Run Fox Run

For the fourth consecutive year, Leda celebrated her birthday with her good friend Jack who was born two days earlier, just down the hall at Overlook Hospital.  This year, they also celebrated with Jack’s little brother Daniel, who was born soon after Jack and Leda’s pirate-themed third birthday party.  This year’s party had an airplane theme, and Jack’s mom prepared a fleet of flight-inspired activities.  When they play together, Jack and Leda often announce that the couch is an airplane about to fly them to California or Sicily or the city, load it with “baggage,” perform boarding announcements for each other, and change planes several times.  Connecting flights were never so much fun.

At their party, their guests received small personalized carry-on bags to decorate and fill with party favors.  They decorated their own wings for test piloting on the obstacle course, and constructed gliders to race.  They dined on airplane food served in plastic trays (thank-you, Lunchables, for making this easy), stowed their gifts in the baggage check (no TSA agents in sight), and ate cupcakes topped with adorable airplane favors (Jack’s mom) and scrawled icing airplanes and clouds (yours truly).  Grandma Lynn and Papa even FLEW in an actual airplane to enjoy the party. A small selection of the enormous number of photos documenting our fun are in the 4th Birthday Party album.  We all had a fantastic time and are grateful to Jack and his family for sharing the festive occasion with us once again.

In the second half of September, we spent some time down the shore and in New York — which Leda calls “my city.”  Leda also started her new, serious ballet class, and enjoyed playing with her friends.  Cleo’s vocabulary expands each day, though she seems to think that saying “Please” while yanking toys out of other kids’ hands counts as asking nicely.  Today she pointed to the MacBook and said, “No-no, that’s Mommy’s,” woke up from nap wanting only to “Hug Yehda” and exulted, “Sushi!” when we pulled into the parking lot of our favorite neighborhood restaurant.  The latest photos are in the September 2008 Part Deux album.

So about those good days I mentioned…here are a few photos Grandma Lynn took during our time at the New York Botanical Garden in the Bronx.  We had a fantastic day with Grandma and Papa!  We’ve been to the Garden before for the Holiday Train Show, so it was a treat to see everything in bloom.

Several of Run Fox Run’s regular readers (!) looked over the last photo album and asked the question, “Where’s Cleo?”  The answer is that she was feeling a bit under the weather during many of the featured activities.  Since Labor Day, she’s had more days feeling down than up — though she did have some up days, and Grandma Lynn took a few pictures to prove it.  In 2 weeks she visited her pediatrician 3 times and received 3 different diagnoses for what was causing her symptoms and general malaise.  And last Tuesday, her worried Mom had started to worry enough that she took her feverish, shaking daughter to the ER.

Here’s what I thought would happen: (1) the doctors would be a bit skeptical, and say, Lady, this kid’s fine.  Take her home and don’t be stingy with the Motrin.  Or, possibly, (2) they would administer a bit of medicine themselves, and send us home after a few hours.  At the ER I always suspect there’s a standard 3 hours per patient and they make that work more often than not.  Either way, I figured they’d chalk me up as one more paranoid, overprotective mom.

Gentle readers, I was wrong.  Cleo endured a variety of tests — blood work, urinalysis (which, if you’re 17 months old and not so much with the peeing in cups, involves a Kubrickian catheterization), a chest X-ray — and late Tuesday evening the ER doc and her pediatrician decided that she’d have to stay overnight.  She got a mighty antibiotic, and IV fluids, but her fever kept spiking.  It should be noted that I did not feel especially vindicated for having brought her to the ER.  The professionals decided that she had a bacterial infection on top of a virus, and she hadn’t been able to fight it without help.  We stayed three nights before at last, she went 24 hours without a fever, and started to want to eat and play again.  By our last day she looked like this:

The pediatric wing was quite nice — Cleo and I had a room to share, and down the hall was an amazingly well-stocked playroom with a patio to play on.  Cleo made friends with an energetic boy named Henry who liked trains.  She charmed all the nurses and techs as we walked the hallways with her IV pole.  In our absence, Leda had a delightful time with Daddy, Jack, Charlotte, Erica, and other friends. All the same, we’re both quite glad to be home.

For whatever reason, you’ll find a lot of ponies and plentiful jazz hands in the first September 2008 album. There were also some Rancho Carne spirit fingers, but those are less clearly captured on film. But then Leda is rarely as still as she appears above, at the local farmer’s market. Two weeks into September: everybody’s back to school; we’ve hung out at the beach and at the Botanical Garden; and — as you’ll see — ridden our fair share of ponies. More to come…