Boy Oh Boyers

Rowan and I returned home, Grandmommy along for the ride, a little over a week ago. Grandmommy stayed and played even more while I met a deadline. (It was Friday. I met it. Whee!) She headed home Saturday for what was probably a welcome rest, and we've had a relaxing weekend so far. Sorry for missing a couple of pictures of the day; I was too relaxed to think about it! :-) To make up for it, here's a bonus picture I snapped of Rowan this morning while he was watching me post today's picture of the day. He had just gotten done making a raspberry on my leg. Check out that cute dimple, will ya'? (By the way, pretty much all the pictures that I post inside blog posts like this one are click-able if you want to see a larger version of the image. I uploaded a larger-than-usual version of this photo because I think it's so very cute. Not to mention, it's got a nice dark area on the left for your desktop icons to reside...if you're one of those "Set As Wallpaper" kinds of people. Enjoy!)

Early yesterday morning, I woke up violently ill. After several hours, I realized I had to go to the hospital because I was dangerously dehydrated. Uncle Tim came over to play with Rowan while Tom drove me to the hospital. Once I was checked in, I sent Tom back home to relieve Tim, who was missing work to stay with Rowan. I spent most of the day at the hospital getting IV fluids and undergoing tests. It turns out I was quite dehydrated. "Your blood is like paste," the nurse said to me. They've decided the most likely diagnosis is some kind of gastrointestinal virus that will run its course in due time. I'm happy to be back home, but I'm still running a fever and having some pretty nasty symptoms, so I can't really go near Rowan. It is SO hard to hear him in the next room playing with his Daddy, laughing or reading books or building something out of Legos, and here I am staring out the window at a dragonfly that has spent the last hour napping on our deck railing. Sigh. I had a pretty rough night (sent Tom upstairs to sleep so I wouldn't disturb him constantly, not to mention spread germs all over him). I wasn't really feeling like getting up at all this morning, but when I found myself lying in bed holding up my thumb and closing one eye to count how many slats were in our bedroom blinds, I decided I had to get up and take a shower for my own sanity. That went well, I've eaten a couple of crackers (my first food in 36 hours) and am still guzzling Gatorade as I've been instructed to do. *Very* happy to be on the mend.

It's plausible that Rowan had a touch of this same virus I now have. Monday morning when he woke up, I went into his room and was nearly knocked down by the smell of what I thought was a serious good-morning poopie diaper. Imagine my surprise when I went to pick him up out of his crib and there was a pile of dried, regurgitated baked ziti and green beans on his crib sheet from dinner the night before! He had apparently thrown up shortly after going down to bed, and yet hadn't whimpered or made any noise at all, so we didn't even know it had happened. He was covered from head to toe; I had to put him straight in a bath and even after shampooing his hair twice, the smell still lingered a bit. He ate a normal breakfast and played as usual, and has had no symptoms since then, so if he did have the same thing as me obviously his body just got rid of it and said that was that. It was about 24 hours later that I woke up with my horrible symptoms. Tom suspected we picked something up while we were touring preschools. "What?" you say. "Touring preschools?"

Yes, we've decided to start Rowan in preschool two days per week. Last week Rowan and I toured three preschools, and earlier this week we visited another one. I think we've made our decision, although yesterday Tom and Rowan and I were supposed to go for a final pre-enrollment visit, and we were no-shows due to...well...you know. I hope when I call the principal this morning she will not have given our slot to someone else. We shall see. Rowan is such a social boy, and so hungry to learn new things, that we know he will love preschool. I can't believe that in just a few short weeks, I will be hanging a fingerpainting by Rowan on the fridge! How awesome is that!

I've been at a conference every year for the past three years on Tom's and my anniversary. This year we're taking a grand scuba vacation, to Curacao, to make up for it. :-) Grandmommy and Rowan are at home, and we're just about to board a plane in Miami. Glad to be better in time for this awesome trip! See you on the other side of a lot of dives. Don't call and don't email!

Tom and I have had an amazing time in Curacao this past week. We've eaten delicious meals, each situated with a view of the ocean. We have gone scuba diving on some amazing reefs, most of which were so close to the shore that we could have walked right in from land (and sometimes we did). The fish and corals were breathtaking! We're in the Curacao airport now, enjoying a few minutes of free wireless (after a week of internet-free living at our resort). It has been the most fun, relaxing vacation Tom and I have ever had, but it has been accompanied by a *serious* case of missing Rowan. We'll see him soon!

Here's a picture from our first night at the resort. They served us dinner on the beach.

I've posted our photos from Curacao on my picasa album. Click here to view it. Also, just in case you aren't sure where on Earth Curacao is, here's a Google map!

View Larger Map

I should note that our underwater photos did not turn out due to a malfunction in the film advancing (yes, film...if anybody wants to buy us an underwater digital camera, or is trying to sell a used one for cheap, let me know!) We saw amazingly beautiful reefs there, so it was quite a disappointment not to have a photographic record of that excitement. I am quite happy that a guy named Rich did get some underwater photos that capture many of the same corals and fish we saw. You may view his picasa album to see his Curacao diving pictures, if you're wondering what the scenery underwater was like. The dive shop we used also has a web page describing the dive sites. I believe we visited all these dive sites except the Superior Producer (it fell on our decompression day) and the Small Wall, although we dove several walls including one on a night dive (fun!) These photos still can't capture the magnificence of colorful underwater scenery stretching as far as the eye can see, or express the exhilaration of being surrounded by schools of fish of various sizes, swaying gently with them in the waves, feeling like they've welcomed us into their space. It was an amazing experience -- the best diving of my life, and definitely our best vacation.

Rowan's comprehension of spoken language is increasing rapidly. With his greater sense of balance and the ability to hop to his feet at a moment's notice, he's also usually pretty quick to respond to requests like, "let's go to the high chair" or "go find Angel". Yesterday he astounded me when he responded to a much more complicated request.

I was in the master bathroom putting in my contact lenses. Rowan was in the closet doing one of his favorite activities: taking all the shoes off the shoe rack and putting them back in a haphazard way...or, lately, putting them in the laundry basket with dirty clothes. (It's better than putting them in the kitchen garbage can, but I digress.) Anyway, I took the cap off my contact lens solution and the cap fell to the floor. It was a very small, round, white plastic cap, and with my contacts out I couldn't see it. I was curious to see what would happen if I asked Rowan to help, so I said, "Rowan, Mommy has dropped a white cap. Can you help me find it?" Rowan promptly emerged from the closet doorway and walked over to me. He looked around by my feet and immediately crouched to reach underneath the counter beside the towel basket. He stood up, reached his hand toward me, and handed me the contact lens cap! Wow!

It's amazing to see how he is moving from simple word recognition (like pointing to the ball on the living room floor, or picking out the cow in a picture book) to putting ideas together. This morning we were using sidewalk chalk to make a picture in front of the house, and I drew the sun. He said, "suh", and then pointed up to the sky (where the sun was not yet visible) and said "sigh!" He knows not only that the picture of the sun corresponds to the word "sun", but that the picture of the sun represents something that, in real life, is in the sky. Gosh, humans are amazing! (And of course, my little baby human is the most amazingest. Ever!) ;-)

Now if anybody has advice on how to stop him from sticking his foot in the dog's water bowl...

Yesterday evening when Tom got home from work I left to drive to Washington, D.C. for a two-day workshop at the National Science Foundation. It was painful to leave after so recently returning from vacation, but I knew Tom and Rowan would be fine without me. Erin and Ander came over to stay with Rowan today, and they'll come again tomorrow while Tom is at work. It's the 4-hour drive to D.C. that I want to write a bit about now.

I was about halfway through the drive when the sun went down. I was driving our car, a Mazda3 wagon with a manual transmission, a welcome change from the minivan. I reached Richmond, Virginia and my breath caught at the sight of the city skyline approaching in the distance against the black sky and the dark asphalt of the freeway with its bright white lines zooming past as I indulged my love for driving just a touch faster than the cars around me. As I was maneuvering through traffic, handling the curves in the freeway, taking in the cityscape, I had a vivid flashback to another nighttime cityscape drive I took a long time ago.

I was living in Atlanta, working on my master's at Georgia Tech, when Grampies was diagnosed with an abdominal aortic aneurysm that needed surgery. It was too specialized a surgery for the doctors in my small hometown, so Grampies and Grammies made a very speedy trip to Atlanta for surgery at Emory University Hospital. We all knew that my grandfather's condition was like a ticking timebomb that, if it ruptured, would kill him in a matter of seconds. He was already elderly by some people's standards, but his life was still filled with adventure: golfing, riding his bike, doing his best to aggravate my grandmother on a regular basis (which anyone who knows them would probably attest might have been the most hazardous sport in which he had ever indulged). I drove to Emory every day to visit his hospital room. Many times, I would drive home after dark, and the route took me straight down I-75 through downtown Atlanta. I vividly recall the sight: eight lanes of dark asphalt curving with the terrain, cars moving quickly with relief at the absence of rush hour congestion, and the looming glowing city skyline in view like stacks of jewels in the distance. On one of those solitary nighttime drives might have been the first moment I really felt my own mortality. I remember crying in the car when I thought that the grandfather I loved, the father my mother loved, and the husband my grandmother loved, was almost snatched away in a horrific and unexpected, even untimely, death. I acknowledged the possibility that I could be snatched away at any moment too, or perhaps, that it might feel like just tomorrow when I would be a ripe old age and maybe nobody would consider my death an untimely one.

This flashback, along with bringing up myriad bittersweet memories, served to invoke a strong feeling of gratitude. Perhaps the most obvious feelings of gratitude were the ones that came first: I felt thankful to be physically well. I marveled at the blessing of having a healthy, intelligent, loving, social child. I felt thrilled that in a small, unlikely town, I had found a man I fell in love with and who still treats me with kindness, a great sense of humor, and complete devotion. Then, I remembered how thankful I am that the beauty of eternity colors all things, whether exhilarating or heartbreaking. Even the most profound loss doesn't compare in magnitude to eternal, infinite Good.

And then it was time to exit the freeway.