29 Gifts, Day 3 - Small Gifts

I feel like I didn't give a "real" gift today, but I gave a few small ones so I'm not going to give up on the challenge.  I gave a gift to Adlani's teachers and classmates by keeping him home from school after he coughed and hacked all night.  I'm sure they had probably all shared his germs already, but he seemed so miserable when he woke up that I thought he would sleep for a few hours after we took Aliya and Norah to school.  No such luck - no nap and no TV to distract him from driving me crazy.

If any of you are wondering when I actually work, since I'm always running over to school for something or working around a sick kid, I work almost every night from 9 until somewhere between midnight and 2 a.m., in addition to my daytime work.  This week I was asked to join a team which is headed by my boss' boss' boss' boss, which was very flattering but means a couple months of extra work.  I'm looking forward to being a part of it and I'll be traveling to Indianapolis in April for a few days to meet face-to-face.  

Aliya had her Sage presentation today so while I was there I hung one more photo on the board that I had forgotten to print yesterday.  Not a big gift, for sure, but every little thing feels like a big effort right now.  I'm officially overwhelmed.  Aliya did a great job with her presentation on cats, and I think she enjoyed learning how to do research and create her "product."


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I got my new glasses from Ilana (her son is in Sage with Aliya), and I really like them but they're going to take a little getting used to.  They definitely affect my depth perception - I feel really short when I'm wearing them.  It's amazing how clear everything is though, and how blurry certain things are when I take off the glasses.  I told Ilana that I gave her a plug on my blog...I guess that's a tiny gift.  I think Aliya likes my glasses - all afternoon she has been wearing the 3D glasses she got at the movie theater yesterday.  It's nice to be revered (at least by one kid - keep reading). 

I took the kids to the library after school, and then we went to Dairy Queen where I tipped the drive-thru girl $2 even though she took forever to get to the window.  No matter...DQ is open so it must be SPRING!!!

I gave myself the gift of Zumba this evening, which probably doesn't count but I'm glad I went.  I swear, my legs were burning at the end of the first song!  I was so tired out from the week that I laid down on the couch to vegetate and Norah was driving me absolutely crazy poking at me and hitting me with things.  I got mad at her and during the verbal exchange she yelled, "I WANT YOU TO DIE!!!"  I'm pretty sure that I didn't say that about my mother until at least 5th grade, and I doubt that I said it to her face.  This kid is 3 1/2!  What the hell are we going to do with her when she's 15??

Since all of my tiny gifts don't feel like I've done enough, I'm going to donate some rice at freerice.org.  You can answer questions on a variety of topics - vocabulary, geography, foreign languages, multiplication tables, etc., and for each right answer 10 grains of rice are donated.  Not a lot per question, but it really adds up.  In February, 1,281,469,630 grains of rice were donated.  So go test your knowledge of famous paintings or chemical symbols and donate some rice!

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