Chloe's test

Chloe had her procedure this morning and came through it fine. The sphincter at the top of stomach does not close, so her stomach acid goes up into her esophagus (just like her Mommy). The Prevacid that she takes will alleviate her symptoms and she will need it for life (also like her Mommy). She also has a hiatus hernia which means that part of her stomach is above her diaphragm. It doesn’t pose any problems now, but if it gets worse could require surgery. The doctor took biopsies of her stomach and esophagus and we’ll get the results of those in 10 days (I’m not sure if that means ten business days which is 2 weeks). The lining of her stomach is red and irritated and the biopsies will tell the doctor more about the irritation including if it is caused by food allergies. If she has food allergies more testing is required to determine to what foods she is allergic.

week ending feb 25, 2007

Week ending February 25, 2007: This week we decided that Chloe should get the endoscopy. Her appointment is tomorrow at 7am. She’ll be put in “twilight consciousness” for the procedure and she is most worried about getting the IV. We barrowed “Franklin Goes to the Hospital” from the library and have been reading it everyday so that the EKG, people in masks, funny gown that ties in the back, etc will be at least a little familiar. The kids always use pretend play to work through their anxieties. After Alex threw up the last time, the kids spent a couple days pretending to throw up during their imaginary play, and now the kids pretend to have operations during imaginary play. We’ve told Chloe that she’s having a “test” not an operation, but I don’t think in her mind that the two are particularly different. We really enjoyed the snow today. It was supposed to be sleet and freezing rain (of which we’ve had about as much as we can stand), so snow was a nice surprise. The kids built a snow man and rode their sleds on a small hill in the neighbor’s yard. Lately we’ve been noticing the kids trying to figure out bigger words that are harder for us to explain in terms they can understand. This morning Alex asked Casey what “successful” means. The other day Chloe said that a doll’s hair was “ridiculous”. I asked her if she knew what ridiculous meant and she said “no”. I said that ridiculous meant “very silly”. The doll’s hair was very messy and sticking out every which way, so Chloe reiterated that the doll’s hair was, in fact, “ridiculous” and I had to admit that the hair looked very silly. This week trying to come up with answers to each of their “why?” questions has gotten me in trouble. When they ask if one of them can stay home alone while the other one goes to the mall with me, I say “I can’t do that” and they say “why?” and I say “if I did that, I’d go to jail”. Or if we are stuck in traffic and they ask me to “go anyway” I say I can’t and they ask why, and I say, “if I went anyway I’d run over the car in front of me, and then I’d have to go to jail”. Now they’ve asked me a couple times this week “please tell me all about jail?”. I didn’t realize that jail was something that would weight on them so heavily.

xtreme bounce zone

today we went to xtreme bounce zone http://www.xtremebouncezone.net/daily_packages.php

For a half hour of bouncing. It was a WILD place. There are 5 moon bounce type areas with places to climb and slide inside the bounce zones and I think there must have been 60 kids under the age of 5 there. The twins seemed fearless and at their age are able to do all the climbing pretty competantly. There was a story hour first and when the "teacher" asked the kids to come and sit near her, Chloe ran to the front and got the closest peice of floor. Alex didn't cling to my leg at all but ran up to sit with Chloe. I found it hard to keep track of both of the kids at the same time and I saw other parents were having the same trouble. One little girl was crying "where's my Mommy?!" and no one, including the staff, bothered to help her. By the time I waded through the sea of humanity to get to her, her mother found her. Later I helped another little boy. I had walked the twins over to the ladder of the castle slide and then walked back to the other side to catch them at the bottom of the slide. AFter several minutes I could see the same head of brown hair almost at the top of the castle (he wasn't high enough for me to see his face over the slide) and no other kids getting by him. So I walked back around to the ladder slide, asked all the kids on the ladder behind him to climb down so I could climb up and help this poor sobbing kid figure out how to climb off the top of the ladder so he could get down the slide. I never did find out where his parent was. Overall it was a neat idea, and would probably be great when they rent it for smaller groups like birthday parties. Since it was only $3/kid I may be able to gird myself up to be able to face it again in a couple weeks.

studio portraits

week ending feb 18, 2007

Week ending February 18, 2007: On Friday evening when the Baltimore Gas and Electric web site posted that of the original 100,000+ people who had lost power in Wednesday’s ice storm, only 1700 were still without power, we were one of the unlucky few. We lost power just after 7am on Valentine’s Day (Wed), and since whenever we lose power (which has been at least once per year of the 4 years we’ve lived in this house) it seems to take at least 48 hours for power to be restored to us, I decided to start packing and calling relatives to find a place for us to stay. At first our woodstove seemed to be doing an adequate job at heating the house, so I considered staying at home for a while. However, by 9am Alex had wet his jammies and got pee on the floor, and since we have well water and the pump runs on electricity, we couldn’t use any water to clean up the mess, I decided that getting out of the house as soon as possible was a good idea. My parents’ and Casey Mom’s house were both without electricity, so we headed over to my brother’s house. His daughter, Natalie, is 2 and the twins enjoy playing with her (and her toys) but after a few hours over there the novelty wore off and the kids started bickering. By the next morning the power was restored at Grammy Barb’s house, she was on vacation, so a little peace and quiet at her house sounded like a good idea. Each day we’d visit with Daddy for a little while and have dinner together. Then Daddy would head back to our house ever-colder house to load wood into the woodstove every hour and a half around the clock. Meanwhile, after dinner, the kids and I would make our way to our new abode and unload, unpack, set up beds, and run through our night time rituals alone. This meant that each night the kids got to bed an hour or 2 later than usual, and then each morning the kids would rise with the sun, an hour to 2 too early, as they realized that they were in a strange place. I did the best I could to maintain some constancy for the kids by bringing their sleeping bags so their beds would be the same each night, our laptop computer so they could listen to their favorite lullabies before bed, a soft-sided cooler of their favorite brands of yogurt and other snacks, 2 changes of clothes for us and them, and snow clothes so we could get out of the house now and again. All told there were 7 bags to load and unload each time, and by Friday morning we were all pretty tired and grumpy, but BGE said that they expected to have all power restored by Friday night, so we loaded all 7 bags back into the car in the expectation that we’d be sleeping at home that night. It didn’t happen. The power wasn’t restored by bedtime so we moved on to Grammy Carole’s house a 3rd late night and early morning. By the time power was restored at 3am Saturday morning, the temperature in our house was 40F and in the garage (where our very expensive water treatment system lives) was 33F, and the main pipe to the kitchen had frozen but not burst. Casey’s vigilance probably did only just help us to escape costly damages. I am proud of how well the kids did with the circumstances. At one point Chloe yelled “Mom! BLUE SKY!”. It truly is the little things that matter. On Saturday morning Chloe (out of the blue) said she’d like to go to an indoor swimming pool, so we took the kids to the brand new indoor water park in Glen Burnie and they had the time of their lives. We’re counting our blessings that we had relatives near by to stay with, that our home wasn’t damaged, that Casey could take a couple days off work, and that our toilet seats are now warmer than 40F!

week ending feb 11, 2007

Week ending February 11, 2007: This week we took the kids to the Auto Show. Although the kids liked climbing through the cars, it really didn’t work out as well going to the boat show with them because Casey and I didn’t feel like we got to see much, the kids were hard to “contain”, and there was over-all a lot more complaining. Alex’s potty training isn’t going terribly well. He’s had several “accidents” and wet the bed once (thank goodness for water-proof mattress pads). This is the 1st time either kid has wet the bed, so I guess we’ve been pretty lucky. One of his accidents was while he was playing with water in the bathroom sink, so it isn’t like he didn’t have time to get to the potty in time. I think he either doesn’t understand what it feels like to need to go, or he so hates sitting on the potty that he actually prefers wetting his pants. The other day Chloe impressed me with her ability rationalize. Casey and I told the kids that we were going to have dinner at a restaurant, but we didn’t say which restaurant. Chloe immediately began a campaign for Chik-Fil-A, but we ended up going to Chili’s. Chloe was upset for only a few seconds and then she said “We’ll go to Chik-Fil-A another time?” and I said “yes” and made sure that it wasn’t long before we actually did go to Chik-Fil-A. I think there are grown-ups who don’t fully understand that people don’t have to get everything they want every second that they want it in order to be happy, so I thought it was very mature of Chloe to calm herself down by asking if we’d go “soon”. I’ve been trying to teach the kids to play “I spy” and this week Alex said “I spy something the color of that truck”. I’m not sure he quite gets the rules yet ;) This week Chloe said “you’re a good chef Mom and a good everything”. I know that all preschoolers worship their parents, but it is still nice to hear that she thinks well of me. Alex pricked his finger on his guitar string and had quite a lot of blood on his finger by the time I got to him. He kept saying “the paint came off” because he didn’t understand why there was red on his hands until I explained it to him. After I stopped the flow of blood and washed his hands he said with a big grin “The blood is gone, I’m so happy!”. No attached pictures this week, just a link to the pictures I posted of the kids at the auto show: http://picasaweb.google.com/constance.phelps/BaltimoreAutoShowFeb2007

week ending feb 4, 2007

Week ending February 4, 2007: This week Alex said something funny. We were getting ready to paint and I was heading toward the dining room table where we usually paint and he said “No! I want to paint on the urinal!” He meant the “easel”, sounds kind of alike. I’ve been noticing how the kids go about trying to find new friends to play with when we are out at venues like the playground. I taught Chloe to say “Hi, I’m Chloe, what’s your name?”, and she has started saying it to every little girl remotely close to her age. For most kids her age, this seems to be enough of an icebreaker and they’ll start following each other around, but if it doesn’t work, Chloe will say “do you want to play with me?”. Some of the older girls (5 or 6 years old) act like Chloe is nuts for being so forward, but Chloe doesn’t seem to worry about it and just moves on to the next candidate. Alex won’t talk to kids he doesn’t know, but sometimes through mimicking he can get another kid to play with him. Alex is still quite shy and prefers to watch when situations are in anyway new. We’d been going to story hour at the Annapolis Library, but they are taking a break before the next session, so we went to story hour at the North County Library near Cousin Natalie. Although the format was the same as “our” story hour, Alex reverted back to sitting on my lap and refusing to participate in the singing and dancing because this story hour is at an unfamiliar place. One day this week he started crying in the bathroom and saying that he didn’t want to flush his toy car down the toilet. We assured him that we weren’t going to flush his toy, but he kept crying. As we asked more questions we figured out that he was upset because on the episode of “Rugrats” that we’d gotten from the library, the little girl’s toy goes down the drain. Alex said, “that was a scary movie”. I guess from his perspective, it really was scary. Earlier this week I sang “my bologna has a first name…” and the kids asked “what’s bologna?”. I said it is like salami or ham, but I thought it was so odd that the kids have made it to 3 years old and don’t know what bologna is. I guess the invention of microwaves and chicken nuggets have changed the way preschoolers eat. Oh, speaking of preschool, the kids were “accepted” to preschool (that means I got the applications in on time). Along with our acceptance letter was a bevy of medical and emergency release forms one of which said that if I couldn’t be contacted during an emergency I would give them permission to send my child in an ambulance. I thought it was a sad commentary on our culture that my kids have been “accepted” to preschool for all of about 4 seconds and already I have to have an image in my head of my kids riding in an ambulance.