Picture This

It's been an interesting week or so. A week ago last Friday, I went to the women's Bible study I go to, and Elaine came with me since she doesn't go to school on Fridays (there's childcare provided). About halfway into it, they brought her in to me, and she was trying not to cry. Very unusual. I picked her up and she whispered, "I want to go home. My ear is hurting." So, we went home and, wherever you were that morning, if you heard earth-shattering screams for about 25 minutes, it was Elaine.

By the time we got home though, she was half-crying, half-asleep, so I gave her some Motrin, put her nightgown on her, and popped her in my bed--where she spent most of the rest of the day sleeping, off and on and drinking ginger ale.

The next morning she popped out of bed and said, "My ear's feeling better," so we went on our full day of errands, the four of us. On the way home in the afternoon, Darren looked back at her in her carseat and saw her--white as a ghost, sleeping, and with some unidentifiable yellowish goo trickling out of her ear and down her neck.

Yikes.

He called a friend right away who fortuitously happened to be working urgent care at the clinic by our house, and he said to bring her right in. Diagnosis? Her eardrum had ruptured. And the other ear was infected, too.

The next day, all of us except Darren stayed home from church because our throats and ears hurt and we were coughing like barking dogs. And I'm just thinking, "We're supposed to leave for Door County in 4 days."

But, leave in four days we did, and it was glorious. You'll have to take my word for it because I packed everything and asked Darren to bring one thing, ONE I tell you, the camera--and he forgot it. That's two trips to Door County in a row that we haven't brought the camera.

So, you'll have to just try and picture it all in your mind: turquoise blue water and sky, maple leaves such a bright red it almost hurt your eyes, evergreen mixed in to soothe, and showers of aspen leaves, sprinkling down like handfuls of gold coins.

The weather was some of the nicest we've had too--it can be dicey in October there, but it was so warm and sunny we didn't even need jackets and could eat outside (at the Cookery, natch). Somewhere along the line, I picked up Elaine's ear infection, so I felt kind of cruddy all while we were there, but it almost didn't matter.

We still went to Peninsula Park every day to walk in the woods; we went to the harbor in Rowley's Bay to walk on the beach; we drove the country roads with the fall trees making an arch above us.

I read one pretty good book and one not that great one and one awful one. Darren and I finished watching all the episodes in our latest TV addiction, Doc Martin. We ate cinnamon rolls and cherry/almond scones and thin crust pizza and other Door County specialties, until we both declared that we are 100% back on the healthy eating program from now until Thanksgiving.

We got back late yesterday afternoon, and I have a garbage bag full of laundry to do and things to catch up on, and I grocery-shopped this morning since all that was in the refrigerator was a carton of moldy strawberries and some milk that was well past its sell-by date.

I wish so much that we had had our camera with us since there were a lot of moments I wanted to capture. But I know that I'll always remember some of the little moments--Lucy going out in her nightgown with Darren to look at the stars; Elaine running down the beach, yelling, "Daddy, Daddy, look at the big shell I found!"; both girls, giggling, bent over a game of Sorry.

They're all titled the same thing in my mind: "This is now--when the girls were little."