A Happy Sixth

Miles’s birthday party day started with his professing so much pain in his legs that he couldn’t stand or walk. He also was a little sniffly and slightly warm. (grrrrrrrr) I wasn’t terribly sympathetic, I confess. If you don’t get up and start running around normally, I’m calling off this party! Oh, he did not want me to call it off, but he still hobbled around. I’m fine, Mom! (grabbing on to furniture, knees bent stutter-stepping, even crawling!) [Miles: I had an idea, and I pulled myself along the ground with my hands.] That went on for a couple of hours, and then I started getting worried. Maybe he had some godforsaken African virus that attacks the muscles or joints or something. So I decided we’d go to the doctor (open on a Saturday morning, thankfully). Time was ticking and I was thinking, we’ll have to go ahead on the cake, but I could still cancel the balloons… But after not toooo long a wait, the doctor on duty said he had a slight cold and “growing pains” – sometimes one bone will grow faster than another which can be very uncomfortable… So I dosed Miles with some ibuprofen and the party was on! [Miles: At the time of my party, I could walk, stand and run!]

[Since I wrote that, Eliza came down with the same “growing pains” symptoms from what I can only assume was some godforsaken virus. This time it was Easter Sunday, exactly a week after Miles had been sick, so there was no hope of the doctor’s office being open. We had plans to leave that morning and drive 4 hours to Antelope Park to stay with another family in a house there, (more on that later) so we decided to go on since Miles had recovered after a few hours. It was scary to see Eliza in so much pain she couldn’t straighten her legs or walk and her symptoms did last longer, but by early evening she was running around. Does not make me feel very confident in that doctor on duty, however. I’ll be talking to their regular doctor about it.]



Back to the party…Miles’s KG class is all girls except for 3 other boys, 2 of whom couldn’t come, and then we had a couple other friends. They wore costumes and got little nametags to write their alias when they arrived. There was Sleeping Beauty, Tinkerbell, Hannah Montana, Cinderella (Eliza), Princess, Skeleton Girl, Spooky, Batman, Monsta, Kirriyo (no idea…something Italian?), and Crush-doh-man (Miles).



Six-year-olds are certainly more mature than 5-year-olds. They knew the rules of the games and reminded each other. They were very orderly and nice. (Maybe it’s because they were mainly girls.) It was too bad David couldn’t be there, but I had our friend Clem and a few new mom friends to hang out with (Nevena-Serbian, Bettina-Austrian, and Michelle-Zimbabwean).



On Miles’s actual birthday the next weekend, we opened some gifts David had brought back from the States, and we went to an Easter party with a few other families at Clem’s house. It was a nice scene…we stayed all day and night. The kids swam, hunted Easter eggs, and watched attentively as David set up Miles’s water pressured rocket which provided sufficient entertainment when it blasted 100 feet in the air and then landed on the house. Setting it up a second time proved impossible although the dads did make a valiant effort.