Well, now that we know our health insurance is working just fine, we decided to celebrate! Our next-door neighbor, Rylie, turned a year old on July 21st and we went to her party today. Nicky had lots of fun playing with the other kids there. When we were done, we went across the street to see our neighbors from down the street that moved to Minnesota last year and came back for a visit. Nicky sure was pooped by the time we got home! He went to sleep very quickly tonight. Honk shoo (that’s snoring)…
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Friday was my turn to visit the emergency room. Before anyone panics, let me explain. I was at work on Thursday when Paul told me that he wasn’t at work because his tree fell down in his back yard. It took out his power line, his shed, and his fence. The pictures show this better than I can explain it. The first of the three legs of the tree had fallen a couple of months ago and when Paul had somebody come out to look at the rest of the tree, they said it was stable. Yeah… So this leads us to Friday. I’m at work and Paul is home again because the tree people are coming over to take care of the mess and take down the rest of the tree. I thought it would be nice to bring Paul lunch and come over to watch the workers do the tree removal. On may way into Paul’s house, I felt like I got something in my eye. Granted, the wood chipper was running on the side of Paul’s garage, but I was nowhere near it. Turns out, the wind was just right and it blew a wood chip into my left eye. I immediately went into Paul’s bathroom to try to flush my eye with saline and then water. Nothing was getting rid of the sensation that I had something in there. In a fair amount of pain, I managed to drive myself to the emergency department at Highland Hospital. After only an hour wait I was treated. My cornea had been torn from approximately the one o’clock to four o’clock position along with a bunch of smaller tears. I was given an antibiotic eye drop and told to call Dinesh K. Chawla, M.D. for a follow-up appointment. When I called his office, they said he’d be out of town early next week but they could see me immediately. What luck! I managed to drive the short distance to his office from the hospital and he took me right away. Not only did he put a cocktail of drops in my eye, he patched it and told me to get a follow-up appointment with him, which is this Friday at 3:15PM. Jen and Nicky had to come pick me up from his office and I left the Vibe there overnight. Jen called our friends to see if they could come help me take care of Nicky yesterday while she was at work. Not only did Amber and Braden come over in the morning, they also retrieved our Vibe for us. Then, when they couldn’t stay past the early afternoon, our friends Kris and Ang showed up and spent the afternoon and evening with us. I was so greatful since I was in a fair amount of pain. I’ve got the eye patch off now and my vision is slowly getting better. It’s still blurry in my left eye but I should be back to normal before my appointment on Friday. Things could have gone much worse. I’m truly grateful for my friends, family, and health care workers who helped me throughout this situation. I decided to vaccuum in the couch cushions tonight. In the past, I’ve pulled out money, food, and plenty of Keanu’s hair, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this – I pulled out a measuring spoon. I love finding Nicky’s things in unlikely places; it just reminds me how much I love being his mom. I keep expecting Nicky to grow some teeth or grow into the next clothing size (which is 24 months!) any day now. For the past month or so, he’s been exhibiting teething behavior, runny nose, always wanting things in his mouth, drooling, and a couple of restless nights, too. He’s also been taking great naps, mostly sleeping better at night and eating like a champ. All weekend, he had a fever but wasn’t irritable or having any other symptoms, and I know that sometimes can be a sign of teething. We measured him a couple of days ago and he’s about 1/2 an inch taller than he was about a month ago. Every morning when he brushes his teeth, I look/feel around in his mouth, but there aren’t any more teeth in there. Monday night, he didn’t want to go to sleep and he was up until 10pm. Last night, he was pretty fussy going to bed but was asleep by 9pm. Just as Chuck and I were going to bed at 11, Nicky woke up and was up for about two hours. We tried everything we could think of to get him back to sleep, letting him try himself, changing his diaper, nursing him, rocking him. We finally brought him into our bed with us, at risk of starting a bad habit. Just when I thought we’d found the answer, he cried again. Chuck ended up giving him about 8 ounces of frozen breastmilk, and he went back to sleep until 7:30 this morning. When he woke up, you’d never have known about the celebration of Nicky’s 11-month birthday! He was a happy camper! He’s napping now and has been for about 2 hours. It’s also his last night of Water Babies swim class, so that should tire him out well for tonight. Hopefully, we’ll hop right back onto our happy schedule. We liked all of the cloth diapers we tried for different reasons, but our favorite was the Happy Heiny brand, so we purchased a 6-pack that arrived yesterday. After they took a trip through the wash, I arranged all of our diapers into a beautiful rainbow:
I’m really glad that we decided to do this! Thanks to Margaret for leading me in this direction! Happy anniversary to us! Chuck and I celebrated our six-year wedding anniversary yesterday. Since it rained most of the day, we hung around inside and played with Nicky. We really enjoyed reminiscing over our wedding photos and spending time with our baby. Except for the bottle of 2001 Fulkerson Riesling Ice Wine we shared after Nicky went to bed, I can’t think of a better way to celebrate our marriage! Nicky has really picked up speed with his walking. I think it’s his preferred method of travel these days; he doesn’t crawl that much any more. He can even get up on his own, without using anything for help, but he doesn’t do that too much yet. He still loves to be chased around the coffee table, but now he lets go and I chase him around the whole downstairs as he giggles with glee! I’m so impressed with how much he seems to be understanding and learning now. He knows where my nose, mouth and belly are (and showed everyone at my sister’s engagement party!). He does the motions to “If You’re Happy and You Know It” which is so cute! He just started making a diamond with his fingers for when we sing “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star”, aww! I’ve posted a few new photos here. There are some cute ones, obviously, since he’s Nicky! I called the allergist’s office this morning to see if there were any cancellations/openings for us before the 30th, and we were in luck – they got us in at 11:00 this morning! I was very happy because I felt like I needed more guidance than what we were getting. Dr. Friedman is great! She is definitely a realist and I need that. She doesn’t sugar-coat things, she’s honest about what to expect and about just how careful I need to be about things. She made me feel a lot better about using the Epi-Pen if I ever have to and really gave me a positive outlook on the milk allergy. She said that his allergy isn’t severe (even though it’s strong, it could be much worse) and that he’s got about an 85% chance of outgrowing it before he goes to school. She gave Nicky a skin test that wasn’t bad at all. I thought it would be awful, but it really wasn’t. I tried to take a picture of Nicky’s leg and it didn’t work, but there was a piece of plastic that had 5 needles on it that the nurse put on Nicky’s thigh. She tested two controls, milk, egg whites and soy. I had really, really wanted to know about soy before we start giving it to him to drink; after all, he’s almost a year and will need to be switched from breastmilk (a whole other event, I’m sure). Well, big surprise, he’s allergic to milk, but he’s not allergic to egg whites or soy, so yay for that! So, she gave us a written plan, which is good because we were there for a long time and I’m glad to have the references she gave us. Obviously, no milk. Also, NO DAIRY PRODUCTS WHATSOEVER. Our pediatrician had told us that goat cheese would probably be fine (and it definitely wasn’t when I tried it for him), but Dr. Friedman told me that the animals are so closely related that the proteins that cause the allergy are the same. She said that if I really had my heart set on giving him milk, he could have horse milk, but I’d probably have to buy my own lactating horse and milk it since we’d never find it in a store around here! It’s really okay, soy is fine with me. He can have eggs that are in baked goods, but not scrambled or cooked on the stove (they won’t get hot enough to denature the protein that causes the allergy that way). Even though he doesn’t have an allergy now, he can still develop one, and we don’t want that for sure! Because he’s allergic to milk, he’s more likely to develop other allergies, so we’re holding off on all of the highly allergenic foods, probably at least until he’s two. That includes fish (even though he had and loved tilapia), shellfish, peanuts and tree nuts. He’s been eating things with wheat right along and doing fine, so that’s still allowed. So, we’ll follow up with Dr. Friedman in the next 6-12 months. She said nothing will change before then, so we shouldn’t retest for milk allergy sooner than that. However, if there’s something we’re concerned about, she told me to bring him back and we can test him for whatever we need to. I really feel like if I need something, I can call her to ask, which is great. I feel like I can be a more appropriate level of careful without going crazy. I guess I won’t be burning as many anxiety calories now… So, now that we know what we’re doing with food, it seems like it’s just in time to make some changes. Nicky LOVES to feed himself and does much better at his meals when he can. So, I’m extremely sad that I won’t be using my beloved hand blender as much for now, I’m excited that he’s moving on to more table foods. Here are some things that I’ve been giving to him lately, cut up into baby bite-sized pieces:
I’ll need to re-work my freezer and phase out the cubes of fruits and veggies and start making a stash of all of them in pieces now. I’ll probably keep doing some of the fruits in cubes so that I can mix them with his cereal in the morning because he still does well with that. Thank goodness, I couldn’t quit my pureeing cold turkey! It’s been busy in our backyard lately! We’ve had many visitors:
Who knew we lived in the middle of a wildlife preserve? |
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