A plague on both your houses

We're all just getting over a horrid ten-day cold of doom and I'm shaking in my metaphorical boots at the thought that this is probably only the first of many plagues Nico will bring home from preschool. I was so miserably stuffy that I risked taking Sudafed three nights in a row and I opened a Crappy Day Present. Poor Elliott got it the worst, which is extra unfair since he's too young for cold medicine. Plus, I was pissed that my exclusively-breastfed baby got sick at all. Isn't that supposed to be one of the benefits, that they don't get sick or don't get as sick? And oh, y'all, he was pitiful. There were many days that he was too stuffed-up to nurse, and even cruel torture with the Nosefrida didn't help. He spent most nights sleeping in his infant-to-toddler rocker beside the bed because if I laid him flat in his crib he'd wake up coughing and crying after only a few hours. He still woke up, but at least he didn't get quite so clogged up. In the early stages he was afflicted with the dreaded cough-barfs, too. But even with his poor nose stopped up and his little throat all rattly, he'd still light up and beam at me when I walked into the room. Oh, baby boy. Killing me with sweetness.

This other guy is pretty sweet, too, especially to his baby brother. I'm sure there will be times in the years ahead when two kids absolutely kicks my ass, but right now I could not be happier or feel more blessed. They are such a gift.

Preschool appears to be going very well so far. We're two weeks in and Nico is happy to go each morning. When I asked him how school was this past Thursday he said, "It was GREAT!" so I'm counting that as a win. I hesitate to say anything lest I jinx it, but he already seems more inclined to pick up his toys at home than he did before school started, so big win for preschool right there. Nico also got to hang out with his good friend Nathan at a party Saturday night with my old-job coworkers. The boys played so well together…it was awesome. It was kind of cool seeing all those people. It's hard to believe I've been gone from that job nearly two and a half years now.

Current-work is going really well, but the crazy-busy time of the year is upon us. For whatever reason, October is always the most insane month. It's ramping up fast and I find myself scrambling to get things done, leaving the office a little bit late, making notes in my phone as I lie in bed at night…it's getting a little bit ugly. Part of it is that the replacement for my supervisor hasn't been hired yet, so I'm still doing a job and a half. I'm supposed to finally be getting a raise on my next paycheck, so once that happens it'll feel worth it. And it is work that I'm good at and enjoy, but man…it's kicking my ass a bit. On the bright side, the next month is going to fly by. We have a few family adventures planned for the weekends along the way, so that should help (and hopefully won't add to the stress too much).

I debated whether or not to tell you guys about this next thing just because I try not to put too many obviously-identifiable things here. It's not that I'm too worried about a curious blog reader finding out my real name…I'm more worried that a bored real-life person will google me and this blog will pop up. That would ruin my day but good. I think I can do it without being too traceable, and it's just too crazy of a thing not to share. For those of you who follow me on Twitter, it's old news anyway. But it's probably the singularly most weird thing that has ever happened to me, at work or otherwise.

I do educational nature programming at work, and as a part of this we keep some reptiles. We recently obtained a new snake and I moved her into my office from my boss's office two weekends ago so that I'd have her for a program on Tuesday morning. She did her meet-and-greet that morning, and when I left Tuesday at the end of the day, she was safely stowed (so I thought) in a latch-top tote with her little water bowl and hidey-log. She'd been happily living in said tote for several weeks so I left without a second thought. The next morning I came to work, dropped my bags, sat down, glanced at the floor, and saw this:

I can honestly tell you it didn't scare me. I did have a few moments of dog-head-tilt while I tried to figure out what the hell I was looking at. Then I'm pretty sure my eyes bugged out in amazement that this had happened. My next thought was thank goodness she didn't get out of the building, because I'd have been in so much trouble if I'd lost her. My boss was having a meeting in the next office and my officemate was gone for the morning, so I couldn't even say anything. I snapped a picture with my phone and posted it to Twitter and my personal facebook with the message "I guarantee this has never happened to you at work." Once the boss's guest was gone, I showed everyone in the office. One of my coworkers put my picture up on our work facebook page and within about an hour, one of the local news stations called to see if they could come by and interview us about it. Meanwhile, the facebook post was going viral…it ended up getting more than 40,000 views. It went viral so fast that facebook called us and tried to sell us some ads. Our fifteen minutes of internet fame! Freaking surreal.