The Call

Every mom knows the call. It happens on those days when you send your child off to school and you think they seem a little off. However, there are lots of reasons they could be off. In Ella’s case, I figured she was just tired. Considering she’s not a morning person, some grumpiness in the early hours of her day are to be expected. She wasn’t feverish and talked my ear off on the way to school. An hour later, we were on our way to Lily’s school when I got “the call”. Ella’s school flashed on the screen. Sure enough, Ella had thrown up. She didn’t make a production out of it, she just casually stood in the middle of the room, watching everyone – threw up – and continued to stand there. No crying. It wasn’t too bad because she’d only picked at her breakfast. Lily’s school is next door so we were walking through the door a couple of minutes after it happened. We were welcomed by Ella’s little friends who were quite excited to see us. Ella was sad, but chatted with me on the way out to the car.

As we left, Ella realized she was leaving school and started, telling me, “No! Ella school! Ella school!” Then she was running through the parts of her day she was missing: “Miss Maria!” “Ring Around Rosy” and my favorite, “put sit-upon away!” The sit-upon is my favorite little phrase she utters throughout the day. The students all have little mats that they sit on or play on called sit-upons and at the end of the school day, they need to put them away. Ella couldn’t understand how her school day could be done when she hadn’t put her sit-upon away. She was pretty worried about this.

Whatever illness she has is really strange. She naps, wakes up hot and feverish, cries and shakes then after a half hour or so, she snaps out of it, fever down, happy as can be and hungry. So, I feed her when she’s happy and hold her when she’s crying. Her fever isn’t even that high when she has it and she hasn’t thrown up since school.

She stayed home today from school and I took the girls to the zoo. I figured even as a sicky, she could sit in the stroller and look at animals, and the fresh air was good for her. She did enjoy the zoo. She even asked to, “find zebras!” Mostly, I had to get out of the house and away from PBS Kids for a bit. Their programming is great, but after an entire day of it yesterday…I needed some fresh air too!

Ella’s language skills have just exploded, and we’re at that fun stage where she mimics everything. One of our favorite Ellaisms happened the other night. She has a habit of calling caps, craps. Ella was observing the jar of baby food we had sitting on the table and the lid was off. She pointed out to us, “Look! Crap, baby crap!” “Baby food crap for Lily!” We were just besides ourselves.