The doggie that almost got away

Last week, A and I went to the beach before swim class. He played in the sand. I've added his "I'm going to be a model" beach shot here so you can appreciate the kind of cuteness we're dealing with.

This was also the day of his flu shot, so he had these two little rubber-and-wire toy doggies that he was playing with in the sand. He'd bury them and tell me he was going to find some treasure, then dig them up and show me his treasure again.

Of course, he's three, so at some point he lost interest in his doggies and wandered off to make castles and dig other holes and have a good time.

This is the point where a seagull came over and took one of his doggies. Not a minute after the seagull took off, A realized what had happened and took off running after the bird.

"Hey, bird! You took my doggie! Shoo, bird! Give me back my doggie!"

The seagull took flight, touched down by the water, discovered that the toy was not actually a French fry, and left it by the water. So A got his doggie back from the bird and we were all happy. He spent the rest of his time at the beach making sure the birds didn't get too close to us by running after them. "Shoo, birdies. You don't eat my doggies."

H1N1 Success!

I've got an appointment to go get vaccinated, next Tuesday at 10:30AM. Happy day!

I should share: Yesterday, among my other annoyances with the pediatrician's office, as I was leaving, I saw a post-it taped over the receptionist's credit card machine that said, "Pregnant moms, $42.00."

I'm that person who asks. "So, can I get the H1N1 shot here?"

The receptionist looked at me like Oh God, we're so backed up, please don't ask me this now. She said, "You'd have to ask one of the doctors for permission, but we do it for a fee." A $42.00 fee.

Let me add these caveats: the Feds are providing H1N1 vaccine free to everyone. No health care providers are paying for it. Doctors' offices may charge a fee for the work of setting up an appointment, coming into their office and having your regular health care providers give you the shot, but there's no cost to them for the actual vaccine.

I'm sure the cost of getting the flu shot varies according to your insurance, but for A, in the same office with the same insurance coverage, the shot is free.

I'll keep you posted on any weird side effects. The good news is that aside from the occasional asthma-related breathlessness, I'm mostly well right now and in reasonable shape to get a vaccine.

The Week of Doctors

Sometimes it feels like all I do is drive around in the car. Tuesday: A at the dentist. Wednesday morning: me at the OB with A in tow; Wednesday after noon: me at the dentist without A, thank God. Thursday morning: me at the hospital filling out pre-admittance paperwork to L&D; Thursday afternoon: A gets an H1N1 flu shot.

Let me just say that while I love the doctors in A's pediatrician office, I hate the office staff. It's like going to an office run by the Marx Brothers, but less funny.

First of all, they super-overbooked. There was no parking available and I had to park two blocks away at Bread & Cie, which made me late. There were thirty people (not including two small babies) in a waiting room that normally holds ten. That's its own little level of hell.

And gentlemen, yes, you with the penises? Stand the hell up for ladies when there aren't enough seats. That's your job. I don't care about feminism; I don't care that your wife's happy to stand while you sit. The mommy who just came in with the seven-month-old needs a place to sit while she nurses. When I'm thirty-five-weeks pregnant and seriously considering giving her my seat, that's your cue to be a man and get off your ass and on your feet.

I had to have a run-around discussion about whether or not A needed the injectable vaccine or the Flu Mist with the nurse. It's not like this is the place that told me that yes, he needed an injectable and yes, they had the injectable available when I called.

"We don't have any more big kid-sized doses of the injectable. He'd have to have two shots if you don't want him to have the inhaled because we only have the baby doses left."

"Well, he's asthmatic and has been hospitalized this year and can't have the flu mist so I guess you'd better get the two shots ready."

"It's still going to be two shots."

"Look, go get Dr. ----- or Dr. ----- and I'm sure all of them will tell you he needs the injectable. Because I'm not letting you give him the live virus Flu Mist and he's not leaving here without a vaccination. Okay?"

She brings in a tray with the two shots and sets it down within arm's reach of A on his eye level, which no nurse has ever done before and freaks him out completely, then waits for me to calm him down so she can give him the shot. She offers him two toys from the treasure chest when he's done.

Anticipation is worse than having the shots. He's wriggly and it's not like I've got a lot of lap to hold him on right now to take a shot. But she did the shots quickly and he cried more before getting the shots than after he'd gotten them.

In doctor's visit news, I'm fine. Baby's on track. The hospital looks, well, like a hospital but the people were friendly enough.

The bad news: most hospitals in San Diego, including the one I'm set to deliver in, have banned all children under 14. When I went to the hospital to do paperwork, the entrance is cordoned off and there's a security guy having people fill out a brief questionnaire: Do you have a fever, a cough that's developed in the last three days, body aches, chills, nausea/vomiting/etc., and are you here with anyone under 14 who is not here for their own appointment or treatment?

So now I'm sad because A won't be able to come visit me and meet the new baby in the hospital. I'm sure we'll of course beg for an exemption and have it not be granted. I'm really sad about it. I feel even more pressure to have a successful VBAC, just because it'll cut down on the time spent in the hospital. With a vaginal delivery, I could be home the next day; I know a C-section is a good--ahem, minimum--two or three days at least (last time, four). Grumble grumble grumble. Maybe they'll have lifted the restrictions by then, but I doubt it.

Dentist visit

A did great; he's got wonderfully clean and pristine teeth with only a few pits on his molars and a beautifully aligned bite. They let him run the Mr. Thirsty water-sucker-thing and the air/water gun, and he thought that was wonderful.

Our dentist's office (still) adores him. And they scheduled me for a cleaning tomorrow and assured me that I'm having a girl. But A assured them that he's getting a brother. So there we are.

On a completely random note: Is it weird to anyone else that many, many interpretations of the religious beliefs of the Founding Fathers seem to be purported by sects of Christianity that did not actually exist at the time of the Revolutionary War? And that the Founding Fathers are all claimed as forefathers to these churches that did not actually come into existence until at least a decade or so after the Constitution was written? Or am I just a bizarro preggo former history major with too much historiography in her head?

H1N1 Updates

A is scheduled for his shot next Thursday, so keep your fingers crossed that he actually gets it.

I am on a wait list for a shot at my doctor's office, and am apparently ranked pretty high up there on the list. All the free clinics in San Diego are offering the nasal spray, which I can't have. My OB is not offering the shots; if I'd gone to an OB clinic instead of a doctor in private practice, I probably would have had one by now (but then I wouldn't have Dr. Wonderful, so there you go). My doctor's nurse said they expected to have supplies by the end of the month.

C is on a wait list at his PCP for his shot.

I'm actually mostly better, with an actual voice and a limited cough. I'm still on my inhaler; I'm still hitting the inhaler every four hours, which is the minimum amount of time between hits. I'm a little fatigued but still feeling much better.

Humility

Every morning, A comes in and wraps his arms around me and lovingly rubs my belly and back, which I thought was a lovely way to show his interest in the baby.

Or so I thought until yesterday, when I realized he's not lovingly rubbing me as much as lovingly tracing my ever-growing stretch marks.

Dia de los Muertos

We had Halloween. A went Trick-or-Treating for the very first time with his friend H. A was a lion, H was a firefighter. We met up with a mob of kids; A and H were the littlest ones in the group, adorable. The neighborhood wasn't super, lots of houses without lights and lots of big hills, so after a reasonable number of houses (under ten), we split H and A off from the big group and doubled back, hitting the houses on the other side of the street.

But A certainly understood trick-or-treating this year. C's "What do you say?" prompts to him for a "Thank you," resulted in a "Happy Halloween!" half the time after A overheard the mob of parents saying "Happy Halloween." He's still pretty cute.

We came home and trick-or-treated at our sweet neighbor's house, where she'd baked a batch of cookies especially for him, and he took off his costume and looked like he was ready to stay the night.

He got a small stash of candy, which is larger than any stash of candy he's ever had in his life. The funny thing is: he asked for a piece on Halloween night when we got home (a Tootsie Roll, a tiny one) and he hasn't asked for one since. This may be an out of sight, out of mind thing; it may be that we had birthday cake last night. But A's candy might disappear if this keeps up. We'll see if the other kids at school today remind him that he has candy.

In sickness news, I have been still sick, pretty much mute all weekend. Today my voice has started to come back and my head's not full all the freaking time, thankfully, but I've not been the world's most functional person. Saturday I took a midday nap; yesterday I fell asleep in front of the TV around 8:30 or so after my nap efforts were thwarted by two fighting cats (thanks, guys). I started cleaning and laundering this morning, which is always a sign that I'm feeling better. Unfortunately, crankiness is one of those signs too, but I've felt that all week.

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."

Morning preschool

Morning preschool is so much freaking better than afternoon preschool. Instead of our day being somewhat hackneyed, it went like this:

• Drop A off at school
• Drop C off at work
• Come home for blessed quiet time on my own
• Pick up A from school
• Nap for A
• Lunch for me (and more quiet time)
• Snack, playtime, reading time, dinner for A
• Pick up C from work
• Bedtime for A

Hurray!

Open House and the Switch

Yesterday was Back-to-School night, where parents go to school (apparently with children in tow) and talk to their children's teachers. A mercifully passed out after school yesterday, so our neighbor watched A while I went in. C was swamped at work and could not make it, which was a pity all around. I got to talk to his teacher and his speech teacher.

His teacher is, to quote a friend, "funny and formidable." She just turned 60. She loves the kids, loves doing art with them, and loves reading to them. There are so many books in that classroom that it almost made up for the unhappy fact that preschoolers don't have library privileges at school. Almost. I'm a little sensitive to library privileges.

But she explained to me what she likes to read to the kids and what kinds of stories she looks for, and I'm happy with her tastes and selections. She doesn't like to read down to them; she likes stories that have some theme or moral or meaning. The next unit they're going to do is folklore, starting with Anasazi stories and going through stories from around the world.

They had paintings up on the wall, each captioned by the child's reflection on his/her painting. A's painting said, "I paint for Mommy and Daddy." What a sweetie.

The good news is that A's being switched to the morning class starting Monday. This is really a blessing for us. The days have been hard--A hasn't settled into any set routine for naps. Sometimes he's been exhausted and passes out at 10:30AM, which is enough time (maybe) for a good nap before school, but leaves a long afternoon. Sometimes he's been exhausted and passes out on the way home from school, which is understandable but pushes bedtime back to 8-9PM, which is approaching my bedtime these days and cuts into C and my time together. Sometimes he refuses to sleep and ends up passing out at 5:30-6PM and sleeping until morning, which bypasses our whole bath/teeth/PJs bedtime routine and leads to earlier mornings.

So starting Monday, he'll be in the morning class. Aside from juggling his swimming classes, it'll be a lot better.

Cobblers and sewing and more, oh my

We're having a baby. It's due in December.

This may not have been clear previously, but I'm a wee bit Type-A sometimes, particularly about holiday preparations. I like to have my Christmas shopping done by Thanksgiving. I like my Christmas plane tickets bought by mid-August. I like schedules and order and predictability.

This whole baby in December thing throws me for a loop. I'm trying the serenity prayer and deep breaths. I can't change when Baby 2.0 shows up. I can't change the onslaught of the holidays (although I can embrace the fact that we will not be traveling this year over the always-exciting holiday season).

But I have the wisdom to produce cobbler. Lo, behold: one of two cobblers I made this weekend. The peach season is almost over here, but we had a bunch on our counter perfectly ripe, too many to eat. Our peach cobbler recipe comes from Cooks Illustrated. You bake the fruit until the juices start to extrude, then drop a sugar cookie batter on top by the spoonful and bake until it's done. Delicious, pretty simple.

Fruit went into the disposable pan, topped with parchment, frozen. Cookie batter got dropped by the ounce-ful onto parchment, then plastic bagged. When December and the baby come, we'll be able to pop the pan in the oven per instructions, drop the frozen cookie batter on top, and have summery delicious peach cobbler. As long as we remember to take the plastic bags out.

We have made this with great success with frozen fruit before, but there's something satisfying about not having to mix or measure anything. Now I'm waiting for apple season to be in full swing so I can freeze some pies.

Contrary

The word for A at three is contrary. There's a lot of not listening, a lot of testing, and a lot of outright disobedience--a "give me that" turns into throwing said object in the absolute opposite direction. Happily, he does this to both me and C, so it's not just me.

Sometimes he's so sweet and cute and adorable, and sometimes I'd happily lock him in a closet for an hour. I figure those impulses will pass--oh, maybe when he's thirty, if we're lucky.

The mantras: It's just a phase. This too shall pass. Consistency is the name of the game.

Getting Ready

I've found myself more easily irritated by the world in general in the last few weeks, and I think it's a sign that I need to be slowing down, taking it easy, and preparing for Baby 2.0.

C and I have been struggling with how to making the concept of Baby 2.0 real to Baby 1.0, and we're unfortunately both pragmatic enough to say, "Oh well, none of us have any clue what we're about to get into and it'll happen when it happens. Let's go to Disneyland instead."

We've read books; A talks to the baby and feels it move (this one's a stretcher, not a kicker, which makes it more difficult for A to tell). We talk about babies and families when we see other people with them; we talk about how babies sleep and cry and nurse. (This he remembers, at least to the point of pointing to other people feeding their little babies juice and French fries and telling them, "No juice for baby; babies drink mommy milk!" Alas, there are times where I'm happy A is not completely intelligible to others.)

One of the things we did as a family this weekend was make Baby 2.0 a play mat according to Amanda Blake Soule's Handmade Home. A picked out fabric and ribbons for it (with Mommy vetoes on the pink safari animal fabric and the snapping crocodile fabric); we all colored on the top fabric together. I assembled it yesterday and poof, it was finished. That gave me more comfort than a lot of the other things I've been doing recently have.

I'm trying to embrace more of those experiences. This means yes to finishing the family-related sewing projects like family stockings, yes to lazy time just spent reading (even the non-baby stuff), yes to freezing cobblers and pies for use later this year, and no to taking on more responsibilities with my various volunteer activities, like not volunteering to bake a hundred cupcakes for a party. Just because I can do it doesn't mean I should.

Dr. Horrible

I know it might be odd, but some of you may not be familiar with Dr. Horrible or his sing-along blog. You can watch it on Hulu and I'm sure lots of other places, but it's Neil Patrick Harris.

A is not among you. He's decided he's Dr. Horrible. I just ordered him a costume through the Old Navy baby sale, but jeez, I'm tempted to try and find a baby Dr. Horrible costume.

Three-hole drilled book recommendation

While I read voraciously, I don't usually recommend books to people randomly. I read pretty quickly, so a lot times I'm not sure if the time investment a book represents to me is worth the time investment to other people.

But I read this book recently (within the last month) that seems to creep into a lot of my conversations since then, so I thought I'd put it out there. It's by Paul Tough and it's called Whatever It Takes. I heard about it on This American Life, which is a good teaser if you want a preview of what the book is about: Geoffrey Canada and the Harlem Children's Zone, which is (crediting This American Life's description) "the most ambitious and hopeful solution to urban poverty in the country."

It's the program President Obama is hoping to replicate in twenty cities around the country, just for your current event edification.

There's a lot in the book that talks about how to get kids to move up and out of lower socioeconomic levels and how difficult it is to get kids to move beyond where their parents are and how early those things are set (you know, like age three or seven or ten). If you want to go to college, there's a lot of skill sets that go into that beyond math and reading proficiency; there's the soft skills of patience, persistence and delayed gratification/long-term goal setting. Research is showing those soft skills needs to be in your makeup by ten-years-old or they're near impossible to learn. If your parents don't have those skills and thus couldn't achieve those goals, where will you learn them?

These topics have been coming up a lot in our household what with the onset of preschool.

Like yesterday. I went to Target (Tar-zhay) because we were out of toothpaste and our laundry basket died and so on and so forth. As I wandered office supplies looking for crazy glue, a woman stopped me, a normal-looking woman, just like me.

"Do you know what this is?" She showed me her shopping list, which was a school supply list, and tapped the words Three-ring spiral-bound notebook.

"Are you wondering if they mean a three-ring binder or a three-hole-drill notebook?"

She looked mystified. Absolutely mystified. So I walked with her to the notebooks and explained the differences between a three-ring binder and a spiral-bound notebook and showed her how to look for the three holes on the notebooks.

I walked away thinking, how the hell can you be a grownup and not know what a three-hole spiral notebook is? But then I thought about the child that she was buying the supplies for, and I thought about Geoffrey Canada.

There are advantages I knew A has in life: the basics of two parents who both live at home, a safe place to live, food to eat, clothes to wear, medical care, not to mention all the enrichment opportunities he gets like the zoo; parks, playgrounds, and the beaches; lots of good books and toys; swim classes; speech therapy and preschool; trips to museums, Sea World, and Disneyland. But I hadn't considered having a mom who recognized a three-hole spiral notebook an advantage until yesterday.

Preschool! Chocolate milk!

Wow, he's at preschool now every day.

He's in the afternoon sessions, which I don't like but apparently nobody does and the new people get stuck with afternoon classes. Yesterday he took a nap after school; this morning, he conked out two hours before school. I'm not sure how this nap pattern is going to pan out.

First day, we're there early with the other early birds. The kids run around and play on the grass; the parents chit-chat about how old the kids are and how many we have. The ages in class range from three to four, with A being one of the youngest.

Time for class comes, we all sign in our kids, off they go. One or two are crying, some walk hand-in-hand with their parents, but A runs right in without a backwards glance at me.

The parents all wander in and stand around snapping pictures while the teacher calls the class to order, has them sit on the floor around her. She goes through attendance and my motherly heart swells with pride as A is one of only two kids in this class of twenty-four who knows to raise his hand and say, "Me!" when his name is called.

After roll call, the teacher says it's time for us parents to go, and as I'm wandering out, he turns and waves at me with a big smile and says, "Bye, Mommy!" Then he blows me kisses.

It was too much for my little pregnancy-hormone-drenched heart to bear. I made it to the car before I teared up.

Anyway, the first day, he did great although he had some bathroom accidents, probably because he was just too darned excited to excuse himself to use the facilities. They get free lunch (who knew?) and all he would tell me he ate was two Pooh cookies and chocolate milk. (Damn you, school district and your chocolate milk; we were keeping him away from chocolate milk's addictive pull.)

Today we got to school and he played with the early-birds again and then gave everyone big hugs. Oh my, he's sweet. When I picked him up, he was accident-free (hurray) and cried when I said it was time to go home. The teacher reassured him that he'd be right back tomorrow.

And today's lunch? A Nemo cupcake and chocolate milk. (It was someone's birthday today, hence the cupcake.) I need to get a copy of that lunch menu.

In awkward conversation news, I called his previous preschool and explained:

• We found out last minute he'd been accepted by the school district when we thought he'd been rejected,
  
• he would be receiving speech therapy through the school,
  
• and unfortunately, it was just easier to send him to the school district's preschool.
  

I did not reiterate that the school district's preschool is free, which has amazing appeal, or that since he's in at three he'll probably be in at four. No, I said that we had no qualms about the school or the teachers and everyone was wonderful and I hated to do it. And she was fine and cheerful so that's all well. So I've officially given notice and just need to go by and pick up his stuff.

The school district speech teacher and I are playing phone tag to get A set up for speech, so that should be coming along soon. Then we'll have to have tearful goodbyes with his speech therapist. Sigh.

Preschool drama

I got a letter, oh, a couple weeks ago saying A got turned down for public preschool.

I got a call yesterday reminding me that preschool orientation was today at 1pm.

You know, for the preschool he got turned down for.

So I went.

He got in.

He starts next week. Tuesday.

Now I have to figure out how to explain this to his current preschool.

Carrots

A's really into carrots recently. Raw, cold peeled carrots. He'll eat them instead of apples, which is the fruit of choice around here.

Today we hit our local farmers' market. We asked A if he wanted to get anything (as we ask each other, what do you want today?).

And A said, "Carrots." Of course.

Not peaches, nectarines, plums, tiny wonderful grapes, figs, avocados or cheese. Carrots.

When we finally found some carrots, C held A up so he could pick some out. And the guy gave A the carrots for free.

"Do you want a brother or a sister, A?"

"Um, a sister."

"Really? You want a little girl to come live here?"

"Um, a brother."

"Another little boy?"

"Um, maybe a dinosaur."

Yeah, I guess this is a pretty inane line of questioning. Dinosaur it is!

Cough cough cough doctor

The best way to get into a doctor's office the same day is to say you're a pregnant woman with shortness of breath.

Anyway, I headed to my doctor, my regular one, not the OBGYN, and she said, hmm, some asthma, definitely bronchitis. I'm getting a boatload of steroids, bronchiodialators, and antibiotics. But my lungs sound clear, so they don't need an X-ray, which is nice.

She also gave me the scary talk about getting a swine flu and regular flu vaccine: pregnant women go to the front of the line, asthmatics go to the front of the line, mothers of young children go to the front of the line. I'm a trifecta and everyone should get out of my way for the flu vaccines. When will the vaccines be ready? They have no idea. Call back in two weeks.

The Name Game

I just got edition 2 of my favorite baby name book in the mail, and let me tell you, the naming this time is a puzzler. We've got to come up with male and female names, and we've got to come up usually with more than one so we can dither up until B-day about whether we like this one or that one and whether the baby looks more like name A or name B.

I'm mostly using the royal We here, because while C holds the veto power, the name finding committee is mostly me until the later months. Besides, he usually suggests "Rocket" at first chance, which gets him kicked off the naming committee.

Anyway, here's the complex mix of rules we're grappling with:
- No two-syllable names ending in "er" due to duo-syllablic -er ending of child's last name. This seems like a minor thing until you look at how many cool -er names are out there, including my sentimental favorite of Cooper, which we will have to name a cat someday since the cats get my last name. (True. Jake and Niles have my last name.)
- No "oo" (as in Cooper) sounds in the first syllable of the first name, to eliminate assonance issues.
- No H first names. I will not have alliterative first and last names.
- No first names ending in a phonetically soft A or H sounds, so no Anna. This is because I can't stand when people's names all blend together. Names should be crisp and distinct so you know, when you hear them spoken, where the first name ends and the last name begins. (There's a discussion on whether or not the first name needs to not end in S so it doesn't blend into the child's middle name, but honestly, the only times you hear your full name is when you're in trouble or graduating, so it's moot.)
- No names that can be easily given an -ie or -y nickname. Nope. I might entertain a -y ending on the full name, but those names I've liked have been few and far between.
- The name should be somewhat compatible with the ethnography of the last name, which is a pretty common American name, an Anglicized German surname. So English names get first dibs.
- The child's name must lend itself to whatever permutations of nicknaming and reforging of identity they'll go through in their tweens and teens; however, it should not be a nickname.
- No made-up names. Uh-huh. We don't do that.
- No bizarro spellings, like Khryctoffyphr. I know that's the trend, but no.

- Full names must pass the oration test, which is: say the full name aloud. If it sounds like it fits after, "Introducing the President of the United States," and "Doctor." If it doesn't, this is not the name. [I'm not saying I would wish the presidency or doctorates on my children, but I wouldn't want them to be limited by their names and I can't think of anything higher office than a president or a doctor. And before you scoff, C and I know two children--not related--who are going to be limited for the rest of their lives by the terribly hick and backwater names their parents gave them. I wouldn't dream of publishing them here, because they are sweet dear people, but those poor kids are going to have a hard time if they don't get some decent nicknames.]

Sidenote: If the name sounds perfectly fine after, "Now entering the courtroom, convicted serial killer..." this is really not the right name.

- And the gotcha one: the name must not be popular. If it is, it needs to be rising in popularity, not falling in it.

Nobody talks about how after you name your first child, the name of the first sets the tone for the name of the second. Our first child's name is not Bob or John or anything normal like that. Heavens, no. This child will never find his name on a mug or a license plate or a key chain. (Those of you who have sent personalized things are greatly appreciated.) Still, it's a great name.

So the added constraints of A's name to the name game:
- No names starting with T. Why not? Well, in shorthand, we'll have T&A. I could get over it and say A&T but I won't.
- The name has to be somewhat compatible with A's. This is a subjective rule, but it's like pornography: we know it when we see it.
- The name cannot rhyme with A's, which seems like a silly thing to note, but it's kicked a couple names out of consideration.

Any suggestions? At this point, it seems more like a logic puzzle than a joyous naming extravaganza.

Cough cough cough

I'm down with something, a cough, shortness of breath, some body aches, but no fever. This makes me terribly cranky. We're going into Week 24 with Baby 2.0, which means I've now got a pregnancy-tight belly. During my ultrasound last week, I was surprised by how far up the kid is already (between my ribs, right below my sternum). This means when I cough, my lungs are competing for room with a baby the size of an ear of corn housed in a uterus the size of a soccer ball. Let me tell you, the baby always wins.

Unfortunately, the boy is in full-fledged contrary mode. The whole last week post-birthday-party has been very trying. A says "No!" and "Get out!" to me when asked (told) to do something. (Lots of timeouts.) Yesterday, I watched A run his father's patience ragged, which made me feel like, well, at least it's not just me. He's testing all of us.

What can I tell you that's cute? A knows about Baby 2.0, although it's still a nebulous pretend item like the dinosaurs that occasionally stalk him. I told him he could talk to the baby, and he leans over my belly and says, "Hi, baby, I'm A. I'm big brother. Don't worry, you're fine. Mommy's got you."

Checkup update

Everything's fine with me and the babe. Just normal cramping, apparently. If there's spotting or bleeding, I should worry, but other than that, it's take it easy and go with it. The joys of pregnancy.

When I was pregnant with A, I had such a cheerful disposition, and he has such a sunny disposition. If this next one has the temperament I've had while I've been pregnant this time around, this child will be fearsome.

Birthday soiree and other weekend summaries

Saturday was A's big three party and he had a great time. One other kid, H, was able to come, and while the two of them could not be more different, they had a great time together. We're bridging the gap between A's parties being his friends and our friends. Next year, we won't be able to put the party off for two+ weeks.

A was all about the presents. People came in the door with them and he wanted to open them. Ah, well. No, first food, then cake, then presents. And pinata--a dinosaur one, not a Dora one, because Mommy couldn't find a Dora one. It was also filled with toys and fruit leather and no candy, so it was certainly a gringo pinata bash. He now has way too many presents, but he adores them all.

A had a great time with his grandparents. The weekend felt action-packed and I think all the adults were sleep-deprived. Thursday we ended up in Encinitas for the evening since I had an ultrasound at 6:30PM (more like 7, and it took an hour). But the good news is that Baby 2.0 looks great and on track for development. We found an excellent Greek restaurant up there that I'm going to be visiting again once I have another appointment, let me tell you. They had a lemon-chicken-rice soup which sounds terrible but is exactly what I want to eat the next time I'm sick.

Sunday the grandparents left, which is sad. Not enough time. A got up the next day (a normal day, with everyone back at work or home) and told me, "I don't want you. I want Daddy; I want Grandma." Sorry, kid. You're stuck.

Of course, A is sick again, somewhat, with a little head cold. We're watching his asthma meds to make sure his head cold doesn't turn into a hospital stay.

I'm taking it easy, since I'm having some cramping, which I've had since yesterday. I was supposed to get into my OBGYN's today for a checkup but of course, they canceled it--both doctors were delivering one hour before my appointment. So I'll be rolling out of bed before dawn tomorrow to get there at 8:30AM with the traffic (yuck).

That Day

Today was not supposed to be That Day. Today was supposed to be busy but doable. A had a playdate with H where JJ would took both boys to Balboa Park and I was alone in the house to clean. (Yay JJ! There are probably not two toddlers less alike, but they genuinely enjoy each other's comapny.)

And I cleaned: scrubbed toilets, scrubbed floors on hands and knees, once with degreaser, once with bleach, dusting, clearing clutter, laundry, and even some mild outside work. I banged out some thank you notes and the minutes from Sunday's meeting. I made vanilla gelato to chill for the ice cream machine later, plus cupcakes, plus simple syrup. Plus lunch for everyone when they returned from the park.

My domesticity just astounds you, right? And I'm good in bed too.

But somewhere between this wildly productive morning and now, things fell apart. A toilet broke. A wouldn't take a nap between lunch and speech therapy. I got out of the shower I finally had to take to find A standing in a puddle of urine in one of the clean bathrooms. And then there was a wipeout in a puddle of urine, which means he'll have lovely bruises for his birthday part. Plus, A needed a quick shower instead of a bath because his speech teacher was coming in fifteen minutes and I had already scrubbed the tub once today.

So once he was clean and dry and clothes, I scrubbed the bathroom floor (again). Scrub number two plus cleaning a urine-soaked boy meant I needed shower #2.

And then the shower door fell on me.

I'm fine. My back hurts, but that's being pregnant and scrubbing floors.

This doesn't mean that I'm happy. If I were a cat, my back would be arched, my ears flat, and my hair standing straight up.

So instead of using my speech therapy downtime to call people on various organizational-related business matters, I'm blogging, listening to This American Life, and playing Civ. That shit will all just have to wait until tomorrow because I am in no shape to be charming or gracious right now.

The calm before the storm

It's Saturday. C is better but not great; still sounds like he's going to cough up a lung every now and again. A and I avoided the flu, so I'm thrilled.

Today is the deep breath before the plunge of this week. Tomorrow I am going to meetings, meetings, meetings: San Diego Writers Ink, followed by the plumeria society. That'll take me from 9AM to 5PM pretty easily, if not longer. C and A are going to a Padres game. It's both of their first baseball games. A and I are doing the summer reading program at the library and for reading twenty books with Mommy, he got two tickets to the Padres. Go A! They're playing the Mets; I'm a little jealous of C.

The grandparents roll into town at Wednesday midnight, so there is shopping and cleaning that needs to happen between then and now. Wednesday my fabulous friend JJ offered to take A off my hands in the morning for a playdate so I can house clean and bake a cake, plus A has speech therapy that day. Plus the grandparents will be getting there late.

Thursday we're jam-packed with preschool and grandparents and my twenty(-two, nice scheduling there, guys) week ultrasound. Friday C's off work but I'm sure we'll be busy running around and doing party prep.

Saturday will be the official birthday party for the little boy. We are not bounce housing or petting zoo-ing or anything like that. Brunch at home, wading pool on the lawn, a pinata, and cake, of course. "A Dora pinata, Mommy," I was told this morning. Right. Dora.

And then the whole whirlwind will be over. So this time next week, I should be a lot more relaxed.

Sick sick sick

C is sick sick sick. It's the flu. Our doctor doesn't think it's the swine flu, which is good, because flu is bad enough with everyone in this house besides C being a high-risk group (a pregnant woman and an asthmatic toddler).

C is spending time sleeping and playing of Xbox and looking like a zombie.

A is not happy when C is sick. I tried to put A down for a nap (C was already napping) and A said, "No, I want to sleep in Mommy and Daddy's bed." With Daddy, of course.

No, honey, Daddy's sick.

Protest, protest, fit, all made worse by the fact that A needed a nap.

So out we went for a drive and he fell asleep and now he's down for a nap. And I am going to have some chocolate to medicate my headache.

Happy birthday!

It was my sweet baby boy's (who is more boy than baby now) birthday and he had a jam-packed day. First, preschool, where they gave him a crown and had muffins (mommy-baked, peach and blueberry) and sang "Happy Birthday." His teachers gave him the run of the place for the day, so he had a good time.

Then lunch at Chick-fil-a with Mommy, always a hit, then a nap, then speech therapy. His teacher brought presents for both him and Mommy (nice!). Daddy came home early and grilled him his own pizza and then it was cake and presents and bed.

For three, a pretty full day. The party will come later when his friends are back in town and Grandma and Grandpa are here (and Mommy is not double-booked for meetings).

But he's so amazingly cute and sweet. Liz and Bill sent a box of stuff (a wonderful surprise) and A tore through it like mad as a before-dinner treat. But he's so amazingly smart. He opened a book he's never seen and said, "Oh, it's Dr. Seuss!"

We just got back from Balboa Park. I took him to the puppet show (Pirate Paul) to get a birthday surprise: a crown and a card and a little frog prince finger puppet. Then an auditorium of people sing "Happy Birthday" to him. They called his name and he just ran down (we were sitting in the very back row) to the front without one look back for Mommy. He's getting so grown-up and worldly.

Hormones

Yup, I've got 'em. It's official.

Last week, I woke up at 4AM and couldn't get back to sleep. So I did some ironing (it's been hot and 4AM is the coolest time of the day) until A got up and then I went into the kitchen and looked at the dishwasher and the counter full of dishes and had a nutty. To his credit, when C heard me slamming doors and dishes and mumbling under my breath to myself ("Sure, I'll unload this thing again since I'm the one who loaded it and ran it and unloaded it and ran it the last five times,"), he sent me out of the kitchen and finished doing it himself and didn't say a word to me about it.

In my own defense, there's something about unloading the dishwasher when you've loaded the dishwasher that makes me feel like a complete drudge even when I'm not pregnant.

Then the YouTube crying attacks started. I teared up to the birth slideshow on one of the blogs I read, because the husband and wife look so in love and newborns are so tiny. People sent me the YouTube video of the bridal party dancing down the aisle and I teared up every time the bride came down the aisle.

I've got no reasonable defense for that.

Last night, I had to print volunteer recognition certificates up for the writing organization I am the Volunteer Coordinator for. All I had was a .PDF file, so I had to run them through twice, once through Adobe for the certificate and once through Word for the names. The paper crumpled or curled or misfeed so it was a complete failure. And that's when C came in and took over for me and got things to a point where I could manage to go to Staples and finish it today.

And my darling husband hasn't once said, "Dear, you seem a bit irrational and crazed," because he's very wise and he knows there's nothing he can do. But, yes, dear, I am aware that I am irrational and crazed and thank you for taking up the slack and stopping me from being quite as destructive as I could be.

I have no earthly idea how I'll make it through a "thank you, wonderful volunteers," speech today without blubbering.

Audiology success

Today was A's third hearing test. This time, he's old enough to try a more interactive test, so he was given small tasks to do every time he heard a beep. Being the old hand at testing that he is, he responded only to the first beep of each frequency. If they tried to retest him, he stared at them like, "Oh, please, can't you leave me in peace?"

The good news is, the test went great. He had some test fatigue that gave him some funky numbers on his right ear, but even if the funky numbers are right, they aren't in a range that would impact his speech development abilities, which was the whole impetus for the testing in the first place.

So it looks like he's got no hearing losses. His eardrums behaved beautifully. The hearing receptor cells in his ears are responding as expected. He's just bored the third time through his hearing test.

Due to funky numbers, we have to go back for a retest in one year, which I am fine and dandy with. And the audiologist was nice enough to give me a copy of the audiogram, which is what the school district wants to show he's been tested and that's not an issue they have to start testing him for on his speech.

Great news. And C and I did the two-car tango today to take car of a punctured tire and and oil change, so the car's in good shape, A's ears are in good shape, and it's almost Friday.

Rock star mommy

Oh no, audiology, I will not be your humble supplicant again.

I got a call from the audiology department. As you'll recall, this is my third time trying to schedule an appointment and I first requested a hearing test August 1, 2008.

"He's cleared from his ENT and his ears look great, so I'd like your next available appointment."

"That would be September 11 at 10AM."

Excuse me? So I cajole and wheedle and reluctantly type it into my calendar, and then I get my inner rock star on.

"May I speak to your supervisor? I'm very disappointed; his ears are clear; we've been through this twice now and I don't want to wait and see if he's sick in September or not so we can go through all this again."

Um, she doesn't know why I'd want to speak to her supervisor. After all, her supervisor isn't here.

"How many supervisors do you have?"

"Well...which one did you want to speak to?"

"The one who can get me an earlier audiology appointment."

"That would be audiology. Hold on."

I hold.

"This is Elisha."

I explain, nicely, that I'm trying to get an audiology retest for my son. Both times the audiologists saw something in his ears; after the second time, they recommended going to the ENT and calling to say, he's clear, he's well, do it soon. And I did that and they offered me September, and while I understand how swamped the schedule is, I don't want to go through this again if he's sick in September when I know he's well now. It seems that by going by the system and always having our next appointment six to eight weeks out, we are setting ourselves up for failure.

Elisha says she'll look, and while she's looking I reiterate how busy I know they are and if this wasn't the third re-test, I wouldn't be talking to her.

"How's Thursday at 9?"

"Thursday, like two days from now Thursday?"

Yes. We'll take it. For bonus rock star glamour, I call his preschool teacher and get him rescheduled for tomorrow instead of his usual Thursday. And now I have an extra Wednesday morning free this week!

All clear, preschool registration

So it's been a week. C had comp time for his horrible work schedule of a while ago, and so we had a go about our normal crazy routine week. A couple highlights for you:

A had two follow-up doctor visits so far and he's doing great. One with the asthma specialist at our pediatrician's, who says he's sounding great and is taking him off most of his drugs. One with the ENT (finally) to check his ears to see if they are affecting his hearing tests. His ears are crystal-clear gorgeous and he's fine and ready to go to town on the hearing test, so cross your fingers that we can get that scheduled soon.

While C braved the pediatrician's, I went to public preschool registration, which was a little three-and-a-half hour slice of hell. First of all, when I entered the room (about the size of my grandparents' barn, but louder), there was a violin class for eight-year-olds going on at the front of the room. Thirty little children sawing away on their violins weren't even the worst of the noise. There were randomly arranged tables and hundreds of metal folding chairs that appeared to have been dropped from the ceiling and left where they fell, because there was no order to this room.

The room was filled with screaming, largely unattended children, mostly under six. It was stuffy and hot and the parents were obviously too frustrated with the processes of bureaucracy to care about whether or not their little ones were behaving. There were two sisters who took on the alpha mean girl roles and took toys away from other children and hit them when the other kids complained. They were nasty enough that other parents were just saying, "Stay away from those two," instead of slapping the girls around.

I was number 108. I was second to last.

The system works like this:

1. Go to entry table. Show all documents (birth certificate, immunization record, proof of address, proof of income). They make copies and assign you a number.
2. Wait to be called. For three hours. In kiddie hell.
   
3. Go to the document confirmation table. Woman confirms that you have all the documents and that you filled out forms correctly. She gives you a folder for all your copies. Go back and wait some more, maybe twenty minutes.
4. Wonder if the small children coughing near you have TB. Take your hand sanitizer and wipe out your lungs.
   
5. Go to the proof of income table. Woman does math with paystub to determine whether your child qualifies for Head Start (low income and disadvantaged in some way), preschool (low income but not as low or disadvantaged as Head Start), or School Readiness (everyone else). Smother urge to ask woman if you really needed to go through this charade since you darn well know you are not low-income.
6. Wait again. Cheer up when you talk to someone who made it to the inauguration and how amazing it was.
7. Go to the nurse table. The nurse sees the asthma box checked, hears the word, "hospitalization," and produces four more forms to be filled out by you and the child's doctor. She also tags your folder with a sticky note that says ASTHMA so she'll know who you are later.
8. You're almost the last one, so there's no waiting for the last table, the school choice table. You ask for the school near you that has public preschool for kids regardless of income and a great speech therapy program. She tells you it's almost full. What are your second choices? Um... She makes some suggestions. You accept them, because you have no clue. He's only three. You're beginning to feel like he's not going to get in anyway.

Doctor's followup

Of course, they recommend you see your pediatrician within a couple days of being in the hospital. Of course, our pediatrician was all booked up, so I asked for the asthma specialist instead. I had to get all Bryn Mawr on them when I made the appointment. ("I'm sorry, maybe I didn't make myself clear. My 3-year-old just got out of the ICU and needs to see his pediatrician for follow-up care within one to two days. Would you like to check the schedules again and see where you can get us in?")

So today we went and saw the asthma specialist, and learned the following things:

1. One of our practice's doctors was physically in the same hospital we were all weekend and nobody called him to let him know we were there, which they're supposed to. This makes the doctors in our practice a little pissed.
2. The chest X-ray A had in the ER did show some interesting congestion and was not as clear as I was led to believe.

The doctor wasn't thrilled with the way A sounded, upped his meds again, and wants to see him on Tuesday to double-check the congestion he's hearing.

So that's where we are. A is still much more active and happier than he's been, but he's not 100% yet. But he can do normal activity levels, with lots of drugs.

We got word today that he's been accepted into the preschool he's currently going to once his free services expire, so hey, that's one less thing to worry about.

Hospital alphabet soup: ER and PICU

Happy Fourth. We all had an exciting one here. Very early on the 4th, like 2:30 a.m., C woke me up and said, "A's retracting. I just gave him albuterol and it didn't seem to work. I think we need to go to the hospital."

Now sometimes it takes me forever to wake up, but that one got me instantly awake. I looked in at A and said, "Yeah, we're going to the ER." C had been up since midnight with A (letting the pregnant lady sleep, thank you). When A can't breathe, he can't sleep. But A was pretty pale and lethargic and uncommunicative.

Off we go. We throw clothes for A and some other random supplies into his preschool backpack: a book for me, extra underpants, his immunization card. We make it to the hospital around 3 and park at the curb in front of the emergency room. We go to the front desk of a huge waiting room and explain what's happening to A. The nurse takes a look at A and immediately takes him into the back to put him on oxygen. His first oxygen saturation level was 82-85%. Normal is in the 90s, the high 90s for being awake. At 75%, you pass out.

We were in the ER for about three hours while they tried a couple different drugs on him: albuterol, xophenex, magnesium sulfide. They put an IV in to get stuff to him quicker than the nebulizer. They took blood tests. Nothing was making him better, so then they admitted him to the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) where he could get more treatments and continuous monitoring.

So we spent Saturday in the PICU while they worked on A. He slept for about an hour during the day, but spent most of his time watching television (what a novelty!). They changed up his drug cocktails and put him on heliox, which is a helium and oxygen mixture that's not as hard for someone to breathe as straight oxygen. By the end of the day he was stable but not great. He was so hungry but they weren't letting him eat until they were happy with his oxygen levels and drug cocktails, so he didn't get to eat anything until the afternoon. First some juice, then a popscile, then it was the clears for dinner: broth, Jello, Italian ice, juice.

C and I slept in the PICU with him, C on the pull-out chair and me on the window seat that was just shy of five feet long. None of us slept particularly well. Both C and I were up with A at different times. A was hooked up to six different sensors, plus the IV, and all that tubing is hard on a wiggle worm who moves around a lot in his sleep. The nurse eventually knotted it all together into a kind of corset so he wasn't getting tangled every five minutes.

Sunday he looked a lot better. He was alert and had opinions about what movie he should watch and how he didn't want the sensors on him. He ate a bowl of cereal. He was let off the sensors to go to the potty and that became his way to get up out of that bed. [A side note: the kid is potty trained. He wouldn't go in his diaper, even when we told him there was no way to get him off all the monitors and IVs and he should go in the diaper, so he held it until we found a bedpan and took the diaper off. He is so potty trained.]

Sunday night they debated releasing us or sending us to the medical/surgery floor for observation, deciding (with our supporting opinion) that he should probably spend another night just to make sure the maintenance treatments were working. So down we went to another floor, another room. When we got there, we were in one of the few double rooms on the floor with a family loudly watching soccer with two obnoxious wounded children, but they checked out not long after we got there and we had the room to ourselves for the rest of the time.

Sunday night, I slept in the folding chair and C slept on the floor. We were all a bit slap-happy at that point. A was disconnected from all the monitors and his IV, so he slept much better. The nurses checked A's vitals every four hours; the respiratory therapists administered treatments every four, and none of them really woke him up from sleeping, so that was fabulous and appreciated.

Monday, A was much, much better. He spent all the time he could in the playroom and took a nap around his normal naptime for a really long time. The nurses decided around noon that we would go home; we just needed a lot of paperwork and approvals because the PICU was still following A's case. But they let us go around 5-5:30, loaded A up with drugs and us up with filled prescriptions, and sent us home. And our friends and family from out of town delayed our dinner reservations so we could go home, hand off A to our darling neighbor, and go out for a fabulous dinner.

I'm so tired. A's pretty tired. C is tired. We've got new drugs to hopefully keep us out of the hospital in the future; we've got appointments with all sorts of doctors to keep us on track and help us figure this out. But as I write this, A is laughing in the tub and having fun with Daddy so things are much better here now.

Children's Museum, Adieu

We've been members at the children's museum for a year now, and we're going to let the membership lapse. But it expires Tuesday so I thought we'd suck the marrow out of it and go today.

And so we did. A got to participate in a class where we made parachutes out of grocery bags. Goes like this: Take a regular plastic grocery store bag. Cut the sides open a bit to make them more airy. Take two small (1/2-3/4-inch) washers and thread the handles of the bags through the washers. Punch two holes in a piece of cardboard and thread the handles through so that washers are flush with the cardboard. Fold the remaining cardboard over the washers and seal with tape.

Wah-lah. Parachute.

Except that they don't work very well without being launched, and so they have four jerryrigged cannons made of rubber bands, clothesline, funnels, and brightly-painted MDF to launch the parachutes into the courtyard below.

Now, the project was great fun, and then there was some marching, and then there was the launching, and A thought launching was fabulous. Except our plastic bag was a pretty green one from a bookseller (he picked it, not me) and as such did not have the appropriate lightness and capacity to make a good parachute. So it torpedoed onto the gallery below us, where people were painting a car and playing with clay.

A thought this was the most fabulous thing ever, because all he saw from his position behind the balcony was the launch. He could not lean over the balcony to see the landing. I could, and I saw people scurrying out of the way and sometimes getting hit in the head.

Well, once you launch, they drop a bucket down to collect the parachutes. And they kept sending A's back, so I kept letting him launch it. If they're stupid enough to send a projectile back up, I'm stupid enough to let him launch it. He launched it five times. He had a blast.

Anyway, it was a good last day. I think we'll join one of the other, more exciting museums (the Fleet, perhaps) that has share days with the children's museum and that'll suffice. But it's just not as super as we anticipated.

The boy is more right than he knows

Conversation over dinner:

Me: And what's your name?
A: A------.
Me: And what's my name?
A: Mommy.
Me: And what's Daddy's name?
A: Home.

Yes, A. That's what I call Daddy too.

Post 400

In honor of Post 400, we're introducing Baby 2.0. That's right; I'm pregnant. I think most people have heard, but this is the official blog announcement.

A laundry list of answers:

• The due date has gone from being "definitely before Christmas" to "hopefully before Christmas." It should be this year.
  
• I'm fine. I've been sicker and achier than the last time, but I'm into the second trimester now so that's improving.
• So far, everything looks fine with the baby.
  
• We haven't discussed Baby 2.0 with A yet, since time seems to go forever for the almost-three set. We'll probably discuss it after his birthday, once he could feel the baby kick.
• We're not planning on finding out the gender before birth this time either.
• We're going to try for a VBAC instead of a C-peat, since the recovery time last time was oh-so-sucktastic.
• I'm probably showing but my relative pudding-ness makes me just pudgy. As with the last time, my breasts grew first and their size de-emphasizes my belly.
• It's not twins. I've had two ultrasounds and it's not twins.

And I think that's it for potential questions, the polite ones which will get answered, anyway. I've got some older unpublished posts that I'll publish now that Baby 2.0 is public, but there you go. Happy post 400.

Party party party

After a couple of craptastic weeks, we needed to have some fun this weekend. And boy, did we ever. Saturday was the big 0h-Three for our friend H, who had a rocking birthday party complete with bounce house, Cookie Monster pinata, and cake. Boy did A have a good time, and so did we. He even used the potty in the scary park bathroom--twice.

Sunday, we headed up to the House of Mouse for a day of rides. Oh my, rides. We rode Pooh and Buzz and the small world boats, of course. A looked at the map and insisted on going to see Nemo, so I waited in line with him while C ran off to ride roller coasters (it was Fathers' Day, after all). The lines weren't actually that bad at all. And we didn't have an asthma attack and end up in the hospital, so that always makes the day just a little more fun.

I should mention that A is currently in love with Dora the Explorer and maps. He can't get enough of maps. We go to the Zoo, we look at the map and map our route. We go to Disneyland, he gets his own map and wants to know where we are, where we have been, and points to where he would like to go.

We had a learning experience where A wanted to ride "the rabbit ride." This would be Splash Mountain, which is hard-core and has one of the taller height requirements. So I took A over to the dreaded "you must be this tall" sign and stood him there and had the guy explain that he wasn't tall enough yet for Splash Mountain. A is tall enough now for the Matterhorn and the little kid coaster in Toon Town, but we're waiting for him to ask to ride them before we take him on them.

We had Mickey ice cream and burgers and Mexican food and I fed the feral cats to protect them from toddlers. A used the potty and stayed dry all day, hurrah. So that was all grand. And we were in the car so A could be asleep by his normal bedtime and home in time so we could be asleep by our normal bedtime.

He had swimming this morning all by himself, which was good because I could pretty much let the teacher take him and see how he would do in a private, mommy-less lesson, and he'd do relatively well, I think.

Wee wee wee, all the way home

Potty-training minutiae, you've been warned.

Today's been another accident-free day, with the crowning achievement of the day being A telling me in the parking lot of Phil's that he needed to make water, and me without keys or potty to say, "Okay, let's go into the restaurant or into the parking lot."

So I told him, "I'm sorry, we can't go to the potty right now. You can go in your pull-up if you need to." (We had him in Pull-ups for a late night errand run that might have run into bedtime.)

We get home and he is bone dry. Bone dry for a fifteen-twenty minute car ride. He held it. He held it. Wow! Wow wow wow.

And now he's complaining that he wants to wear his big boy pants at night. We're not quite ready for that. We told him when he's dry all night (which he is irregularly) he can have big boy pants for bed. But the end is in sight.

Potty training success

We've had a good twenty-four hours of no accidents, so keep your fingers crossed.

We even went to the Greek festival and ate enough flaming cheese and baklava to make me sick.

Now I'm waiting for C to come home (maybe, since he didn't answer his work phone) and for A's pasta to cool so I can give it to him and he can eat and go to bed.

But keep your fingers crossed for us. A whole day, no accidents, running to the potty and everything.

One week of the suck

The boy's breathing, which is good. The daddy is working massive overtime (still not home), which is bad.

I am tired and getting to the end of my patience. We had potty training again today with not enough nap and that was a bad combination. I'm not even sure at this point if the potty training will actually take, but I know leaving him in diapers will not help. I'm sick of doing all the laundry that potty training entails. I'm sick of doing three meals a day plus snacks (usually, Mistah C does breakfast and often dinner) and loading the dishwasher and emptying the dishwasher. I'm sick of feeling like the Feminine Mystique for a new century.

I don't feel like I get a lot of time to myself this week, and not a lot last week, and so now that I've a stretch with pretty much no creative/play/social time for Kim as grownup non-mommy person, I've decided mommies need our grownup time. I get really cranky without it.

Accidentastic

C came home at normal times for the last two nights and so our lives feel more normal. A is doing well. He had an exit developmental evaluation today, and he's doing great, actually. He had the Bayley developmental assessment today, and that tracked him as on target for all areas of development, including speech. (I know! Speech too!)

The doctor doing the test made two recommendations: one, that we keep him in preschool (which was like, duh, no kidding), and two, that we keep him in speech therapy once or twice a week to work on his articulation. She said the words, vocabulary, sentence structure, and syntax he has are all on target, but that he needs help learning to articulate. This is super news as far as we're concerned.

This all makes me wonder how the hearing test plays in.

Anyway, I felt confident enough (read: not too lazy) today that we went back to potty training, hard core, Supernanny style: underpants, no Pull-ups. (I would like Supernanny to get over to my house and clean up the resulting mess.) But I am resolved and stalwart and he will be potty trained.

Sucktastic

Yup. That's what our lives are doing right about now.

In order of sucktasticness: On Friday morning, A had his second audiology follow-up. He was having some problems breathing but we loaded him up on his inhalers and off he went.

Results: He has good hearing in his right ear but showed a non-moving eardrum in his left ear, which means maybe he's got some hearing loss in his left ear. But he also had the beginnings of a cold and possibly an ear infection, so the audiologist referred him to an ENT (ear, nose, throat) specialist and scheduled him for another follow-up.

Friday he wouldn't take a nap. Wouldn't, wouldn't, wouldn't. Fought me and cried. And I thought, it's been a hard week for him; maybe he's picked up some new tricks from our young visitor that we'll have to convince him don't work here. But then I remembered that when he's having trouble breathing, he can't sleep. So I looked at his throat and belly, and yes, he's retracting, and I called the pediatrician's office to say that I was bringing him in immediately (because I'm learning and I don't mess around with this shit).

So Friday afternoon, we get a breathing treatment and see our pediatrician who says, "Buddy, you're having issues." Since the nebulizer seems to have a better effect on him than the inhaler, she orders us a home nebulizer, which will be delivered to us this evening at home.

This means my Friday is completely shot and tasks like shopping for the bare essentials our house requires like milk and cereal is bypassed, as well as the fun stuff like the open mic three-minute prose reading I like to go are off the menu.

The nebulizer was delivered by the kind of creepy guy who made me keep my cell phone in hand the entire time he's in my house. He showed up at 7:45pm. (A had fallen asleep on the couch around 7 and I didn't have the energy to move him.) He didn't give his name, didn't have an ID badge or name tag, and didn't have his name on any of the paperwork he gave me. When he said, "So it's just [you and A] here alone?" I wanted to call 911. But I said, "Well, my husband will be home any minute now." And he's big. And scary. And could totally kick your ass.

I seriously wanted to take a picture of him with my phone and send it to everyone I know with a note, "If I'm dead, please look for this guy from Apria Healthcare who probably did it."

My anxiety about this was heightened because my husband was actually not coming home any time soon because he is in a crunch with the eye of the CEO of his company on what he's doing, which is a very bad place to be in. He ended up coming home around midnight. The next morning, he said, "Why were all the lights on?" and I explained about creepy guy. I don't know if lights would keep creepy guy away, but it's better than sitting in the dark.

Saturday from 9am-2pm, I had a board meeting of the writers organization I work with, and that was fine but arduous and not exactly relaxing. Once I got home, C was off to work again and didn't get back until midnight-ish again.

And this morning, after breakfast and (thank you, C) helping me with the shopping, C was off to work again.

A hates the nebulizer and cries every time we get it out. He screams bloody murder and none of the bribes I offer him are lasting.

I'm very, very tired.

And A ate the frosting off the last chocolate cupcake I put out for myself to warm up and eat later while he napped.

But the good news is: A's napping now, and I can go eat veggie chips and ginger ale on the couch like a twelve-year-old whose parents are out of town while I watch me some Ocean's Eleven eye candy.

Cross your fingers for C getting done today, maybe even before midnight.

Zoo freakout

We went to the Zoo a couple days ago to spend time at the new Elephant Odyssey (which is terribly neat if not big) exhibit.

A and I were walking along a path. A family with a couple kids walked by us. One of the kids was a boy about six-years-old. A saw him and started to freak. He was pointing at the kid, jabbering, very upset, to the point where the kid and his family noticed.

"What's his problem?" the mother said to me in a not-very-nice way.

I was trying to calm A down so I could understand, because he kept saying, "No shirt, no shirt," over and over and that was all I could understand.

Finally, I looked at the kid. He's wearing a striped blue shirt that says, "Handsome like Daddy," which I recognized as a pajama top from Old Navy, because A has the same PJs.

The mother and her family were still hanging around making clucking noises at A, so I said to A, "I know that's his pajama top. His mommy lets him wear his pajamas in public, and that's okay, even though your mommy doesn't let you wear yours."

A said, "No pajamas outside."

I said, "Yes, for you, no pajamas outside. You're right."

And the family went speechless and the kid looked like he wanted the pavement to eat him and we walked our pajama-less selves onward.

[To be fair, A is allowed to wear his PJs to Bread and Cie for the first run of the day. But only to pick up, certainly not to eat there.]

Another delayed-date post: Nuchal translucency testing

There's a relatively new test out there called the nuchal translucency screening, which is a screening (read: not a 100% sure thing) for Down's Syndrome (Trisomy-21) and Trisomy-18 (a terribly scary disease that almost always results in death soon after birth). This screening is the combination of a (maternal) blood test and an ultrasound. The tech takes a measurement of the fluid at the back of the baby's neck. A normal range of length would be up to 10-20mm, and an abnormal range would be 35mm or more. The ultrasound is then compared to the bloodwork, where the levels of two pregnancy hormones are checked to see if those levels are abnormal. In certain chromosomal disorders, the nuchal folds are thicker and the hormone levels are off.

I've already discussed my concerns about not getting prenatal screenings here, so I won't belabor it again. Since my doctor is in the process of having a birthing center built that I could actually use, I thought it would be the responsible thing (again) to find out if there was anything wrong with the baby before we made the decision on where to deliver. When I read that the nuchal translucency (NT) gave a 70-90% accuracy in detecting Down's without requiring things that scare me muchly, like amnio or CVS, I was all for it.

I had to go to the swanky La Jolla hospital to have it done, since it's only done by extremely specialized ultrasound techs. C joined me. The baby was not cooperative, although the shelf of fat from the C-section didn't help either. The tech pushed and prodded and had me get up and shimmy and finally the kid was visible.

Anyway, she ran off to get the results. The doctor came back in and I almost fell over, like, oh my, they sent the doctor to tell us the bad news. But no, everything looks great and he just wanted to look himself.

The results are given as odds. Right now, I'm 1 in 6,600 for Trisomy-21 and 1 in 58,000 for Trisomy-18. That's given as 70% accurate. It'll be combined with another set of bloodwork (the quad screen) in the second trimester for a 90% accurate ratio.

The only other thing is that the ultrasound dated the kid one week earlier than my date, but I'm still not sure I trust the whole gestational dating thing for ultrasounds. The gestational dating for A always put him a week or so behind and smaller than everyone thought. At my last ultrasound at the birth center, the tech said, "Oh, just over six pounds. Small like Mommy." (Mommy was over nine pounds at birth, but that's besides the point.) At the ultrasound in the hospital, the doctor said, "Six, six and a half pounds."

And he was seven pounds, 11 ounces. So I think the ultrasound sizing is a lot of hooey.

But I'll take the NT results.

Friday? No, Thursday

It's hard to keep track.

L and K left today, and I have to say we (being all the grownups) were unpleasantly surprised by how little A and L got along. They used to get along fine, but this visit was like a non-stop toddler cage match. They couldn't parallel play or cooperatively play. If one had a toy, the other wanted it. Tug of wars over toys escalated to throwing toys and shoving and hitting.

This was bad. Very bad.

The relatively non-stop screaming was also bad. I think every time C came home, he hit the Advil bottle pretty hard.

Neither of these kids act this way with anyone else. I'd ask at preschool, "Was A acting out today?" No, he was super. It's sad because A and L used to get along fine and after our fabulous visit of last week I thought, two birth class friends, playing together, what could be more fun?

Nope. Fun didn't happen.

Anyway, we're getting back to our normal existence, although tomorrow A has his second audiology exam so normal is relative, I guess.

Bone-freaking-tired

I am tired. Really tired.

We went to bed last night before 10, without any super duper TV viewing.

We got up after 6, which late for me.

And I am still tired enough that I could go to sleep.

But we have company coming--our photographer friend K from Texas with little L is coming and I have to finish moving all of A's bedding from his room to our room to accommodate everyone.

But it's hard to move a bed when I just want to be in a bed.

Cute things A did

Now every time we fly out of San Diego, we are generally stocked with petit baguettes from Bread & Cie and some butter, if not cheese and fruit.

We got to the Portland airport. We go through security and get to our gate.

A looks at us and says, "I'm hungry. Bread, please."