Author: admin

Max Bumped His Head

Last night I got home from Max’s first trip to the ER at one AM. Yawn… I’m tired. While I was at a play with James (that he was supposed to attend weeks ago to write a report that was due YESTERDAY) Max fell off his step stool. Okay,, nobody kick me, please. My butt is already bruised from kicking myself. He is a climber and we just let him climb the step stool because he was so steady.

He fell right through it and onto his forhead. (On the tile, no less!) I will post a picture of the poor baby when he gets up. He has a lovely knot on his forehead, but the thing that alarmed us was that around his eye and one side of his face also swelled up! He never had symptoms of a head injury, but it looked really traumatic.

So I called the doctor – they said take him to urgent care.
Took him to urgent care – they took one look and said off to the children’s hospital.
Went to the children’s hosp – they assessed him and sent us home with instructions, encouraging words, and a warning that the swelling would be much worse by morning but that if he could move his eye and was acting okay then he was fine.

So anyway, I am thinking that it is time to ditch the step stool and get something like the learning tower.

Did I mention that Jay is out of town from early this morning until late Sunday night and the other kids are sick?

I am thinking that the most strenuous thing I will do today is make brownies. School is canceled and it is now officially “Be a Blob on the Couch Day” here.

I don’t ALWAYS complain

It just seems like I can hardly get a break around here!

Anyway, things are looking up. Kathi brought over her carpet cleaner today, and I cleaned the carpets already. It still stinks to high heaven in here but it is noteably better.

Today is my Jay’s birthday so we get to go out to dinner SANS KIDS!!!

Generally, can I just say that my kids are so awesome? I had to take them to a dermatologist appt with me last week. Only four of them came with me but the derm is in Sun City (a whole city of over 55 year old people) so I knew that it had the potential for disaster. But they were as good as GOLD. They walked into the waiting room, sat in their chairs, and when we went into the teeny little exam room, they lined up on the floor out of the way and didn’t make a peep. (And then they got candy bars on the way home!)

I know that I can always count on them to really behave themselves when I need them to.

Like at a wedding this past weekend. Jay’s cousin was getting married and his family was coming from far and wide for the festivities. Turns out that at the reception they sat my family and Jay’s brother’s family (both with 6 kids) WAAAAAYYY over in the back away from the whole rest of the family. I was a wee bit offended to say the least. But I didn’t have to tell my kids to behave at all! It was the other family members who have two or so kids who’s kids were running amuck and spoiling things. (Not that all families with fewer kids are like that – it’s just ironic that they thought mine would do that and the ones who were seated in the thick of things were the ones getting into the bride’s pictures, tearing down decorations and getting up on the stage and pulling cords.)

And this morning, I saw Paisley walking down the stairs to go to school and was overcome with how blessed I am. She has such style and poise. And not only was she THERE, but she was walking down the stairs in our OWN HOUSE, which we missed so badly for so long. It was one of those moments when everything was accounted for, KWIM?

Up, up and Away!

Max has moved to the next step beyond mobile – he is upwardly mobile. Each day I find him on something a little higher an more interesting. So far he has gotten up to (but not ON yet) the kitchen counter and into his sister’s high chair. His next project is trying to get over the banister so he can bypass the gate at the bottom of the stairs. He has seen the other kids doing it, so he knows HOW, his legs just aren’t long enough to do it yet. This doesn’t stop him from trying.

Here he is on the kitchen step stool. (The very one he used to ALMOST get a steak knife.) Yikes!

And here he is trying to climb up and OVER the rocking chair. Apparently ON it wasn’t high enough.

(And just so you know these shots were fully spotted and supervised. Risk was as minimal as it gets when you are ten months old and can climb.)

Happy Birthday to ME!

I am now officially out of my “Early Thirties” and in my “Mid-Thirties”. When did that happen? Sometimes I think I am *only* thirty-x and still a young whippersnapper. Then other times I think, ugh… I am *already* thirty-x, practically an old lady.

Okay, so not an old lady yet, but not what I once was. Every now and then I have a day where I have “The old gray mare” running through my head all day.

Anyway, for my birthday, I got to jet out to San Diego with Jay and Max. We stayed the nght in a hotel and then in the morning Jay went to take a certification test for some work equippment and Max and I went shopping with Heidi. she helped me give my wardrobe a little waking up (so I don’t dress like I am thirty-x!) and we had a lvely breakfast together too!

After shopping we hung out at her house for a while, then Jay and Max and I went out to dinner with Jay’s parents (who were also there for the ceritfication) and flew home. it was a lovely, short getaway. very refreshing!

Is it Friday Yet?

Oh wait. It’s only Wednesday, and it’s only 7:30am… we have a long way to go.

Monday this week was a fairly normal day. School went well. We tried a new pattern, instead of starting with math as we always have, we saved it to do until after lunch and were able to easily finish up everything else, including a nice game of Set to stretch our brains a little. The only major incident was finding out that Zinger had terrified one of Ben’s friends while he was here recently and I hadn’t known about it. I felt truly terrible that this had happened right under my nose and I hadn’t been able to prevent it. Apologies were given and accepted.

Max, who had been doing so much better with an increase in solids has suddenly decided that he wants nothing to do with any solids that he can’t feed to himself.

Tuesday was an interesting day. School went well again, but as we came down for lunch Jay called and said he was working nearby and could we bring him some lunch. I said sure, we needed to go to the library anyway, and he was right on the way. We ate our lunch, took his to him and went to the library. At the library, I replaced the movie we had lost, picked up my reserved books, and helped the kids to find their books. Since we are doing world history this year, I wanted to do some historical reading. I started looking up the call numbers on a few of the books on my book list.

First stop: Plato. I go (well saying “I go” makes it sound like such a simple process of walking across the library. It’s not. There are weirdos in libraries, so “I go” entails rounding up the kids, telling them to be quiet as we go into the grown up section, and trailing our book cart and the three who can walk behind me, while trying to convince Max that he really does want to stay in the sling, not get down and rip all the books off the shelves.) Anyway, I go to the number the card catalog gives me, but all I find there are books on writing like “How to Write Romance Novels for Dummies”. Ok, that doesn’t particularly strike me as having ANYTHING to do with Plato, and are the romance novels for dummies to read or to write? I start to puzzle over it but Ben has just backed into a paperback rack and knocked a bunch of books off, and someone is trying to get around us. Time to move on. I probably wasn’t ready for Plato anyway, and I know he wasn’t ready for us.

On to Aristotle. I find myself in a nutritional section. I am truly confused now. Did someone not know how to set up the Dewey Decimal system here? I double check my list of number copied from the computer. Nope, those are right. Oh well, I probably wasn’t ready for Aristotle either. The natives are getting restless but I am determined to go home with a Book, a real book that will challenge my mind and help me to be a Smart Person. So we go back to the computer – the whole line of us. I check my book list and select Plutarch. Let’s see if they have that. I write down the number, double check it, triple check it, and we all trail away to find Plutarch. Score!!! I select Volume One and we are on our way again. And in my wandering I also made another score, I found the Complete Peanuts! (Cartoons) I have to balance Plutarch with something light, or my brain cells might go on strike.

The rest of the day is relatively normal. Oh, except for the part where I was folding Laundry and Max came crawling towards me. His hands looked dirty, and when I picked him up I thought, “Oh boy, you got into the markers again!” There was red all over his foot. But on closer inspection, it was all over him and didn’t look like marker anymore. He was covered head to toe in BLOOD. It was all over his legs, feet, arms, hands and face. A sick feeling crept, no raced, over me as I started my inspection of him to find out WHERE IS HE BLEEDING? The hallway is too dark, so I took him to the table where I went over him carefully and found a 1/2 inch cut on one finger. So I put pressure on that with a napkin and start looking for what else is bleeding. NOTHING! We got him cleaned up and bandaged. We had to put a sock over his arm because he wanted to eat the band-aid and I was worried he would choke on it. We cleaned up the trail of blood and went looking for what he had possibly cut himself on. It turns out that the bowl he had pulled from the cupboard a few days before had sent a shard up into the cupboard that we hadn’t seen. We had been very careful to get the floor clean… VERY careful. So we cleaned out the cupboard and the floor again, just in case there was any left.

So now we have made it to Wednesday. My alarm went off this morning and I staggered to the bathroom. Ugh, no toilet paper, have to go downstairs for that. As I reach the top of the stairs I realize that toilet paper is going to be the least of my worries.

The smell that reached my nose as I stood there was… I don’t think I can describe it.

So I go downstairs, open the back door, then open the door to the downstairs bathroom and chase Zinger out the door. Sure enough, when I turn on the bathroom light. Oh, shit. No really the whole bathroom is plastered in puppy diarrhea. No one should have to smell or look at that sight at 5:50am, no one.

But now it is clean, and I have showered, and it’s time to move on with the day. And we are only almost halfway through the week. Oh goody!