The Little Toilet

I got a phone call from my husband today while I was out getting a pedicure.   This happens a lot lately, I answer the phone, expecting it to be him but instead it’s my daughter calling from the Amazon Alexa.     Typically when this happens it’s because she has a question, with the most common question being, “where are you?”

I told her I was getting a pedicure and she wanted to know what that was.  I explained about having the nail polish changed on your toenails and she said, “but you can do that here, mom”.  I said that I could, but they did it a lot better than I did it at home and did she remember going with me a while back to get her toenails painted?

I think this was back before she lost her vision because she said, “I remember there being lots of chairs in a row.”   That’s right, I told her and then asking if she remembered how she put her feet in the warm water while you sat in the chair.   “Oh yes, I remember mom, you put your feet inside a little toilet.”

She said she’d like to go with me next time I went and then said, “I’m going to hang up now, mom”.

The Big Boy Update:  No idea where my son heard the word, but he wanted to know what ‘prom’ meant.    I think he was satisfied with my answer but it was hard to tell.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter went to tumbling class tonight for the second time as a private lesson.  She tried for the whole hour, but I think she had some anxiety and stress.   She can’t see what the instructor is showing her and we had to tell him it was okay to physically move her body so she understood.   He told me later he always was careful with that because some parents had issues with it.  I told him it was pretty much a requirement for her.

I Only Have One Sister

We have some close friends that made an announcement yesterday.   We had heard about this beforehand, with their family visiting with us and staying at our house for a week this past month.   Their eldest child, who turned seventeen yesterday, decided that after sixteen years living as a female, she wanted to present to society as a male.   Did we have a problem with this, the mom asked on text to me in November, because they would understand if we didn’t want them staying at our house.

I believe my response was, “oh hell no we don’t have a problem, come on down”.    We’ve had an opportunity to talk to them, including their son who picked his new name but when asked, told his parents, “you named me the first time, I think you should have a say so in the name the second time.” They looked up names, all voting for keeping the first and last letters from his birth name and ‘Keaton’ was picked as the one they liked the best.

There are some very heartwarming stories I’ve heard since we first heard about it on the day in November when they decided to let family and select friends know.   The first is how much positive support they’ve all been given.   Keaton has virtually zero negativity surrounding him, which I know is tough for some children going through this same identity struggle.   Keaton says he’s known since he was in kindergarten that he felt he was male.   That’s a long time as a child to feel not at home in your birth identity.

I know when I told my children about our friends coming to visit and that I had some news to tell them that they took it rather in stride.   To children at six- and seven-years-old, it’s a pretty easy thing to explain.   She was born a girl but she wants to be a boy and we can be respectful of his wishes and call him Keaton because that’s his new name.   Yes, we will love Keaton just as much as we love Kaitrinn, that will always remain the same.

So my children rolled with it easily and we all made mistakes from time to time and got the pronoun incorrect but the name correct or vice versa, but Keaton is ever patient with us and knows it was many years of knowing him by another name and change can take time.

So at two o’clock in the morning on Friday, Kaycee, Keaton’s mother, announced on Facebook to the larger community and to her 800+ friends.   She went to sleep and woke up to over two-hundred likes, loves and comments.   And not one of them was negative.   Including the one family member they had been worried about.   Keaton added a comment as well, thanking everyone for their support and wishing every child going through the same thing could have parents, family and friends as supportive.

Kaycee also told us that in her very typical way, whenever she has something new in her life, she joins online support groups and did so as soon as Keaton came forward with his decision.   But she told me something I didn’t expect, or maybe I should have.   She said she can barely read the forum posts.   It’s so negative—a parent who won’t call their child by their selected name/gender pronoun after three years, parents who want to ‘fix’ the ‘problem’, etc.   I can’t imagine how hard that would be.

My husband and I talked last night to Kaycee, Keaton’s mother, about how it went within their family of five with two younger siblings, one girl and one boy, she said it was just a done thing.   They had a family conference, explained and told them Keaton’s new name and from that point on it was just how things were and everyone was fine with it.

There is an interesting side note on their transition to Keaton as male.   My son went to tumbling with Gavin, Keaton’s brother.   On the way home in the car Gavin mentioned something about his sister.   My son asked a question about which sister to which Gavin replied, “I only have one sister”.

We had a sleepover last night to celebrate Keaton’s seventeenth birthday.   There were four teenagers, who stayed over in addition to the movie night adults who all went home after the movie.   I found out that teenagers don’t get up early, unlike mine, who are up as soon as the sun rises, even if they went to bed three hours late.

The Big Boy Update:  My son found another song I really like on Amazon music.   As he was dancing around I asked him how he found all the good songs.   He told me, “I’m the king of music.”

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter keeps going to the piano and playing almost melody-like tunes.    She doesn’t do it all the time, but it seems to be getting more sophisticated.   Her music therapist, who is also a piano teacher, is working with her to introduce the piano incrementally so that she loves playing.

Teen Sleepover

It’s movie night and we have a lot of people at our house.   We’re also having a sleepover, only it’s not with my children’s friends.    I’ve been upstairs all night doing various things and didn’t watch the movie.   We just had lemon cake to celebrate Keaton’s seventeenth birthday and he and three of his friends are spending the night.

My son is mostly incensed, primarily because Gavin, one of Keaton’s siblings and my son’s idol, can’t spend the night.   My daughter is cranky because she doesn’t want to go to bed three hours after her bedtime and can’t she stay awake for longer?

I just want to go to bed.  But I’m old and tired or maybe I’m just older and more lazy than the children.

The Big Boy Update:  Last week we were looking at possible vacation spots for our family for next Christmas.   Aunt Kelly would show one on her iPad and then Kyle would say he’d found another option.    These were all beautiful houses, large enough to host our entire family.   One of them we liked a lot had a second, small house to the side.   We jokingly kept calling it the Cabana Boy house.   My must have been confused because he asked us who the. ‘Commander Boy’ was.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  This morning my daughter came to my bedside and said, “mom, guess what?  I don’t have strep throat anymore.”   I told her the medicine was helping but she had to keep taking it until it was gone so the sore throat didn’t come back.   She, like I and many other children in this world, didn’t understand why we had to keep taking medicine when we felt better.

Electric Sledding

I had a sled when I was a child.   It was fairly rudimentary it would seem, while being sophisticated at the same time.   It had two metal runners and some wooden slats.  You could nominally steer by pulling on a rope connected to the front that would bend the metal runners to the left or right.   It got us down the hill.

When we were at the bottom of the hill, after shouts and squeals of delight, we had to trudge back up to the top of the hill to have a second go.   We did this for hours.   It was what we called back then “fun”.  We had some snow today and I saw a different kind of fun being had by my children’s generation.

For starters, it wasn’t really what I’d call snow.   It was about an inch, which in the south is akin to snomageddon, but it required schools to be let out one day early, cancelled the next day and start on a delay the third day.   Regardless, my children were excited.   Snow gear was donned and they went out in the dusting, carrying their now high-tech formed plastic sled with them.

I went out to run an errand, braving the sunny, just below freezing weather while they went off to enjoy the minor accumulation.   When I returned I saw a neighbor, on his golf cart, with four sleds strapped to the back of his cart.   He was driving them around the streets.  

Electric, no-hassle, no work sledding.

The Big Boy Update:  On the ride to school two days ago I told my son there was a chance we’d get a little snow, but to not get his hopes up because it was likely only going to be a little.  He said, “it’s okay if we miss snow this year, all I care about is Christmas”.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:   My daughter wanted to, “eat the snow” she told us earlier today as she went out for the third time after hot chocolate and lunch. After trying it three times she wiped her mouth and I could hear her saying, “blech” at the results.

I’ll Be Glad When My Christmas Present Is Gone

My husband has a dry sense of humor.   Sometimes he says things that are so sincere you don’t realize he’s joking until you play through what he said a second time.   Last night we were in the kitchen, Uncle Jonathan was visiting and I was cleaning up from dinner.   My husband casually said out loud to Jon and me, “I’ll be glad when my Christmas present is gone.”

I looked around and had to laugh.   He was right, I can’t wait for it to be gone too.   We have a thing with dishwashing soap.   Method made this great foaming dish soap for a while and then stopped making it.   The soap smelled great like a lot of their hand soaps do, but the thing that made this particular soap so nice was the container and how it functioned.   

It was a grip pump not unlike you’d have in a bottle of window cleaner, only it spewed out this nice foam dish soap.   It was easy to grip and easy to spray and it worked well.    I don’t know why they pulled it, other than it was easy to go through a bottle fairly quickly. 

I tried other options but the ones I found were top pumps that were awkward to hold as you picked them up and aimed all around at the greasy pan the potato wedges were just baked in.   But I tried other options.   I found online the last of the soaps available and ordered them at a higher than typical price because I wanted the containers, not the soaps so much.    The one remaining container we had worked well with any foaming dish soap, but it was wearing from use of more than two years and needed to be replaced. 

I’ve checked eBay and keep looking from time to time but there just isn’t any more of that particular soap container that I can find.   So I branched my search out and found what was touted as a foaming soap industrial grade bottle.   There were good reviews.   It was large and held a lot of liquid and the pump looked easy to manage.   

Christmas day and my husband opened up an empty spray bottle and I told him I though I’d found a solution.   I filled it partially up with one of the other foaming dish soap options I’d found—for baby dishes, which made it super safe apparently.    And we tried it out.  

And it was awful.   Not only was there no foam, it doesn’t even spray, it just oozes out and makes a mess down the bottle.    The one thing the bottle is good for is a laugh though.   Every time we have some over since Christmas my husband makes sure to be grateful in front of them—which always makes me laugh. 

And he’s right, I’ll be glad when his Christmas present is empty so we can recycle the bottle and I can continue my search for a foaming dish soap dispenser. 

The Big Boy Update:  My son went back to school today.   On the car ride to school we had an in-depth conversation about GPS, including what it stood for for starters.   I explained about the satellites, which he was disappointed in because he could’t see them.   We talked about how their signal was read by the car and how that told the car where it was on the road.   Then we got into how cars (and devices) had a map they could place our current location on to determine where we were in the road.   And those same maps would help us navigate to any destination we could drive to.   At about that point he had to get out of the car in carpool line.   Maybe he’ll have more questions about GPS and satellites tomorrow.  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is still sick with strep throat.   She took the day very easy and spent a lot of time on her iPad.   We like her on the iPad because it’s visual work at a distance she can be successful in.   She does drawings and is pretty good at finding buttons in the games she plays.   Tonight she wanted to play something on the Wii U that my husband got her a while back.   She was playing on the small screen on the controller itself and aside from not being good at the game in general, she was doing okay.   Lack of contrast made it hard, but she was moving Kirby around and she was happy about it.   I called her down to dinner in a while but she fell asleep in a ball on the bar chair and didn’t eat dinner.   I put her to bed with her clothes on, only waking her to give her some ibuprofen because I think she still has a fever.  

Strep And Scorch

Let’s get the first part of the title out of the way—my daughter has strep throat.   She’s had a head cold and today after a week of congestion she woke up with a sore throat and a fever a few hours later.   Fortunately doctor’s offices are quick to get a sick child in and cultures work within minutes in-office so we had a diagnosis.    She has antibiotics now which Dr. Baldwin said has zero incidents of not killing that strep strain.   With odds like that I’m not too worried.  

The scorch part of the title is about the heater not working in our basement and master bedroom.   The part was ordered and came in over the holiday weekend.   Today the technician came back and replaced it.   There was a scorch mark on the original board.  It’s not a large area, but it was important for the heat to work.  

The Big Boy Update:  My son returns to school tomorrow after the holiday break.   He’s not ready for school mentally and we should have had him do more reading I know over the break, but he did so some productive things and he is getting better at reading.   Tonight as he got out of the bath I heard him ask, “does that say ’nay-quill’?”   I told him he was close and that it was pronounced NyQuil and that dad was taking it for his cold.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter, now diagnosed with strep throat, spent most of the day on the chair in the living room.    She fell asleep multiple times and was quietly cranky or just exhausted when she was awake.   She’s had her first dose of antibiotics and hopefully will feel better tomorrow.

New Year’s Wish

I wanted to stay in bed all day.   I’ve done it before, but only when I’ve been sick and I’m not sick.  My husband has a head cold and has been doing some impressive snoring the past few nights.   My daughter has a bad runny nose with the same head cold but my son and I have remained mucous-free for now.   We’ll see how the cold plays out in our house over the next week or two.

So about staying in bed—I nearly accomplished it.   I got up a few times to answer calls for help from my children.   I had them bring in a game to play on the bed at one point but for the most part I was in bed until close to six o’clock this evening, so I’m going to count it a successful New Year’s day overall.

The house is nearly cleaned up from Christmas excepting the tree, which we’ll get done tomorrow and the thank you notes are almost complete.   School starts for my son on Wednesday although my daughter has three more weeks off with her track out year-round school calendar.  

I’m finishing this post and going back to bed in our coldish bedroom.   The master isn’t as cold as the basement since there is warm air right outside the door from a working heat system.   Hopefully that will get fixed tomorrow too.

The Big Boy Update:  My son has been writing some thank you notes and drawing pictures on them to indicate the presents he was given.   His favorite part, and the incentive I’ve been using to get him motivated, is sealing the envelopes with sealing wax and some seals I ordered from—wait for it—China.   He loves sealing the envelopes with all different colors of wax.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been writing her thank you notes and surprise, she wants to write the letters, not use braille.   She’s good at writing, although she doesn’t optimize space on the page well.   She writes in print but honestly, she’s not that much behind her brother in writing.   I wish I could tell how much and what she can see when she does it though.