Yesterday, part 1--Summer, sickness, distant relatives

David's sense of time and grammar has evolved to understand the past tense in terms of "yesterday" and "last week." "Yesterday" is anything that happened in the memorable past, such as seeing "Horton Hears a Who" when it came out. "Last week is anything that happened before a time he can remember; his infancy and my childhood both took place last week. While is makes for some difficult conversation, it does make belated blogging better. Rather than feeling guilty about not having blogged about anything that happened this month, I can simply assert that anything blogworthy happened "yesterday."

"Yesterday" summer finally really began. June has been a gorgeous, beautiful month with a lovely mix if mild days, mildly hot days, and thunderstorms (worse for parts west of us). Typically, the starting event for our summer is the Smoky Hill River Festival in Salina. This year's was particularly nice. Everyone was able to attend, the weather was lovely and Jaime and I figured out a way to rig our finances so that we could do our Christmas shopping. Since the festival is Father's day weekend, that means we knocked out two holidays in one weekend.

David followed up by getting sick. It began on a Tuesday night with a sore throat at bedtime and progressed to a fever and continuous vomiting throughout the night. Wednesday afternoon he saw a doctor and Wednesday night, after 36 hours without food or drink, he went to the hospital for fluids. He'll describe this to you in detail. "Yesterday, I went to the hospital and the poked a hole in my arm and purple blood came out. I didn't like it." He has been obsessed lately with the color of his blood, observing that it is blue in his veins but red when it gets out, so it was an opportune time to have blood drawn and an IV inserted. We never did determine conclusively what he was sick with. He was neg. for strep so it was probably a virus. He still had a fever at bedtime that Friday night. I haven't seen him that miserably sick since his first birthday. Because of it, we skipped my company picnic on the 21st, which I had been looking forward to for about 6 months. Instead we had a lazy Saturday together.

June also saw visits from several relatives. Firstly, my aunt Marla, her son, Shawn, and his wife, Janelle, came to visit. I have never met Janelle and the last time Shawn was back, Jaime was still pregnant with Simon. Simon was typically shy around them at first but eventually warmed. Since they left, every time we go to grandpa's (which is where Simon saw them), Simon says "Shawn? Shawn?" This was actually Marla's second recent visit. She was here in May with her youngest, Patricia with whom Simon also took his time falling in love. I don't have any photos of either of these visits, but the visitors do. Maybe I can get some from them eventually.

More recently, uncle Grant visited from Seattle with similar results. Initial shyness followed by obsessive longing. They got go to the Kansas City Zoo where Ducks were apparently the highlight. Grant very self-consciously cultivated the role of cool uncle for himself, which both he and David enjoyed immensely.