attercop! attercop!

today was an itchy day.  last night was an itchy night.  at one point greg woke me up and said, 'it's almost 4:00, he's still awake.  can we swap?'  of course i had no idea he and william were even up, and had been on and off, for hours, and that william had had a bath and everything.  we swapped.  i took over spraying william with the magical chicken pox spray from the pharmacy, getting him water, snuggling with him and singing him songs, until eventually we were both asleep, at which point greg summoned me back to our room because henry was awake.  that was our night.  it started out easy though.  william fell asleep before 6:30 (though only for an hour or so), the dishes were done, and magically we found ourselves, both of us, reading stories to henry.  he looked so happy when he realized we were both going to stay and read to him and it felt so special sharing that time with him, and a little sad knowing how little time he gets with both of us to himself.  eons less than his big brother.  obviously it is the fate of the little brother, but i still feel sad about it.

after such a wakeful night, william was up by 6:30, never once requiring a nap in the middle of the day.  we built much of a lego TIE fighter and, for not the first time in the last few months, i realized how meditative it is to sift through a big bin of little lego pieces searching for the right ones.  i'm easily lulled on little sleep.  we also read more of the hobbit and i was a little bummed out tonight that he didn't want to read more before bed because i would like to see them get out of the mirkwood forest, but that will just have to wait until tomorrow.  -- an interesting side note (at least to us)... at one point bilbo sings songs to taunt the spiders (so he can save the dwarves who have been wrapped up in their webs) and in one of the songs he calls the spiders 'attercop'... which, under any other circumstance (one where i'm not living in denmark) would go over my head, but we were interested because the danish word for spider is 'edderkop.'  (pronounced, at least if you're william: ella-cop.)  attercop is apparenty an old english word ('attor'- poison and 'cop'- head).  the two countries were united a bit during the anglo-saxon period thanks to the vikings and so there is a lot of english in the danish language.  but until today i hadn't known that spider was one of them.

well, there is your possibly accurate linguistics lesson for the day.  until tomorrow (assuming it's not another wakeful night).  goodnight!