Adventures in WondERland

The end of this week was exciting, but not in a "we're having so much fun now!" kind of exciting--more of a "I could do without this" kind of excitement. Late Friday night (about 11--late for us!) Andrew woke up with a coughing fit that quickly turned into an "I'm trying to retch" fit. He stumbled into our room crying that his stomach hurt, and writhing around to prove it. We tried several things to help him feel better: Dan tried to help him throw up (by sticking a finger down his throat) with no success; we remembered that he hadn't eaten much at dinner and thought maybe he was hungry, so we fed him some bread. That helped, temporarily, and he went back to bed. Only to get up five minutes later crying desperately that his stomach hurt. This (putting him to bed and then having him scream) happened a couple of times before we finally decided maybe we should take him to the Emergency Room. In retrospect, I think we probably didn't need to be so alarmed--but Andrew is usually pretty stoic about pain (except when it surprises him, like banging his head), and he'd never done anything like this before. Plus, the pain had seemed fairly consistent, since he'd complained about it that afternoon, and he wasn't showing any typical signs of a stomach bug, etc. Anyway, to make a long story short, I volunteered to take him and Dan stayed home with Evelyn.

And that is how Andrew and I came to spend two hours (from midnight until just after two) in the ER. I know this is shorter than the average ER stay (they warn you it usually takes at least 2.5 hours), but in the middle of the night, with a three-year-old who--in between bouts of pain--was unnaturally perky, it was pretty grueling. And of course, ten minutes into our stay, Andrew finally did throw up, which not surprisingly made him feel better. A nice nurse gave him a popsicle, and then I spent the next hour or so trying to keep Andrew occupied enough to stay in the room. I was exhausted (fighting off a cold on top of a late night), but Andrew's three hours of sleep before he woke up seemed to have refreshed him. This is how most of the stay went: "Mommy, what's that helicopter outside for?" "Where does it go?" "Why?" (And after I'd explained it, he'd start the round of questions again). "What are all those people doing here?" "Why?" "Who's sick?" "What do the nurses do?" "Why isn't the doctor here?" And on and on. Finally I turned the lights out in the room and insisted he lie down--he didn't got to sleep, but at least he wasn't bouncing around as much. The doctor ran a strep test (negative), felt Andrew's belly and determined there was nothing too worrisome, so I brought him home wishing we had never ventured out in the first place.

Andrew seems better today, although he spent most of yesterday complaining intermittently that his stomach hurt. (It was almost funny--he would play and run around like normal, but if he stopped for long enough, he would remember his stomach hurt and start writhing for thirty seconds, before getting distracted by another toy and running off). We kept him home from church today, just in case--and he slept the entire three hours he would have been in church.

Of course, our ER visit meant that none of us were at our best Saturday morning--Dan had to be up early to go judge BYU's Spring Research Conference. Andrew initially woke up at 5:30 and thought he was going to get up--luckily, Dan finally persuaded him to stay in bed, so he went back to sleep until 8:30. And because we were all tired and/or sick, we didn't do anything very exciting. (Although I did get to go shopping with my mom, which was fun.)

Other highlights of the week: um, actually, neither Dan nor I can remember much of anything, so there can't have been much excitement in our lives in the early week.

It has been remarkably warm, though, so we've been outside a lot. (Although I hear it's supposed to snow tomorrow!) Evelyn is finally big enough to sit up in our little wagon--she grips the sides in her tight little grip and braces her feet against the opposite feet. Watching Andrew pull her in the wagon is one of the cutest things I've seen recently; unfortunately, I keep forgetting to take a camera outside when he does this. In other news, we also got Andrew's little red Radio Flyer scooter back (I had thought it was stolen when we initially found it missing a month or so ago). It turns out that the neighbor's granddaughter, who'd been over to play with Andrew before, knew where the scooter was and borrowed it one time and forgot to bring it back.

Aside from that, we live boring--if busy--lives. We're heading into the final stretches of the semester, and next week is interview week for me--we're heading into our hiring season for new Writing Fellows. It's always a lot of fun to meet so many bright, interesting students, but it's also pretty time consuming . . .

Anyway, hopefully we'll have something more interesting to say next week.

We'll close instead with some pictures of Andrew and Evelyn playing in the tub together. I wanted to get a picture of Evelyn with her tongue sticking out (she does this adorable thing where she plays with her emerging front teeth with her tongue, and it ends up sticking out the left-hand corner of her mouth), but got these intead: