It's the 2nd of February, and you know what that means...it means that January is OVER for another whole year.

I despise January. Actually, I'm not so fond of February either, but at least February is one month closer to spring. January is so far away from any remote glimmer of warm, lazy days. The holidays are over. We come down with endless colds and flu. Vitamin D levels plummet. The kids are cranky. I'm cranky. I can never get warm enough, no matter how many sweaters I wear, except when I'm occasionally suffocating from the heater's blast of parched air.

We hibernate. Our friends hibernate. The days become nothing but get up, trudge through the day, feel cold, go to bed. I make an attempt to get out of the house and go for a hike with the kids once a week, but Julian has started saying that he doesn't want to go...it's too cold outside.

To add to my joyous outlook, Julian has had a NASTY flu for the past week. Poor little guy barely spoke, barely ate for three days. He complained about being hungry, then didn't touch his meals, just sad there red-eyed and miserable with multi-colored goo dripping out of his nose.

I thought he was being kind of wussy, but then *I* came down with it last night and FUCK. What a nightmare. I could barely sit up in my chair. I had to sit on the floor to put on my jammies because I was afraid I would pass out and bonk my head on the tile.

I was so out of it that I went to bed with Adrian at 7:15pm. I lay in bed next to him, wracked with frigid shaking chills, then burning with fever. I slept on and off, but mostly I just swung between the two extremes in a delirious state. Luckily, Adrian had a great night of sleep and barely woke up. Thank goodness, because if he had been having a high-need night, or if he had been screamy, I am not sure what I would have done, but it would not have qualified me for any Mother of the Year awards, that's for damn sure.

I woke up at one point and felt like I had been in that bed of misery forever and a day. Utterly weak, shaking, sweating, and my hips and knees ached like I was 95 years old. I couldn't get comfortable. My throat burned with a ball of fiery snot firmly wedged out of loogie-hacking range.

I had to pee like a racehorse, so I crawled out of bed and into the bathroom. Surely it must be around 5-6am, right? It felt like I had been in bed for 12 hours straight. Looked at the clock and was horrified to see that it was exactly 1:06am. FUCK! Six more hours of torment!

And why, you ask, didn't I just get up, if being in bed was so awful? Because being out of bed was even worse. Freezing cold in the house, and I didn't have enough strength to sit up.

Shortly after crawling back in bed with Adrian (and praying that I was passing him enough breastmilk antibodies for him to avoid coming down with this), I heard Julian open his door and come out in the hall. He rattled the door handle to Adrian's room, but in his sleepy state couldn't get it open (I normally leave it ajar). I heard him go back to bed after a little bit, and felt bad, but oh well.

I woke up again later on...surely NOW it must be close to dawn, right? Nope, now it was 3:17am. I got up to pee again, but this time Adrian woke up too and started crying, so I toted him into the bathroom with me and sat him on my lap while I peed, sat him on HIS potty to pee, and headed back to the Bed of Pain.

As I was creeping back to bed I heard Julian stirring, and once I got into bed and got Adrian settled, he appeared at the bedside. "Mommy, I want you to come and sleep with me."

"Oh honey, come and crawl in with me here. Mommy is too tired and sick to move."

He laid next to me, and the two of us sickos cuddled and commiserated. "I feel sick." "Me too." "I don't LIKE being sick." "Me NEITHER. I HATE being sick. "I'm sorry that you're sick." "I'm sorry too, I hope we both get better soon."

We both laid awake for a long time, neither of us feeling well enough to sleep.

Awake, asleep, awake, asleep. Tossing and turning, freezing and sweating. Aching hips, aching knees, aching shoulders.

Finally at 6:45, Adrian woke up and started chattering happily, crawling around the bed, and trying to pounce on his poor tired brother. Then Julian woke up and the two of them rolled around like two little puppies, cute as could be.

We all got out of bed eventually, got some breakfast, and I popped two ibuprofen. I normally prefer to let a fever run its course, but after my night of torture, I felt I had had enough.

So here it is, 5:00pm on a Saturday. It's dark and gray and cold outside. I have on a turtleneck sweater, a wool vest, a wool hat and a scarf. INSIDE. And I'm still freezing, even though the thermostat says 67.

In my pre-kid days I would be lounging in a scalding hot bathtub right now, but no chance of me doing that. I could get Dan to watch the kids, but Adrian would still be squawking at top volume outside the bathroom door. GOD FORBID YOU STEP AWAY FROM ME, MOMMY WOMAN. It's too cold for them to go for a walk or perform any other distractional tactics.

I could take a bath after the kidlets go to bed, but that will eat into my work time, and lord knows...I'm way behind on that. Behind on emails, behind on website updates, behind on organizing inventory. You name it, I'm behind on it. Well, except for shipping orders. I can't afford to get behind on that.

Speaking of which, time to deal with the Super Squawker, who is right now standing next to my chair screaming. Time to start making dinner as well. Oh please, let tonight go better than last night...