I just realized I never put this one on the blog & obviously it must be preserved:
Leah had her well-child doctor visit Tuesday (& all three kids had their dentist appointments - no cavities!)
This was the only picture on my phone:
They didn't hand out a milestone checklist - I'm not sure if they've stopped doing that or if the med student forgot. I found this one by the CDC:
Birthday Interview: Leah is 5!
It's been a while since I did one of these!
One morning Leah very sweetly asked me (whilst covered and surrounded by pillows): Can you get me another pillow for my feet?
What feels like many ages ago, the school newsletter came home with a blurb about the spelling bee. James happened to be on the couch when I was reading it & I asked if he'd like to participate. He did, so I signed him up & emailed the sponsor that we'd like the study packet. Then we got COVID and the school closed for three days due to staff shortages and there were three snow days and we forgot about it.
The sponsor might have also forgotten about it, or maybe there were just too many disruptions due to missed school, but we didn't get the study packet sent home til two days before the bee, when James promptly freaked out because he hadn't been going to the Spelling Club meetings. I reminded him about that conversation way back & asked if he still wanted to do it & he said yes. He reviewed words after school right up til the bee & practiced following the Scripps rules. He was getting all of the 3rd grade words right and really a great deal of the 4th and 5th grade words, too.
Then came the night of the Spelling Bee and James was the first kiddo to be knocked out! On a word I'm sure he knew, but it was a little bit stressful of a situation! I was impressed with how well he did practicing & he says he'd like to try again next year.
He stayed up to tell me all about it when I got home from work. There was much excitement. Leah didn't want to sit still, and then they left her coat in the auditorium, but they got locked out of the building, and then the line at McDonalds to get an ice cream was too long, but then finally they got frozen custards at Randy's. Whew.
Welp, our only child (thus far) to need stitches has now got a second set. This accident was much worse than the first time, though, and necessitated a trip to the children's ER and concious sedation rather than being able to just stitch them up in the office.
This might sound a little kooky, but I think the COVID may have affected our sense of balance. I had the wicked earache and took a bad fall in the art room - which made it hard to distinguish sickness body aches from normal bodyache from my big dumb fall. James and Leah also took other big tumbles and then Sunday morning, Leah had the bad accident. She was sitting on my legs and started to jump up and just went over sideways and her head hit the edge of the side table. When I got a look at it, I saw that her ear was just sliced open & knew she needed to go to the ER. Sam thought he should take her since I was in quarantine.
Prepping for the procedure - you see they mollified her with PBS games on an iPad.
She played "puppet show" with Sam where she recreated the whole experience with the Hello Kitty paper dolls we got in the giant bag of craft supplies. When she got to go back to school, she started telling her teacher the whole thing, but Ms. Kristin convinced her to finish the story inside where it was warm.
They put her hair up in an orange rubber band to get it out of the way and she also wore her hat all day, so her (very, very curly) hair got pretty matted. She let me wash it the next day, and this is what her ear looked like then - maybe a little swollen.
And then this picture is 16 days out from The Incident, and it's still looking a little gnarly. She had a follow-up with the ENT who said everything looked good, and I think her hair will cover up the notch.
And then there's James! He was roughhousing with Amelie one night while I was at work, and banged his ear in a way that pushed the stud into his earlobe. It swelled up something terrible (over the stud) so we thought we'd better take it out and let it heal. Poor guy only had his earring two weeks! I told him if it had been healed up better, like if the roughhousing had happened even a week later, it wouldn't have been any big deal. He might try again once it's healed.
The kids got 3 whole snow days. They got 3 Covid days recently, too - this might have used up the available time off without having to make it up, so I'd predict any other cancellations have a high chance of being virtual instead of just off. Amelie had a project and a paper so she was working quite a bit anyway.
Sam took some pictures!
I stayed inside, but got these pictures from the window. Here's Amelie and Leah building a fort:
We ended up with seven inches on Wednesday and two more on Thursday. Roads were still dicey on Friday.
Edited to add some sledding pictures from our neighborhood park yesterday:
Look at all those kids!
Right before we got sick, they predicted a big snowfall for Columbia. It got adjusted down and we wound up with just a couple of inches. James was impressed with the snow's sticking ability.
I'm not 100% sure what they're doing here.
Well, the first week back from break, I got notices from both James and Amelie's schools that they'd been exposed to COVID, from Leah's school that she'd been exposed to lice, and from my work that I'd been scheduled with someone else who tested positive shortly thereafter. It wasn't even a full week! I had a sore throat Saturday & then Sunday, I wasn't able to smell my coffee in the morning, so I went into MU urgent care for a test. The worker told me not to go back to work while waiting on my results. I developed a massive earache after that & had basically convinced myself that it was a bad sinus infection. But I got the positive result Monday afternoon & by Tuesday night the kids all had some symptoms and been warm to the touch off and on. It's Sunday a week later and James and I are still snuffling and flushed. So all in all, worse than a cold but not as bad as strep/flu.
There has been lots of Nintendo.
