What's been going on

Updates on my children.

Aubrey:

She recently informed me that what she does at recess is not the same thing as other girls do. Most girls in Aubrey's class are running from the boys chasing them at recess, and screaming. For Aubrey, it's the other way around. She chases the boys. It reminds me of the Ramona books, how Ramona was always chasing Davy, the boy she liked, on the playground at recess. I think Aubrey chases one boy in particular also. She frequently talks about this boy at other times also, and last week when she was filling out names on her Hello Kitty Valentines, she chose to put his name on the one that said, "Be My Valentine." So you know it's pretty serious. Actually, this boy is a nice kid and really talkative, so they have that in common. Last year it was Anthony, this year it's another boy. Scares me.

She also informed me that she, Kymber, and Inaya from school were going to make a club at recess. I asked her what she was going to do in her club, and apparently, you don't have to have a mission statement for a recess club. You just say you're going to have one and then you have one. It was going to start the next day, so when I picked her up from school, I asked her, "So, how was the club? What did you do?" And she looked at me blankly before telling me they had all forgotten about the club and didn't officially make it that day. And I've never heard any more about it.

On our drive to school, we always look out the window for the junior high boy waiting for the bus who wears only basketball shorts and a t-shirt every day, even when it is 30 degrees outside and raining. I don't know why he is so fascinating, but we see him pretty frequently, and he never has a jacket on. We anticipate this spectacle by asking each other, espcecially on really cold mornings, "Is he going to be in shorts today?" And hope that we see him. This unnamed boy has no idea what entertainment value he holds for us as we are waiting in the car line before school.

Aubrey was recently sick, not with the flu, but with this awful cold that caused her to cancel the Valentine's Day party we were holding at our house, miss the 100th day of school, and also miss the class picture and Valentine's Day party at her school. It was a bad time to be sick. I felt sao bad she had to miss those things. She laid at home with a fever that finally broke about last Friday, but prior to that she just laid on her bed and the couch and slept most of the day. It was very sad. Andrew also got that same cold, to a lesser degree, but instead of causing him to languish about the house, it keyed him up and made him SO irritable and cranky. It was awful and we were glad to be done with it.

Andrew:

We have been with the ECI Keep Pace program for a year now. This is the program we're enrolled in where people come to our house and visit with me and Andrew twice a month and help keep him developmentally on track, as he has some minor delays. At the year mark, they retest him in five different areas, (like mental, physical, social, emotional, etc.) and score him by age (in months) for each of those areas. This past year has been great, and with them coming a couple times every month, and I feel like we've made some really good progress. So I was anxious for the year retest. Last year, when we began with ECI, when they tested him the first time for the baseline, he was 15 months old and he was tested to have an average age of 11 months. So this time, he was 27 months and he tested at 26 months. So I was really excited for all his progress. He's caught up a lot, and I can tell. He will graduate from ECI in October, when he turns 3, and after that, we will try to get him into a school preschool program to help keep him on track. So, I want him to keep progressing, and catching up, but I hope by the time the fall rolls around, he will still qualify for the preschool.

Also having to do with ECI, they have given Andrew one more month to fill out weight wise before we have to go back ot the GI doctor. (We went there June of last year and did blood test and stool samples, and all kinds of wonderful things that gave us no results as to his slow weight gain). He has made it onto the growth chart for height, he is now at the 3rd percentile, but has yet to make it on for weight. So we have been trying to bulk him up majorly. We will see how it goes. I decided to get a jump start on the GI Dr. by taking him to a Cystic Fibrosis test, which would be the next thing GI would want us to do. (They just make his leg hot with electrodes and then collect his sweat and test it for salt, because CF kids have a high salt content in their sweat). It was a five hour round trip experience, because we had to go downtown. It wasn't the most pleasant experience, but when I came home I was glad I had done it. Until they never called back with the results, when they said they would call the next day. So, by the end of the second day waiting on them to call, I finally called them and found out they were unable to collect enough sweat to test it! So we have to go back and do it AGAIN! I was really annoyed because 1, that should have been something they could have seen at the time, and we would have gladly waited longer for him to sweat some more 2, because they never called me about it-- I had to call them and 3, they made it seem like my fault because they said, "you need to make sure he's well hydrated next time"... would have been nice to know that ahead of time! They did not tell me that until I called them for the results. Seriously. And the thing is, he probably doesn't even have CF. It's SO annoying.

Andrew is definitely two. A couple days ago, I was trying to get him dressed for the day, and as I tried to pull his Cars pajamas up over his head, he flipped out. He bent his elbows and pulled them down so I could pull his arms out of the sleeves. He was screaming and arching his back. Since he doesn't usually have such strong reactions, I just decided to let him wear his pajamas that day. It really didn't matter to me, and it wasn't a battle I wanted to fight. So he wore his PJ's all day long. Every where I went I had to explain that I had tried to dress him, and he just refused.