Welcome to Fresh Burger

Owen has been battling a post-vaccine fever that’s been hovering just over 101 – high enough that the nurse told us we needed to make a return visit to the doctor’s office to make sure hot baby was not undergoing excessive complications from the shots. So we enjoyed morning number two in the doctor’s office (where I always wonder what sick germs the boys are contracting as we get shuffled from room to room) and canceled a planned walk to the park with Will’s good friend and his mom. That, of course, frustrated Will, but he went along surprisingly patiently with the change in plans.

Then as he was eating lunch, he reflected on his morning. “Mom, I didn’t have a tantrum,” he said. We talked together about how as he’s getting older he’s beginning to get better at talking about his frustration and avoiding those screaming, tearful blow-ups that make us all miserable. Of course, I’m thinking all the while about the afternoon of successive tantrums we barely survived two days ago as Will readjusted to life without water sports and constant attention from his grandparents and Aunt Leash.

But that’s old news too Will. He matured so much in two days. He says, “When I was young I used to have tantrums too.”

And for now I’m happy to play along with the fantasy that those days are over.

Speaking of fantasies, here’s an update on “Ally and Puff and all my other friends,” which make daily and sometimes hourly appearances in our home. “All my other friends” have lately acquired names. Yesterday Rob and I listened to the adventures of Wake-we, Suey and Upkine Baby over breakfast, in which Wake-we, Suey and Upkine Baby all went looking for Ally and Puff who, it turned out, were hiding in the mud. Then Wake-we started climbing all over houses and whales and things: “Wakewe used to come upside the house and downside the house and he’d tumble down the stairs, but I didn’t watch him because I was making a hot dog with Ally And Puff. And then he jumped off a whale and I didn’t look because I was making a hot dog with Ally and Puff but then he just tumbled off and fell right in my arms.”

For weeks now, Ally, Puff, Will and “all my other friends” have been living in the town of “Fresh Burger.” We finally learned where that was when Will pointed it out on his placemat map. Turns out they’re living smack dab in the middle of the Caspian Sea (that’s just north of Iran, in case you’re a geography fool like me). To get there, they enlist a pilot, who first drives a car, then flies a plane, and for the final leg of the journey, drives a truck into Fresh Burger. As Will explains, “It’s a big long way.”