Ha, and I thought perimenopause was crummy!

We're "social distancing" here in Oregon. Today was the first day for me of working remotely. My office is encouraging everyone who can to work from home with no/limited in-person meetings, and Cook's office is reorganizing around staggered shifts and partial teleworking so they can all stay six feet away from each other all the time. (All the meeting rooms have been assigned quotas based on their size, so the smaller meeting rooms can now accommodate two people who sit pressed against the opposite walls.) I was supposed to go to a conference in Chicago next week, but it was cancelled. (And I was really looking forward to it.) Skipper's school trip to Japan in June has been cancelled. (Though our family trip to Japan is not cancelled- we're going to hope as long as possible that we can pull that off.) Skipper's baseball season and Duchess's ultimate frisbee season (long story) have been postponed. All my meetings have been cancelled or turned into video chats. THE LIBRARY SYSTEM HAS CLOSED.

All the stores are out of toilet paper, which briefly seemed very problematic when I thought this morning that we had only two rolls left in the house. Turned out we had an unopened box in the basement containing 36 rolls, so we'll make it a bit longer.

The kids are out of school as of today, through next week and the following week (which is spring break) and half the week after that (unless they extend it). All activities are cancelled. I'm not sure how that's going to go. Based on experience so far, Duchess will spend it lying in bed texting, and Skipper will read a bunch of books and periodically appear to ask questions like "What's communism?" or "What's a nuclear family?" or to startle me as she did this week when we were talking about COVID-19 and she said "Well, Mom, one death is a tragedy, and a million deaths is a statistic" and I said "ARE YOU QUOTING JOSEPH STALIN AT ME?!?!?" and she looked at me with a puzzled expression and said "Yeah!" like that's a normal person thing.

None of us know how to prepare or what to do. Skipper had a sore throat and abdominal pain this evening - do we now all stay in the house for 14 days? Are grocery stores going to run out of food as the supply chain falters? Should I have bought more canned beans today? Is it really going to snow tonight? The future, even the immediate future, feels wildly uncertain. And yet, people are still out and about, going to work and to bars like it's normal. I met a colleague at a coffee shop this morning; he was firmly in the this-is-overblown camp, and mentioned that his 75-year-old mother who has compromised lung function is really paranoid right now and makes everybody wash their hands. Sitting there, eating an almond croissant, with people socializing cheerfully all around us, I felt crazy. (And I told him his mom is right and he should wash his damn hands.)

Anyway. I bought a puzzle and the new Hilary Mantel book. We may starve to death, and/or have to wipe our butts with rags and moss, but we're not going down without reading material.

Some desultory photos

Everything's fine around here; we're just tired and fighting off various viruses. Spring break is over. Duchess loved horse camp. Skipper loved reading all the books. Neither of them are very happy to be back at school. Cook got a sinus infection and actually took a full day off work and actually didn't do any work while at home.* So he was probably almost dead. But he's recovering now.

We dug up an old jersey of Cook's. It's very trendy; Duchess might even wear it to school.

*He watched part of a biopic about George W Bush. Because even though he was taking time off, he's still a weirdo who doesn't understand that sick days are for watching things like Parks and Recreation, or superhero movies.

Hey, it's been a while, eh?

I'm home today with a limp and feverish Skipper, and feeling kind of crummy myself - perfect opportunity to blog!

Except I don't really have much to say. I'm not doing a lot of thinking lately.

I'm starting to tentatively look for another job (mine will officially be over at the end of June) while also trying to do decent work at my current job, which has brought me to tears several times over the last few weeks, once (humiliatingly) in public. This is pretty draining.

Duchess continues to be large and loud. Skipper continues to be small and mean. They both continue to refuse to take any responsibility for anything going wrong, and this continues to madden me and Cook.

Skipper is quite happy without gymnastics.

I've laid out the basic summer plans already, and Skipper is, for the first time, going to a mini (one-night) sleepaway camp. She wants to do this for the same reason she wants to do many things - to match up to Duchess (who would be delighted to spend the whole summer at sleepaway camp). She also has a friend who's going to a WEEK of sleepaway camp, and wants Skipper to come. We haven't decided on that one. Duchess is going to a week of sleepaway horse camp, and is very, very, very excited. The plan is also to have Duchess do parks and rec swim team again, which means an hour of swimming every weekday morning. If I am employed, she will be on her own all day, and will walk herself home and (presumably) lie on the couch reading for six hours at a stretch. She's pretty excited about this, too. (Skipper, predictably, is pissed that she will have to go to daycamp if I have a job, and do stupid activities with stupid other people instead of getting to lie on the couch and read for six hours. I pretty much feel this way about work, so I get it. Stupid other people.)

We're also thinking that it's probably time to buy the kid a phone. Many questions remain.

The Eating Less campaign continues, with decent success. I still feel that it is easy to see what I have to do, and set things up so I can generally do them successfully, but I certainly feel the drain of the requirement that I have to repeatedly and endlessly make the choice to not eat, and to stop eating. There's only so much I can do to set myself up to make better choices, because I can't actually set things up so I don't eat at all. Eating less, unlike many other self-control challenges, requires me to frequently do a little of the thing that I want to do a LOT, and then exert willpower in order to stop doing the thing. That's a big demand on my small reserves of self-control.

That's about it. I have to write up some job applications now...

Words for living

My bike commute to work involves a long downhill stretch that is turning out to be a kind of barometer on how confident or optimistic I'm feeling each day. On Monday I barreled down the hill at (relatively) high speed, heedless of pavement imperfections and the possibility of getting t-boned by a driver making bad decisions. This delirious positivity was the result of a weekend that made things feel pretty good.

Here's what happened this weekend:
1) I recovered from the flu! The flu is terrible, and just the pleasure even of being able to lie in bed and NOT feel like a damp bag of scrap metal was pretty tremendous.
2) The girls and I went with friends to a Renaissance Festival. It was very hot, and I was still maybe slightly delirious from fever, but I can't even describe how weird that was. We saw a magic show, a rat circus, a falconry show, a joust, and, weirdly, an air show going on above the whole time, and it was all really fun and strange and disorienting. The girls loved it. Duchess wants to buy a corset. Skipper said later that she married one of the jousting knights.
3) I read three parenting books while lying in bed feeling like a damp bag of scrap metal, and found a strategy in one of them that seemed very silly, but, when I dutifully deployed it on Skipper, WORKED.  It worked, you guys. We finally have a way to help Skipper correct her own behavior, and it works at least a little bit some of the time. Yay!
4) On Monday morning, when Skipper came out in the kitchen seeking breakfast, I said, in greeting, "Hey, Skipper, what's the word?" (this sounds ludicrous but is a greeting I fairly frequently use because I am ludicrous), and Skipper said "Awake! Happy!" and I was so happy to hear that those were her Monday morning words. (Duchess, following in her wake, said "Sleepy! Zombie!" to balance it out.)

That's the words. Happy Tuesday!

Duchess is taking this Sick thing seriously.

Duchess hasn't thrown up for nearly 30 hours, but she's still incredibly limp and tragic. In the last 40 hours, she has consumed (and kept down) maybe a cup of water, a few sips each of sports drink and ginger ale, a quarter cup of miso broth, and five saltines. She is, however, reading books today, which is a big step up from yesterday, when she was just lying around looking glassy-eyed and semi-conscious.

Sick day

Duchess is sick. She woke up in the night complaining of stomach pain, which Cook and I assumed was gas or constipation. It's pretty hard, with Duchess, knowing if she's dying or just being very dramatic. She likes to look at herself in the mirror while she moans in agony. Anyway, we weren't terribly sympathetic, and I was very grumpy and tired when she finally threw up around midnight. I made her a pallet in our room, which turned out to be super-convenient when I could just reach over without even getting out of bed and hold her hair while she barfed in a bucket on the floor every two hours for the rest of the night.

Currently she's lying on her pallet (she drank a sip of ginger ale, fetched along with saltines and sport drink from the convenience store by Cook on a pre-work trip, and she promptly barfed it right back up), listening to a random story I dredged from the internet.* Skipper is playing with the pretend kitchen, organizing fake food and chanting "Too much, too fast! Too much, too fast, too much, too fast, too much, too fast..."**

Last night I went to a mandatory meeting for the language-immersion school a few blocks from our house. We entered Skipper into the lottery for their preschool program, which she would start in September. What I learned at the meeting is that the school community is much richer than Duchess's school community, presumably because parents have to lottery their kids in, and therefore are more likely to be well-educated and/or affluent.*** They have fulltime PE and music teachers! There is a teacher AND a teaching assistant in every kindergarten classroom of 28! Parents raise over a hundred thousand dollars a year to supplement staffing and materials! As I sat there listening to the principal, I felt both covetous and resentful on behalf of Duchess's school. Why should this public school have so much more good stuff than another public school less than a mile away?



* My tablet is reading to her, you see, while I ignore her. Technology is a great parenting resource!
** I don't think I said anything along those lines to trigger the phrase, but you never know. Actually, that's kind of Skipper's feeling about the world in general, so it may be a kind of protective mantra of hers.
*** If you lottery into a slot in the preschool program, your kid is guaranteed a slot in the kindergarten the following year, so you're more likely to get into the school than if you try to lottery into kindergarten. The preschool, however, has tuition involved, so if you can't afford to pay for that, you're screwed. (There are scholarships, but it's pretty easy to be too rich to qualify for those but still not have extra cash to pay for preschool. For example, if one parent is unemployed. Ahem.) This makes it even more likely that the kids entering kindergarten are richer than your average bear.

Waltzing Machiavelli

Skipper has learned the fine art of malingering. Yesterday, Duchess stayed home from school sick.* Skipper was very jealous, and said this morning that she wanted to stay home. I said no. (It's a scheduled day off work for me, but I have lots of volunteering commitments, plus a grubby house and the prospect of a busy weekend.) She seemed very jaunty on the way to preschool, but she abruptly announced just before we got there that her stomach hurt, so I notified her teacher that Duchess had been sick, and that I was available to pick up Skipper if they thought she seemed legitimately sick. I dropped her off at 9, and they called me at 11:45 to say that Skipper was complaining of stomach-ache, and seemed lethargic - not participating in play, staring off into space. I got on a bus and retrieved her shortly thereafter from the preschool's office, where she was happily looking at books. It quickly became apparent that she is completely healthy and chipper, and on further questioning, she forthrightly admitted that she had been planning from the moment I dropped her off that she would finagle a pick-up before naptime. She even skipped lunch to add verisimilitude to her fake illness, counting on eating at home. Now she's running around the house (having refused to nap), singing nonsense songs and making an elaborate pretend-food feast to feed to me.

Sometimes, because Duchess is so large and articulate, and Skipper is so small and incoherent (not just in the clarity of her speech, but also in the content of her speech, which often seems to be made up of improvisational riffs), we think of Skipper as relatively babyish, somehow forgetting that she is a fully-formed, power-hungry person propelled by tremendous will, hampered by very little ethical drag. Underestimate her, and you'll find your afternoon plans suddenly including the pretend consumption of a lot of pretend food.



*This episode had a stressful launch - she complained of an aching stomach all morning, but we got all the way to school before she decided she needed to stay home (she was very pale, and hardly talking at all, which is a pretty dire indication of illness for Duchess, but she really, really wanted to go to school and kung fu), and then as we were walking very slowly home, with pauses for her to crouch and retch in the bushes, I called my office to tell them that I was home with a sick kid, and my boss promptly called back to tell me that was unacceptable and I had to attend a meeting that afternoon. So Cook, who has an understanding and flexible boss, had to cancel an important meeting he was supposed to run that afternoon, and come home. Duchess barfed twice and lay in bed all morning dozing or staring off into space, not talking AND not reading, which made me think she was probably going to die before dusk. But she turned the corner before noon, and was chatting and reading by the time I got home.

5 PM, kitchen floor

Hot

Today was the hottest day in Portland since the little heat wave during Skipper's infancy in 2009 that is burned into my memory. It was hot.

Cook, because he is reaching Ahab-level obsession with home improvement jobs, spent the blazingly hot afternoon  washing, scraping, painting, and repairing various parts of the exterior of the house. At one point I came out and found him wielding the clippers in a demented frenzy, trimming away branches and prickly plants at the overgrown, little-visited northwest corner of the house so that he could get to a crumbling corner of the roof before his magic (toxic) wood-preserving potion hardened up and became unusable. I backed away slowly.

Duchess is still vacationing in balmy coastal California, so she didn't get to enjoy the heat. Skipper seemed kind of sluggish and off her stride all day, and by the time she fell asleep for a second nap at 5:30 PM, we had finally cottoned on to the fact that she's sick. The poor kid even managed to fire up a fever on the hottest day in three years.

Self-medicating

I'm not much of a medication user for minor complaints like colds, fevers, indigestion, etc. I generally feel that  suppressing symptoms just takes away your cues about what you need to do to take care of yourself, and it's not worth the money, the waste of environmental resources, or the addition of foreign chemicals to your body. I'm not hard-line on this, but even when I do buy and use medication, I usually try to stick to things with only one active ingredient at a time. It's a general approach that Cook shares, so our medicine/first-aid kit before kids usually consisted of some elderly ibuprofen, bandaids, and maybe a few cough drops. We've beefed up the first aid side of things over the last few years,* but we still don't really have much in the way of over the counter medication.

Today, though, I bought the kind of cold medicine that has THREE active ingredients and claims it'll make you feel totally healthy. I felt a little frisson of danger, like maybe I was going to go home and cook up some meth.** I live a crazy life! Actually, at the moment I'm just kind of beyond caring about cues to take care of myself. I'm tired and under-exercised, yeah. That's not news to anybody, and I have stuff to do, and it's raining. Now dope me up!

*Especially recently, after Cook sliced off the very tip of his finger and we discovered the value of non-stick dressings.
** Though apparently that's not possible any more. 

My husband is broken.

Poor Cook has been trampled by the flu, which is lasting even longer in his system than it did in mine.* His February hasn't been so great - one weekend of single-parenting, followed by a weekend of lying in bed feeling terrible.** My three-day weekend wasn't the best, but at least I was vertical.


*Dutch processed it twice as fast as I did, and now feels fine. Before I had kids, I thought they were weak and fragile, you know, being the ones who die of flu. Now I know they're actually ridiculously effective at coping with viruses (and other stuff that feels terrible to adults, like falling down, or getting stabbed in the eye with a fork). Whenever the family gets an illness, Dutch breezes through it with a fraction of the pain and duration of the adults' experiences. Skipper doesn't even bother to get it.


**He does get up periodically. I've seen him every once in a while. He staggers into the kitchen looking grey, clammy, and red-eyed, apologizes for being useless, washes dishes until his knees give out, scavenges around for ibuprofen, and then creeps back to bed. It's like having a zombie housekeeper. 

We Have The Flu.

I started feeling better Friday night, about the same time Cook fell ill. On Friday, I also belatedly put together my symptoms and realized that I had the classic Flu. I can't remember the last time I had The Flu! Of course, I also immediately realized that I had done a woefully bad job of avoiding making other people sick. (For one thing, I took Dutch to school every morning, a herculean effort that left me exhausted for the rest of the day, and also provided the virus plenty more opportunities to find new hosts.) I'm sorry, everybody. I thought I just had a cold. And a fever. And aches and pains,including really achy eyeballs. I know, it was obvious, and I'm sorry.

Last week while Skipper and I were reading in bed, she read me an article* in the Atlantic about how viruses change host behavior. Apparently, The Flu makes you more social (before you crawl into bed feeling like you're going to die, that is). I may have missed that part, or maybe the impulse was quashed by the experience of my seatmate on the airplane home saying to me (among other things), all in the first two minutes of our acquaintance, "Hello sweetheart! I'm so glad you made it!" and "So what do you think of Obamacare?"


Dutch came down with The Flu today and has been holed up with My Neighbor Totoro and Little House on the Prairie** all day. I'm pretty sure Skipper is waiting until Wednesday to come down with it, in order to maximally screw up my work schedule. For now, she's very jaunty, maybe because she enjoys having the run of the house.

It hasn't been a great week, for sure. But I did get some pruning done today! AND! I got to attend a PRUNING WORKSHOP! So the weekend was salvaged. I really, really enjoy pruning things, I really do.




* Just kidding. She actually just summarized the key points. 
**Two things that could actually mash together pretty well.

I had kind of a bummer of a day yesterday. Not awful, or anything. Just kind of a bummer. My voice is still only partly recovered. I found out that my new job, which was supposed to start today, is at best delayed three weeks, at worst cancelled for good (budget cuts). I had to tell the babysitter I just hired that I can't hire her. A coworker told me about some hard, sad  things going on in her life. On my way home on the bus, I started reading a new library book and discovered it was a sad book, and had to put it away, so I was staring out the window when a sort of spray of something sprinkled over me. It turned out to be coffee grounds, sprayed off the used garbage bag a homeless guy behind me was vigorously shaking out.  My first response (after suggesting firmly that he stop doing that RIGHT NOW) was to teeter toward the verge of tears,* but then I thought about the way I was going to tell the story to Dutch when I picked her up, and I realized how ridiculous it was, and my perspective was miraculously restored. (Then I realized the coffee-ground coverage wasn't very extensive, and they at least seemed to be reasonably fresh, and not mixed with anything nastier. And given that I've ridden public transit  at least two times a week for over a decade, I should probably just be grateful that my grossest experience involved only coffee.)

And then after Halloween (which was NOT a bummer in the least, and cheered me up immensely), I downloaded the photos off the camera, including these, which erased the last vestiges of emotional grime from the day.

* Because Oh My GOD! My life is SO HARD! And NOW, COFFEE GROUNDS!!! O the HORROR! I am so SO sad! Why does EVERYTHING bad happen to ME?!

Silenced

I lost my voice. I've never really experienced this before, except a little bit toward the end of a long day of talking while sick with a cold, but today I've been unable to speak at any volume above a whisper. ALL DAY.

It's driving me crazy, but I can see as how it's also an opportunity to learn a few hard things. Here's what I've learned:
1) My parenting, especially between 6:30 and 9 AM, is heavily voice-dependent. All morning I had to physically track down the kid I wanted to order around, and whisper in her ear, and then hope she did what I asked. This didn't go very well. I actually burst into tears (I'm still feeling kind of crappy from the bad cold that caused the voice loss in the first place, and that plus frustration apparently me into Crazy-Pants Land), which alarmed Dutch so much that she finally started helping out. Lesson: Maybe I Should Try Yelling a Little Less.
2) I had a few interactions with strangers, and as soon as they heard me whispering at them, they started treating me like I was Special, and not in a good way. The thrift store cashier started speaking very loudly and clearly to me, like maybe I was deaf, or possibly extremely stupid, as well as whispering. Lesson: Try to Avoid the (Apparently) Human Tendency to Treat People Weird When They Do Something Slightly Weird.
3) I picked Dutch up from aftercare and walked home with her in the rain. She talked the whole time. I wasn't able to say anything. She loved it.  Lesson: Maybe I Should Try Listening a Little More.


It's been educational, like a little moralizing story for children, possibly involving animal characters (not Struwwelpeter, though, if the universe has any mercy). However, tomorrow I would like my voice back, please.

The Gastroenteritis That WOULD NOT GO AWAY

Skipper started barfing again this morning, almost two weeks after her first barfing episode, and ten days after her last barfing episode. We are not happy campers.

*****Squeamish people, stop reading RIGHT NOW.*****

Skipper hates barfing so much that she tries desperately not to, even up to the point of actually swallowing her vomit. While this generally means less cleanup, and I don't think it's harmful to her, it's completely appalling to witness, and I'd actually prefer the cleanup. I say "It's okay, honey, just let it out," and she screams "NOOOOOOOO!!!!!" and her whole body gets stiff with the conflict between the urge to barf and the urge not to barf, and... ew.

Anyway. Cook bought some bleach (something we've never used in this household, preferring to stick with dingy clothing and household cleaning with vinegar), but I feel like a virus that lasts two weeks and causes this much misery probably demands some bigger guns. I don't know what, though. Maybe we should leave the house for a week and have it steam-cleaned.

keeping the ball rolling

I've fallen out of the habit of posting on this blog, for lots of reasons,* and I'm going to try to post more. No, not better. Just MORE. You're welcome.

So... here is your tedious tidbit for today!

Today: Dutch barfed her breakfast right back up immediately after its intake. That was a bummer. She stayed home from school, and she even threw up again in the early afternoon, but she otherwise felt totally fine, so we think what's happening is that her poor stomach is so ravaged by the Saturday barf-a-thon that it's still working on repopulating its flora and fauna in order to handle normal food. And I really, really hope she doesn't barf any more.

Also today: I picked up my PTA-fundraiser tomato seedlings from the school (yes, even though Dutch wasn't in attendance), and transplanted three of them, in spite of my serious skepticism that they'll survive. Now I have more things to worry about.

That's the news. We're all settled back into normal life, except Barf Girl, who really enjoyed her one day back at school yesterday, and yearns to get back to it. Keep your fingers crossed for warm nights here, and lots of sunshine! And no barfing.

*I am so tired. SO TIRED. That's a big one. And I don't seem to have anything to say that's interesting even to me.

I'm back.

This week has been hectic. Skipper got a stomach flu and barfed (and had diarrhea) erratically for a few days, and then we went to Disneyland. (Cook stayed here so he could work!) We spent two days there with another family, and then we went to my dad's house in L.A. to spend a day and a half there.

So, Disneyland. Disneyland was fun. People really want to be there, and everybody wants to be happy, and so they kind of just are. My dad also pointed out that he and Dutch have a shared childhood experience now, because he went to Disneyland when HE was a kid, and that's pretty cool. I assume Disneyland's awareness of this is why they keep old rides that now seem really hokey. Anyway, it really is just... fun.

I made a major tactical error, and took the kids on Mr Toad's Wild Ride, practically first thing. Of course, Skipper hated it,* and that was pretty much that for her willingness to even try rides. This is a typical sample of what it was like on rides that she DID go on.

(Also, you may have noticed that at the very end of that clip, Dutch is saying "Mom, I'm scared." and I'm ignoring her because I'm trying to make Skipper stop wailing.) I don't really have much in the way of decent movies because of this problem. And I didn't bring the camera because I was trying to pack light. So you'll just have to imagine the experience - mostly Dutch being blissful, and Skipper being confused,** sometimes pissed off, and occasionally completely terrified.

This is the only thing at Disneyland that Skipper really liked. (Note that Dutch was very bored by it.)

Anyway, it went well. Dutch had a wonderful time, I had a pretty good time, and Skipper was confused. Then we went to my dad's house. And then Dutch started throwing up. And she didn't stop. She threw up FIFTEEN times in nineteen hours.*** The poor kid. However, she didn't die of dehydration or sheer misery, finally stopped throwing up last night, and rallied enough to get to the beach this morning before our early-afternoon flight. (Skipper, it turns out, hates dry sand but LOVES the waves, and she briefly reversed her position on wanting to go home.)

And now we're home. Dutch was really great most of the time, and complained very little about anything. (She got extensively lectured in advance about how this was a Big Treat, and she'd better not goddamned whine about anything, and also about how I would need her help because Cook wasn't there.) When we first got to California, while I was wrangling Skipper and figuring out how to get from airport to hotel, she fetched all our baggage off the carousel, without being asked, all by herself. She was helpful and not obnoxious nearly the whole time, and I was proud of her. (Yes, I told her so.)

And now we're HOME! We are all very happy to have Cook back, and to be home, and I'm also happy that nobody in the household is barfing.

*I don't know why anybody thinks that a ride that takes place in the dark, with loud noises and flashing lights, is going to be fun for anyone. As soon as it started, I remembered that I had hated that ride as a kid.

** The first night we spent in the hotel, it took forever to get Skipper to sleep. She kept asking questions about where we were, where Daddy was, did we really have to get on a plane to get back home, etc., and finally she said "dere no animals in here?" and I realized that she really needed me to tell her that this was a safe place to sleep, a place where tigers were not going to eat her, where she could relax her vigilance. Vacations are hard when you're two.

*** We are AWESOME house guests. Doesn't this make you want to invite us over?

Today

Second sunny day IN A ROW!!! Also, dying Easter eggs in our sunny backyard, the extremely-low-tech way. Also, Skipper, completely whiny and floppy due to some sort of barfing bug* which seems to be done now.** Also, Dutch, who is overcome with excitement about the Easter Bunny.

*This was Skipper's first barf ever, and she was understandably appalled and terrified. After the first time, I asked her if she felt like she was going to throw up again, and she said "NO! Me not WANT do dat again!" as if her refusal was going to stop the virus in its tracks.

** for HER, at least. I dread the prospect of all of us getting sick. I took Dutch to get some supplies this morning (pretzels and gingerale), just in case we all get felled at once again, because I do NOT want to repeat the miserable zombie episode of a few months ago.

This is Dutch in one of her new outfits, feeling very mature and proud of herself.

This is Cook and Skipper (and Dutch, buried deep in the bed on the other side of Cook), reading while feeling awful on Friday afternoon.

This is the view in our driveway this evening.

Family is down!

Send help! No, actually, don't. We're fine. But we've all got some kind of nasty cold/fever virus, and what with Skipper's DTAP vaccination today, Cook's gum surgery yesterday, and a generalized sleep deficit, we're all pretty under the weather.*

After her appointment today, I can tell you officially that Skipper hates doctors. (She's been to a dentist, optometrist, and pediatrician in the last month, and all of the visits have gone quite poorly.** I can also officially tell you that she's officially smaller than average. She weighs half a pound more at 24 months than Dutch did at 18 months. She's healthy and thriving, though, and only screamed for seven-eighths of the appointment, which I considered a tremendous success. All afternoon she was going up to strangers and saying, apropos of nothing, "Me went doctor! Me got SHOT!!!"

*Though I feel pretty under the weather ALL THE TIME, what with the weather being evil. EVIL! Today I left the house at 8:20 AM, with Skipper in the Ergo. I schlepped the kids to school (.6 miles), dropped Dutch off and proceeded with Skipper to the doctor's office (2 minutes walking, 5 minutes on bus, 3 minutes walking). After her appointment, we took one bus, waited 20 minutes for the next, took that bus, went to the library, walked (.4 miles) to the grocery store, shopped, and then walked (.8 miles) home. We got home at 12:30. I walked only maybe two miles total, but I had Skipper lashed to me (plus groceries and library books) and it rained THE WHOLE &#*@_%^* TIME!!!!!!! I felt pretty sorry for myself. I (like many other Portlanders) am beginning to feel pretty wild-eyed and desperate about the endless rain.

**Behaviorally, not medically, I mean. Medically, we're good, though the eye doctor and the dentist both opined that it looks like she's going the same direction as her sister, so we will be buying braces and glasses for BOTH girls.