May 10, 2001 - Thursday
What an exciting day for Harry! On the very street of his daycare, someone was digging up their backyard with a backhoe and he got to watch it. As a matter of fact, there he was with his daycare provider when I drove in to pick him up. They were on the side of the road looking toward this backyard. She tried to point Harry toward my car, but he was captivated. At first, I didn't know what to make of it or what they were looking at, but as I got closer and could see into the yard behind the house, all became clear. As I parked the car, the provider was already walking toward me with Harry (thus away from the backhoe). Harry reached out to me with more desire than he's done in quite a while, but his motives were apparently not pure, well, at least not in terms of wanting to be with his old dad. As soon as I had him in my arms, he turned his head toward the other yard and longingly, and extremely focused, said "backhoe." Then, in a genuine sentence he pleaded, "watch it! Bachoe, watch it!" There nothing like true obsession to drive learning and it seemed that day Harry had learned how to express his desire. So, I took him back over to the yard, and even went in behind the house to give Harry a better view. He said, "dirt," and I pointed out that the backhoe was "digging dirt." Best of all, he repeated the whole thing later, effectively recanting his days excitement for his mother after we got home for the time in his life. "Backhoe, dig dirt, wow, dirt, backhoe, cool." Very exciting stuff!

Unfortunately, with very little warning, Harry quickly descended into a bad fever this evening. I had an inkling of trouble, thinking that Harry was surprisingly well behaved when he and I stopped in a couple of stores on the way home, but it was really not until he seemed to genuinely want to just lie on my chest rather than run around the living that we thought seriously that something might be wrong. Dinner was not bad, but the degradation had begun and by bath-time his fever was assured. Poor boy.


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