Steve has been working on Long Island for a few weeks now - and still has a couple of weeks to go. It is very very hard. I keep thinking about single parents or people whose spouses are deployed in Iraq. I don't quite have the support system for this - though I have lots of friends. One of them took Aidan for much of the day yesterday on the fly because Will woke up with a fever and I wanted to take him to the doctor. The break was lovely, but it didn't prevent our regular dinner time blow out.

I can't quite figure out if it's him or me. I know that I am not as rational as I could be. I am also expecting more of him as he gets older and he's not quite up to my expectations. I'm struggling to understand which of us is being unreasonable. I don't like to be commanding and dictatorial - I prefer to present him with options and consequences. This has always worked really well for us in the past, but something has changed - he's gotten older, we had this really strange time that we lived at grandma's house, he's become a big brother. This feels like adolecence to me, except I can't imagine that adolescence is this insane and unreasonable. Maybe I shouldn't tempt fate by saying that.

Will is fine - I just wanted the doctor to listen to his lungs because he's been congested in his chest for a couple of weeks. She thought he sounded good. I wondered what had made him get a fever.

I have hay fever every year for the month of May and sometime in the middle of the day yesterday it kicked in hard. I don't usually take anything for it because I've been breastfeeding for years and because I just don't like to take things. By the time I spoke to Steve last night during our nightly "free nights and weekends" chat, I was sure I was going to have to take something to preserve my sanity. I lay in bed last night wondering why it had gotten so bad so quickly and why my head hurt - not a typical symptom for me. Then it hit me - I have a cold, and probably that's what Will has too. Tricky nasty cold, showing up in the beginning of May like that.

Steve is coming home for two days tonight. It will be great to see him.