Vermont #2

On Tuesday morning we gathered together all of our passports and took a 2 hours drive to visit Montreal Canada. The drive was beautiful! (who am I kidding, the only one who saw the entire drive was dad, since he was driving, all the rest of us slept). :) But when we woke up that morning Mallory had a little goopy eyes that I just washed off. We thought maybe she had a little allergy or something. Literally as the hours if not minutes went by the goopiness turned into a yellow/green stickiness practically 'pouring' out of her left eye. Then her eye started to get swollen and little red fingers started to work themselves down her left cheek. It was so hard for me to look at her, because it felt like my heart would break each time I would see that happy smiley girl with the nasty looking eye. So despite the fact we had driven to Canada to site see, it became more of a 'Oh my goodness what do we do for Mallory' sort of a day. We still managed to tool around Montreal a little, FINALLY (no thanks to the locals) finding Old Montreal (which really feels like you are in France), getting to have some really yummy sweet and savory Crepes, seeing Canada's Notre Dame and a few other building, all the while I was trying to figure out if I should call Kaiser now, wait until we get back to the US, or take her to a hospital in Canada. I had finally said 'Man if she was a dog I would just treat her Conjunctivitis with some BNP drops...I wish I just had some'. That's when Mom brought up the brilliant point that we ARE in Canada... home of free health care and MAYBE we could just buy something. Thus began the quest to find a local pharmacy. SUCCESS! 30 minuets later I had a beautiful bottle of antibacterial eye drops in hand and could treat that sad looking eye! Within 30 hours you couldn't even tell there was ever an issue! THANK YOU Canada! That night Mallory had a rough night... though she didn't seem to care. She clonked her head, giving herself a nasty goose-egg in the center of her forehead, then fell face-first while pulling a blanket and gave herself her first bloody nose. Poor girl, conjunctivitis, giant goose-egg and a bloody nose.... but STILL smiling! That girl is one tough cookie!
Our adventures continued the next day as we found a local Stowe Vermont Maple syrup company. We got a great lesson on how its made (new and old ways), got to try the different types (who knew there were different types...light, medium and dark), and then of course bought a GALLON to split between our 2 families. Mmmmmmmmmm. We then drove a short distance to the official Ben and Jerry's Ice Cream plant! We took the tour, ate the sample and then ate even more! :) Such a great place... and so environmentally friendly. Very cool. I do have to say that THE best part of the ice cream trip was what happened after the tour. Dad had taken Mallory down to a giant ice cream carton top prop so that Mallory could stick her face in 'Jerry's' cut out face. There was a group of 3 Asian tourists who noticed and thought it was cute, so they started to take a few pictures. At first we were like... 'move out of our way so WE can take a picture', but soon realized that the REAL picture was how much they were all loving Mallory! The Crowd grew and grew, until there were probably 10-15 Asian tourists swarming Mallory all shouting 'BeeBee, BeeBee, BeeBee!!!!' Offering her candy to look at them and all the while their cameras clicking away. They were like paparazzi! Then one by one the tourists would get in the 'Ben' face so that they could have their picture taken with 'BeeBee'! Poor Dad was back there trying to hold up Mallory while laughing hysterically. Mallory couldn't quite figure out what was going on, she kept looking over at the new tourist like they were nuts, but at the same time was loving the attention. Go figure. It actually is one of my favorite memories of the entire trip.