Ticked off

This morning Rachel woke up at 6:00 again to do her morning constitutional—throwing up (which is apparently now her morning constitutional). I'll be so happy when this cough goes away.

She crawled into bed with me when she was finished and started begging me to allow her to stay home from school.

"Please, please, please let me stay home from school. I'm still sick. I need to rest. I won't bother you or anything. I won't fight with Miriam. I won't ask to do anything. I'll just rest all day in my bed."

Considering it wasn't even time to get ready for school yet and she was already pestering me, she was off to a bad start to keeping her end of the bargin.

"You're fine," I assured her. "You don't have a fever or runny nose or anything. You've been sick for nearly two weeks. Your cough is only bad in the mornings and as soon as it goes away you want to be up and doing things. You're going to school."

She stayed home on Wednesday and let's just say that things weren't entirely calm at home.

I heard Benjamin stirring, so I went out to get him from his bed so that he could nurse. Instead of bringing him back into my bed I sat on the couch to nurse him (since my spot on the bed was taken up by Rachel). He started greedily gulping down his milk and lazily closed his eyes to drift back to sleep when we were interrupted by Rachel.

She came and plopped down on the couch beside me.

"Please, please, please! I won't bother you, I promise!"

"But you are bothering me. It's not even seven o'clock yet and here you are, pestering me and waking up your brother. If you were really sick then you would go back to bed."

"I'm not that sick!"

"Then you're going to school."

Backyardigans

 Yesterday Rachel didn't go to school because she threw up in the morning, due to coughing. I tried to convince her to go to school, told her she wasn't really sick, but she held her ground. You're not supposed to go to school on the day you throw up, she informed me. She needed to stay home and rest.

So I let her.

She is sick, but just with a cold. Her awesome esophagus is the only reason she throws up all the time; it has little to do with her stomach at all.

This morning we overslept a bit but would have had her ready for school on time, had she not thrown up twice due to coughing. She had been so bored yesterday, though, that she insisted that she wanted to go to school in spite of having vomited twice. Her cough is always the worst in the morning, anyway, so I figured she'd already had the worst of it for the day.

We gave her cough medicine and then I drove her to school, leaving Andrew at home with a just-awake Miriam and a still-sleeping Benjamin. I stayed and volunteered in Rachel's classroom for the morning and she did fine so I let her stay for the afternoon.

Technically, I could have gone to the "Volunteer Tea" that afternoon, but I had to get home to my babies. And I had no desire to go since I know no one else who volunteers at the school so it would have been a real stretch for my introverted spirit to put itself out there and meet new people. I might have made myself go had we been staying at Rachel's school next year but since she's switching schools anyway I had no desire to put myself out there and meet new people.

So I came home and gardened and Andrew cut the extension cord in half when he was trimming the hedges (but he's fine (and it seems to be something that happens a lot)) and he fixed that. He was so proud of himself when he finished. I was pretty impressed, myself.

"I just did my first electric work!" he said proudly once he'd finished putting the cord together.

We used a velcro strap to hold the cord out of the way of the blades while he finished trimming the hedges and it worked out a lot better.

 When Rachel came home from school the girls practiced riding their bikes.

Benjamin in the bath

Last night Benjamin had a bit of a reflux problem shortly after dinner and right before my ride to the primary presidency meeting was due to pick me up. Since he'd just eaten an entire bowl of oatmeal and applesauce he needed a little something more than the regular wipe-down so I threw him in the bathtub.

He had such a fun time exploring that I got to wondering when the last time was that I'd actually given him a bath and...I couldn't remember. Usually he just showers with either Andrew or me. He had so much fun in the bathtub, though, that I might start giving him baths more often.

One man's trash

My friend Kim is moving in just a couple of weeks. We've been borrowing her baby bouncer (for bigger babies) for several months and she's been borrowing our baby bouncer (for littler babies). We're going to have to trade back sometime next week (technically I just have to get hers to her; she's keeping mine until the day they fly out). I'm kind of sad about this because it's been so, so useful!

Today Benjamin joined me outside to do some work in the garden. He wasn't supposed to. He was supposed to be napping but he got woken up (by Miriam who decided to play drums using a metal mixing bowl and butter knives) so I hung some towels up to dry to make a little shade tent for him and he bounced in his bouncer while I worked.

That Benja-boy

T minus one week until my sweet baby boy will celebrate his first birthday.

He has a cold right now (again) so his face is a constantly dripping waterfall of snot/drool and we're getting our best block of sleep after we should be awake for the day. It's been a rough couple of days.

But Andrew's almost over his cold and I think Rachel might be getting over it as well (Miriam and I have so far artfully avoided being contaminated with germs (knock on wood)) so chances are Benjamin will be on the mend soon. And then maybe we'll sleep again.

Oddly enough, Benjamin's odd sleep-cycle hasn't put a damper on his ability to make mischief as it has on my ability to curb it. While I'm walking around like a zombie (in spite of the extra help Andrew's been (working from home so that Benjamin and I can sleep until noon after staying awake until sunrise)) Benjamin's toddling around getting into stuff.

Getting into stuff is Benjamin's new favourite pastime. That's how I know his first birthday is coming up.

While I was busy making dinner, Benjamin decided he was ready for a snack:

Bennett Place

Last night we had a family movie night and watched Wreck-it Ralph while eating homemade pizza. Then the girls begged to sleep on the top bunk together because it wasn't a school night, so I let them—on the condition that we not hear any fighting. Surprisingly, they pulled it off.

So that's just what we'll do

This whole garden thing is kind of taking me by surprise. It started off as an experiment to see if we could get anything to grow. I've never been in charge of a garden and I was nervous because I have a history of killing off houseplants. We decided we'd start small—with one 4x4 garden box—and see how things would go this year.

Not to count our chickens before they hatch or anything, but our garden seems to be flourishing.

Here it is last week:



And here it is today:

Wrightsville Beach

When people ask me where I'm from I can never give them a straight answer because there isn't one.

Answering questions such as "Where did you move from?" or "Where were you born?" are easy to answer because there's only one possible answer. But "Where are you from?" is a difficult question with a complicated answer so when I'm asked this I take a deep breath while I think about how much of my life history I should share. I don't even have the privilege of that two word answer, "Army Brat," because I wasn't one, but I did do my share of moving around. I also have the added complication of being a dual citizen. Where do I belong? Here and there and nowhere at all.

Part of me feels like I belong at the coast, probably due to the time I spent living on the coast (briefly (but not in my memory...much) in California, several years in British Columbia, and a couple years in Egypt (those were Seas, technically, not the ocean but that still counts as coast)).

Going to the beach is a homecoming of sorts.

That's why I was so excited to move to a coastal state. But we've lived here for nine months already and I haven't seen even a hint of the ocean (except for that one time we went to South Carolina) so I've been whining about it to Andrew (and we planned and aborted a few trips) and finally, finally we made it out to the beach yesterday.

We left straight from the ballet studio and drove the 2.5 hours, past Wilmington (because, we were informed "there are no beaches at Wilmington"), all the way to Wrightsville Beach (which is in the town of Wrightsville, which is in the Wilmington Metropolitan Statistical Area (so is technically part of Wilmington ...ish)).

Parking was a bear, but we finally found a place to park after driving in a loop several times. All the parking is metered ($2 per hour—thank goodness you can pay by phone because we did not have nearly enough quarters on hand!) and there were metermaids-enforcers just strolling up and down the street, handing out tickets willy-nilly (don't they have anything better to do?).

Stumbling onto the beach was like stumbling into paradise. We were stumbling because we were dragging along three small children and a cooler (and various other packages) and it was paradise because it was the beach.

The griddle, too.

The scene: A wife stands at the kitchen sink, barefoot (but not pregnant) with three young children swarming around her (who would have been pulling on her apron strings, I'm sure, had she been wearing an apron (but she's not)) while she attempts to wash dishes.

Enter Husband.

Husband: Hey, there's a griddle over here, since you're doing hand-dishes...oh...uh... I mean...uh...I wasn't... Oh, no. I just...uh... I. Appreciate. You. So. Much.

******

He certainly backpedaled quickly, didn't he?

In truth, it was the most hilarious thing he's done recently. We both busted up laughing about, right there at the kitchen sink—because Andrew is the most undemanding person in the world and didn't mean to come across quite so...chauvinistic. We've been joking about it ever since. 

"Wife, clean my frying pan!" was tossed out, followed up by, "Wife no clean frying pan! Wife take nap!" (Thank you, Peter Pan (the girls watched it on Sunday as part of their "Post Peter Pan Party" so it was fresh in our minds)).

We also have been tacking it onto the end of pretty much anything we ask each other to do, for example:

"Could you get me a glass of water, please?"

"Sure; should I wash the griddle, too?"

It's one of those moments that will live on in infamy...at least in our home.

But the strangest of all were the people who lived in...

...our house. Probably. The strangest of all were the people who lived in...

I was reading to the girls tonight, each tucked up into a ball and cuddled into either side of me, just as they were meant to be, while the Benjaboy listened in, practicing his standing while slapping my legs with his chubby baby fingers.

"These houses were quite small," I read, "the biggest of them reaching only as high as Dorothy's waist. There were also pretty little barns, with china fences around them. Many cows and sheep and horses and pigs and chickens, all made of china, were standing about in groups.

"But the strangest of all were the people who lived in..." I paused to turn the page—since our story was interrupted by a full-colour illustration on the next page—and found, to everyone's dismay, a new chapter heading.

Huh.

I quickly skimmed through that page and then flipped to the next.

"This forest is perfectly delightful," declared the Lion, looking around him with joy. "Never have I seen a more beautiful place." Page turn. for us to go any other way except due South."

Oh, no.

We skipped from page 182 to 190 and back to 184. Fortunately 190 was repeated, but in its proper location, eight pages down the road, but page 183 was no where to be found. With bedtime looming over our heads I made the split second decision to truncate an entire page of a childhood classic.

Miriam was already so distracted by the illustration because it was of Dorothy melting the Wicked Witch of the West (which happened over the course of pages 122–123) and she wanted to know why that picture was there. Was the witch back? That would be rather troublesome because Dorothy melted her (and she didn't say "Oh, what a world!" but instead "Look out—here I go!" (this book is nothing like the movie (silver slippers? Our iconic ruby slippers were invented to show off colour television) and both Rachel and Miriam have been a little conflicted about that).

"But the strangest of all were the people who lived in this place," I told the girls after we quelled Miriam's fears about Witches regenerating after being melted by buckets of water. "We need to head South."

We finished reading the chapter and put the kids to bed. And then I hopped online and headed over to Project Gutenberg to find out what happened on page 183. I threw it into InDesign and did a little guesswork on fonts and things but Andrew caught me fudging through the process and insisted that if we were going to create an addendum at all we'd be doing it right, crop marks and all.

So, in case you were wondering...