Out of it

Hi. I've been out of it. But not as out of it as my poor mother, who had back surgery on Monday and has since been loopy on pain meds which have not always been working. The short version: it was bad. It's slowly getting better. There's a long road ahead.

In the meantime, I'm going to start a post category for "dreams." I remember a Dilbert cartoon in which the first frame has Alice talking in excruciating detail to someone (intern Asok?) about a dream she had; in the second frame, Asok (yeah, I'm pretty sure it was Asok) says there is nothing more excruciatingly dull than listening to another person talk about their dreams; in the third frame, Alice is gesturing animatedly and saying "but this was no ordinary grape, it was a seedless!..." and Asok is trying not to slit his wrists with the staple remover thingy. Or something like that.

None of the probable truth of that sentiment will stop me from relating this dream of the Bean's. She came into the bathroom this morning in her sheep PJs, arms outstretched, bottom lip quivering, holding back tears. I held her on my lap and she told me she'd had a bad dream, in which "we were in a parking lot, and [Peanut] took some steps backwards, and a red pickup truck was coming out of a parking place and it hit her, and she fell down. Then a man came out of the truck, picked up [Peanut], put her in the truck and took her away."

Poor Bean! She was so upset, it just broke my heart. I know precisely how she felt -- her dream sounded a lot like the kind I sometimes have. The kind I have to work out of my system by crying in the shower till I can face the day without holding my babies so close they'll wonder what the heck's the matter with me and why I'm squashing them and sobbing.

So we tiptoed into the Peanut's room to watch her sleep, so the Bean could see she was fine. That seemed to help. Then she was all about pretending to have blue hair with her PJ top pulled back over her head.

Me? I'd just woken from a dream in which I was flying around the country with Barack Obama, managing his campaign. Won't I be proud if he wins!