Our little guy has a tummy bug today, which announced itself in graphic fashion this morning with a poop episode I’ll leave to your vivid imaginations. Suffice to say that much laundry and two baths were required to put him and his environment to rights. I’m happy to report that other than a bagel-gagging incident detailed previously (“I Burp” http://dev.freeverse.com/blogs/catherine/archives/2004_09.html) he’s never vomitted in his life. I hope to keep it that way! He has a low fever and is feeling quite poorly I think. No chasing, no soccer, no hide-n-seek around the house today. He’s been so subdued. My hope is that it doesn’t get any worse and that it moves quickly. Ironically he’s been claiming to be sick quite a bit lately, crying wolf. (Although today the tone was sadly quite different.) He’ll say, “Be sick… tummy ache… go to doctor” when clearly quite well. This puzzled me for a few weeks, and then one day I asked him point blank, “Why do you want to go to the doctor?” (when he’s actually AT the doctor he hates it there). He immediately brightened up and replied, “CANDY!!” Ah, so this whole sickness ruse is an elaborate route to get a sucker. Wow! The kid must be really candy-deprived to go to all that trouble, and even risking getting a shot.
On this topic, the other day he performed a scene from “Brats in the Grocery Store.” This is a routine you’re all familiar with, and I’m sure that like me, you frowned upon the incompetent mothers who obviously handled their charges so badly from birth to set the stage for this performance. What happened was that we walked into the local health food store (no less), and were reviewing our organic kale and such when Isaac began to holler in a nice loud voice, “CANDY!! WANT CANDY MAMA!” To such a degree that I found myself explaining to total strangers, “You know… I really don’t know where he gets this ‘candy’ thing… we don’t have candy at home….” as if they cared… I got him a cookie– not too healthy of one either– and this staved him off for a moment while he ate it. But soon it was back to screaming, “CANDY! MAMA! CANDY!” I tried fruit leather, fizzy water, even licorice… All as delaying factors to get five minutes of non-candy-screaming such that I could rush through my shopping. Nothing worked! Finally I just paid and left with the screaming still underway all the way to the car. There I opened this toddler bar thingy with dried raspberries crushed into sort of a brown rice Rice Krispie treat. This placated him immediately. He gnawed on it and then soon dropped off into deep slumbers. (I think the candy meltdown was sort of a lightening rod for tiredness.)
Oh well… yet another humbling moment to add to the list.
On another note, there might be a few of you out there who missed the Numa Numa dance… I mention it here because now every time I sit down at my computer to do something, Isaac comes running up and says, “Funny man dancing, mama, see funny man dancing!” This is what he’s talking about, with an article about it below:
(I don’t know how to make this actually link, so you’ll have to copy and paste it into your browser…)
http://www3.ns.sympatico.ca/lyle_24/myhero.swf
>
>The article about it…
>http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/26/nyregion/26video.html?ex=1110258000&en=11fd3ec8ec80aab2&ei=5070