaving for Japan tomorrow, so I am at home alone this afternoon.

Now the quiet is starting to feel slightly unnerving. I'm so used to tuning out noise all around me to work, it feels as though I can't really concentrate without the noise. That can't be good.

Is it because we fight, or is that why we fight?

Since he got virtually no sleep last weekend and has been hanging out with his friends until all hours every night, it is hardly surprising that Christopher has been looking exhausted and completely lacking any energy all week.

This afternoon we had a "discussion" (he said it wasn't a fight, but that's what it felt like to me), and I was feeling terribly angry and disappointed in him for just wanting to give up trying to get through school – and not even really showing any great enthusiasm for anything else either. After lunch he went to visit his friend Leo, which I thought was a good idea, because Leo is wonderful and it always does Christopher good to spend time with him, especially after a fight.

However, he didn't look much better when he came home this time. He said he was feeling overly tired and the thermometer confirmed that he has a slight temperature, so he just went to bed.

It makes me wonder: Does it make him not feel well when we fight, or do we fight because he is already not feeling well? There may be a pattern in this too.

In any case, if his temperature doesn't start rising, the sleep will do him good, and he may be all right again tomorrow. Otherwise – maybe it's not a bad thing that we didn't have much planned for Easter anyway, although we have all enjoyed the electronic Easter cards from the Masons.

Our wonderful washing machine

Christopher started doing the laundry the other day, but then when Peter put his little bits of sandpaper in, water starting coming out of the soap compartment. After cleaning up the water on the floor, I took the filter apart and found a piece of plastic in it, so I figured that had caused the problem and ran another load. When water started coming out of the soap compartment again, it seemed fairly obvious that there was probably another piece of plastic stuck in the hose and blocking the water flowing out.

Our washing machine is so well designed that it is relatively simple to take it apart, remove unwanted material and put it back together again. Sometimes this can even be a very soothing and reassuring activity. I have been telling myself that for days, but somehow I just couldn't quite bring myself to start taking the washing machine apart.

Today Peter beat me to it. In fact, he fixed the washing machine while cooking spaghetti for lunch at the same time. It is completely beyond me, how he can be so efficient at domestic multitasking, but he really is amazing. And he even brought me roses along the way, because he could tell just by the sound of my voice that I was upset about Christopher.

While Paddy is doing the dishes this evening, I decided to celebrate finishing a difficult text I was working on by cleaning up the bathroom around the washing machine and working on some of the spots of mold. The bathroom doesn't exactly look new again, but I feel a greater sense of satisfaction about it.
Mission accomplished.

Easter break and no alarm clocks!

It was good to get away with Peter for a weekend, even though the hotel was a bit of a disappointment: over-decorated with kitsch and seriously under-staffed, and it was frustrating to be presented with a wonderful breakfast buffet but have to spend 20 minutes chasing someone down to get coffee, and the sauna was nice, but they ran out of sauna towels in the afternoon ...
So on the whole, I think we might like to try something like that again, but definitely not at this hotel.

In the meantime, although Paddy was looking low and lonely when we got home, it was reassuring to hear that our neglected children were not entirely abandoned while we were gone. Paddy was obviously quite intrigued by a phone call from Jean to check that he didn't have tonsilitus and described how she sent him to check for white spots while she waited on the phone. Oma came by with more food than our poor children normally see in a whole week, and later she was full of praise for what a good job Christopher had done looking after things, washing the dishes, doing laundry, picking up. Paddy was less satisfied with his brother's performance, but I think there was some altercation, because Christopher was looking forward to having a party while we were gone, and was disappointed that Paddy didn't feel up to it. Amy sounded almost shocked that we would actually allow Christopher to have a party while we were gone, but since we had clearly stipulated that the house had to be in good shape when we got back and none of the neighbors upset, I don't think it would have been a problem.

Then we all got through one more week of school before Easter break (although Christopher didn't pass a single test he had that week) and were all greatly relieved to reach the weekend and ten whole days of no alarm clocks.

Christopher started off celebrating the holidays by going to a weekend workshop organized by the Socialist Party youth organization. He had signed up for the workshop on solidarity with Latin America, but that was full so he ended up with his second choice, a workshop on Open Source. This is obviously not something he could possibly learn from his parents! One day when he was talking about trying a new sound program, I offered to let him borrow a CD I have with a free software sound program on it. Christopher's response was to pat me on the head with an affectionate grin and the comment, "you're cute". What kind of a response is that, if I try to tell him about Dyne and the philosophy behind it, which would be far more in keeping with his purported political positions?

Nevertheless, the new blog he made with his thoughts about similarities between graffiti and open source was interesting to read. I suspect, however, that all the kids who put comments about their experience of the weekend online in various formats that they were working with in their different workshops, were not really thinking about the possibility that curious parents could end up reading them. Being curious, I did read them, of course, so I hardly found it surprising that Christopher looked absolutely shattered when he finally got home. At some point this week, he really needs to get some sleep.