July 5, 2025 - Saturday

We thought we might cancel today's Marietta trip to see Dennis and Hazel because Ollie had a pretty high fever last night and went to sleep crying about how badly her throat hurt, but we decided to wait until morning because things change so quickly with kids. Well, we're glad that we did because this morning she said she felt perfectly fine. She was still a little hot, in my opinion, so Ben asked his parents if they'd rather we didn't come while people were sick. They said they didn't care, so we headed over. Ben is feeling pretty awful: feverish, terribly sore throat, headache, and has completely lost his voice. However, he did not want to cancel on his dad, which I understand. 

It was a pretty good visit. Instead of crappy cold cut sandwiches, they bought a few big subs, and it was such a nice surprise! They've never done that before. We were all very excited. The guys went up on the hill and practiced shooting targets while I visited with Hazel and the girls played with the old toys she still has at her house. Later on, the girls went for a little hike with Hazel in the heat and the rest of us played cards for a couple of hours. The time went quickly and smoothly. We ended up getting Little Caesar's for dinner, which was yummy, and also a welcome surprise. We headed out right after dinner. 

Since Ben has been feeling sick, he's snapped at me really meanly a couple of times. I've brought it up and asked him to try and not do that. I've told him he's hurting my feelings and that I wish he wouldn't take his bad moods out on me. But today I did not handle it well. We started driving home and he yelled (well, it would have been yelling if he had had a voice!) at me about something dumb in the car. I got so freaking pissed off and I was SO sick of it that I actually yelled back and told him to stop being so mean! The kids, of course, got scared and were completely silent (meanwhile, they were all getting super carsick and grabbed their vomit bags because Ben was driving like an insane maniac around the super twisty, hilly roads near his parent's). He apologized for being mean, but then spent the next 10 minutes trying to justify it and I stayed pissed off and told him to stop trying to justify acting like a jerk. He told me I needed to be more understanding when he was feeling sick and I told him I wasn't going to ever be understanding when he's yelling at me and if he wanted to be married to a doormat, then he picked the wrong person! It was a mess, and it is completely unresolved, like all of our arguments seem to be nowadays. We sat in complete silence for the next hour and 40 minutes, aside from some requests from the kids. I wish we hadn't fought in front of them, and I wish I hadn't yelled. I apologized for that, and he started to come back with some additional bullshit but then stopped himself. The thing about apologizing to Ben is that he looks at it as a newly opened door, through which he can toss a fresh assault of complaints and insults. It's hard to apologize to someone when they treat apologies that way! It makes me just never want to speak to him again. Alas, I was wrong for yelling, and I want to show the kids that apologies are important to relationships, so despite all the screwups today, I didn't want that to be one of them. He showered and listened to a teaching when he got home and behaved civilly towards me again, but dang. Things are just not good between us.