Awesome

Here I am, Saturday night, bags pretty much packed, ready to go home first thing tomorrow morning. It's been a great week. An awesome week. I will never forget this week and probably never experience something like it again. A bittersweet thought.

Today was a bit of a tough one for both Darcy and myself. This morning she didn't want to eat breakfast, get dressed or go to the park. Oddly, at one point we had been playing in the basement and I had asked her to do something a couple of times, when she got up and went to sit on the stairs with her arms crossed for a minute. I'm still not sure if she was giving herself or myself a time out. Lunch turned out OK. She ate some plain pasta with Parmesan. Got her to bed for her nap fine, but then she insisted on singing all about "baby Donald Duck" for a good 10 minutes. Finally she drifted off though. But then she woke up crying. It was time for her to get up anyway so there was no point ignoring her. I went to her and got her out of the crib and still she cried. I cuddled her and hugged her but she kept on crying. She basically cried non-stop for 45 minutes after waking, at times just kind of whimpering, at other times really sobbing and sometimes nearly choking from not being able to catch her breath. I was really starting to get worried. All I could do was hold her. She didn't want to eat, drink, nothing seemed to hurt her. It took about half an hour (God - what kind of idiot takes so long to figure out what was wrong?!) to notice that she kept holding her ears. I finally asked if she had an earache and of course she said yes. So then I started imagining that we'd end up spending the evening in an emergency ward somewhere getting Darcy treated for an ear infection. Luckily it didn't end up that way. Fourty-five minutes after she woke up crying, she stopped. She just suddenly pulled away from me, looked up and said "I happy now". And she was. The first game she asked to play was hide & seek. By the time Sue got home and I explained what had gone on, Darcy had forgotten all about it. In talking with Sue about this whole episode, we ended up thinking that probably her new teeth were causing the earache, might also be part of the reason that she wasn't eating too much. But really, what do I know?

Sue offered to take me out to dinner as thanks for staying the week, so we headed to Montana's. Naturally, Darcy ate nothing. Sue and I however, cleared our plates! On the way there as we passed a bright yellow car, Sue asked Darcy if she liked that car, Darcy's response (and I swear I did not make this up) "Awesome!". Sue & I burst into laughter.

After a nice drive home along the river (because it was too cold to walk outside and none of us were dressed properly) we got into some warm clothes and played a few rounds of hide & seek before calling the family in Montreal. My parents leave tomorrow for their vacation to England, Switzerland and Spain.

I'm realising now that tomorrow's train ride home is going to be long and quiet; the kind of quiet I haven't had in over a week. I have a good book, my iPod and some food but I have the feeling that I will somehow still miss having Darcy around.

Ask me how I found the week? Awesome!