This has been

One of the most trying weekends of my life.

(And I have to get this complaining over with, because someone gave me one of those no-complaining bracelets, and I'm starting tomorrow.)

(Honest.)

It really kinda started on Thursday. When Jason asked me to pick AM up from school because he was at the bank. And, since he is in charge of four different checking accounts, I checked to see which one he was having problems with.

Turns out it was ours.

Turns out that the bank had merged with another one last month, and none of the things that we rely on to keep us informed - email alerts if the account balance drops below a certain amount, and a quickly-updated website - were not working.

Turns out, we had about $500 in overdraft charges.

That's five hundred dollars.

And we only found out because Jason was trying to buy a website template, and his credit card was denied. Apparently the company had detected some fraudulent activity and shut down the account. So, he checked our checking account to see if he had enough to buy the template (he'll recoup the cost from the folks he's building the site for) and, um, no.

He went to the bank, and they forgave almost all of the charges. (By the way, know when we got the notice about the checks that started bouncing on Monday? Yesterday!)

We've been running a bit lean this weekend, to say the least.

And did I mention that the cough that Anna Marie had developed earlier in the week has been progressively getting worse? And that we've changed medications about, oh, three times in a week, and nothing is helping?

And she woke up about 3 a.m. Saturday morning, and no matter what I did, we couldn't calm it down. It took over an hour, and a cup of hot chocolate, to get her back to sleep. She slept propped up on the couch, and I slept in the chair next to her, until a bird woke me up about 6 a.m. and I got back into my bed. I slept another hour, and she slept about an hour past that.

We got her through the Nutcracker. I know, I sound like a bad mom, but she wasn't running a fever, and she'd have been devistated if she'd stayed home. And she didn't cough at all while she was on stage being the cutest mouse you've ever seen.

(My BFF Marcia and her fiance Luke came, and he decided that someone needed to invest in some pest control because there were so many mice running around.)

Jason and Mom left the ballet early to get started on the catering job. I took AM home, and we ate chicken noodle soup and watched High School Musical 2. She fell asleep watching The Wizard of Oz, after I (quite possibly) gave her a bit too much medicine.

She was up three times last night. I thought she was an infant again.

I kept her home from church today. I was going to take her to a minor medical clinic, but it didn't open until 9 a.m. By that time, she wasn't coughing! So, we decided to stay in and have a rest day.

I'm still in my PJs.

She's done pretty well today, but tonight it's kicked back up again. We're trying a new medicine, Delsym, but it isn't helping much. About the only thing that does help is a cough drop, and getting her to keep the thing in her mouth is fighting a losing battle.

If she has another night of coughing, I'm having Jason take her to the doctor in the morning. I know she won't like missing school, and I don't know what the doctor can do for her, but I'm at my wit's end.

I realize that, in the grand scheme of things, a cough you can't fix in your kid isn't the worst thing in the world. But, if it's your kid, it doesn't really matter if it's a cough or something worse - you still want to fix it.

And I'm exhausted, because I've been taking care of her by myself for the past two days. Jason didn't get home until late last night, and today he went to church and then praise team practice, and then to the auction kitchen to clean the pans they'd used last night.

And I promise - I'll be doing less complaining starting tomorrow!