It's a bird! It's a plane!

No, it's another giant mystery illness threatening to descend on the Punk Rock household, rendering its occupants listless, whiny and useless. While I can console myself with the fact that Clementine will likely never get sick past the age of five after these immunity-building years of daycare, I sure wish we could shake these germs. But what would I do for entertainment? It's far too much fun to track her symptoms on webMD and try to diagnose her using snippets of information from parenting books, websites and organic health brochures. So far she has the puking of a week ago, a super runny nose and bouts of fever, not to mention diaper rash: I'd say it's an ear infection mixed with teething, but what the hell do I know?

Other than wiping Clementine's nose and taking echinacea every chance I had to ward off my own bout with the sniffles, this weekend was pretty low key. We went to the carnival for a bit, I ran a race and Clementine cheered me on, we played outside and then let her watch the Wizard of Oz while she shivered, all wrapped up, from fever. Yesterday she didn't even want to get dressed, so we went to breakfast and the grocery store with her in her Pee Wee jammies, which came off only at bath time and to put on new jammies, which she is presently wearing at daycare. There are so many fights on Monday mornings as we have to get her up and out the door sooner than on weekends that it's not even worth that conversation just yet. Besides, if she didn't like what we had to say, she'd just say "Nate, Amanda [sounds like Mada], I don't think so." She's pretty bossy lately. And cute.





We're suffering from one last Chicago-induced crisis: Rye. Or Ry. Or Wry. Rye (I like that spelling best) is a stuffed zebra Clementine plucked from her cousin Abby's collection, bestowed with a name and promptly fell in love with. Rye didn't come home with us, but his spectre still haunts Clementine's bedside, apparently. As she was drifting off to sleep last night, she sat up suddenly and demanded Rye. When I explained he lives at Abby's house, she seemed to understand but continued to talk about it: "Rye Abby house. Baby get Rye." I let her go downstairs to her toy box to pick out another friend (perhaps Noo Noo, the little doll we picked up at the carnival), but none quite did it. I even tried to pass a stuffed horse off as Rye, which was met with an annoyed glance and "No Rye," from the discerning little girl. So I guess we're in search of a stuffed zebra.