Here’s a craft we did tonight. After dinner Claire said, “I want to do a craft project,” and I happened to have the supplies handy. I love the site No Time For Flashcards; it offers great and simple ideas. Here is Claire’s Indian corn.
When we moved here five years ago, I bought a little Meyer lemon tree and put it in a container. Meyer lemons are thought to be a cross between a lemon and a mandarin orange, and they are sweeter and lighter tasting than regular lemons. The tree yielded meagerly until this year. Yesterday I picked two dozen lemons off the tree, and more are coming. Mind you, this tree only stands four feed high!
What to do with all these luscious lemons? I zested and squeezed them, and put it in the freezer. I have a total of three cups of lemon juice, which I am freezing in ice cube trays. There’s a cup of zest. This is all great for baking and cooking. The next task (probably tomorrow), is to roast the little pie pumpkins we bought and puree them. Claire still loves to eat plain pureed pumpkin, and it will be great for pumpkin bread and pie. And again, I freeze it in ice cube trays to make just-right serving sizes for Claire.
I was playing with stencils in this one. I wanted to keep things clean and simple. I was in the mood for green, because I am still waiting for the mountains to turn into that gorgeous winter emerald color, if the rains ever come consistently. The word “listen” came to mind, because there is so much to hear in the natural world. I’m try to bring Claire to as many natural spaces as I can, and give her the chance to move and get messy and hear what the world has to say.
We went out and covered a few blocks. Claire had fun and got lots of comments about how cute she is. She was a little shy about saying “trick-or-treat” at first but soon got the hang of it. People were very generous! She became obsessed with a giant spider decoration. We had to walk back two blocks to see it a second time; she named it Mike.
I ended up carving a pumpkin after all. Claire named it Wendy because it is winking — Winkie Wendy. Claire is doing much, much better. Her fever broke yesterday. She’s still tired and has a cough, but she is well enough to say she wants to go trick-or-treating, even though I suspect she really doesn’t know what that means. I’m not sure we will go, but if we do, it will be for a very brief outing. She doesn’t really want to wear a costume. Perhaps we’ll don her in one of my blouses (long enough to be a dress) and costume jewelry, and she can go as a “lady.”
She has been waking at 5 and 5:30 a.m., so we’ll see how early she gets up tomorrow after we fall back an hour on the clock! (Please please please sleep; don’t wake up at 4 a.m.!)
Based on her symptoms, Claire’s doctor thinks she has H1N1 (swine) flu. Her temp at 12:30 p.m. was 103.6; an hour ago it was 102.5.
I’m doing my job, being the Mommy bed. I hope Husband and I don’t get sick (at least not at once).
We’d have gotten a flu shot if the damn thing was made available. It turns out that although Santa Clara county is the sixth largest county in California (1.85 million people), we’ve only gotten 14,100 doses. Other smaller counties have gotten twice and triple that much. There are no seasonal flu shots either.
There actually were 79 H1N1 swine flu cases for every lab-confirmed case and about three pandemic flu-related hospitalizations for every reported hospitalization through July 23, according to the new estimates from CDC epidemiologists Carrie Reed, PhD; Lyn Finelli, DrPH; and colleagues.
After July 23, the burgeoning number of flu cases made it necessary to stop counting lab-confirmed cases — which the CDC always warned was ” just the tip of the iceberg” — and to start using mathematical models to track the pandemic.
Claire was better last weekend and on Monday. Then on Tuesday, she screamed and resisted going to music class, which is unusual because she adores going. But she said, “Please no music class,” and I honored that. We went out for a walk around the block but otherwise didn’t go anywhere. Yesterday I kept her home from preschool; she had a cough again, and generally had no energy and was clingy. We stayed inside all day. She got to watch more t.v. than usual. I called the doctor, who suggested that if she’d gotten well for any period of days and now has symptoms, that it’s probably a whole new entity (and not another secondary infection). I’m following the usual protocol. Claire woke at 2 a.m. with a fever of 102, and it’s not varied much. I’m not bothering to change out of my pajamas. We won’t be going anywhere. I feel sad for her when she’s sick.
I harbor a hope that Husband will get home early enough for me to get out to the local yarn store to hang with my friends and knit. I’ll need it. And now, here’s a rare photo. (This child never sleeps anywhere but her own crib, and in nearly all photos I take of her she is moving.)
Since Claire has a small mouth and is still learning to chew, she doesn’t gobble up cookies with chocolate chips or M&Ms in them. She’ll even turn them down. (Horrors!) So I searched for a simple cookie and came across a Snickerdoodle recipe. I made it. Oh my, oh my! They make petite little rounds of cinnamon sugar goodness. I used this recipe here.
I went to bed on the late side, but then, Claire had trouble falling asleep last night and intermittently cried until 10. I went in multiple times to comfort, give medicine, and rock her. Then she woke at midnight, thirsty. And she woke at 6:30 without enough sleep. One of the first things she said was, “I have a fever in my mouth.”
And now she is cranky, cranky, cranky. No fever. She’s just not herself. She’s had some kind of illness (cold, ear infection, cough) for 20 days now. She finished the antibiotic last week, but she now has a dry cough.
It’s been a difficult month for us. It’s had some wonderful times too, and she’s made incredible leaps in her language and comprehension. I’m tired today. I need some energy to get through.
Claire and her Dad took a walk to the mailbox tonight. On the way they saw the moon. And then Claire noticed the stars. She raised her arms and said she was feeding the stars.
“What do they eat?” asked her Dad.
She replied, “Peanut butter. And they open their mouths up wide like hippopotamuses.”
Daily she comes up with some creative and startling associations and narratives!
I had intended forgo the large pumpkin this year, but when Claire and I were at the grocery this one caught my eye. It was so round and such an appealing shade of orange. So it came home with us. I still doubt I will carve it for Halloween (famous last words!), but we decorated it with stickers (mostly I peeled and she stuck). I plan to cut the top open and scoop out the seeds to roast. Claire can have a classic taste of fall.
While I love getting the paints out for Claire, sometimes the paint cups are more ambitious than I want to tackle. They are spill-proof, but they are big and messy, and I am constantly moving them around so she can reach them. The other day we took a preschool field trip to a pumpkin patch where she got to paint a mini pumpkin; they used small plastic boxes with dividers in them to hold paint. The boxes held many colors and yet contained most of the mess. So we went to Michaels yesterday in search of something similar. I looked at the bead storage boxes, and most of them had moveable dividers, which meant the paint would seep into the other spaces. But I did find one that had 12 little containers, each with its own screw top, all of which can be nestled into a box. I filled them this morning and look forward to using them frequently.
Claire is obsessed today with spaghetti. But that’s not on tonight’s menu. Uh-oh! But with this activity, we had fun with food. Thanks to No Time For Flashcards.
For the last 10 months, each morning Claire sits with her Dad on the sofa, watching PBS shows while he works from home for an hour, giving me a break to shower and prep for the day. One of her first and favorite shows has been Between the Lions. It’s a show with a muppet-style lion family that runs a library. Many stories are read, and vowels and consonants are explored. It’s a really creative show. (The pun between the lions refers to “reading between the lines” and to walking between the lions at the entrance of the New York City public library.)
On the show they talk about getting a library card; for the past couple of months, if you ask Claire, “What do you do with a library card?” She answers, “You bring the books to the lady and she lets you take them home.” In recent months she’s been talking more about going to the library. (We had not gone to story hour since she turned 1, because the librarian who runs the story hour for ages 1-2 is a stickler for making the children sit still, and has been known to chastise mothers if their children don’t follow the rules. So we haven’t been.)
Today, because we stayed out of preschool so as not to share any lingering germs, we went to the library to get Claire her very own library card. She was very proud of it and told her Dad all about it when he got home from work. She picked three books for herself, and we’ve read them each about a dozen times already. I’m sure we’ll be making regular trips from now on.
