I was sitting on the floor reading Jace a book the other day when a sneeze or two overtook me. Once I was finished, Jace said “Bless you”, as clear as can be. Who taught him that? I don’t think it was me (or Steve)
Wake up and sing a little song to the menagerie of animals in the crib
Go back to sleep for 15 minutes or so.
Wake up for real and start yelling “mommy mommy mommy”
Once mommy walks in the room ask for “addy addy addy”
Play in crib for 5 minutes while parents watch. Stand up. When parents reach to lift you out, lay back down, giggle and wrestle with menagerie.
Finally decide to get up and perhaps consent to a diaper change
Run to fridge and once parent has opened the door to get the milk out, open the crisper drawer and take a handful of grapes.
Eat grapes and drink milk sitting in monster chair in kitchen.
Run off to living room to play, dragging parent with you
Protest loudly when they decide it is time to get dressed or have a clean diaper.
When it is time to put hat, shoes, and jacket on to leave, run away every time parent turns around to grab next item. Laugh hysterically at your own antics.
Last Monday saw our first trip to the emergency room with Jace. He had a cold all weekend and on Sunday started to run a fever. No big deal we thought, dosing him up with tylenol. Monday he still had a fever so I stayed home from work with him. After his morning tylenol dose he seemed fairly bouncy so we ran to the grocery store to pick up a few things. Okay, I confess, it was a desperate ploy to distract a very whiny kid. He had been in a constant state of whine since Sunday morning and I was beginning to go a little crazy. He fell asleep on the way home from the store but as I had to wake him up to take off his jacket and shoes, I gave him another dose of tylenol before putting him down for a real nap. When he woke up 2 hrs later he had high fever despite the tylenol. At a loss of what to do I called the pediatrician. Try Children’s Motrin they suggested, and call us back in an hour and let us know if his temperature has gone down.
After a frantic rush to CVS, I took his temperature again (let me tell you, Jace was not pleased at this) and gave him the Motrin. 1 hour of floppy (he was past whiny at this point and just floppy and sad looking) kid later and his temperature was down a whopping .6 degrees (it was 103.3 for those who want to know how high a kid’s fever gets). Called the doctor’s office and they told us to head to Winchester Hospital Emergency Room. Winchester is a neighborhood hospital who happens to have the forethought (or budget?) to have a Children’s Hospital Pediatrician continually at the hospital. All the pediatricians in the area know this and no matter what hospital they are affiliated with, they send you to Winchester because that is where they go with their kids.
Winchester was fabulous and the nurses had us out of the waiting room and seeing the doctor within half an hour of arriving. After listening to his lungs (Jace had his usual nasty cough to go with his cold) they decided he needed a chest xray to check for pneumonia, nasal swap to check for flu, and blood draw to check for whatever they check for in your blood. Getting a chest xray (or rather two) of a small child who doesn’t sit still is a challenge but they were wonderfully patient and clearly had done this before. Diagnosis…”a touch of pneumonia”. Jace then got to have IV antibiotics to attempt to jump start his battle against the germs and they wanted to monitor him for a couple of hours to see if his temperature came down with the additional dose of tylenol and the antibiotics. Getting the IV in was easier than I thought, mostly due to the “child life specialist” who basically is a nice lady who brings toys and talks with sick kids to try to make things easier for them and their parents. She had a ton of distraction toys (things that light up, spin or make noise) to use with Jace while the nurses started the IV. He general was a trooper about the whole thing and we saved turning the TV on until we needed him to sit still for the IV antibotics to be administered. Cartoon Network did its job.
After a couple of hours, he definitely seemed to be feeling a lot better and the doctor decided we could go home provided we promised to take him to his primary care doctor in the morning or come back to the ER if he started to have problems breathing. For a trip to the ER, it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be although hopefully we won’t be back anytime soon.
And yes, Jace is now back to his running, jumping, giggling self.
This morning found me sneaking out of the house at 6:50am leaving behind two sleeping boys. It was both comforting knowing they were snug in their beds, snoozing away and frustrating because I wished I were with them.
I promise to get all caught up on our adventures from the last month soon…
Merry Christmas to you all. Hope you all get to enjoy time with friends and family and that Santa is good to you.
We are headed up north to my parents in New Hampshire where internet is slow (dial up), cell phones faint (1 bar) but snow is plentiful. Hopefully Jace will get over his wariness of the snow because otherwise it will be a long week.
A couple years ago, our friend Derek told us about the “veggie vision” technology they were evaluating for the Stop&Shop grocery stores. This fancy high-tech image processing system would determine which fruits or vegetables were being passed across the scanner so that it would be unnecessary to type in the produce-specific code. It’s probably difficult to get a computer to do this reliably (and I never did see it show up at an actual store), but Jace seems pretty good at it — at least for the basic classification of fruits vs. vegetables. Even when faced with a completely new food item, he just needs a quick glance — no touching, tasting, or sniffing required — to tell whether it is a fruit that should be stuffed in his mouth, or a vegetable that should be kept away at all costs. He provided a great demonstration of this a couple days ago while visiting Nick, Julia and William, where he rejected all vegetables but eagerly reached for figs to gobble down, despite never having encountered them before.
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He doesn’t always refuse all vegetables, though. Jace has a color-coded system for showing how hungry he is. Tonight for one of the many dinner courses, I heated up a frozen mix of carrots, corn, peas and green beans. On a typical night, these might all go untouched. If he’s hungry, all the orange items disappear, but all the yellow and green items remain. A bit hungrier and only green items will be left. Note that these are very discrete steps. If a particular color qualifies for eating, every bit of it will disappear. So far I haven’t seen the green things get touched…
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Jace is becoming more adept at stacking and balancing. Today I put half a dozen chunks of banana on his tray. He used his left hand to place them all into his right hand. This was not an easy task, since his fist is only big enough to hold two of these banana chunks, and banana is slimy and slippery. But after a minute or two of squishing and stacking, he held a delicately balanced tower of banana chunks in his right hand.
And then he shoved the whole thing into his mouth.
