Second Day of Summer Vacation

All right, if you haven't already my previous post ("The First Day of Summer Vacation") you really need to do that before you read this one.

So, after getting home from the ER after 11:00, you would think I would have been smart enough to go right to bed, but instead I messed around on the internet and blogged until 1:00 in the morning. At some point before it was light out Luke was standing at my bedside asking where Teo was. In my fog, I said, "He's in his bed, isn't he? What time is it?" Luke went over to the clock and said "4:58." AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH! Go back to bed! It's the middle of the night! I don't know what that was all about, but he did go back to bed and slept until the more reasonable hour of 8:30.

Teo apparently crawled to the top of the stairs upon waking and then came down them one at a time on his bottom. His foot doesn't appear to feel any better, and he still won't put any weight on it, which made coming up with fun activities for the day somewhat of a challenge. Day two, and already we have a major handicap.

So after a slow morning (in which I was grateful for having frozen half a batch of yesterday's pancakes) I decided to run two quick errands (bank and post office) and then take the kids to the local playground for a little fun despite the cloudy skies. I figured I could always plunk Teo down in the sandbox, where he spent an hour last time we were there. When we got there, though, he didn't want to do anything except sit in my lap. Luke looked around at the playground equipment as if he was thinking "What is this crap?" They were so not interested. Then it began to rain.

I called my friend C, who was going to meet us at the playground, and redirected her to the pet store a few blocks away where we sometimes go to play with puppies. It's a rare treat to play with a puppy and a fun, if brief, rainy day amusement. I carried Teo in and we admired the many puppies, but were also thrilled to see that they had a kennel full of kittens this time, too. They don't often have kittens, but it's always fun when they do because they let you go in the kennel and play with them. So we went in and the three little black-and-white cuties played and cuddled for about five minutes, when Teo started to whine and said there was something in his eye. I looked over and he was rubbing it and I knew that he had touched kittens and now he was rubbing his eye and that wasn't good. I grabbed him and hightailed it out of there to look for the handwash they always keep by the play pens. I washed his hands, but he kept trying to rub at his eye again and it was getting red. Yikes! I grabbed his hand and headed him to the bathroom, but he couldn't walk (I'd forgotten!) so we didn't get very far. I carried him into the bathroom and washed his face with soap and water, and then headed out to find Luke and C. Teo's eyes were surrounded at this point with a variety of small and medium-sized white hives and they were puffing up alarmingly fast. I put him in his car seat and tore home to give him Benadryl. Now he couldn't walk, and he looked like Will Smith after he eats the shell fish in the movie Hitch. Seriously, he looked BAD.



At least this series of events had me convinced that it had been a mistake to ever venture out of the house. I made Luke lunch and arranged for him to be picked up for the play date I had set up for him earlier (thank God). Teo went immediately to sleep and slept for the whole afternoon in a Benadryl coma. He finally got up shortly before Luke and Tina both arrived, and I ran upstairs to find him scootching on one knee and one foot and smiling up at me, his face disfigured still, looking like an film extra for a movie about poverty in Calcutta. Why had the Benadryl and the nap not returned my handsome boy to me? I still don't understand it. When Tina arrived she insisted we make him submit to eye drops, which he loathes, and even Luke seemed very concerned. My God, I thought, thank goodness this didn't happen before we brought him to the ER. They would have called DCF.

In my defense, I must say that we've been to the puppy center many times before, AND we took care of my neighbors two cats for a WEEK this winter, visiting them a couple of times a day to play with them so they woudn't go stir crazy. He has spent entire days at the homes of our many friends who have cats. The kid has been around cats before. Well, never again.

Anyway, poor Teo hadn't even eaten lunch, and meanwhile I'd fed Luke lunch and our friends had fed him dinner, so we whipped up some veggie burritos for us and I fed Teo everything in the house that he would consider eating, which turned out to be grapes, more grapes, a homemade banana nut muffin, and some grapes dunked in apple sauce. Then we all watched Enchanted, which had come from Blockbuster and I had told Luke we could watch together. At this point, I guess the 8:00 bedtime is not gonna be happening in the summer of '08.

Around dinner time I got a voicemail from my Aunt Jeanne about coming up to NH for the week of the 4th. We were going to try to conserve gas by all going up in one car on Thursday night (T has to work the 3rd), but after yesterday and today, I'm thinking "How early can I possibly get up there?" Not that there aren't couches to jump off of or cats in NH, but right now camp seems like the sanest place we could be. Memere had six kids. They LIVED down there the whole summer, even though their house was only five minutes away. I'm starting to really understand that...

First Day of Summer Vacation, 2008

Today was the first day of summer vacation, and I'm not sure how much more I can take.

Blessedly, the day only started a little before 9:00 a.m. The boys screw around so much in their bedroom at night that they stay up pretty late no matter how many times I go up there and lay down the law. But at least they sleep in, and with no school today, I didn't have to wake them.

We started the day with homemade blueberry pancakes (the best recipe), which I made while Luke brainstormed a list of all the fun things we can do together this summer. He was very serious about this and even flipped through the pages of the latest Family Fun magazine for ideas.

Then he chose four of the items on our list to do today: make an obstacle course in the driveway, have a stuffed animal battle, play Wii, and make stuffed lizards (using a pattern from the book Mama gave me for mother's day). I suggested that they battle it up with their animals while I hit the shower so I'd be decent for the driveway.

After my shower, and a quick tour of the house across the street, which is being refinished as it is up for sale, I learned that Luke had only the slightest grasp on what an obstacle course is when he took me through his. So I designed one that involved a scooter, a wagon, a watering can, the hose, my garden, and a lot of chalk. It was pretty cool, but we all lost interest fast. I started weeding the bed of day lilies that runs the length of the driveway, and Luke decided we should add the kiddie pool in the back yard to our list of fun things to do. So I filled the pool, and Luke showed up with two bathing suits and our bag of beach toys. After I dutifully applied sunscreen, the boys splashed around for a bit while I weeded on (that is a really LOOOOOONG bed). Luke was very ready by this point to make lizards and complaining about my weeding, so I stopped about halfway down the bed (the ability to do so, by the way, represents radical personal growth that is a direct result of many years and thousands of dollars worth of psychotherapy...thank you very much). We policed up the obstacle course detritus and beach toys, and went inside for lunch.

After more cooking and washing of dishes (these creatures seem to need nourishment every three hours or so; it's endless), and discovering of clothes that had apparently been peed in before Teo took them off to put on his bathing suit, the boys each picked out fabric for their lizards, and we traced the pattern and started cutting. Mostly I did the work and the boys watched because the things are about two inches high and demand fine motor skills that challenged even me. Eventually, as I labored as if in a sweatshop, Luke repeatedly asked "Why do you always do Teo's first?" and "Are you finished with mine yet?", and the boys careened around the sewing room in their wheeled desk chairs from Ikea. Eventually they moved into the living room, where I heard Teo exclaim, "No, I don't want to do that any more!" to Luke right before he started bawling. I ran in to investigate, where Luke claimed that Teo had been jumping off the couch and Luke accidentally tripped him. Teo was very upset and his foot really seemed to be hurting him. He wouldn't put any weight on it.

Now it was time (of course) to have a snack, get dressed, and get our butts over to Luke's Tae Kwon Do promotion test. I carried Teo to the kitchen and served up snacks to them both, then ran upstairs to get Teo's third outfit of the day and try to get him dressed and get him to use the potty all without touching his right foot to the ground. This involved physical feats that I'm surprised didn't result in any new injuries to one or the other of us. Somehow we all ended up in the car and at the Dojo with ten minutes to spare before the test began. Of course, I had to hold Teo the whole time and he was starting to feel pretty heavy.



Luckily, reinforcements arrived when Teen met us there for the test. She and Ting clucked over Teo's now swollen foot. Then we tried to focus on getting some good video and pics of Luke's promotion test. He did a good job, even broke the board with the first kick! And I was proud because I got a great picture of it. After the test Wenlei looked at Teo's foot and she really thought we should get an X-ray. Yikes. We had promised Luke we'd take him out to dinner; but we decided we should still eat, even if we did have to go to the ER. So then it was out to our local diner/ice-cream restaurant, where I gave the boys a present I had discovered hiding in my craft closet when I was getting fabric for the lizards (must have bought it at Christmas time and then lost track of it): a set of activity cards made by Nickelodeon with over 50 cool games and other boredom-busters on them. I think they may come in handy in the coming weeks! We promptly put them to use playing a version of the old game we used to call "Quaker meeting" where someone who is "it" is asked questions by all the other players and he/she has to answer "SpongeBob SquarePants" to every question. If the one who is "it" smiles or laughs, he is out. We played that for about a million rounds and it actually was pretty fun to figure out what question would put an image in someone's head that would make him crack up. Some of my favorites: "What should we use to clean up Teo? (who had ice cream all over his face), and "Who do you call first when you're in trouble?"

After dinner we swung by the house to clean up the kids from the ice cream and put them in their pajamas. Then we headed to the ER. It was 9:00 by this time. Double Yikes. Luckily, they didn't keep us waiting at all, but we were still there for two hours getting the X-rays. The boys had a blast, riding through the hallways to radiology on Teo's bed, getting Mickey Mouse dolls from the radiologist, and reading funny books. By 11:00 they came in with our diagnosis: limp. I was reminded how crazy it makes you when you finally decide you really should go to the ER that you actually want there to be something wrong so that you didn't go to the ER for no reason. Is it terrible that a part of me was actually disappointed my kid didn't break a bone? A small part of me. Can you imagine me wrapping Teo's limb in plastic the whole damn summer so he can play at camp, go to the sprinkler park, take a bath, etc? Holy canoli, Batman. That would have been AWWWWWWFUL. They prescribed Motrin and told us to elevate his foot tonight, and said if he still won't walk on it in two days to see our pediatrician.

So we made the trek through the parking garage at 11:00 p.m. and headed home, where Teen helped me brush teeth and get the kids in bed before she headed home herself. Teo, of course, refused to keep his foot on a pillow regardless of our exhortation that it was "doctor's orders," and I was too tired to fight with him. To Teo, there really is no higher power.

I'm freaking exhausted. Is it still only June?

The Little Red Hen

The Little Red Hen from encarna on Vimeo.

Luke was cast as the lead in his class play. He did great, despite battling a case of stage fright.

Shaky camera work (sorry) by Tina.