Tricia - loved your pics too! Come on - everyone else - time for your pics too! Oh, and Tricia - I hope the meds help out some. If it's not better in 48 hours or so, I'd definitely call the doc again because it should be helping by then. If not, I always think of these Readers' Digest stories where they always start out "I thought I had a stomach bug/flu, etc." and then it turns out to be some weird thing no one's ever heard of that "if we'd only caught right away I would have been fine". Okay, I'm weird - I'm sorry!
Keisha - yep, I'm a West Pointer. As is DH, if you didn't figure that out. Classes of 88 and 86 respectively. Oldest DS's goal is to get into the Air Force Academy.
As far as 9/11, I was home too. I was subbing that year as well, but not on that day. DH called me to tell me to start watching. Maybe a half hour later, I got a call from our church. I was teaching religious ed that year as well, and they had all these stupid planning questions for me. I was kind of watching the TV in the background and trying to figure out if they even knew what was happening yet, and if so, if they really thought this was that important. (Didn't ask, but don't think they did).
I called the school (kids were in 1st, 3rd, and 4th grade) to ask if I should get them and they said it was up to me. Since I couldn't believe anyone would go attack a suburb of Detroit next, I didn't. Went in about a half hour before the end of the day to do some stuff at the school and realized at that point, as Keisha said, that there were hardly any kids left in the classes. The older 2 were pretty aware of what was going on at the time and over the next weeks (not in school - oldest DS had heard that a plane crashed, but that was it), but youngest DS only vaguely remembers the day "they watched videos in school all day".
When I got there, I'd walked by my 3rd graders' room and saw his teacher and she asked if I wanted to take him. I said sure, but was heading to the workroom to do some laminating. When he walked in there with me, they had a small TV on in there. One of the 5th grade teachers just started screaming at my son to get out. When she realized he was with me she apologized, but I have to say that if that's how the teachers were reacting to the kids, maybe they should have just had them all go home.
Another wacky thing was that oldest DS (then 9) was on a travel soccer team for the first time. We really didn't know if soccer would be canceled due to this, so called the coach (pretty much everything else in the rest of the world was, including professional sports). He was like "yeah, why wouldn't we have practice?" I was like, "Um, maybe because of everything at the World Trade Center today?" and he said something along the lines of "Oh, well, of course if that affected you personally or something, I guess your son can miss practice". I was just like "Is there anyone who this SHOULDN'T affect personally?"
Anyways, we went to practice and pretty much all the parents stayed and just talked. It was a beautiful day that day in Michigan too (I know you always hear how nice it was in NY that day), and it was just eerie sitting there with our kids the only ones outside and no planes at all flying overhead.
Meanwhile, my brother was in DC at the time for a job interview. When I called my mom to make sure he was okay, she was like "Oh, I'm sure he's fine. He's not actually in DC, he's in Arlington." Hated to break the news to her that the Pentagon was also in Arlington! He was nearby and saw all the smoke and commotion, but of course was fine (but of course we didn't know at the time what extent the damages were!).