Sickness and Riddles

Thekla came down with a bug about three weeks ago and was out of school a couple days. I took her in to her pediatrician who gave her ampicillin. A week later she was still coughing, so I took her back. Diagnosis that time was upper respiratory inflammation, a/k/a asthma (although they only call it that if it becomes chronic). She went home with an albuterol nebulizer and a steroid for the inflammation. A week and a half later she was still coughing and running an occasional fever. That time, the doctor listened very carefully to her lungs, sent us down to x-ray, and on seeing the film diagnosed her with pneumonia. Luckily, a very mild case. She got azithromax and a week out of daycare, and now a week later she seems mostly better with no more fevers. She’s still coughing, and that will probably go on a while, but I’m sure she’s on the mend. (So is Mama, who had a very serious, four-days-in-the-hospital case of pneumonia, and Daddy, who just had the flu.) The good news is: she doesn’t have asthma.

In happier news, Thekla has been watching a lot of Dora the Explorer, which is a much more annoying show than My Little Pony. One of the shows had something to do with riddles, so Thekla started telling them to me (at first the ones from the show):

Q. What has two tails, eight legs, and goes “hee haw, hee haw”?
A. Boots the monkey riding a donkey.

Then she started making them up:

Q. What is orange and has a big tail?
A. Toulouse!

Q. What has whiskers and brown shoes? (WTH?)
A. Daddy!

Well, that last one just killed me.

I’m really noticing how much more articulate she’s getting, how much her sentence structure is improving (although she still doesn’t seem to think that the number fourteen exists, or for that matter feminine gender pronouns). She’s got more memories of things than I thought she would have at this age — she saw a photo of herself that had a snowflake background, and told me about the time we made snowballs and threw them at the house and she missed. That was nine months ago.

She’s an incredible kid.

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