Over the last several weeks, my immune system, bless its poor, misguided heart, has been desperately trying to reject an invader.  It just knows that it's a malicious intruder, and that my life is on the line if it doesn't kill all intruders. 

I love my immune system.  It's just trying to do its job.  How can you not love something that only lives to defend you?  It's sweet, really, romantic.  Only problem is, it's tried this same thing four times before, and failed.  For photos of the previous results, please see raising baby birds. 

Not that I mind a failure.  The four failures I've got are an awful lot of fun, and who doesn't want 25% more fun?  It's just...I and my immune system are stuck in the same body, and it's been giving me an awful lot of grief because it didn't get the "Failure This Time Is Okay" memo. 

This is where my little wintertime friend up there comes in.  My one true mug.  I have other mugs, to be sure, but this one has been pasted to my hand for the last weeks.  It's held tomato soup, chicken broth, breakfast cereal, and many, many cups of soothing peppermint tea.  (Not all at the same time, because, ugh...that doesn't even sound good to me.)

Oh, how I love the happy, chipped visage of my companionable mug.  Day after day lately has found me filling it up with one warm thing after another, trying to soothe that vigilant immune system, trying to make it until bedtime so I could sleep more of the first trimester hours away.  It holds a whole can of chicken broth, something I've been grateful for many times during the last weeks.  And it always, always smiles.  

Now, however, it seems that the clouds are clearing.  Romeo, my wonderful immune system, seems to well and truly have failed again, and is receding to his corner (or maybe he lives in a guard tower) to sulk over his defeat.  A week ago, when I began to think I might start to feel better soon, I took my sewing machine out of the house for a cleaning, mostly to keep myself from starting up new projects before I'm fully out of the woods. 

Yesterday the sewing machine shop called to say my machine is ready to come home, I've got a new stack of fabric (a trip to the fabric store alone was therapy indeed), my children are, miraculously, all still alive, and so life will be getting back to whatever normal is again very soon.  But before I move on, I'd just like to say, thanks, mug, for the nourishment, and the reminder. 

Keep right on smiling.

~MB~