Jadens Journey

These were taken in the couple of days it took to put the playscape in. First the sprinkler system guys came and marked off the sprinkler lines so the landscapers wouldn’t rip them apart when they leveled the section of the yard intended for the play area (pink flags). Then the landscapers came and leveled the yard, and ripped out the sprinkler lines anyway – so we had to have the sprinkler guys back again to fix the mess. Finally the playscape came. There were three guys there to put it together (it took 4 hours) then another two guys came with the rubber mulch (which took another 4 hours). It’s a very good thing installation was included. If I had left it to Neville it would have taken 8 years, not 8 hours!

Jaden was very impressed, once he figured out what it was. We had him outside all morning on Saturday playing. Saturday afternoon and Sunday we paid the piper with his allergies – but it was definitely worth it!

Everything else, Pictures allergies, Pictures, playscape

Everything else, Pictures Cape Cod, mini-vacation, Pictures, weekend

Everything else, Pictures Mystic, Pictures

It’s just been crazy lately. Work is driving me mad. Like cows. They keep *ing me over. Fill in * with your favorite explicative. I tellya….
On a happier note, it feels like spring!! How long will it last, do you think?

Pictures from Michael’s christening are now posted (finally!)

p.s.: Hi Auntie Carol!!!!!!

Everything else nothingness

Everything else, Pictures Pictures

I guess I’m in a writing mood tonight. I realize I haven’t given much of an update on Jaden except for sick, sick, sick lately. So here goes – I apologize in advance if I’m repeating myself since I haven’t re-read any of my older posts tonight.

Signing: Jaden knows more signs than we do now. His teacher at school is fluent in sign language, and is teaching all of the kids in his class some basic signs, and that’s helped him immensely. He now gets frustrated with us because he’ll use a sign he thinks we should know but we can’t figure it out. There’s no “reverse sign language lookup” dictionary out there, that I know of, so it’s like a needle in a haystack. It took us ages to figure out that he was signing train (his sign is a variation of the ASL sign), another long while to figure out he was signing bus (which is also his sign for Thomas the Tank Engine), and now he has this new one that I just haven’t been able to decipher yet. I am amazed at how many signs he knows. If I ever tried to write them all down, I know there would be over 100 (we counted that far already) but I’m guessing the latest number is more like 200. I have to say signing has been a godsend for us since his speech is taking longer than we had expected, and during the terrible twos the last thing you want is to add communication problems to the mix.

Speaking: Jaden has quite a few “word approximations”– but there’s one word that he says loud and clear: “NO!” — yep, he learned that one perfectly. His pronunciation of “no” is always emphatic. It was cute when it started – I’ll leave it at that.

His real speech breakthrough started coming, believe it or not, after we put early intervention on hold. We put them on hold for a number of reasons, but the intent was not to shock Jaden into talking, yet that seems to be what has happened. I know while they were coming he was very stubborn about doing what they wanted him to do, and even now if you try to get him to say something he’ll only attempt it if he’s really in the mood to do it. Otherwise, forget it. No way Jose.

So he’s saying Buzz (Buzz Lightyear), and Woody (also Toy Story), and “nana” (banana). Of course he’s been saying “mama”, “dada”, and now for Grandpa he says “papa” and for Neville’s dad he says “pop-pop”. Sometimes those two sound very close, but usually we can tell the difference. He says “bus”, and “rain” which means train. He says “all done” which is very approximate, but I know when he’s saying it. Let’s see – there’s also “apple”, “eat”, “water”, “Gordon” (which sounds like water), “more” (which also sounds like water), and a few potty training type words I’ll save you from reading. He’s getting colors down: purple (that one is very clear), red, orange, green, blue, and yellow. He even signs the colors, which just baffles me since I don’t know them at all. We need Antina here more often for that. I’m sure there’s more I’m not thinking of but the point is that there’s been a tremendous breakthrough in the past few weeks to a month. The biggest difference I see is that he’s now willing to TRY to say words, whereas before he wouldn’t even make an attempt.

We’re looking into other options for speech therapy. In the meantime we’re very impressed with how much he’s progressed.

Everything else ASL, Buzz Lightyear, sign language, speech, Thomas the Tank Engine, Toy Story

Alas Jaden is sick again for the third time since January 10th. In the beginning of January it was some type of virus with high fever and all the cold symptoms to go along with it. Of course I caught it a few days after he did. At the end of January he had a stomach bug that he kindly shared with both me and Neville. Now he has a virus that seems very similar to the early January one. I think he’s made it to school (daycare) less than two days a week on average (out of the three he’s scheduled to attend) since the year started.

On Monday he is supposed to start his five days per week schedule at school, but who knows whether or not he’ll be well enough to attend yet. I certainly hope so. It has been very difficult to get any work done while he’s home, and since he’s been home so much, well – need I say more?

Of course I have my usual guilt over sending him. But then I tell myself we do send him to a “school” and not just a run-of-the-mill daycare, and he is getting a lot out of it. They teach him a lot – they’ve even started to try to potty train him (good luck with that! hahaha). I know it’s good that he has contact on a regular basis with other kids his age – since right now at home it’s just us, or my parents, or Neville’s parents, and Jaden just doesn’t have the patience yet to talk about the weather, or American Idol, or the latest sports results. A friend of mine once said to me that she thinks sending her daughter to daycare makes her a better mother. So that means now that Jaden will be going to school for 5 days instead of 3, I should be 66.67% better as a mom, right? It’s nice to think that way.

Everything else daycare, school, sick

Neville and I have spent the last week (literally) empathizing with my brother  and sister-in-law (with the new baby) in the land of the sleepless. Where to begin?… we awoke abruptly Sunday evening (technically early Monday morning) to Jaden vomiting up his milk he drank before bed. He was running a 102 fever and it started with him coughing – then he gagged and that was the end of his milk.

On Monday Jaden was irritable, to say the least. His fever had increased, at one point topping out at 105. He was so miserable, I could tell he was in a lot of discomfort and it drives me crazy to see him like that and not be able to do anything about it. We called the doctor’s office when they opened; the nurse who took the call thought he might have a sinus infection and said to bring him in. So I bundled up my sick child, and dragged him to the doctor’s office, only to have them tell me that we need to wait 24 to 48 hours before they can do anything for him. So why did we go in? I just don’t get it. They did however say that if his fever doesn’t break by Tuesday they want him to go for a chest x-ray to rule out pneumonia. Great. So Tuesday morning when his fever was still over 104 I bundled him up once again and dragged him out into the cold to the hospital out-patient center for a chest x-ray.

Let the fun begin! I know I’ve said this before, but Jaden is what some parenting books call a ’spirited’ child, meaning he doesn’t do anything without putting up a tremendous fight (unless it’s something he enjoys, like eating cake and ice cream). The two of us (Jaden and I) went into the hospital on Tuesday, and all I could think is “How on earth are they going to get him to sit still for an x-ray without doping him up on general anesthesia”? I should have taken that thought as a forewarning.

After waiting almost an hour we finally were called to go into the x-ray room. Three women there asked me if Jaden will stand up in front of the bulls eye they have on the wall so they can take his x-ray. Ha Ha Ha. He’s TWO — what do you think he’s going to do? First of all, I couldn’t even pry him off of me – he had his legs in a vice grip around my waist and his hands clawed at my shoulders as if his life depended on it. So they said, “okay, then you’ll have to get in the x-ray with him” – whatever.

Maybe we should have gone to Children’s hospital where they have all kinds of tricks to get kids to participate in things they normally don’t want to do. But here we were, at the out-patient center with not a lot of options, so I said okay, donned the lovely lead apron that is so fashionable in these hangouts, and tried my best to hold Jaden in a stable enough position that they could get the x-ray. By this point Jaden had already decided that he did not like these women, he did not like that I had to pry him loose in order to put the lead apron on, and he was not going to, under any conditions, allow me to hold him still so they could get the x-ray. Somehow they managed it anyway, but by the time they did, we were both traumatized.

…….

Well, I’ve now lost my train of thought since I put this down about an hour ago. As I was writing that last sentence, over the baby monitor I heard the usual coughing, then gagging, then puking fit. Neville was holding Jaden by the time he tossed up his ice cream and milk, so it was all over Neville, all over Jaden, and all over the carpet. This time it was much earlier than every night past, so maybe this means he’s getting better?

What fun parenting can be. I never imagined I’d be watching Neville clean Nestle’s Quik colored spew off of our beige carpets, but here we were, me holding Jaden trying to keep him from getting even more upset than he already was, and Neville trying to clean up the mess and hide the smell so we can get Jaden back to bed asap.

That just about sums up what we’ve been through every night. Here’s hoping one more day will do the trick.

Everything else fever, illness, sick, sleepless, x-ray

My favorite numbers have always been three, six, thirty-three, and sixty-six. If I had to pick one favorite, I would whine a whole lot about being forced to pick only one, and then I’d choose thirty-three. I never thought of eight as a lucky number, just as I have never thought of clubs as a favorite suit when playing cards.  That has all changed.

My brother and his wife had a beautiful baby boy on Christmas Eve. It has always been difficult living two hours away since I’d like to see them more (especially now!) but I was fortunate to see them twice the week my nephew was born. Once the day after Christmas, and once a few days later. On the second visit Antina and I went together, and my brother announced that they were trying to decide on godparents for my nephew. They said the godfather was easy– my sister-in-law’s brother– but for the godmother, they said they love both me and Antina equally so they couldn’t make a decision. So my brother came up with this idea that we’d each draw cards and the high card wins.

Of course we were all giggling about the idea and just to make sure we all understood, we started to wonder aloud: Are aces high or low? Are twos wild? What order are the suits in the case of a draw on the face value? That one was Mom’s question–  and once my brother rattled off the suits, she expertly wrote it all down in her executive assistant-style notebook, just to make sure there were no arguments after the draw. You can never be too cautious when dealing with sisters.

After we got serious again, I drew a card. The eight of clubs. With a deep sigh I resolved to being the “loser”. I thought there was no way I was holding the high card. I showed my card to the room and you could almost hear the heaviness in the room as if everyone was thinking “oh, too bad for her”.   So we were all surprised when antina drew the six of clubs. (Sorry Antina ) And now, not only do I have a new appreciation for the number eight, I’m a godmother too.

Everything else baby, cards, Christmas, godmother

I dropped Jaden off at daycare this morning, then headed to work. I put in a few hours (even though I didn’t need to be there today) and then I had to run a couple of errands, the first of which was to pick up a new winter coat from a woman who offered it on freecycle. The coat is for my sister-in-law’s mom who is coming to visit our very, very cold part of the globe from a very, very warm country. But that’s besides the point.

The trip to get the coat was about 45 minutes from work, but on the way I had to pass the exit for Jaden’s daycare. I couldn’t pick him up yet because I couldn’t drag him to my second appointment that afternoon, and Neville wouldn’t be home from work for another few hours.

If you have ever felt homesick, you will have a good idea of how I felt as I drove past the exit for daycare. It was the oddest feeling in the world to me at that particular moment. I couldn’t understand how I was that sick about leaving Jaden in daycare for what would amount to another 90 minutes, maybe. He likes daycare now. He’s happy when I drop him off, and he’s happy when I pick him up. Of course he wants me to stay with him, but he has a great time all day anyway. I can see the excitement and pleasure in his face when I sneak a peek into the room he is in before I actually open the door and give away that I am there to pick him up. So I shouldn’t be getting sick over leaving him for another hour or so, right?

It just struck me as amazing, and it saddened me in the same way being homesick would sadden me. In a good way. Because the way I see it, I can’t be homesick unless I am missing someone I love, and using roundabout logic that means homesickness is a good thing– even though it feels like crap when you’re in the thick of it.

Everything else daycare, freecycle, homesick