The day before the day before, in true Carrie fashion. I had it all planned out, and almost none of it went the way I expected.
Jack was supposed to have a flag football game which got rained out. So I FaceTimed the boys to say good bye and work on Brooks saying Cici, I got Gigi and that’s close enough for me.
The plan was simple. About an hour of work in the morning to wrap up a pile of projects including balancing the books so our accountant can work on our taxes. Then run my Amazon returns since the dates were starting to pop up on me. Then packing. Easy.
What actually happened? I sat down at my computer and the next time I looked up it was 3 p.m. So much for the one-hour plan.
I rushed out to the Amazon return spot and rolled in fifteen minutes after they closed. So I handed the whole bag to Tim to deal with next week with a kiss and a “good luck.”
Somewhere in the middle of the chaos, I shot Mom a text to ask if she had packed her Nozin for the trip and one for the plane. She replied yes and yes. No reminder needed. Big improvement from last year.
Quick story I left out of last year’s blog. I made Mom a believer in Nozin last year because we went the whole week without her getting sick. Big win.
However as we were packing up, I figured mom she could still pick something up on the flight home, so I gave her my extra bottle to take with her and keep using for a few days. I set the dropper on the counter with the last things she had to pack.
Then in the packing up rush, she used it as eye drops.
It was 5:45 a.m. We were minutes from the car coming. She screamed from the bathroom. I ran in to flush her eye with water. She put her face down in the sink and I was trying to explain she needed to flip her head over so I could get running water in her eye. When she finally cooperated all she could see was me hovering over her in my bra, telling her to look up. All I thought was OMG I blinded my mom.
Eventually the burning calmed down enough for us to get downstairs, but her eye was bright red and the plan was to find a pharmacy at the airport to find an eye wash.
The driver was nowhere to be found, the front desk tried hard to help us, our concierge picked that exact moment to call us for a review (his timing was terrible and as a result he did not get one), and we later found the driver had logged the wrong pickup time. It was a comedy of errors!
We Ubered to the airport. Mom cried because the week was over but the good thing was that’s what her eye needed. She was unable to find eye wash but it eventually got better.
The Nozin tricked work she & dad became a believer, she did not get sick. And later, once we could finally laugh about it, she told me I had gotten “real serious like a mom would” while flushing her eye. But what she could not stop laughing about was her view of me in my bra from down in the sink.
So this year, when she replied yes and yes to my text, I was real pleased. We are way past the training phase.
OK, back to my own packing chaos. I finally started for real around 8:30 p.m. and didn’t tuck the last thing into the suitcase until 3 a.m. But I got it done, and I felt great about it. The whole time I packed Sammy watched me and had a scowl on his face the whole time. I wish I had a photo for you, just trust me. He was mad!
I did show him his new anxiety bed and I got a report that he’s using it!
Then, naturally, I couldn’t just go to bed. I still had to put all the clean laundry away and walk through the house tidying up so it would be in good shape while I was gone. Future me always thanks past me for that.
By the time I crawled into bed it was the wee hours. I closed my eyes hoping for a couple hours of sleep.
Happiness is Possible 