Kathleen M. Basi's Blog, page 89

Fiction (Wednesday): For Love Of A Child

(The image is of Julianna, just to give you a visual)

When Adelaide stumbled into the P-ICU for her shift, Kiana looked alarmed. “Addie, what’s the matter?” she exclaimed.

Adelaide blinked and looked around the sterile cinderblock common area ringed by sterile cinderblock rooms. She didn’t remember driving here.

“Addie? Honey, if you’re sick, you can’t be here.”

She roused herself. “I’m not sick.”

“Here, let me take your coat.” Kiana frowned. “What’s that?”

Adelaide glanced at the paper in her hand, crumpled where her fist clenched it. The letter she’d pulled from the mailbox on the way to the car. The letter that had ripped her heart out.

“They turned me down,” she said, her voice catching. “They won’t let me adopt. They said my schedule…”

Kiana drew a soft breath. “Oh, honey, I’m so sorry.” She wrapped her arms around Adelaide.

At that moment, an alarm sounded on the bank of monitors behind them. Kiana hurried back to work.

Adelaide read through reports as she scrubbed her hands. Not much had changed in the last thirty-six hours. There was the boy injured in a fall, the toddler battling pneumonia…and Baby Joy.

She tiptoed to the door, smiling slightly at the magic cast by tiny beads suspended over the warmer, turning this way and that on gossamer threads that shimmered as they scattered the light filtering through the blinds. Adelaide had made the pendants herself three days ago, when she could no longer stand the barrenness of Baby Joy’s room.

Such a beautiful baby, black hair and creamy skin, just three weeks old. For several days it had been touch and go, but she’d been extubated yesterday. Her cheek bore a red mark where the ventilator tubing had been taped down. Even now, both arms were taped to stabilizing boards, to keep her from pulling at tubes and leads.

“Nice to see her face, isn’t it?” Kiana whispered.

Adelaide glanced over. “Has the mother shown up yet?”

Kiana’s face darkened. “Hasn’t even called. The doctor calls her once a day, but…”

The girl had brought the baby here a week earlier, close to death, and stayed just long enough to leave everyone with a strong impression of her complete self-absorption.

Adelaide swallowed hard on rage. “It’s not fair,” she whispered. “When this is over, she gets to take that baby home, even though she’s too selfish to be a proper mother. And I…”

Kiana patted her arm. “You have such a heart for the little ones. At least we can hold her, now the vent’s off.”

It was a quiet day in the P-ICU, so Adelaide spent her shift in the rocker, stroking Baby Joy’s cheek, singing softly to her. If I could take you away with me, she thought, you’d grow up knowing what it means to be loved.

When she came back from dinner, there were new orders. Mother had been called. Baby Joy was moving to the main floor for observation anticipating release tomorrow. “Mom acted like it was a big inconvenience, because now she has to spend the night in the hospital.” Kiana’s eyes flashed. “Oh, well. Can you handle things for a few minutes, so I can visit the little girls’ room?”

“Sure.”

Silence fell in the P-ICU. Adelaide didn’t hesitate. She knew what she had to do, even if it meant leaving everything she knew.

She pulled a scissors from the side table and carefully snipped off the baby’s security bracelet.

*

The assignment was to use the words gossamer and affinity as inspiration. Yesterday, Danielle suggested that I add “the day that really important letter comes in the mail.” And here you are. If you’re interested to know origins, our family has spent more time than we’d care to dwell on in the PICU, and one of those times there was, indeed, a baby in the PICU whose parents never visited. That much is real; the rest I made up.

One of THOSE Stories

Sad face (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At eleven p.m. on Sunday night, I was the only one in the house awake. Maybe I was only half awake, but when the screams started from Julianna’s room, I was out of bed and down the hall before she drew her first breath, hoping against hope to get her calmed down before she woke her roommate.

No such luck. I flew past Michael, standing in his crib and wailing, and gathered his big sister into my arms. “Shh, honey, it’s okay,” I said, assuming she’d had a nightmare or heard a firework or a fire engine siren. She didn’t stop screaming, and underneath the noise I heard a rumble from her midsection. I realized instantly what was coming. I scooped her up and ran for the bathroom. And Michael? Michael saw me ignore his wailing and LEAVE THE ROOM. You can imagine the outcry that followed!

We made it–she fought me as I tried to hold her hair back and get her to target the toilet instead of the floor. And all the while, Michael continued screaming. I was standing there thinking, There is NO WAY Christian is sleeping through this. Finally I yelled, “CHRISTIAN! A LITTLE HELP, PLEASE!” And just at that moment I heard his soothing voice and realized he was already in the room with Michael. Michael, who was, if anything, even more upset that the wrong parent had come to comfort him.

I will spare you the details of my half of the job (you can thank me with zucchini bread and book sales, ). I did the worst of the dirty work and then washed my hands and went to trade kids with my husband. At that point, Michael had just calmed down. But he still launched himself into my arms. I laid down with him chest to chest for a few minutes while Christian put Julianna in bed. I do like the feel of baby…oh, well, all right, he’s a toddler now, I have to admit it…against me. His poor heart was pounding. When it calmed down I rolled out of bed and put him back in his crib.

Due to that little drama, Julianna stayed home from school yesterday. And I spent a good portion of the day watching her anxiously and trying to make sure she got hydrated and got a bit of food in her. It took me most of the morning to write yesterday’s epic blog post, and I got very little done all day other than snuggle Julianna and clear out some minor jobs I’ve been procrastinating for lack of opportunity. (Call the dentist. Respond to that program survey.)

She perked up considerably after dinner and some chicken noodle soup, so I’m crossing my fingers for a back-to-school day today, so I can return to normal programming. Which brings me to another point:

I want your help. I want to do a fiction prompt this week for the Write On Edge people, who have asked us to be inspired by two of the most enchanting words I know: gossamer and affinity. But for some reason, I always do better with a third parameter; it seems to pinpoint a structure for the other two. So throw some ideas at me. A concept, a relationship, a place, a scenario–my poor brain is shot after the revolving bugs we’ve been fighting since school started again. I need your help!

Reality Beats the Fairy Tale All To Pieces

When I was ten, I thought I was going to go to Calcutta and be one of Mother Teresa’s nuns. Well, anyway, some kind of a nun. I remember spending one whole library visit looking through the lists of religious orders and seeing which ones sounded the most exciting.

By the time I was in high school, I no longer felt the slightest interest in religious life. I was going to go to Juilliard and be an orchestral flute player. I practiced during study hall and after school, drove half an hour for lessons, and thought I was doing everything I needed to achieve my dream. I wasn’t, but I didn’t know that. And oddly enough, maybe because of the money, or maybe because I was scared of leaving home, I never even requested an application for Juilliard.

The summer after I broke up with my atheist ex, I chaufferred my sister and her boyfriend home from the airport after her overseas summer exchange program. My soul was raw, and I wanted Someone more than anything I had ever wanted in my whole life. Seeing them all lovey-dovey in the backseat made me almost nauseous, not so much with jealousy as with an overpowering sense of something missing.

Enter Christian…and all the years of anxiety that followed. During all that time, what I struggled with most was discerning GOD’S WILL FOR MY LIFE. I thought of it just like that, all caps, some big, ominous concept that if I got it wrong, I would surely be completely miserable for the rest of my life, and do who knew what to my immortal soul. I mean, what if I was wrong? What if THE ONE GOD INTENDED ME TO MARRY was not Christian, but was waiting another year or two in the future? On the other hand, what if I ditched Christian only to discover that he was THE ONE GOD INTENDED ME TO MARRY?

You can make yourself crazy with questions like that, and I almost did. I didn’t know anything about spiritual attack in those days, but God is good and in the long run, I managed to hang on to reason over irrational fear, to get married and start the life that has proved to be so rich and beautiful and filled with unexpected opportunities to grow. I’ve found joy, but not because I’ve ever come to a point of complete certainty of GOD’S WILL FOR MY LIFE. I’ve found joy and acceptance in simply doing the best I can with the knowledge I have.

9/4/99

A few weeks ago I was reading The Theology of the Body in John Paul II: What it Means, Why It Matters, by the late Fr. Richard Hogan when all of a sudden one day I sat up straight, electrified:

“Since every vocation is a gift from God, we cannot simply make up our own. Of course, people try to do this all the time. If called to marriage to a specific person, sometimes people … may doubt that they are actually called to marriage or to marriage with a specific person. …

“Usually, in refusing such a gift from God, a person finds his or her path to heaven more difficult. It is not so much that there is only one way to heaven for each of us–for example, that a particular person is suited only for marriage or, more specifically, that there is only one possible spouse for that person. But it seems that God calls us to the best possible vocation suited to our personalities and talents.” (ToB/Hogan, p. 155)

Did you catch that? There’s a sort of fairy tale mindset that we pursue without even realizing it, that says, “There is only one person in the whole wide world with whom I can be truly and permanently happy.” That’s what it means to find a “soul mate.” I’ve always loved this idea from a romantic perspective, but in reality it’s kind of terrifying. What happens if you choose to park on the left side of the street instead of the right, and don’t end up encountering said Soul Mate at all? Are you then doomed to unhappiness and unfulfillment? On such random, inconsequential things does happiness turn! No, it would be a pretty wretched, impotent God who would set the world up that way.

The whole idea that only one person can make you happy is a terrible twisting of the purpose and potential of love. The reality is so much better than the fairy tale: namely, once you’ve found someone with whom you have commonality and compatibility, you choose, mutually, to give yourselves permanently, exclusively, and completely to each other–and joy and fulfillment results because you stick to it, because you choose to seek out joy and holiness and love in action. Not because it just magically “happens.”

That’s really good news–because if it was all dependent on feelings, what would you do when PMS comes around? Or stress, or attraction to another?

“If there were not more than one possible path for each of us, then a vocation could not be accepted freely. ….Constituted as persons by the creative act of God himself, human persons can only act by their own free choice and in light of their own knowledge. God would never violate his own creative act by compelling human persons to act in a certain way. This is why God tolerates the choice to sin. Therefore, there must be more than one possible path to heaven for each of us, although for each of us there is a best vocation.” (ToB/Hogan, p. 155)

How incredibly liberating.

Sunday Snippets

It’s time for another round of Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival, hosted by RAnn of This, That & The Other Thing.

Since we’ve had sickos all week, I have had to postpone all posts that require deep thought; hence, you get posts labeled “Other” this week: Michael acquiring a new nickname, Julianna’s academic progress (or lack thereof), a bit of a rhapsody about Jazzercise, and a 7 Quick Takes in which I get to gloat about weight loss, but I also touch on Julianna’s new “re-eval” just completed.

7 Quick Takes

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134 pounds. 10 down. 5 to go.

I am wondering how people get such lovely pictures of themselves to put on blogs. Am I the only person in the world who feels prohibitively self-conscious asking someone to take my picture? And wince the whole time because it feels like such a bother on someone (AKA my husband’s) time? Or maybe the problem is we did it while he was trying to get out the door yesterday morning….

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In any case, I needed to crow a bit. For the first time in ten years I don’t feel like my upper regions are grotesquely huge. For the first time, um, EVER, I actually like wearing jeans. They actually feel good now!

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Photo by OnePinkHippo, via Flickr

In this process, the last three months, I’ve come to understand a truth we’ve all been told: more is not necessarily better. The thing is, that truth is contradicted daily in ev.er.y.thing we are exposed to in advertising. Restaurants: bigger portions = better. Car manufacturers: more power = better. And so on. But as I’ve really broken down what goes into the meals I’ve been eating for the last dozen years, my jaw dropped. The way I made a peanut butter sandwich? 450 calories. The way I made a tossed salad, with cheese on top (and lots of it)? 380 calories.

And I realized I wasn’t even enjoying them all that much. In the process of trying to cut back on the high-calorie foods, I found, to my astonishment, that I liked the end product better. A lot better. I’d just been overdoing it all these years. Like the one Blizzard I’ve had since starting this lifestyle change (notice I don’t call it a diet, b/c it’s going to be permanent, if not always as strict as it is now). I had 1/3 of a small Blizzard. I ate it in tiny bites, and it was the best Blizzard I’ve ever eaten. Shoveling in more, faster, just numbs my mouth so I can’t taste it at all.

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Another thing I’ve discovered in this process is that “hiding” spinach in food is very easy. I put the word in quotes because I’m not actually hiding it. It’s openly acknowledged in our house. I did have to hide it at first in the smoothies (raw spinach, no less!), because I knew there would be a knee-jerk reaction. Indeed, Christian won’t eat the smoothies because he knows it’s in there. But the kids drank them for a few weeks and then when they found out there was spinach in it they went, “Oh. Okay, whatever.” You really can’t even taste it in the smoothies. Which then made it possible for me to drop leaves in the gumbo and beef up the vitamin content that way. And so on. Christian’s even using spinach instead of lettuce on his sandwiches now. (Spinach is one of the “super”-veggies, and probably the most flexible as far as I’m concerned. Avocado is another.)

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Moving on.

I had all kinds of thoughtful, reflective posts this week, but I’m in survival mode now because of the rotating sickness in the house and, more to the point, the extremely fragmented nights resulting from them. Michael went to the doctor yesterday and was tentatively diagnosed with sinusitis, so he’s on amoxicillin now and acting…well….somewhat better. He still got up (one, two, three, four, five) FIVE times in the night, meaning I slept from 11-2, 2:15-4:20, and 4:45-5:30. This sort of schedule, more or less, has been going on for about two weeks now. So I’ve given myself permission to spend this week free writing instead of trying to draw out deep philosophical insights. Maybe next week.

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I did make some progress on fiction submissions, though. I submitted one story to two different places and began the process of polishing a couple others, hopefully to send in the next week. Crossing my fingers for making some headway in that area soon.

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Yesterday was a zoo of a day, beginning with two doctor appointments and ending with a First Communion meeting, but the biggest event of the day was Julianna’s IEP/re-evaluation result. They do a major battery of tests to figure out where she falls on the different scales, including an IQ test, which is something we’ve been intensely curious about her entire life. It turns out at the moment her IQ is 60, which is considered “mild intellectual disability” (mental retardation, even as a formal classification rather than a derogative, has recently fallen out of favor–most likely because of the derogatory usage). In different areas her scores are scattered over the higher and lower range, but basically she’s functioning in most areas like a three-year-old. Which is about what I thought. I questioned myself because I’ve been saying that for a year at least. But then again, she passes through stages very slowly, so that’s probably about right.

Well, this is becoming epic in length, so I’ll just stop there. There are boys getting into trouble, and bathrooms in need of cleaning.

Michael Mayhem

I capitulate, and confess: my fourth-born has officially outstripped my third-born for the title of Trouble. In fact, he has a new name: Michael Mayhem.

And he’s so quiet about it, too. You never know it’s happening until it’s a fait accompli.

I took Alex to his piano lesson yesterday afternoon–with all four kids in tow. When we arrived, we came inside long enough to collect his teacher’s youngest child to come outside and play. She mentioned that she’d quarantined another child in his room since he had strep. And then I happened to glance down. Michael had something long and skinny in his mouth and was chewing on it. I took it from him. “Nice,” I said. “A used straw.”

The look that crossed his teacher’s face was one of horror. She’d just thrown away the sick child’s cup, which was…wait for it…missing a straw.

When we came home, we decided to play outside for a bit. Michael loves being outside. He also loves running into the street. Deprived of that, he loves running over to the cul de sac, where there’s a big, nasty puddle that lives in front of the neighbor’s driveway. And slapping his hands in it. Just to make sure he’s good and exposed to every possible pathogen in our immediate environs.

Hands in the toilet. Food off the floor. Emptying the bathroom drawers, chewing on candles, chewing on hair spray bottles, chewing on remote control batteries, reaching for things I’m prevented by marital law from mentioning.

Books ripped to shreds, puzzles thrown here and yonder, bringing up commands no one’s ever heard of on the computer, gashing his cheek on the shower door.

I’m telling you. Mayhem.

And on top of that, we’re not even done with him when he goes to bed. He screams for a while when we put him in bed (that’s new since Christmas, too), then sleeps for half an hour and screams some more. We have to go get him every night. Make that I have to go get him. If Daddy tries to hold him, he works himself into a lather. But as soon as Mommy takes him…snuggle down and shut up. Snuggling is nice, but so is time with my husband. I’m at my wits’ end.

What’s that? Oh, yes, as a matter of fact, he does have a fever this morning. But we’ve had several others with fevers in the last week, so I’m not jumping on the strep bandwagon just yet.

Life is completely beyond me right now. I gave up writing willingly enough for the two weeks of Christmas break, but we cannot seem to get back into the swing of things. We can’t even get the rest of the Christmas decorations down. In the first five days of school, I’ve had two different children home sick on two different days. Plus my own lost twenty-four hours, when the best I could do was sit on the couch and wrap ornaments as the kids handed them to me…and even that required a nap afterward.

Just imagine what the laundry pile looks like right now.

I guess that’s my cue to get off the computer. Or maybe my cue was Michael, ibuprofen-second-wind firmly in hand, coming over to steal the computer mouse from under my nose.

Rhyme And Reason (or: the Reason she can’t Rhyme)

Helping make cake pops, post-glasses breakage

I haven’t written about Julianna’s speech and cognitive development in a while. You’re ready for a post on that, right?

Last Friday morning, hours before the second day of school post-Christmas, Julianna woke up at 4:30 a.m. with terrible respiratory distress and a moderately high fever. By 7:30 a.m. I was sending emails and calling off the bus. Along with the email to her teacher, I crowed about Julianna knowing how to spell all of the “no excuse” words they’d given her. Pretty quickly I got a note back, saying basically: Yup, we know she can spell. She’s great at memorization. Not so great at concepts like “how many syllables?” and rhyming.

Rhyming! Rats. I’d forgotten that one. They told me at her parent-teacher conference last fall that we needed to work on that. So Friday morning I sacrificed my writing time to bring Julianna over to the computer and find some rhyming games.

She was abysmal at it. Nicholas can rhyme better than she can. I drew out syllables until even I was ready to smack myself for being so annoying: “Does Ha-a-a-a-a-at rhyme with Fr-o-o-o-o-g? Does Ha-a-a-a-a-at rhyme with Fr-o-o-o-o-g?” Almost half the time she just said “yes” no matter what I said.

I started having her try to say the words, and that’s when it smacked me upside the head: she can’t identify rhymes because she can’t say them. She can hear and distinguish words, yes, but her pronunciations are so far off on so many words, and it’s in the sound production that you really begin to make those kinds of connections.

In fact, her speech is actually worse lately (at least in terms of us comprehending it!), because 1) she’s trying to say so much more, to communicate so much of what’s in her head, and her poor muscles just won’t cooperate, and 2) they’ve been working with her on ending consonants, which has for some reason caused her to warp all her middle vowels. Hence, “milk” becomes “mocha” and “drink” we’ve only re-identified in the last two days as “doh-koh.” (Which is better: “deee” or “doh-koh”? Agh!) It’ll all come together eventually, but it was quite the light bulb moment, realizing that what appears to be a cognitive deficiency is actually–still–the fault of low muscle tone.

Every problem this girl has is low muscle tone related: her health problems, her speech problems…

Well, I guess the attitude can’t be blamed on that, right?

Why I Love Jazzercise

I have never understood the concept of paying a membership in order to exercise. I’ve always thought people need to abandon the noisy machines, the TVs and the general dissociation from nature that comes with a gym. People need to get outside more. Walk, bike, hike, climb, run, do something that brings you at least marginally into contact with nature. Ditch the stupid headphones and take time to quiet your mind, or (gasp!) even pray. Why spend the money when you can exercise outside?

(btw, we don’t have that many people in any of the classes I attend. I think we’d all run into each other. )

I still think that’s all true, but I’ve been doing Jazzercise the last few months, and I really enjoy it, for a lot of reasons:

Variety. I think what I’ve always hated most about exercise is the mind-numbing repetition. Running, Nordic Track, sit-ups, you name it, it just goes on and on, the same thing over and over and over and over and…well, anyway. Jazzercise is choreographed to music, and the patterns change between verse and refrain–and the song changes every three or four minutes. So there’s never more than thirty or forty seconds of doing the same thing.

It’s dance. Because I was a band girl, I never got to be in a musical, and I’ve always wanted to. Once I learned the moves and my head stopped feeling like it was going to explode, I started having fun with the dance. It gives me a chance to imagine I’m on stage in a chorus line. (I hate playing, but anyone who aspires to write fiction has to enjoy imagining out scenes and scenarios.)

It works the whole body. Running is good for legs, Pilates for core, and so on. But in an hour of Jazzercise we do both aerobic and strength training, plus some targeted work within the core for toning.

Even though it’s an hour long, and it’s working the whole body, it doesn’t kill me. I’ve never been good at running, for instance, because it hurts too darned much. Since I’ve been doing Jazzercise I can feel my body stronger than it was, particularly in the core, which I’ve been focused on since I realized what all those C sections were doing to me.

I’m learning things about the body I didn’t know before, like: it’s the up and down that really gets the heart going and makes exercise most effective, or flexing certain muscle groups protects others from injury.

It burns a lot of calories. It’s advertised to burn “up to 600,” but I have trouble imagining many people actually hitting that number; nonetheless, it’s a lot. According to my brand-new heart rate monitor set, I’m averaging about 275 calories burned in an hour. That’s equivalent to a grilled cheese sandwich, or a bowl of ice cream (although not a Chocolate Extreme Blizzard, for which I really would need the whole 600!).

So I am now a Jazzercise junkie, membership and all. (Thanks again for that, Kelley.) It will never replace getting outside and finding a quiet place to walk, but let’s be honest, the walking is just to get me to a place where I can sit and be still, anyway.

What keeps you motivated to move?

Sunday Snippets

Sorry I missed you all last week! I took a blog break and I meant it, so I wasn’t even on to see when the link went live. However, I’m back to joining everyone else for Sunday Snippets: A Catholic Carnival, hosted by RAnn of This, That & The Other Thing, whose every A review goes straight on my Goodreads list.

My contributions to the edification, enlightenment and entertainment of the world this week include:

One serious post: My word for 2013 is “charity”

and a whole lot of fun (well, maybe not fun, but funny) kid moments:

Of My Little (Not)-St. Nick

Vignettes from the Car

Moto Perpetuo

Things That Go Shatter, Crash, and Snap

Hope you enjoy!

Things That Go Shatter, Crash and Snap (a 7QT post)

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The day after Christmas, we were at my parents’ house, and I asked Alex to help me spread the tablecloth. My mistake was putting him at the end by the Christmas tree, but I could swear he didn’t touch it at all; that little glass ornament of the Wise Men simply shattered in midair from the resonance of his personality alone. (Well, a mom can dream, can’t she?)

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The morning after we came home from my in-laws’ house, everyone was occupying themselves quietly when the most almighty thump-thump-thump-CRASH made its way down the (carpeted) stairs. Two parents came rushing to the scene and found Julianna sitting guiltily at the top of the stairs while the wet, glitter-encrusted, sharp-edged wreckage of Nicholas’ brand-new music box/Santa snow globe lay scattered over the bottom seven (carpeted) stairs. (Did I mention they’re CARPETED stairs?)

This was a particularly tragic loss because: 1) Nicholas is THREE, 2) he fell in love with the snow globes one day at Target while I was perusing alarm clocks, and 3) he’d been reading The Secret of Santa’s Island, which ends with a charming snow globe. You know how every once in a while you stumble on a gift that is absolutely perfect? This was one of those. And a quick search of the Web made it clear that this snow globe could not be bought for love or money again. Fortunately, a Facebook diatribe ended with a friend who has a large collection of musical snow globes offering to choose one from her collection and send it to Nicholas.

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The day after we came home from my in-laws’, we put Julianna and Nicholas down for nap in our bed. I won’t bore you with the drawn-out explanation for why that particular configuration; just know it was necessary. An hour later, Nicholas emerged from the room. “Daddy, Juweeanna’s gwasses bwoke,” he said.

Earpiece: SNAP.

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The evening of that same day, I was reading The Book of Three to Alex when from the far side of the bed came a CRASH, immediately followed by Michael’s most sustained, ear-piercing wail. We found him underneath my jewelry armoire, which had every single drawer open, and following the boom, no jewelry in it at all. As we spent ten minutes sorting out the mess, we discovered the pieces of a bracelet my mother-in-law gave me two years ago. By pieces I mean three, plus  two of the stones popped out of their brackets.

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Why yes, I’m tremendously glad my kids are GOING BACK TO SCHOOL, thanks for asking.

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Only Julianna’s not going today, because she woke up at 4:30 with a fever and respiratory distress bad enough to scare her into crying about it. I’m not enormously concerned, but on the way home from my in-laws’ house, Alex had croup bad enough that he physically couldn’t draw breath, and Julianna, of course, has a history of much worse. Still, she hasn’t had hospital-worthy croup since the fall of 2009, so I’m hopeful we’ll ride this one out as we’ve ridden out the others.

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And that is why I’m finishing this post at 5:16 a.m. instead of still in bed. And now I leave you to go to Jazzercise so I can get back home before Christian has to leave for work.