Phoebe's crawling

Here's a sweet picture of Phoebe, who is feeling much better:

 

I think that in addition to being ill with COVID, she's begun teething. So she's been grumpy upon grumpy, very drooly, and her tongue is sticking out of her mouth 95% of the time. But she's darling.

She also decided during our little COVID quarantine to make locomotion be her only goal in life. While I was stuck in bed, she was scooting all over the house and even pulling up on things. She's been crawling for a while (since about 6.5 months old, I think, so about a month now) but she's really kicking it into high gear and just goes wherever she wants to go.

This morning she scared me by reaching out from under the table to grab my feet while I was talking to the kids. I knew she was crawling about—in fact, chasing her down was next on my list of things to do!—but I hadn't realized she'd crawled under the table and was after my feet. She really likes to find my feet for some reason.

Here she is after testing positive, when we were reunited in our little quarantine room after spending a few days apart (you can see, perhaps, another early sign of teething—she hadn't figured out the little tongue thing yet so spent a few days sucking on her bottom lip):

She wasn't feeling great but still wanted to play around, so we made a little mess of the toys and then she crawled right up to me and...

...rested her head on my feet. I figured that was a good cue that she was ready for a little nap, so that's what we did next.

And here she is getting all brave in the pool before any of us had tested positive (we splurged on a little yard pool to help occupy the kids while waiting to turn positive (which they all did) and then again while waiting to turn negative (which they all haven't...yet):

She thought the pool wall was just made for pulling up on, though!

Here are the kids being a little wild (that poor slide had since popped, so we cut it off and they've still been enjoying the rest of the pool without it):

Uncle Clark (Karen's brother) and Aunt Lynnea stopped by on their way to Texas from North Carolina. I wasn't sure they were going to stop by since we were under quarantine, but they did! I was quite nervous about having them over (since I would go on to crash with a high fever later in the evening), but they've seemed to escape contracting this disease, as did Grandpa (even though Miriam was staying with him and later also came down with symptoms). I think it helped that we stayed outside the whole time (even though it was rather hot) and were sure to keep our distance—no hugs or anything. Grandpa had also just gotten his booster shot, so that surely helped as well. You can see he was even brave enough to hold Phoebe (though at this time only Rachel had tested positive or had any symptoms, so we were all isolating away from her)!

We're looking forward to being back to our normal pandemic selves, rather than our sick pandemic selves! Being sick makes isolating a lot less fun!