Sophie's World

8:45 PM: We should have posted an update long before now. I bet folks have been worried that we haven't posted because Sophie took a turn for the worse. I'm happy to say that she continued to do well through the week and is totally back to normal. Sophie is standing next to me as I type and said to tell you all that she's been feeling sad and mad and happy. We've been talking about feelings a lot lately, so that doesn't surprise me.

We had a good weekend, the highlight of which was meeting our friends for a movie and dinner. Everyone had a great time (and the girls thought the Garfield movie was very funny). Last night, Bob and Patti watched the girls while we went to dinner in Fayetteville, so we felt well-rested to start our week.

Elisabeth has had a tough day. She started a new camp this week, and when she got there and saw lots of kids and teachers she didn't know, she got a little scared and started crying. Randall was the one who dropped her off, and he hadn't thought to talk through how she might be feeling on the way there (the way we sometimes do). He hung out with her for a little while, and when she seemed to calm down, he left. She did fine, of course. I picked her up this afternoon, and she told me all about what she learned in cooking camp (the highlight was cooking grilled cheese sandwiches--wrapped in foil--with an iron). We stopped at Starbucks and had a treat and then left to pick up Sophie. Elisabeth complained of an upset stomach, and not long before we got to Sophie's day care, Elisabeth threw up (a lot). Luckily, I had finished my drink and handed her the cup to throw up into, so it wasn't too messy. She had been drinking a steamed milk, and we're starting to wonder if she might be lactose intolerant--we're going to start keeping an eye on how she reacts to different types of dairy products. After we got home, I gave both grls a bath, and Elisabeth was then totally hysterical about wanting to wear pajamas that are three sizes too small (that we put away a long time ago). I eventually calmed her down enough to come up with an alternative, but it took about a half an hour. Whew!

Randall had dinner with friends in Durham tonight and is on his way home. The girls are on their way to bed (but are frequently interrupting me as I write this), and we need to prepare to take Sophie to clinic for treatment tomorrow. It sounds like Randall is going to take her so I can get some work done, but we'll see. She already let me know what foods she expects to eat when she wakes up from sedation: cheese grits, rainbow goldfish, and "banana crackers" (which, it turns out, are stone ground wheat crackers that I don't think taste anything like bananas).

Here's a sweet story about Elisabeth from this morning. She was watching a TV show about making wishes, so Randall asked her if she had three wishes what she would wish for. Without hesitating, she said she would wish for (1) Sophie not to be sick, (2) me not to be stressed out about work and be happy, and (3) Nannie to feel better. I think it's pretty amazing that her wishes were all for other people. When I asked her about it this afternoon and told her how interesting it was that she hadn't wished for something for herself, she said she had an idea for a fourth wish. I thought now I would find out what she wished for herself, but this one was that T'yanna would never have gotten sick and hadn't died. She doesn't talk much about T'yanna's death (we've tried), but it comes out at times like that.