I am not coming back
Trip Start
Sep 16, 2011
1
180
290
Trip End
Nov 20, 2011
Southport, Queensland, Australia
Monday, April 9, 2012
Considering the amount of chocolate Woody ate yesterday and that he has not had enough sleep he wakes in terrific spirits. As do I. Noah works on his job application after a restorative 2 hour sleep.
And then we play a game which we end up playing all morning. We find a stick which is our fishing rod. We make a lake out of a sheet. And then I attach pipe cleaner 'hooks' to all the letters from an alphabet puzzle and they become the fish. Woody is pretty happy about playing fishing all morning. He is loves catching the fish on his rod, and is enjoying playing with the letters and making words. Just in a couple of hours playing I can hear massive progress in his alphabet skills.
I think we are having a ball. I know for sure I am. Elwood asks me to write a note which says, ‘I am not coming back’. I do it, speaking him through the letters, thinking this is part of his renewed enthusiasm for letters. I hand him the finished note, and he hands it straight back to me. He says, ‘I don’t want to play with you anymore’. I cannot believe this – I really thought we were having fun, and he has made me write my own ‘dismissal note’. I am hurt, and I must show it. He hands me back the note and says ‘can you put a kiss and a smiley face at the bottom’. Rubbing salt in the wound...
We have some lunch and notice that Woody feels quite hot. I take his temp and realise it’s 39.5 – too high. I cannot believe I had not noticed earlier. He was a bit lethargic and a bit greyish around the eyes but I put that down to a busy day on Sunday. He had not complained once all morning. We feel really bad that we did not realise he had a fever. Woody is stoic when it comes to these things.
I go and get him an icy-pole as I am full of parental guilt.
We sit in Woody’s room and read books and he falls asleep.
When he wakes up we build a den. Once it is built, he just gets in and lies down. That is not very Woody at all.
We do some more ‘alphabet fishing’, make a campfire and cook some sausages and some of the freshly caught fish on our homemeade campfire. Woody loves it.
Woody is keen to learn at the moment and asks Noah and I lots of questions, about things we do not know the answer to. The latest questions which highlighted our ignorance were about how snow is made and what a bilby is. We are relying quite heavily on Wikipedia at the moment. So I read Elwood 3 pages of A4 print outs on bilbies. He loves it. He asked questions, mulls it over, repeats things back to me. It is brilliant and I do not even care that his interest in bilbies is solely motivated by the chocolate Easter bilby in the fridge. I tell him he can eat an ear from the Bilby tomorrow. He is happy.
On a roll, I read to him about snow, rain, sleet and hail. Again, he loves it. Not as much as bilbies but he still shows enough interest to make me feel ridiculously proud.
He goes and tells Noah quite a lot about bilbies and snow and he is very proud of himself. He is a legend.
We have some dinner but Woody cannot really face food. He is fading fast. We clean him up and he goes to bed and is asleep in a heartbeat.
Noah finishes off his application and sends it off. Brilliant. We have a celebratory wine / beer and watch an extreme weight loss program (why?) and go to sleep.
Woody is awake a couple of hours later with a temp of 41.5. Hot as hell. We give him medicine and cool him with a face washer but he says he feels really bad. He is awake for ages and is being heartbreakingly good natured considering he is obviously poorly. And his temp goes down and we all get some sleep.
Phew.
Good night. xxx
