2003-01-14
Clay is so dear to me today. Is it because he's sick?
This morning I had dressed us both for the day, was about to head out the door, leaving him with B, when Clay demonstrated an activity I'd previously only read about: projectile vomiting. Onto his clothes, onto the rug, onto the sleeve of my jacket.
Ever the optimist, I figured it was a fluke and brought him upstairs to change him into a fresh outfit. The thinking was I'd take him to daycare and if he persisted in being ill, I'd pick him up. (B, having lost much more work time than I during last week's chicken pox siege, had made it clear that it was My Turn.)
So I changed him into a particularly cunning little T-shirt-overall ensemble, brought him back downstairs, handed him to B and went outside to load the car. Upon my return, I joined the two of them on the couch, whereupon episode two of the vomiting began. How could one small stomach contain so much? It really was stunning. Clay's never been much of a spitter-up, just dribs and drabs. This, on the other hand, was clearly something different; recognizable bits of last night's dinner awash in the fruits of this morning's nursing session. Bleh.
Anyway, we kept him home, I worked from home, and the day went reasonably well. No further vomitus, but there were three explosions from the other end. Through it all, Clay, when awake, seemed remarkably cheerful. We're crossing our fingers that this will be a 24-hour thing and tomorrow we can resume the increasingly elusive regular routine.
Oh, and one other thing: this morning for the first time, he looked up at me and said, "Ma-ma!" Now, I don't consider this particularly deliberate, but given the weeks of Da-da-da we've been experiencing, it was a kind of music to my ears.
He's suddenly doing all sorts of things. Both B and the daycare ladies claim to have witnessed him taking a number of unassisted steps. Today I realized that he was independently pulling down the lever of the See-and-Say in order to elicit recordings of barnyard animals making their characteristic sounds. It requires quite a bit of strength, that lever.
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