Ten Times Crazier

So now that Thanksgiving, Christmas, and the New Year have come and gone…

In the end of October the boys turned three (see previous post), and I made ghost costumes for them (after being thoroughly disenchanted by the costume selection for little boys in the stores (I went the day before we needed them for a Halloween party because I’m on top of things like that)). JJ wanted to be a ghost, and Lincoln was going to be a mummy (I slightly directed them towards these costumes because I had a bunch of white muslin lying around) but decided he’d prefer to be a ghost once he saw JJ’s costume. Hazel was a witch (*nudge* *nudge* Get it?).  I present the photographic evidence:

Witch Hazel

The only pictures we got of the boys in costume were a few Jeff took when I tried the costumes on the boys just after I finished them. They look much more ghostly with face paint and the hoods on. We meant to get pictures on Halloween, but that day didn't go quite as we were expecting, as you will see if you keep reading.

That party was the Saturday before Halloween. Then on Sunday we carved pumpkins, and the kids noses started running.

By Monday morning Link’s breathing was labored and wheezy, and after a few puffs of albuterol gave him little relief, we decided that a visit to the pediatrician was in order. He puked all over himself and his car seat as we pulled into the parking lot. I took off the shell of his coat, which luckily took the brunt of the blow, and threw it on the floor of the van with a shopping bag of a few paper towels I used to cursorily clean the major chunks off his seat.

Once in the doctor’s office, the nurse checked his oxygen saturation and promptly fetched the doctor because his saturation was alarmingly low. After an oral steroid dose (which made its way to the exam room floor accompanied by what little was left of Lincoln’s breakfast — well some of it; I caught the last half the load in a puke bag), a subsequent steroid shot to his hiney (to make sure it didn’t come up again) (it was his least favorite part of the day, and boy, did he let us know it), and a couple of nebulizer treatments, his oxygen saturation wasn’t improving, so we were admitted to the hospital around lunchtime.

After changing into a spaceship-studded hospital gown, Link told me he needed his puke bag, so I whipped around to get it. By the time I turned back to him, his stomach had expelled the juice the pediatrician had given him all over his spaceships, so we had a wardrobe change (plain blue, but this time with pants!) and a bedding change, and then the real fun began. (By the way, that was mercifully the last of the puking.)

Next, they put an oxygen monitor on Link’s finger that was like a bandage with a wire coming out of it. He was not too hot on having a wire attached to his finger (ah, if he only knew the joys that were yet to come), but the thing had a light in it that made his whole fingertip glow red, and that mitigated his vexation at being tethered enough that he let it slide. After that came the oxygen cannula.

The kids came with me to my ultrasound a few prior to this. JJ watched the screen for a minute and then he was like, “Yeah, okay, a baby or whatever. If you need me, I’ll be over here playing with these blocks,” but Linky was fascinated. He talked about how he “saw the baby in Mommy’s tummy on the TV” for the rest of the day. The next day he kept asking to see it again, so we looked at the ultrasound pictures, then we watched the video of the boys’ 20 week ultrasound, then we watched short physiology videos on YouTube (this started because he wanted to see more heart pumping, and it just snowballed from there give-a-mouse-a-cookie style) for over an hour, and we only stopped because we really needed to eat. His fascination has continued, and he still regularly asks to see the ultrasound and physiology videos.

So back in hospital land we were about to stick tubes up Lincoln’s nose, adding a second and arguably more annoying tether. The nurse, based on experience, thought it would be a problem, and I, based on common sense, thought it would be a problem, but before we tried to put it on, I explained to him that because he was having trouble breathing, his lungs couldn’t put enough oxygen in his blood for his heart to pump around his body, so we needed to give him extra oxygen through his nose, and he let us put it on with nary a fuss. Not only that, but he was defensive of it. Anytime someone tried to adjust it, they got swatted away with a chastisement about ruining his “ossajen.” Hooray for his recent fascination with the body human!

Putting in his IV made me very nervous given the heartbreaking display of weeping (his and mine) and wailing and gnashing of teeth (just him on the latter two) we got in conjunction with his steroid shot that morning, but aside from a few seconds of crying right when they put it in, the administration of the IV line went in striking similarity to the administration of the cannula. I explained that we needed to give him medicine to help his lungs get better, that they would give it to him through a tube that would go right into his blood through his hand, and that it was going to hurt a little. He took it like a champ and gave what for to anybody who tried to mess with it thereafter. “You’re not supossa touch it!”

Because he was on an IV, they wanted to make sure that what fluids were going in were coming back out, so the nurse asked me to try to get him to pee in a jug she gave me so it could be measured. She asked it like she thought he might not be amenable to it. I guess some kids don’t like the idea of going anywhere but in the toilet, but Link is not one of those kids. He thought it was awesome. Any time he had to go, he would gleefully exclaim, “Get my pee jar!” and I would let him go just standing on the bed.

He also got a chest x-ray, which they did right in his room. He did a great job considering the separation anxiety he must’ve felt when I left the room while they did it. He was scrambling for me when I came back in, but he held still long enough to get a good x-ray in one try. Luckily the promise of getting to see a picture of his bones (thanks again, physiology fascination!) was sufficient motivation. He thought it was very cool. I did, too, but mostly because the picture showed nothing wrong.

Once the parade of nurses and technicians (all of whom asked Lincoln how he was feeling, to which he replied every time, “I feel much better now,” and then, directed at me, “Let’s get out of here!”) slowed a bit we settled into a pattern of one video after another (which included the one My Little Pony video they had three times) accompanied by constant snacking from his meal tray and occasional interruptions for nebulizer treatments and vitals checks and a visit from some friends from church to give Link a blessing. Meanwhile, Jeff took JJ and Hazel trick-or-treating (which I heard JJ loved, and I’m sad Lincoln and I missed it) and put them to bed. Then a neighbor came to our house to hang out while those two slept and Jeff came to visit Linky and me and bring supplies.

I tried to keep Link up until Jeff got there, especially since he was scheduled for a nebulizer treatment at about the time Jeff would arrive, but he was sick, and it’d been a long, hard day, and he just couldn’t do it. He passed out about five minutes before Jeff came in and took this picture:

Pulmonology came to give Link his breathing treatment shortly thereafter, and since he’s fond of neither breathing treatments nor being awoken prematurely, he freaked right out.  By the time the treatment was done, he’d calmed down, though, and we enjoyed a little time hanging out with Daddy and eating some of the Halloween candy he brought us.  Then Jeff left (with a warning that a bag of puke had been baking in the car he was swapping me for; I hope it didn’t smell too bad), and we went to bed to enjoy a hospital night’s sleep.  That is, I slept with Linky on his bed (which was not a big deal — I’m a pretty still sleeper), nurses and pulmonary therapists came in and woke us up approximately every hour, and Lincoln (and, therefore, I) woke up for good around 5:30 a.m. because his bladder was about to explode from the IV fluids.

Luckily we had a great nurse overnight who diligently weaned him off the oxygen over the course of the night so that by the time we were done with breakfast, he was able to take off the cannula to find out if he could keep his oxygen saturation up on his own.  He was!  And the more we got up and moved around, the better it got, so we spent the morning wandering around our floor with Link’s IV pole.  Luckily Link was the only patient in Pediatrics that day because any time we wanted to leave the unit we had to be buzzed out by a nurse (security and all that), and the second he knew we were going on an excursion he would zoom out the door yelling, “NUUUUUUUUURRSE!” at the top of his lungs.  I had to remind him constantly not to go too fast lest he yank the IV line right out of his hand.

By the afternoon, they were confident he was well enough to go home!  And by the next day, he was pretty much back to normal (albeit on steroids and nebulizer treatments).  So Lincoln has spent two of his first four Halloweens in the hospital (the first Hospital Halloween was spent in the NICU just after he was born).

We had a repeat of this hospital stay a couple weeks ago — almost identical except that it started at the ER at five in the morning and the ER doc gave him anti-emetics to combat the puking up of the steroids rather than a shot (thank heavens).  I think I’m getting a better handle on how to cut this off before it gets to hospital-stay level (I was this close to taking him to the pediatrician the day before even though most people wouldn’t have been able to tell he was getting sick at that point), so I’m hopeful that he’ll get to spend next Halloween begging strangers for candy like a normal kid.

You may have noticed that I updated the look of my blog (or you may not have, if you’ve only seen my posts in your RSS feed for the last week-ish).  I’m not really in a place in my life where I feel like I have time to be fussy about aesthetics — the change was not for that purpose, and you can see that I didn’t get real fancy — but I’ve been wanting some features that just weren’t possible with my old template.

I thought about moving the blog in the process — I was a little short-sighted when I chose the name, and now it’s obsolete in a certain sense — but 1. I didn’t want to lose anyone who reads here in the process, and 2. the TTC, in its infertility context, doesn’t really apply anymore, but it is still what inspired the creation of this blog, and I think I am still at least ten times crazier than I used to be, albeit for different reasons now, so I am okay with sticking with it.

Back to the features I’d been wanting to add, I now have THREADED COMMENTS! and COMMENT REPLY NOTIFICATION!  so I can properly engage with those of you lovely readers that take the time to leave me comments.  I am very excited about it, so comment away!  (But not on this post because it’s boring.)

With two boys and a girl, Jeff and I were hoping for this next one to be a girl to even things out — you know, make room-sharing simple, make sure Hazel didn’t get too spoiled being daddy’s only little girl, things like that — but we both felt like it was going to be a boy.  I wasn’t sure whether to attribute this to some kind of parental intuition or just to the fact that we expected to get the opposite of what we wanted.  Not that a boy would be disappointing, just less… symmetrical.  The boys both said pretty consistently that it was a baby girl.  I wasn’t sure whether to attribute this to some kind of fraternal intuition or just to the fact that, in the context of our family, girl babies (i.e. Hazel) are the only kind of babies they know.

We all descended upon the OB’s office yesterday (18w2d) for an ultrasound.  It was only to check my cervix (since I have a tendency to dilate early), but I figured the ultrasound tech wouldn’t mind having a peek at the baby’s private parts to tell us whether parental or fraternal intuition reigned supreme at our house.  She gladly obliged.  The boys were very excited to see a “picture of the baby in Mama’s tummy on the TEEvee.”  So was I.

The baby cooperated nicely by practically doing the splits for the camera.  When the crotch came up on the screen, Jeff and I both let out a we-were-right, “Ope!” and I declared, “It’s a boy!”

“Actually,” the tech corrected me, “those three lines are girl parts.”

Click here to see the ultrasonic evidence!

Well.  I guess I’m not real good at reading ultrasounds, then.  Let’s hear it for symmetry!

Hey!  If you can’t make it to the end of this lengthy post, at least skip to the end.  There’s important information down there.

So I’m just going to jump right into this like I haven’t been seriously neglecting this blog.  Here’s what’s up lately:

During July/August we went on a four-week, 5,000+ mile road trip out to the west coast which included a week of camping.  Like, tent camping.  With two two-year-olds and an eleven-month-old.

The short version:  We survived, which was better than I was expecting.

The long version in bullets:

• The driving was actually the easy part of the trip (save one factor, which I’ll get to later).  The kids were champs (thanks, in no small part, to the DVD player).
  

  my good little travelers

• Camping went mostly better than I expected except that the boys were so wound up by the novelty of the whole situation that we couldn’t get them to eat or sleep as well as usual (actually, that was true of the whole trip), so there were more than a few meltdowns, and by the end of the week both boys were sick to the point that we made a trip to urgent care where we found out they both had pneumonia.
  

  a rare nap during camping week

• In spite of getting sick, the boys LOVED camping on the beach due in part to the intrinsic joys of the beach (playing chicken with the waves, sandcastles, throwing rocks in the water, seagulls and pigeons walking around right! by! us!, etc.) and also to the fact that it was a family reunion, so, between my siblings’ kids, my cousins’ kids, and my cousins who still are kids, there were upwards of 40 minors running around like, well, like 40 kids turned loose on a beach/campsite (they were supervised, of course, so there were no pig heads on sticks or anything), so the boys had an endless supply of exciting friends.
  

  I think the everybody-in-white-shirts-and-jeans thing is cheesy and cliche, but whatever

  

  See that wall of sand behind them? My dad and siblings built it. It stood for days, and every time a wave washed around it, the space behind it filled with water. It was the perfect little pool for the bitty kids.

• Staying with generous friends whose home is very only-adults-live-here with two kids with pneumonia, no matter how hospitable and understanding the friends are, is very stressful (for me, anyway).  To put it into perspective, I felt relieved to move on from there to my MIL‘s house.  At least there I don’t have to worry that someone’s going to be exhausted for work the next day because the kids were up all night coughing.
  

  the boys with their new buddy, Batman (note the juice spill on the probably rather expensive pillow)

• We got to see a lot of friends from the days when we lived in L.A.  We’ve missed them.  I am horrible at keeping in touch with friends once I move away from a place (a side effect of being a military brat and moving a lot), but Jeff is great at it, so I’m starting to find out what it’s like having people who can actually be classified as “old friends.”  I likes it.
• We also got to visit many of Jeff’s friends from high school when we were in northern California (he seriously keeps in touch with, like, everybody) including his best man with whom he went to high school, undergrad at UCLA, and grad school at UT, Austin (not purposefully, but geez, get your own lives, guys).  One of his friends invited us to her new letterpress studio, and she did a little project with Linky and JJ.  It was soooooo cute!
  

  she let them pick the colors and everything

• We also went to Jeff’s cousin’s wedding.  The boys referred to Jeff’s cousin, the bride, as “the princess.”  She loved it.  I got to meet the estranged cousins.  One of them was totally awesome with the kids; he let Jeff and me relax a little.  I loved it.
• We brought Jeff’s sister back with us on the drive home for a short visit.  Our van was packed full.

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Hazel now has 20 or so words that we can identify and one sentence to her vocabulary.  Of course, almost none of them are well enunciated, but they’re identifiable.  (Heck, a lot of Lincoln’s vocabulary still fits into the poorly-enunciated-but-identifiable category.)   One of her latest and most stinkingly cute words is “blastoff” (which actually sounds more like da-tah, or, more accurately, DAAA-TAAAHH!!!).

She had been able to walk about six feet at a time since before she was ten months old but always opted to crawl when given the choice.  Then two days before her birthday she just decided she was a big girl and has thence been walking everywhere.  Now, at thirteen and a half months, she’s an old pro.  It makes her immensely happy because now she can keep up with her brothers better, and they’re, you know, totally rad.

About three weeks ago I started potty training the boys.  I meant to do it in the spring but kept finding excuses not to (I think my desire for them to stopgrowingupsofastalready may have played a small or large part in the delay) until we got close enough to our trip that I abandoned the idea entirely until we got back.  Thinking about things that could be awful on a road trip with three wee bairns was bad enough without having two of said bairns being freshly potty trained; frequent stops (at what would most frequently be scary public restrooms) and accidents were not things I wanted to add to the list of possible complications.  So we just got around to it.

Aside from urine stream issues — despite positional modifications Link has an uncanny ability to pee precisely through the crack between the bowl and the seat about half of the time — I declare them well-trained.  I still wipe butts post-poop, occasionally I find JJ wrapped up in an activity clutching his crotch and have to remind him to take care of business, Lincoln hasn’t mastered the art of re-pantsing himself and frequently emerges from the bathroom shuffling ’cause his drawers are still around his ankles (or he takes them off completely and announces his emergence by throwing his underwear in my face; it’s my favorite), and when they’re tired they insist on a parental potty escort, but besides that, they do it all on their own.  I’m very proud of us all for this accomplishment.

As for the one factor I mentioned forever ago that made the vacation driving more difficult, it was pregnancy nausea.  I spent our four-week road trip vacation with three tiny kids deeply immersed in the exhaustion and vomitousness of early pregnancy.  I had moments — like while puking into a campsite toilet in the wee hours of the morning — where I regretted going forward with the trip after I found out I was pregnant (which was just days before we left), but overall I’m glad we still did it.

Baby number four is due to arrive in mid-March at which time, God willing, we will have four kids under four.

I am really enjoying Two (years old, that is). The guys demonstrate new skillz pretty much every day. Their language is growing in leaps and bounds, and it is so fun to have them start communicating well enough that I get bigger and bigger glimpses of what is going on in their adorable, disproportionately huge heads (seriously, at their two-year checkup, they were both at or below average for height and weight and around the 90th percentile for head circumference). The game we play of Mama trying to figure out what the heck JJ and Linky are talking about is almost always a blast and quite satisfying. Admittedly, it is occasionally frustrating on both my end and theirs — especially when I ask for clarification and they just affirm heartily (e.g. JJ says, “More, pwease, Mama. Pwease, pwease, pwease,” and I have neither given him anything nor done anything for him in recent moments, so I ask, “More what, JJ?” In answer, JJ nods exuberantly and says, “Yeah!” Gyaaaargh!) — but I think we are pretty good at being patient with each other.

Anyway, occasionally they bust out with things that amaze me (I am willing to admit that, perhaps, I am too readily impressed) because I have no idea where they learned them. For example, when the mail comes in and gets set on the table, if we give them the opportunity (which means not standing over them every single blasted second — so basically every time), the boys will swipe the pile off the table and shuffle through it looking for something interesting (them boys love a catalog — if I try to talk to JJ while he’s perusing one, all I get is a curt, “I busy!” (sadly, I know exactly where he got that one)). Around Thanksgiving JJ came running up to me with one of his finds — a card advertising some store’s Christmas sale — and pointed excitedly at a row of lit pine trees. “Yook, mama! Chwristmass twree!”

I was then just as excited as he was because 1. Yeah! Christmas tree! (although I couldn’t wait to get ours up, I failed to make Jeff see the merits of getting our tree up the day after Thanksgiving and that event was relegated to the next weekend and 2. Where the heck did he learn that? I mean, Jeff and I didn’t teach him that, and we hadn’t watched any Christmas shows yet or anything (I tried my darnedest to not get too excited and let Thanksgiving have its day without being mowed over by carols and tinsel and Rudolph and such), and there’s no way he remembers those words together like that from last year (when he was 14 months old and not doing much talking at all), right?

One of Link’s latest where-did-that-come-froms is the way he searches for things. He wanders around aimlessly with his hand shielding his brow while alternately calling out for the missing item — for example, “Pooooom, w’aaaaah eeeyooooooou?” (for those of you not fluent in 2-year-old mush-mouth, that’s “Spoon, where are you?”) — and tapping his chin with his index finger while going, “Hmmmmm. Hmmmmm.” As far as I can remember, I had nothing to do with his acquisition of this behavior, and, while it is pretty stinkin’ cute, I wish that whoever it was that taught it to him had also taught him how to do the actual searching more effectively because the objects invariably do not answer his calls, and the chin tapping is equally useless, so I always end up having to find them for him.

I can’t wait to see what other things Two will bring that I didn’t teach them.