Testing Limits -- of Patience and What the Human Body Can Endure

Brigid hasn’t had a very good time of it lately, being sent home Friday from Sibley 45 minutes after we dropped her off. The center called around frantically trying to reach one of us to say she had thrown up three times in the 45 minutes after we left her on their doorstep. Jack had the car, so they finally got him at home. He brought her home and spent the rest of the day sitting by her side while she threw up and spiked a fever. I got a ride home from a co-worker and took over the sitting part. She had her last bout about 8 p.m. – just about 12 hours after the first. It was weird. All of the sudden, she was fine. She went to bed, had no problems, woke up Saturday raring to go.

That Saturday afternoon Jack and I went to Lowe’s to check out refrigerators (more on that later). Then, I went to the Y to walk on the treadmill and Jack took Brigid and Patricia to the rec swim. Margaret had her friend, Natalie, over for the night. They hung out while the swimmers were gone, then, once they got home, Jack took Brigid out to stomp in mud puddles, which she loves to do. After dinner, we all went to the mall for a few hours to burn off steam and let the girls hang out on their own but not really since we were there, too. Brigid loves running around the mall, and has learned how to skip with one leg. It’s a weird, hybrid mix that’s not quite the young toddler gallop and not quite a true two-legged skip. But she’s miles ahead of either of the other two at this age, who only learned to skip once in Miss Nancy’s tap class. That, for Brigid, is six months off.

Sunday we had our weekly replacement of the refrigerator ritual. I think it’s the way to keep a new appliance in the home – buy one, call them to come and get it a week later, then do it all over again. We’ll never have an old refrigerator this way. It’s actually a major pain. We got rid of our old frig after about 15 years (it was used when we bought it before Margaret was born). In the end, the thing was held together with duct tape. So, hooray! We got a new one. Lowe’s delivered it two Sundays ago. We went bold – it was black! It matched the façade of our dish washer. I felt so cosmopolitan! Then, after it got up to temperature, it sounded like the dish washer, so in that, it matched. You could hear the thing out in the living room. I thought it would “settle down” or something. But after a few days of living with the loudest refrigerator I’d ever heard – even our old one wasn’t that loud – I called Lowe’s to complain. They didn’t give me a hard time, and I was armed for bear in case they did. The refrigerator was responsible, in part, for the day care center having such a hard time tracking us down. After we dropped her off that Friday, we went up to Lowe’s to look at other models, thinking maybe we needed to trade up. But the price difference between the model we had and a “better” one was about $300. They weren’t better, ie., they didn’t have any sturdier shelving or brackets. They were just bigger and some had ice makers. But we listened to the model we did have, turned on, in the cavernous store and it was silent. We left to think about our options, and that’s when the plans for the day changed and Brigid came home. That’s why we were looking at refrigerators on Saturday. They came on Sunday to exchange the unit, and we spent another Sunday morning taking things out of a refrigerator while we waited for delivery of a new one. At least this time, we’d already cleaned and dumped all the old stuff, so it wasn’t as much of a pain. They brought the new one and it hums along the way it was meant to.

So, Brigid returned to school on Monday no worse for wear. She had a great day, and has been talking every day about her upcoming birthday and being a pretty princess for her birthday (she’s a pretty princess everyday.) Tuesday morning, I no sooner got to my office when the phone rang and it was the center saying to come get Brigid. She had a huge explosion in her pants – big, huge. I guess it was quite the mess. So, for the second time in four days, we were picking the baby up from day care. I got her home and she was absolutely … fine. They said she had to be 24 hours diarrhea-free, literally. 24 hours. So, at 9:45 a.m., I dropped her off today. I think it was just a combination of too much juice and raisins. But, we’ll see. So far, so good. No frantic calls saying to come get our kid with the bodily fluids problem.

Meanwhile, through all of this, Margaret and Patricia have been gearing up for state math testing while Brigid has been gearing up for her own testing – of her limits and boundaries. She’s got an “A” in almost-3-year-old behavior.