The Plague descends upon our house . . .

We're all sick or getting sick: Micah's had a miserable cough for more than a week, keeping him (and us) awake at night and just making life hard, especially since he's not eating much. (He is still drinking his bottles of formula and sippy cups of water.) His cough is so harsh, I half expect to hear the wet splat of a lung hitting the wall. He and I finally went to see the doctor yesterday, and he's now on azithromycin - and we'll see how things go over the next few days. Micah is so much better than Thea at taking medicine. Thea started with a cough and runny nose Friday, I've had something lurking in my sinuses on and off for a couple weeks, we just need to get better before Christmas.

I got most of our holiday cards out this week, with a few stragglers here and there. Next year, back to shutterfly.com or kodakgallery.com. Now if I could just get motivated to do the Christmas shopping.

The Bureau of Vital Statistics re-issued Micah's New Jersey birth certificate, so the Bite-Me comment can be rescinded. Despite the screw up with the file number, it still took less time than Thea's birth certificate.

By stock in Kimberly-Clark, the only holiday decor in our house is fluffy drifts of tissues all overthe place.

Potty-less in Princeton

I'm shamelessly riffing off of one of my favorite blogs, http://www.cluelessincarolina.blogspot.com/. If you read the Crayola Factory post, you're aware that on Friday, my dear sweet Micah flushed a small plastic bottle down the powder room commode. This is the potty of first resort when you have a four-year old whose executive planning skills doesn't include making time to use the bathroom. Out of commission for the weekend, hike to the upstairs bathrooms, plan ahead.

The very nice plumber came Monday afternoon, gave the toilet the equivalent of an endoscopy with the snake, pulled the toilet, gave it the equivalent of a colonoscopy and said that there is the perfect place for something this size to wedge itself, beyond the reach of the snake. So the toilet got taken - likely to be replaced on Wednesday. The plumber's boss called and said they'd give it one more try in the shop before declaring it dead.

So right now we have a gaping hole in the powder room floor, stuffed with half a roll of paper towels to prevent sewer gas from making its presence known and morning will bring either the old almond porcelain toilet back to us, or a new white one. For the sake of expense, I hope it's the old one, but since the plumber said that it was likely a lost cause and new toilets do not come with seats, the kids and I went to Home Depot and bought a toilet seat - and a new kitchen faucet.

This was after schlepping for the third trip to UPS in Hamilton/Trenton to try and pick up my prescription pads. They must be signed for and handed to a live person, so what I usually do afte the delivery notice arrives is get on the UPS web site and have them held for pick-up. It's been a fairly routine, every six month occurance since I started working at the family practice in 2001. Wednesday the delivery came, and since we were all at the ophthalmologists' office, the notice was on the door. That night I put the hold notice in the computer. Thursday morning Micah and I go to UPS on our way down to Columbus. Hours have changed, the pick-up/drop-off place now opens at 11:30. Bite me, UPS.

So we stop off on the way home from work/day care on Thursday and the package is out for delivery, whoever is in charge of pulling it FAILED to do her job. Bite the other butt cheek, UPS.
Friday, we bailed and went to Crayola, so another day lost - for a package that allegedly will only be held at UPS until December 5th. Finally on Monday after picking up Thea at school, we went one more time and got the package. Fortunately, my supply of Rx pads is not completely used up so I was only flipping out over the number of trips there in a world where gasoline is almost $3/gallon.

Bite Me, NJ Bureau of Vital Statistics

Back in mid-October, on a Wednesday when Ela wasn't able to come for Micah's session, he and I zipped down to the Bureau of Vital Statistics to apply for his NJ birth certificate. I was thrilled that the person who had helped me with Thea's application had not yet retired, brought all my papers and then some, and we got through the whole process and went home to wait. The wait for Thea's NJ birth certficiate to arrive was around four months, and that was considered very, very fast.

So imagine my utter delight when right around Thanksgiving, Micah's NJ birth certificate arrived in our mailbox. I went to the Yahoo group for NJ parents with children adopted from China and posted my surprise and happiness. . . .

. . . .and then last week a letter arrives from BVS asking me to return those birth certificates because they had the wrong file number on them. And the office sent an envelope but didn't even have the decency to put postage on it, considering it was its error, not mine. So today, after seething quietly about this, I finally copied everything (including the envelope because the person who had written the accompanying letter wrote on it so that it would come back to her) and sent it off.

Maybe obtaining Micah's passport will be trouble-free part of this whole documentation process. . . . I doubt it - and it worries me because when I do apply for it, I have to surrender the one and only copy of his Certificate of Citizenship. It is returned with the passport, but considering even expedited processing isn't really expedited, giving that up, hoping it doesn't get lost in the processing, is more than I can handle right now. And we're not going anywhere anytime soon anyway.

Crayola Factory & National Canal Museum

What do you do when your toddler flushes a four-ounce bottle of his sister's juice down the powder room toilet, flooding the bathroom? You mop up and decamp for greener pastures. Actually we were on our way to going to Easton to the Crayola Factory when Micah found a four-pack of Thea's juice somewhere on its way upstairs and decided to see if the four bottles and his bottle of formula would sink, swim or flush. Thea pulled two out of the toilet, I found one in the foyer, and the fourth is likely lodged somewhere beyond reach. The plumber will be coming on Monday, and his fee will be deducted from a future allowance payment.

Anyway, Crayola is just a bit more than an hours' drive from Princeton, and the route goes right past the drive-thru D-n-D, so coffee was also part of the agenda. Thea warmed up to Crayola pretty quickly - there are just so many little projects to try out: we got modeling clay, made gingerbread puppets, paper-bag puppets, went to this area that projected her movements onto a screen in various colors and speeds. She tried out her Super Spy dance moves and was impressed with the results. Micah liked the area that had lots of plastic balls that you dropped into a bin, the balls rode up on a screw-like device, went on rails over to a series of plastic ramps down into the bin where they could be retrieved and the process repeated, and repeated, and repeated.

An elevator ride above Crayola is the National Canal Museum, which was very cool - very hands on: Thea could take a model of a canal boat and move it through a series of locks up and down, loading coal along the way, until the boat arrived at the other end. She took it very seriously, unlike the three boys on a school field trip who were playing Battleship with their canal boats.

They could also build their own canal using a series of plastic walls and sending bathtub boats through the chutes that they created. Thea got to steer the tiller of a mock-up of a canal boat, which made a platform move and she tried pulleys to lift a 32 pound barrel to see which pulley system made it easier to lift. I almost enjoyed all of this more than Crayola, especially since there were fewer people around.

After we made the obligatory stop at the Crayola Factory Store, we had lunch at Perkins and then drove home. Micah was asleep before we got to the bridge over the Delaware River, and Thea conked out after a few rounds of games on her Leapster.