What’s happenin’

Three posts in four days was evidently too much to keep up with. By now I’ve probably gone two weeks in a row without so much as a word about what we’ve been doing. 

It’s been busy, busy, busy. I’m sure I mentioned in an earlier post that I finally decided that my best option for next semester is to take a leave of absence and stay home with Jaden. Each day that passes by in which I get nothing done at home (because I’m just trying to keep up with the massive volume of university-related emails, student emails, and student IM’s), I realize that taking leave is the best decision I’ve made since coming home from Korea. Those of you who are still waiting for a thank you note are unfortunately getting the brunt of my busy life I promise the TY’s (as they have now become on my TODO list since they’ve been there for so long they have their own abbreviation) will be out soon. I’m saving the best for last.  

Jaden is doing terrific, except for – you guessed it – sleeping. I had to bring him to the doctor’s office last week for a rash that he was getting all over. Turns out he has dermatitis, and we think that is part of what was keeping him awake. That’s the theory anyway. He was scratching everything in the middle of the night, and every day the rash would get a little worse, which then created more scratching, and the cycle continues. They gave us an antihistamine, and said it would not only eliminate the itching but it would make him drowsy so he could sleep without scratching. It sounded too good to be true. 

As it turns out, the antihistamine worked like a charm to eliminate the scratching, and to help him sleep. The problem it created, however, is night-terrors every hour or so- -including during naps, which is a new one for us. Anyone who has been through night-terrors would probably agree with me that they’d rather be awakened by a cranky, over-tired, itchy, scratching baby than have the emotional suffering and feeling of helplessness while they listen to the sound of their child’s relentless crying, without any means to calm him/her. It really is heart-wrenching to see and hear. I did figure out that picking Jaden up when he has night terrors can be worse than leaving him in the crib. The last night that he had them, I just let him stay in the crib and patted his arm and back, while talking to him in a soothing voice, and believe it or not it really helped him calm down. He didn’t wake up during that night-terror session. The thing about Jaden’s night terrors is that they start when he’s asleep, and sometimes he’ll open his eyes once they start (especially when he’s picked up), but I really think he’s in a partially-awake, mostly-asleep state and doesn’t know where he is, who has him, etc, and of course that would be terrifying to anyone. I’m not sure if it is a by-product of being removed from his foster family’s home in Korea, or if it is just something that happens to all babies around this time. I do know that the antihistamine they gave us for him made them much, much worse, and very, very frequent. We stopped giving him the meds yesterday and he’s now back to itchy and scratchy, but no night-terrors. He is giving us a really hard time about going to sleep now, which I guess is because he’s afraid he’ll end up with more nightmares. I don’t blame him. Nightmares suck.

Mr. Smarty-pants (what we lovingly call Jaden now when he does something relatively unbelievable) has figured out how to open up his seat-belt on the high chair. Last week I turned around to dampen a washcloth to wipe his face with after he finished eating, and by the time I looked back he had unfastened the belt and was doing his ‘superman’ impression which is his sign for “pick me up and get me the heck out of here.”

Yesterday (or was it Saturday? I have it written in my “baby’s first” notes) Mr. S-P put a couple of pieces of bread in his mouth all by himself. YAY! Mommy can’t wait until the motor skills are developed enough so that he can feed himself more often. It can get tiring popping Cheerios into his mouth all afternoon. 

He’s testing gravity, along with his ability to balance now. He’ll hold onto the chair, or the ottoman, or some other thing that he’s managed to pull himself to a standing position with, and he’ll do sort of a ‘look at me – no hands!!” thing. He leans his chest up against the object, and pushes himself away from it momentarily so that he’s standing freely. He lasts a few seconds before he has to sit down or grab the object again. Looks like Grandpa was right and he’ll probably start walking by Christmas.

We still have our family room looking like a disaster area with the miscellaneous, random objects in front of the TV to try to keep Jaden at least a few feet away. Every day he figures out how to get around one of the objects, and thus challenges me to find something else to barricade him with. We got a new TV and we are not going to even turn it on to check the picture out until it is safely bolted to the wall – we’re afraid that once Mr. S-P realizes it is a TV, we’ll have a new, 135 pound, “keep Jaden away from the TV” challenge on our hands.

We had a scary moment tonight after Jaden had scoffed down two and a half jars of baby food – he gagged on something as I put the spoon in his mouth from jar #3, and that was the end of dinner. We had so much green projectile vomit that he turned red in the face, and then blue, from suffocating while wrenching his guts out. Of course what I fed him was primarily green, so I half expected to see his head start spinning around. All kidding aside, it was a scary moment, and I didn’t stop shaking for about an hour afterwards. 

Speaking of shaking!!! We had another interesting even this weekend… our dumb ass neighbor (good thing we’re Luna and Neville, eh?) decided to dump cinders from his wood stove into the small section of woods between our houses. Like, um, yes… these are the woods with all the dead, dried out because it hasn’t rained in a week, leaves on the ground. The woods with trees so high that if they fall, say because they’re engulfed in flames, they could potentially land on our roof and poof there goes everything. Thankfully the wind was blowing parallel to our house, and not directly into it. The neighbor went out and tried to smother the flames by -guess what?– putting more dried leaves on them! Okay, dumb-ass, so now the fire is getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger by the minute. I guess he was never an Eagle Scout.

I called 911 right away, before the fire had even started to spread more than a few feet, and I’m glad I did because it took the volunteer fire department a LONG time to get there. We even called 911 back two more times before we finally heard the sirens. In the meantime Neville and Dad ran out to try to get the hose to work, but it was frozen. So Neville ran down with a rake and tried to make a barrier to prevent the fire from coming any closer to our house (every man for himself!), which thankfully worked because the wind was blowing the other way. The fire took out quite a bit of the brush, and had started to go up the trees, and dangerously close to another neighbor’s house, when finally the fire department showed up and used about a gazillion gallons of water to put the darn thing out. While I watched this fiasco from my deck, close to tears, with Jaden in my arms, I had a fleeting thought that if the fire came any closer to the house, I should probably grab whatever we really, really have to save, and get the heck out. But my brain, under pressure, tends to get hazy, and I couldn’t think of a darn thing except for ourselves and Jaden’s papers. All I could think of was, “OMG, where did I put Jaden’s passport and visa?!!!” 

So after the excitement was over, the fire was out, and the fire trucks had rolled back to the fire house, I found Jaden’s passport and visa and put it in the fireproof safe with our passports and all of his immigration papers…….. and Luna, Neville, and Jaden lived happily ever after, next to the dumb-ass neighbor. 

The end.