A life in the Day

Back in our London days, when, on the rare occasions we were not training on a Sunday morning, we used to go for brunch loaded with the Sunday papers, one of my first reads was the Sunday Times' A life in the day, where somebody famous describes how his/her typical day looks like.

If I were famous, or had done anything remotely interesting so that people felt they wanted to read about me, last week would have given me perfect material to describe my own "life in the day". On second thoughts, I am not too sure about "perfect", but "some" material, for sure.

Wednesday started early, if not well. 4.10am, to be accurate, as we had to go to a meeting in the South of France, 5 hours from Annecy, and my new company does not believe in bearing the cost of a hotel night so that you can have a mind in working order when you get to your all-day meeting. From then on, the day went like this:

4.40am - leave home, to get picked up by my colleague and drive to the railway station.

4.50am - arrive at station, check on the departure screen  for our platform, can't find our train listed.

5.00am - at last find a member of staff, who tells us that our train has not run for the last week because of the strike (surely the entire world knows by now about the French strikes - the best way found by some workers to be make sure the economy goes down the pipe even faster and their situation deteriorates equally fast). As there is absolutely no other way to arrive where we're supposed to go before mid afternoon, we wisely figure that, given that our return train also leaves mid-afternoon, we may as well cancel all together.

5.15am - I am back home, and get back into bed in the crazy hope I may get anadditional  hour and a half of sleep, but as all crazy hopes, this one does not materialize, and I end up deciding to go to work, so that I can leave earlier in the evening, and get to spend more time with Malo.

6pm - "Spending more time with Malo" has proven to be a crazy hope, too, as  I am stuck into a meeting with people who clearly got more than 4 hours sleep last night, and look and sound depressingly energetic. I, on the other hand, fight to keep my eyes open, in spite of the litre - make it a galon -  of coffee I must have downed.

7pm - home at last, with Malo as tired as I am, after a full day of playing at day care. Hard life to be a baby. We manage to fit his bath and dinner before puting the little one to bed, I bidding my time before I can do the same.

8pm - Martin and I have had dinner, but bedtime has suddenly become something further away, as we have just realised that the cleaning lady is coming tomorrow for the first time in 2 weeks, and that we must promptly tidy the flat to avoid her resigining as soon as she arrives in the morning.

10.30pm - we're ready to go to bed but that the time Malo, who usually sleep 12 hours straight, choses to wake up and start crying. I end up craddling him in my arms for half an hour, which I love... but would have loved even more if I had not been up for 18  hours 1/2.

On Thursday, it quicky looks like the day may not be much better than the last, only different. Thursday is the only day I ride my bike to work. As I am driving towardswork, I start getting a lof of cute little black shiny stars in front of my eyes. Not very convenient to drive. And scary. I made it (just) to work, where I get into a meeting, to promptly have to lie down on the floor with my feet up, shivering and feeling dizzy, and crying uncontrollably. Is there anything you least want to do that crying in the office, especially lying on a dirty carpet with your boss' scarf beneath your head?

Friday is going to be better, at least for the two male members of the family, since Martin has taken the day off to spend it playing with his son (and has even written so on Facebook so that the entire world kneows what a great day father and son are going to have). At 11am though, it becomes clear that Friday is NOT going to be better than Wenesday or Thursday. Martin calls me at work, asking me to come back home urgently, since he is having a migraine attack and cannot even see Malo anymore, let alone play with him. I promptly get out of the very important meeting I have just walked in, rush home, load Malo in the car since Martin has convienently left his migraine drugs at work and needs me to go an pick them up, come back, cook lunch for Malo, feed Malo, call day care to see if they could take care of Malo for the rest of the day, realised I don't have time to have lunch myself, drive to day care, then to work. Whatever is left of the day was uneventful.

In case this was not enough, we played "A life in the day" this week too. 

Malo cried all night on Monday, meaning I was, on Tuesday morning, 1. pretty worried since he has slept through the night since he was five weeks old and him not sleeping meant sometyhing was definitely off, 2. so tired I felt I was in dire need of a weekend. Unfortunately, even in France with its crazy labour lwas, weekends don't start on Tuesday mornings.  On Tuesday afternoon, I was called by daycare to advise me Malo had fever.

On Wednesday morning, fever had gone up, meaning Martin had to give up a climbing day he had dreamt about for weeks, to look after his son.

On Friday, we took Malo to the doctor, which means I did not get to work before 10.45am. Later that evening, I realised, back at home, that I had forgotten his prescription in the office and was unable to get it before Tuesday, since this is a long weekend here. 

Yesterday I decided it was vital for my sanity that I squeezed in a little run in the rain, started running by the river, got freaked out by a guy on his MTB looking too interested in me for comfort, had to run back on the road, stopped at the chemist's to try and negotiate she gives me Malo's drugs without prescription, failed, ran back home feeling ultra cold after the chemist-stop over.

Today, since Malo was still clearly unwell, we decided we could not take the risk of waiting until Tuesday evening to get his medicines, so had to drive accross town to the on-call doctor, where we obviously waited for ever, and well past Malo's lunch time. On the bright side, it turned out his ear infection had actually not worsened. On the not-so-brigth side, I took the opportunity of me being there to tell the doctor I was not feeling too well and had a sore throat, and she quickly diagnosed a massive throat infection, and put a veto on the long trail run I had planned for the day. 

Feeling I had had enough good news for the day, I did not even ask about running tomorrow.