From PDX to the OC & back again: a tale of phlegm, cutness, and natural disasters

Hola. Matthew rappin' atcha for a change. Sup peeps?

I'm home with Lucy today while she is on the mend from a cold. We just had a not-so-successful trip to Southern California - Lucy, Melissa, and me - over the labor day weekend. But even with Lucy getting sick, we had some fun. It was good to see the family and - during the stretches that Lu wasn't miserable - she had fun meeting people, being a goof, and playing with the cats.

Lucy was starting to get sick before we went down, but it didn't seem like her little cough would amount to much. We had a good flight down.


Aside from being an adorable goof (pictured above), she wanted to look endlessly at the "A Year in Kid Believe" picture book that the people at the Stringer Center printed out. The pix in the last post are a very few of the hundreds of pictures that they assembled into a spiral-bound, probably-60-page picture book of the whole class, teachers, friends, and family over the last year.

More entertaining than I expected, Lucy spent hours going through the book and pointing out her friends and teachers and the special guest appearances from Mommy, Daddy, and Grandma Bobbi. And Lucy is friggin' obsessed with a picture of a former teacher, Kim, and Kim's baby. Even though meeting Kim's baby apparently was a pretty freaky experience for Lucy (in one of the Kim's baby pix, you can see Lucy frantically signing "All done!") - she wanted to see the picture dozens of times.


After flipping away from Kim's baby page for the 55th time...

• "Kim?" Lucy asks, "Baby?"
• "Seriously?" we reply, "Haven't we looked at that enough yet?"
• "Kim!" She insists "Kim! Baby! Now!"
• "Oh my God Lucy!" we moan, "You're killing us, kid!"

After a pleasant trip down and a nice reunion with (Lucy's) great-aunt and great-uncle Amy and Bill and her uncle Joe and friends of the family Miles, Christopher, and Mary Anne (I'm so bad w/ names - we discussed how she and her two sisters have alike-sounding names that now I can't quite recall any of them), fun meeting of the family cats Lotus, Kia, and Bently* (fun for Lucy, not the cats), we had a lovely dinner in the warm So Cal evening.


Lucy continued being adorable through dinner.


But that night the horror of the common childhood illness kicked in. She was up a lot all through the night coughing & feverish & crying. The family (sweet hearts they are) claimed they heard hardly a peep - but it seemed to me like her plaintive wails resounded quite effectively through their open-floor-plan, all-stone-floored house. I tried to sleep in on a sofa in the opposite corner of the house for a while & could hear every whimper.

So, change of plans: we moved up our return trip by a day and a half, checked into a hotel for that last night, and even made an urgent-care visit with Lu. Made sure she didn't have an ear infection or anything else serious. They tested her for the swine flu, too. Nothing serious. Just a cold or bug of some kind.

And that night we actually stayed in a really wonderful hotel & Lucy managed to rally enough for some smiles and laughs. Here she is looking down from our window at a very cool kids' water feature - a bunch of timed water jets & sprayers & sprinklers & other contraptions.


We put on our swim suits and ran around in the water park a little. If she'd been healthy, she would have been bonkers for the sprinklers & sprayers. As it was, she was happy to have dad carry her around & investigate the various ways to get wet.

The hotel was full, so they actually opened up a room for us they keep on reserve - a special suite (identified on the room sign as a "sweet") that was quite wonderful. Spacious & luxurious. And somehow Lucy managed to sleep like a log all through the night. A welcome contrast to the previous largely-sleepless night.

On our flight back I snapped a few really neat photos of the California wild fires. Amazing that natural disaster can look so graceful - beautiful even - from 35,000 feet up.


We recently upgraded from a digital point-and-click to a mid-entry-level Nikon SLR and wow... I really like this camera! It does a beautiful job just with its auto settings - and I am just enamored of the amount of data that a 10.3 Megapixel camera captures. I've always loved taking snapshots out of airplane windows and this camera really takes that to the next level. The following side-by-sides show the whole picture + a screen resolution full-size detail. (Click the images to open the larger versions)


OK... Lucy is now done with my blogging so I'm signing off. L8R, MCH