I’ve not been too active blog-wise lately because these are the weeks of AG.

Seriously, check it out:

1. Last week, the kid performed an early morning audition for her school’s spring musical, and this week’s the callback.

“Callbacks?” you say. “In elementary school?”

OH YES, is my answer.

The school music teacher doesn’t play when it comes to extracurricular productions, apparently. You should’ve seen last semester’s Christmas play. It looked and sounded more elaborate than you might expect, given that it featured only the younger students in kindergarten through third grade, including the Sidekick.

2. AG also competed in the district spelling bee last week.
It wasn’t pretty.
There were, in fact, tears that were thankfully short-lived because:

3. Saturday found us doing the typical, two-child-family weekend juggle between the Sidekick’s figure skating lessons, shopping for a birthday present for AG’s best friend, an early dinner with extended family, and getting AG to the sleepover party for that birthday.

4. After sleeping just a few hours at the party, my kid then went to volleyball clinic from noon to 2:00 yesterday, a chain of events leading directly to:

5. Her crashing at about 5 pm last night and sleeping all the way through to this morning. I hope that means she’s well rested for her normal school week, the callback audition, the first of the musical’s weekly after-school rehearsals, and – AND! – her 11th birthday party at the skating rink this Saturday.

6. I’ve been shepherding AG through all of the above while A) updating this site, B) working on some freelance projects, C) still looking for a full-time position during a dismal recession in which no one’s hiring and in a newish-to-me city where I have almost no business contacts, and D) working on the Super-Secret project for this site.

This sounds like me complaining, but actually it’s not. This is more the dawning recognition that hot damn, is life busy now that AG’s reached that tween stage, where she’s attending after-school events and parties and practices all the time but won’t turn old enough to drive for another five years. (Not that I’m rushing that particular milestone.)

See, that normalcy we were talking about in last week’s reader response?

This is it.

This right here, this chauffeur/planner/homework-helper stage of life Mr. Asthma Mom and I have entered? This constitutes that “normal,” everyday stress that other families experience and that I dreamed of when AG was little, when the girls would go to bed and I’d imagine what it’d feel like to watch a WHOLE MOVIE on the couch, all the way through, without having to start up the old nebulizer at midnight. Not to feel the nausea rise and my stomach clench over the stress of a child who cannot stop flaring and never gets just to sleep, just sleep and breathe.

Related, I don’t write very often about my neverending job search because it gets me down, this terrible, terrible luck I’ve had with timing.

You just can’t make this stuff up:

My earlier interval as a stay-at-home mom lasted longer than expected because of AG’s health, my attempt to return to the full-time work path started in a small Florida city with terrible job prospects for anyone, and then I finally moved to a much larger city with better jobs – but right in the middle of a recession. It’s not that “normal” life makes the job hunt easier to bear but more that I appreciate, so much,  how that’s source of my stress – rather than AG’s health – right now.

That both my girls get to experience healthy childhoods. That most of the time, I can watch movies all the way through and that when my daughter does have problems breathing, she can catch them early. That now I can focus on looking for a full-time position with a good trajectory for my career and on teaching her the first steps of asthma maintenance and on decisions like:

Should I let her join a swim/dive team the way she wants, despite my reservations about indoor pools and asthma? Because she’s a strong swimmer and diver and she loves them both and she’d be great.

But that’s a post or three for another day.

Filed under: Asthma Parenting, My Asthma Girl & Me, School and Sports