Benched

Thanks for all your good wishes. AJ was feeling much better this morning and now we’re running into a different kind of trouble with his recovery: keeping him still.

He woke up early and very cheerful and requested no more medicine for now. In fact, he didn’t ask for Tylenol until the afternoon when he crashed for a little while. The Boy and Girl Next Door and The Boy Across The Street all came over to visit him, and this was fine for a while, but then it was not, because the four of them can’t be together and be still for very long. The visit ended in tears (AJ’s) and with some toys put in time out and it took AJ a while to recover. He behaved badly, but I still feel like it was my fault for not predicting that too many friends would be a bad thing. We’ve instituted a one friend at a time rule from here on out.

To cheer him up, I took him out for lunch, but he didn’t eat much and was starting to fade. But he perked up again later and was coerced into playing all kinds of games for much of the afternoon — Connect 4, a knock-off version of Gnip-Gnop, Zooreka, a magnetic fishing game, Rush Hour, and now he’s sitting on the screened porch playing Stratego with his dad on a vintage 1960s era board, that belonged to Mr. Spy’s family.

The best thing, though, is we’re hearing AJ’s voice. I caught him singing to himself for the first time since the surgery today. But mostly it’s his speaking voice. I’ve missed it. It sounds so different, but not in the ways I expected. It’s much higher and he sounds so much younger. He sounds like he did when he was two. I suspect the higher pitch is due to his sore throat and will probably go away when he’s feeling better. But right now everything he says sounds especially charming and earnest.

It is spectacularly cool and breezy here and the stream is running high and fast again after yesterday’s colossal rains. It doesn’t feel at all like tomorrow is the Fourth of July. The monarda, which looks like red fireworks, and which has religiously bloomed on July 1 every year since I planted it is still quite green.

I spent a lot of time in the garden today, which sounds nice, except that a lot of my time was spent in rubber gloves plucking Gypsy Moth caterpillars off of my beloved Weeping Copper Beech tree, which has a bad infestation. It is, along with removing slugs from hostas, the least glamorous garden work. But it did afford me the opportunity to meet a small fluffy white, impeccably groomed and very placid dog named, oh so ironically, “T-Rex.” T-Rex was walking by our house with AJ’s friend M. and his mother and eldest sister and he sat patiently at their heels. I wanted to take him home. And maybe teach him how to growl. I may need to teach AJ that too.

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