I want to thank my regular readers for bearing with me last week, and I want to say hi to anyone who might have come over here via Kerri's link and decided to stick around. I don't consider myself a diabetes blogger, but since it does occupy a huge percentage of my brain, then it comes around from time to time.

And if nothing else came out of my week-long essay, then there's this: I got an email about halfway through the week from another woman with a four-year-old diabetic who's fairly recently diagnosed. We've been trading emails since, comparing treatments and foods and marvelling at the similarities between our situations. (They even also have a new baby in the house!)

So Friday was Matt's and my anniversary. Our 10th, to be precise.

I took the Thieves and Kigns proof pages that he'd been given years and years ago and had them professionally framed, so we can hang them somewhere. He gave me a baby dinosaur. (That's sort of a joke, left over from our college days, when I kept a running list of things I wanted: A baby tiger, a froggy-bug [a trilobyte], a baby dinosaur...)

The Pleo is really cool, and I'd meant to post pictures and movies and stuff, but today has already been insanely crazy, so it'll probably be another few days before I can get to it.

In the meantime, Penny is begging me nearly every second of every day to turn it on, which makes me slightly crazy because a) she has to be supervised with it (it's fairly delicate and not recommended for children under age 8) and I just don't have that much time, and b) its battery takes about 4 hours to charge and then it's good for about 1 hour of play, and Penny does not get the whole recharging battery concept.

"The dinosaur is sleeping," we say. "She's very tired."

"I think she's had enough sleep now," Penny says.

"Honey, the battery needs to charge up. It doesn't go without the battery."

"It's done now," Penny says firmly, with the true conviction of a 4-year-old that saying something forcefully enough can make it true.

We went out to dinner at the Melting Pot on Saturday to celebrate, and it was wonderful. It took us two and a half hours to eat, though it didn't feel nearly that long. It was fun and quirky and relaxing, and we're definitely going back sometime.

The downside to the slow, relaxing meal is that even though we had a reservation at 5:00, we didn't get back to my folks' to pick up the kids until well after Alex's bedtime, and by the time we got home, it was well past Penny's bedtime. Screwing with kids' sleep schedules makes them slightly wonky.

Plus, all the running around at my parents' sent Penny's metabolism into overdrive, so she had a low blood sugar at 9:00. And again at 10:30. I got to bed at 10:45, only to wake up at midnight, when Penny got up to go to the bathroom. (She didn't come wake us up -- she went to the bathroom and then went right back to bed -- but she left the light on, so I had to get up to turn it off.)

I got up again at 3:00 to recheck Penny's blood sugar and make certain she wasn't dropping again (she wasn't), and then at 4:15, Alex decided to wake up. (So much for that awesome 10-day streak of sleeping through the night!)

And then Penny started trying to pry me out of bed at 5:30. (I finally gave in at 6.)

And then last night, when I went to fetch Alex for his 10:00 feeding, he felt overly warm. Baby's first fever, whee. (It makes the five-years-ago link on the sidebar there pretty amusingly ironic, though...) It wasn't horrible -- not even bad enough to make me dig out the thermometer for a precise reading, so I'm guessing it didn't go over 101. But being sick will screw with a kid's sleep schedules, too.

So last night, I went to bed at 10:45 and then got up at 2 to check Penny's sugars (she'd been too close to her low-boundary at bedtime to suit me), and then Alex woke up at 3:15, and then he woke up again just as the alarm was going off at 6.

So I'm a bit tired and punchy today.

The week is not going to contribute to my restedness, either. Matt is staying home with Alex today, but if he's still sick tomorrow, we'll probably need to take him to a doctor, just to make sure he doesn't have an ear infection or something else that requires antibiotics.

Wednesday morning, Penny and I have dentist appointments first thing in the morning, so I won't get to work until about 10. (I was going to book club on Wednesday, too, but it looks like that's going to move to next week. Lucky for me, as I haven't even bought the book yet.)

Thursday, the guy at daycare who does Penny's shots is going to be out all day, so I'm going in for breakfast and lunch. And Alex has his 4-month checkup that afternoon. I've decided to just work from home that day, and I'll just only clock about 4 hours.

Friday, Matt and I had planned on the second part of our anniversary celebration -- dropping the kids off at daycare and then taking the day off from work to go to Busch Gardens. (Five years ago, we'd said we wanted to go to Europe for our 10th anniversary. But a new baby and a new diabetic is too much to dump on my parents for a whole week. Maybe for our 20th.) So: Busch Gardens, which is sort of like combining Europe and DisneyWorld (which was our honeymoon). ...Right?

Of course, depending on how much time we wind up taking off for Alex being sick, we may have to postpone that.

And Saturday, we're meeting up with some friends for a family-friendly Game Day -- board games and food, and movies for the kiddies. We'll see how it goes; Alex does not always travel happily. But if it doesn't work out, we can always just leave early.