What a weekend and what a week. My beau was in Florida on a golf trip for a long weekend so I was solo parenting. Typically, we alternate taking “me time” but his trip coincided with BookCon, an event I bought tickets to back in September and had really been looking forward to. Albert strongly believed I should still go and pushed for me to get a sitter to watch him all of Saturday, something I feel guilty about on a weekend. He reminded me that Finn would still get plenty of parent time so it was a smart move for all. Everything was going great…until the middle of the night Sunday when he got a crazy 12 hour bug. The whole long weekend was a testament to teamwork because every moment was a seamless coordination between me and Albert to make sure we were enjoying ourselves while also caring for Finn. I’m proud of us.
Finn and I went to Matt and Karina’s for supper on Friday. Finn saw his first rainbow on the way there, and I ate an excellently grilled cheeseburger. The weather was gorgeous, and I had a perfectly crisp glass of wine in the backyard while I acknowledged and celebrated that we are finally out of the harsh winter.
I’ve seen a lot of complaints about BookCon and, yes, there are certainly kinks to work out, but I had a fabulous time. Perhaps I entered the weekend with more managed expectations, but $140 (including tax and service fees) was a good value for me. I anticipated it would be crowded (it was a convention at the Javitz center…duh) and looked at ARC giveaways as a bonus – I didn’t go expecting a ton of free swag. I didn’t wait in line to get in AT ALL, but I also timed it right. A lot of the lines to get in were due to heated rivalry madness, which I couldn’t attend anyway because of when my sitter arrived. Other insanity was all around people trying to get ARCs which I didn’t bother with because I was elsewhere at the time. I saw the event as an opportunity to attend interesting panels (check), get books signed (check), and discover new authors in indie alley (check). Considering I paid at least $50 to see Rebecca Yarros speak to a sold out crowd in the very last row of a huge theater, $140 for two days of multiple, far more intimate panels + meet and greets seemed like a great value. I didn’t fully lean into the fandom side of things (e.g., Shadowhunter fan meetup), but that would have added even more value. I also recognize that since it was just a subway ride away for me, and I wasn’t spending over $1k for flights and hotels, the stakes weren’t as high. Bottom line, I loved being surrounded by 20,000 fellow book nerds and plan to do it again next year.
It finally happened: I experienced having a sick child. It wasn’t even the full enchilada, but it fully exhausted me. At 11:30pm on Sunday night, Albert checked the monitor as he was heading to bed and noticed Finn was sitting up. He wasn’t saying anything but after a while, Albert sensed something was off and went into his room to find it covered with vomit. He cleaned him up and changed the sheets…only for me to catch the same thing happening again almost an hour and a half later. We stripped the bed again and gave Finn a bath that he shivered through (the teeth chattering was alarming). At this point he had no more clean sheets so we put him in our bed while I did three loads of laundry and slept on the couch in clothes in case we needed to head to the hospital. Just before 2am, it happened a third time. I went to sleep at 4am and called out sick from work. By 10am on Monday, he was a new boy, literally dancing in the doctor’s office…and I was beyond exhausted. Albert came home at 4:30pm so I could rest on the couch and by Tuesday things were back to normal. Very happy to be on the other side.
Peaches to Apples 