Carter’s fever broke during the night—it was basically an eight-hour flu. It was REALLY high at one point though—very close to 104, which is so radically different from Ava. Her highest temp, once, was 102.3. I was mentally preparing to go to the ER at 11 PM when his underarm temperature read 101.9, and that is (on average) 2 degrees lower than a rectal temp. When I moved him, he screamed. He just hurt. But then at 1 AM, I woke up, felt him, and he was cool as a cucumber. It was bizarre.

Ava has a cold too. She has had it for a while, and it is in the lingering phase. The “my child may look sick, but really, she is not contagious even though she clearly needs to blow her nose’ phase. But is has lodged itself in her throat, and her voice is being affected. In a moment of careless verbiage I said to her “you are losing your voice, Ava.” Her face lost all traces of animation as her mouth gaped, her eyes stared and her hand slowly drifted to her throat, and she slowly said “I am losing my voice? Why?” I quickly realized my mistake and tried to undo the damage caused by allowing my daughter to think that she was never going to talk again.

Carter is scheduled to go to the pediatric dentist in Vermont so that they can look at the missing enamel on his front tooth. Presumably they are going to look at it and say “he is missing the enamel on his front tooth, and we need to fill it in. Can you come back in 2 weeks?” At least it will be taken care of relatively soon.

He fell asleep last night without nursing. He stopped, stared at the ceiling and blew raspberries for a half hour while I rocked him until he was blowing them in his sleep. He still is not speaking in English, but is rather effective in communicating in his own language. One of the cutest things he does is to widen his eyes, open his mouth a little and jut his lower jaw out a bit as he raises his eyebrows and says eeeeehhhhh!, which translates to “would you get a load of this!”. He understands everything we say to him, and I learned the hard way not to ask him if he wanted to go swimming 2 hours before the first class was scheduled to begin. He went straight to the sliding glass door, gesturing vehemently toward the lake, and lost his mind when I said no, not yet.

Fortunately, swim class started last night. Carter goes from 5:30 to 6 with me while Ava waits patiently on the side of the pool with a life jacket on, and then she has her class with the teacher. She was very patient while I was wrestling with Carter during his class, and I tried to alleviate some of the boredom by playing with her during the free play time (we squirted water at each other, and Carter thought that was a riot). Swimming with Carter is like swimming with an octopus. He wants to be set free, which is out of the question. His favorite part is being tossed way up high, and climbing out along the wall. However, when Ava is in her class, he is miserable. He just wants to get back in. I am not sure what I am going to do with him, because I obviously have to be there while she is swimming. I just might end up back in the water. Fabulous. But Ava did really well, until she got cold and ditched the jumping part. They all line up and each one gets to jump in to the teacher, and Ava decided that she did not want to stick around for that. Later, in the car, she asked me why they had jumping in the class. I told her it was to practice jumping, and because it was fun. Her response was “but I already know how to jump.” I almost told her that such logic was sure to get her in trouble in the future, a la her mother who got detention in fifth grade for not doing her long division homework for the very same reason. But instead I laughed and reminded her that it was also for fun. If she decides to bail on long division homework because she already knows how to do it, more power to her.

I think school is going well. I can only assume so, since she wakes up every day and asks which school she is going to. Tomorrow they have school pictures. Amazing. She is getting a school picture. I am still in shock. I guess I did not think that they had pictures for little ones. Or I forgot. It is so ‘big girl-ish.”

And my school has officially begun. After a month of panicking because I had not received anything from London, a very nice, very British email came my way, welcoming me to the program, and letting me know that my course materials were on their way. Phew. I am only taking two courses, and honestly, I forget which two. I know I am doing the preliminary epidemiology class, but I cannot remember if the other one was statistics or another core course. I think it was statistics. There is no end to my pleasure at this new challenge. Finally, I feel like I am directing my brain in the right direction. Clearly mothering is a brain challenge, and very much the ‘right direction’, but in a drastically different way. There are whole sections of my grey matter just dying to be utilized, and in my humble opinion, I think that can only have positive ramifications for the kids and my ability to steer them through life. And it also offers a connection with the rest of the world, something often hard to find in this area.

We went to the blessing of the animals today at St Agnes. I am unclear as to what made me think that bringing both kids and a 13-year-old incontinent dog all the way to Lake Placid so that I could nearly lose track of them in the chaos of 100 dogs and 200 elementary school-age kids was a good idea, but I did it. I guess I figured Rose deserved it. Fortunately, Peter walked up from the office to help out. It was almost as difficult as explaining to Ava what a blessing was. That led to a discussion of St Francis, which led to a discussion about St. Nicholas and his connection to Santa Claus, and their connection to Christmas and Jesus, which of course looped back to St Francis, and somehow I managed to bring everything together into one tidy, relatively logical explanation of God. Sort of. It passed the time in the car nicely though.

The other day, after Carter fell asleep, I let Ava come out into the living room with me (a treat, since she usually has to go to bed at that point), and I pulled out the map of the world. She has been bugging me about where things are, and it has been a while since I last had it out, so I thought that would be a good time. When I brought it out, she got very serious, and said “now, where is Mexico?” (based on her knowledge that Monarchs migrate to Mexico) and then she said “I know this is China, and I know this is Florida, and what is this again?”

“Africa”

“Oh. Where is Kenya?”

“Here”

“Where is Alaska?”

“All the way over here”

“And what is this?”

“Russia”

“Russia. Hmmm. And this?”

“Brazil, South America.”

And on and on and on. I must get this child a globe.