Week 153: Bailing

As if he had just read the "one walk, two talk" memo, Lime decided that, being one now, it was time to start walking.  He took his first steps on Tuesday, and has been walking more often and further each day.  It's so fun to watch, even if, this being  the second time around, I have a clearer comprehension as to what this new development means for my sanity.
 
This weekend, we went to the annual county fair.  As was the case last year, tractors captivate Lemon's imagination far more than animals.  Lime, on the other hand, seemed pretty keen on the flesh-and-blood attractions, so with any luck there will be some diversity of interests in our household.

Like much of the country, we had some pretty extreme weather this week, including a flash flood in our neighborhood.  It's hard to capture these things with a camera, at least if you're me, but I think you can tell even from my iPhone picture that our street effectively turned into a river for an hour or two.  Of course, this flooding precisely coincided with the window of time that I had scheduled to bring a home-cooked meal to a fellow CF mama with a kid in the hospital.  So, that plan went down the drain, or it would have if the drain had not turned into a geyser.  Good thing we CF mamas are well-practiced at handling disappointment.

One "feature" of our house is that we have a walk-out lower level.  In storms of this severity, of which there have been two since we moved to Madison, the walk-out turns into a flow-in, resulting in flooding of our playroom.  Last time this happened, we didn't know it was going to happen, and did not have the appropriate equipment on hand.  This year, we felt a little smug since we already owned the wet-dry vac and knew where to strategically position the dam of towels.  Papa Bear and I spent a quality hour or so vacuuming, dumping, wringing, and wiping until the rain eased and the water level went down again.

The last development of this week is actually about next week.  We had planned to leave on Friday for a trip to Boston, to visit all our dear friends on the east coast.  We've had some reservations about going, because in addition to all the hassles imposed by traveling with our assortment of medical equipment, our kids seemed to be at the worst possible ages for traveling.  Lemon is nearly 3, and is in a particularly willful frame of mind.  He resists everything, and somehow that seems to involve Pediasure 1.5 getting on every surface in our house. Potty training is a work in progress, not without its setbacks.  Lime is very good-natured but with his newfound mobility does not like to be restrained for even an instant. Or, to summarize from Papa Bear's perspective, "The kids are pretty much unstoppable wrecking machines that spew liquids from all orifices continually."


The closer we got to the trip, the less advisable it seemed to go.  I hated the idea of canceling a trip for no other reason than it seeming like a bad idea, since we've had to cancel so many trips for other, more substantive reasons since we moved out here. But, we just couldn't see how this trip would end up being a "vacation" for Papa Bear and me, or really, for the kids either.  So, we're postponing.  Our tickets are good until January so we are hoping to repeat our trip of last year, for the week between Christmas and New Years. In the mean time, we'll head to a hotel on a lake nearby with a couple of nice swimming pools an a pool-side bar for a few days, which will hopefully provide a fun and relaxing (as possible) experience for everyone in our little family.