Part 1
Denver:
Theo was very sick... he hadn't been sick for 4 months and then, BLAM right before our flight, he got a fever and a horrible cough. What's a mom to do? I packed a traveling apothecary and hoped for the best. By the time we arrived at my sister Barbara's home, we had been traveling 22 hours door to door. We were both wiped out, and sooooo glad to be there! All the wonderful plans my sister and I had made before our journey had to be put on hold. Our first outing the very next morning was a trip to the pediatrician. Diagnosis: a virus or a reaction to his MMR vaccine - we were told to wait it out. Of course that is a little hard to do when you only have 2 weeks to spend with your gorgeous 1 year old niece and fun-loving, goofy 3 year old nephew. We did our best by playing in the garden, taking lots of naps and drinking lots of fluids. Did I say drinking lots of fluid? It would have been more fitting if I could have been hooked up to an IV drip that fed me H2O around the clock. I felt like the water was being continually sucked out of my body by some imaginary nasty, water sucking fairy. One couldn't drink enough water! I was downing water every chance I had. My lips were so dry they were cracked and bleeding. My nose was bleeding too! When I didn't drink 1/2 liter of water every 30-minutes, I felt as though I was stuck out in the middle of the desert and was going to die if I didn't receive liquids immediately. Barbara, who doesn't drink much water to begin with, thought it was totally amusing. I, on the other hand, drink on average 2 liters of water a day in a normal environment. In the hostile dry-land of Denver I was easily managing 3 liters a day. Point: drink loooots of water in Colorado...
We wound up taking poor sick Theo back to the doctor after a couple of days due to high fevers and uncontrollable coughing. Diagnosis: ear infection and antibiotics. The boy was looking like his old self again after 2 hours of taking his first dose. Antibiotics are amazing. That's when the real fun started. We had play dates and splash pool fun. We visited the Botanical Gardens and the Children's Museum. We went swimming. Instead of bar hopping like we used to do, we went play ground hopping. We planted flowers in the garden and helped the boys color their own clay flower pots. We went shopping and we went shopping, and did I mention we went shopping. When in America, take advantage of the shopping... We had gin and tonics on the terrace and enjoyed home cooked meals prepared by her do-it-all husband, my brother-in-law, Russ. We talked for hours about the advantages and disadvantages of living in big cities and small towns, politics, musik, sports, kids, cars and old and new friends. We laughed until we cried and our stomachs hurt. All in all, time well spent with my sis, whom I sorely miss and her young family, who's growing up so fast they'll be wearing lip stick and going on dates so fast it makes my head spin. I took lots of pictures to freeze the precious moments and to show my kids so they don't forget who their cousins are far away in Denver.
