cookie basket

Twelve hours of sleep did the trick. I got up the next morning with no more headache/fatigue, no miscellaneous aches, no heart rate spikes. I was basically normal except for a runny nose. I think I had a mild fever that broke during the night, because I woke up sometime during the middle of the night feeling really warm.

BB was also back to normal except for a runny nose. So me and Patient Zero spent a happy morning playing together, with multiple adults still down for the count. We read Snow Kid and opened some more Christmas presents. There was a tin of alphabet magnets, as well as a set of induction pots and pans (the new house has an induction stove). Then I was like “Hey, let’s open the cookie basket!” BB had been pointing out the “cookie basket” for days, and I was curious what kind of cookies were inside. In fact, there were no cookies, but we examined the contents one by one: chocolates, nuts, jam, bread rolls, and lotion. Then we set them aside, because we had a nice basket. We filled it up with BB’s sushi plushies.

It turned out the “cookie basket” was not a present from Mom & Dad to brother’s family (as I had assumed), but rather a present from brother’s family to Mom & Dad. Oops. So then brother's wife came to remove the plushies and gift the gift, and BB wailed. It was his basket!! Oops oops oops I made a situation. Thankfully Mom is an expert in de-escalation. She quickly put her presents in a cloth bag and assured brother's wife it was fine and BB could keep the basket.

We considered staying an extra day to give them more free child care, but Dad didn’t bring extras of his meds, so that idea got nixed. We left around lunch time. I think there may still have been presents around the tree…well, it’s fine, they’ll get to them.

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Okay, more language stuff. BB makes a few errors that are really interesting. He conflates “heavy” with “big.” Specifically, something is “heavy” if it is difficult to carry due to its bulk: his blanket is “heavy,” a large beach ball is “heavy.” Also, to him, every clock is a “cuckoo clock” and every castle is a “sandcastle.” He responds to the short forms “clock” and “castle,” but the full terms are implied.

I also think he conflates spicy-hot with heat-hot. One of the packages of nuts had stylized lines radiating out from a nut that looked a bit like illustrated steam. “It’s spicy,” BB told me. (Is this why he always talks about spicy soup? It’s actually just hot soup?)

He’s good at following directions. A couple of times he was looking for a toy that I had seen earlier, and I told him “It’s in the box under the slide” or “It’s under the mango” (his giant mango plush, which was serving as a lid on a basket of toys) and he could follow that.

In other news, I was curious if he could balance standing on one foot. I did it and encouraged him to try. The first time he just watched and didn’t attempt it. The second time, he looked at me dubiously, then did it while holding on to the couch and the coffee table for support. Cautious lil guy. I praised him anyway. “Yeah! Good job, BB! You’re doing it!”

Man, looking at the weather forecast before this trip, I was so hopeful we could go to the park…instead we all got sick and there was no park at all. Maybe next time.