In The Words Of The Man Himself

I haven't posted a lot of detail about our adventure on ride day, because Dan hadn't recovered enough from his 80-mile effort to talk about his part of it much. It was hot, with the kind of humidity you get on the first sunny day after two days of pelting rain. The toddler-wrangling was plenty strenuous for me--six hours of keeping a two-year-old sufficiently cool, hydrated, and amused on the festival grounds at the finish line was a two-person job I could not have accomplished without the help of our host and good friend jeneralist. That said, Dan undeniably did the hardest part, not only riding 80 miles on a course with several major hills, but also exercising his wisdom and stopping short of the 100-mile goal when his wrists and knees asked him to, which was not an easy choice.

Here is Dan's own account of the Livestrong Challenge ride.

Thanks to everyone who donated to the Lance Armstrong Foundation. As the starting line for Zach's chemo comes up, we're making a lot of use of their cancer support resources.

So Many Possibilities

Did we catch this bug from the other kids at the library's story hour? At the fabulous Please Touch Museum, where we touched things? From the several thousand riders and supporters at the Livestrong Challenge finish line? At the gymnastics academy that had an open house for its preschoolers' program, where we found the only ball pit I've seen anywhere since the H1N1 outbreak started? From the playdate where the other kids' mom said they were over the roseola and couldn't possibly still be contagious?

Some quarantine decisions are easy: we won't be keeping our weekend plans with anybody who's starting chemotherapy on Monday. Other decisions are not so easy. If we caught the bug at the library, we don't need to stay home from story hour tomorrow. If from our playdate, then we know at least one family we can play with this week. Heck, if we knew the bug to be roseola, we could shrug, mumble something about it being common and mostly harmless, and pretend there was nothing to see here. But the Please Touch Museum is in another city two hours away, and half the riders at the finish line were from the DC area, and this might not be roseola, so maybe we're New Jersey's patients 0, 1, and 2.

If Gareth were in daycare, we'd be facing this quandary at least once a month. Great googly-moogly, how do parents with kids in daycare survive?

(Oh, and it looks like I've overcome my swearing habit. Heck? Great googly-moogly? Those really were the first words that popped into my head for those sentences. Another year of childrearing, and people will hardly be able to tell I live in Jersey.)

EDIT:
Dan's well enough to cook...sort of.