TRAVEL ORDERS

Have you ever had one of those days that made you question every decision you’ve made in your life — or at least the ones that led you to be living in some exotic faraway land? We had one last week.

Our African super immunity baby got sick for the very first time, his fever quickly climbing to a scary 104 degrees. As if this wasn’t enough, it happened while we had no power and also, as of a few hours before, no functional car. I gave a screaming Flynn a bath by flashlight to try to break the fever while Andy tried to figure out a ride to the pharmacy for some medicine stronger than what we had at home.

Our bath and medicine rotation didn’t work, and per a call to the CDC malaria hotline, we decided that yes this did merit waking up the embassy’s doctor and making him drive in to work in the middle of the night. At the health unit, there wasn’t a different plan but was at least an extra set of hands to hold Flynn down while we forced more cold water and medicine on him.

Through the night we worried he had malaria, despite the doctor’s assurances that he didn’t. If we were in the U.S., would we have had more faith in the doctor? Probably. Plus, we wouldn’t have had to worry about malaria in the first place. We would have avoided that whole scary situation with the high fever in the dark and no way to get anywhere too. And we would have had the comfort of knowing an emergency room and ambulances were at our disposal should we need them. These things become increasingly important when there’s a little person who you’re responsible for keeping alive and well.

Fortunately Flynn’s fever eventually broke and, day by day, he got better (although not before a terrifying 20 minutes after his nanny called to tell us his fever had risen to 105, and before we got home to learn that she’d misread and in fact it was really just 100.5). However, the lower his fever dipped, the more pink dots speckled his body. Back to the doctor we went. This time, we received a firm diagnosis: measles.

Yes, our toddler who was vaccinated six months ago for the measles somehow still managed to pick up the measles. But before we could get feeling too guilty about dragging him to this exotic faraway land where we’d exposed him to the measles, we did the incubation period math and figured out there’s pretty much no way he picked up the measles in Benin. He would have had to have gotten them while we were in the U.S. on R&R. Oh, the irony.

I guess there’s nowhere in the world where you can completely protect your kid.

Still, it was not a good day.

Hey Flynn, how are you?
EIEIO!

Hey Flynn, where’s grandma?
EIEIO!

Hey Flynn, want to play?
EIEIO!

Hey Flynn, want to watch cartoons?
EIEIO!

Hey Flynn, can you say anything else?
EIEIO!

Hey Flynn, EIEIO or cookie?
Cookie! Cookie, cookie, cookie! EIEIO! Bubbles! Cookie!

Like any good Unitarian I pick and choose what aspects of my husband’s Catholic faith to adopt. Honestly, I haven’t adopted much at all, but I’ve got to say that I really do love the Catholic concept of godparents. I like the idea of a kid having another set of adults who are looking out for him, and who he knows he can turn to when turning to his own parents isn’t appealing for whatever reason.

Admittedly and not surprisingly we don’t have the most traditional take on the role of godparents. As proof, here is part of email we wrote asking them to serve:

Now, I must admit that Andy is a little nervous about the influence you could potentially have on Flynn. “But they’re not Tigers fans,” he objected. “Can we make them convert first?” That flaw aside, you guys are good and cool people who we would like to be in Flynn’s life, and from what we can tell you’re just the right amount of Catholic to jive with how we plan to raise Flynn (read: not really Catholic at all). We envision godparents not as religious guides, but more just people who are involved in Flynn’s life though not technically related. I guess somewhat like N’s parents were to me, although obviously things will be different since we won’t necessarily be living so close. Still, we hope he’ll have adults to turn to for advice and stuff, especially during the phase when he will inevitiably decide that his parents are totally lame and awful people.

They accepted (and even promised to make the Tigers their official American League team), and so Flynn is lucky to have some pretty great godparents who even traveled three hours each way to get to spend a little time with him this past weekend, even though they’ll see him again soon once I’m back in the U.S. too and our whole family travels to visit them.

A little while back for Flynn’s first birthday, his godparents shipped him a few presents, one of which was a French language picture book. He wasn’t very interested in books at the time so we shelved it away. But since then he’s grown into quite the bibliophile and down from the shelf the book recently came.

“Am I mistranslating this?” Andy asked while reading through it for the first time. “This book is about some animal trying to figure out which other animal pooped on his head? And I’m really looking at illustrations of various types of animal poop?”

I examined the book for myself. “Yep, seems so.”

“Where in the world did we get this again?”

Of course, we got it from N and K. Not the most tradition of presents from not the most traditional of godparents, which is perfect because we hope Flynn won’t be the most traditional of guys.

It’s funny when you scroll through the photos on Andy’s iPhone. Flynn at his current age and then getting younger and younger. Flynn eating. Flynn walking. Flynn swimming. Flynn sitting. Flynn rolling over. Flynn making a funny face. Many photos of tiny baby Flynn doing nothing at all. Then you see a photo of my very pregnant belly, and after that, Abbey. Abbey at the park. Abbey on the couch. Abbey begging for food. Abbey howling.

It’s a visual record of the shift of our attention. And man, poor Abbey. But lucky for Abbey, Flynn and Andy are off getting a head start on R&R, and so now I have nothing but Abbey on which to focus my attention. She’s been basking in the glory of thrice daily walks on the beach, unlimited snuggles in bed, and — most of all — no little boy diving on top of her for a “hug” as she tries to get in a nice snooze.

I’d like to think she’s going to be sad when I finally leave too, but really she’ll probably like that even more: her live-in dog sitter has never gotten the hang of properly portioning dog food.

Our Halloween did not go quite as planned.

A week before the embassy shindig we met up with some other Americans to carve pumpkins. Yes, you can find pumpkins in Benin, and if you look long and hard enough you can even find ones that aren’t brown and oblong shaped.

In the U.S., at least in the chilly Midwest, a carved pumpkin would certain survive a week out on a front porch. We knew better than that here, though, so we kept our pumpkins inside our heavily A/C-ed house. Just two days later, though, they were already starting to mold. So we scooped out all the mold and moved them to the freezer. When we took them out the day of the Halloween festivities they were unexpectedly ghostlike.

Luckily the frost melted away. By the time we moved them to the porch and lit some candles inside, they looked like perfect American jack-0-lanterns. We headed out trick-or-treating with the gang. When we looped back for the stop at our house an hour later the pumpkins had literally melted to the ground like candle wax. Oops. That was Halloween fail #1.

Unfortunately there was also a Halloween fail #2.

Flynn is obsessed with our dog Abbey, so I spent hours upon hours searching the interwebs for the toddler dog costume that most resembled our curmudgeonly beagle. At long last I found one (and we thought of a cute idea for Andy and me too). I placed the order on October 1. Plenty of time, right?

Wrong. First of all, the embassy festivities originally planned for October 27 were moved up to October 20. Still, there was a chance mail would arrive in time. But… of course it didn’t. And so it was that day before “Halloween” and we were costume-less.

After searching Flynn’s room for inspiration we found a costume his grandma had picked up at last year’s after Halloween sales. Unfortunately it was a monkey, and Andy has an irrational hatred for all things monkey. (He would argue that it’s rational: he doesn’t think kids should be called “monkey,” as many are, because it encourages mischievous behavior.)

But you take what you can get when it’s a day before Halloween and you live in a country where no one celebrates Halloween. A monkey he would be.

But now, what about us? We’d come up with the perfect accompanying costumes for Flynn’s beagle get-up. I can’t tell you what because we very well may try to use the whole thing next year, but let’s just say it was the perfect combination of fun and clever and also pretty much no work, which is what we go for in the costume departure.

To accompany my monkey I decided I’d be a banana, mostly because it seemed like very little work as I had plenty of yellow clothes already. With no better ideas, Andy reluctantly agreed to be a banana too, but having no yellow clothes himself and refusing to wear mine, he sent our housekeeping off on an expedition to buy whatever  yellow menswear he could find in the market. Amazingly, he came back with some stuff.

Though the banana get-up was ready, Andy decided on a better idea. That day we’d visited a water bottling plant for work, and to tour the factory they’d made us dress up in some quite interesting attire. With it, our trifecta was complete:

Maybe not such a Halloween fail after all.

All costumed up, we headed off to join the 20 something other trick or treaters the embassy wrangled up (mostly European expat kids who didn’t know much about Halloween but heard about the free candy thing and said sure). Then we all caravanned off on our trick or treating route.

I really truly thought Flynn was going to love trick or treating. First of all, thanks to his last trip to grandma’s, he has quite the sweet tooth and is not shy about asking for cookies, which to him means anything sugary and nutritionally bad. Second of all, he’s going through that phase where he’s obsessed with putting things in containers. Candy that goes in a bucket? What’s not to like?

But maybe because the whole thing fell a little too close to bedtime, he was just not having it.

When we got to our house on the trick or treating route we left Flynn with his nanny and proceeded to the after party ourselves. Our costumes  took some explaining without the monkey.

Flynn got more into the Halloween spirit the next day, when he carried around his candy bucket everywhere he went and screamed and whined until we finally broke down and let him eat one Tootsie pop, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

Oh, and the beagle costume? Of course it arrived on Monday.