Week 113: Survivors

We all made it.  I'm not exactly sure how, except that Nona is largely responsible. 

We started off feeling strong, ready to rise to this new challenge.  Papa Bear and Lemon had bonus time together on Monday and Tuesday mornings, while Lime got to learn the great joy of participating in conference calls.   He was not at all a fan of the overhead lights, so I mostly kept them off and worked using only a small desk lamp, thus maximizing the cave-like feel of our windowless basement office.

By Wednesday, we were starting to feel a little frayed but we were still hanging on.  Thursday at 5 a.m., Papa Bear left for a conference in Texas.  Lemon noticed his absence immediately, since Papa Bear always has breakfast with him.  When Lemon was sitting in his booster seat, waiting for me to get his breakfast together, he saw one of the cats walk down the hall towards our bedroom.  Referring to his missing Papa, he said, "Daffer will find him."  He asked about Papa Bear constantly for the next 24 hours.  Then, on Friday, Opa disappeared, too--bound for the east coast.  That may have been the last straw for poor Lemon, who had 3 of his key people vanish from the face of the earth within 5 days.

Friday night, he just couldn't settle down in his crib, so I had him lie down on his big-boy bed so that Lime and I could keep him company.  He finally fell asleep, and I didn't want to disturb him and risk waking him up, so I crossed my fingers and left him there.  Unsurprisingly, he fell out of bed at 2 a.m. and clonked his head on the floor, so I picked him up and brought him into the room that I share with Lime.  He fell right back to sleep.  I dozed off and on in between feeding Lime.  At 5, Lemon woke up again and started singing.  I tried to explain to him that it was still night time and that the occasion called for peace and tranquility, but to no avail.  Eventually, his singing woke Lime, and Lemon started yelling joyfully at the top of his lungs, "He's awake, he's awake!" I did not share his joy, I have to confess, but at that point I gave up and decided that we would start our day.

I had thought that the night on the big-boy bed was a one-off, but after that transformative experience, Lemon decided that he was done with the crib forever.  I'd been hoping to get him out of there sometime in the not too distant future, but I certainly hadn't planned on making the transition on a weekend when I was a solo parent.  I refer you to parenting lesson number one, which is that kids have zero respect for your plans.  It feels like I spent about 70% of my waking hours (of which there were an exceptionally large number) over the remainder of the weekend variously standing, sitting, or lying in Lemon's bedroom while holding Lime and trying to get Lemon to stay in bed long enough to fall asleep.

In summary, we were all very happy to see Papa Bear when he got back on Sunday afternoon, and also very happy to see our nanny restored to health and back at work this morning.  Just to ensure that this week has no chance of being boring, Lemon came down with his first cold of the season on Friday and has been coughing quite a bit, so we're going up to 3 vest treatments per day for at least the next several days.  In a bit of fortuitous timing, we have a clinic visit already scheduled for Friday, so if Lemon is still sick then we can get him looked at.  I have to say I'm really dreading this weigh-in.  Lemon was doing better with food for a while but he's in another "experimental phase" at the moment and I can already see that we're losing ground again.  Ah well.  If past experience is any indication, next week will be entirely different, in some way that I cannot yet fully anticipate...