Bucketless At Last

To understand the title of this post, you have to scroll down to the picture on the last post. Joshua lost about a tenth of his body weight, I’m afraid, during this illness. I took him to school on Wednesday–mainly because he hadn’t thrown up since Sunday and I was worried he might actually absorb into the TV if he watched anymore. He lasted an hour an a half. Fearing this might be the case, I volunteered at his class until I could tell he didn’t belong at school. He came home, went straight to his bed, and only woke up when he had to use the toilet.

Don’t worry. I don’t believe he’d be contagious after all that time. But he was so weak! The boy turned down a Popsicle the day before. Not only did he have the fever thing that flustered my first Winco trip but the throw up thing at the same time. (Those links aren’t as scary as they look–they merely take you to my post about the subject!) And a cold sore on the roof of his mouth. Almost nothing tempted him enough to go through the effort he had to put forth to take a bite. Even a banana was too tiring to chew. Despite a little banana, tea, toast, Imodium, classic coke, and anything else I could think of, the diarrhea continued to plague him. His little tummy was going concave.

Last night, he turned a corner. He ate a normal breakfast this morning, walked up the hill to get to school–yesterday we’d had to sign in late because he had to take such small steps from the car up the hill–and stayed for all of kindergarten.

Needless to say, his sickness had put me behind on quite a lot. So today Mom and I got most of our Ashberry Lane Newsletter done before we went shopping for frames. Both kinds. She needed new glasses and I needed picture frames for all the prints I’ve had behind the couch for the last year or so. If you have an Aaron Brothers Framing shop near you, go before Sunday. They have beautiful Steinbeck frames on sale for 40% off. I got nine–NINE–frames for less than $150. And some of them are big…like 24×36. And sign up for their email updates as I heard they have a penny sale every January and July.

Another item checked off my list: I’ve officially finished my three months of jury duty.

One assignment I had from my agent was to write a bio about just myself. I don’t know why it’s been so hard. I’m just used to doing every writing-related thing with Mom and I find it easier to talk about us as a team than to talk about myself as an individual. Here’s the current version–tell me what you think!

Mother of two, wife of one, Christina Berry usually shares the creative process with her coauthor/mother, Sherrie Ashcraft. Undiscovered is Christina’s debut solo novel, which draws on lessons of forgiveness learned firsthand from a time her now blissful marriage could have been described as anything but.