Monthly Archives: December 2004

Hope everyone’s having a fun holiday. We we’re in Crested Butte, CO with Chris’s family: Mom Lucy, sister Laurie and bro in law Mark. Played Cranium after the baby went to bed. The cards that have you hum a song and others guess it were priceless, mostly because Laurie can’t hum to save her life. Just for fun, right now, where ever you are, try humming any of the following songs: My Best Friend’s Girl, Close to You, Celebration, Nights in White Satin or My Sharona. Hopefully you’ll see what I mean.

I am considering two very risky regifting moves this year. The first is giving something the origin of which I don’t recall. What if I give it back to the person who gave it to me? The second is re-gifting something in the same week I received it. Somehow I always thought it was right to let the thing sit around a bit before sending it on. Both these things make me feel like I’m living on the edge. Wheee!

On Saturday we went up to Stinson Beach where our friends had rented a house for the weekend in honor of Josh’s birthday. We drove up with Don, who is always entertaining, and who was meeting his wife and three week old baby boy, Alden, whom Don and Tamar adopted unexpectedly over Thanksgiving in a wonderful twist of events. It’s so fun to see a tiny little baby again; I miss it, though of course they’re more fun at Clementine’s age.

We had a fabulous Thai dinner cooked by Helen and Don and played cards well into the evening. We put Clementine to bed in the bedroom off the living room where we could hear if she woke up. At about 10:30, she rolled off the bed in her sleep and hit her head on the based of a heavy carved table and got a big egg on her forehead. She cried for a minute but went back to sleep quickly and seemed okay, though the egg looked painful. About an hour, after kicking butt at Scrabble, I got into bed with her. I hadn’t even fallen asleep yet when she turned over and started throwing up her whole rather large dinner. This was alarming, not only because of the seriously putrid smell, but because we had learned in our infant first aid class that this can be a sign of a concussion, which can be very serious for kids. We tried calling Kaiser’s pediatrics advice nurse, but while we were on hold (“Wait time may exceed 30 minutes”–why yes, it did), she threw up again and it started to freak us out.

The fire department paramedics came and ended up driving us to Kaiser Terra Linda, 40 very curvy minutes away over Mt Tam. For future reference, this is the wrong ride to do in the back of an ambulance, facing backwards, at night, with your baby’s puke-encrusted hair about 1/2 inch from your nose, when you are prone to motion sickness. When we got there, Clem seemed okay, though tired, and I excused myself to go hover over the toilet, convinced the nausea was getting the better of me. They kept us so they could observe her for a couple of hours; I got to sleep on the gurney curled up with the baby; Chris had to sleep sitting up in a very uninviting chair. In the end, Clem threw up five times, the last two times barfing pure bile, which was really alarming, but she was okay. They finally let us out of there at 5:30 am and we just drove straight home. What a scare. Next time we will bring the bedrail with us.