week ending apr 25, 2009:

The pictures are of the kids enjoying the warm weather at the end of the week, and making perler bead projects at the beginning of the week, and Chloe passing out the wrong way on the sofa next to her barf-bowl at the end of last week.

Week ending April 26, 2009: Last week we wanted to make sure Alex got extra attention, and we were successful in our campaign, but I’m not sure Alex would have chosen to have this week go the way it did, given a choice. Alex started throwing up Monday evening and is still not eating a full day’s worth of food, so he’s playing “pay attention to the sick kid” to the extreme. When Chloe was sick, she was too tired to put her jammies on, so we let her sleep in clothes, and she was too tired to brush her teeth, so we brushed her teeth for her. After Alex started throwing up, he made sure that he also got to sleep in his clothes and have me brush his teeth for him, etc, even though he never really got as run down as Chloe did. So I guess the good part about Alex getting sick is that we can be pretty sure that this time Chloe’s throwing up was because of a temporary virus rather than her chronic gastro conditions.

I registered the kids for Kindergarten this week. They are just growing up too fast. We keep noticing them using more and more big-kid phrases, and this week we caught a half dozen or so like “oh come on!” or “for crying out loud!”. One day Chloe said to her dad “I’m not gonna get cold cuz it’s like 70 Dude!” And when we were talking about our trip to the Magic Kingdom last year Alex said “last year I didn’t want to stay in the haunted mansion because I was a ‘fraid-ee cat. We asked him where that expression came from and he said Scooby Doo (same place where ‘Dude’ hails). And my least favorite of all the new expressions is one Chloe learned from yours truly. When Alex says something that she find unacceptable she says “EXCUSE me?!” as in “I think you would like to rephrase that!” I hate it all the more because I know I say it.

At school this week the kids celebrated their 100th day of school. The teacher sent home a note beforehand saying that any kid who could count to 100 would get a certificate, so we practiced and they both got their certificates! The weather has played a part in their growing proficiency with numbers. They can’t wait for shorts and tee-shirt weather, so we started having daily arguments about whether 37F was cold or not, so I made a chart with specific number for which weight clothes they could wear at which temperature. They practiced reading the digital thermometer to determine which days would be short sleeves and which would require coats. At first they had a hard time remembering whether 37 was pronounced thirty seven or seventy three, and they still have trouble with the seven segment display telling a 2 from a 5, but they did practice a lot of 2 digit numbers.

We leave for Florida (and no wifi) at the end of the week, and we are driving so I don't know how long it will take us to recover when we get back before I post again.

week ending apr 19, 2009:

Week ending April 19, 2009: This week has been mostly about Chloe’s tummy problems. She threw up several times Monday, wouldn’t eat much on Tues or Wed, complained of constant pain and by Thursday was listless. I called her gastroenterologist and we talked about how I’d seen strawberries that she had eaten 12 hours earlier coming back up. The doctor said that her stomach isn’t emptying and that there is a medicine to help with that. Chloe started the medicine Friday and threw up less than an hour later, but she felt a little better on Saturday. She threw up once Saturday night but then ate quite a bit of food afterward and slept through the night. On Sunday she ate a little more than the previous day, and complained a little less. Also on Sunday she was active almost the whole day and spent only a little time too tired to play or so nauseas that she sat in the bathroom. I keep asking various health care providers how long my 40 lb child can survive on less than half her normal food and what are the symptoms that would designate her problems as an emergency. They all say that as long as she is able to maintain hydration, she is not in an emergency state, or looking at it the other way around, if her body gets to the point where she’s not bringing enough calories in, her body will also not be able to maintain hydration. So far we’re in the clear, and with her slowly getting better, we may stay that way. I still don’t understand why increasing this medicine (Nexium) that is supposed to help her would cause her body to react so violently. I can’t seem to get an answer on that one, so it worries me to be giving her such a large dose.
Alex has been getting short shrift while I wait on Chloe hand and foot, and by the end of the week he started to let us know. On Saturday evening he didn’t get his way over a relatively minor issue and he threw a big fit and we had to carry him crying away from a party. As we carried him he threw his head back and yelled “WHY DOESN’T ANYBODY LISTEN TO ME ANYMORE?!” He does have a flair for the dramatic sometimes. We made sure to have some special “Alex time” on Sunday to try and make up for a bad week.

week ending apr 12, 2009:

Week ending April 12, 2009: This was a big week, Easter party at school, gastroenterologist visit for Chloe, visit to the zoo, an Easter egg hunt.
This week Chloe was talking about parachuting, I think she’d seen it on TV or a movie. I asked her if she knew that her mommy and daddy had done it before. She hadn’t remembered that, but then she asked if she was old enough to parachute. Really?! What 5 year old wants to jump out of airplane? Apparently mine does.
I got to go to the kids’ Easter party at school. The kids were really looking forward to it and they weren’t disappointed. They decorated bags for collecting eggs, dyed hard boiled eggs, had an egg hunt, and then had cupcakes for a snack! At one point Chloe’s teacher called to the other teacher across the room “could you please get the E-G-G-S out of my truck?” and Chloe piped up “I’m learning how to spell and I know that spells ‘jelly beans’!” Very cute!
At Chloe’s gastroenterologist visit we discussed how I’ve been having trouble getting Chloe’s Nexium and that every time I change Chloe’s medicine Chloe seems to spend a whole day throwing up. We finally got a 3 month supply of Nexium on March 26, so I thought Chloe would have started getting better, but instead she had another day of vomiting followed by picky eating and frequent complaints of abdominal pain. The doctor said to increase Chloe’s dose up to the maximum and suspected that would make her better. The doctor was concerned that Chloe has lost a pound and asked that we schedule an appointment for 6-8 weeks from now.
At the church Easter egg hunt it was raining, so they hid the eggs inside the classrooms. The kids had a great time and each brought home 30 or more eggs. What are we going to do with all that candy?

zoo apr 2009

Zoo, April 2009: After Chloe’s gastroenterologist appointment I figured since we were in Baltimore anyway, and the kids had off school for Good Friday/spring break, we should go to the zoo. Chloe’s been asking about going to the zoo for many months, but we kept telling her it was too cold. Finally we got a great day and the sun even peaked through a few times. The animals were more active than I’ve ever seen them. The otters were so playful I just had to video them. The boy polar bear and the girl polar bear were separated, but there was a sign advising that it is breeding season that at times the bears will do what comes naturally. The zoo has set up a new area in which patrons can buy a sprig of acacia leaves and hold them up for the giraffes to eat. I bought 2 at $2 a pop. Alex decided he didn’t want to do his, so I was going to do it for him, but somehow Chloe ended up with both sprigs and managed to feed them to the giraffe before I got my camera turned on. Sigh. It was still a really cool experience. We also got to talk to a bat expert. The kids loved the slinky metaphor for echo-location, and we got to ask her about vampire bats. Ever since the kids saw a National Geographic video about creatures of the night, they’ve been asking about vampire bats. We were assured that they only live in South America. That doesn’t mean anything to the kids, so I told them “even further away than Florida”. Minor bickering aside, it was a great day.

week ending apr 5, 2009

Week ending April 5, 2009: This week Chloe lost another tooth, the other lower middle. This time she yanked it out of her mouth at the dinner table. She’s been hoping that the Tooth Fairy would bring her a ring and luckily the Tooth Fairy came through.

Recently the twins have started thinking about spending the money in their piggy banks. They each had $2-3 in coins and they’d been asking if they could use it to buy a toy. We hadn’t come up with anything I felt compelled to drive out to get for them and then one day Chloe told me that she’d offered the 9 year old boy next door money if he’d come and play with her. He’s busy with hockey and school, doesn’t have much time for the twins, and he’s the youngest of 4 kids, so he’s anxious that his older siblings not see him as the “baby”, so he doesn’t often agree to play with the twins. But, when he does play with them he is very funny and creative and they really love him. I didn’t think that Chloe would be happy with her decision once her money was gone, so I suggested that she pay him a penny a day, knowing he wouldn’t go for it. A few days later Alex came and told me that he’d divided his money between himself, Chloe, and me. As we talked about it, he said he thought it was “fair” that if he had something, he should divide it between the 3 of us because he loves us. I really wasn’t sure what to do at that point, so I’m afraid I botched things and Alex got sad about his money being gone. I’ve enforced with him before that when he gives things away, he doesn’t get them back. Once he gave Chloe a shirt that he didn’t like and then later decided that he did like it. Chloe didn’t want to give it back and I told Alex he’d made his decision and had to live with it. Of course this time I was able to give him back the money he’d put on my nightstand, but the money he gave to Chloe was already in her piggy bank and I didn’t see how many of which types of coins he’d given her, so I decided that she’d get to keep it.

At the grocery store this week we were in the frozen section and Chloe saw a box of fish sticks and asked for it. I try to encourage trying new foods, so I bought it. Alex had fish sticks for dinner one night and gave it a “thumbs sideways” (not up or down), but decided he didn’t want them for any more dinners. Chloe gave them a thumbs up and has had them a second time. I do cook separate dinners for the kids when Casey and I want to eat something spicy, so I don’t have to eat fish sticks myself!

The kids asked to have their faces painted this week and here’s what we came up with.

week ending mar 29, 2009:

Week ending March 29, 2009: This week Chloe got to change her earrings for the first time because it has been 8 weeks since she got them pierced. She’d been asking “how long” until she could change them, and “8 weeks” doesn’t have much meaning to her, so I told her after we went to visit Angie at Angie’s house. I meant within a week of the visit, but Chloe took a more strict interpretation and decided that the day after the visit should be the day. I figured that was close enough. Weeks ago Grammy Carole had shown me the set of 9 pairs of studs in 9 different colors she’d bought for Chloe, but we didn’t show Chloe until Sunday. Chloe was very brave about changing the earrings and decided she’d like to change them every day to match her outfits.

Since he knew Grammy Carole was coming over, Granddad stopped by with kites he’d picked up at the dollar store. The kids were thrilled. I’ve never been able to get a kite to fly on our cul-de-sac before because the houses and trees block too much of the wind, but Granddad was very patient and got the kites up a few times. He even got one kite high enough that it was above the tops of the trees and Alex was able to fly it by himself for a while. The kids were thrilled! I’ve mentioned before that I thought the kids were getting almost cynical in that they don’t seem to enjoy the simple pleasures as much as they used to, but they really loved flying the kites. They were cheerful and talked about for the whole rest of the day.

On a less pleasant note, Chloe spent most of the day Monday throwing up. She didn’t run a fever and none of the rest of us got it, so I think it may have been something she ate. She seems to be very sensitive. She’s doing much better now. I had some arts-and-crafts projects stocked away for a day like Monday when we’d be stuck in the house with kids without much energy. We spent the day doing Perler bead projects, creating ink stamp projects, and putting together tiny 3-D airplane puzzles that came in a 6 pack for a dollar. After we put the second airplane together Alex said “this is the best day of my life!” He loves putting stuff together, and he loves stuff that is new. He felt like he spent the day getting presents because the stuff was new to him.