Week 94: The most of it

This week certainly wasn't what we'd planned or hoped for, but all in all it turned out fine.  Lime passed his first non-stress test on Thursday, and his second one today, so at the moment at least things appear stable on that front.  We have our first set of Dopplers to look at his blood flow on Thursday, so fingers crossed there.  In the mean time I am taking advantage of all these non-stress tests, which force me to lie still on my back in a quiet room with no one else for a half hour, to do something I haven't done since roughly the time that I started writing this blog: read a novel.  I can see why I used to do this a lot, it's great.  Something I aspire to get back to on a regular basis sometime in the next decade...

The schedule of appointments that I have to keep, plus the concern about Lime's growth, kept us here in Wisconsin and forced us to cancel our trip to a family reunion in Connecticut.  We were very disappointed to miss it but tried to make the most of it.  Papa Bear and I both took Friday off of work, with the intention of having a fun family day.  We did, although of course not as we had expected--Lemon decided to take an unprecedented 4-hour mid-day nap, which precluded the visit to a petting farm (with ice cream stand!) that Papa Bear and I had planned.  Instead, we took Lemon to the playground and he seemed totally fine with that as a substitute.  No ice cream, though!  We did enjoy a delicious dinner thanks to two of my aunts, who sent it over to us as a consolation for missing the big family dinner in Connecticut. 

On Saturday morning, we took Lemon to the busy downtown farmer's market to see Cows on the Concourse.  He had been talking about seeing the cows all morning, so we thought he'd be thrilled, but when we got to the actual cows, he looked at them with a disdainful expression for a few seconds and then hurried off to find some trucks to look at.

We had a much more successful animal encounter on Sunday, when we took Lemon to see the new Arctic Passage exhibit at our zoo.  He loved the polar bear and the seals, but most of all he loved the Tundra Buggy vehicle that was on display near them.  In addition to being huge and having giant wheels, it is surrounded by a bed of small gravel that can be picked up and dropped through a fence.  Pretty much heaven, if you asked Lemon.

So, all in all, not a bad week, really, except that Papa Bear and I knew what we were missing.  When we first moved here, we were a bit baffled by how infrequently people who live here travel to other parts of the US and the world.  Now, I think we're figuring it out--you may want to travel, but it is basically impossible to actually leave Wisconsin!