Unexpected developments

Monday, 13 March, Capricorn:
Unexpected developments mess up all your plans.
This will be the rule rather than the exception, all this week.

The Monday after Spring Break started off with the traditional bang. Although in this case I guess it was a fairly literal one. I got back to my office after class and lunch and had a phone message on my cell phone and office phone, and two emails from Will’s daycare. Both phone messages—Chris got them both too and we had one at home that night as well—said basically, This is Ms. Pamela, and it’s not an emergency, but would you please call me about Will? Anytime it starts off with it’s not an emergency, your parental adrenaline informs you that, yes, in fact, it is. Or mine does anyhow. Turns out Will fell “playing chase with a friend”—and running on the sidewalk, both of which are daycare no-nos, precisely because of the big purple goose egg on his forehead. He got lots of love and ice, the accident report assures me, and the following corrective action was taken: “Will was reminded not to run on the sidewalk.” Even the daycare has bureaucracy now.

Really, it took me some time yesterday afternoon to settle down from just my usual day—class, trying to catch the biology search committee before they went to lunch so I could meet the candidate too, attending her lecture later, reading drafts of papers, and negotiating my mid-afternoon panic attack about Will in the middle of all this. The child development center finally got a computer in each classroom now, which the kids use to play games, but I think the teachers have been asked to use it during naptime to keep in touch with the parents. The first two email I got from the Caterpillar teacher, ominously titled Will, both jolted me quite seriously out of my workday and into paranoia land—is something wrong? Is he sick? Did he do something? I imagine it must be something like people felt when they got phone calls in the past—it couldn’t possibly be just to talk? I think once I recover from the initial shock of having Will pop up during work I’ll actually enjoy it; we got a really cute email from his teacher last week:

From: Ms. T
To: Lisa and Chris
Date: Wednesday - March 8, 2006
Subject: Will
Funny story.... Will had been in the bathroom quite a few minutes. Being the concerned teacher I am :), I went to check on him. This was the response I got from William. “A little privacy here, please.” What an adult thing to say! T

I’m pretty sure I know where he learned that, having had about two seconds of bathroom privacy myself in the last four years. This morning, Laura is sick, most unfortunately on a teacher workday when she should be having a holiday. She’s got a little sore throat and is running a fever, watching tv and scratching Kitty’s chin, while I wander around, work a little, and then wonder what I should do for her. She already had her Tylenol and tucking in. Jello? Popsicles! We are both somewhat at a loss. Just another unexpected development.