My throat is burning and my ears ache. My head feels weighted by rocks and it hurts to open my eyes. I’m sick, and I’m not happy about it.

WonderBaby is fine. So is the Husband, who felt under the weather for a day or two but was able to dope himself up with all manner of pharmaceuticals and ward off the virus that somehow mutated out of WonderBaby’s little teething cold into a mama-smackin’ monster that flung itself onto me and knocked me clean on my ass.

Havin’ a bad week.

The Husband, bless his big manly heart, has been a trooper, tending to WonderBaby so far as he can and letting me sleep and brewing up hot gingery throat-relief concoctions over a hot stove in the smothering heat of Toronto’s July. And WonderBaby, though climbing the walls – literally (halfway up the baby gate yesterday) – is being forgiving and focussing much of her energy on her father, who happily swings her about by the ankles and flings her toward the sky and encourages her in all manner of extreme baby sport, all the while tooting the theme song to the Muppet Show on a kazoo.

And, always, the smile:

The cheeky little smile that says aw, you sick Mommy? Lemme bash your head!

As sweet as those smiles, though, I can’t help feeling a little overwhelmed by the general suckage of this week. Can’t sleep (and here, yes, is further evidence that the gods have it in for me: WonderBaby has slept through the night, 11 hours straight, three nights in a row now. And yet awake I remain, reflecting upon the burning in my throat and thrumming in my ears), can’t eat, can’t write. The last, possibly (possibly), the most painful. No release from swirling thoughts, the better to lay awake at night. And so on and so forth.

Can’t even blog-socialize. Yesterday was scatter-shot blog visiting, through the haze of discomfort, stopping here, linking there, forgetting where I was, whether or not I’d commented. And, in the process, mucking up my usual rounds and missing just about everybody. Then, instead of just starting over with Bloglines (which I still cannot figure out because I am stunned), I spent a very long time trying and failing (Typepad! WTF?) to leave comments at two blogs that I’d never visited before, obsessed with the desire to leave markers of my visit, before slamming my laptop shut in frustration and cutting short visiting hours. Today, I can’t do visiting at all. I’m sorry. Not up to it. I know that you can’t see me here, flushed and sweaty and voiceless in porridge-stained pajamas, but still. I feel that I would smudge up your screens, infect your virtual living rooms with viruses and clouds of funk.

Really. ‘Cause gloom is following me and you don’t want me dragging it your way. This morning I pulled this out of the mailbox:

Creepy. And not even interesting-creepy, which sometimes (not today) isn’t so bad. I mean, first of all, if I did have questions about cremation, I’d Google them, and secondly, they wouldn’t be questions like ‘what is a columbarium niche?’ They’d be a bit more grisly, a bit more Gil Grissom-y.

But whatever. I wasn’t up for having whatever sicky mellow I’d got going from the Husband’s throat brew harshed by creepy purple pamphlets about death. Thanks, Glendale Memorial Gardens. Thanks much.

And. My apologies to any one of you who came here looking for profanity or discourses on dolphin penises or marginally amusing pedantry. None up today. I can offer you this, though:

It’s going to make me feel better. Soon, I hope.

Real soon.

(Cue Muppet theme song on kazoo. Gotta close on a high note.)