Sam recently reached the 30-night mark for sleeping in her own bed.

It was rough going some nights, especially when she was sitting on her bed, her body all tense, sobbing that she just wanted someone to snuggle her and love her.

I held my ground. Several nights, my husband stepped in and took over settling her down. I'm not sure how he did it -- although I know it involved some taking of deep breaths -- but there she'd be in the morning, her hair mussed and her face a little blotchy but in her own bed nonetheless.

This means Sam earned the grand prize she'd been working toward: A giant wooden dollhouse from Target.

A few weeks ago, my husband started working 12-hour overnight shifts -- 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. -- seven days a week at TMI. The job lasts only until Dec. 26, thank goodness, but we pretty much aren't going to see him until then.

This means I've had to drastically rearrange my work schedule, which is usually 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday-Thursday and 3 p.m. to 1 a.m. Sundays.

First, ain't nobody gonna babysit my kids until 2 a.m. Monday morning.

Second, ain't no way I'm gonna try to leave my kids with the sitter -- even if I could -- until 7:45 or 8 p.m. during the week.

So this means our lives and routines have been drastically altered.

And this, my friends, is something Samantha does not like.

Noah has found the sky.

Last night, on our way home, I heard Noah in the backseat saying, "Whoa! Mommy, ky! ky!" I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw he was pointing out the window, up toward the sky.

"It IS beautiful!" I said, looking at the horizon. The sun was beginning to set behind the mountain, and it cast a pink-and-purple tinge across the sky. The fluffy clouds, lilac and cotton candy dotted with white, were almost glowing. "Look at those beautiful clouds!"

"Whoa!" he said again. "Mom, whoa! Ky!"

Even Sam chimed in on the momentous occasion. "Mom, he's talking about the sky! Good job, buddy!"

This morning, as we were headed to the sitter's, he pointed it out again: "Mom, ky! Bwoo ky."

He was right: It was a baby-blue sky, with stringy white clouds wafting across it.

Not even 2 yet, and my son's already an aesthete. I love it.

We stood in line for more than an hour, with Noah alternately hollering in my arms and running away as fast as his little legs could carry him.

Sam wandered, playing with the belt from my jean jacket and trying to make friends with the unsociable kids in front of and behind us.

It was hot, it was cramped and it was hugely unfair that other people came and went within 10 minutes because their last names didn't start with any letter between F and L.

But in the end, Sam was vaccinated against swine flu.

Well, halfway vaccinated. She has to get a second shot in a month. At the same place. Probably with the same divisions of last names, meaning I'll be in line for a long time again because I chose to marry a Gulli.

I've gotta say, though, once we were inside, it all went smoothly. And all the folks who were involved were wonderfully patient and calm -- an amazing feat considering they were all volunteers.

Anyway, we're part of the way to safety. I'm celebrating it as a small victory.

One day last week, as I was cleaning all the rooms upstairs and returning furniture moved during our home-wreckage project to their proper places, little Mr. Noah was wandering around helping me.

Except by "helping" I mean that he was taking things I was returning into their rightful places and putting them back to where they didn't belong.

At one point, he came barreling into the bathroom, yelling "Mom Mom!" and carrying an open box of baking soda.

Noah helped me with my work ensemble today.

I've got smushed Pop Tart on my left shoulder and the inside crook of my right elbow. I've also got a faint air of milk and brown-sugar Pop Tart, too -- hmmmm, wonder if I could bottle this smell and sell it as Eau de Mommy?

I'll admit that, even in one of my recent posts, I've been a little snarky about swine flu.

I mean, it's a flu. People get the flu all the time. My household even had a collective bout of flu last month.

But the news today that a Littlestown kindergartner died because of complications from swine flu scared the bejesus out of me.

My Mr. Noah's vocabulary has totally taken off.

He's got quite the repertoire now. Among them:

*Warning: This post is not exactly about being a parent. I mean, the kids' comfort factors in here, but it's not the main purpose of the post.*

Thanks to my incredibly bad math skills, I found out that I had a bunch of vacation days left over that I have to use by Nov. 5.

Whoopie! I thought. Let's get cracking on painting over that heinous blue-and-pink-diamond-esque-patterned wallpaper on my bedroom wall and ripping up that other-shades-of-blue-and-pink-randomly-patterned rug off my bedroom floor.

Except it's never that easy, is it?

Five days and five trips to Home Depot and Lowe's later, we've got an exposed 114-year-old wood floor that might not be able to be refurbished; painted plaster walls that look like we used a faux finish when, in fact, it's just barely hiding all the crazy crap the previous people in our house did to them; and further proof that the entire electrical system in our house needs to be rerun before the place burns down.

Yippee. Five days off.

I was almost ready to come back to work today.

The other three people in my house have the flu. And I think the cat has a urinary-tract infection.

So much for my mental anguish over whether to get the seasonal flu and H1N1 vaccines, huh?

No school for Sam today. She told me seven kids were absent (or, as she spells it, "absit") from her class one day last week.

This morning, she wanted to know why I kept her home. I said, "Because your fever is almost 102 degrees when you don't take medicine."

She said, "So I don't have to go back until FRIday??"

Not sure how she got that out of what I said, but heck, at this point it could be true.

Anybody else dealing with flu already in your house? Any tips for keeping the kids -- and, let's face the truth here, husbands -- comfortable?