Other Non-Nutritive Sucking Experiences...

I was thinking of what other NNSEs exist in our daily survival; those experiences that do indeed suck, and afterward, you get nothing out of them. Detroit Lions' games, SNL in a non-election year, and if you quizzed my students, any cat story I've ever told for example.

One that would also have to be on the list this week is being sick. I was the first to physically cave in to whatever cold bug was in the air on Monday. After 12 hours of sleep, I began to recover on Tuesday and Wednesday.

When my parents and sister visited for Thanksgiving, my mom caught it next on Thursday. She suffered through on Friday and was rebounding fairly well today. As that was happening, Lisa started to falter on Friday and is currently ripping through the Kleenex as I speak.

Lastly, Allison caught her first cold last night. We put her to sleep at 8:15 and finally woke her up at 9 this morning. We kept checking on her through the night to be safe. She also went down for a solid 5 hour nap late this morning and has since come back to her regular self this evening.

I remarked to our nurse, Holly, that it was a sad state of affairs this afternoon when Ethan seemed to be the healthiest person in the room.

Although our respective colds made for a bumpy holiday, it still was great to see my family and let them see how the kids have grown. We bought most of our Thanksgiving dinner already prepared from Hy-Vee and it turned out pretty good. We took it out of the box and cooked it, so technically, 'home-cooking' is an applicable term here and I'm using it.

When Abraham Lincoln first declared Thanksgiving a national holiday, he established an annual opportunity for all Americans to take stock of what we can be thankful for. (Other holidays, such as New Years, add a "planning" component where you're supposed to set out resolutions for the future after reflecting upon perhaps the past year's shortcomings, but I'll save that work for a month from now).

This Thanksgiving for me was more difficult than most to look at what I'm to be thankful for, which makes the task even more important to do. In the end, the list was surprisingly long, given my son's continuing fight and the Cubs' post-season performance. I won't bore you with the details, but Ethan smiled again today at me and that makes for a pretty good year.