Ice fishing postponed

Well, we were going to take the little nipper out to Chena Lake this morning and try to get in a good ice fishing day before break up starts to happen...which is supposed to be sometime this month. The ice is pretty thick out there...four feet or so still...but the junior jet set decided to catch the cold train and is now coughing and snuffling. It's not really a surprise. Charlie came home this week with a vicious cold, bordering on bronchitis, and it looks Connor's caught it though thankfully not the same extent.

Still, he's waking up several times in the night and he's extruding various disgusting effluents out of his face so we thought it best not to take him out in freezing weather with a serious ice fog on, despite the heated huts. I don't want to tip a minor cold into a serious one just because I had a yen for fresh trout fried in cornmeal.

I managed to get myself into a nice little back spasm too, so I'm not altogether disappointed. This happens to me once or twice a year, at least once while pregnant, and used to happen with much more frequency when I was an exec. Stress plus heavy lifting (office supplies and filing cabinets and O-6 desks weigh a lot!) used to net me one of these every three months or so. The pregnancy ones always hit around the same time and is probably the result of relaxing ligaments and the weight of my belly starting to fall forward. I've tried every home remedy on the sun, even enlisting Charlie for some Swedish-style muscular torture, but it hasn't completely gone away. I've been snivelling for a couple days...I'm lucky Charlie puts up with me at all.

We got an email from the Freels...they're leaving South Padre Island to head up home to Indiana. They missed the worst of the winter craziness up there...for awhile I thought Angela was going to have to paddle her way up here for refuge from flood waters! As much fun as South Padre is, they're going to be glad to be home, I'm sure. I hope they'll come up soon! Mom and dad are already planning on coming up the week before Memorial Day...once we get settled in the new house we'll be so glad to see them and my prodigal kitties. We've already got some plans for what to do when they're here. Angela wants to come and go dog sledding and yet isn't up for Alaska winter weather, though those two things really rather go together. We'll see if we can't get her up here in the summer...I'm eagerly awaiting this much vaunted summer weather everyone keeps bragging about!

Red Flag Alaska kicks off for the first time next week, so we don't expect to see much of Charlie. He is running about putting out fires and trying to get a handle on his people...it's really tough because about half are deployed at any given time, and the other half are rather demoralized from only being here six months out of every year. Six months on, six months off deployments are terribly enervating for all concerned. Families are tired and stressed, the troops have a hard time feeling committed to either job because as soon as they get going they know they'll be gone again, and Charlie's the head cheerleader trying to rally the team. His pom poms are a bit tattered, because he knows none of this is easy on anyone. I'm not sure what the solution is, but I hope there's one soon to ease the burden on good guys like this.

I think we are going to venture out and pick up some fruit, yogurt and bread at the store. Connor has a yogurt and fruit smoothie every night and goes through the stuff at an exponential rate. He's still not reconciled to most veggies...green and orange things are right out...but I can always get him to eat his weight in watermelon, blueberries and apples so I'm hoping that compensates. He's chubbing out a little bit, probably preparatory to shooting way up in height again. We also need to look for new shoes for him because he's nearly outgrown the pair we got in January. I think he's only got one more toddler size until he's in grown up kid shoes. Sheesh, this kid is getting big!

Oh and on cool kid accomplishments...he added at least ten more words to his vocabulary this week: home, all right, car, watermelon, book, green, blue, yellow, purple, puzzle, boy, boat, square, star, circle, etc. Some of them probably wouldn't be very clear to someone who wasn't around him much, but he's trying so hard to really talk. And he adds the signs if he thinks you're unclear on his meaning anyway. He's known his signs for all his colors for six months or so, but it's fun to hear him say them and actively identify them. My favorite is please...it comes out "peez" and instead of circling a fist on his tummy, he does a funkified Queen of England wave above his head. If he's really desperate -- if, for example, cookies are at stake -- he'll yell "peez" in his most ingratiating Bambi voice and looks like he's trying to lasso something over his head. Yesterday was the first time that he tried to count independently without being prompted...he got a car as a reward for being a good boy during a haircut and was told he could pick one. He solemnly held up a finger and said, "one car?" I told him that was right, one car...so he grabbed a package of five cars that were all in one wrapper. I had him count and we agreed very seriously that there was more than one car, so that was not okay. You could see his little brain thinking I had somehow snookered him in semantics, but he gallantly accepted a little gray VW beetle as his reward for a job well done.

Wow, kids are cool.