Some days just suck!

Yesterday was one of those days. I suppose part of it could be due to the fact that Shane is still in Africa and the boys and I are missing him terribly. Josh told me yesterday that "dad will be home in exactly 92 hours". I guess that means we're down to about 77 hours now...not that I'm keeping track or anything!

What really made yesterday sour though was a domino effect of events that ended in lots of tears between Brody and myself. Brody had an appointment with his allergist to have his annual allergy testing done which requires a blood draw. Of course Brody was not looking forward to this at all. When I stopped at school to pick Brody up for his appointment, my older son, Josh, was lying in the nurse's office with a migraine. Another fun thing we deal with on a regular basis. Since I was heading to Madison with Brody, I decided I needed to sign Josh out of school and drop him at his Grandma's house because there was no way his headache was going to go away by lying in the nurse's office all day. Okay, great, got that all taken care of and dropped a completely miserable Josh off at Grandma's so he could sleep off his migraine.

Then of course on the way to the UW Hospital there was road construction and detours. Lovely. But we somehow managed to make it to Brody's appointment with 2 minutes to spare! Since the UW Hospital is a teaching hospital, our appointments always last at least 1 1/2-2 hours because the students assisting the doctor are extremely ssslllooowww. Once we finally were done with the actual appointment, we were sent down to the lab to have blood drawn. Now Brody has been doing this every year for his entire life. He is very aware of the fact that some of the lab technicians are awesome at drawing blood and some are, shall we say, torturous? Can you guess which category our lab tech fell into yesterday? Brody was a trooper though and he and I looked into each other's eyes and started slowly counting to try to keep his mind off of the needle. With a good lab tech, we only manage to count to about 10-15. Yesterday, with tears in Brody's eyes, we almost counted to 100. Why, you may ask? Well, according to lab tech guy, Brody's vein kept "moving" so he had to keep jabbing the needle in even deeper and then he would take it out and start all over again. Torture.

After the hospital incident was over, I had promised Brody we could run into Whole Foods Market to see if they had any of his favorite Orange Sorbet so we could stock up our freezer with it. The store was out of it last time we were there, so I was hoping they had restocked. As we stood there in the freezer section, I realized that they weren't just out of that flavor, they had discontinued it completely. And that, my friend, was just simply more than little Brody could handle for the day. As we walked out of the store empty-handed, Brody broke down and started crying. I picked him up and we held onto each other and cried into each other's shoulders...partly because it had been a long, hard day, partly because we miss daddy being here to help make things better, and in large part because there are so few store-bought "treats" that Brody can eat, that when something he absolutely loves is discontinued, it really sets off a tidalwave of emotions ranging from sad to hurt to downright ticked off!

So right now I'm in the process of making homemade orange sorbet to surprise Brody with after school. While I'm sure it will be very tasty and he'll enjoy it, it's certainly not the same as all the other kids who get to just go out and buy an ice cream cone, or a sundae, or a shake, or....you get the picture. But we'll make due and hopefully today will be a better day.