A Brighter, Happier Thursday
My, what a difference a week can make!
Sunshine’s fever was down Saturday and gone Sunday. Pop stayed home from church with her because she was still coughing and sniffing a bit, and pretty tired after the whole ordeal. Cricket stayed home too. He felt “weird”. Frankly, he IS a little weird, but I didn’t have it in me to argue that day. He spent most of the day with a small fleece blanket wrapped around his head like a turban because it helped his head feel better—and limping around because his headache had spread to his knee. (Next thing you know the boy will be wearing a tinfoil hat to keep the aliens at bay…sigh. Normal we are not.) But I had a lovely day at church all by myself. Except I didn’t quite know what to do with my hands without children and their paraphernalia to juggle.
Sunshine went back to school on Monday. Her friends had “missed her SOOOO MUCH!” She was glad to be back. I had a good Monday too. It turns out my court case (the one I was supposed to show up for jury duty for) was cancelled and I didn’t have to drive up there on the frozen slush at what-was-I-thinking in the morning after all. Yay!
On Wednesday Sunshine had a turn doing “show and teach” at school. She had me help her pack up our two African clawed frogs and haul them in. We also took a little worksheet for her class (Sunshine adores handouts) where they could cut out pictures of a frog’s life cycle and put them in the right order. When we got there, her teacher was so excited that she went and asked the other two kindergarten classes if they’d like to come in for her presentation too. So there was little Sunshine up in front of three classes worth of kindergarteners. I was a little concerned she’d get stage fright with all those eyes staring at her. HA! Not Sunshine. Not my little attention sponge drama queen social butterfly! She ate it up. The more the better. Public speaking is NOT a problem for this child. She explained what kind of frogs they were, talked about the life cycle, demonstrating what order the pictures from the hand-out should be placed in, discussed their behaviors (they like to swim, and never come out of the water) showed the children the frogs’ food pellets, and carefully selected one child from each class to come up and feed the frogs a worm–after she demonstrated the proper technique, of course. Then she opened the floor to questions, called on children with their hands up, and consulting with her advisor (me) if they asked something that stumped her (she couldn’t remember how to tell which was the boy and which was the girl, apart from the size and color–leave it to a teacher to ask that particular question of a five year old…hee…hee…). She was a big hit with the kids and the teachers, and made her Mom quite proud too.
Cricket has had a good week as well, for the most part. He even went and played with a friend over in the park for a while the other day. Yippeee! I was starting to wonder if the whole wanting to play with friends business was just a phase that had passed, or if it was just on hold somewhat during the bleakest winter months. But the snow mostly melted in the rain and sunshine this week, and it seems he’s starting to come out of hibernation mode again.
Speaking of which, the grass in our yard (!!!) is greening up, and the daffodils and other bulbs are starting to put up little shoots. We may still have a few more spring snowstorms, but Mother Nature is definitely starting to show signs of spring. I’m glad. I’ve missed our usual mid-winter thaw this year, and Pop is tired of shoveling snow. Now I’m itching to get out and plant the garden and try out our new automatic irrigation system that was installed all over the yard last fall, including two watering zones for my gardening habit. But the garden beds and gravel paths in the back yard are not yet installed and the whole garden area is a big mass of gooey, gluey mud. We have a pretty heavy clay soil, which can suck your shoes off in a blink when it’s wet, and is almost as hard as concrete when it bakes in the summer sun. Speaking of which, Sunshine had two little friends over on Tuesday, and they all went out to play on the lawn in the sun for a little while, and came back sans socks and shoes with mud all squelched up between their toes. Clearly they’d had a good time, but it did entail a bit of motherly clean up on the porch before the little mud bunnies were clean enough to come back in the house.
At any rate, influenza has passed. Spring has sprung. Pop has finished some work projects that have been hanging over his head for a while. Mom has a new bread cookbook (more on this later). And all is well in our little world.
–how on EARTH do you have that much energy with a temp that high?) I parked her in front of a video with a popsicle and ran out to the all night grocery. When I got back she was well setttled into the couch, of course, so I gave her some ibuprofen and left her there. When I was pretty sure her fever was down a couple degrees I went to bed. At 5:30. Shudder.