Long overdue post part 1: Sylvie is THREE!!!

Sylvie's birthday fell on a Tuesday this year and since we wanted to have a party, we decided to celebrate a couple of days early on Sunday. We knew we'd have several small children ranging in age from 1-3.5 yrs, we wanted to make sure that they'd all be kept busy (and happy!) so we set up two play areas: one in Sylvie's room and one upstairs. The upstairs play area had a pop-up house/ball pit, tubes to crawl through and even butcher paper on the walls with a large can of crayons at hand for any aspiring muralists. Plenty of fine and gross motor therapy for all, heh.

All told we had about 25 people at the party and everyone seemed to have a great time. Sylvie enjoyed herself but seemed mostly oblivious to the fact that the party was for her. Still, she did run around saying "happy birthday! happy birthday!" at random intervals which was adorable. I managed to get a party hat on her (briefly) and she cracked up at her reflection and said "happy birthday!" a few more times because the pointy hat symbolizes birthdays to her ever since we attended baby B's 1st birthday in December where many of the guests wore the hats.

We had one minor upset during the cupcake eating when Sylvie gagged and threw up. The mess was mostly contained on her booster seat tray and we were able to whisk her off to the bathroom for cleanup and a change so quickly that almost no one knew what had happened. We kept an eye on her for a bit but after a while we thought (as it turns out, incorrectly) that it was just a case of 'too much birthday' as she went right back to being her smiley self. When it came time to open presents, Sylvie was pretty 'meh' about it but Sara's enthusiasm as our self-designated helper more than made up for her lack of interest. Sylvie received many fabulous gifts including cool clothes, fun books, art supplies, a scribbly spiral pen, a wooden sandwich set, character dress-up magnets featuring Elmo and Zoe, a bucket o' play-doh fun...(plus many other things that I hope the people who gave them will not be offended by my not listing!)

The party eventually wound down and everyone headed home. R and A stayed a bit longer and helped with the clean-up (thanks guys!) before they too departed. All was right with the world until later that night, about 2 hours after Sylvie had gone to bed, when suddenly we heard her coughing...followed by the unmistakable sound of her vomiting. Turns out the cupcake upchuck from earlier in the day was not an isolated incident as we'd hoped because the poor girl was unhappy-go-pukey all through the wee hours of the morning. This also alerted us that Sylvie's birthday soiree that day had been a possible disease vector because it was a little too coincidental that Theron had puked his guts out 2 nights prior and that he'd likely had a GI bug and not just food poisoning as we'd originally believed. (We learned later that only one party guest ended up being sick as well and her parents thought she could just as easily have gotten it from another friend she saw that same day.)

Sylvie stopped throwing up around dawn but was completely wiped the whole next day and developed a high but short lived fever of 102 that afternoon. I made sure to keep her hydrated and cooled her off with a damp cloth during the worst of the fever and after a good nights rest she was much better the following day.