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.