My weekend with K

After nearly a week of stomach problems for K, I became increasingly worried about appendicitis. Friday in the middle of the night, when he woke up screaming and inconsolable AGAIN, I packed him off to Children's. (K's first trip to the ER! And he's 5. Not bad.) He calmed down by the time we arrived and was surprisingly happy and cooperative (and awake) most of the time we were at the hospital. He had an x-ray and an ultrasound, and in between we played bad guys and... I don't even know what we did to occupy ourselves in that little room, but we arrived around 1 a.m. and left around 6 and it was actually kind of nice spending all that time together, just the two of us. No appendicitis. They said he was severely constipated after getting over a stomach virus and not eating much for a week.

On Sunday he asked to go to the ice cream store. I was happy to oblige, since it was the first food he had actually requested since getting sick. We stopped by the consignment store down the street on our way to the car. I planned to take a quick peek, but when I noticed that K was interested in looking around, I slowed down and took my time. I picked out a few things and brought K into the dressing room with me. Every time I tried something on, he said, "You look pretty, Mommy! You should buy that." As I was paying for the dress he convinced me to buy, he noticed the stairs leading down. "What's down there? Can we go look?" So we went downstairs, where they had a room full of shoes and the clearance section. K picked up EVERY SHOE. "This one is so shiny! Look at this one. It's so tall! I bet it would be hard to walk in that one. This one is purple, isn't it pretty?" He brought me shoes to try on and actually put them on my feet like a little salesperson at a high-end store. We stayed down there for an hour! Finally, I had to drag him out. Check out the shoes he tried on:


Sunday night, after waking up screaming at 3 a.m. again, K came into our room at 4:30 saying he had a bad dream. I didn't have the energy to deal with it, so I just grabbed him and stuck him in the middle of our bed, pulled up the covers, and went back to sleep. I can't count how many times I woke up in the next hour and a half. Each time, K's hand was in my face, or he was elbowing me in the chest, or his foot was sticking into my side. JW said at one point he woke up and he and I were on the very edges of the bed while K sprawled diagonally in the middle. Just after 6, K sat up and started wiggling around, trying to figure out how to get out of bed without waking either one of us up. He did not succeed. Yet another failed experiment in co-sleeping.

Meanwhile, X continues on his parallel quests to contract every strain of the common cold before age 2, and to eat garbage and paper. He dismembered a pop-up frog from the counting book before I confiscated it. I am ready for this eating-everything phase to be over, and I'm packing a pacifier for our beach vacation next week.