Ughhh. Today sucked. It started with a 3 AM wake-up from throbbing back pain of unknown origin. All I’d been doing was sleeping, which clearly is a liability now that I’m middle-aged. And DANG did it hurt. Took some aspirin and flopped between various sleeping positions for a good 30 minutes before deciding to wake Nick and ask for a massage–he loves it when I wake him for massages in the middle of the night–but he loves me, so he did it, and that seemed to help enough that I could sleep again. This was NOT a good start to the day.
Nick took off for work around 7:45 and I headed to class shortly thereafter (more on that soon). Nia’s bus doesn’t come until 9ish, so I left her explicit instructions to set an alarm for nine and put our numbers by the landline in the event of a problem. Imagine my surprise when, just before noon, I get a call from the Principal saying Nia never made it to school and that another student informed the teacher that “Nia’s Mom was bringing her to school soon,” which was news to me.
My first call was to Nick, who had not heard from her either. My panic was growing by the minute, so I jumped in a cab for the 15 minute ride home, all the while imagining all the bad things that could have happened to her. I distracted myself by hunting for our home landline number (which we typically never use and rarely know the number for) while in the cab and was over the moon when I dialed and she picked up! Yay! She’s alive!!
Turns out the bus never came (or as I found out later, it came early and left before she got to the pickup spot, even though she was on time) and when she tried to call us on the landline, the call wouldn’t go through. For some reason she didn’t think to email, but thought to get a message to her classmate, which is how that confusing “mom-is-bringing-you-to-school” message came about. Long story short, the bus driver messed up and is being dealt with by the school.
I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I saw her in the flesh. She seemed unphased by it all, which I’m taking as a good thing. She didn’t panic. She just took the steps she knew how to do and waited patiently for us to come. We didn’t have time to talk through it all because we needed to jump in a cab and get her to school. I managed to get her there by 12:30 and was met by the principal and head of transportation, both of whom I thought handled it very well and agreed to clear things up with her teacher.
As for me, I needed to rush back home to meet our recently hired household helper. She started a week ago Monday, so it was her ninth day of work. I was still reeling from the stress of the morning, when she let me know that she accepted a different job and would be done working for us the next day. It’s not that I was mad. She’d found something full-time when we were only willing to offer her part-time. It makes sense that she’d take it. It’s just that the timing was so bad on top of everything else that had already happened.
As if that all wasn’t enough, I also heard back from the computer repair shop that they weren’t able to get my computer working (it had stopped booting up a week ago), meaning anything that was saved to the hard drive is now lost.
And with my back still aching, I’m going to call it a day and hope for better tomorrow. I’ll take all the healing energy and good vibes you’ve got–send ’em on over. Thanks for letting me complain, dear readers. :) I feel better already.
