I Passed the Test!!

    Once a year my husband travels for work for a week in May.  Last year I was an absolute wreck during the time he was gone.  I had just started my medication and counseling and was terrified at the thought of being alone with the kids for that length of time.  So....I went and stayed with my sister for a few days, which was a wise choice at the time. 

      As the dates loomed before me for this year, I noticed some of those old feelings coming back and I realized that I was feeling anxious about my husband leaving and I was afraid that I couldn't do it alone.  With my daughter's school schedule for the week, traveling was not an option.  Then I had an epiphany.  This was a test, if I could do this alone, for the four long days that my husband was going to be gone, then I could do anything.  If I could do this it would mean that this depression had lost and I have won.

     So....I was definitely put to the test.  I am very challenged when I don't get enough sleep, which is almost all the time, but I usually have backup in the wee hours.  My husband is a great help at night when the kids wake up.   I find that I lose my patience after awhile if I am woken up enough.  The first night Daddy was away, I settled into bed and then started hearing my daughter in the beginning stages of an asthma attack.  Her allergies have been terrible over the last few weeks.  So I got up and gave her a nebulizer treatment, which takes about twenty minutes or so.  Then she was fine for the rest of the night.  So I settled back into bed and then my son decided that he was not going to sleep at all.  He has been having nightmares lately and been waking up very upset and scared.  So I spent most of the first night up with him.  I felt like a zombie the next day.  Anne had school, and Matthew was in good spirits.  It ended up being a decent day.

     The second night, I had just drifted off to sleep and Anne woke up with a bad asthma attack.  So I had to get up around 2 am to give her another treatment.  I got her settled back down and went back to bed, and then fifteen minutes later she was in my bed terrified from a nightmare.  So we dozed on and off for awhile until Matthew woke up screaming with a nightmare.  I finally had them both calmed down and back in their own beds around 5 am.  That was a long night.

    I was very impressed with myself about how ambitious I was the next day.  We all took naps in the afternoon.  Then I packed everyone up, and we went off to get the kids haircuts then I took them out to dinner by myself, which I had never done before.  They were really good.  Then we went to evening church.  That was where I got the phone call from my husband that he was sick.  As it turns out pretty much his entire group contracted the Norovirus at the hotel he was staying at.  I got the kids home and in bed and spent most of the night on and off the phone with him trying to  figure out what was going on and how sick he was.  Initially we thought it was food poisoning.  I didn't sleep much that night worrying about him, although the kids slept fine.

    I kind of dragged though the last day, but we MADE it.  My husband came home just after midnight.  He was feeling much better.  Luckily his flight left mid afternoon so he had time to recover before getting on the plane.  Many of his colleagues were not so lucky and had very difficult journeys home.  

     I feel like I slipped back into some lazy and unmotivated routines for a couple of days after my husband returned, but then we all reset ourselves and got on with our lives.  The point is that I MADE it, I DID it.  I proved to myself that I can handle more than I thought I could handle.  In the end I learned that I need to raise my own expectations for myself.

The kids survived too!  Look....Happy faces!!