The Fish Pond

Lesson Learned: Reasons Not to Stay Up All Night Drinking When You Are a Parent, Besides the Obvious

So, BigDaddyFish and I have been going through - something. I don't know what. Maybe a mid-life crisis? But we're both going through it together. We've been doing a lot of talking and connecting and going out together and just generally enjoying each other's company in ways we did back when we were dating and in the earlier years of our marriage, before the kids came along. And we've rediscovered a love of good red wine. It's been a lot of fun, and the kids have been patient with us. Most of the time.

This past weekend, BDF and I polished off a bottle of wine, and then...well. We were stupid. We moved on to scotch. We didn't go to bed until 7 am Saturday morning, and then got about three hours of sleep before we had to get up with the kids and be functional. We spent the day doing things for the kids, spending time with them, taking them to a cafe next to the train tracks in a nearby town that we like to frequent because we can eat good food and watch the trains go by right there. Our homeowner's association recently replaced the playgrounds in our development (like, last week) so we took the kids over to play on the new playground (which is awesome). We just focused on them. But that can only go so far. My stomach was roiling most of the day, though I never got sick, but the thought of cooking the ham I had planned to make was unappealing at best, so we cried Uncle, or, specifically, Uncle Dave (side note - he played the 9:30 club in DC on Friday night while BDF and I were trying to recapture our youth - check out that clip of him singing Sledgehammer), and he came to take care of the kids (bonus - he totally got them to clean up the family room, too. We'd be lost without him) while BDF and I went out for hangover curing burgers and fries. And no alcohol. We came home not long after the kids went to bed, and we went to bed ourselves.

At about 3 am, Trout came into our room complaining about a headache and sore throat. She hadn't eaten any dinner at all and had gone to bed early without complaining, and we had suspected for days she was coming down with something. She had a fever of 102, so we gave her some ibuprofen and a small snack, encouraging her to drink water and eat a bit. That backfired as she threw up about 20 minutes later, so we put her in the shower and got her cleaned up and cooled down and put back to bed at about 4 or so. She usually is our early riser, getting up between 7 and 8 (how we had a morning person is a mystery) and going down to watch tv, and she keeps an eye on the littles as they get up and come down while we sleep in. She did get up and go to watch tv, but she wasn't feeling well, and wasn't paying much attention to what was going on around her. BDF and I slept in rather late, finally dragging our asses out of bed about noon when Sunny and Little Man shrieked that Nemo was poopy. We told them to send him up and we'd take care of it.

When Nemo arrived in my room, he was soaking wet up to his shoulders, which to me meant only one thing: disaster. Visions of his previous forays into playing in the toilet crossed my mind, but Little Man told us he'd been in the kitchen, which we keep gated off, though everyone but Nemo can open the gate. I sent Little Man down to survey the damage in the kitchen while I changed Nemo, worried that the cleaning product cabinet had been left unlocked, or worse. I could not have imagined what actually happened.

Nemo got in the fish tank. He decided he wanted to play with the shee-shees, so he put the following items in the fish tank with the fish: two full cans of Juicy Juice concentrate (unopened), a couple of Christmas ornaments (one plastic, one glued), a piece from a Plan Toys vegetable garden set, my brand new stainless steel pepper grinder full of peppercorns (fully submerged), at least one Fisher Price Little People animal, a hair clip, Little Man's magic wand from magic club, and I'm sure I'm forgetting some things. He had messed up the filter, and I'm thanking God almighty that the light wasn't plugged in - we unplug it every night when we go to bed, and the kids don't plug it in - otherwise he might have been electocuted.

BDF went down to deal with the carnage from that as I got Nemo cleaned up and changed, and got dressed to take Trout to Doc-in-a-Box, as she was still feeling (and looking) just awful, and BDF suspected she had strep (she didn't, I was right, "just" a virus). He dealt with fishing (ha!) things out of the tank, and then he marshalled the remaining healthy kids to clean up the family room. I was supposed to go to a rubber stamp workshop, but with a sick Trout it just wasn't possible - taking all 4 kids to Doc-in-a-Box when only one needed it is a level of crazy that even BDF and I haven't achieved. DIAB was empty, though, so we were there and back pretty quick.

Even after fishing all the stuff out of the tank the water was still pretty cloudy. BDF had done a partial water change while I was gone, but he decided he wanted to do a full change but we didn't have enough water. So I went out to buy a bunch of gallons of distilled water. Before I left, though, I made a couple of sandwiches, and as I stood there eating my sandwich I studied the tank, and noticed something that looked a little weird on the bottom of the tank.

_{Yes, I actually could see in there.}

There were a bunch of little round things, odd looking things, like some sort of durable hard cereal, mixed in among the gravel on the bottom of the tank. BDF started fishing those out, and we found this:

_{Doesn't BDF have nice hands?}

A washable crayon, hence the reason the water wasn't coming clear even after a partial change, and the better part of a pound of knock-off m&ms from the bulk section of Whole Foods.

 

A full water change was in order, so I made a speed run and we changed the water. The stress of the whole thing made one of our females go into labor, so we got to see the baby fish before the goldfish manged to find and eat them all, which is something we knew was going on but we didn't want to think about, much less explain to the kids (we'll go back to breeding them once we have a new house and space to do it again - we bred before and at one time had 17 fish tanks [and a dog!] in an apartment). Miraculously, all the fish survived and don't really seem any worse for wear, other than the premature labor. It'll be a while before the tank conditions return to normal, though; all the plants are coated with cocoa butter and some sort of waxy substance from the m&ms.

This is the tank Sunday evening - it really didn't look any different the whole day on Monday, either. We had a good long talk with the kids about how important it is for HIS OWN SAFETY for Nemo to be kept out of the kitchen, and that they must always always always shut the gate when they go through it. We don't want anyone to get hurt.

So what have we learned boys and girls? Keeping the fish tank away from the fish-loving two year old isn't as easy as it seems. And for God's sake, save your midlife crises for times when a competent adult is in charge.

Lesson learned.

The Mother of All Poop Stories

Motherhood is not for the weak stomached. I've caught puke in my bare hands as the kids threw up and couldn't get to the bathroom. I've been peed on and pooped on, and cleaned up a spectacular mess made by Little Man when he had projectile poop across the NICU. I've been spit up all over and been puked on in my hair and down my shirt. Nothing I couldn't handle. I've never had a kid get into poop artwork, and I've only had one incidence of poop in the tub. The worst poop problem we've had here is Sunny taking off her poopy diaper and throwing it at me. It was bound to happen sooner or later. So really, I shouldn't have been surprised (NOTE: If you have a weak stomach, read no further. You have been warned).

Sunny attends preschool in the next town south of here, a distance of about 10 miles that takes about a 20 minute drive. I like to leave a bit early to pick her up at her 1pm dismissal, because Nemo falls asleep in the car and that's the best way to ensure he gets a decent nap before we go meet BigDaddyFish for lunch. I usually leave about 12:15, after Nemo has had a chance to watch his favorite Noggin show, Oswald.

This morning, I was in the kitchen looking at porn reading blogs doing the dishes, and Nemo came up to our kitchen gate, crying and spitting and saying something about "Chock-lit." He held something in his hand, and I figured he picked up a piece of stray chocolate from the floor or in the couch cushions that I hadn't found on my cleaning binge and was trying to eat it.

"No! Dirty, Nemo, dirty, don't eat that! Spit it out!" I told him as I ran from the sink to the kitchen gate. He continued sputtering and coughing and gagged and threw up a bit. I reached him and the stench was unbearable.

"Nemo! What did you do? Are you okay? What did you eat?!?" I shrieked as he shoved his hand down the front of his pants again, muttering about the chocklit and "messy". That's when it hit me.

Nemo has developed a habit lately of putting his hand down his diaper and playing with himself. Today, he apparently grabbed a turd and pulled it out of his diaper, and thought it looked an awful lot like chocolate. He learned the folly in that pretty quick.

Choking down my own puke, I grabbed the wipes and stripped him. He had apparently been squishing around in there and in an effort to clean the mess off his hands, he'd wiped them on his sweatshirt. I went at him with about eleventy million wipes (and I pride myself on my two-wipe diaper changes, so that's saying something) and finally decided it was just too much of a mess and made a dash for the tub.

One emergency bath later, I crammed him in clean clothes at 12:35, anxiously watching the clock. Although he was clean he still had poopbreath, so I grabbed a couple of Grasshopper cookies to deal with that. BDF had said he would pick up Sunny and meet me in the parking lot, so I wasn't too worried, but still wanted to make it. I got in the car at 12:43 and BDF texted me that he had a meeting and couldn't make it to pick up Sunny. So I skedaddled. I pulled into the parking lot at 12:58.

And that is why I will be having tequila tonight. The end.

Transitions

I never intended to have a family bed. To the best of my knowledge, I never, ever slept with my parents, and I fully intended that my babies would spend a short amount of time in my room in a bassinet and then transition to their own cribs in their own rooms when they outgrew the bassinet. (I also never intended to have four kids, so the own rooms thing worked well.)

Everything went according to plan until Trout was three months old, when she developed RSV. We spent three days not sleeping at all, just staying up all night staring at her to make sure she kept breathing. Once she recovered, I went back to putting her to sleep in the crib, but BigDaddyFish had a little Daddy Freakout and decided he couldn't sleep with her so far away from us, so he went and got her and brought her to our bed. I argued against it for a while, but frankly it was easier to nurse, and she was a good kid to share a bed with - she pretty much stayed put all night long, no kicking or shoving. She shared our bed until she was 16 months old and we knew her brother was on his way.

The move from our bed and room to the crib in her own room was wrenching but thankfully over in a week. The first night she screamed and cried for three hours. BDF slept on the floor beside the crib so he could soothe her periodically and she could adjust to the crib before she was alone. The second night, she cried for 45 minutes, and then sat in the crib giving us the stinkeye every time we walked by the room to check on her for about four hours. The third night she cried maybe ten minutes, then went to sleep after about an hour. Within a week, BDF was out of her room and back in our bed and Trout was sleeping by herself. She didn't stay in the crib very long, because we needed the crib for her brother and we didn't want to kick her out of the crib when he was born. We were idiots, and in hindsight we should have just bought another crib. But we moved her to a toddler bed instead.

Then we had the two hour ritual of me reading book after book and then sitting beside her bed so she could fondle her favorite comfort object as she drifted off to sleep, my hair being that comfort object. After too many nights of me dozing off and waking with a crick in my neck three hours later, I wised up and bought her a doll with hair, and she learned to fondle it instead of me. She later got another doll with hair, which she still sleeps with every night.

Little Man was easy, because he really didn't do well sleeping with us. He helicopters around, wanders all over the place, and talks in his sleep. It didn't take us long at all to discover that we all slept better with him in the crib. By the time he had outgrown the bassinet we had finally relaxed about his birth circumstances, so the transition to the crib at about four months went smoothly.

Sunny was a champion nurser, so she slept with us for years. We started trying to make the transition to her own bed when she was just shy of two and we bought her a toddler bed. We set it up in the corner of our bedroom, and went through an agonizing six month process to get her actually moved to the bed and then the bed moved from our room to the room she shares with her sister. She was still nursing at the time for a part of it, though she had weaned down to once a day. BDF and I went on a trip just before her second birthday and through that we were able to cut her off and finally wean. She still tries to come to our bed at least one night a week, but now I'm able to promise her a sticker in the morning if she stays in her bed all night and that works.

Which brings us to Nemo. I have been trying desperately to get him weaned; I want my body back, after three full years of pregnancy and more than 70 months of nursing, but he has other ideas. I also want some sleep, and I don't think that's asking too much.

Nemo has been sleeping in our bed with us since he was born. It was easier to nurse, and really, we had no place to put him. We have a three bedroom townhouse. The house itself is huge, and we have a lot of living space, and the master bedroom is a good size. But the other two bedrooms are really small. Trout and Sunny are crammed into one room, Sunny still in her toddler bed, Trout in a twin bed, but with the windows in that room we can't really make any changes in there - the windows come down to within 24 inches of the floor. Beds can't go underneath them because my kids would find it rather too easy to jump through the window. Little Man is crammed into a bedroom little bigger than your average walk-in closet, with a closet that is only 6 inches deep for most of its width. At about age 1 I set the crib up at the foot of our bed, and we tried to get Nemo to sleep in it, but he decided it was baby prison rather than a comfy, cozy place to sleep, and he would scream til he puked. Crying it out, which I certainly would have considered, wasn't really an option because sooner or later, we had to come to our own room to sleep, and he'd just start back up where he left off. So back into our bed with us. No one has been getting much sleep because Nemo will wake up in the night and need us to help him get back to sleep, either through playing or through nursing, and he wanders all over the bed and kicks and shoves and is a lot stronger than his brother. I want my bed back to just me and my husband.

Over time, I've been putting him in the crib at other times than bedtime, just to get him used to it. I'd fold laundry on my bed while he played in the crib. A couple of times Superbabysitter was able to get him to go to sleep in the crib, though he really won't reveal his secrets as to how. I'd been asking BDF to put Nemo to bed, because if the Nummies were around he asked for them, but was okay without them if they weren't an option. Slowly, over a course of months, BDF worked on getting Nemo to sleep in the crib. And in a stroke of genius that only a dad would think of, I think, one night he gave Nemo the Gameboy with a Little Einsteins game in it, a game so easy that you really only have to push one button to make it do anything and Nemo can manage to play it well enough to keep it going. He kissed Nemo goodnight, layed him down in the crib, covered him up, and let him play the Gameboy til he fell asleep. And he did.

So now, a couple of nights a week my son sleeps through the night. Yes, he's two (yeah, he had a birthday this past weekend) and should have been doing it all along, but he'd wakeup in the night and wow - Nummies! Think I'll grab a snack! and sit up and smack me in the face (literally!) shouting "Mom! Mom! Nummies!" until I rolled over and ponied up. He doesn't do that now, because they aren't right there in his face. Some nights he'll get up and yell at us until one of us brings him into bed with us, but sometimes BDF is able to get him to lay back down and go back to sleep by rubbing his back and telling him to go back to sleep. We also discovered a deep affinity for glowsticks, so sometimes we mix it up with the Gameboy and give him a glowstick. Best of all, as long as I keep the girls covered up, I can put him to bed without him asking to nurse, provided he didn't nap too late during the day.

Now, I'm getting more sleep, though thanks to my husband, still not enough. But more than I used to. It's been so nice that BDF is now thinking more seriously about what we need to do in this economy to get moved to a bigger house, where Little Man and Nemo can share a room and the hormones girls can have their own rooms, because he's liking being able to snuggle his wife with something other than his foot since there's no kid in the way. His wife's kinda liking it, too.

Maybe We Have to Broaden His Social Contacts

Last night Nemo was sitting on my bed looking through the pages of a Parenting magazine. He stopped on each page gazing at the faces, and every so often attempting to name them. A photo of a dark-haired little girl gave him pause.

"Trout?" he queried.

"No, baby, not Trout." He sat back and studied her face for a while longer.

"Dora?"

Maybe I just shouldn't let his sister watch so much TV when he's around.

Ma Bebe's Got Skillz

Tonight I went out to dinner with Little Man - we try to take each kid out for some one-on-one time from time to time, and we've found that it pays great dividends as far as their behavior is concerned. Plus it's fun. My 20 year HS reunion was tonight, but I figure if I'd wanted to keep in touch with those people I would have - and I did, with some of them. I also was able to make contact with one of the few who I'd like to reconnect with, through classmates. I frankly had more fun at a deli with my seven year old. Either I have my priorities straight or I'm officially old. Probably a bit of both.

Anyway, that meant that I left BigDaddyFish home with the other three monsters terrors monkeys darlings. He's recovering from a sinus infection that kicked his ass the past week, and really isn't up to, well, not even 70%, much less 100. I came home to find BDF and Trout sitting on the couch watching Cops at about 90 decibels, Sunny strewing Barbies from one end of the room to the other, and Nemo practically climbing me because he was so hungry. I got Nemo settled in his high chair with some food, made a plate for Sunny and sat her at the table while I put some groceries away, and then went out to talk to BDF. While sitting next to him, I happened to do a visual survey of the floor and noticed something odd.

"Why is there a wet diaper on the floor?" I looked at BDF. He denied changing the baby.

"He must have taken it off himself."

"I don't think so. He's wearing overalls." BDF walked into the kitchen, threw away the diaper, and asked the baby if he took his diaper off. I missed that part of the conversation, since I was in the other room, but BDF assured me the baby still had his diaper.

The baby fell asleep in his high chair, the other three were massively overtired and tantruming, and our Wii wasn't working, so we had plenty to distract us as we got kids in bed and dealt with our Wii (which appears to be FUBAR and will have to be sent to Nintendo to fix - we'll be Wii-less for wiiks - no Guitar Hero - I may perish). Once everyone else was settled, I picked Nemo up out of his high chair to change and put in bed. He was very very sweaty, so I really didn't think too much about the fact that he was drenched, til I put my arm under his bottom to carry him up the stairs.

Yes, indeedy, my baby DID take off his own diaper underneath his overalls, without removing any of his clothes. And he was OUT, sound asleep. I gave him a quick baby wipe and washcloth wipe down to remove the blue fuzz from the overalls from all of his parts, put a new diaper on him, and tucked him in, all without waking him.

Maybe I have a couple of skillz, too.

And the Silver Medal for High Fever Goes To...

Nemo, for his incredible achievement of 105.3 degrees. We are so very proud of him.

Thankfully he is spent and the fever broke this morning. It was over 105 all weekend. He sat up Saturday morning after the horrible second night of nursing nonstop all night long, pointed to his throat and said "Huwt. Huwt." A more pitiful thing I'm not sure I've seen. So we did the dreaded Saturday morning pediatrician run, which actually wasn't so bad at all. They apparently have a new nurse who we haven't encountered before who was so cute on the phone. "Do you know where our office is?" Uh, yeah. When do you want me to come in? "Well, as soon as you can get here, of course." Very cute.

Unfortunately, he was diagnosed with the dreaded Coxackie virus, nothing they can do for him, keep giving him advil and go around with him attached to your body for the next 48 hours because he is miserable and doesn't want to do anything but nurse. I can't begin to tell you how much fun that was. And can someone please tell me why my kids felt they had to wake me up to tell me that my boob was hanging out no less than three times during the one two-hour non-nap that we were able to take on Saturday afternoon? I was in my own room, for Pete's sake, no one there to see me except them when they came in. Which they had no reason to do at all.

So I've done little but nurse the baby and daydream about my vacation for the past six days. I certainly wasn't doing any sleeping. He was all hot and twitchy and having trouble sleeping and using me as a human pacifier, and we were a bit worried. Only a bit, though, because high fevers run in the family (note that he only received the silver - Trout still holds gold medal status with a blistering 105.6). I'm just exhausted at this point.

So! A little bloggy business! That vacation I mentioned? Because we are Parents of the Year, we are pulling our spawn out of school the second week of school for a boondoggle to the Outer Banks for a week of eating sand and running away from waves. My wonderful next door neighbors will be watching the house, feeding the fish, and watering the plants, but I could use a few blogsitters to keep the Pond lively in my absence. Please let me know if you are interested - I'll need posts by Friday so I can pre-load them. The house we rented doesn't have Internet access (I know!).

In the mean time, you'll have to bide your time for a day or so for me to recover before we get to such titillating topics (HA!) as the fact that Nemo is "still" breastfeeding, my adventure in bus riding following a wonderful lunch downtown, and how I feel about the new school year starting tomorrow.

Little Exhibitionist

This afternoon I was making dinner and Trout was playing some weird complex game in which she stripped Nemo down to his diaper and wrapped blankets around him, then pulled the blankets off while he shrieked and giggled. There was more to it than that, I think, but that's what got through to my brain which was busy trying to cook and not burn anything.

Anyway, about 10 minutes later I called Sunny over to the kitchen gate (we keep Nemo out of there - it's just easier for all of us) to come in and eat - we've found that shift eating sometimes works better when BigDaddyFish isn't home for all of us to eat together at the table. Nemo followed her with a shit-eating grin on his face and just giggling to beat the band, and I thought he wanted to eat, too. 'Til I looked at him good.

He was playing with a "toy" that had him giggling like crazy, and that toy was his unit, for lack of a better word. He had somehow managed to pull it out of the diaper without taking the diaper off, just kinda draping it over the top, and he was, of course, grabbing at it and laughing like crazy.

I took it to mean he needed a diaper change, which I put on backwards to try and thwart him a bit. I didn't think I'd need to tell him to keep it in his pants for quite a few years yet.

Skin to Skin

Nemo is at such a fun age right now - 18 months. When he nurses (yes, we're still going strong there) he yanks on my shirt to get it out of the way, and he likes to rub his soft pudgy hand all over my tummy. He will also sometimes take my hand and put it on his head, over his ear, or on his side near his tummy to hold and rub him. He loves to have that skin to skin contact, and while it does present a challenge being discreet while nursing in public, I am more than happy to give him all the comfort and caresses he craves while we are at home.

I love his skin, so soft and smooth and mostly unblemished so far. He's got a couple of scars from his rough and tumble lifestyle already, and he currently has a sizeable scrape on the top right part of his forehead, courtesy of yesterday's attempt to use a stack of cases of water bottles to climb on to reach his balloon from Trader Joe's (Boon!) and subsequent tumble onto the jagged part of our hardwood and crash of a three-quarters full 3 gallon water fire extingusher onto the back of his head. (yeah, that was fun.) I'm not allowed to rub that part right now. So now I just concentrate on rubbing his tummy, and when I sleep I rest my hand on the soft velvety smoothness of his belly as we spoon.

Our skin is such an amazing organ. It really is. It puts up with so much, and still continues to protect us and help us cool down and cleanse ourselves. And we abuse it. We go out without sunscreen. We let our skin burn. We cut it, we stretch it beyond reason with our excesses or with growing new lives. We let it dry out. We curse it when we see the lines and blemishes and other effects of our lifestyles on it. But it keeps on ticking.

Most of the time. I have very fair skin and a long history of burn/peel/burn summers, and my family has a history of skin cancer. Most of them haven't been a big deal; my grandfather in particular had numerous small cancers taken off of his face, but never had a problem. My aunt, who was a synchronized swimmer, had a melanoma on her leg that was successfully treated almost two decades ago, and she's still doing fine. As a result of this history, I go to have my skin checked for signs of trouble each year.

Nine months ago I went in to the dermatologist to have my annual checkup, and at that time one of my moles was removed from my arm and shipped off to biopsy. TUESDAY morning when I got up I had a message on my cell asking me to call the dermatologist's office because they had my biopsy results in and I have to come back in. When I called back I asked her why it took NINE MONTHS to get the results back and she guessed that someone was looking at the records and noticed there was no follow-up. She wouldn't say what exactly was going on, but she said I have to come back in to have it checked and probably frozen. So next Tuesday I will be going in to have the thing checked and possibly frozen off, and at that time I intend to interrogate the doctor and find out why it took 9 months to get my results, especially since something in the back of my brain says I called and was told it was fine, and to find out what the deal is. I'm pretty scared, actually.

So make sure you have your skin checked each year. Make sure it can do its job without hurting you. And whatever you do, follow up carefully, requiring copies of any test results.

Make sure those little ones get lots and lots of skin to skin contact for as long as they need it. The thing is, you need it, too, even if you don't realize it. I know it's a great comfort to me at the moment.

Insult, Have Some Injury, Please, and a Side of Salt for the Wound, Too

The past week and a half has kicked my ass. Done me in. Rode me hard and put me away wet. Really worked me ... alright enough with the cliches already. It was tough.

First it was the lyme disease. Then Monday, my uncle's wife called to tell me her father died. Her parents live in Delaware and because Trout's First Holy Communion was this weekend and that's not exactly something you can reschedule when you have 90 kids getting first communion (it's a big parish), I couldn't go to the memorial service. This may seem like a bit of a distant relation, but my aunt's parents and my grandparents had a relationship that from my experience is kind of rare - they were friends. They had never met outside of the relationship of my uncle and aunt, and wouldn't have if not for them, but they shared a faith and common values, and my aunt's parents were at most of our family gatherings for holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries. I feel really bad that I couldn't be there for her mother like she was for us so many times.

Tuesday the doctor called to say the lyme test was negative, which isn't as good news as you might think. She said that a lot of times the test will show negative if it's too early, so she wants to repeat bloodwork in 4-6 weeks, and keep him on the nasty antibiotic for the full 21 days. He doesn't have a fever anymore, but he's still sleeping more than usual, and nursing a ton. I had him weaned down to once a day, at bedtime, before he got sick, but I just can't deny him that comfort right now.

I mentioned before that I've been having issues with my left knee and my right ankle. The left knee has been grinding when I go up and down steps, particularly when I'm carrying something with some weight to it, like full baskets of laundry, or Trout when she's in trouble and being defiant. The right ankle has been swollen and painful, especially along the inside of the ankle and down underneath to the arch of my foot. After months of BigDaddyFish badgering me lovingly suggesting I get it looked at, I did the research to find and orthopedist and I saw him Wednesday. It is a huge sports medicine group with a young staff, which isn't clear when you just look up orthos in the insurance company database. The doctor was younger than me, which is a great way to make yourself feel ancient when you're not.

After X-rays and watching me walk and grabbing my feet and torturing me practicing Hulk Hogan moves examining them, the upshot is that he thinks I have some mild arthritis in my knee. He gave me a CORTISONE SHOT in the knee, and oh my holy hell did that hurt. If I hadn't ever had an epidural where the doctor missed and hit a nerve it would have been the most painful thing ever. He wants to follow up in 4-6 weeks and then do an MRI if it isn't cleared up and not grinding by then. He also suggested I trim down as much as I can, and well, duh, but even he acknowledged it's hard to do that when you can't exercise much because of the knee and the ankle.

Ah, yes, the ankle. The state of my knee was the good news. The short version with my ankle is that I have a tendon that is degenerating for some reason. Frankly I think that they're ALL degenerating to some degree; I've always had loose joints and could hyperextend pretty easily, and I think all the loosening up that you do during pregnancy has just done a number on them. At any rate, I've got a brace for the ankle that I have to wear pretty much all the time, I have to get prescription orthodics made and wear them in a pair of high-end running shoes like New Balance or Asics which I have yet to purchase, and I get to look forward to some sort of full reconstructive surgery sometime in the future. It isn't bad enough to go there yet, though, in part because it's a mite inconvenient at the moment to be down for the count for months, what with the 4 kids and a move and all.

As if all of that wasn't enough, we've been having issues with Little Man being...well, sad and angry and violent. I've been reluctant to blog about it, and I won't discuss most of it here, but we are quite concerned about him and working on getting him what he needs to feel better. In the course of his acting out recently, he threw himself backwards into our woodframe couch, giving himself an enormous goose egg on his head. Later in the week he started to thrash about as BDF picked him up to take him upstairs to time out, causing BDF to drop him onto the edge of the baby jail playyard where Nemo was. Nemo wasn't hurt but Little Man has a huge bruise on his leg, and somehow in his efforts to not drop Little Man, BDF ended up breaking a toe.

The week hasn't been all bad, but it's been wearying. Trout had her First Holy Communion this past weekend, and we had a lovely day with my best friends and three of their children (they have seven total), including my godson. I even had the presence of mind to ask one of them to take a picture of our family, so we have a rare family photo. BDF's been tweaking his work schedule here and there and we've been spending a lot more time together, both as a family and one-on-one, which has been helping Little Man with his issues. We fishsat for our neighbors this weekend, and it reminded us how much we loved having fish around, so we just might get some more before we move, instead of waiting which was the old plan. The weather has been glorious, and I've been able to work out despite the state of my knee and ankle (he said biking and swimming are great, but don't do much else, NO running - I asked him if he realized the impossibility of running when you have four little kids but he told me not to do it anyway) and I've actually enjoyed it, and I am dropping weight slowly. The brace makes it so it doesn't hurt. This past weekend we were able to dig through eight more rubbermaid bins in the basement and get rid of more stuff and stage more stuff to go into storage.

Man, am I tired.

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The Barenaked Ladies have made a cd for kids called Snacktime due to be released tomorrow, and I had the privilege of reviewing it. See what I thought about it over on Props and Pans.

Blymey

Last weekend, when I was changing Nemo for bed, I noticed a strange rashy area under his left arm. It had a raised bump in the middle, and then an irregular shaped halo about a half-inch away from the spot; it was a total of about an inch in diameter. Despite finding a tick on Little Man earlier in the week, I didn't think much of it, especially since there was no bug to go along with it, but when Nemo started to run a fever on Wednesday, I put one (certain exposure to a tick by another family member) and one (rash in armpit) and three (sleepiness, clinginess, and low-grade fever) together and got:

Lyme disease. Most likely.

We spent most of the morning on Thursday going to the pediatrician, the lab, and the pharmacy. We won't have the results of the blood test back til sometime this week, but the pediatrician said that in cases where there is a clear bullseye rash in a preverbal child, they just treat the child as though they have Lyme disease anyway. In a lot of cases there can still be a negative blood test that later tests positive, especially if it is a recent infection, like less than a month. The best prognosis for a full recovery with no lasting effects is quick treatment, so we're glad they do this, even though giving him a foul-tasting antibiotic (because he's allergic to penicillin thanks to my genes) two times a day for 21 days is not high on my list of fun things to do.

I think he's feeling better now, because he's not sleeping so much. Last week he took a 3.5 hour nap on Wednesday when my in-laws were babysitting, and both Wednesday and Thursday he wanted to go upstairs early in the evening and get in bed. We put him on our bed and he put himself to sleep. Pathetically cute, but he was sick. Now he's back to his old I-wont-go-to-bed-without-nummies-for-an-hour self.

Just wanted you to know why I was so quiet.