Toads-in-the-Hole

A couple nights ago, Adelaide and I enjoyed an evening of Girl Time while Joel fulfilled some overnight on-call hours at the hospital’s emergency room.

Okay, well, Adelaide turned in at around seven o’clock and I baked some chocolate peanut butter cookies and settled down to watch the recent film adaptation of the Broadway musical Rent. Adelaide snoozed peacefully through the two-hour flick, and so I decided to push my luck and view the feature-length documentary that accompanied the film … Note the words, “feature-length”. I finally went to bed, head full of rock harmonies and belly full of 1% and too many cookies to count, at around midnight.

The alarm clock read 12:16 AM when Adelaide awoke with a whimpery moan. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just give her a little something to eat, and we’ll both be asleep in no time.” Her moans quickly became baleful and angry as the clock ticked from twelve to one.

One became two.

Two became three.

Three was fuzzy.

Four rolled around. I began saying to Adelaide (in a calm, controlled voice), “I’m really tired, and you’re beginning to make me feel frustrated with all the tossing and fussing.” It seemed to help because the next thing I remember was visiting an island community that had a pet shark named Marcie the Beautiful (I know I must have been dreaming because it would take an Act of God to get me to an island whose inhabitants had a pet shark). And then, it was 7:50, and Adelaide began her morning in-bed calisthenics routine, signaling the start of a new day.

Yesterday, we figured it out (with our suspicions and symptoms validated by the Sears Library). We think she’s struggling to push a few teeth through. So, last night at around bedtime, we gave her a healthy (and accurately measured) dose of acetaminophen and let her chew on a cold wet washcloth until she was ready to nod off … And it seemed to do the trick. I slept without dreaming.