I thought this week I would write a nice easy blog post about how it was my birthday this past week, as well as our fifth wedding anniversary. I would wax nostalgic for the simpler times before we had kids and before CF entered our lives, post a few old wedding photos, muse on the fact that I can't actually remember how old I'm turning without thinking about how old my kids are first, and so forth. 
That was all before yesterday afternoon, when our indispensable nanny texted me to let me know that she was very ill, in the hospital in fact, and would remain in the hospital until mid-week this week and would need time at home to recover afterwards. So, it took a grand total of 4 weeks since I returned to work full time to have our first full-blown child care crisis. It feels to me almost as though fate had this planned out for us, a stress-test if you will. Just to see if we had enough redundancy and flexibility built into our lives to handle one more thing. To keep things really interesting, Papa Bear is leaving at oh-dark-hundred on Thursday morning for a 4 day trip to Texas, leaving our defense down by two, a double power play if you will.
Once we put Lemon to bed today, Papa Bear looked at each other across the wreckage of our house and congratulated each other on surviving Day 1. He stayed home from work in the morning to take care of Lemon so that I could work, with Lime with me in the office either on my lap or asleep in a Rock-n-Play that I brought down there for that purpose. It worked out more or less fine. He slept soundly through all of my morning conference call except the part where I was scheduled to present, at which point he began screaming at top volume. Luckily my coworkers were very understanding and switched the order of presentations so that I could go later in the order, once Lime had settled down. 
Then, later in the afternoon, the real heroes of our tale, Nona and Opa, arrived. They kept both kids entertained until about 3, when Lime came back down to the office for another feeding. I was in the middle of yet another conference call, fortunately one where I was just listening and watching, not speaking. Since I didn't want to miss any of the visuals on the presentation, I decided to just keep him on my lap until the call was over. This triggered his impeccable sense of timing, and he produced a blowout of epic proportions, pretty much up to the hairline. But, I didn't want to leave my office before the end of the call, so I tried to optimize the way I was holding him such that gravity and capillary action were both working in my favor. Once the call ended, it was straight to the bathroom for some serious personal hygiene. Now, I should go try to do a bit more work and go to bed. 
I make no promises about next week's blog post. It may consist entirely of an itemized list of the mammals in our house who survived the week. I have a feeling that my birthday gift from Papa Bear may be gone sooner than expected.
