Lying low

We had all kinds of busy and exciting things planned for the weekend: there was the vegetarian potluck on Saturday, and pumpkin carving, and an outing with friends, and we'd talked about a hike in the woods on Sunday, to celebrate the return of crisp, fall weather. But on Saturday morning, in the wee hours of the morning, T. woke me up by crawling into bed next to me and uttering the ominous words, "I don't feel very good." Then she settled her hot little body around mine and I lay awake, feeling an almost audible toll of some warning bell somewhere: fever, oh no!

I should have known. On Friday she made an off-hand remark about lots of kids in her class being absent. And one of her closest friends, the girl she sits next to at lunch every day and plays with at recess was out almost the entire week. Those things, when added up, equaled a very sick T. for most of Saturday. She even fell asleep on the family room floor--something neither one of my children ever does when healthy. On Sunday she ran a low-grade fever all day, and today she's home from school.

Last night, when T. crawled into bed with us again I lay awake, thinking about how in those particular hours of the night--when you're up with a sick child, or lying awake listening to one breathe, or feeling a feverish head burrowed into your neck, your life can sometimes feel so vulnerable--like a house of cards; that there are many, many things you can fix as a parent, but so much you can't.

And you can't wait until morning because then, the house-of-cards feeling vanishes, and you can get down to the business of making things just right again.

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It may not have been the weekend I had planned for us, but it was the weekend we needed, and we still managed a few Halloween-spirited things. We carved the pumpkins:

Isn't this amazing? Scott's finest handiwork yet..Yoda.

And I roasted pumpkin seeds:

We ate an enormous pomegranate--a fall tradition of sorts at our house.

And half of us even made it to the vegetarian potluck. I took L., who for all his foot-dragging at first, thoroughly enjoyed himself, even if he didn't sample a single bite of food. I tried some wonderful recipes: pumpkin stew, a vegetable pot pie, Thai noodles, and ate too many Eyeball Bites (a slice of veggie hot dog topped with cream cheese and a Spanish olive).

Even if the busy weekend I had planned on Friday vanished like something blown away by the wind, it was a good weekend--the kind we need sometimes to remind us to slow down a little, that sometimes we need to pull our world close in around us, and just lie low.