Sometimes I should just keep my mouth shut. I wrote yesterday’s self-pitiful post about how I feel less than fantastic, but, OK, honestly I’m not dying, right? I mean, hell, I’m just pregnant. Things could have been worse, right?

Well, they got worse. Murphy’s Law.

Christine has La Gastro, plus the rest of her laryngitis from last week, and a lovely rhynohoweverthehellit’sspelled thing so she’s miserable and shooting liquid sewage out of her rear end all over her clothes and the rest of creation (read as her mother) and drooling snotty drool and leaking gray matter from both nostrils. This has turned Little Miss Independent As Hell into Little Miss Hold Me Now Damn You Or I Will Scream Non-Stop Without Pausing For Breath. Did I mention the fever? She’s got that going on, too. So I’ve been stuck with a burning blob attached to my exterior since yesterday.

I called the local groupe médicale to try to get her in to see the doctor. They were booked full, but as they are simple country doctors, and absolutely wonderful, the secretary offered to call me back with an appointment as soon as she’d talked to the docs to see what was possible. I put Pooplette down for her nap. She slept, the lovely little shitty, snotty beauty.

Of course, she’d only begun to snore when the phone rang. “Dr. V can fit her in between two patients if you can come right now”. Fuck.

Quick, quick, pack Muppet off next door to Mémé’s house where Mémé was not feeling too hot either (Muppet eventually ended up helping Pépé cut branches off the tree in the front of the house and boy, that was some kind of fun, much better, in any case, than doing anything at all with Mom, no matter how much Play-Doh was involved), grab all my papers and Pooplette’s Carnet de Santé, toss the half-dazed, half-asleep, half-dead baby in her car seat and tie her down and try desperately not to speed the seven miles to the doctors’ office. Yea! No ticket. Boo! Back spasms.

Dr. V. also happens to be an osteopath, so I asked him if there was anything I could do to keep my back from making me continuously miserable. “Yes”, he says. “Wait until you’re no longer pregnant and it’ll go away on its own.” Gee, thanks. Not exactly what I was hoping for. He did eventually explain that the manipulation needed to alleviate the pressure on the nerve that’s making me so miserable is next to impossible to do when one is pregnant, and even if he were to do it, and do it correctly, the weight from the baby would just pull everything right back into whatever out-of-whack position it’s already in, meaning I’d be no better off and possibly worse. (Did I ever mention I hate being pregnant?)

We got back home and Pooplette was kind enough to continue her nap for a bit while her brother made my life miserable. He would not shut up. Or calm down. Or do anything remotely human in nature. I was stuck with some kind of creature with entirely too much energy and vocabulary for the state I was in. And then, POOF!, he calmed down. And at that very moment, POOF!, Pooplette woke up and began her 'Hold Me Now, You Bitch' song.

By the time Marc got home a couple of hours later, both the baby and I were exhausted from crying. Muppet, bless his heart, did try to be a good big brother, fetching whatever I though might possibly calm his sister down and giving it to her with all the kindness and love a little boy can have for his little sister. He was still a ripe little bastard with me, and refused to understand that using my kidneys as pedals for his imaginary bicycle is a sure-fire way to get a spanking. But he was an absolute darling to his sister, so I can forgive him a bit (now).

So, poop all day with the Poolette. It was a shitty day, pun intended. And then, at dinner, because I hadn’t had enough fun cleaning up crap all day long, Muppet decided to forget, all of a sudden, that he does indeed know how to use the toilet. So we had that to clean up, too. But by then the reinforcement had returned home and was able to provide support while I tried, desperately and without much success, to hold on to a tiny thread of sanity.

Bwahahahaha. Sanity is all gone now.

We did manage to get them into bed fairly early and I do believe that is what prevented me from taking them both to the river and setting them free to seek their fortunes in the world. Or the hereafter. Depending on how they behaved on the walk down.

Today Pooplette is a bit better. She’s less clingy but just as shitty. Oh, the odor! And Muppet is at the crèche, so that’s one less burden. But Marc’s in meetings again all day, with his afternoon meeting in Reims, an hour and a half away, meaning he’ll get home just in time to leave again for rehearsal. I’m not looking forward to tonight. I hate being the single parent on bath night with a sick kid and a monster from some place where kids are made of pure energy. I don’t hate it as much as being pregnant, though, so I guess I’ll make it through.

Anyway, I’m not complaining, as that just opens the doors for more crap to come flooding into my already crap-filled life. In fact, I’m just going to go have a lie-down and forget about everything for a while.