After two nights of hard partying and eating and drinking everything Nashville has to offer, I woke up feeling sick this morning. Maybe sluggish is a better word. My body was just yuck. Here’s something–I quit taking antihistamines a few days ago in an effort to “give my body a break,” so my allergies have kicked up a bit. Consequently, last night my ears started itching, and this morning my sinuses were running more than Florence Griffith Joyner in the 1988 Olympics. I thought, Perfect, I’m getting ANOTHER infection.

Of course, by perfect, I meant decidedly not perfect.

I’ve spent the afternoon trying my best to cleanse, guzzling water as if it were going out of style. I’m sure I’ll be up five times in the middle of the night to pee, but maybe in the process I can flush out all of my bad decisions. With any luck, they’ll swirl right down the pipes. Goodbye, cheese and chicken nachos. Goodbye, Blue Moon and scotch.

Blue Moon is a beer, Mom.

In addition to hydrating, I spent the afternoon helping Mallory and the gang get ready for Bonnie’s birthday party, which was this evening. Several days ago we decided on a dinosaur theme because Bonnie likes tiny dinosaurs, in part because of tiny dinosaurs we saw in Austin last year and a subsequent post I wrote about the little suckers. Anyway, I already had plates, napkins, a table-cloth, and a banner with dinosaurs on them, and today Mallory and I picked up some plastic dinosaur toys to set on the table. Later Bonnie said, “I love it. It looks like a party for an eight-year-old boy.”

Here’s a picture of the table just before the festivities kicked off. (For the foodies out there, that carrot cake in the corner was made by magic elves out of nuts, angel dust, and frosting. In other words, it was delicious. Or as I like to say, fattening.)

In order to make the dinosaur toys more festive, we gave them all party hats, some on their heads, some on their tails. (The stegosaurus got three hats on his pointy spine.) One dinosaur even got a polka-dotted collar. (In the photo below, he’s the one with the sign that says, “I heart BoYo.” BoYo is Bonnie’s nickname.) One dinosaur had a sign that said, “Happy Birthday,” but the remaining three had signs that protested growing older. The stegosaurus’s sign said, “I want my life back (now),” and the t-rex held two picket signs in his tiny arms–“Aging Sucks!” and “Down with this sort of thing.” Lastly, the long-necked dinosaur had a sign around his neck that said, “I feel fat!”

Here’s a more zoomed-in picture. Is this the cutest thing you’d ever want to see or what?

After dinner and cake, our crew played a board game, and since Mallory turned the air down (like she does), everyone had to wrap up in blankets to keep from freezing. And whereas everyone else got a “normal” blanket, I got a shark blanket, as Mallory has some strange obsession with sharks. Check it out. When the photo was taken, I’d just finished saying, “What do I do with my hands?”

Now it’s one in the morning, and I feel like a field of dandelions is blooming in my nose. I’m tired. So often these two things put together–sick and tired–make me frustrated, but in this moment, I’m compassionate. (I’ll explain.) This morning at the breakfast table, while eating a homemade waffle, I told Bonnie that although I don’t know exactly what’s going on with my body medically, to me it feels as if it’s on “high alert.” My allergies are set off at the smallest provocation, and my skin gets irritated if someone looks at it wrong. I said, “It’s like my body is mirroring my emotional state. I’ve seen so many shoes drop, most days I don’t know how to expect anything but shoes dropping. Consequently, it’s nearly impossible for me to calm down, to de-alert. If there were one message I could tell both myself and my body, it would be, ‘It’s okay, sweetie, the worst is over. You can relax now.'”

I’ve lived so much of my life waiting for shoes to drop, breathing in and just holding it, I honestly forgot that it’s possible to be steady, to not be worried or nervous all the time, to not be constantly irritated or otherwise worked-up about something. Like, no matter where you are or what’s going on, it’s possible to breathe in, then breath out, and feel completely at home and at ease. Like you really do belong here. Like life is on your side. I can’t tell you how much I want this. Better said, I want more of this, since that at-ease feeling does come occasionally and usually in the most unexpected moments. I’m talking about peace, of course, that feeling you get when you’re crying into your waffle because you’ve finally been honest about being scared all these years, finally let go a little, finally breathed out.