It worked last time

I've been thinking lately of two books I loved when I was little that I'd really like to find for my kids. One of them is A House for Barbapapa, which isn't in print anymore in English but is on Amazon in French (no problem, I can read it to them in English and the pictures are the best part anyway). The other one is harder.

Does anyone remember a picture book (okay, this is a good one) about a little girl who goes sailing on a boat all by herself, except that she brings her baby brother along? The illustrations are very soft watercolors, and very detailed of the inside of the boat, and I think there's a peach tree on the boat that she puts there so that she can feed her baby brother peaches (or something like that... sorry, it's been about 30 years!) I have a hazy recollection of the ship being called the Morning Something, and I definitely remember a wonderful illustration of her and her little brother in a bassinet and the inside of the ship, and my own fantasies of having such a ship myself.

Ideas?

In other news...

[If you're reading this while eating your breakfast, maybe it'd be a good idea click away now. Go read the news or something, and come back later.]

pinworms!

Yes! More pinworms! A couple days ago I started noticing Barak reaching inside his underwear to scratch his bottom. At bathtime, I saw a lot of red marks on his tush, and thought, hmm, that doesn't look like a rash but what is it? And then at night, he woke up wailing and crying--real tears and everything--saying that his tushy hurt him. I told him to go to the bathroom. He said he didn't need to. I told him I could put some cream on if he had a rash and maybe he should be careful to wipe himself very well when he went to the bathroom. Then I saw that he had his hands in his underwear again and was scratching like crazy. "Barak, does it hurt or does it just really feel bad?"

"It feels really really bad!"

"Is it itchy?"

"It's iiiiiiiiiiitchyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy! It itches so so much!"

Thick, aren't I?

This time I bypassed all natural remedies recommended by the Internet and went directly to the thermonuclear approach. Both kids got dosed with mebenzadole on Thursday (Avtalyon's too little, so he gets lots of vaseline--he's not unhappy) and have had diarrhea ever since. Iyyar's diarrhea has little white things in it. Some of them are squirming.

I told you not to keep reading if you were eating, didn't I?

So... today's pre-Shabbos recreation will involve a lot of hot water and laundry. I'm really really hoping that the pinworms have actually been in Iyyar's system this whole time and are the cause of the GI woes. I'm less convinced right now that the dairy was the culprit; he was immediately better for a week, but the problems have been coming and going over the last month and he hasn't had dairy, except for the couple of times he's sneaked it, in almost 6 weeks.

In further news, Avtalyon, after a week or so of being generally under the weather, is back to his happy perky self. This is a very big improvement for him and also for the household at large; he was being pretty pitiful and we all felt sorry for him, especially Barak, who kept trying to get him to smile with endless rounds of peekaboo. Iyyar pooped on the potty a couple of days ago, and got ice cream, which was great; the timing could have been better, though, since his ice-cream-lust-fueled desire to use the potty came just when the pinworm-fueled-diarrhea-avalanche came. I have been scrubbing a lot of poop out of a lot of different pieces of flooring, carpet and furniture lately.

Okay. I'm done. You can go finish your breakfast now. That is, if you still want it.