Why does life fall apart when my husband leaves?

It's always when the husband is out of town that life decides to test what you can handle. At least that's how things work in my experience. This week I've spent a lot of time asking the Holy Spirit to give me strength for the day. We've battled a stomach bug that circulated from Hickory, to me, to Doyle, and on to Ephraim. I think Canon is the only one who hasn't had the plague, but he could have just not told me about it because Canon always has some sort of digestive issue happening pretty much. At the same time we discovered poison ivy growing in the backyard by way of Ephraim breaking out in a nasty, blistery rash. I didn't even recognize it at first because when he first showed it to me it was just a few red bumps that looked like mosquito bites, which all the kids have. However, when I went to put some Benadryl cream on it, it was starting to sprout small blisters and I knew it must be something else. Despite living in the country and taking multiple walks through the woods with my dad with him educating my older brother and me on how to recognize poison ivy, I had never had the rash myself and had never really learned how to distinguish it from other plants. I sure know it now though.

the culprit

in front of his ear and his index finger

This was just what I originally saw that made me think, "Um, this is NOT a regular mosquito bite..." but I still wasn't quite sure what to think at this point. These got much more red and the blisters much bigger and I noticed the rash in more and more places over the next few days. Poor kiddo. However, for the last couple day I've been having him take Benadryl and have been religiously putting clear Caladryl on it and it seems to be getting better. Today I picked up some spray specifically made to kill poison ivy plants. I'm just waiting for the wind to die down (hahaha. Not sure if that will ever happen here in Oklahoma.) so that I can spray the heck out of the thing and kill it.

I've also had to battle with a clogged sink, which resulted in me attempting to fix it myself and thus having a pipe come apart under the sink and flood the area with hot soapy water. Luckily, the person who owns the house we rent has a son who is a plumber, so he came over and rebuilt the plumbing under the sink since it was what he described as "built to fail." Even I, who knows nothing about plumbing, could tell that the old plumbing was basically being held together with hopes and dreams, so I'm pretty stoked that it's fixed now.

Do you have a spouse that travels?? Does it ever seem like things seem to fall apart when the leave? Or is that just me?