Fickle

               Ahhh November.  You are such a fickle bitch.  First you come on all strong and wonderful.  You entice me with your dark chilly evenings that hint at snows to come.  You bring gorgeous starry moonlight nights unencumbered by loud, annoying people or worse, loud, annoying mosquitoes. You arrive with a mysterious barrenness and brisk winds that speak of winter and tell us it's time to batten down the hatches and remind us why we love our couches and spouses.  (Hint- they are both fuzzy and warm.) You smell like the earth has turned into one giant pumpkin spice latte.   And just when I am all infatuated with your dark mysterious looks and smoldering gazes with hints of frost, you drop a crap ton of leaves on my backyard, bring the temperature up into the 60's and grow leaf mold like it's your job to get my kid all sick and snotty.  Thanks.  Bitch.

                I shouldn't complain too loudly. I really shouldn't.  We have some crappy Novembers where Feisty Pants was in the hospital, sometimes for the whole month. I have had Thanksgiving dinner in more hospitals and Ronald McDonald Houses than I care to think about.  This a minor illness.  A simple sinus infection (FP is prone to those) due to her allergies caused by the (you guessed it) leaf mold.   It is just that I adore cold weather and now that it is finally my turn to wax rhapsodic about the outdoors, my kid has to go and get sick and now all I can obsess about is those Novembers when we were crashing in hospitals and sitting eating dinners by a sedated kid on a ventilator and worried about her and about exactly what the teens at home were up to without us to supervise.  (The only thing scarier than coming home to a wrecked house when you've been out of town while a teen was home is coming home to a spotless house when you have been out of town and a teen was home.)

                Nothing to do about it really, but give myself the old "it's just a fancy cold" pep talk  and keep on moving.  Feisty Pants only missed one day of school.  She still got to go to a party. (I wanted to keep her home but she threatened to go nuclear if she was stuck with her boring old parents one more day.  She just could not even.)  The antibiotics are kicking in so I think we shall all survive with our minds intact. If this is as bad as my November gets I will take it and be very grateful.

                But why, oh why, does it seem that all the alluring beautiful ones are just trouble waiting to happen?