Yes. We had a miserable week since we last updated all of you. It will be a week that will live on only as a blog post and repressed memories. But none-the-less I will share about it with you, and afterwards it will be referred to as “the week that shall not be named”. Both Heather and I got sick for starters, which if it were only us would have been hard but not that big of a deal. But the reality is that we have kids and they still need us, even when we’re sick (I will bunny trail for a moment to say that parenting truly is one of the most difficult jobs). And again if only one of us were sick, we could still rely on the other to carry the parenting duties. So we had to turn to a third parent to help us and this parent goes by the name of DVD player. For four days we had a movie marathon (ok, to be honest we did other indoor activities, but for the most part we watched DVDs). At one point Heather put in “the Sound of Music” which is one of my all time most hated movies, but it alone takes like two days to watch since it’s so long… which helped pass “the week which shall not be named”. (It also rained outside the whole 4 or 5 days so even when we were feeling slightly better we couldn’t get out of the house… we’re lucky to have survived this week)
Two classic Heather quotes came out of this week though which do make me grateful (and yes she read this post beforehand and is ok with me writing about it). Heather for those of you who don’t know her, can get a bit worried when she’s sick. And since rumors and fears of H1N1 are alive and well here in Xian, it’s immediately what she thought we had, correction, knew we had (luckily for us that wasn’t the case). We went back and forth on it with Heather taking the position of us having it and I affirming her we didn’t. At one point I told her gently it’s not H1N1 to which she replied with this zinger “When we’re sitting in the hospital tomorrow you’re gonna feel stupid when they tell us we have H1N1!” Luckily for me we never had to go to the hospital so I will never know what that stupidity would feel like. She, in another heightened frenzy fired this off “I bet you $100,000,000,000,000 (give or take) we have H1N1!” Again, luckily for us we didn’t have H1N1 and now I find myself with a huge I.O.U. in my pocket. Which is nice, because now when we have a disagreement I can bait her by saying “Do you wanna double or nothing your H1N1 bet???”
We’re all better now and it stopped raining, we’ve turned the DVD player off (and on from time to time) and are again enjoying life outside of our apartment. I got back to teaching today which went great and both Heather and I are resuming our Chinese studies. I have some more to write about my job and the craziness that happens there… but this post is too long. Check back in a couple days for it.
Peace,
the petersons
