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...