Turning Into Animals

We weren’t sure what we’d be doing this year for New Year’s Eve initially but now that the evening is here, we’ve got plans and they’re looking up to be fun.   Neighbors who have a fun fire pit area in their back yard have invited the street to their house, children included.    We’ll start the night there and then head back about bedtime for the children.

We have a friend, one of our children’s teachers, who is getting married about now.    The ceremony at their home is a small one, but the after party is for all their friends.   Once the children are with our sitter, we’re going to wish Miss Kica and David congratulations and celebrate with them.

The Big Boy Update:   I came over to kiss my son good morning today.   I came up behind him, kissed his neck and then sniffed him, saying, “you smell great!”    He told me, “if you sniff too much you’ll turn into a dog.”  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and took care of our friend’s cats while they were out of town for several days.   We would wash our hands after cleaning the litter boxes out.   She told me, “you need to wash your hands or you might turn into a cat.”  

Can I have Carrots?

Sometimes it’s hard to know when a child is old enough mentally to understand what’s happening to them.   Sure, they don’t have control of their lives, meaning they don’t get to eat candy every meal.   But do they understand the reason we want them to eat more healthful foods?  Are they able to connect feeling badly later because they ate too many marshmallows and gummy worms when you weren’t looking?

As parents we say, “No” an awful lot.   We sat, “not right now” almost as much.   And then there are the, “no, because you made a choice” answers.   Those are the best.   Let me give you an example from tonight:  my daughter didn’t want to eat her piece of pizza for dinner.   She decided taking all the cheese off the top would make it better, but she was wrong.    I told her she had to eat the piece of pizza AND the cheese she’d torn off the top because that’s not how we ate pizza.    If she did this, she would be eligible for dessert.

We don’t ever make our children finish meals because we don’t want them to be required to eat food when they’re full, building bad habits.   What does happen though is by not finishing their meal, there are consequences.   “If you choose to not finish your dinner, that’s fine, but there will be no more food at all tonight.”   This almost always is met with an, “okay” answer and commonly is followed up with complaining, whining and terrible suffering on the part of the child when they realize they’re hungry an hour later.  For some reason, telling them they can have as big a breakfast as they want in the morning rarely mollifies them.   But it does make for a good lesson.

Today my daughter didn’t want to finish the pizza, or the cheese she’d pulled off the top.   She said, “I don’t want dessert.  I don’t want the cookies I baked with Morgan this afternoon.  I’m not hungry.”   You know what happened next, right?  She was ravenous—for cookies—only cookies.   I told her her dinner was in the trash because she walked away from the table and told me she was full.   I explained how I was sad to throw away the pizza, but she said she didn’t want it.  

She cried.   She wailed.   She told me how her tummy was hungry, but only hungry for cookie.   My husband came into the room and told her if she was that hungry, she could have carrots.    That brought on another round of crying with her bemoaning, “I only like carrots if they’re in carrot cake.”  I looked around the corner to where Edna was vacuuming and told her this was one of the best parts of parenting in action.    She and I tried not to laugh out loud for the next twenty minutes while my daughter came up with reason after reason she needed food (not carrots but definitely cookies).

Then, suddenly, I think she finally got it.   My daughter changed her tone and said to me, “Mommy, I’m so sorry I didn’t eat my dinner.  Can I have carrots?”

The Big Boy Update:   Yesterday I mentioned how my husband and son went to launch his birthday rocket in a gravel field.   My son was thrilled for the entire three launches.   He figured out how the rocket was traveling downward with the parachute and ran across the gravel, catching it neatly when it returned to Earth.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I were doing water painting yesterday.   We wanted to help the water dry faster and my daughter suggested we make a paper fan.   I told her I’d get a piece of paper for us to accordion fold into a fan.   She told me, “get an orange piece of paper.  All fans are suppose to be orange.”

T6 & T10

My daughter has been complaining about her back for a while now.   She’s not much of a complainer, so I didn’t think much of it, except it’s been going on for well over a month.    Initially she started doing this strange thing where she’d lie on her back and flip her legs and body up and over to one side or the other.    It looked like a contortionist move and she does all kinds of staggering flexibility feats, but this was new.

Her teachers noticed it too, saying she did it at circle time and spent a lot of time doing it at rest time in after school.    Couple that with my daughter mentioning on and off that her back hurt.   I asked where and she always pointed to the same exact spot in her middle back.    Interesting.   What was more interesting was she could tell me exactly when it happened—when she was jumping off the five foot brick wall into the meager pile of leaves the children had raked together.

That was some time ago though and her back had been consistently bothering her.   I took her in for a workup at the chiropractor’s office today and found out—because she answered every one of their questions in detail about how and when it hurt—that it was more than I’d realized.   I was a little scared.

She’s five, so they don’t do x-rays, but they didn’t really need to.   She has no signs of scoliosis or other spinal issues, but she did have T6 and T10 subluxated.    The doctor said he could fix it and once might do it completely because children hold corrections a lot better than adults do.   He said we could do three days in a row to make sure it was staying in place.  

Then, he did two little things on my daughter’s back while she lay face down.   It took about thirty seconds total.    She says it feels better now.   Not gone, but better.   We’ll go back tomorrow and see if that helps even more.  

I’m glad to have a non-intrusive, non-surgical, non-medicine option to try and help her.    From what she said, she was having pain all day, every day, which is why she was doing the constant rolling over, which helped it feel, “a little better”.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and husband went to launch his birthday rocket they’d built over the holiday.   There was a no trespassing sign at the field they went to.   My son was worried about trespassing.   He said, “maybe we shouldn’t go in.   Do you think they’ll come and chase us?”  My husband told him it was a government gravel field and they should be okay.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I were listening to a Brittney Spears song in the car on the way to the chiropractor’s office today.   She asked me, “mom, why is Brittney Spears so naughty?”   I really didn’t know what to say…

And I Ran Across The House…

It’s the end of the night.  My husband is helping with the laundry before going downstairs to his man cave (the basement) and I’m finishing up with things before I get into the tub (the woman non-cave?) We had several things in the children’s laundry basket that needed to be washed tonight so I’d dumped my day’s clothes into the basket, and gone across the house to start the load.

I had been wearing my new, favorite pants.   These new pants are camoflage, with cargo-like pockets on the sides.  Also, they’re fairly form-fitting, which is in these days, even though I protested several years ago with my “spray-on pants” post.   So came, lots of big pockets and form fitting.   Winner all around.

I like these new pants so much after wearing them several times I informed my husband yesterday I was going to the store right then to see if they had another pair in my size before they sold out, because I was fairly sure I could wear the heck out of two pair of cargo camo pants.   He nodded and I dashed off to the store, coming home triumphant with the only remaining pair in my size.

So tonight I wasn’t overly worried about putting the one pair in the laundry when there was a second pair waiting for me in the chair by the bed.   I had come back from starting the laundry and was working on helping fold when I noticed my phone wasn’t in the charging spot.   I said something to my husband and then jumped up and sprinted out of the room.  

My husband had made it half-way across the house before he realized I was stopping the laundry to see if I’d just dumped my pants, including phone in pocket, into the laundry.    We were both relieved to find the pants soaked but phone-less.   Where had the phone gone?

I got back to the bedroom and realized I’d put it in my shirt (well, bra).   My husband said, “how did you not notice that when you were running across the house?  

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been given a new privilege today.  We moved the lego colored-sorted drawers into the bonus room and set up a new table with two chairs for him and anyone who wants to work there.    He knows he can’t hit, yell at or force people to clean up if they’re making a mess of the Lego’s, but he also knows it’s his responsibility to let us know if people aren’t respecting the rules for keeping the Legos organized.   He liked the upgrade.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been complaining about one particular spot on her back for several weeks now.   She says she hurt it when she was jumping off the brick wall into the leaf pile.   Her complaint is always the same spot and she says it bothers her a lot.   Tomorrow I’m going to have it looked at by the chiropractor.   If they think there’s something more to check out, we will.   It could also be nothing, so hard to tell with children.

The Thank You Stick That’s Not a Stick

Some time ago I helped my best friend by driving her to her colonoscopy.  In order to thank me for this small task in time, you may remember she gave me an orchid which over time, has taken up more time than the original driving favor.

This might be a great gift to most people—who aren’t afraid of killing a plant, who know what to do with a plant or have any qualifications at all for taking care of a particular and delicate plant.    That person is not me.    But I watered it, it did okay, the flowers fell off and I wrote a blog post about how I now had a stick to water every two weeks.

When I found out later that the blooms fell off any way and I didn’t do anything wrong, I was relieved.   But when would it have flowers again?   This was more confusing because most people I talked to (non-orchid people, otherwise known as my friends) said it was hard to say, the plants were unpredictable.

There were two flowers once, but there were more difficulties than successes and most of the time there was just a stick with two little leaves.    Recently, I went to a friend’s house who had orchids with no sticks.  I asked her about them and she told me about cutting the stick off once the flowers dropped, putting cinnamon paste on the cut section and that the plant would come around faster because it wasn’t dedicating nutrients to the old stalk.

I wasn’t sure.   I’d been complaining about that stick for so long now I would feel bad just cutting it off.   But my mother-in-law checked into it as well and found out all sorts of things to help the plant, including cutting off the old stalk, removing all the bad surface roots, cutting off damaged pieces of the leaves and sealing the edges of anything cut with a antibacterial spray, or when you didn’t have that, cinnamon paste would do.

So we did all that and she further went and cleaned off all the leaves with a homemade spray to make sure there was no bacteria growing on the leaves, something orchids are susceptible to.    Then we watered it and now I’m waiting.   It may take months for it to become, “un-shocked” but when it does, I hope there will be a new stick and flowers to go with it.

My best friend saw it the other day and said, “oh no, you cut off the stick!”  I was about to launch into the story of our research when somewhere between one to five children interrupted us.   I need to let her know I only maimed the Colonoscopy Thank You Plant in the hope of future good.

The Big Boy Tiny Girl Zoo Adoption Story:   My children were asked by their Aunt A what their favorite animal was.  My daughter said a Hedgehog and my son said a Tiger.  For Christmas they got a stuffed animal to match.   Then, today, we got in the mail from the Palm Beach Zoo adoption papers to go with their stuffed animals.  My son has now helped adopt a tiger at the zoo named Beropi and my daughter has an adopted hedgehog named Faso.   Suffice it to say, they are both very excited and looking forward to going to Florida to visit their new friends at the zoo.

Not Un-helpful

Today I did some of the first real estate work I’ve done.   I’ve been in classes, taken tests, paid membership fees, been trained on software, signed up with a firm, attended meetings, configured online sites for access and shadowed someone for office phone duty.   But so far, I don’t think I’ve done anything other than prepare for work I’ll be actually doing once I’m working.   Until today.

We had a request from one of our team members to help show a house to prospective buyers and prepare another customer for listing his mother’s estate house.   Since my mother- and father-in-law were in town for the day and could stay, I went with my husband on both calls.  

Both locations were fairly far away from our house at over thirty minutes drive.   This gave us time to talk about what typically happened at showings, what information we needed to know in advance, what questions potential buyers would ask and what we could do to help them.   There was a lot of iPad data looking beforehand and discussion between my husband and me.

Both meetings went well today.  I was not un-helpful and possibly even a little bit helpful.   And although, my husband didn’t need me, it was nice working with him and seeing what process he went through with customers.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was “looking through his head” this evening when I got home.   He was peering into the now-darkened window, looking rather intently at himself.   I’m not sure what he saw, but he was looking serious about seeing into his brain.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My children went out to our play structure to swing, slide and play while we were out with a customer this afternoon.   They decided they were in a boat or a plane or vehicle, I’m not sure which, but the important thing to know was we were in good hands because my daughter said she was, “the Coach Pilot”.

Corning Ware Casserole

It’s Christmas day, well, Christmas night.   We’ve been through the morning of presents, the afternoon of cats and the evening of dinner.   Now we’re into the post-dinner entertainment and I’m sneaking off to write this post.   Overall, it’s been a capital good day.  

To start the day off, my son came into our bedroom happy and glad to wish us a happy Christmas morning.   He had tried to wake his sister up but she didn’t want to come downstairs until eight-thirty.    In the meantime, we had breakfast of bacon, square potatoes (potato hash dad makes), eggs and fruit. At nine o’clock we went to the basement to see what Santa had brought the children (one present each) and open family gifts.

Our children had a discussion on being grateful and not demanding more presents.   They were very polite, being more interested in passing out presents than opening their own presents some of the time.    When the morning of present was over,  my daughter and I went to take care of the seven cats.   She fed them all treats while I scooped lots of litter.  

For our family dinner, my mother was wanting to bring over a roast she’d made the day before.   She wanted to borrow a casserole dish.   I looked through our cabinets, not finding what she was looking for.   We realized we were talking about something she though we would of course have, because everyone has them, and I wasn’t sure what she meant but we didn’t have any of those things because we didn’t use them.

I do know what a Corning Ware Casserole is (especially after looking them up online), but we don’t have any.  We don’t use them.   I’m not sure how our kitchen and cooking routine/needs are different, but it’s just never presented itself as a need.    I need to look into this more, because it would seem like a nice thing to have from time to time, if only I knew when I might use a casserole dish.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was approaching the “adult” table for dinner tonight on his hands and knees, making a growling sound.   We told him only adults allowed in the room, not animals.   He left and went back to the other room.   We poured more wine for dinner.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  “Ready. Set, Go!”  My niece was trying to get into character to do lines from MacBeth tonight.   Just about the time she was ready to be severe and serious my daughter yelled out in a sing-song voice, “Ready, set, go!”

Do You Like Being Tortured?

It’s Christmas Eve day and we’ve had an interesting battle ongoing since last night.   My husband made Christmas-colored pasta for dinner with my parents.   There were green, brown, red and regular colored noodles in varying shapes (some fancy pre-packaged set) in the pot.  The sauce was his regular sauce and the chicken parmesan was the same as always.   But my son wasn’t having it. 

He is six now and my husband and I weren’t having it either.   We told him nothing would be available until he ate that bowl of pasta, even if it went into breakfast.   We thought he’d give in, knowing he’d like it if only he’d taste it.    He held out and unfortunately we went into this morning with him waking up and remembering of his own accord the pasta eating requirement.  

He didn’t eat it for breakfast and tried about twenty-seven different tactics on why he couldn’t eat it, he shouldn’t eat it, it was the wrong spoon, wrong seat, not hot enough, too much sauce, not enough sauce, had gotten cold again, etc.   My parents came over and went and the pasta went uneaten.   My in-laws arrived and the pasta wasn’t yet eaten. 

My son told me, “do you like being tortured?”  He explained, at length, to me how making him eat that terrible, horrible bowl of pasta was cruel and torturous.  He protested in a loud scream, “I’m going to die!” and then collapsed into a fit of crying.    He worked himself up so much he threw up, just from tasting the tip of the spoon,

It is now almost five o’clock on Christmas Eve and my son has had about four bites of food all day.   This is a battle that must be won, and we’re holding firm.    He was sitting at the table, watching his sister decorate her gingerbread house while he sat in front of the bowl of pasta.    He decided to take a bite and then told me, “it’s actually pretty good.”    I thought we were in the home stretch.  

But no, then he came up with a new theory, saying he couldn’t eat any more because—get this—“if I eat one more noodle I’m going to go back in time and I don’t want to see this all over again.”

I don’t want him to miss Christmas morning breakfast, dinner tonight or opening presents, but this is a battle we must win or the next time he stands up to us he’ll know all he has to do is hold out long enough and we’ll give in.    As parents, you can’t do that if you plan on staying in charge. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son was angry about having to eat his pasta for breakfast this morning.   He walked into our room after waking up and said with the grumpiest face he could muster, “you’re going to have the worst Christmas ever for making me eat that pasta.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is helping me take care of some friend’s cats over the break.   She had a lot of fun feeding them treats.   She moved slowly because she can’t see where they are well, which didn’t frighten the cats.    She said things like, “he’s a cutie.”  “He loves treats.”  “He likes me.”  “I love her.”

Off the Bottom

I don’t think I’ve had my hair cut in a year.   Everyone says, “your hair is getting so long”, and it is, only it’s doing so at a tragically slow pace.    To keep the hair healthy I need to get some cut off the bottom to keep the ends healthy.   I need to do this every so often.   But if I cut the hair regularly, it would never get longer overall.

So I work with my hair as though it were in a delicate state.   I am careful with it from washing to brushing to drying and styling.   I’m also careful of how I treat it as I’m putting it up, taking it down or just walking around with my purse or laptop bag on a shoulder where hair could get caught and pulled.

Today I had a bit cut "off the bottom”.   There was negotiations done about how much should be cut off versus how much I could bear to lose.   In the end we cut off an agreed upon amount that was not enough she thought and too much, I thought.

Long hair is a serious commitment in time.  If I didn’t like it so much I would consider a shaver.   Maybe bald heads will be in style soon.   Think of the hair care products and time it would save the ladies?

The Big Boy Update:  My son’s behavior, kind and generous and not nearly as “fighty” as he used to be, is being noticed by people.   I’m so glad we found Dhruti and am so grateful for her guidance.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  There was a little boy sitting beside us at the gate earlier this week before we boarded the plane.  The boy didn’t know my daughter couldn’t see so he brought over his blue dog and showed it to her from about three feet away.   I told her what he had and she said to him, “that’s a beautiful dog.”    I don’t think she even knew where the dog was, but she knew how to make someone happy.

Amadeus Laugh

Tell me you’ve seen the movie, Amadeus?   If you have, one of the things you’ll probably remember is the crazy laugh Mozart had from time to time in the film.   It was loud, it was outrageous, it was memorable.  

It took me a while to realize every now and then, when the situation is just right and something strikes me as very funny, that I do the same laugh.   When I realize I’ve done the, “Amadeus Laugh” it almost makes me laugh again.  

Last night I was in the car with my girlfriend going to a ladies wine tasting party and something one of us said was funny, so funny that I did the Amadeus laugh.   I chuckled and told her and then she too was laughing, agreeing it was a fair likeness.  

I’m not sure I’m proud of that particular laugh or not, but it is funny (at least to me) when it surfaces.

The Big Boy Update:  We went to Dave & Busters tonight (or Ghostbusters, as my daughter likes to call it).   My son was playing Skee Ball when he looked at the balls and told me, “these balls actually look like Bludgers”.   He’s right, although the ones in Harry Potter fly around and try to hit you in the head.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter apparently didn’t like the mannequins in the store the other day.   We were walking on, past another store when she said, “I hope we don’t see those aliens again.”

Driving in Detroit

I’ve been driving in Detroit multiple times now.   It’s different than in North Carolina.  First of all there are the turn about to make a left turn.   The intersections with stop lights commonly don’t have a left turn lane, instead, you travel up a ways past the light to a u-turn lane which may or may not have a stop light.   This lane is only for left turns and takes you back to the spot you wanted to turn left at so you can make a right turn to head in the direction you wanted to go in the first place.   It sounds complicated, but it’s not once you’re used to it.   It’s just different.

The other thing happening right now is the road conditions due to snow over a week ago.   The temperature hasn’t either gotten or stayed above freezing long enough for the snow to melt.   This means piles of snow on side areas.   There is another white substance, salt, that’s everywhere.   It’s on your windshield, the side of your car, all the walkways and parking lots.   You can’t get rid of it on the windshield because spraying wiper fluid doesn’t work well in seven degree weather.   It’s a reduction in visibility, which I was grateful not to have when I returned home to clear, clean windows after our flight yesterday.

There is another substance, this one black, that’s on the ground.  It’s sludgy, dirty, grimy melted snow slush.   My daughter was thrilled to still have snow on the ground and delighted in splashing and dragging her feet through things I don’t even want to think about.   I explained to her multiple times how the snow in some places wasn’t snow we wanted to play in.   Once she got in the car and put her hands all over the bottom of her shoe to show me how it was just wet, not dirty.   Let us just say there was a lot of hand washing and the boots she wore while there have been washed twice.

The last thing is the drivers.  I was very impressed with the speed drivers drove.   Every time I’m on a highway I’ve seen drivers not driving the speed limit but significantly under it if conditions weren’t safe—and that means even in clear weather.   Most of the time I was on highways I wasn’t going the speed limit, even in the faster lanes when I was going with the flow of traffic.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been playing with our younger neighbor, Whitaker, lately.   Much of the time my son must think Whitaker is too young to play what he’s playing, but in the last two days they’ve started playing for long periods of time together with Lego characters, doing imagination things together.   They sound very creative and when I listen in, I hear my son sharing and listening to Whitaker’s ideas instead of just dictating play—something we’ve been working on with him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  Mimi asked my daughter where she wanted to go for dinner on Thursday when they got to town.   My daughter thought and told us she wanted to go to, “Ghostbusters”.   I told her that was a movie, not a restaurant.   It was a while before she could convince me that yes, Ghostbusters was a restaurant by describing it with bright video games.   I finally realized she was talking about Dave and Busters.

Leaf Questions

In order to be able to understand something highly complicated, you need to have a basis in knowledge about that thing.   You need to have a foundation on which to base new facts and to ask question to gain new understanding.   When it comes to understanding my daughter’s eyes, I feel like I’m asking questions about the structure of the veins of a leaf when I haven’t the slightest understanding of how that leaf got to be there in the first place.  What is a twig?  What are branches? What role does the trunk play?   Roots?  I didn’t even know there were roots, hiding underneath the ground and performing vital, life-sustaining functions for that little leaf I’ve been asking about.

So, in short, I’ve been asking leaf questions.   I’ve been asking leaf questions without a foundation of knowledge to know if the questions I’m asking are relevant or even appropriate.   And it is through this process of uneducated knowledge that sometimes I report back in this blog things entirely contradictory to other things I wrote about as though they were fact some time before.

It’s okay, I don’t mind.   I can’t expect to have the knowledge of years of schooling and decades of experience with only one case study a few hours each month over the course of a year.   So, bear with me as I report back answers to my leaf questions with the caveat, “Answers Subject to Change”.

Tonight I'm doing a bullet point report on the questions and discussion I had with Dr. Trese today.   If it doesn’t read well, I’ll go back to my more long-winded, paragraph format for next month’s report:

• It was hard for Dr. Trese to look into right eye due to her rolling it back and up through a fierce habit to avoid light which she’s been doing for so long now that it’s hard for her to not keep her eye protected. 
• He saw no infection present in the sclera (white of the eye) and what he could see into her eye looked normal.
• The retinal fold is not as predominant across her field of vision and isn’t that far back into the posterior of the eye (less of the retina) as I had thought—significantly less than 40%. 
• There is no pooling in the bottom of the eye (what he was able to see) which is good. 
• His prevailing theory is something happened to the ciliary bodies in her eyes (summer cold? some sort of infection?) which triggered initial cascade of events in August of 2015.
• At that time, the reduction in aqueous flow (fluid) in her eyes caused hypotony (low intraocular pressure), which caused her retinas to detach, crumple inward and for fluid to subsequently fill in the space behind. 
• Children’s retinas are more flexible than an adults and can stretch. The remaining fold in her right eye may be a result of stretching.
• The iris is two main layers, the color layer on top which is the color we see in eyes and then under later which is mostly a grey. The initial inflammation last August caused her irises to retract and pulled over the under layer, causing scaring, and the ultimate appearance of grey, dilated, misshapen pupils.   As this is scaring in the pupils, this won’t change, although it doesn’t affect her vision.
• At some point during a procedure some blood was likely trapped in her right eye. Blood is food for scar tissue growth.   The tissue Dr. Trese removed from her right eye last Monday was more scar tissue growth and less cellular growth from the remnants of her natural lens.
• The vasculature in her right eye is poor, meaning she has less blood vessels in her retina than a normal person’s. Before we saw Dr. Trese, our doctors at Duke were concerned about the growing aberrant vessels in the eye’s attempt to try and add extra oxygenation to her retina, so they injected Avastin. This caused the “bad” vessels to wither away. 
• Her right eye today is protected by a side-effect of the silicon oil which negates much of the “bad vessel” growing response by the retina. 
• I asked about the left eye and possible future plans. I asked was he considering  a partial vitrectomy in that eye and adding silicon oil and PFO to try and help flatten the retina.  If so, did he think it could be helpful or at this point has it been too long with her current state of vision? 
• Dr. Trese said most of the folding of her left retina has resolved at this point (which isn’t what we remembered, but we may not have asked in a while because there is just a lot going on.) He said the vasculature in the left eye is much better than in the right and that there isn’t an ongoing, current danger now that the inciting incident has passed. 
• We talked about getting a refraction on her eyes during anesthesia.  I shared the challenges (and ultimate failure) of getting a refraction at her ophthalmologist’s  due to the rolling and inability to look at a specific point to get an accurate reading.
• I asked about the PFO (heavy substance) and how that affected the refraction (prescription) when he measured it under anesthesia many months ago. Again, I thought I understood the PFO to be the component that changed the refraction and when she was sitting up and the bubble of PFO was in the bottom of her eye, her refraction index was different. He said the PFO didn’t factor into it at all, it was the silicon oil that was making the change in refraction and that didn’t change with position.  He’s going to try and get an updated prescription for both eyes if possible in January for us and we’ll update her glasses if needed. 
• Next steps: 
• EUA on January 9th to look at progress 
• We’ll look into patching after the January ninth EUA but plan on doing some tests a bit sooner to see if we can, at minimum, help her reduce the eye rolling behavior.
• Continue stingy, unhappy-making antibiotic drops for one more week.
• Continue steroid drops six times per day in the right eye and four times per day in the left.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and husband are building a rocket he got from us for his birthday.  He is very excited about launching it when they’re done.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter asked me on the way to the airport why more people didn’t go to the moon.  I did my best at explaining the rocket my son and husband were building, how it was  hard to escape the earth’s gradational pull (“you fall back down when you jump, right?”) but that people and companies were working on how to get people to space.   I said only a few people had ever been to the moon.    Then she asked me, “yeah, but mom, when I was a baby and was on the moon…how long ago was that?”   She didn’t believe me when I told her she’d never been on the moon, even when she was a baby.   

Twenty-six Hours

My daughter and I are about to fly off to Detroit for her follow-up visit since her surgery last week.   She has been managing fairly well after the surgery but has had a hard time adjusting.   She keeps the right eye closed a lot of the time and hates the additional drops we have to do.

Prior to surgery we had prednisone drops in each eye four times per day and a dilation drop in the right eye once each day.  Now she has prednisone drops six times in each eye, antibiotic drops four times in the right eye and a dilation drop once each day.   It’s a lot of drops and they hurt because she has incisions that are healing in her right eye.

She spends a lot of time in a ball on the floor facing down when she thinks things are too bright, or more commonly, when we tell her it’s time for drops.    She has been interested in wearing her glasses more though, which might be an indication she’s getting some information from her right eye—if she’s opening it, that is.

In a few weeks when the incisions are healed and we’re finished with the antibiotic drops we’ll start patching the left eye and see if she really can see anything in the right other than super, duper, painful light (that’s me paraphrasing her).

For now, we have a twenty-six hour trip to Detroit and back for an office visit.   Per usual, my daughter is excited about going on the trip.   I’m not excited about the high of fifteen degrees and low of five degrees.    At least there’s no snow predicted.

The Big Boy Update:  When my son opened his birthday present from Grandma Shu he saw a Lego dog and duck set.   He said, ”Aww, that’s so cute”.   I’d never heard him say anything like this before, he not being the type to declare things cute.   Then, a few days later he was itchy with dry skin and I found an old baby eczema cream tube in their bathroom.   As I was putting it on his legs he looked at the picture of the little baby on the front and said in a baby talk voice, “he’s so cute”.   It would appear my son is in fact into cute.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was lying in bed getting ready to go to sleep when she told my husband, “Dr Trese might make my eye better, but he might make my eye badder.”   It’s hard to know what to say when your child says something like that that could be true.  How do you explain we’re doing everything we can to help her, but it’s going to be long, hard and painful sometimes.

Harry Potter Coming Out Party

My son had his sixth birthday party today at our house.   He has been into Harry Potter like nobody’s business lately so it was a natural pick for the theme.   We had cupcakes with two colors of swirled icing matching the Gryffindor house colors with an upside down ice cream cone dipped in chocolate on the top to make them look like wizard’s hats.   They looked great and were fun to eat.

My husband and father-in-law hung brick patterned sheets on the front door so you entered the house through the Dragon Alley entrance.   This should have been less complicated but we were in the middle of pre-storm weather which meant more wind than the sheets could manage.   They had to weigh them down with wrenches and other tools from the garage so they didn’t blow away.

Once everyone was inside we headed downstairs where there was a table under which lit candles were hanging from the ceiling just like the Grand Hall in Hogwarts.  Next each child got to select a wand under a cloth with the saying, “the wand picks the wizard”.  They got to unwrap their wand and everyone liked their choice.   They liked to see how their wands were different from their friends.    My husband found them from a seller on Etsy and I think they were the best thing at the party.   They were made from wooden dowels:

We sent the children outside to play Quiddich next using a collection of random balls we had with one spray painted gold as the Golden Snitch.  My husband had put some hula hoops he’d spray painted onto stakes and placed them across the back yard.  The game was less than a game and more running around throwing balls, swinging on the swing and sliding down the slide.   Some of the younger children took off upstairs to find the Transformers to play with.  The adults didn’t mind at all because everyone was busily having fun.

The rain started just in time for the cup cakes and birthday song.   At that point I disappeared upstairs to put “magical creatures” all around the main and second floor.   Magical creatures being small plastic animals and dragons.    After the cup cakes had made a disaster of multiple faces and the carpet, I handed out bags and told the children it was time for a hunt.   They ran upstairs and came down a while later with their bags full of creatures.

My son then got to hand out a chocolate frog he, my daughter and husband had made a few days before, a set of Harry Potter plastic glasses and some Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans to add to their bags.   These beans turned out to be the most fun of the party for some of the children (and adults) as they found vomit, ear wax, dirt, earthworm, grass, booger, black pepper and rotten egg beans and tried to get the adults to eat them.   I tried them all and they were appropriately named.   I have a collection of the “bad” beans some of the children left for me to eat later.

We had some friends we’ve known for many years and some new friends attend the party.   Two of the ladies attending are dear friends of mine and have recently become a couple after their marriages to their husbands didn’t work out.   As they left the party one of them told me in a quiet voice, “thanks for having us, this was sort of our coming out party.”  I was very touched they would choose our party to share their story.   They are both lovely people and I’m so happy for them both.

My son was a gracious friend to all the people who came to his party.   He made me proud all day long.   Tonight he didn’t want to take his Harry Potter cloak, tie and shirt off to put his pajamas on.   I think he had a good day.

The Big Boy Update:  This afternoon towards the end of the birthday party I got down on my knees and asked my son for a hug.   He looked at me and told me, “I’m going to hug you forever, mom” in a very sincere voice.   Then he hugged me and hugged me and finally let go only when his name was called out by one of his friends.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter and I were heading towards the bedroom for bath time this evening.   She told me as she was walking and taking off her shirt, “do you know I can take off my clothes while walking?   Well…my shirt, not my pants.”

Busy Times

We had our luminary and neighborhood party tonight, and both events were a big success.  I’m full of cookies and cocktails and my husband and I are off to another neighbor party as soon as this blog post is done.   It seems like the holidays are one fun event after another this year, making it busy but happy times here.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is very, very excited about his Harry Potter birthday party tomorrow.  He watched most of the first movie last night, finishing it today intermixed with sessions of running out of the room and covering his ears during the scary parts.   He got some Harry Potter glasses from his Aunt A today and a cloak from a family friend he’s looking forward to wearing tomorrow.   It’s going to be a fun party for everyone tomorrow.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter went to our neighborhood party today and helped for several hours to hand out luminary packs with her friend, Gigi, who is two days younger than she is.   She navigated a busy crowded pack of adults and children well even though her vision is quite poor.   She is my little hero in many respects.

Movie Night Present Swap

It's been a busy, but fun day. My son's ear was hurting and we brought him home from school early but we think he just needed to blow his nose in a major way. My daughter is still highly light-sensitive, but otherwise is fine aside from hating the drops as they sting her incisions.  We were busy preparing for this evening: our annual movie night friends present swap.

Everyone arrived and presents were handed out by our children with help from the adults. Paper flew off the packages and we all found fun or useful presents in our packages.  The children wanted to open more, even when there were none left.  Now, in the wake of the evening, my son is happily watching Harry Potter and my daughter is sound asleep.

I, for one, am tired, having prepared for the neighborhood luminary event happening tomorrow.  I'm going to sleep as soon as I can so I can get up early to run and then have another day full of holiday events with a cookie swap, luminary event hand out of materials and street party.

The Big Boy Update:  my son simply can not wait for his Harry Potter party in Sunday to celebrate his sixth birthday.  He is looking forward to having his friends come to celebrate with him.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  light is the enemy since surgery, which is good, we hope.  Sunglasses are helpful, even in dim light.  In a few weeks we hope to know if her right eye can see form as well as light.

Office Visit Notes

I thought there would be some sort of revelation in the information my husband heard from my daughter’s follow-up visit to Dr. Trese post-surgery.  It was mostly because we had come up with all these questions and had hoped it would give some clarity on who, what, when where or I guess really only ‘why’.

What was that tissue he removed from her eye and where was it?  It was some lens capsule, but it was also some scar tissue that grew.   He thinks at some point she had a moderate sized bleed from the vessels in the iris and that organized into a scar.   He thinks more scar tissue could forming the future,  which is less likely to happen is she doesn’t bump her eye and cause another bleed.  

Asking this child to not bump into things is a hard task if you imagine it.   She is blind and she runs into things a lot.   She wears glasses and her eyes are usually protected, but we can’t over protect her and limit her life too much.   For now, we’re keeping her reasonably protected while the eye heals from surgery.

He thought the dot of blood in the front of her eye had already resolved from the surgery the day before, which is good news.  

What about the blood vessels in her retina?  He said she had less than normal and they were abnormally small.   He commented that her circulation is not extremely prominent, but she obviously has function, so the retina is oxygenated.   The vessels in her left eye show better circulation, but he can’t see it now because of the cataract.

We’ll know more at Tuesday’s recheck in his office.   Maybe I’ll get to see some snow since it’s my turn to visit Detroit.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is super excited about his Harry Potter birthday party on Sunday.   My husband made Quiddich hoops in the back yard using hula hoops and stakes and we’re hoping for no rain so the children can run outside and make up some rules with balls and hoops and wands.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is light-sensitive, but not 100% of the time.   I think she’s keeping the eye rolled upwards or not using it that much and then suddenly when she does use it, she gets light overwhelmed.   I really hope this is a good sign.

Phonathon

I haven’t even played the audio recording from Dr. Trese yet.  It was my plan to, as was my plan to discuss the content of the audio recording with my husband since he was there when they met, but that also hasn’t happened.   It’s been one of those days.  

We had our school’s phonathon tonight and I helped prepare for it some.   That kept me busy part of the day and then twelve other things got in the way of preparing adequately for tonight’s blog post.   That being said, gosh, I’m tired.   I’m off to bed.

The Big Boy Update:  Today we celebrated my son’s sixth birthday in his class.   He was very pleased to have his father, sister and me join in the circle of students and teachers to help wish him a happy birthday.    My husband prepared pictures, one for each year, and we talked about what happened that year.    We left the pictures in his class so he could talk to his friends about them when we had left.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was light-sensitive this morning.   She went to school wearing her sunglasses.   By the afternoon she had adjusted to the light.   Hopefully she will continue to have issues with brightness because that might mean her right eye is seeing more/something/anything.

Contracts and Closing

This post was supposed to be about the follow-up appointment my daughter had with her retina surgeon post-op this morning but it’s just not happening.   It’s been one of those days where you feel like you’re not going to get on top of your day, even if the day extended into next week.    My husband and daughter arrived this afternoon and it’s been so cram-packed with “stuff” (for lack of a better term meaning all kinds of crap that has to get done) and I haven’t even had a chance to find out what happened at the appointment.    So hold on for tomorrow and I’ll try to catch up.

Today I was in class for the last day of my Contracts and Closings post-licensing course as a real estate agent.   There was math, done in a group setting so we could help correct each other when we faltered, a review and then an afternoon exam.  

I passed.   I did not get a hundred percent, which is a shame, because I wanted to.   Don’t we all want to get hundreds every time?   At any rate, I passed easily and am now on to the next class, Broker Relationships, starting in January.    Soon…soon, I’ll be a non-provisional broker in charge of my own destiny in the world of real estate.

The Big Boy Update:  I have this wax seal kit with two seals I got as a Christmas present two years ago.   I brought it out as an incentive to my son to get his thank you cards done.   This has turned into more of an obsession for him than I intended.   He likes to play imagination games with the silver, gold and red wax sticks and the other parts of the set.   But most of all he loves to melt the wax over the candle and make the seal on the envelopes after I’ve put his drawn-on card inside.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is home and you’d never know she had surgery from her mood.   Yes, she is un-thrilled about the additional drop frequency and added antibiotic drops, but she doesn’t mind the metal, protective eye-patch at night.   She didn’t want to sleep on her back tonight but I was able to move her around once she’d fallen asleep—which she did about three seconds after laying down, she was so tired.

Opened Up and Smashed

My daughter had eye surgery today, but don’t be alarmed by the title of this post, the “smashed” part happens at the end of the story and isn’t related to her eyes.    On the whole, we have hopeful news—unconfirmed, but potentially good in the long run.

Dr. Trese checked the pressure in both eyes, which was fifteen, a very good pressure for a little girl who had zero pressure eight weeks ago.   That means the Healon he injected in both eyes is maintaining and since eyes need pressure to hold the structures in place, this bit of news is good news.

He performed surgery on her right eye which involves putting teeny, tiny instruments into her eye to both see and do things.   Being inside her eye gives Dr. Trese a better idea of what’s happening overall than he’d otherwise have from an external inspection.  

The retinal fold blocking about forty percent of her field of vision is still there and remained there at the end of the procedure.   He thought it might be a thin piece of scar tissue but instead it was quite thick.  That fold may be there for good, time will have to tell there.

He next removed the scar tissue blocking her field of vision.  After that he could see her optic nerve which is still attached, as is most of her retina.   She doesn’t have tremendous blood vessels in the retina, which isn’t great, but that’s been something she’s had since this all started.  The optic nerve also looks attached and healthy.   He said the retina looks healthy even though it has less blood flow than a normal retina.  I’m not sure if this means she has less visual capacity (if the retina is working in the first place) so we’ll have to wait and see.

When they inserted one of their instruments there was a little gush of brown, old blood.  It is possible this blood has remained since one of the prior procedures and could have been why the retinal fold has scared the way it did as the old blood organized and formed sclera blood tissue.   There was also a little drop of new blood that remains in her field of vision from the procedure today. The prudent course of action is to leave that drop in place and let it resolve on its own.

Dr. Trese’s suggestion is to consider patching soon once healing is complete in a few weeks (or possibly earlier).   He said her vision will be suppressed from the brain side because she’s been so dependent on her left eye for her vision for such a length of time.   Her right eye doesn’t know what to do with the images it’s seeing, "but her brain should be able to do a little more understanding in terms of seeing what’s coming in because her left eye is far from perfect” he said.

She has more drops (because drops four times per day wasn’t fun enough).   The increase of steroid drops to six times each day will hopefully help prevent more scar tissue from forming.  She also has antibiotic drops for two weeks and gets to wear a stylish metal patch over her eye to protect it for two weeks.   The patch has holes in it, and Dr. Trese suggested using bright lights in her eye to try and stimulate the retina/brain connection.  Yes, in this case we are suppose to shine bright lights into her eye, interesting, no?

So unknown news, but we’re hopefully good news in the future.   We’ll have to wait and see.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was picked up by our neighbors from school today because I was in class.   When I got home he’d made muffins with them and had shared them with all the children on the block.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This is the “smashed” part of the blog post title.   At the mall after surgery my daughter slipped and smashed her chin.   My husband called and we called a doctor friend of ours, sharing the picture of her chin and discussing the potential need for stitches.   In the end, my husband decided to go to an urgent care.  Thankfully they had no patients in the waiting room and they were in and out in thirty minutes.  They decided the cut was shallow enough to not need stitches.   My daughter is sporting a pressed closed wound with steri-strips for the next week so the tissues can grow back together and heal with minimal scaring.   Here’s the photo we debated over, considering the depth of the cut and the raggedness of the edges.  If you click it and zoom in you can see why we were debating stitches:

Six

This morning my son came over to my side of the bed and said in a worrying tone of voice, “mommy?”  I said in a rather groggy, still half asleep voice, “yes?”  He then said in a happy, bright voice, “it’s my birthday!”   I woke up immediately, grabbed him so I could give him a big hug and told him it most definitely was and happy birthday and he looked older and all sorts of other supportive things parents say to their children.  

My son then asked if he could go tell dad, who was in the shower at the time.  I told him he could and listened as he repeated the same question and answer conversation over with my husband, who also responded with peppy, happy congratulations on being six to my son.  

A few hours later my son found me and told me in a cautious voice that he felt different.   I was worried he’d caught the cold we’d been sharing around the family for a week or so and asked him how he felt different.   Guess how?  He felt taller, he informed me.   Ah, I said and told him we would definitely need to get the marker and measure him on the wall in their room later in the day.  

We did several other things during the day, but what was interesting to me was how my son was both shy and quietly excited at the same time.   This is normally a not-shy, not quiet kind of kid we’re talking about here, but he was both today.   We were at the school, he being one of the only children with a collection of adults packing muffins in little bags for an event in the morning.   He came over to me and whispered, “why aren’t you telling them it’s my birthday?”  I asked him if he wanted me to tell them.   He decided he wanted me to whisper it to each of the adults so they would know.  

You know how that went, right?  The first adult I told said out loud to my son, “is it your birthday?  Happy Birthday!!”   He got shyly excited and then answered all of here questions about how much taller he was and how he could help out more around the house now (apparently he said he gets to help out with laundry, which I was pleased to hear.)

During this time my husband and daughter landed in Detroit and they sent a picture of my daughter romping in the snow.   As my son looked at the picture on my phone he swiped through older pictures, noticing the one where we went to Krispy Kreme the last time we were in Detroit.   He wanted to go to Detroit to get donuts next time, he told me.   I told him we could do one better, we could go to Krispy Kreme right now, even though it was four o’clock, because it was his birthday.  

So we went and we got donuts and we ate them in the car as long as (and this is the important part) no one tells your father.   He told me he wouldn’t and he ate over the big cloth and didn’t make a mess and decided they were the best donuts in the world.

We came back and went to a casual invitation for dinner at our back yard neighbor’s house whose children are good friends with ours.  My son, again, wanted to make sure I was going to tell them it was his birthday.   I said I would, although I didn’t want them to feel like they had to do anything special (they were ordering pizza).   They had been making cake balls when we arrived though and we each got to have three little desserts to celebrate my son’s birthday at the end of the meal.   On the whole,  I think it was a good sixth birthday.

The Big Boy Update:  My son and I went to lunch with Uncle Jonathan today after my husband and daughter went to the airport to fly to Detroit.   He was upset his favorite sushi restaurant wasn’t open but agreed, after some discussion and telling him there wasn’t any other choice, to go to an alternate restaurant.   We sat down and after he got his food delivered he told Uncle Jonathan and me, “best birthday ever.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and husband landed in Detroit amid falling snow.  Not a lot of snow, mind you, but snow.  Snow of the, “more than seven flakes per hour” variety which, in North Carolina, means “cancel all schools”.   My daughter was delighted with the snow, not minding the cold nearly so much because there was fluffy white matter on the ground she could play with.

Decorations Done

The Christmas decorating.   Or, rather, it’s almost done.   The vast majority of it is complete and for that, I am grateful.  I like having things decorated but I don’t like the decoration process because it’s a lot of unpacking holiday things, rearranging, and packing up other things that are in the way.   And stairs, most of all stairs.

My husband, mother-in-law and children went to pick out a tree this afternoon while I stayed home to bring down the holiday decorations from the attic.   Thirty flights of stairs later I’d just gotten the boxes down, was in a full-sweat and hadn’t put a single decoration up.   It wasn’t that many boxes, but with a basement where the tree goes, a two-story house and an additional flight of stairs to get to the attic, the stairs pile up quickly.

We celebrated my son’s birthday today because tomorrow, his actual birthday, coincides with his sister and father leaving early for Detroit (with 100% chance of snow) for eye surgery.    He didn’t mind because his birthday party isn’t until next week.   He picked the dinner location and then frozen yogurt for dessert.

My father-in-law had knee surgery yesterday, but you’d barely have know it because he was walking around and resting only to ice his knee.    He’s one tough guy.   His doctor said, “motion is lotion” and encouraged him to walk.

I have just a few final things to complete before I can drop into bed and fall into sleep knowing we got a lot done today and tomorrow…I can get on the rest of the holiday tasks on my list.

The Big Boy Update:  My son did not want Nana to leave tonight.   He has gotten more into hugging lately.  He asked Nana, “can I have a second hug?”  She told him he could and then had to have help getting to her car as he was blocking the door, trying to keep her from going home.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and father-in-law set up the lollipop tree today as is our tradition during the holidays.   They were very methodical in their plan for how they populated the tree and what the arrangement of colors should be.   When they were done my daughter said, “what a splendid tree.”

Honey-colored Lights

This may not seem like a thing, but it was at our house (or at least to me).   It was a color thing.  It’s apparently been a thing for a lot of people for some time now so it’s good to know we’re not the only ones.   This is about our lights, specifically the lower-power, more eco-friendly LED lights we put in a while back.

LED lights are great, but boy, are they bright and white.  They’re uncomfortably bright and white in some instances and while that’s great if you’re in need of a flashlight to light up a cave to inspect for the presence or absence of an angry bear, it is not the most comfortable light to be bathed in as you try and relax around the dinner table.

Over time light bulb manufacturers and researchers have been working on warmer, softer and generally more friendly colors for their lights.   Apparently this has been hard, but it’s been doable as each year better options become available.

Just after Thanksgiving dinner I did one of my, “and another thing…” speeches where I explain to my husband why something isn’t the way it should be (or the way I want it).   He agree with me that yes, the lights in the breakfast nook area and especially the dining room were just too darned white.    So he did something about it.

He found a new varietal of bulb from the bulb farm at the mega hardware store.   He brought home samples and the difference was dramatic.    He went back and we replaced the bulbs in both rooms.  Now, when we turn on the honey-colored lights, I’m relaxed, not put on edge.   Thanks, dad.

The Big Boy Update:  My son had just informed me, “I have a brilliant idea.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter asked me if all the trees going down the hill to our  neighborhood were evergreens.   She asked me this before we had gotten to the long downward hill and typically she doesn’t even know where we are when we drive around.   But apparently she’d been looking out and up through the top and side glass because she was right, it was all evergreen.  

Compost Back On

I found the compost bin!   We had it about four years ago and were doing a fine job of collecting compostable content and then throwing things down the hill when the bin got full.   Then there was the bacon grease incident.   I won’t go into details but to sum up: grease was poured outside in a similar spot to the composting spot and the dog was never able to fully get over the memory.

It was getting more and more restrictive deciding what we could throw out that wouldn’t attract the dog, especially after decomposition had begun.    So we gave it up and I put the compost bin away.    After our dog died at the end of the summer I thought about the compost bin a few times but was elsewhere and kept forgetting to look for the bin in the attic.

Then, when I did go look, I couldn’t find it.  That’s odd, I know where almost everything is.   I have an overly-organized attic and, well, let’s be honest, the rest of the house is pretty organized too.   That being said, I don’t lose things very often.   But this compost bin was nowhere to be found.    I looked again a second time but to no avail.  My husband and I talked about why we’d give it away and we were certain we hadn’t thrown it away but where could it have gone off to?

Then, yesterday when I was looking under the laundry room sink for the extra bleach to fill up the smaller container—I saw it.   I yelled.   I yelled a yell that probably sounded like I’d been speared by a whale harpoon.   It was that loud and surprised.   I immediately said, “I found it!!!!”   This helped not a bit because my husband, who was in the middle of making dinner, didn’t know I was looking for anything.

I brought it into the kitchen, looking triumphant, saying how I remember putting it under the sink now that I’d found it and wasn’t my husband excited and hooray we could get back to the business of composting.   My husband agreed it was marvelous news, but from his rather flat tone of voice I suspect he wasn’t as excited as I was about the whole thing.

The Big Boy Update:   My son got a birthday present in the mail from his Great Aunt Martha, my father’s sister.    She sent him a large stuffed hound dog.   It’s soft and squishy and huggable and the tag on it said, “Floppy Dog”.   My son upgraded the name and decided to call him, “Sloppy Dog” instead.  Sloppy dog, similar to a real dog, has followed my son around for the better part of the last two days.  My son has carried him like a back pack, rode on him on the hard wood, had him sit beside him while he ate and he even tried to take him to school.   The number one thing Sloppy Dog likes to do, apparently, is be a weapon.  My son swings him around, slams him into the sofa, swishes him around to ward off friend and foe alike and even jumps up and down on him.   None of these actions are done with any sort of malice towards Sloppy Dog—in fact (so I was given to understand from my son) Sloppy Dog loves being partners with an about-to-be six-year-old little boy.    My son loves Sloppy Dog.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter came into the kitchen tonight while we were unpacking the dinner my husband had just come home with.   I looked over to see her in her down winter jacket, socks, and, well that’s it.   She told us, “I took my pants off”.   We said, “fine, would you like some dinner?”   She agreed that would be good and dinner proceeded just like it does countless places all over the globe with parents who realize it’s not even worth asking sometimes why children do the things they do.

December Calendar

We have a calendar on our refrigerator.   It’s a laminated sheet with no specific information.   Each month (or so) I update it with sharpies of various colors to let the children know what important events will be happening during the month.  

My son likes the calendar and checks it regularly.   He told me yesterday it was out of date—what with it being December 6th—and could we update it?   I told him we’d do it today and to prepare for it, I got out the sharpies and acetone pads and waited for this afternoon when my son was free to tell him it was time to change the calendar.   And here’s what happened…

My son completely cleaned off the old information (tough with sharpie) and then, on his own, started to write in the numerical days of the month.   We showed him which day of the week the first of December was on and then he just started writing the dates.    He wrote the entire month, and then continued to the sixth of January until the calendar ran out of space.

Then he wanted to draw pictures for things like his birthday, his birthday party day, when his sister was going to Detroit, when Christmas was, what day New Years’s was on, when the last day of school was and how long they’d be out of school.  

There were a lot of things to write up on the calendar, and, I was informed, we didn’t have enough colors in which to document everything.   So I went to my Sharpie stash and brought out additional color options.   And my son kept drawing.   He had ideas of what to draw for each thing.    I could tell his hand was tired because he would shake it from time to time, but he was going to finish the job.

After he was done he looked at his work and then walked off to have his bath.    Here’s the point I’m going for in this though: this is a child we were told might not make it to first grade next year because he was behind.   I’m not going to go into the ways in which he was behind, because they’re many and some are a bit subtle, but he just wasn’t moving along at the pace he should have been.

But that same teacher who told us he wasn’t far enough along—his new teacher we are all immensely pleased with—now has changed her mind.   My son is thriving with her as his teacher.   He’s matured, he’s interested in work, he’s excited about going to school and he is (I think) in love with his new teacher.  

My son has made so much progress in two months with his new teacher.   What happened tonight wasn’t even remotely possible two months ago.   My son didn’t even want to write a single letter.  I love asking him what he did at school and he likes telling me.   It has been a big change—for the better.

The Big Boy Update:  My son got a chemistry set from his aunt, uncle and cousin for his birthday.   Can we say, “obsessed” folks?   He is so excited about making crystals and doing the different chemical color flame tests.   Tonight they made another round of crystals.   He’s definitely into science.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been helping me wrap presents.   If, by some chance, you get a present in the mail from us this holiday season and the wrapping is a combination of crumpling coupled with excessive amounts of tape, you’ll know who my helper was that day.

Ahh…

Today has been a hectic but good day.   I rushed off with the children to get to school on time only to find out for the second day in a row my husband, children and I had somehow all forgotten we were supposed to be taking the other car and not the normal car to school.    This morning we needed to take one of the cars into the service center so after depositing the children at school, I returned to the house to swap cars quickly with my husband so I could get to class on time.

The class I’m taking, Contracts and Closings, sounds dreadfully dull but it’s fairly interesting.  Pair that with a funny ex-military teacher and it makes for an enjoyable day.   But that didn’t make it a short day.   I made it home as quickly as I could in traffic, making the trip decidedly not quickly, and scrambled to get seven things done in thirty minutes before my husband and I left for our anniversary concert night.  

Of the seven things, I got six done.   I forgot to eat.   I grabbed some water and crackers and we drove to the concert, enjoyed the entire show immensely, met The Piano Guys for a photo afterwards and then headed home to pay the sitter, make the lunches, put the dirty dishes up and then come write this blog post.  

I rather like writing these posts, but right now I’m looking forward to the one thing I look forward to  every day when the children are up in bed and I’m finishing the remaining chores that need to be done.    I’m looking forward to getting in a nice hot bath into which I will sit.   Once I’ve sat down I will say in my most happy and relaxed voice, “ahh…”.    

The Big Boy Update:  My son and husband were at a bounce house place this afternoon.   My son had been excitedly running around for a while when he came over to my husband and asked, “why am I all sweaty?”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter put this together with her therapist today.   It doesn’t look like much, but for a child that’s blind it’s a lot of work.   She has to find the end, get the pieces connected, get the next piece from the box and connect again.   Then, and this is the tricky part, she has to not run into the parts she’s already put together and break them apart because she didn’t see them.   Her therapist was so pleased she sent me this picture. Her comment was, “So much work and lots of problem solving to get this.  All by herself.”

Anti-hibernating

That’s what I’ve decided this time of year is.   Earlier in the year when spring came around I was enthusiastically training for and running two marathons.   Well, one marathon and one mostly-marathon on account of the coming in early so as to avoid injury.   There was exercising though, and lots of it.

Summer got into full swing and I was active outside with the children, the water in the pools, the water hose in the back yard and some running wedged in where convenient.   As fall got closer we ramped back up the training for two more marathons.   Then in November I executed the double marathon plan (which was more of a scheduling accident as opposed to a proper plan).

When I returned home from Las Vegas I was fitness free.   I had no upcoming race scheduled.  So I decided to sit back, enjoy the “not having to get up early” days, eat some fattening foods and basically be exercise lazy.  

It’s just the right time of year to go into anti-hibernation: it’s getting colder but instead of going into a cave and eating nothing, I’m going to put on a sweat shirt and eat holiday treats, fattening myself up for the holidays.   I wonder if I still have my, “buffet pants” with the giving elastic waist?

I’m sure I’ll regret it come mid-January when I have to re-train for a March marathon, but for now, bring on the homemade banana nut bread, cookies the children made from three houses down and, of course, candy canes.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was showing me how he draws his numbers tonight.   He was explaining how “this number is strong and that number is soft and some of the numbers are strong and soft.”  Strong, it turns out, means sharp and straight lines.   Soft is the curved parts.   So a zero is all soft while a seven is all hard.   A five is half and half.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter likes to find new songs by asking Alexa to play words or phrases.   Tonight she was asking Alexa to play ”disposal” and “recycle”.   Sometimes Alexa comes up with good songs, including “Moon Rise” which my daughter stumbled on one day and we enjoy listening to the song regularly.

Back in Class

I’m became a licensed real estate agent in November and then I joined the association(s) of Realtors later in the month making me a Realtor as well.  There is still training to be done though.   I’m a provisional agent until I complete three thirty-hour post-licensing courses.   Not wanting to wait around and not liking that, “provisional” word on my title, I signed up for the classes.

Tomorrow I start the first class on contracts and closing.   It’s sure to be a good class, but it’s also a busy month.   I like to feel as though I’m ahead of the holidays instead of having it feel like they’re barreling down on me with little time left to finish my planning, shopping, decorating, delivering, baking and wrapping.  

It doesn’t seem like a lot, but all the little things add up to make for a lot of hours doing things that are fun in and of themselves, but sure can busy up your month.   This month with two trips to Detroit and a two-week continuing education class added to the schedule, I’m feeling already pressed for time—and it’s only the fourth of December.  

I’m still ahead of things—I think.

The Big Boy Update:  I asked my son if he wanted to look through a new catalog that came in the mail today.  Typically he’s all about this, but today with a new Lego from Grandma Shu on the table, he had no interest.   I told him, “but you could find some things to put on your wish list, do you want me to save the catalog for you?”   He said, about the things he’d put on his wish list, “all those things were just to get people interested.”  In what, I wonder, buying him more presents?

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   Speaking of holiday things to be done, I was making earrings for the school staff, something I’ve done since our first year of school.   There are more staff, this year necessitating I create forty pair of earrings.  My daughter asked me several times how much longer I was going to be, to which I replied “days”.   She then asked me, “mommy, why do you do everything for the school?”

The Silent Parenthesis

It’s the end of the day and I find myself at the computer again.   I do this every day, without fail, putting into words thoughts or ideas I’ve had that need writing down.   It’s become part of my life, the silent parenthesis to the day.

That doesn’t always mean I know what to write.   Sometimes I have too much to write and not enough time.  Other times I have not as much on my mind coupled with unseasonable free time.  Most commonly I descend the stairs into the basement with a single topic in mind, something specific I’ve had highest on my list of things to be written.  

It’s a good thing, this desire to write about life, thoughts and experiences.   Only sometimes it gets in the way of my plans for a nice hot tub bath.   Something I plan on correcting in short order, right after I finish this post.

The Big Boy Update:  My son told my husband today he hated himself.   He followed this up by saying he likes everyone else.   He was just coming from a birthday party in which he knew our neighbor, his friend, but none of his classmates who attended the party.   My son felt rather alone.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has had some bouts with fear of monsters in the relatively recent past.   She hasn’t been scared overnight in a while now and recently she told me, “do you know there’s only one monster in the world and he just went past?”

Sat Nav

This past Monday in the recovery room after her evaluation under anesthesia I was talking to the nurse about where we were going to go to dinner—the place my daughter had been talking about all day, Chick-Fil-A.   I mentioned I couldn’t remember which mall we were going to, but it was a big one fairly close.   It was at this point from the recovery bed that my daughter, who had been dozing, said, “mom, you can just ask Sat Nav”.  

My daughter knows about GPS and knows we use it to map things for us on our phones, on the computer and in the car because she hears adults talking and let me tell you, she hears everything.   I told her I would have to do that when we got in the car.   The interesting thing was, my husband and I don’t use the term, “Sat Nav”.

A short time later she was discharged and we found ourselves in our car in the cold with our seat belts on, ready to go.   Only I wasn’t going anywhere yet because I was looking up directions on the phone.   I told her what the hold up was and she again, mentioned “Sat Nav”.   I asked her where she heard the term from and then I found out…it was from Peppa Pig.  Oh.

What followed was a lengthy story from my daughter about how Daddy Pig had gotten the car dirty, Momma Pig got upset and how “Sat Nav” was used to help the whole family get to their destination.   By the time she finished her story we’d made it to the mall and had ridden up to the third floor of the parking garage to find a spot to park.

After nuggets, fries, lemonade, throwing some pennies into the fountain, purchasing some candy, purchasing a Lego Dimensions character set for her brother and then selecting a ring/necklace/bracelet set for herself, we headed back to our car.   I sat again in the driver’s seat getting the directions to the hotel started quickly this time, driving off without delay.  

The navigation voice with is apparently called ’Sat Nav’ to my daughter, started talking to us, telling us to turn left.   Then, it immediately told us to turn left, then it said to go back right.   What was happening was we were going down the levels of the parking garage and Sat Nav thought we were just plain confused.   My daughter decided she’d had enough after two floors and said, “cut it out Sat Nav!”

The Big Boy Update:  My son has started getting birthday presents as his birthday is drawing close.  He was happy his sister got presents at first, but then as some came in after her birthday from friends or family we didn’t see until later in the month he got frustrated, asking when his birthday was going to be.   He just found out he has a present from Edna who is here this afternoon.   When she told him he got this very excited yet shy grin on his face and then asked if he could open it now.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter was driving loops around our living room, kitchen, dining room on her tricycle after dinner last night when she told me, “mommy, do you know what I’m attracted to?”  I told her I didn’t.   She said.  “I’m attracted to girls.”  I told her girls were very nice.   She then said, “well, and other things too.”  

The Four-way Switch Was a Bad Idea

When we were planning our house with the architect we got to the stage where we picked out locations of all the light switches.   My husband and I thought about how we might enter spaces, which lights we envisioned having and from there we got a map of the house lighting plan.   At the time our builder told us not to worry too much about it because everything would change when we got into the framed house and saw things in three-dimensions.

He was right, we changed a lot of things once we were walking around the wooden framed house.   We moved switches, decided what needed to be three-way circuits so the lights could be turned on and off from more than one location and eliminated some things we realized we didn’t need.   We had this one place—one large place—we decided we needed a four-way switch.  

Our builder told us it was rarely done but I was certain we’d have definite needs to turn on or off the upper hall lights from each end of the hall, the top of the stairs that arrives in the middle of that long hall and the bottom of those same stairs on the floor below.  

So, how many of those switches do we actually use?   There are two of them we use regularly and those two are at the top of one flight of stairs and at the bottom of a second flight of stairs.   If that gives you any indication on how far apart these four switches that control the same six lights are, then let me tell you why it annoys me so.

I will start off by saying I’m particular about some things—well, a lot of things.   With the light switches I think up should be on and down should be off.  This is fine and always works with a single switch, but throw in two switches in the same circuit and you can get them out of whack.   Turn up on  one switch to turn the light on.   Go to the second switch and flip the switch up and the light goes back off.   Now you have two switches in the up position but the light is off.    And this bothers me.

Now imagine four switches across two floors and a long hallway and me going from switch to switch so I can turn off the one switch that’s currently in the up position.    Any of the other three switches would have worked, but no, I have to find the right one.  

The only thing that ameliorates the frustration from having to find the right switch is the relief I feel when I do find it, knowing that all four switches are properly in the down position.    Next time, there will be no damn four-way switches though.

The Big Boy Update:   This morning on the way to school my son said, “I smell pink”.   I sat there and listened to my daughter ask him what pink smelled like.   He answered, “I smell pink and it smells so princessy”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  While in Detroit my daughter was carrying around a small stuffed turtle in her hands.   This turtle has a name, but at that point she decided to rename her turtle to, “Turdy”.   She then decided to call out “Turdy, Turdy” repeatedly…in public.   I smiled my mother smile and we  went on as if it didn’t sound like she’d named her turtle something that sounds like a toilet word.

I’m Starving

It’s a saying we use all the time: “I’m starving”.   We say it when we’re the tiniest bit hungry or when it’s past meal time or when we just want to eat a lot of food (which for me is frequently).   We’re not starving, we’re just hungry.   If you’re reading this blog, you’re likely not in a situation where you’re literally starving.   You hopefully have the means to eat and drink when your body needs food.    Still, it’s a phrase that’s highly overused.

On Sunday my daughter couldn’t eat anything after dinner time because of her procedure the following day.  We finished dinner at around six-thirty and she had some juice shortly before bed.   The next morning she could have clear liquids up until nine o’clock in the morning.   She drank a decent number of calories before we went to the hospital, but because there was no food, she told me she was hungry about seventeen times.   So many times in fact that I suggested we head over to the hospital early so I could get her mind off the hunger and to the toys she likes to play with in the pre-op rooms.

While we were at the hospital she informed me several times that, “my tummy is telling me I’m hungry”.   She knows and understands she can’t eat until after the procedure on account of how many times she’s done this by now, but it didn’t stop her from complaining.    Considering I hadn’t eaten anything since the night before as well, I was in agreement with her.

There was a NICU patient with an emergency that Dr. Trese needed to see before us, which absolutely takes precedence and we certainly don’t complain about little tiny babies getting emergency care they need, but it meant an even longer wait for us.    By the time my daughter went into the OR it was past 3:30PM.  

The procedure was quick and she recovered swiftly from the short time under anesthesia and we were off to the mall to get the one thing she wanted: Chick-Fil-A.   The line once we got there was exceptionally long seeing as the restaurant had just opened.   There must have been forty people in front of us easily.  

We eventually got our food at almost six o’clock, nearly twenty-four hours from our last meal.    It was good.  It was delicious.   I was a very happy person as I sat there eating and watching my daughter get Polynesian sauce all over the table, her face and her arms as she ate her nuggets.

We had been hungry, that’s for sure, but we weren’t starving.   We weren’t even close to starving.   Not having enough food to sustain your body is no joke and something awful no one should have to endure.   It’s a giving time of year.  Hopefully much of the giving will be able to be used to feed people for more than just the holiday season.

The Big Boy Update:  My son is now obsessed with Harry Potter.   My husband finished reading the first book last night and they started in on book two tonight.   My son has decided he wants to have a Harry Potter birthday party.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  In one of those non-sequitur comments children are so famous for making, my daughter asked me in the car yesterday, “mommy, why is Dolly so big?”   Dolly is a doll (Dolly is her name) that is about four feet tall.   She’s floppy and can easily fit into a bag, but she’s pretty big.   She is much, much bigger than any of the other stuffed animals we have.   I told her I didn’t know.  Sometimes as a parent you just don’t have a good answer to those “why” questions.

And Now For Something Completely Different:  You don’t realize how much you appreciate Poopourri until you’re in a hotel without any.

Stuck on the Plane

My daughter and I took our time this morning getting ready to go to the airport.  She wanted to eat at the little bistro at the front of the hotel, saying their chocolate muffin was delicious.   We had coffee, orange juice a banana and a muffin while we sat by the fire in the lobby.    Then we went back to pack up and head out.

We weren’t able to get seats on the plane due to over booking, but I wasn’t overly worried we’d get on the plane due to offered incentives.   I also wasn’t too worried we wouldn’t get seats together because usually people don’t want to sit beside a five-year-old without their mother.  (I would have been fine with someone else entertaining her for the flight and knowing her, she would have made a new best friend.)

We got to the gate with plenty of time to spare given the inbound plane was delayed and we had an extra forty-five minutes before boarding began.   We got those seat assignments (together) without even a question asked and when boarding began we got on the plane and settled in for the reasonably short flight home.

When we landed I texted my husband who said he was leaving the house as I sent the message.   I figured we’d get to the pickup area at about the same time.   It was then that the captain came on the speaker, telling us there was a problem.

The problem was the entire airport was out of power.   There was a regional outage (meaning larger than the airport).   The airport did have generator backup running, but it didn’t run everything and for good reason, power went first to things like the traffic control tower and other essentials.  

What was out of power for the time being was the gangway, which needed electricity to move from its parking location to connect with the side of our plane so we could disembark.   We were right there at the gate, but without power, we weren’t going home yet.  

Most of the passengers were understanding (because how can you get mad at the airline when there’s a power outage they have no control over) but some passengers weren’t so understanding.    I was just glad we were home, or almost home at least.

There was conversation between the pilot and the ground crew about getting a stairway up to the plane, but as there was no ground entrance for us into the terminal it wasn’t a straightforward solution.    In about twenty minutes they were able to divert power around and we were able to get into the terminal.

It was interesting what did have power when we got inside.  There was reasonable lighting and planes were still planning on boarding and departing from the lit monitors and announcements I heard.    The moving walkways and escalators didn’t work but that was just more walking for everyone.   From the looks on their faces I could tell there were serious problems for some passengers…the Starbucks concession didn’t have power.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was glad to see both my daughter and me when we returned home today.  He did a lot of hugging and smiling at us.   He was happy to see us, but it was clear he was trying to ingratiate himself with us so he could ask where his Lego Dimensions present was.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter and I were in the pool “at Detroit” as she calls it, going back and forth between the hot tub and main pool.   I like sitting in the hot tub because, well, it’s hot.   My daughter, not so much.   She told me, “I’m attracted to cold” and headed off to the main pool, which she decided was her house.

Good News, Stable News, It Might Be Bad News

If my daughter was trying to win an award for the most complex eye case, I think she could well be in the running.   We had an EUA with her retina surgeon today.   The total time with her doctor today was five minutes discussion before the procedure, a fifteen minute procedure in which he looked at her eyes and a ten minute discussion afterwards.   That’s thirty minutes of incredible expertise, hampered in half by my questions to gain a grip on what’s happening.

First, the good news:  six weeks ago we came to Detroit well ahead of schedule because my daughter’s vision was decreasing and we didn’t know why.  Her pressure had dropped to six in one eye and I think zero in the other eye, which is respectively bad and abysmal.   He artificially increased the pressure with Healon and set a recheck for today, six weeks later.   We all hoped the pressure would maintain.   Today she had a pressure of seventeen in her left eye, the highest number I’ve ever heard, and thirteen in her right eye.   This is good news.   Long term her eyes may never be able to maintain pressure on their own, but that can be managed with the Healon.

The stable news is her clouding lens (or cataract) in the left eye.   Dr. Trese said he couldn’t get much view into the back of her eye as a result, but it doesn’t look much more clouded than last time he saw her.   He can’t see in well, but she can see out far better than he can see through the short distance into the back of her eye.

She does however have some new vessel growth around the iris area.  We’ve seen this before, way back, when this all started late last year.   These aberrant vessels grow to try and get more oxygen to the eye.   He said they’re very small and shouldn’t affect her vision much and they’re also small enough to hopefully not impede the eventual removal of her natural lens.

I asked him if once a cataract starts to form, does it ever stop progressing or will it always continue?  He said it will likely continue to get worse, but for now he doesn’t think it should be addressed.   Removing her lens will disrupt her main vision so waiting until the procedure is necessary is the most prudent course.  He plans on discussing the latest situation with our pediatric ophthalmologist to plan for the future and to determine who is best to do the procedure.   As an aside here, he was very impressed with what he saw her doing visually when he came into the room given the state her eyes are in.

The, “it might be bad news” part is the right eye.   To sidestep for a minute, what can the right eye see at this point?   The right eye was more damaged having only light and dark perception last year.  Her retina is now attached and the rods and cones have had time to heal, but she doesn’t seem to be seeing much of anything with the eye.  Recently she’s let us patch the left eye for upwards of twenty minutes to get some exclusive use of the right eye, but when we’ve done so she seems to see almost nothing and uses the skills she’s gained over the past year to navigate as she moves around

Today he said there were two things happening in the right eye, specifically in her field of vision.    While the retina is lying in place and flat, there is one large fold right at the left front of her eye.   It’s the area of retina we would use only for extreme peripheral vision but in this case, it’s folded in and is  blocking the left side of her field of vision.   He drew this diagram:

What’s the “Baby Swiss Cheese” part, you say?  I’m glad you asked, because that’s what he talked about next.  There has been cellular growth from the area in which they removed her natural lens.  This happens in a percentage of patients and in the case of my daughter, that cell growth has created a matrix with small holes in it, making it “like trying to look through Swiss cheese”, Dr. Trese said.   Then he clarified his statement saying, the baby Swiss kind with the small holes.

So even if she can see with the right eye, it’s not getting much chance to be able to see with what’s going on in the front areas.    Dr. Trese wants to perform surgery on her right eye on December 12th to remove the cell growth and see if the retinal fold to the left is in any way attached to the cells, possibly freeing it up to flatten back out.   There’s a also chance that fold is from her retina stretching while being detached in which case it will likely remain as is.   One good bit of news though is the PFO heavy substance in her right eye, which was put int to help flatten the retina, is still there and might help flatten the remaining fold.

So, silver lining?  Can the right eye see but hasn’t been given a chance to or is all this on an eye with a retina that just doesn’t work any more?   We won’t know unless we try.    So it’s back to Detroit in two weeks for eye surgery.    Best Christmas present yet would be some returned vision in her right eye as a result.

And on a final note… as we were at the mall after the procedure, I got an unexpected text message from my daughter’s Pediatric Ophthalmologist asking how things went.    She is one very kind and caring doctor.  It always amazes me how doctors who take care of so many patients have time to remember you and check on how things are going.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was unable to focus at school the last time my daughter and husband were in Detroit.  This time he said he was going to work on something special for his sister and me while we’re gone.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter said so many things that were funny today but I’m going to put the one here that was the most touching.   We went to the mall to eat after her procedure.   She had brought her panda purse full of pennies for the fountain.   She not only likes to throw them in, she likes to makes wishes.   I sat beside her for a while, listening to her make a wish and then throw a penny in.   Not one wish had anything to do with her vision.   She’s not mourning the loss of her vision, it’s just her reality.   What is apparently wish-worthy is for Avi be her best friend at school, for Madison invite her over for dinner and for her brother be happy about the present she’s bringing home for him tomorrow.