Math-a-thon Climax, Mixed Blessings

It has been an interesting few days. Today, Friday, is the official conclusion of the math-a-thon. My kids have faithfully mathed themselves through 60 pages of math work of various difficulty. On Wednesday they both realized they were short their goals, and they put on a last-ditch burst of speed that was really quite impressive. Boyness learned all about greater than/less than/equal signs, Girliness learned how to add and subtract fractions that already shared common denominators. I am very proud of them for not just running around writing down simple problems to get their page count up.

On Thurs I went to clinic, and Marie (itandme) watched the kids. Her kids, like mine, were math-a-thoning their way to our Friday movie.

As I conducted prenatal appointments and my preceptor buzzed in and out to check on me and do various things herself, a semi-drama unfolded outside my purview. I'll not unpack it so much, since the internets aren't exactly private (and it seems like a violation of her privacy to share almost any details at all) but one of our clients needed to be induced. Neither of the hospitals my preceptor works with would take her. When my preceptor called to communicate this, the client and her family were standing around their house, bags packed, entirely ready to go. They had even tucked their daughter in to bed, telling her they would see her tomorrow with a baby. And then, in so many words, "oh, no, sorry..." The plan was to call around in the morning and see where she could go.

On the way home from clinic I called all my math-a-thon participant families and made contingency plans. I hedged my bets, telling my children that there would probably be a baby the next day and that if I was at a birth, we would surely still go to a movie, just maybe not right on time. The kids were upset about this possibility, understandably. They'd worked hard for this, and it wasn't just the MOVIE, it was the whole THING that was important.

So, the mixed blessings:

Our client went into labor late Thursday night. So they got screwed around, but she got into labor naturally. Yay!

I got an hour of sleep before I got called to that labor/birth. She had her baby in time for me to get home as Fran was getting ready to leave for work, with half an hour to turn around and leave to get to our math-a-movie done on time. So I only got an hour of sleep last night, but I got to take the kids to their math-a-thon movie, which (relatively speaking) went really well. Yay!

I'm feeling tired, but really, I don't think there was any better way this could have played out. I really thought this would be the first big let-down for my kids.