My younger three girls are all sick again. It’s sort of a coughing cacaphony over here. Anika (age 5) came down with croup on Saturday (while at my parents’ house no less!), and had to come home early from her play weekend with Grandpa and Grandma. She was so sick when I picked her up that she didn’t even complain despite the fact that Trinity, who was spending the weekend there too, got to stay an extra day.
Ani was fine on Friday, but woke up at six in the morning on Saturday barking like a seal and wheezing. Lucky Grandma! Actually, my Mom handled everything great. She steamed up her bathroom and let Anika sit in there while Mom called the advice nurse who told her to go steam up her bathroom. Guess my Mom passes the Grandparenting Minor Medical Emergency test. Way to go, Mom!
So now the croup seems to have mellowed into a more normal sounding miserable cough, and the fever petered out a couple of days ago. Apparently feeling left out, Kyra and Faith both decided that coughing would make a nice addition to their vocal ranges and started hacking away as well.
After I dropped Georgie and Trinity off at school this morning, the three little girls sat in the backseat and coughed in unison (or pretty close) all the way home. I think I need a HazMat suit now… So charming, being in a small, enclosed space with your darling children when they are actively spewing germs at the back of your head at ninety miles an hour! In case that weren’t enough to make everyone around here happy to be alive, Faith (our one year old) picked this week to attempt to sprout four new molars. Let’s just say that the tone of our week has been more strident than melodious.
In the plus column, however, we took the kids to the Portland Art Museum on Friday to go look at the Egypt exhibit. I wasn’t sure how they would do since they would have to quietly mill about looking interested at what small children could conceivably construe as several thousand year old junk; but between a shameless bribe of two tic tacs to anyone who behaved themselves (yes yes, Mommy=cheapskate) and the childrens’ surprising knowledge of Egyptian icons due to watching “The Mummy” way too many times, they were all fascinated and enjoyed themselves very much.
We did have to explain once or twice or ten times that the mummy in the museum was, in fact, not going to come to life and that scarab beetles do not actually eat people from the inside, but we covered those important points before we even left the house so as to have a minimal amount of screaming in terror whilst actually touring the museum. Seemed to work well.
Actually, even the trip to the museum was interesting. We got in a fender bender when the guy two cars in front of us inexplicably stopped in the middle of the highway and the motorcycle behind us ran into our new and now dented van (interesting may possibly be the incorrect adjective there…). No one was injured and the damage wasn’t that much either (the motorcyclist was able to drive away as well).
Okay, so that wasn’t the paragraph I was thinking of when I said “interesting.” That would be this one. The museum is located in the Park Blocks of Portland up by the university, and the streets run along on either side of a park area (hence the not terribly creative name) with statues of presidents. When we drove past Abraham Lincoln, Trinity shrieked “Look! It’s President Lincoln” much to my surprise (she’s six); and when we drove past Theodore Roosevelt, Georgie pointed at him and announced that he was “the twenty-sixth President of the United States, but I can’t remember his name.” (Georgie’s eight).
When I stopped laughing, I pointed out that he was Theodore Roosevelt and asked how he knew who he was. From “Night At the Museum,” of course. Apparently they watch too many movies. On the other hand, it’s difficult to complain when they pick up educational stuff like who the past Presidents were and Egyptian history (in between all the silliness of live mummies and feuding dioramas). I suppose that’s why we do things like take them to museums and actually talk to them: to help them decipher what’s real.
Well, I’m off to enjoy another sleepless night of Faith screaming (last night she ended up coming to bed with me at 3a.m., and I spent the following delightful five hours trying to snooze while being repeatedly kicked in the head by a squirrly baby). Hurray for Starbucks! And Disney. Hurray for Starbucks and Disney! Thus ends our product placement portion of the story… Now if I could only get Starbucks and Disney to give me a little kickback for the mention… Ahhh, what’s life without goals?
Have a lovely weekend! Say hello to Dreamland for me…
Rachel
Fiendish friend for effusive fun!
