Weekend Goings-On

[selenite0]

Last Friday was my day off so I took Maggie to the Nature Center. This was her third visit. Last time we saw the prairie dogs. This time I took her to the marsh side. There's a boardwalk out over the water so we could look down at the minnows and lily pads. Then we walked through the woods along the marsh edge. Very active insect ecology in that stretch, lots of spiderwebs and pretty dragonflies. Jamie hasn't been included because he's in pre-school but given later that might be just as well.

fordprfct hosted gaming on Saturday. It was a small crowd but the kids kept the house from being too quiet. celticdragonfly and I had our two, Tom and Sarah brought Alexis and Samantha, Chris showed up and was drafted as playground equipment. There was less gaming than usual, we had lots of chatting since there was a few months to catch up on.

The first game was Empyrean. I had my worst game ever while Sarah ran away with it using a strategy I thought would never work. Lesson: never overpay for a planet. Next was Apples to Apples which had all kinds of sillyness. "Plastic is a subset of Disco." Plus an astrophysics argument over whether energy in the center of the Sun is transferred by radiance or conduction. bkseiver wasn't here so anyone could win Unexploded Cow. I blew a 50-50 chance to drain the pot right at the end so Sarah took the pot and game.

Sunday we noticed Jamie had a bunch of bug bites on his feet. fordprfct had checked the yard for fire ants. The three girls played in the backyard without harm. But Jamie had a dozen bites and his feet were swelling up. So we applied lots of goo and decided he'd stay home from school Monday.

This morning he woke up unhappy and didn't want to stand up. Time to go see the doctor. Showed up at 8, next open appointment at 10:30, they saw us at 9. Good manners and sincere worry are a powerful combo. celticdragonfly had to deal with the tangle of getting the prescriptions filled.

After one too many emergency room visits I declared Brendan's Indian name was "Runs With Scissors." Seriously, my comment on his first asthma attack was "Wow, we've always been here for trauma before." Given the other times Jamie's had nasty ant bites in the past year I'm dubbing him "Dances With Fire Ants."

Comments

[telophase.livejournal.com]

My mother tells me that once, when I was wee, she heard me screaming and crying in the yard. Looking out the window, she discovered I was sitting on a mound of fire ants, without the sense to move.* Luckily, I have no memory of it, and the time in Tanzania at the age of five when I blundered into a column of army ants turned out OK because Dad saw me and had me stripped and ant-free in half a second flat. I think I was far more traumatized by him doing that than the ants, because I didn't even realize what had happened until he told me afterwards. :D


* Mind you, I was probably too distracted by the pain to think of it at the time.