I can't count high enough to enumerate the excuses I have for not blogging, but they all fall into the category of either "I've been really busy," and/or "I couldn't get started." Neither of which, let's face it, are really good excuses if the whole purpose of blogging is to make yourself write as much as humanly possible. Oops.

Quick recap of what's been going on:

1. We had baseball season for Jake (2nd year) and Danny (1st year). I really should have been blogging about Danny's practices and games, because OH MY GAWD he's such a little puppydog and he was sort of the team mascot. He's not the tiniest on the team, but definitely the youngest, but that didn't deter him at all. Luckily, he seems to have none of his mom's ultraselfconsciousness (nice word, eh?), so he just got out there and did what he could.I could really see his strength grow, and it was pretty incredible to watch. Since he was diagnosed with low tonality, I could really see examples of where his upper body strength failed him -- like in the beginning of the season, how by the third time up at bat he could barely swing at all.

At their last game, Danny swung on the first pitch his third up at bat, and clocked that fucker toward the shortstop. I got a little teary, to be honest. Add to that how fabulous his coaches were -- both dads from the team, one of whom is our neighbor across the street, and you get a really great experience. They found something positive to point out about every kid at every practice and game -- no matter how little. "Did you see the way Anna overran first base?" "Check out how Jonah transfers the ball from his glove!"

Based on this little league experience, I have coined a new personal term: MomCrush. I have MomCrushes on Danny's coaches. It's not that they're all that hot or whatever; they're so terrific to my kid that I'm stammeringly grateful. (Don't get me wrong, they're not physical train wrecks. But a MomCrush isn't about me.)

Oh, I was making a list here. So, 2. Benjamin got really sick. For a little over a week, he had a nasty fever that wouldn't respond to baby Motrin or Tylenol, and he was fussy and didn't eat or drink. After three days of fever, I took him to the doc, who did a blood test. He was livid. I wasn't more than halfway home when the nurse called and said they wanted to repeat it; his white blood cell count was really high and they weren't sure if it was a false positive.

So I turned the car around and brought him back to the pediatrician, where he freaked out just being carried into an examining room. They stuck him AGAIN, and put a bag over his privates to try to get a urine sample from him. This time, I waited, and in 10 minutes, the doctor came in and said she was sending us to the lab for them to really take blood. Oh, and THAT was fun. He was so dehydrated that it was really hard to even get to a good vein, and I had to hold him down bodily while the tech did the blood draw. I think he cried harder than me, but only because I was trying not to let him see I was upset.

One of the most frustrating things about seeing your kid be sick is when you can't make it better. Add to that a poorly communicating doctor (not his regular pediatrician), and I think you can understand why I was so grumpy all that week, whenever it was. An unresponsive fever of unknown origin plus a high white blood cell count has a very ugly possible conclusion, and I spent several days concentrating on ignoring the potential for really bad shit to be going down.

About a week after it started, Benj's fever started to come down, and he came over head-to-toe with an ugly rash... so we were able to finally diagnose him with roseola. It's one of those childhood diseases that seem scary while it's happening but don't seem to have any long-term effects or dangerous pathways. Within two weeks, my little baby was zooming around the apartment finding things to show me with an excited "Dah!!!" so he ended up being okay.

3. I ran an orientation for my second class of students in this new program I've been running, which culminated in me talking (mostly on camera, yeek) to 50 grad students for four days straight. I love getting to teach, but while it's going on, I worry that I'm boring them silly; I always come out of a session kind of shell-shocked, assuming everyone is glassy-eyed with scornful boredom. Fortunately, things went really well and I got good evals, so now I can look forward to the next one in two months. *sigh*

4. I've been working from home most of the summer, and only worked half-time for the first two weeks of July. However, I'm probably more tired than if I'd been going downtown every day. Two weeks out of each month, Jake is going to baseball camp at the local university, so I have to make his lunch, drop him off at 9, and then come back to pick him up at 3. In between, I try to work for a few hours, and then two days a week take Danny to occupational therapy. In June, I took Danny swimming a lot, but I've gotten so busy we haven't gone in two weeks.

Then, last week, our nanny called in sick... turned out a problem she's had on and off for years was because of a nasty bleeding cyst, and she ended up having it removed via laproscopic surgery that same day. So added to Mom duties are the more typical SAHM jobs of laundry, more cooking and cleaning (of which I frankly haven't done that much) and even more dishes than usual. Oh, and lots and lots of chasing Benjamin around, because he's 19 months old now and relaxation be damned!!!

5. Last week, I got invited to the cool kids' party. No, seriously. We joke that we're the scourge of our neighborhood, because our apartment building is surrounded by these incredible, mostly-rehabbed giant Victorian homes, most of which go on the market in the multiple-million-dollar range. But Little League kids get put in teams by schools and neighborhoods, so Danny's team was populated by well-off families who mostly live within three blocks of us. Apparently the cool kids have a weekly barbecue on Friday nights where the kids do the Lord of the Flies thing while the grownups have a few beverages and trade kid-wrangling as the sun goes down. The wife of one of Danny's coaches invited us at our end-of-season party (where Danny won "Most Improved" on the team and I got a little weepy as his accepted his award).

DH couldn't make it home from work that early, so I cleaned up the boys, put together one of the recipes I got from a cooking class (arugula-sweet-corn-relis h made as a salad), and bundled them all into the red wagon for the trip a few blocks down.

I'm a fairly social nerd, but I get tongue-tied and stupid in groups. I can function fine if I'm on a stage (singing, teaching, whatever), but to see me try to make small talk is probably really funny. I just suck at it. My mom is a total social butterfly so you'd think I'd have learned at her feet, but I didn't get the I-love-aerobics-and-dieti ng thing from her either, so there ya go.

But these really cool kids (I can't help thinking of them that way) actually made me feel really comfortable. They asked about DH, drew my kids in with theirs, included me in conversations, and really made me feel okay. Except for two things, neither of which were their fault: the first was when Benjamin snuck away from me and ended up going around the house (following the bigger kids) and a little ways down the block, where he was stopped by someone's dad and recognized by another mom who held onto him until I caught up, petrified and mortified.

Ugh, it terrifies me to even think about where he would have ended up. Yeek.

And the second thing that went slighly awry was another time I was chasing Benjamin, when I turned into the driveway after him and was stunned by a basketball directly to the eye. I know it scared the shit out of the poor girl who'd thrown it, and it sure shocked me. Luckily, I put my hand to my eye reflexively, so I caught my contact lens and was able to put it back in. My face hurt like hell, but I could tell the kids were freaked out, so I made a joke about the fact that my eye hadn't fallen out this time, and wasn't that lucky?

But I've had a headache since Friday night, and it was so bad yesterday that I couldn't sleep. I've been a bit nauseous and off my game, and today I feel a little double-visiony -- that freaky feeling you get after you've been playing a 3D video game and then try to walk around. If things don't feel significantly better later, I may run this by my doc. It may mean a quickie CT scan, but that's a small price to pay for making sure there isn't a blood clot working its way into my malformed, already impaired-enough brain.