Babywearing Humor

This cracked me up.  Advice on babywearing during a  zombie apocalypse .  I think babywearing is most appropriate during any apocalypse, but I had not yet considered zombies, specifically.

Ears, Ears, Ears

Poor Limelet.  

He just finished a course of (much-loathed) antibiotics for ear infection a bit over a week ago, and it looks like he has another one already.  This will be the third time since he started day care. He never had them before (though a couple of times his ears were a little iffy, they never actually got to a bad stage).  

He went to his well-baby visit last week, and got his second Hep A (as planned by me) and also a chicken pox vaccination (one of two, which the doc talked my husband into, and I'm still kinda ticked about).  Anyway, four days after the vaxes (Friday night) he came down with a fever and threw up once in the middle of the night.  Of course I was trying to get back to night-weaning that week, so once again I feel like a monster because he was sick.  He was in decent spirits all weekend, at least in the daytime, but had a fever the whole time.  I attributed this to the vaccination reaction, though this may or may not be the case.  Maybe his ears were just getting bad again and caused both the fever and the throwing up; I don't know.  TheLimey is convinced that the vaxes caused it all.

Limelet didn't sleep very well Saturday night (so I slept about 3 hours) and then last night it became obvious that it was his ears again, so in the middle of the night we dragged the blankets and stuff downstairs so I could sleep in the chair with him.  He whimpered and slept only fitfully and intermittently for the remaining few hours (so again, I got about three hours total sleep last night, too).  Once it was daytime, he was cheerful again (if a little fragile and clingy).  He feels okay when upright, basically.  This morning he has an appointment at 10:30 to which TheLimey will take him, since he is still not back to work yet (second interview Wednesday, though!)

We went all out and spoiled him over the weekend, really just to have some way to help him feel less miserable.  It was too cold to go outside, and Limelet was too sick to be around others much, so we were trapped in the house.  I got several "new" videos at the Starvation Army, and on Sunday Daddy broke down and went to Toy-R-Us and got him a little train (the generic version of the wooden Thomas trains) and some new Play-Doh.  Also, we let  him eat whatever he wanted, since his appetite was so down we were happy to have him eat anything at all, even ice cream.

I know that a naturopathic treatment for ear infections is to cut dairy out entirely.  Maybe we will be trying that soon.

When do their ears (internally) change shape enough to grow out of this?

Wow!

Limelet slept last night from 9pm to 4:30am.  And I slept from 10pm to 4am (when he started stirring.)  That's a record 6 hours of sleep in a row!

He was doing well on the new post-teething night-weaning program (a month ago), but after the first week he became ill, and then had 3 illnesses in 3 weeks, so it pretty much went out the window.  I still feel terribly guilty for the first night when I didn't realize he was sick, and would only give him a sippy cup instead of nursie.  Poor little thing.

But now that he is done with teething and is no longer sick, his personality has  suddenly blossomed.  It's an amazing change.  He's so much more cheerful and patient and generally happy.  Just goes to show what chronic pain can do to a person.  And what would he be like if he hadn't experienced that for the first 2.5 years of his life?  I'm certain his sleep would be very different by now, and a whole host of other related things.  Including his diet--he's sudddenly eating up a storm again.  He began doing so after his teething was over, but then he got sick immediately and his appetite diminished again.

I predict he will become a vegetarian, like so many on both sides of my family.  I brought home a roasted chicken from the supermarket the other day, and I was cutting some pieces off the leg for Limelet.  He watched carefully and then happily exclaimed "Meat weg! Wike Dack's weg!" while grabbing his little thigh with both hands.  Well, he already likes soy milk amd eats soy sausages for breakfast every day, so it shouldn't be too shocking when it happens.

He recently had a "well-baby" visit (Daddy took him).  His ear infection was all cleared up, thank heavens (as we could tell by his behavior anyway).  His height was 37" and he weighed 28#.  Accoridng to  the percentile calculator , and he is in the 77th percentile for height and 41st percentile for weight.  So he's actually gone up in his weight percentile: it used to be 25th.  Glad to know he's gaining some weight, even if he's still tall and thin.  Which is normal for my family, anyway.  Not sure about TheLimey's.  I still think Limelet will turn out to be a tall guy, as I have thought since he was born.

Mary Poppins is still his favorite movie, replacing Rat (Ratatouille) after many months.  He has memorized way too many passages of it, and talks about the "flying Mama" at day care.  It took me a while to realized he was referring to Mary Poppins flying off with her umbrella.

He does seem to have somewhat of an English accent, at least as far as his r's go.  One of the support staff at the doctor's apparently told TheLimey that she remembered Jack as having "the vocabulary of a college student."  (This may unfortunately be true in the case of some college students.)  He is beginning to play with other kids more at day care (as opposed to parallel play).  He's also generally more comfortable just going there and being there.  Today he sat down at the breakfast table with the other children when I took him in, instead of needing to be handed over to the daycarer personally.  When he feels better physically (i.e. not sick, teething, or exhausted), he's a lot less clingy on me (understandably) so this teething and sleeping business could make  a lot of other everyday things easier, too.

Limelet has begun drawing up a storm lately.  He wasn't that interested before, but now he really is.  He also got some Play-Doh (and the extruder), which he loved to bits.  We need to get some more already.  His other favorite activity these days is basketball (still).  He wants us to shoot hoops with him at his little PlaySkool basketball hoop that I got him on eBay for his bIrthday last summer.  We sure are getting the most out  of that particular $20, that's for sure.

I feed him whatever the heck he wants, and it works. He wanted some chocolate the other day, and I let him have some.  After one bite, he asked for an apple, some meat, and some milk, and ate large amounts of those instead.  He eats lots of whole-grain couscous, homemade stew, and anything with potatoes.  I think his weight will go up somewhat, at least I hope so.

The Sicklies

Last couple weeks have been pretty hard.  We all fell ill last week with stomach bug of some kind or other.  Limelet threw up several days (but not a lot), was generally fussy and cranky  I held out until the weekend but then got it worse than either of them, had to take a day off work but taking care of Limelet.  (Not exactly a real day off, then.)  Limelet also got a cold or similar over the weekend, and then during the week started not being able to sleep at night.  We thought it was because he was so congested.

After several increasingly miserable nights of 3 spotty hours of sleep or so, we figured out that it was probably ear infection (perhaps from the cold, perhaps from the throwing up).  Doctor confirmed double ear infection; Limelet now on antibiotics and doing much better.  Also, the past two nights I slept sitting up in the living room chair while holding him up somewhat, so that he was actually able to sleep (ears hurt when he tries to lie down.)  That helped us all a great deal.  Poor little thing.  I was losing my mind and my temper by the third night awake.

Thank goodness our medical insurance was through my work and not TheLimey's.

Limelet loves Mary Poppins film (got VHS at 2nd-hand store for $1.99), has surprisingly little bad stuff for kids, and we've seen it about 20 times in the past week.  He likes the dance numbers, especially the one with all the sweeps on the roof.