Halloween at school

A got to wear his Halloween costume to school today, a lion costume. He's been practicing his roars and he's quite cute.

When I picked him up, he was wearing a different costume, a bright yellow bodysuit.

"Did he have an accident?" I asked.

"Oh no," his teacher said, "the lion was just too hot and we had some costumes donated, so we changed him. I hope that's okay." She hands me his lion costume and a plastic elastic-banded mask and ah, it's Pikachu.

I know A has no earthly idea who Pikachu is, but A got a glow stick at school and is happy, so whatever. We walk off together to the car.

A says, "Mommy, I'm Pikachu!"

"Yes, you are," I say.

"Mommy," A says, "what's Pikachu?"

"I don't know," I tell A, "but you're pretty cute."

We walk a little longer, and then he starts fake-sneezing: "Ah-choo! Ah-choo! Pikachu!"

"Bless you! Bless you! Does Pikachu have a cold?"

"No, Pikachu makes sneezes, Mommy," he says. Of course he does, sweetie.

Classroom cuteness

We overslept this morning and were therefore running late to drop A off for school. (When we run late, we run late: A needs his meds and that's just 10-20 minutes we have to spend every morning regardless of how late we are.)

We made it before he was technically late, but the class had already started their morning activity, a circle around their teacher while they sing or read a story together.

A ran right in, right up to his teacher to say hello. She said, "Hello, A," and then turned to one of the other little boys.

"See, N, A's here; your buddy is here today."

And this other little boy gets up, plows through the other kids seated on the floor to kiss A on the cheek, and sits down next to him, making A sit down right next to him. A's got a friend who misses him when he's not there, yay!

Am Vets: score!

[Health note: still voiceless. Didn't sleep really well last night. Am taking today very easy with soup and tea and not much activity.]

Baby 2.0 is a-coming and it's going to be a completely different time of year for us to have a newborn. A was born during the hottest summer on record, so despite all the warnings and shopping lists in baby magazines which said we'd need 6-12 sleepers at least depending on how often we wanted to do laundry because he should be dressed in whatever we wore plus a layer, he spent most of his first two months in onesies. Honestly, I spent a lot of time (any time I could get away with it) in my underwear and nursing camisole and felt like I had too many clothes on. A would have cooked in a sleeper and a blanket. He's hot like C is, anyway, and has been from the beginning.

This means we don't have a huge supply of newborn/tiny sleepers for Baby 2.0. After seeing exactly how quickly babies grow out of their newborn gear, I'm not exactly jumping up and down to spend a lot of money outfitting this one. But this kid will need something respectable and warm to wear.

Enter AmVets, thrift store extraordinaire. One of my writer friends here turned me onto the local AmVets store last March, where I found a Fisher-Price garage for A for the princely sum of $1.50.

As we've been getting closer to the end of the pregnancy, I've been stopping by AmVets maybe once a week after dropping A and C off. I've gotten a couple things here and there, but thrift store shopping is always hit or miss. Plus, this AmVets is huge and busy and it takes a certain amount of fortitude to gear up and shop there, particularly on half-price sale days. But I went yesterday and let me tell you, I did good.

• Six (non-gender-specific) sleepers from good manufacturers (Gap, Nordstrom's, Le Top), normally $2 each, on sale for $1 each.
  
• A bright yellow (read: gender neutral) fleece bunting for babies up to 15 pounds, also gender neutral, normally $3, down to $1.50. I wasn't going to get Baby 2.0 a jacket or bunting, but jeez, for $1.50, why not?
  
• A Christmas-patterned gender-neutral Hanna Andersson zipper in pristine condition, size 80 (too big now for Baby 2.0 and too small for A, but good for Baby 2.0 in one year if not two), $3.

I'm so tickled. I haven't unearthed our stored baby stuff yet (need to), but with yesterday's haul and the items I've picked up previously, I'm feeling much better about Baby 2.0's wardrobe.

Besides, we just need enough to get us through the initial period of not knowing what the gender is. Then the shopping will be much, much easier, right? Especially if it's a boy.

More sick! Still sick!

I am just going to be sick forever, it seems.

Headed to my PCP today, and can I just say: they have their act together in that office. I check in, I pay, I go to the waiting room, they call me, I get my vitals checked, and my doctor sees me. It's amazing how fast it is.

Good (?) news: the laryngitis is a virus that's going around and I just have to live through it. No strep.

Bad news: My doctor's really unhappy that I haven't been off my inhaler since I saw her way back when. She's more worried about my lungs and gave me a nebulizer treatment when I was there.

But this led to a frenzy of: don't get the swine flu; don't get the swine flu; if you think you have the swine flu, see me immediately and don't be surprised if I want to admit you to the hospital. If you know you've been exposed, get in here immediately.

Warning signs of swine flu, according to my doctor: Fever. Body aches. Every joint in my body will hurt. I will feel like I've been hit by a truck. The good news is that the incubation period for swine flu is apparently very short, so I don't have to worry about being contagious and asymptomatic.

We wrapped up the conversation with, "If you get a fever, call me and come in. I really don't want you to get sick."

Yeah. Me either.

Sigh.

Our friends just left. Sigh. They spun through town like a whirlwind to go to a wedding, but happily were able to make some time for a visit with us this week. It's just wonderful to see them. A adores them, particularly Mr. Bump, who was "my [A's] Mr. Bump."

I am sick. Friday night I was down for the count, took it easy Saturday, felt better Sunday, did Disney Monday, I have lost my voice as of this morning, and am heading to my (regular) doctor tomorrow.

Monday I also had some pregnancy issues that were enough to make me call my doctor and my doula. (Did I mention we were at Disneyland?) My doula said, "Let me know when you're home and I'll come over and check you." She did (a house call!), which was amazing, and everything's fine. We headed up to my doctor's today to confirm that everything was fine. He did a quick ultrasound to double-check fluid levels and everything's fine. Baby's doing well; he didn't accidentally blab the gender, so we're still okay here.

So. I'm fine (although missing our friends) but sick and taking it extremely easy.

Traveling with kiddos

This is random, but I've been Googling "Hawaii with kids" recently in anticipation of a potential trip next year, and what a big bunch of whiny whiners there are out there.

Look, I know traveling with kids, especially the little kids, can be a PITA. Seriously. They have so much stuff you need to take along: diapers, TSA-unfriendly creams, heavy car seats, extra clothes, blankets, snacks, wipes. People shoot you the look of evil when you get on the plane, especially as you approach their seats.

But if you can't take simple reasonable precautions to travel with your kids, then I think you should shut the hell up and stop giving advice.

For example: I just read a blog entry about a couple who took their 25-month-old to Hawaii from New York. That's a fourteen hour plane trip, same as what we spent on the plane with A going to Italy. So how did it go?

Well, not good. First of all, they lied to the ticket agents about the kid's age so he could travel as a lap child. This was to save money (I assume).

When we went to Italy, A was eight months old, twenty pounds, and would have legally qualified as a lap child. And we still ponied up the money for a seat for him. And not because we love the airlines so much that we wanted to give them lots of money.

C and I ran it by a basic litmus test: In the comfort of our home, would we be comfortable holding him (both awake and asleep) in our laps for the same duration of time? And our answer was an emphatic, "Hell no." Heck, we wanted to be able to sleep on the plane, and when you've got a baby in your arms, it's difficult to fall asleep yourself without pitching the baby on the floor. We bought the seat for him, tucked him into his car seat, and he slept most of the time.

By the same litmus test, I can't imagine holding a two-year-old in my lap for longer than fifteen minutes without an argument, let alone fourteen hours.

I know that for the next big trip, we'll have two and it'll be exponentially more difficult, but we'll just keep to the same litmus tests and proceed sanely. Heck, what I know is that traveling once the kid is mobile is a helluva lot harder than traveling when they pretty much stay put. I'm crossing my fingers that if this trip to Hawaii happens next year, it'll be before Baby 2.0 is walking. And thank God we won't have two toddlers at the same time. Yikes. Mothers of twins, I salute you.

Flu shot success!

I did get my rock-star mommyness on; I got A an appointment at his doctor's for a seasonal flu shot (independent of the H1N1 vaccine), and he got it today.

He took it like a champ. The doctor's office was backed up with people getting flu shots. Crazy. But he got his injectable vaccine and I got his vaccination record updated and we're all set on seasonal flu vaccines in our household.

Next stop: H1N1 vaccines.

There's a lot of crazy out there on the tubes, as we like to call the Internet around here in honor of the former senator from Alaska, namely in the anti-vaccine movement.

Repeat after me: correlation does not equal causation. Equating correlation with causation in lieu of scientific evidence is how superstitions get started.

I'm not as hard-core about the H1N1, but the anti-vaccine rhetoric for all the standard bad diseases drives me batty. I know how long doctors went to school and that as many hours as I spend watching House, I am not a doctor. So if my doctor recommends something and the CDC, the WHO, and everyone with a medical degree under the sun seems to back her up, then yeah, vaccines are super.

I wouldn't mind it if the anti-vaccine people were only hurting themselves (I'm not so keen on them hurting their own kids, but I'm willing to take that as Darwin at work). But when someone else decides that their kid should experience the measles instead of getting the MMR vaccine because the MMR vaccine "causes" autism, they've become a public health risk to my family. Measles is communicable by air; you can get it by being in the same place an infected person was within the last two hours.

If this seems like a far-out situation, there was a measles outbreak here last year where there were contagious people in my local Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. Eleven kids got it, some of them infants who needed to be hospitalized. Some seventy kids in total ended up being quarantined, either because their parents chose not to vaccinate them or they were too young to be vaccinated. I imagine it's super fun to be stuck in your house with a kid for two weeks.

So when you're Googling vaccines to "educate" yourself, take a minute and Google the pre-vaccination mortality rates of those diseases. Google the side effects of the vaccines, and then Google the effects of the diseases.

Then the next time you see a cute little three-month-old shopping with his or her parents in Trader Joe's, think about giving those diseases to that baby, because by not vaccinating your kid, you've made a choice to give that baby that disease too.

Unstructured time and baby kisses

Yesterday we headed to the House of Mouse. It was jam-packed with people, crazy full. The Halloween celebration draws a lot of people; there was apparently some kind of charity walk/event where people got free tickets.

One of the things we like to do at the House of Mouse is get Mickey-shaped ice cream bars and sit in the Carnation Plaza Gardens and eat them. There's a bandstand there with a small stage; there are shows in the evening but during the day it's an out-of-the-way, quiet place to sit and rest. Once he's finished his ice cream, A can jump down and run around for a bit on the stage and burn off some energy while C and I talk.

Yesterday, A was running around the stage while C and I were finishing our ice cream when a little girl came up to him. She was probably a little older than him, but he grabbed her hands and wanted to dance and run around with her. They danced, they chased each other, they spun in circles, they hid behind the piano and the podiums from each other, and they giggled madly. A likes playing with older kids, and if I ever thought he was shy, he's certainly not now.

Eventually, the little girl had to go; her family was waiting.

"Little boy!" she called. "Little boy!" When A didn't respond, she ran up to him and said, "I have to go, goodbye," hugged him, gave him a kiss on the cheek, and ran off.

A came back over to us and pointed. "That little girl kissed me on my cheek." He had a huge smile.

Just don't get out of bed

Sometimes we have those days (as I'm sure you do too) where it's apparent that none of us should have gotten out of bed.

C didn't sleep well. He's had a lot of work stress recently and sees a lot of late nights coming up this week.

We've been trying to get A a flu shot. His pediatrician's office isn't giving them until they get their H1N1 vaccine supply, because they want to give both shots at once. They had a shot clinic at the local hospital last weekend, but by the time we got there, they were out of the injectables and only had the flu mist--which is contraindicated for people with asthma like A.

Okay. The nurse says call me Friday, I'll tell you whether we have any injectables coming next week and when you should come.

So I do. And she tells me: 9:15 AM. Don't be there at 9; it'll be too swamped.

Great. We get there at 9:15AM. I realize I forgot A's vaccination record. C drops us off and goes home to get it. I go into the clinic to discover a huge long line.

They only had enough vaccine for the number of people in line when they opened at 9AM. I'm not talking injectable vs. flu mist; I'm talking all the vaccine, period. There's nothing for us. So they completely suck, as far as I'm concerned.

Then we have a bunch of errands that just spiral out of happy land into unhappy land. I try to make an all-butter pie crust while mad and discover it's near impossible. I cannot mail my foot pedal at the automated kiosk at the post office because the box isn't big enough for the automatically-generated postage sticker, so we have to wait in line behind the man who bathed in cheap cologne and Irish Spring soap this morning; the smell makes me want to retch every time I turn his way. We go to the cat food store to get a bag of cat food on special sale and they don't actually stock any that's on special sale in the store. I get a cramp/wave of sickness in Trader Joe's that sends me to the restroom. I get home and the new neighbors across the way have turned their garage into a giant speaker blaring 80s New Wave music right into my bedroom, where I am trying to take a nap until the sick feeling goes away.

I'm trying to adjust my attitude, but some days it's quite difficult, you know? Tomorrow will be another Disneyland trip and hopefully (cross your fingers) that'll be better.

Failing that, cross your fingers that I can get my rock-star mommyness on and get past the receptionist at the pediatrician's office to someone who will let me schedule my high-risk asthmatic germ vector for a seasonal flu shot ASAP.

Bad day, continued

A capped off his bad day yesterday by taking my embroidery scissors and almost completely cutting through the foot pedal cord of my (relatively) brand new sewing machine.

He's fine. I was in the bathroom. He came to me and said, "Mommy, it was really loud," so he obviously had some learning lesson about electricity that wasn't lethal.

Now I need a new foot pedal (or cord, at least). So much for all the sewing I had planned.

31 Week Prenatal Visit

Everything's fine. I had blood tests; they actually got the results (I thought the tech was going to lose the vials of my blood) and everything was perfect. Fundal height is 31 cm, which is perfect for 31 weeks, so all the people who keep telling me that I'm not big at all and "that baby doesn't seem to be growing at all" can shove it. My doctor's happy and would like me to stop reading any activist birth literature in favor of positive, warm-fuzzy stuff, but we all know how effective it is to tell me not to read something. I understand what he's worried about.

I stopped by my doctor's new baby store and got a birth/yoga/fitness ball to sit on. It's a cute store, lots of neat stuff. He had suggested papaya extract for my terrible ongoing heartburn, but I didn't see any.

Anyway! A is having a bad day. He's been fighting some cold, so we've got him hopped up on albuterol in addition to his pulmicort. He was cranky with Daddy when he was dropped off at preschool and he was cranky with me afterwards, including having an all-out temper tantrum in the library and the library's parking lot that ended in me bodily carrying him to the car. A little old lady stopped to watch as I strapped him into the car seat while he hit, pinched, and kicked me. (Hello, preschool influences?) I left him in the car to cool down (cloudy day, but I rolled the windows down just in case) while the little old lady took down my license plate number. Now I'm just waiting for Child Protective Services to call me for being a bad mother.

He's sleeping now. I hope he perks up or it'll be a long, long afternoon.

Competent Thursday

This week, C's been burning the midnight oil at work, which means he drops A off at preschool and then he's home late. Really late.

Usually this sends me into fits, but I've been surprised by how well A and I are coping. A's had a head cold since Monday (Sunday, really). We've been giving him the more rigorous slate of meds for his asthma, since we don't want him back in the hospital, thank you very much. But he perked up yesterday and has been perky but runny-nosed ever since. We just happened to have a three-month checkup with his asthma doctor yesterday, and A sounds clear and is on the right course of treatment. He'll be on daily meds through the winter and spring, but that's okay since he can breathe.

In my spare time, I've managed to: finish the piecing and pin a beach blanket for quilting, make two batches of frozen mac and cheese for post-baby consumption, (mostly) finish A's Christmas shopping, read a couple baby-related books (Birthing From Within) and non-baby related (After Etan, which kept me up last night), knock off a lot of The Office and 30 Rock.

Sunday we went to Disneyland (ah yes, Disneyland). We're trying to max out the value of our pass before it expires in early November, which should be just about the time I get too large to want to sit in the car that long or walk around all day.

A wanted to send a letter to Grandma, so we bought a postcard of Pooh from the Pooh store. Then we saw Pooh out meeting people, so we had to say hi to Pooh. I had my big fat pen-pencil-stylus writing implement, so I offered the pen and the postcard to Pooh to sign for Grandma. I wasn't sure he could do it--ballpoint on a postcard front, plus big fuzzy costume with reduced vision--but lo and behold, Pooh not only managed to sign his name but also drew a honey bee.

Today I have a writing organization meeting that if our sweet neighbor is already on vacation, A will have to sit through. Let's see how happy I am after that.

Changes in Weather

The weather has finally turned from hot to fall-ish here. My cold weather detector, otherwise known as Jake, woke me up at 1AM by climbing under the comforter with me and stretching out over my enormous belly. I was happy for the warmth, but by 4AM he had completely taken over my side of the bed, wedging himself inextricably between me and my body pillow. He's still in bed now, almost where he went to sleep last night.

I went down to the couch to fall asleep to Arrested Development DVDs and made two exciting discoveries: all but our lightest fleece throws had been relegated to storage upstairs and it was way too cold to be downstairs in a chemise.

This brings up a conundrum that I hadn't really considered: I'm much larger now than I was the last time I needed my cozy flannel PJs. I found an old pair of sweatpants that fit (yay baggy what-not-to-wear sweats), but I'm going to have to fix the PJ problem. But the cheapskate in me doesn't want to buy maternity PJs that will only be worn for less than three months.

Things A Says Now

"Another book, please, and not the last one."

"Really." As in "really good" the modifier or "really?" the question. (Okay, this could be from us.)

"Look, it's a Caldecott." You know, the ALA medal for achievement in children's picture books? He recognizes the sticker.

"What's this?" he asked me, pointing at his Dr. Seuss map book.
"Longitude," I said.
"This is latitude," he said, pointing at the next picture.

"Night is falling." No idea where this one came from.

He's also singing more now, including: the "This is Halloween" song from The Nightmare Before Christmas and "It's a Small World."