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| I think I'm giving up on Xanga. Apologies to my Xanga friends, but it has been giving me nothing but problems lately, and I infinitely prefer LJ and Blogger.
My baby boy has finally reached the 20lb. milestone. He is officially big enough for his new forward-facing carseat, if I can ever figure out how the darn thing works and get it installed in the car.
My little sister came to visit a couple of weeks ago. It was so much fun having her here. We went shopping, and went swimming, and watched Lost, and went swimming, and watched more Lost, and went swimming. We both got burned while swimming her last day here. My shoulders are still red (and peeling now too, hooray), two weeks later.
On Mother's Day, we hopped a plane to New York and went to visit my oldest sister for a week. New York is a pretty cool city, full of an incredible diversity of people and things to do. Seeing as we took our 1 year old with us, we kept our "things to do" list to a minimum: the Empire State Building, making a cake with my sister for my birthday, the Bronx Zoo, seeing Wicked, the Met (and the Cloisters), the Natural History Museum, Central Park, and Chinatown. Everything was fabulously fun. While there we ate: pizza, cheesecake, Indian, sushi, Chinese, bagels with cream cheese (and we tried a lox spread which I thought was pretty gross, I will have to try the sliced stuff sometime as I think it will taste much better)...I can't think of anything else we ate. Oh, and my birthday cake, which was delicious. Everything was extremely tasty (other than the lox spread). We got back on Saturday morning, and have been trying to catch up on sleep and lazing about ever since (well, except for Dusey who has been diligently working). Though I did go shopping yesterday, and made dinner, so I haven't been totally lazy.
Endless thanks to my sister for letting us stay with her, and use her bedroom, and help us figure out what to do and how to get there and entertaining us whenever we weren't out doing things. It was a wonderful trip, and I'm so glad we got to go.
While we were gone, the grass seed that we spread over the back yard to help the dead patches recover absolutely exploded. There are still a couple bare patches, but the yard looks infinitely better than it has for the past year that we've lived here. The grass is a beautiful bright springy green color, and it desperately needs mowing. Some of it is verging on six inches tall, I think. But it is entirely too hot to mow during most of the day now, with temperatures approaching if not broaching 100. So perhaps Potato Bug and I will go swimming today instead.
My garden is also doing quite well. We are getting delicious ripe tomatoes, and I think the eggplant is ready for picking, and the cilantro is huge and the other herbs are hanging on which is amazing, considering the heat. The pepper plants are still fairly small, I'm hoping they continue their slow and steady growth and give us some fruit before the true heat of summer arrives and burns them all up.
Some day I will stop being lazy and post some of my pictures from my new camera. I certainly have enough to pick from now. I suppose you will all have to remain in suspense until I finally get around to it.
On a final note, we got an Ergo Sport baby carrier, and I love it. It was perfect for carrying the kiddo around New York. Also, I adore my new pajamas. They are comfy and light and cute and if it wasn't killer hot here right now, I'd be tempted to wear them all the time. | | |
| The kidney reflux progress tests for my Potato Bug Boy are all over and done with (for now, at least). We had the VCUG this morning at the hospital, where he got to be immobilized on a board while they stuck a catheter all the way up into his bladder and pumped a lot of liquid into it and then tried to take pictures before he peed it all back out (they were not successful with the getting him to not pee part). They were very nice, and put on Finding Nemo for him to watch, and tried to help me distract him, and gave him a beach ball when we were all done so he could play with it while we waited to get the CD of images from them. He was fairly good, though as to be expected he cried from the moment I set him down to check his diaper to several minutes after I pciked him up after the test was over, and sporadically after that whenever he remembered that he was supposed to be traumatized. The doctor who did the test told me that he still had reflux, but that because he peed during the ENTIRE test, they weren't ever able to get his bladder completely full of their contrast dye and so he couldn't tell me what grade the reflux was.
Cue the sorrowing and worrying on my part.
Once we finally got the CD and got back to our house, it'd been just about three hours since we left, and I had half an hour before I wasn't supposed to feed the kiddo anything anymore, and approximately an hour before we had to leave for the second appointment of the day. What's a mommy to do? I stuffed him full of banana and milk and put him in his crib so my super-sleepy boy could take a short nap.
Then I had to wake him up to go to the next appointment. Still sleepy baby who's already been traumatized by tests once during the day = a bad patient. We got to drive right back to the hospital (actually, to a building next door), where I got to refill out all the exact same paperwork they had me fill out LAST TIME. Cue more frustrated mommy. At least the babykins enjoyed crawling around while we were waiting for them to call us back (they need to clean their carpets though, his knees were BLACK by the time we got to go back there). And then we had the ultrasound. Ultrasound = needing to hold still to get clear pictures. Grumpy baby who has to (gasp!) LAY DOWN on his BACK on a PAPER SHEET = wiggly. And crying. Lots and lots of crying. I think he remembers the paper sheet from the doctor's office when he got his shots last week. Traumatic. Even though the ultrasound was so totally painless, as far as physical pain goes. I cannot speak for his emotional pain (he was upset), nor for the pains of the technician, who was having a horrible time trying to get clear pictures of his bladder and kidneys (I got to hold him for the kidney ones, and he wanted to crawl all over me and was still being very wiggly, poor ultrasound tech). Of course, he had pooped right before the ultrasound, so we both got to deal with diaper stink the whole time. Once she was done, I got to lay him BACK DOWN ON THE PAPER SHEET (oh noes!), which of course, caused great amounts of crying, so that I could change his stinky diaper. And he, in retaliation, peed all over the paper sheet in the middle of the diaper change. And for once, I was not responsible for cleaning up his mid-diaper-change pee.
Poor, poor ultrasound technician. At least I had a plastic baggie for the stinky diaper to go in.
Then we got to sit and wait in a small room (not the lovely waiting room) for the nurse to come and tell me what was what and how he was doing. The room, of course, had an exam table in it, with a paper sheet. Potato Bug took one look at it and started wailing. I eventually managed to more or less distract him with the "I'll hand you something that you can throw on the floor for me to pick up while still trying to hold you" game. We played it with almost everything I had in the diaper bag and in my purse.
Finally, the nurse came in, only to let me know that she was getting errors from the disc from the VCUG and needed to go call the radiology department at the hospital to get the doctor's write-up or a new CD. So we got to sit and wait a couple more minutes. And then she came back in, with the doctor's write-up. And he had Grade 3 reflux at the last test, in his right kidney. And now he has a trace of Grade 1 in his left kidney, and she couldn't quite tell exactly for sure what the Grade was for his right kidney due to the CD problems, but she felt like classifying it probably as also Grade 1 (though it could feasibly be Grade 2, she said). Anyway, either way, this is a HUGE IMPROVEMENT. Cue happy mommy. Ultimately, we decided to call it Grade 1, and give him 2 more days of his antibiotics (due to the catheter that morning), and then, just, stop. No more daily medicine. Call it good. He's growing out of it.
Of course, I still have to watch, and if he gets a high fever (anything over 101.5) I have to go get him catheterized to get a urine test done to see if he's got a kidney infection, and if he does, then we will have to admit that he still has bad reflux.
But we're all hoping (of course) that that never happens. And in the meantime, we will be assuming that it is Grade 1 and that it will disappear completely as he continues to grow. (Grade 5, by the way, is the worst, and takes surgery to fix. Grade 3 gave him a 50% chance of outgrowing it on his own.)
So, I am no longer feeling like a bad mommy. And I am not carrying around that constant worry in the back of my head anymore that he will not outgrow it. And he's happy because we're staying home the rest of the day. And I am happy because I am incredibly relieved.
He got a banana in the car on the way home from the ultrasound and follow-up, because he was still extremely tired and kind of grumpy and undoubtedly hungry. And I learned an important lesson. Do not give your child fresh fruit (particularly not bananas) to eat in the car when they're prone to throwing their food to the side sporadically for absolutely no reason. I got to fish banana bits out from under the passenger chair of our truck once we were home and he was in bed. And the truck, I suspect, still probably smells like banana.
Which, by the way, is Potato Bug's first word (other than Uh-oh and mamamama and dadadada). He sees bananas, and he says "nana nana nana nana" and gets very excited. Oh, my funny little babykins. I love you so much. | | |
| My little boy is still quite little. 19 lbs. which puts him in the 5th percentile for weight still, and 29 1/2" tall, which is 50th percentile for height. Since those percentages are pretty much the same as they were last appointment, the pedicatrician says it's probably just how he's going to keep growing, kinda skinny. She joked that maybe I should feed him a lot of cake to fatten him up. He ought to be big enough in about a month, she said, to move into his big-boy forward facing carseat, once he gains that vital last pound. All in all, he seems quite healthy. He didn't like lying on top of the paper on the table, and really didn't like the shots, but calmed down as soon as I gave him a cookie once I picked him back up after. The insurance we've got for him right now apparently requires some routine bloodwork done at a year old, so I decided to get it all over with in one day, and we headed over to the lab right after the pediatrician's this morning. He really didn't like the blood draw (of the normal sort, with the needle in the arm), and they didn't get very much blood (the phlebotomist said I should have him drink more water, but I personally don't think it was a very good poke in his arm). So, we might have to go back and do it again if they don't end up having enough. I fed him a banana as soon as we got home which cheered him right back up. He adores bananas.
I am feeling like a horrible mother because I have not been giving him his antibiotics for his kidney reflux for the past several months. I am waiting to hear back from the nurse at the pediatric urology office about it, since his appointments are next week. We went on vacation, and I didn't remember to give it to him while we were going all about and so busy, and then I kind of didn't remember once we were back home, and though he has seemed perfectly fine with no signs of any kidney infections I am still feeling like a failure of a mother for just totally spacing my child's medicine for not just a week or two, but months. Gah. I guess we will see if there were any infections for sure or not next week. I am a bad mom.
Potato Bug loves watching Baby Signing Time. When I put it on for him, he crawls over to me and tries to climb in my lap, and then cuddles with me while we watch it, which is pretty much the only time he does that. The rest of the time, he wants to be either crawling around the house, or if he's hungry, sitting in his booster seat and eating. He's become quite adept at throwing his food on the floor. I feed him pretty much the same stuff as we eat now, though he eats a lot more bananas and applesauce than we do. He likes Cheerios in milk for breakfast most days. His diapers smell worse and worse, it seems, with every diaper change. I guess that's pretty normal with the switch to real food.
He's very good at crawling very fast. He likes walking holding on to things and is getting better at it. He can hold his balance standing up without holding on to anything for longer each time he tries, which isn't very often honestly, as there's almost always something around to hold on to. He is extremely good at waving, and when he feels like it, will wave at everyone and everything. When he doesn't feel like it, he won't wave at all. He didn't feel like it at the doctor's office this morning.
His signs are getting better. He regularly signs food, and milk, and all-done. He frequently signs hat also though I don't think he associates it with hats yet as he doesn't like wearing hats, and therefore I have no idea what he's trying to tell me with that one. Maybe he just likes my hair. Who knows. He occasionally signs more. I think he recognizes several other signs also, though he hasn't attempted to do any others yet. He talks to himself and to me quite a lot, though still with no actual words yet of course. He likes to sing sometimes, especially into anything that reminds him of a kazoo. He's very good at putting balls back in his ball-popper, and also at throwing them (and other toys) across the room. He's started to enjoy getting down on his stomach to look at things when they roll under the couch or a chair, and sometimes puts his head down on the floor and looks like he's about to do a somersault with his bum up in the air. He just stays like that for a few seconds, looking at the world upside-down through his legs, and then goes back to his normal crawling around. Sometimes he tries to clap, but not very often. He's very good at feeding himself, though I am always worried he's going to choke on something (particularly bananas) as he likes to stuff as much food as he can into his mouth in one go if he likes it. He still likes going on walks and watching the cars and birds go past. Mostly we stay inside and play, though. Baths are fun, toothbrushing still doesn't work quite how it's supposed to (he just wants to suck the toothpaste off and then bite the toothbrush, but we're working on it), and he's taken to helping me pull his shirts down over his head when it's time to get dressed.
Sometimes he decides he doesn't want to have his diaper changed. He's really very strong and flips his whole body over while I'm trying to hold his legs and wipe his bum off. I let go of his legs to try to flip him back over and he sits up. I have started trying to put the new diapers on him as he's either standing or crawling sometimes, since when he decides he's not going to lay on his back, there is nothing I can do to get him to lay on his back without hurting him (and I don't want to hurt him).
He has started to make decisions about whether to be sad or not. When he bumps his head, or somebody he doesn't know touches him, or whatever other thing he doesn't like, he sits there and thinks about it for a minute, then frowns, then opens his mouth wide and silent, and then starts crying. He's very good at frowning when he's upset. He's also very good at laughing finally. He laughs at the silliest strangest things sometimes, so I end up doing weird stuff all the time trying to get him to laugh more.
I promise to add some pictures later tonight, after he's asleep for the night. | | |
| After waking up briefly at 6am, the baby and I both went back to sleep until about 9. Oh, heaven.
Then we went to Walmart, where I did not find 3/4 of what I was looking for, but did find a whole lotta baby food on sale so I bought a bunch because I still can't feed the kiddo a lot of what we eat very easily and making my own baby food is cool and all and generally cheaper but it takes SO MUCH TIME and it's handy (particularly when sick, like now) to just have some mush on hand to shovel in his hungry, hungry little mouth. I also bought some Cheerios in a hard little purse-sized container so that I can have something to refill since the Cheerios in the diaper bag in a baggie always end up crushed and leaving little Cheerio dust all over everything leaking out of the baggie. And I bought a small carton of Goldfish.
I fed about half of the carton of Goldfish to the babekins as we drove to Ikea, which is a pretty good-distance drive. It was his brunch. Yes. That is all I fed him for both breakfast and lunch (though he did have a lot of milk that morning). Also, we went to Ikea right during what would have been his naptime. He was almost asleep when we finally got there, and then I got him out of his carseat and kept him awake for several more hours while we wandered all over Ikea looking for just-the-right-thing and some shelves. He lost my little paper where I wrote the location of some shelves I wanted, so we did not get those, but we did get some other shelves I wanted and a just-right-for-now thing for babyproofing game controllers (it's a roll-top small cabinet that was on sale, yay!).
It was past the start of his normal afternoon-naptime by the time we finally left. He fell asleep in the car home, hooray. Then he woke up as soon as we got home, so I fed him some more milk, and put him in his crib for enforced naptime. He cooed at himself and played with his playthings in his crib for about half an hour before falling asleep until 5pm. I, meanwhile, ate a bag of Cheetos for lunch, followed by some hummus on a pita (oh yes, yesterday was the day of HEALTHY EATING HABITS all around). And then I assembled the roll-top thingy. And it took about two hours to put together. And it's pretty cheaply made, but it turned out nice and I'm quite pleased with it.
So then the baby wakes up, right as I'm done transferring all the controllers into the new cabinet and locking it up, so I feed him two things of the newly purchased baby food because, as expected, he was CRAZY HUNGRY and cried whenever I tried to stop feeding him. Then he played for about five minutes, then came and made me pick him up, and then he barfed all over both of us. I am sorry you ate too much, little man, but purple-baby-food barf is Gross. He went straight in the tub while I wiped off my clothes, then peeled off both our clothes and put them in a tidy pile on the floor of the bathroom and washed us both off in the tub until his Daddy got home (with dinner) and could go dry him off and put a diaper on him while I finished cleaning up the nasty gunk and threw all the clothes in the laundry machine and got dressed once again.
After that, was dinner time, so I ate a little bit (not a lot, because hey, it was salad, and yesterday was HEALTHY EATING HABITS day, so I obviously couldn't eat very much of my Chipotle salad, also, you know, there was the whole just-finished-cleaning-up-barf thing). And then the baby-man went to bed. And then we watched last week's episode of Heroes and were both amazed when it didn't Totally Suck like we were expecting it to. And then I went to bed.
Today, in addition to more sneezing (I believe I did not mention that I have been sneezing, sniffling, and coughing for days along with the rest of my family), we are going to the grocery store, where I will buy some food to make some super-easy dinners (hello, Soup!) until we are all recovered. And after that, maybe I will go in search of a summer baby hat for the child (not a baseball cap, thanks, I want something to keep the sun off his face and neck when we go a-walking), and maybe some little shoes for him since he's learning to walk, and maybe some more clothes for him since he has hardly any that fit right now and I'm tired of having to do laundry so often. But maybe not. Maybe we will just come home with our groceries and have some cold juice and maybe I will try to beat the 8th level of Katamari Damacy which currently is terribly difficult for me.
Also, we need to water the garden. | | |
| I've been crocheting like a madwoman lately. I made a Wall*E, and a Dr. Horrible, and an octopus, and a tiny elephant,and some Valentine's Day stuff last month, and a soot sprite.
And I finished my painting and it is fabulous and is hanging on the wall in our front room.
And our yard is finally all ready for the garden, we need to mix the dirt in and go buy the plants and plant them and then it will be done. And we got some PESTICIDE so we can kill the biting ants and cockroaches and crickets and rolly-pollies, and earwigs, and slugs, and spiders, and EVERYTHING ELSE that was living where my garden is now going to live. Tomatoes and peppers and maybe beans and cucumbers and lots of herbs and a squash plant of some sort would be nice...we will have to see what I get when we go buy the plants tomorrow.
My Potato Bug Baby now has seven teeth. And he's been falling back asleep on his own when he wakes up in the middle of the night lately, which has been lovely.
Dusey has been dieting, by eating half as much as he used to eat. It makes me feel a little guiltier about all the food (specifically bottom-unfriendly desserts) that I am constantly wanting to make and eat all of because oh-my-gosh so delicious and sugary. I am a glutton. A glutton for sugar. Yummy.
I made chocolate covered brownie bites for Valentine's Day and they were DELICIOUS. Most especially the ones covered in dark chocolate.
The man-child has been standing up and taking steps along furniture and snarfing down incredibly huge amounts of food in a single sitting and exploring everything and testing me to see what my limits are ("No! Don't eat the garbage!" ---he grins at me--- "We don't eat paper!" ---he giggles--- "Stop rolling over until I have your new diaper on!" ---shrieks of laughter---). Aren't they supposed to wait to test your limits and your rules until they're at least officially toddlers? The little smarty-pants. At least he is listening to me when I tell him we don't bite mommy's leg, no matter how tasty and at-mouth-level it may be while I'm sitting in my computer chair.
I have been wanting to go to the zoo for the past month or so. I keep waking up, thinking, Today would be a lovely day to go to the zoo, and see the giraffes, and indeed it would as the whether has been nice and toasty warm, but Dusey always has work and so we don't go. We are planning on going to the Botanical Gardens soon (once we have our own garden all planted and beauteous), and then hopefully we will be able to make it to the zoo soon after that. I think the Wild Child will enjoy seeing the animals this time rather than sleeping the entire time we're there like he did the last time we went to the zoo during the day, even though he was almost assaulted by a squirrel in his stroller.
We got our plane tickets to New York. I need to get tickets for a show, and then plan out what we want to do while we're there and how much money it will take so we can set that aside and not spend it.
We got our tax refund. It is lovely.
I am going to get a G10 soon. That will also be lovely. You ought to expect me to actually post some adorable baby photos (I know I keep promising and then not following through) along with a rash of Macro texture shots, because, seriously, awesome.
I want to get out of the house and DO SOMETHING today. Maybe I will take le kiddo on a walk when he gets up from his nap-er-roo. Someday he will be a little bigger and will be able to actually play with me in ways other than laughing when I tell him no or knocking down the block towers I build or playing the "I throw it you fetch it, Mommy" game, or the "put the lid back on the blocks so I can pull it off over and over again" game. Though, I must admit, I do enjoy the building of the block towers, and the other little repetitive games convince me that he's really quite the little learning genius, and by the way, he knows the sign for food, and does it a lot, and recognizes the signs for More, and All Done, and Sleep (he doesn't like that one).
The play class we've been taking together has been fun. I don't socialize much there, and neither does the little guy, it's mostly him exploring and trying to eat EVERY SINGLE BALL THERE IS which then I have to throw them all in the "yucky bucket", which requires chasing him around pretty much the entire time. But it's out of the house, and there's toys we don't have, and he seems to like it, so it's all good. Next class I take there though maybe I kind of want to do a ME CLASS. Maybe I will get a weekly babysitter and I will go and PAINT or COOK or SEW or EXERCISE or something. Who knows? It depends on what they're offering, and if it's too expensive or not, and if I could get a babysitter.
I need to start wearing sunscreen again, and putting it on my baby guy as well. Hello, cute little man, you are going to have to learn to Not Eat the sunscreen bottle.
I want to go swimming.
I want to go on a date. With Dusey, of course. Let's do it, handsome man, go see a movie and get ice-cream, or go read books together at Border's, or ANYTHING.
Little-bitty-stir-crazy, you may think. Perhaps.
Tomorrow is going to be a lovely day. | | |
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