Writing in Chaos

Last night The Gang came over. The Gang consists of my friends Elizabeth, Henry and their 5-year-old son, Joe, who are having a foundation replaced on their house, along with my best friend from college, Shawn, who recently moved back to town. It's a lot of fun - we all like puns and discussing politics and life and we all like good food. It's a highlight of the week.

Except.

Except when it's like last night. Now, I still had fun, it was still great to see those who showed up, and we still all had good food, but it was, shall we say, a disjointed evening?

Elizabeth called earlier in the day and explained that she needed to get a friend back from the hospital and wasn't sure if she'd make it to dinner. She thought probably not.

My son lay down and fell asleep around 5. Everyone was set to come at 6. My son doesn't sleep unless he has migraines, so we checked, and sure enough, he had a headache, so we closed his door and let him sleep.

At about 5:50, the phone rang. It was Shawn. She'd had a project thrown at her at 4:30, and wasn't going to make it until 6:30.

I said, "No Problem."

Henry, Joe and Dave walked in at 5:55. Henry let me know that he would have to be at a rehearsal at 7:30. I let him know that Shawn would be late. This had happened before, so we knew starting ahead of time would be fine.

We had a quiet dinner because we didn't want to wake my son. Joe liked the attention. It was nice that it was kind of quiet, for a change, although I missed Elizabeth and Shawn. The dinner was occasionally punctuated by phone calls between Henry and Elizabeth to determine when and where Joe should be dropped off.

Finally, it was determined that Joe would go with Henry at 7. I raced to get food together to send to Elizabeth and her friend. I was just packaging up the last bit when I heard Shawn come in the door. I passed to the back of the house to get something and noticed that my son wasn't in his bed.

As I shouted "Hello!" to Shawn and "Goodbye!" to Henry and Joe, my son came out, shaking and looking white.

"I'm really sick, Mom."

And so he was. He had a fever, which he never gets. And so I bundled him into bed with water and toast while shouting instructions to Shawn about what was out for dinner and listening to Dave talk on the phone as he was letting the Scoutmaster know that they wouldn't be camping out this weekend and then my mother called.

And so this weekend, instead of finishing my novel (and yes, I'm THAT close), the boys are home. But I'll write anyway, in between the toast-making and water-getting and playing with html (again), etc.

But, actually, the past few days have been like that exact moment.

And this is why I don't write enough.

What's Cooking?
Not much today, but last night I made dill batter bread, corn and tomato casserole and I made a variation of Becky's Taco Soup tonight. And okay, so I got the recipe link working, but it's taking a bit to get the hang of all this, so at the moment, there's only one recipe. It's getting there... Recipes