In Which Relatives Visit And Connor Has An Opinion

No seizures today!

This morning I drove down to the airport, leaving Connor and Jer sleeping (Connor stayed up until 1:30am last night) while I picked up my brother, sister-in-law and nephew, who have come to stay with us for a few days.  My nephew, W, is almost one and a half, and he is an adorable rascal.  Within about an hour he'd managed to turn our entire living room into a scene of happy chaos.

Connor was not thrilled with this development.  Apparently no one asked him if he wanted to have his younger cousin come visit and play with all of his toys.  Certainly no one asked him if he wanted to have his younger cousin come visit and play with his mommy and daddy.  He waved "bye bye" to W very emphatically several times, and when that didn't work he resorted to making his classic Angry Face a whole lot and pouting. 

Also when W came over and sat with us on my lap, Connor was patting him on the back maybe a wee bit too enthusiastically.  It didn't phase W at all, but I'm not sure that Connor's intentions were exactly to express his affection for his cousin.  Luckily Connor knows better than to actually hit anyone hard no matter what he'd actually like to be doing.  Also I'm not sure he has the arm strength to do any real damage anyway.  But regardless, the little guy is not happy about the visit at all and is doing everything in his power to let us know it.

Oh well.  He'll get over it.

W, on the other hand, seems to be absolutely thrilled with pretty much everything in our entire house; especially things that can be open and shut, banged on other things, or dragged along behind him.  He also thinks our cats are fantastic, and he expresses this by chirping "kitty" in an adorable half-intelligible squeal and launching himself enthusiastically in their direction, sprinting towards them as fast as his chubby little sock feet can go.

The cats are about as thrilled as Connor is with the visit.  They seem to be spending most of their time in the areas behind our baby gates, staring through the bars in a horrified fashion at the small, red-haired torpedo that keeps trying to coax them near enough to grab.

Well no matter what the cats think, I'm loving being able to catch up with my brother and sister-in-law and getting the chance to really interact with my nephew for the first time.  Last time I saw him he was only about six months old, so he's made some big strides since then!  I'm not sure what all we'll be up to in the next few days, but whatever it is I'm sure it won't be dull!

~Jess

In Which Ellen (No Not That Ellen) Is In Town

My friend Ellen (not my daughter Ellen, though that would be fantastic) is in town right now for a few days, which is, as always, turning out to be tremendous amounts of fun.  This is the Ellen that our daughter would be named after if she didn't already have a perfectly good name and also was able to pronounce Ellen, which she probably can't.  Got that?

Anyway, Ellen and have been really, really close friends since I was twelve years old, which is kind of a ridiculously long time to be friends with somebody.  We usually try and see each other a couple of times a year, and any time we are around each other we instantly revert to around the age we met.  Needless to say, all sorts of shenanigans happen.  So no doubt I will have a tremendously good time while she is here, and Jeremy will be doing a lot of justified eye-rolling.

So I don't have a whole lot to report today, because I spent the first half cleaning and the second half giggling over old sketch books with Ellen, in which I'd drawn a bunch of extremely bad renditions of people in various action poses, dragons that look a whole lot like the pet iguana I had at the time with wings, and chunky, fat horses with legs that bend the wrong way.  Ellen has a bunch of similar sketch books at home.  Ellen and I were Very Serious Artists.  Of course, Ellen could actually draw people and dragons and horses.  Particularly horses-- we've got some of hers hanging in our hallway, and their legs bend the right way and everything.  Also they look amazing, but that's beside the point.

So anyway, it's fantastic to see her, and we'll no doubt enjoy ourselves way more than is probably healthy and/or legal for people our age.  Yay for company!

~Jess

In Which A Kid'll Eat Ivy Too-- Wouldn't You?

This morning David, Connor and I all piled in the car, leaving Jer finishing up his breakfast, and after stopping to drop Connor off at school we drove to the new house to start work. There we spent the next two and a half hours weeding. We almost finished the sidewalk in front of the house.

There are a lot of weeds.

And not just any weeds. There are dandelions the size of my head-- the kind with the super spiky leaves so there's no possible way to get at them without leaving sizable holes in your palms. There are vines that have tangled themselves up in the bushes and while you start off thinking that you are going to be pulling up eight separate plants they turn out to be one giant plant with a network of roots running eight feet in all directions. There are blackberry bushes with stems thicker than my thumb in some of the areas we haven't gotten to yet.

And then there's the ivy.

The ivy bed is somewhere between 50 and 60 feet long, and it's about eight feet wide. Trust me when I say that pictures do not do it justice. It's three feet deep in some places-- a network of woody stems that have totally choked off everything else except for the aforementioned blackberry monsters and some particularly hardy salal. And once we finish the backyard, and the rest of the front yard, this ivy will become my personal hell for the next two weeks.

David is suggesting we use a machete. Jer wants to use a blowtorch or a chainsaw. Connor doesn't seem to have an opinion on the ivy-- he's much more interested in the cars driving by.

I think we need a goat.

I mean, think about it. Goats eat both English Ivy and blackberries. We could just stake him out in the middle of the hill and let him go to town! And while a diet strictly of ivy probably wouldn't be terribly good for him, if he gets bored with it we could sic him on the grass growing out of the lava rock by the curb. When he's not eating the ivy, he could pull Connor's wheelchair around for me like a little chariot. And if anyone objects to him, we could just drop him off at their house at night and he could eat their prize rose bushes. You know, a drive-by-goating!

Though once we ran out of ivy I don't know what he'd eat. The cats, probably. Or possibly the house. Also their eyes kind of freak me out. So now that I think about it maybe a goat isn't a good idea.

Guess I'm stuck with the clippers.

~Jess

In Which We Have Way, Way Too Much Candy

Happy Halloween, everyone!

We stayed home at the apartment to pass out candy. Since we had a grand total of 10 trick-or-treaters come by, this means we bought one bag of candy per trick-or-treater. Since we now have 9 1/2 bags of candy left over, I will be forced over the next few days to test whether or not it is possible to die of massive chocolate consumption.

Woe is me.

Connor was a moose for Halloween. Well, he wore a shirt with a moose on it, anyway. He doesn't go for hats, (that's my excuse, anyway) so you kind of had to imagine the antlers. I didn't make much of an effort in the costume department this year. At any rate he was cute, but that's not really a great accomplishment for him since he's cute all the time. He did have fun snuggling while we waited for kids to knock at the door, so the evening was overall a success.

Major, major work was completed on the house today: all of the carpet is now stripped from the house, (including the horrible glued-down industrial carpet in the kitchen) the master bathroom has been gutted, the ceiling is gone in the kitchen, the framing has been removed in the former closet and pantry area, and all the doors that will be widened have been stripped, among other things! Basically the only room left intact in the house is the guest bathroom, which looks kind of incongruous surrounded as it is by stripped rooms. The hardworking crew stayed at the house all day; they even brought pizza up so they wouldn't have to leave to get lunch. One of Jer's coworkers on leave from Afghanistan came to visit, and he thought they'd been working for a couple of weeks instead of a couple of days!

There haven't been any nasty surprises yet; just a couple of cracked tiles on the roof. We're glad that the house seems to be pretty solidly built. We've also met the neighbors, and I'm happy to say there aren't any nasty surprises there, either. Actually I'm pretty sure we moved into a street transplanted straight out of Mayberry. In the immediate vicinity of our house we have-- and I'm not making any of this up-- a librarian, a state representative, a nurse, a retired air force pilot, a couple with small children Connor's age, and a woman who loves to garden. I swear the neighbors were handpicked for us. We'll be filling the role of "neighborhood eccentrics," since that position doesn't seem to be taken yet.

I'm still half-convinced this whole thing is just a really, really good dream. A beautiful house taking shape by the day, a great neighborhood, and copious amounts of chocolate?

Seems too good to be true!

~Jess

In Which A Book Attempting To Explain G-Tubes To Children Creeps Me The Heck Out

Connor had a good time on W, his pony today. Yes, we named his pony "W." He likes the letter, okay? Anyway, I had to share this picture with you because it was so cute. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything else I'm going to talk about, which is probably a good thing, as I don't want to post pictures of what I'm going to talk about. They might give you nightmares.

Yesterday Connor went to his nutrition appointment, where, among other things, we were given a children's book entitled Why Eat? which details the adventures of Pinky, the "Tubie" alien, who comes from a planet where all the people don't chew. It's published by Prince Productions, and I couldn't find anything to link to about it on the Internet. There's probably a reason for that-- if I was a kid getting a g-tube, this book would scare the bejeezus out of me. It, in an attempt to make g-buttons cool, refers to them as "piercings," and then apparently Pinky the alien hooks himself up through this piercing to your internal organs, sucks up liquid food, and pumps it through his hollow squishy body into yours. Does anyone else find this image extremely disturbing? I mean, I know that they're trying to put a good spin on things, but...eww.

The pictures make it even worse. They're done in clay, and have super bright colors. Pinky looks kind of like a cross between a worm and a length of intestine. There's one particularly disturbing picture on a page attempting to explain supplements in which he is swallowing a huge green apple and green liquid is dripping out his other end into a glass. I'm all for preparing Connor for surgery, but I think I'll stick to the play-acting and the more general hospital books, because I don't think my child is ready for Pinky. Heck, I'm not ready for Pinky.

This book is not actually the scariest book for children I have ever read. That dubious honor belongs to a book by Renee French called The Soap Lady. The inspiration for this book, and I am absolutely not joking about this, is a (warning: extremely disturbing picture behind that link) mummified woman displayed in the Mutter Museum in Philadelphia whose body had saponified, or turned into soap. Apparently Ms. French thought that a mummified soap corpse who comes to life and befriends a young boy would be a wonderful plot for a children's book. I won't give all the details away as you'll have to read the book yourself to see all of the playful antics the boy and his reanimated friend get up to, but the end of the book reveals him playing in the bathtub with her severed arm. That sounds like a GREAT book to read before bedtime, huh?

It wasn't scary enough, so she threw in a ventriloquist doll too. And don't even get me started on the pictures in this one. The Soap Lady looks like, well, a mummified dead woman. But to make sure the book wasn't too scary, Ms French drew hidden bunnies and sheep on every page! That makes it ALL better.

So what's the worst children's book you've ever come across?

~Jess

In Which The Weather Does All Manner of Crazy Things

This morning we woke up to two inches of snow on the ground. It snowed until about 11:30, and then began raining. It rained until 3:00, and then we had blue skies and sun until about 4:00, where it abruptly became gloomy and rainy again. It's supposed to snow again tonight.

I have no idea why the weather has become so wishy-washy, but I'm sure it's somehow Loki's fault. He's been disgustingly smug today. No doubt he's built a weather machine out of stolen printer parts, dryer lint, and drinking straws. I think he has it hidden under my refrigerator-- he's always fishing around down there. I can think of many reasons why he would want to control the weather, but the top one is probably so he can cause a volcano to erupt or something on all of the days when he's supposed to have a vet appointment.

Crazy cat.

During the brief period of sun, we drove down to Solo Point, a little military-access only beach just south of post. I was hoping to show my sister some of the neat brown and orange starfish and the little purple crabs, but the starfish were in hiding, and the only crabs we saw had already shuffled off this mortal coil. Dead crabs, while still purple, are not nearly as amusing to watch.

While it was sunny and pretty outside, it was also extremely windy. Connor thinks this is highly amusing. He loves hair dryers, too-- he kind of leans into them, squinting and with a huge grin on his face: the exact expression he has on his face in this picture, as a matter of fact. I think he likes the noise the wind makes whooshing past his ears. If I could find one, I'd hold his third birthday party in a wind tunnel. He'd have a great time, though I don't know about the other kids.

I have no idea what we're doing tomorrow, but it probably won't be something outdoorsy, as the weather is supposed to be about the same as it was today. We'll figure something out.

~Jess

Schedule of Doooooooom!!!!

Connor would like to inform everyone that there are many, many ways to recycle. Shoes, for example, when outgrown, can become very fashionable hats. Don't be afraid to accessorize daringly!

Right. Today was the day that my sister and I planned to do a whole lot of outdoor activities. Today was also the day it started raining again. Figures.

Jer and Connor stayed home and had a Daddy Day. My sister and I ended up driving down to one of my favorite little cafes in Tacoma and playing Scrabble for two and a half hours. I got my rear handed to me on a platter. Apparently I'm a little out of practice. Then we drove down to the Tacoma mall and wandered around for a while, observing the bizarre ceremonial dress and mating habits of the local teenagers.

We stopped by the store on the way home, after determining via a phone call to Jeremy that the chicken I had thawing in the refrigerator still bore a closer resemblance to a rock than it did to any sort of bird. I made spaghetti with sausage, and we watched Hook after dinner. Well, my sister and I watched Hook. Jer played World of Warcraft and Connor alternated between playing with his Gertie ball (which he highly adores and I would recommend to anyone with a child who has gross motor issues) and screaming with glee over nothing in particular. I love that little guy.

The next couple of weeks are going to be even crazier than usual. Monday and Tuesday are pretty free other than my sister leaving, sign class, and scheduling a bunch of appointments, but then things go kind of insane. Here's a quick run-down of my to-do list:

Wednesday: Connor's special education teacher comes and we have an appointment with anesthesiology at Children's Seattle. Buy food needed for party on Friday-- the party for 30-50 people I was informed by my husband yesterday that I would be throwing. I love the army.

Thursday: Visit the possible schools Connor might be going to (this will take about 6 hours as I will visit a morning and an afternoon preschool at two different elementary schools). Go get Connor's three year vaccinations and an updated copy of shot record, then comfort screaming, irritable child while making last minute preparations for the next day's party.

Friday: Go to Connor's nutrition appointment. Rush from there to Jer's office to set up for party. Attend army function. Host party. Rush home and frantically begin cleaning for guests that arrive the next day.

Saturday: Run around shoving everything into my closets. Mother-in-law and aunt arrive and pretend not to notice dangerously bulging closet doors and my totally frazzled appearance.

Sunday: Prepare for Connor's surgery, try and cram in as many touristy things as possible, as feel guilty for all activities occurring during relatives' visits. Lie in bed at night thinking about all the ways surgery could possibly go wrong.

Monday: Connor's surgery. Fight with husband over who gets to stay at hospital. Either spend the night on uncomfortable chair in hospital room, or at home on comfortable bed wishing I was on uncomfortable chair in hospital room. Sleep poorly either way.

Tuesday: Recovery from Connor's surgery. Resume touristy things. Possible frantic preparation for IEP meeting, which they won't call us about until the day before it happens.

Wednesday: Possible IEP meeting. Forget everything that I wanted to discuss due to extreme exhaustion. Realize later that have agreed to have invisible gremlins help Connor in classroom, which will be paid in bowls of milk left outside the shoe cupboard. Develop nervous twitch.

Thursday: Have Connor's last meeting with Family Conversations and his Deaf Mentor. Cry.

Friday: Connor's last Family Conversations play group. Cry some more.

Saturday: Mother-in-law and aunt leave. Continue to feel guilty over number of things they are either dragged to or times they are left at completely loose ends.

Sunday: Collapse in exhaustion. Vow to never leave bed again.

So as you can see, we have a busy couple of weeks ahead. If I survive, I may need a bit of a vacation. I'm thinking Bermuda. Think my bed will fit on the plane?

~Jess

Closet Trauma

My sister is coming into town today!

This means that I have officially declared my house to be in a State of Emergency, because I have company coming and nothing is clean. I will now spend the next three hours frantically running around and shoving things into closets so that it at least LOOKS clean. My sister will be fine as long as she doesn't attempt to actually open any closets, which would be very dangerous. I love her dearly and would hate for anything to happen to her. Also I think that "Closet-Related Trauma" would look really, really stupid on a death certificate, so we're going to try to avoid that.

I have friends with spotlessly clean houses. I'll walk in and they'll say something like-- "Oh, I'm so sorry the house is such a mess!" I'll look around at the spotless carpets, dusted picture frames, and counters that do not have 6 inch piles of papers from the insurance company on them, and then try to resist the urge to strangle them over their spotless glass coffee tables.

The truth is that I keep the house cleaner when Jer's gone than I do when he's home. I think that this is because when he's gone I spend the evenings cleaning for lack of better things to do, but when he's home I'd rather spend the time cooking dinner and hanging out. I know if I start cleaning than he'll feel guilty and feel obligated to clean too, which is not what he wants to do after spending the last eight hours at work. So I stick to the bare minimum and the papers pile up.

I can't even blame the mess on Connor, as he isn't mobile. Well, I can indirectly blame it on him. 90% of the mess is related to him somehow. It's just not him MAKING the mess. Oh well.

Break's over. Back to cleaning.

~Jess