From Behind My Door

I've been in bed all day long again, but feeling a little better.  Michael Nightengale has once again taken care of everything and everyone in this house.  He has done like twenty-seven loads of laundry, kept us all fed, and taken care of Oliver day and night so that I can rest and not pass along my illnesses.  From behind my bedroom door, I listen to them eat and play together. Sorting laundry and hangers, chasing each other in the play tunnel.  I hear Michael explaining the mechanics of how a fire extinguisher works. I hear him ask Oliver a little too loudly, "Oliver, do you want a baby sister someday? You do? Okay, I'll tell Mom."  (Very sly indeed, as these days Oliver loves to nod his head at just about any question posed to him).  I can hear him teaching Oliver numbers and letters while watching Sesame Street, impersonating voices and getting excited over today's episode, which is brought to you by the number 3.  I hear them rolling a ball back and forth.  Just now I heard Ollie run into Michael's arms, and without a doubt they will be reading their seventeenth book for the day before long.  Michael took him to the zoo yesterday.  After a night that included two hours of crying, Michael took him to anther zoo today, a Minute Clinic, where our suspicions of an unhealed double ear infection were confirmed.  We're on to stronger antibiotics, and more liberal dosing of Ibuprofen.  Two of three of us have fallen, it seems; and Michael keeps us all taken care of. 

I just got up to pee for the zillionth time today (I'm trying to drink more fluids, promise I am), and noted the sunset out the window of beautiful captivity. I watched it disappear sliver by hot pink silver onto the horizon, thinking a little too late that I shouldn't be staring directly at it.  I couldn't help myself.  It was brilliant.  And it made me think, as it always does, how odd it is that the sun is not moving, we are.  Maybe that explains why I feel so off sometimes.  But when I am off, the life I hear going on outside my door confirms that I have married one of the greatest dads on this moving planet.