Apologies for leaving readers hanging with that last post — D did miss a day of preschool last week but he was actually fine that day, only staying home because of the fever the day before. We have had a week of good health, and I was writing this an hour ago I’d have said it was ongoing.
But …
I just picked up Ella from the school nurse. She had been complaining of a sore ear and it looks like it might be infected. Doctor’s appointment later this morning. Fun fun!
So, from Tuesday to Friday, no one was sick here. I had a little feeling like I might be getting the stomach bug but it went away. Then Saturday morning Dom was all congested. He still is. Not that big a deal by itself, but . . .
Today he has a full-on fever. Taking him to the doctor tomorrow.
Will it ever end?
Dominic:
He missed his first day of preschool on Tuesday due to the aforementioned stomach bug, though as it happened he was fine Tuesday and Monday morning was the last time it gave him any trouble. Thursday I was the parent helper, so I have no idea how it would have gone had I just dropped him off and left, but I suspect it wouldn’t have affected his response that much. Having met Mrs. M he was happy to see her again. But really he was just eager to get his hands on the Stuff.
He had been through the downstairs class plenty of times the previous year — I managed the rotating selection of books from the public library on the bookshelf, so every few weeks we’d go to each classroom and pick up books and add new ones. Every time he’d want to stop and take some of the toys off the shelves, but obviously it was happening right before or after picking Ella up so we never lingered. And Thursday you could tell he knew he was finally, FINALLY going to be able to get his hands on the sandbox. And the puzzles. And the playdoh. And the Fisher Price city. And the play kitchen. And the loft. And . . .
He was a kid in a candy store. It took a bit of work to keep him focused on circle time, and on story time, and on anything that prevented him from trying out the next thing that caught his eye. Some of the other boys would get into little tug-o-wars over certain toys, but D seemed to realize that time spent struggling over toys was time NOT spent playing with toys, so whenever he sensed a possible incursion he just moved on to something else.
I made the mistake of asking him to help me set up for snack — a task Ella had always enjoyed. It was a mistake because he misinterpreted it to mean that he was about to get to eat snack right that moment, when in fact there was setting out the plates and cups and napkins and then all of story time before it was actually time to eat. He sat in one of the chairs and loudly called for his snack, and even when he realized it wasn’t going to happen yet he refused to abandon his snack chair to listen to a story.
When they line up to go outside and play at the end of the day, the co-op kid (in this case D) gets to be first in line and decide what they pretend to be when they step through the door. Not having seen it on the first day he didn’t quite get what was going on or what Mrs. M was asking him to decide, but eventually he got the gist of it — a light went on behind his eyes, and he said bashfully, “Aiwpwane.” The kids behind him all eagerly extended their arms. He looked back with a smile of delight, stuck his arms out, and dashed happily outside.
Ella:
Back when she started school in August, it seemed to good to be true that she should fall into the routines so easily, with no tears at the door, no anxiety about all the crowded hallways and the noise, no complaints. And, as it turned out, it was. That damnable week and a half she lost to sickness threw her out of the loop a bit, and when she came back things were harder. She’s been hesitant in the morning. sometimes with tears at the door to the school, though each day after a bit of that she takes a breath, straightens, and purposefully strides through the doors with a grim determination that still brings a lump to my throat. And at the end of the day she’s always perky and delighted to see D and me again.
In between, though, a couple things have been causing her stress, and are the cause of her early-morning jitters. (Communicating with a five-year-old is a delicate affair; I present now what took a couple weeks of clues dropped here and there and comparing notes with her teacher to sort it all out.) First is the cafeteria — crowded and noisy and not, in Ella’s mind, a fun place to eat. The second is one kid in her class who has been acting out in rather extreme fashion, enough so that the assistant principal has made regular visits to her class to help deal with him. This latter bit has been the cause of my first Irate Parent Letter, written to the assistant principal. We’ll see how it all plays out before I write more about it, but I must confess I took a certain writerly pleasure in composing a well-honed IPL, striking the right balance between parental concern, empathy for the plight of the administration, and a stern call for action. We’ll see how that all develops.
Meantimes her teacher has been very helpful through it all; I suspect she has taken a particular liking to Ella. Dom and I are going to make a point of joining her for lunch in the cafeteria every once in a while, and hopefully these things will work themselves out. When I step back and think about it all the only really surprising thing is that all of this wasn’t going on with her those first couple weeks of school, before she got sick.
Oh, and she now knows the months of the year better in Spanish than she does in English, and is a little disappointed when there’s not a worksheet in her folder for her to do at home after school. She loves Library on Fridays and prefers Art (Tuesday) to Music (Wednesday), though she likes them both much better than Gym (Monday and Thursday). And even when she’s dragging her feet at little, the leisurely walk the three of us take down the street to school every morning, now that the weather is cooling, remains a perfect way to start the day.
Most days, I don’t want Dom to ever grow up. Tonight was no exception. I’ve been putting him to bed while Nate reads The Hobbit to Ella. After we finished reading books, I asked him if he wanted to lay in the crib.
“No. Lay in your arms.” How can I say no to that?
The way he’s growing, I won’t be able to do this long. Rather than laying his head on my shoulder, he prefers that I cradle him in my arms while I sing songs to him. He’s quite particular about how I hold him. He wants to have both his arms infront of me – not the closest one behind my back – and my arm holding his legs underneath, not over-handed from the top. This configuration makes it even harder to hold him, so I usually do it for just one song before laying him down.
The next comment is inevitably about wanting to hold my hair while he’s laying in the crib. Tonight he added the variation of asking me to put my hand on his belly.
He’s always angling for one more book or another song, as well. He knows that – if it’s getting late – my response will be “just a short book” or “okay, this is the LAST song.” Tonight he revised his strategy by asking for “just a short book.” Maybe he realized it was already getting late. It didn’t stop him, however, from asking for milk, then juice, and settling for water.
So, yeah, the stomach bug lay dormant for a bit but has now manifested itself decisively in Dominic.
When Ella had the stomach bug she lay around a lot, complained about her tummy, and vigorously denied any food that was offered to her. But she did play ball with the whole “keep sipping fluids” thing, especially when she discovered that she really likes Gatorade.
Dominic, on the other hand, does not complain. He eats and drinks with gusto, prances around the house, acting the picture of health, and then without warning will (gross out warning! . . . . . . . . . . ) void really astonishing quantities of liquidy matter out of either his intake or his outtake, so to speak. I don’t think our laundry machine has stopped running the past 48 hours. But afterwards he’s fine again, till the next time. And he does NOT play ball with the program. He is disinterested in Gatorade and prefers to get back to the cheese pita and carrot sticks that made him spew forth in the first place.
So it’ll be an interesting day or two more; hopefully that’ll be the end of it. The sad thing is that Tuesday is his first day of preschool and barring a sudden recovery tomorrow he may well miss it. His teacher-to-be, Mrs. M, came by for a home visit on Thursday and he was super-excited. He had picked out which puzzle they were going to do together, and then she had him draw a picture to put up in the classroom, and they read a book, and she told him about the different animals that they had in the classroom and at the school. He has been excited to get to go to school like his big sister does ever since she started a month ago. He understood everything Mrs. M was saying to him — the only part that didn’t sink in was the “I’ll see on Tuesday!” bit. So as she was leaving he was hurrying to put on his crocs because he thought he was going with her. And when he found out he wasn’t he collapsed in spasms of inconsolable grief.
So I really, really hope he’ll be better enough for preschool on Tuesday. But we’ll have to see.
Dominic was sitting in the rocking chair when I went into his bedroom tonight. He said, “You be Dominic, and I’m Momma.”
I said, “I don’t want to go to bed, Momma.”
Dominic said, “It’s okay. We can read a book. You sit on my lap.”
Rather than crush his legs, I sat on the edge of the rocking chair between his two legs. He immediately pushed my back, ended the pretend, and told me that he wanted me to read him a book.
Maybe he would have kept pretending if I had sat on his lap …
Ella Back To School
After a long weekend to recover, we’re hoping that Ella will have a successful return to school tomorrow. Her fever was gone for more than 24 hours last week, so she went back on Wednesday. Unfortunately, we should have taken her complaints of a stomach ache more seriously. She threw up after drinking her juice at lunch. Nate picked her up, and she slept away most of the afternoon.
Nate took her into the doctor on Thursday. It seems that she caught a stomach virus took advantage of her weakened immune system. The fever has not returned, so it’s nothing serious, although she has also developed a cough. She started eating normally again late Saturday and had good naps both Saturday and Sunday. The cough is still there, but it’s not a constant thing.
I’m sure she’ll be nervous about going back to school tomorrow. Once she gets back in the swing of it, I suspect she’ll be glad to be there. Fortunately, two weeks absent in kindergarten is not too bad for her to catch up on. Even her sense of humor has returned. Yesterday, when deciding which television show to watch, she suggested that Nate and I should watch Dora, so we can catch up with her on Spanish.
