I feel as if I have spent a better part of today anxiously watching the clock to determine just when it is I can take more cold medication. I can feel when it wears off; the sinuses clog and the chills come back, but when I take more, it all goes (mostly) away for a few more hours.

We headed over to my parents' house in the morning for the traditional breakfast of homemade sticky buns (made without salt, which means that the bread dough is always a bit sweeter than you expect when you bite into it) and then we all spent most of the day lounging around, reading books or knitting (well, I was the only one doing that), or lurking in corners typing madly on laptops (Richard was still working on Nanowrimo) or sometimes chatting. The kids pretty much kept each other entertained, playing with toys inside the house, or out on the back enclosed porch, or even taking advantage of the gorgeous sunny weather outside and dragging some of the adults out with them to go run around in the school playground across the street.

There was the usual assortment of fresh veggies and crackers and dips for a browsy kind of lunch, and then Richard and I headed off to the grocery store to see if we could find just the right colors of Kool-aid for the yarn-dying project I planned to do with the kids (and discovered that the blue Kool-aid is very hard to find - we couldn't find it at either store we went to, and by then most places were already closed or just about to shut down for the rest of the day so we finally gave up). At one point I tried to go take a nap, but the combination of strange bed, stuffed nose, and the ambient noise of small people who really ever only talk at one (loud) volume) on the other side of the wall meant that I only managed to just lie there and snuffle miserably for an hour or so before I finally gave up and rejoined the rest of the group to continue on my knitting.

At one point in the afternoon, as it was getting closer to dinner time, and in order to keep the kids from getting more squirrely, someone pulled out the old Twister game from the game cupboard. The kids had never played before and they had a complete blast. They are all still a bit too small for the game, in that there were times when they just couldn't stretch themselves far enough to reach completely across the mat after getting all tangled up with their feet and their hands. But they absolutely loved it - I think they could have cheerfully played it for hours, and the good thing about them all being so small is that all three could play at once. Eventually, of course, we all insisted that the adults take a turn, so first my sisters and I did it, although eventually I gave up because bending over for that long was making my sinuses go completely haywire, and then all three husbands did it, and that is when we discovered that my older sister's husband knows how to play dirty. Here we and the kids were all being nice and sticking to our half or third of the mat, but there he was, stretching across the mat in front of the other guys so they'd have to work extra hard to get around him and I am not sure who was laughing the hardest throughout the entire game - those of us watching, or the guys themselves.

Dinner was, of course, delicious, and we all ate far too much, but that is only because there was too much to eat in the first place. My parents got a special turkey from the Co-op because most turkeys are injected with a salt water solution to keep them moist - fine for the normal person, but not remotely fine for someone on a low sodium diet like my dad. It turned out fine though - I'm not honestly sure any of us could taste any difference at all, which makes me wonder why they do the injections at all - and there was so much other food on the table that it wouldn't have mattered if the turkey had tasted terrible anyway. My little sister made polenta with a marinara sauce for her and her family since they are vegetarian, but she made enough for the rest of us to try it too, and that is the first time, I think, that I have ever had polenta. It's pretty darn good, actually, and I am going to have to have her send me a recipe or three to try, since cornmeal is Core, and we (Richard and I) are trying to follow that diet again (although he is the only one going to Weight Watchers meetings because I am not sure I can actually stomach the peppy lectures about inane things I already know and the required cheering for the people who only ever had ten pounds to lose and dropped it in five weeks by just switching to diet soda, and somehow still think that they have fought as hard a battle as those of us who have a heck of a lot more than ten pounds to take off and who have been losing that battle for most of our adults lives).

There was talk of the adults all playing a game together after the kids had gone to bed, by the cold medication only goes so far, and I didn't sleep very well last night, so I bowed out shortly after the kids were all put to bed, and Richard and I came home to collapse on the sofa downstairs - me surrounded by four cats who instantly converged on me with tales of being left alone *all day long* - and we watched Grey's Anatomy, and now I am trying to talk some sense into my very uncooperative sinuses to please let me get just a little sleep tonight, and please, once this cold goes away, do not take it as a sign that they need to clog up and force me to spend the next week wired on decongestants, which can only now be purchased after signing a special form and showing a valid picture ID.

This is a NaBloPoMo entry