Happy Birthday Olivia et al.
On Valentine's Day, M's clan celebrated February birthdays at our place. It was a good time. M and I are becoming far more relaxed about entertaining than we used to be. Sure, we still cleaned, but we didn't worry about it being Martha Stewart-perfect -- maybe its the fall from grace and ongoing trial ;^)

We celebrated the birthdays of Hayley, Rachel, Kyle, and LuLu. Again, everyone was well relatively well-behaved. I think everyone had a good time. I did. LuLu was treated to her first taste of cake. She did a great job. Barely made a mess, and ate every bit of a good sized piece. Given Four's egg allergy, we decided to play it safe and give her a piece of the egg-free chocolate cake that M's mom makes for Four. Now, Four has thrown up 2x today and we don't know if we should blame ourseslves for allowing our not-quite one year old to have chocolate cake, or if we can chalk it up to inordinate number of germs currently in our house. We're all fighting colds, perhaps sinus infections, with coughs. In fact, Four spiked a fever last night around 104 degrees. He was burning up and very irritable, we gave him Tylenol and tried to cool him with lukewarm washcloths. In less than an hour, his fever was down around 101 and he seemed to be sleeping comfortably. It still freaked me out and I would wake every hour or so to check on him. By morning, he was down to less than the benchmark 98.6. We usually use one of those ear thermometers but at some point in the middle of the night ran out of the plastic covers for the tip. So I had to use a regular oral thermometer to check on the little guy. Since he was mostly asleep, and probably more because I couldn't be sure that we had never used it rectally, I took his temperature under his arm. This morning when he came out to the kitchen -- for once he was the last one awake -- to our surprise, he cheerfully ran to give M a hug. Then very quickly started looking at his arms. He was clearly looking for something.
M asked him, "What are you looking for?"
Four: "the hole."
M: "What hole?"
Four: "The hole for this..." ...and ran off to his room. He came back with the thermometer, holding the relatively more pointed end toward his arm. In his tired, fever-induced delerium, he thought we had to stick the thermometer into his arm to get the reading. The funny thing is he didn't put up that much of a fight when we did it. Brave?