(no subject)

I don't think that I would be able to tell the difference between a 30-degree day and a 32-degree day, or food served at 140 degrees (as food-safety recommended) versus 138 degrees. So it amazes me that I can detect the difference between 98.6 degrees and 100.6 degrees just by brushing my hand against Colin's neck. It's screamingly obvious.

I think this is the boy's first fever. He hasn't gotten up above 102, but he seems awfully sick. And hot. Yesterday evening he was semi-asleep in our bed, and I went up because he started to whimper. He was tossing and turning, hair damp and plastered to his face, skin flushed pink. I slid an arm beneath him and felt heat radiating from the bed and from his sleep sack. "I can't believe Michael turned on the electric mattress pad when Colin is already running hot," I thought resentfully. But he hadn't. It was just Colin, burning up.

Tylenol doesn't bring the fever down. I took him to the ped office yesterday wanting to rule out an ear infection, because he'd been under the weather for several days before getting a fever and that tips my bacterial-infection meter. No; his ears and throat and lungs are clear. ("This is his first ever sick visit?" the nurse practitioner said. "Well, whatever's in your breastmilk, you should bottle that and sell it.") But the visit was worth the trip anyway, because they told me that he's old enough for ibuprofen now, and that is bringing the fever down to normal.

Hopefully today he'll be willing to do something other than (a) be held, and (b) nurse. I nursed him all damn night. And Alex wet the bed (!) at 2:30am.

You know what? I'm tired.

(no subject)

Colin's feeling much better today. Thank God for ibuprofen, because unlike the Tylenol it actually reduces his fever. He was clingy today but not burning hot or miserable.

Now that my grant is in, we're moving ahead with an exciting plan we've been talking about for a while: redesigning how our house is laid out. Right now, Michael and I have our desks crammed into the dining room. The dining room table tends to attract piles and piles of paperwork. Alex's art supplies are in the playroom, but she doesn't really have a good place to spread them out without Colin being able to reach what she's doing. And we don't have anywhere to spread out any adult projects, like church work or whatever.

Meanwhile, one of the largest and most beautiful rooms in the house is our bedroom, which we really just use for sleeping and dressing. Most of the time it's a massive staging area for laundry. And we have a third-floor guest room which gets used a couple of weeks a year.

So we're planning to move our bedroom upstairs to the guest room on the third floor. There's a tiny room across the hall that will become Colin's bedroom when we decide that he's done co-sleeping. The guest room is small and ugly (70's-era paneling and a dropped ceiling), but it has room for our bed and our dressers and we probably won't spend a lot of time examining the decor. And it has an en suite bathroom, which is nice.

Our current bedroom, large and beautiful with a bay window and three floor-to-ceiling built-in bookcases, will be turned into a study.



I think Michael and I will probably put our desks on either side of the radiator. We can set up the little desk we got for Alex alongside, with Michael's old computer.

We went to Ikea today to get some other furnishings for the room. The main purchase was a big Expedit bookcase - a simple grid of 25 cubes, plus doors for a few of them and file boxes and things to go in a few others. We're planning to use it to hold books, art supplies, papers, and homeschooling stuff like math manipulatives. Since we're going to be dismantling our guest room, we also got for the study a very simple low couch that folds down into a bed. And an impulse purchase (which, I feel compelled to say, cost much less than it says on the webpage): a really cool gateleg table with drawers in the middle. We can load the drawers up with pencils and markers and scissors and tape, and use the table surface for art or puzzles or games or work that involves reference materials or Legos or any kind of project we want to be able to spread out without baby/toddler interference.

So soon our dining room can be just a dining room, and we won't be as likely to wind up with an even layer of crayons and markers scattered all over the entire house, and the large amounts of time that we spend at our computers will be in a more comfortable and well-laid-out room, and we'll have more spaces where Colin can be near Alex without messing up her things, and when we start homeschooling this summer we'll have a great space to do projects and keep all our stuff. And maybe - although this might be asking too much - the top of my desk will stop being a complete disaster area, because I'll have other places to store my papers and things. (Hey, stop laughing! It could happen that way.)

I think we'll make the move in two weeks. Between now and then we have some packing and clearing-out to do. We're going to need to hire a couple of hours of help to do the actual furniture-moving. And I want to see if I can find a few straight chairs at thrift stores, to go with the table. (If we pull our desk chairs over we'll tear up the floor finish.)

I am really excited about how much better we'll be using the space of our house.