In Which Connor Is Sick Again And Our Yard Gets An Instant Facelift

Connor had his last day of school today, and it was a super small, laid back class.  I don't think he's quite realized he's out for the summer yet, so I expect him to probably freak out every time we drive by his school for the next couple of weeks like he did last year.  I think he figures I've just forgotten where it is or something, and if he can yell at me loud enough I'll clue in and go drop him off. 

We probably won't be driving by his school any time in the next few days though, because late this afternoon he started running a fever again and by the end of the day he'd had five seizures.  We'll be taking him in to the doctor's first thing tomorrow morning to see if they can rule out the most obvious things, like a return of his ear infection.  He's conked out right now, and we'll take it easy tomorrow too.

Jer's taking a few weeks vacation so that we can enjoy the summer together, and that started this week.  I'm enjoying having him home already; it's so cool that I can go to the bathroom without an audience in the middle of the day!  Otherwise Connor gets to be my bathroom buddy during the work week, since he needs eye-on care pretty much all the time.  Jer immediately got to work and pulled a bunch of weeds out in the yard, because he's amazing like that.  I'm a pretty lucky gal!

We have new neighbors on one side of our house, and they've been doing some hard work too.  Yesterday we heard a bunch of noise coming from that side of the yard, and then the big Japanese maple on their property that overhung our fence on that side started disappearing in large sections.  A few minutes later one of our new neighbors knocked on the door to collect the branches that had fallen on our side of the fence.  Apparently the tree whacked him on the face a couple of times while he was mowing the lawn, so he got out the chainsaw and chopped it down.  It makes me think we probably shouldn't get on our new neighbors' bad side-- at least anywhere that they have access to power tools.

They seem pretty nice, though.

Anyway, now our yard looks completely different; I keep looking outside and thinking something's missing.  It's that same sort of startled feeling I get when I look in the mirror right after getting a major hair cut.  It's way, way more open now near my herb garden and much more sunny.  The stuff that I had planted in that part of the yard was all for part shade, and now it's in full sun and in danger of frying.  So I'm thinking I might either need to transplant some things or else plant a tree of my own.  A dwarf fruit tree might fit pretty well in that spot, or maybe I'll put in some highbush blueberries. 

Decisions, decisions!

~Jess

In Which We Celebrate Thanksgiving

Happy Turkey Day, everyone!

This year was the first in a long while that I wasn't cooking a ridiculous amount of food for just the three of us.  Instead, I made mashed potatoes and we carried them down to the home of our neighbors, who had graciously invited us to their family Thanksgiving.  There were enough folks to need two tables, which with my large extended family felt just like the holiday I remember growing up.  The food tasted fantastic, the hosts were gracious and the company just lovely.  Jeremy and I had a fantastic time.

Connor also seemed to really enjoy himself after he finished his nap.  He snoozed for a while before dinner in my arms and later then in an easy chair.  I could have done with a bit of a nap too.  The little stinker literally did not go to sleep last night; he had a 7:30am bedtime and slept until just after 10:00am.  I guess Santa and that giant Christmas tree were just too exciting!

After he finished up his nap, he perked up and turned on the charm, especially after he discovered a new favorite food: glazed sweet potatoes.  Or rather, just the brown sugar glaze-- he sucked it off the potato pieces and then spit out the sweet potato. 

Oh well.  I ate enough for three Connors, so that probably makes up for it.

So anyway, it's been a hard year for the little guy, but I'm just so thankful to see him still smiling and that cheery personality once again really shining through.  And I'm so grateful to have Jeremy by my side through it all.  Here's to family, good friends and neighbors, and all those people who make the world just a little bit sweeter.

Like you, dear readers.  A very happy Thanksgiving to you all!

~Jess

In Which I Have An Interesting Encounter And Write A Really Short Blog Post Because I Am Tired

Yesterday I'd just gotten back to the house from my (very short) walk with Connor when there was a knock on the door.  I opened it to discover one of the neighbors I hadn't met yet waiting on the front porch with her dog-- she'd obviously been out for a walk too. 

"Hi!" she chirped, giving me a friendly grin.  "Is your mom home?"

I gave her a sort of stunned look.

Obviously thinking that I was a shy or perhaps sort of surly teenager, she tried again.  "Your mom-- is she home?" 

"Um," I replied in a very articulate fashion.  I was still kind of in shock.  Her grin faltered a little bit.

"Wait a second," she said, giving me a closer look.  "Are you mom?"

The contents of the ensuing conversation are unimportant for the purposes of this blog, but trust me when I say that the rest of it did not get any less awkward from that point on. 

I'd just dyed my hair the night before, which might have had something to do with it.  I'd dyed it because I now have large streaks of gray running through my formerly mouse-brown tresses.  I also have crow's feet.  Two years of frequent adrenaline rushes, little sleep and tons of stress have not done good things to my body, and by now I'm used to being mistaken for being a lot older than I really am.  So I was a little taken aback to be confused for someone closer to my future daughter's age (twelve) than my actual age (pushing thirty).

I'll have to remember which brand of dye-in-a-box I used.  This stuff is magic.   

~Jess

In Which We Have A Lovely Day

Today was a lovely, sunny day-- something that's been relatively scarce around here for the last week or two.  I know that summers here are usually pretty short, but six weeks is a little ridiculous even for this area.  At any rate, with it so nice outside we just couldn't stay indoors, so we headed out to soak up some sun. 

Connor and I took a nice long walk around the neighborhood.  All of the neighbors seemed to be out and about too-- mostly walking their dogs or catching up on yard work.  We made a slow circuit around the block, stopping to chat every few houses with the neighbors we know.  Every once in a while a large cloud of children would speed past us on their bicycles, which Connor thought was enormously funny.  He got particularly excited when a kid of about ten or eleven slowed down and rang the bell for him-- he even turned his bike back around and rode past us a second and third time so Connor could hear it again.  It was really cute, and we're lucky to live in a place with such great people!

I was a little disappointed that I didn't see one particular group of folks out when Connor and I took our walk, though.  I'd run some errands earlier that morning without the little guy along and was driving down our street on the way back to our house when I passed three men out in a driveway.  Surrounding the driveway was a small clump of children.  I slowed down because I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

The men were probably in their thirties, and they were dressed in full karate gear.  Two of the men wore black belts and one wore a red belt.  The three of them were doing nonstop back flips and jump kicks, stopping only to spar with each other before launching themselves into the air again.  All the kids were cheering. 

I am totally not making this up.  Seriously, do we live in the coolest neighborhood ever, or what? 

So after checking to see that our martial arts neighbors were (sadly) not out in their yard anymore, we stopped by the playground across the street from our house, where Connor enjoyed playing on the slide and the bouncing duck.  You know what I'm talking about-- it's a duck, and on a big spring, and you ride on it and it bounces.  What the heck do you call those things anyway?  And why, for that matter, is it a duck?  Wouldn't it make more sense for it to be a frog or something?

So while we played on the bouncing duck (or whatever that thing is called) I also kept an eye out for the owl; the park has the playground carved out of it and otherwise is several acres of woodland, so it's likely that he's got a nest somewhere in there.  That would explain why he was so close to our house.  We didn't catch sight of him though; he must be holed up somewhere sleeping, like owls are supposed to do in the daytime.  The only wildlife we saw out and about was this squirrel, who thought we looked suspicious and watched us from a perch in the trees the entire time we were there.

Anyway, after that we headed back home, and Connor spent some time indoors with his daddy while I finished out the afternoon by weeding the garden. 

So all in all it was a lovely day!

~Jess

In Which Our Day Is Exponentially Better Than Most Of Last Month

Today it was back to business as usual! 

We did hear from the neurologist this morning, and he's got a new medication he wants to try Connor on.  However, the medication level has to be upped very slowly because the body has to get used to metabolizing it.  If it's upped it too quickly it can make all your skin fall off and die.  Um, ow.  So Connor will be building up to a therapeutic dose of this medication over an eight week period, while slowly weaning down off the Trileptal.  I don't want to get the name of the stuff wrong and we haven't received orders for it yet, so I'll wait to tell you the name of the new medication until it's sitting in my hot little hand.  I also spent three hours on the phone with the insurance company, because they are convinced that our pediatrician who moved away over two months ago (I believe she is currently in another country now, so that's about as far out of pocket as you can get) is still Connor's primary care manager even though she doesn't have any appointments available and obviously is not commuting to the hospital.  That would be a long commute.  So they won't assign us another one until we can prove that she is no longer here.  And we have at least three appointments we need to make with specialists, which require referrals from said pediatrician.  Also we have eight billion pieces of paperwork we need signed, also by said pediatrician, for school.  And did I mention that school starts in a month?  Glorious.

So anyway, to cheer me up after all of the hoops I had to jump through, we went to the library today and I let Connor pick out a new theme box for the week from a couple of choices.  He pounced on the "Fun With Music" box, and when I started pulling things out of it at the library to make sure they were all there before checking it out, he got really mad that I wouldn't let him play with the super-fancy keyboard (which I discovered when we got home is the Loudest Keyboard In The World) immediately.  So he started shrieking at the top of his lungs.  Still in the library. 

We checked out really quickly.  Connor trumps the keyboard in both the volume and the nails-on-chalkboard categories.

Then Connor and I sat down together outside and had what was probably a totally ineffectual conversation on appropriate behavior in the library.  And then we went on the swings, because they were there and about halfway through my lecture he stopped paying attention and started asking for swings instead.  I am completely incapable of denying my child something if he goes to all the trouble of asking for it, even if it is during my lecture about playing The Loudest Keyboard That Ever There Was in the middle of the library (though I guess I did deny him the keyboard, so maybe I just thought going on the swings sounded like a good idea).  Oh well.  He had a great time on the swings and burned off some energy, and then as a result I was able to actually go sit down with him in Central Perk-- one of my local haunts-- and read one of the random books I'd managed to grab off the library shelf as I rushed past with my firetruck-imitating child towards the check-out station.  It probably helped that I stuffed the kid half-full of gooey warm brownie as I was reading. 

Yes, I was a virtual paragon of fantastic parenting today. 

Anyway, then we went home and surveyed the sheer awesomeness that is now our front lawn, which put me in the best mood ever-- even a better mood than I was already in from the swings and the reading and the brownie and whatnot.  See, when we bought this house it was for three reasons:

1) It was in the Puyallup school district.
2) It was a rambler.
3) It had a bathroom that could be converted for wheelchair access.

That was it.  We didn't buy it because it was in a good neighborhood or had a layout we were particularly pleased with.  It was one of two houses we had to choose from in our price range that fit the criteria above in the entire city of Puyallup when we needed to buy, and nothing else-- even whether or not we liked the house-- had anything to do with our purchase.  Which is a really weird way to buy a house, if you think about it.

So anyway, we totally lucked out, because not only is our house now the most awesome house in the world and quite possibly the universe thanks to these people, and also these people, as well as all of these people, but our neighbors are also awesome.  I'm not just talking about neighbors who will wave at you when you go by in your car, stop on the sidewalk to talk to you, invite you over for dinner and barbecues, and even do a bunch of weeding and take your yard waste to the dump for you.  They do all of that awesome stuff, of course.  But these are neighbors that are so incredibly awesome that when they find out what an unbelievably horrible month you've been having and that you're having trouble keeping up with the front yard because you are spending all of your free time attempting to use massive amounts of chocolate to induce an amnesic state or possibly a coma as a defense mechanism instead of doing chores, they have people come in and clean up and mow and mulch and weed and trim and put new stone down at the curb and make your yard look about 8,000 times more awesome than it has since you moved in, and possibly better than it ever has in the history if its existence.  Yes, we're talking that awesome.  And then they refuse to let you pay for anything.  See how awesome our neighbors are?  I believe they are off the scale.  I would take pictures of it for you so that you can see just how amazing it looks right now, but then there would be pictures of the front of my house on the Internet.  So you'll just have to imagine the awesomeness.

So anyway, how's that for a fantastic day?  It involved the library, swings, a coffee shop, brownies, seriously awesome neighbors, a great looking front yard, and, maybe best of all, a happy, relaxed, seizure-free child.

Things are looking up!

~Jess