The suffering of Saint Margaret continues, although in much lessened form. Our doctor suspects something viral, combined with the painful emergence of both upper canines (hence the drooling). Once dosed with Advil, she became much more like her old self for the rest of the day. I resent the fact that I have to spend extra time at school today instead of snuggling with my poor sick button, but I suppose I’ll be home soon enough.

My long-awaited run last night was a wash. The high winds not only made my face uncomfortable, but the pressure brought on nausea and headaches. I only made it one kilometre before turning around and walking back to my car. To make it extra-special, I was wearing my new shoes for the first time, and I started to feel pain in my shin while in the parking lot. I could not get out of there fast enough.

Maggie got sick yesterday. It’s amazing how profoundly disrupting such a small event with such a small girl can be. Yesterday she abruptly stopped walking, crumpling down on the floor and favouring her right leg. We took her to the doctor, who couldn’t find anything. The next morning, the sudden crumple was back. She refused to walk for most of the day, and developed a fever around supper-time. She’s also drooling copious amounts. I’ve spent all night with her in my lap, trying to get her to sleep or eat or read a book like her normal self. No go.

I was supposed to start my 10k class tonight; I was supposed to try out a new fitness class with my mom last night. Both ideas have been swallowed up in Maggie’s mysterious illness, which is just enough to keep her miserable and not enough to risk another trip out for inconclusive results. We have a check-up tomorrow anyway, so even if we can’t get her needles we’ll get her thoroughly checked over by our own doctor.

Eh. It’s not like I need to go to a class to prove to myself that I can run a 10k. I wouldn’t even be in a costume: easy stuff.

I have a literal crate of marking to do in the afternoon, but if I have to spend my time reading board books and singing songs, I suppose I can make that sacrifice.

I can’t believe my last post was all about running anxiety, and here I am on the other side of that race. Yesterday I completed my first 10k, without the help of the wheat wine that got me into this mess in the first place.

It was my favourite race so far. The course is not entirely downhill as promised: whenever we hit an uphill section I muttered, “you lied to me!” But it is mostly downhill, and thus quite pleasurable to run. I didn’t huff and puff through any of it, and though I was fighting the desire to use the bathroom from the 7k mark, I managed to finish pretty much on target. 72 minutes is not something to brag about in itself; especially since the winner ran it in 29 minutes, but I never stopped running and it’s still my PB. Other minor problems include tights chafing from the 8k mark and a very small red mark from an irritant on my left arch. My back gave up on me around 7 last night, refusing to help me out anymore and demanding we go to bed. And today I arose a little stiff but withal quite energetic. Going to sleep at 8pm helped.

Even though it was only mostly downhill, I loved the course. We started north of Eglington, passing the G&T where I used to work and continuing down the longest street in North America. I passed lots of interesting new storefronts and many old friends from the old days of haunting the street with Scherezade and practically living with Pixie, Q & the Boy at Froghopper Nook. This is the first run I’ve done on a familiar course, and it was pretty fun knowing where I was going for once.

I suppose the most important part is that I was dressed like a bee. There was a costume component, and the winners were to get extra money for their charities. As my fundraising has been decidedly lackluster, I thought I could play to my strengths and put on a bee costume to fight cancer. I didn’t win, but on the upside, I got to run as a giant bee, which is its own reward.

After I met up with Maggie & Mason at Fort York, we started our long journey back to the car. (The other really nice thing was that we only had one kid with us, so Mason had a lot less stress while I was out on the course.) We stopped at Cheese Werks for an early lunch and a celebration IPA, then took the streetcar and the subway back up north. We walked another three blocks to our car, and began the long drive through mid-town to my uncle’s house, where the newest family member lay sleeping.

You guys, my cousin is the cutest. Way cuter than that has-been, Maggie. (Sorry, Maggie.)

My family was delighted with my bee costume, with the notable exception of my mother, who, although she wears a hat with a chicken on top to sell grocery cards at the church, can’t bear the sight of me in fancy dress. Go figure. Blake was fresh – or rather, exhausted – from a weekend at camp, and spent most of the visit acting obnoxiously. We had to leave far too soon for my taste, chased home by Maggie’s escalating crankiness and another engagement.

Our third party of the day was a birthday dinner for our dads, who were born one year and three days apart. Mason & I got them matching golf outfits so they can be twinsies when they hang out this summer. I was pretty stiff by this point in the day, and though I did enjoy seeing my brother, I was more than ready to go home and crawl into bed. Miss Maggie, a hot mess from a whole day without a nap, was more than ready as well.

I’m running a 10K in two weeks, a decision I mostly chalk up to a strange product called “wheat wine.” I tend to be quite cautious in my new running life; I take training courses, I work hard to get three runs a week, I try my best to follow my instructor’s obsessively detailed countdown to race day. I kind of blew it when I signed up for the 10k. I was tired of doing 5k’s, I was a little tipsy from the wheat wine, and well. Lives are started for similar reasons.

The last few weeks have also been some of the busiest of my life. For the first time since I started running, I’m finding it excruciatingly hard to get my practices in. I am forced to be as creative as possible, and it doesn’t work every week. This week I had to run after Easter dinner at my mom’s, which was unexpectedly great. I got derailed from my Wednesday run when I had to take Blake to the store to replace the glasses he broke “practising face-plants,” and I forced myself to visit the gym between tutoring and home on Thursday. Then I got sick, most likely because my first dance class in ages was Thursday night, and I didn’t get enough sleep to see me into Friday with defences intact. A sore throat that had been waiting in the wings rushed out and pounced. Also, I realized on Friday that I was favouring my left foot, and when I paid attention and walked properly, it was sore as hell. That shut me down on Friday and Saturday.

Today I had to force myself out. Once again, I had my back against the wall, and if I skipped today’s 8k, I might as well forget the whole thing. So I went, sore throat, sore foot and all. Even if I don’t finish the 10k with a respectable time, all of this pushing and heroic practising in the face of illness is pretty impressive. To me, at least.

This week I need to get well; mark 28 essays & 31 tests; see Leonard Cohen in Hamilton; run 5k twice; and help my 10 Rickys write the Literacy Test. Piece of cake.

Do you like controversy? Of course you do! Then surely you’ll love watching me tell everyone that they don’t need to know the sex of their unborn child! Featuring an uncredited cameo by everyone’s favourite DadGear guy, a.k.a. Ian.

I honestly didn’t mean this article to come across as inflammatory, but I have a pretty big mouth. The way it was publicized on Twitter made me afraid of people coming at me with pitchforks and torches and ultrasound wands.

It happens. I love writing, but I also love lying in bed, and I love spending time with the kids and Mason, and also I love not feeling like garbage every time I go to the gym so I have to go regularly. Furthermore I enjoy eating and living in my own house, and I have to go to work to make that stuff happen. It all eats away at journalling.

But I think the most important factor is just that I lost interest in myself. It happens from time to time. Sometimes, when my life is short of funny stories and wacky anecdotes, I wonder what the point is. Or when I’m just fighting up the same slope as I was before.

I kind of snapped out of it on the weekend, though. I’ve been getting lazy about my Bunch articles because it seemed like when I was punctual I would create an embarrassing backlog, so I decided to hold back. I cranked out a new article on Saturday, an uncontroversial piece called “We can wait to find out the sex of our babies” that’s certain to make all parents happy. It didn’t take me long, either, which suggests I have more words floating around in me than I had banked on.

Anyway, read it over and let me know what you think. There’s already a negative comment, so there’s nowhere to go but up.

March Break ended with neither a bang nor a whimper, but more of a slick-click-crunch as I ate sunflower seeds and read The Dead Kids Detective Agency. Today was my first day back, and it was amazing how quickly the memory of leisurely oatmeal mornings and hectic edu-tainment afternoons was replaced by the singular demands of teaching. Or, at least, supervising, as most of my students didn’t work so much as yawn.

In an interesting example of timing, an article I wrote a few weeks ago about how teaching has ruined me as a mother is now up, called “Babies, don’t let your mamas grow up to be teachers“. I do not guarantee laughs, but rather knowing nods and perhaps a quiet smile as if to yourself. Because I suck.

I did not, however, suck on Thursday, even though I took the kids to a museum. This is because I took them to see ULTIMATE DINOSAURS! a shouty show put on by the ROM this spring. They promised touchscreens! and interaction! and a lot of other shit I don’t particularly care about, because it’s dinosaurs for heaven’s sake and I’ve been to Drumheller. But I had a conversation with Maeve about it before the break, and she did a pretty good selling job, so I bought tickets.

(In a moment of regrettable insanity, I also bought tickets for my parents, thinking they’d like to do an outing with the kids and forgetting that they don’t enjoy themselves on these things. This trip was slightly better than the last trip, in that they actually sat with us while we ate before taking off to the next thing, but that was the only improvement. Mason thinks I need an app to remind me not to put myself in the middle of their bickering again, but I think I need a Memento-style tattoo.)

It was jammed with people, of course, and the situation was made worse by the fact that everyone was posing with bones so you couldn’t walk a foot without blundering into someone’s poorly-lit precious moment with a femur. But I really really got into the smaller dinos, like the snub-nosed crocodile thing that ate plants, and the feathered one suspended from the ceiling. Mason liked the ones with big sails on their back because they were the most dedicated to fashion at all costs. And Sage liked the document camera, and flipping through touch screens without reading the contents. (To be fair, he doesn’t quite read yet.)

I wish I had been able to do it with Blake, but he was way ahead of us with my parents by the time we arrived, and my chance to talk about little chicken-sized dinos was over. At least I got to see my favourite hall of birds, and I got to look at the massive Chinese mural while Maggie fell asleep on the breast.

Ever since the boys came home on Wednesday, I’ve been having trouble stringing two moments together. Mason hurt his back right before we were supposed to pick up Sage, so I’ve been doing a little more solo parenting than I usually do while he rests or runs out to do an errand that is just easier to do without kids. This morning I was cleaning the house with the three kids, a circus that was only possible because I got a lot of help from Blake, a little help from Sage, and Maggie was not being clingy (which falls into the category of a lot of help).

In the afternoon I took the boys to the library for a Jedi program while Mason put Maggie to sleep for a long-overdue nap. Unfortunately, the program was for 6-9 year olds, which shuts out Sage. I was wiling to lie, but Blake was honest before I could get the chance. Sigh. At that point it was impossible to backtrack, so I took Sage to the book collection. He had another chance to go in later, when a helper asked if he was in the program, and he scornfully replied, “no, I’m five.” Nice going, George Washington.

I wouldn’t be concerned about the way the day got away from me if I hadn’t signed up for a 10K next month, without a plan or a chance to go train at the gym. Tomorrow I have to run, even if it means that Daddy becomes the High Sheriff of Weinertown for the morning. (That’s our collective descriptor for the kids: Weinertown. As in, Weinertown Mysteries.)

Maybe tomorrow I’ll have a chance to talk about the ultimate! dinosaurs! we saw yesterday. Or maybe just getting to run will be enough of a win.

I took the kids to the zoo today, joining up with Sarah & Leo to form a super family: three adults, six kids, two strollers, no whining. Well, that last was the hope. In truth, except for a brief horrible spell in the Africa pavilion when I couldn’t find Sage and I was thinking how much a curly red-head male would fetch on the black market, it went very well. Blake often resists educational field trips in direct proportion to how much I think he’s going to like them, and I have endured many, many trips to the zoo that are more about me coaxing him off rocks than him taking any interest in the exhibits, but today everything seemed to click. Both he and Sage took a natural interest in the exhibits, looking at everything in turn, and even Maggie was captivated by a few animals. I remember Blake at that age, and how it was impossible for him to focus on anything but butterflies and fish, and I was pleasantly surprised when Maggie was able to look at meerkats and even a big snowy owl. (“Owl” is one of her few words, so she appreciated giving her vocabulary a work-out today.) Sage was a team player from the get-go; even though I took him away from chocolate-making in daycare, he was cheerful throughout and even offered to pick up the rotten banana that Blake wouldn’t touch.

(Aside: I had thought my kids devoured my post-race snacks two weeks ago. Turns out they’ve been waiting for me in the trunk, tucked away in the umbrella stroller. Shudder.)

But by far the best moment for me was packing Maggie and Kiki in the double stroller and hearing them sing to one another. It was the cutest thing I’ve ever heard, and my heart may have exploded.

I couldn’t sleep last night, so this morning I had the choice between sleeping in and feeling terrible, or getting up and feeling terrible. I got up, and have been trying to make the day work ever since. My livingroom painting project has to be put on hold, because I’ve started it too late in the week, so I tried to touch up the bedroom paint. Major fail: I opened two paint cans and even started painting with the first before I realized that neither were the colour of the bedroom. By this time my head was thumping, so I gave it all up in favour of salted peanuts and the second Fairyland book.

I’m not sure if I can put today in the win or fail column. On the plus side, we went on an Adventure. Mason wanted to get a wheat wine release, but the email was non-specific, and we ended up killing time for seven hours with a cranky baby on a rainy day. (That’s bad.) We had a wonderful lunch of noodles, veg & dumplings, while the baby let us walk her through the aisles in her Everyday is Hallowe’en outfit, and then we had gelato & pound cake. (That’s good.) We drove to Mabel’s Fables, a place I have wanted to visit every since we drove by, and another customer was rude to me when I tried to help her. (That’s bad.) But we did find both of the Fairyland books, and Maggie had a grand time crawling around and looking at all the toys and books. (That’s good.) Then we drove to Wychwood Library, and I thought about going to Knit-o-matic, but when I checked online they didn’t have the exact yarn I wanted. (That’s bad.) So we went to buy more paint for the living room, and get two bottles of that wheat wine. (That’s good.) But by this time Maggie was insane with being loaded in and out of a car in the rain, and being dragged through rush hour, so she cried through the traffic jams. We were late for my class. (That’s bad.) I called and got them to leave a route, so I was able to run anyway. (That’s good.) I ran through every puddle in Brampton, I got lost, and my route disappeared, so I had to go back 10 minutes early. (That’s bad.) And then I got a treat that I didn’t like very much. (Can I go now?)

I dunno. The whole day was sort of a silver-plated fail. Still, I have my books and I had two nummy meals. I got some kind of run in and I bought the paint I needed. If only I could get my hair cut I’d be golden.