June 19th

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walk
I hope you all enjoy how I masterfully photoshopped out the woman who walked into this shot at the last second and ruined it, lol
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Gwen had her 18-month vaccinations this week (a month late, oops). We don’t have a scale at home so doctor’s appointments are the only time I bother to find out her weight. She’s 13.2kg/29.1lb, which I think is about the 90th percentile? idk how percentiles even work but that seems good.

As far as I can recall, she was fine after all her other vaccinations, but this round was a doozy of a bad time for her. She woke up around 11pm with a fever that hung on the next day, and the injection site was a big red welt. The welt increased in size on Tuesday, and when I got her up on Wednesday it had grown exponentially larger, formed a weird welt-within-a-welt and also a series of satellite mini-welts that ran down the outside her arm as far as her elbow, as well as the inside of her arm. Her whole upper arm was hard, swollen and hot to the touch.

I spent the whole morning and half of the afternoon on the phone with the nurse hotline and in & out of various doctor’s offices. The first doctor I saw (at the walk-in clinic by my house) thought it could be an infection, and the second (our regular doctor) thought it was a hypersensitivity reaction to the dilutant in the vaccine. He told us to treat with Benadryl, and to keep an eye on it in case it continues to get worse or starts oozing. He also seemed concerned I would stop vaccinating her after this and tbh I was a little offended he thought that about me as I’m hugely pro-vaccination.

Last weekend Sym asked me to take her to buy a cactus for her dad for Father’s Day, which I took as a good excuse to also buy some new plants for the compost heap I call a garden. I chose a really pathetic looking maidenhair fern and a cool groundcover plant called Corsican mint, which smells fantastic when you smush the leaves (not that you should be deliberately smushing your plants). I planted them right outside my office window, between the hydrangea and bleeding heart, and I moved (transplanted?) a couple pathetic hostas in the hopes that they do better with some more light. My one non-pathetic hosta is literally blossoming this year for the first time ever, but all the others are sad and tiny.

I don’t even know if it’s the right time of year to be moving plants around (probably not, although they haven’t died since I moved them) but I DON’T EVEN CARE, like if plants can’t stand up to my type of gardening they they may as well give up now. ONLY THE STRONG SURVIVE, etc. There’s also a nice-looking fern growing near the front of the house that I think I should steal I MEAN TRANSPLANT to my garden. It’s in this weird little concrete alcove where you can’t even really see it & it only has about 6″ of space to grow so I think I’d be doing it a favour (and also getting revenge on the universe for whoever stole my garden hose & sprayer, seriously I had to water my plants with a juice jug).

In addition to the planting and transplanting I’ve been continuing to weed back there and OH MY GOD. First of all, there is something I am definitely allergic to so I should never do any gardening if I can’t have a shower straightaway because the itchiness is unbearable. Also, in the last couple of years I swear someone chucked a few handfuls of grass seed into the garden and it’s terrible! You can’t get a lawnmower back there so the grass just get long and weedy-looking and it’s everywhere, displacing my hard-earned moss and hiding more insidious plants until they are too big to just pull up. On Monday I tore out a handful of grass from under a rhododendron and found a salmonberry bush AND a horsechestnut tree growing there!

While I was gardening Sym was hanging out on the stairs discussing her favourite Pretty Little Liars theories with me. In case you don’t know there is a province-wide teacher’s strike going on here, so I guess school’s out for the summer? Some people are pissed/pissy about it but IMO teachers absolutely deserve to be paid and treated well. I just don’t get all these people who are like “teachers are sacrificing our children’s education so they can line their own pockets!” But like… if you aren’t paying a decent wage, you aren’t going to attract quality teachers, and then what kind of an education are your children going to get? NOT GREAT, BOB.

This early start to summer vacation is kind of a drag, I had been planning to force a reading list & math workbooks on her (because I am cruel) but it kind of snuck up on me and I am woefully unprepared. I’ve been trying to kill two birds with one stone by throwing her outside with a book to read in the fresh air, and I’m hoping to start going on Seawall walks again, which she will also be participating in. She’ll no doubt treat them as forced marches but WHATEVER, TWEEN. You can’t spend the whole summer locked in your room wearing dirty pajamas and watching Youtube videos.

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