18 Road

This has been a very busy week in the Diddiwah house. At the beginning of last week, we got new windows installed throughout the house, replacing the old, drafty single panes with double-paned windows that slide easily and seem to do a much better job of keeping noise and cold air on the outside. Hooray!

Also at the beginning of last week, Cailan caught a cold, his third one so far this fall. On Tuesday, we watched the election coverage with Cailan, slightly feverish, snuggled on my lap. He was asleep before Ohio was called for Obama. Wednesday he had a pretty runny nose and started coughing. Thursday morning he woke up with crusty eyes and a very stuffy nose – he stayed home that day from daycare. It was one of Chris’s teaching days, so I worked in the morning but came home for the afternoon so Chris could get to campus. That evening Cailan almost fell asleep in his dinner. Friday he was extra cranky; he and Chris butted heads for most of the morning, prompting us to order a book called “Your Three-Year-Old: Friend or Enemy” through interlibrary loan. By Saturday, Cailan was starting to get over his cold. We went to the mall and ordered blinds for the new windows, then spent the entire afternoon raking leaves. Our city does something kind of different for leaf pickup: you just sweep your leaves into the street, and once a week a big vacuum street-sweeper comes along and sucks them up. I guess it works in the dry climate here; in the northwest, we were always cautioned to keep the leaves out of the street so they didn’t clog up the sewers during the autumn rainy season.

Sunday was a very big day for Cailan. In the morning, we had our first playdate here. Cailan and I had met some neighbors on Halloween, a mom and a 3-year-old girl. We exchanged phone numbers, and I invited them to come over and play. Cailan was very excited about it and was talking about it all weekend. It went pretty well. They are still too young to really play that much together, but they seemed to have fun chasing each other around the house. It was funny to watch the differences between them; she was much more energetic, more often in motion, moving from one thing to another very quickly, and capable of jumping! Cailan is so placid by comparison, content to sit and play with Legos for long stretches at a time, though there is a constant stream of chatter from him. Sunday afternoon, our babysitter came over for a couple hours while Chris and I went biking. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, having both a playdate and a babysitter in one day, but that is how it ended up. Cailan had even more fun with his babysitter than he did with his young friend. They made lots of Lego dinosaurs, including a 4-foot-long Euoplocephalus. We paid the price of overstimulation at bedtime; it took him forever to relax enough to fall asleep.

Our bike ride Sunday was fun. We went to an area near Fruita known as 18 Road. We rode the trails Joe's Ridge, Kessel's, and Prime Cut on that map. It’s kind of a bleak landscape, very monochromatic, not much vegetation, just these big hills of brown dirt. But it makes for some pretty fun riding. The trails are pretty narrow, with lots of swooping, twisting and turning, and some very steep ups and downs. To get to the trails from the parking area, there is a 2-mile climb up a dirt road. It’s a gentle climb but on Sunday it really pointed out the difference in conditioning between Chris and me right now – he was climbing at a steady easy pace and I was struggling and puffing to keep up. It turns out that I have come down with Cailan’s cold, so maybe the onset of illness made me tire more easily, but Chris has been getting a lot of exercise lately and I simply haven’t. I need to change that. Anyway, we rode for a couple hours and almost 10 miles, until big storm clouds were gathering over the mesas southwest of us and the temperature started dropping. I rode down some (for me) very steep and exposed hills and was thrilled that I didn’t chicken out!



After Cailan was finally asleep, Chris, Utah, and I were piled on the red couch watching Nero Wolfe. Well, Chris and I were watching and Utah – who had gone on the bike ride with us – was sleeping. Then he suddenly sat straight up, panting loudly with a very wide open mouth. He stumbled when he got off the couch, and then when we let him outside, he fell down the back steps. We were pretty worried that something was seriously wrong – I was looking in the phone book for emergency vets while Chris was looking for signs of injury on Utah’s body, but within 5 minutes Utah was breathing normally, his heart rate was normal, and he was able to do all his tricks. We went to bed, and he was completely fine in the morning. Did he have a nightmare? A panic attack? I’m so glad he is okay.