In Which Connor Plays Hard And Eden Sees The Seasons

The kids both had pretty good days today; I used my respite care time to take Eden out for a little mother-daughter time while Connor enjoyed listening to music and playing on his rocking horse at home.  He was pretty tuckered out by the end of the day and went down quickly, which I'm happy about.  The quad rugby game tomorrow might be loud, and he always has fewer sensory issues in regards to loud noises if he's well rested.

Recently I made a questionable parenting decision and introduced Eden to donuts, and she has now decided that they are her new favorite treat.  So we went out and ate donuts at four in the afternoon, because hey, any time is a good time for donuts.  Then we did a bit of shopping and headed home.

I finally took down the pine wreath on our door today and started decorating for spring; even though we've still got nearly a month until the season is here it's really starting to feel like it's coming up soon!  Eden's been noticing all the bulbs pushing up in the garden-- last year she was too overwhelmed to really notice the changing season.  

In Thailand they have three seasons: hot and wet, hot and dry, and slightly cooler.  And by 'slightly  cooler,' I mean only ninety degrees.  So the whole concept of the seasons changing is pretty fascinating for her.  She also lived in a pretty urban area before she joined our family, and I don't think she had a lot of opportunities to notice things like new growth on plants or the habits of local wildlife because there was very little of that.  

She's getting to know our local hummingbird, Gus, very well because he's always more demanding in the winter time.  Today when Eden and I left the house, Gus was sitting on the top of our dwarf Japanese maple only inches from our front walk.  He was all puffed up and looked extremely put out that his feeder had run low.  We all eyed each other for a bit while he scolded us, and then he flew up to the top of a cherry tree and let us pass.  There are no hummingbirds in Thailand, so Eden thinks he's pretty amazing.  I'm so glad I get to share this sort of thing with her!

But close encounters with hummingbirds aside, my girl is thoroughly tired of winter by this point and has announced that fall is her favorite season so far because it's "a little bit hot, but not a lot hot."  

We'll see what she thinks of spring this time around!

~Jess

In Which I Buy Tree Trimmings And Connor Runs Out Of Steam

I took the opportunity today while the kids were in school to go out and pick up some of my Christmas trimmings for this year.  This will be Eden's first Christmas home, and I want to do it right!  Of course, it made me want to put up all of my decorations now, and it's still too early.  This will be Eden's first Thanksgiving too, and I should probably wait until she's experienced all of the holidays before I start skipping over them.

Connor had a bit of a rough day; he didn't have any seizures, but he threw up all of his meals at school and at physical therapy he did an amazingly realistic impression of a sack of potatoes.  Not only did the kid not attempt to work on any of his normal exercises, but he was actively trying to lie down every time we sat him up.  He spent the entire trip back home alternating between signing "tired" and "sad," and when I gave in and put him down around five in the evening he was out in less than five minutes.  Part of it may just be the season; we're getting into the time when it's dark outside at a depressingly early hour, and goodness knows it always makes me want to hibernate.  I hope he's not coming down with something; maybe it was just one of those days.

Hopefully he'll feel better tomorrow!

~Jess

In Which We Gear Up For Another Busy Week

Connor did well at school today, and it looks like he's fully recovered!  I'm excited that he shook this bug off so quickly and seems to be bouncing right back to his usual self.

We've got another busy week coming up, though a lot of it is actually appointments for me; I'm headed to the dentist and the eye doctor.  Since I spend a lot of time acting as a caregiver for somebody else, it's easy to forget to make sure I'm taking care of myself too!  I've scheduled these appointments a couple of times in the past only to cancel them when something Connor had going on took priority, and now I'm way, way overdue for both.  I'm down to my last pair of contacts, and I don't even want to think about the current state of my teeth.  So I'll be getting those taken care of next week while Connor's in school.  If I don't take care of myself it will be really hard to do a good job taking care of somebody else.

We'll be spending most of the weekend trying to catch up on things around here; the house is a shambles and I have crafting supplies scattered everywhere.  It's time for some major cleaning and to think about getting the house ready for winter, which is fast approaching.  The cats seem to sense the coming weather change and are busy shedding copious amounts of fur on every available surface. 

The gerbils seem largely unaffected, though they have slowed down quite a bit.  This is probably less because of the rapid approach of cooler weather and more because they are little geriatric rodents now.  Gerbils typically only live two to four years, and our little guys are over two and a half now.  They've been fantastic pets (other than that whole cannibalism thing that got us off to a rough start) and Connor seems to really enjoy them.  We'll probably get a new pair once these little guys have moved on; I think it's nice to have something in Connor's room that he can interact with, and they're certainly easy to take care of. 

Hopefully they'll stick around a while longer!

~Jess

In Which Connor And I Go To Watson's

The little guy had a couple of seizures this morning at school, but he perked up after his quiet time so I decided it was time to go out.

It's the part of the year where I'm tired of the weather being so gloomy and, except for the heather and primroses, everything being so uniformly green, green, green (we don't do brown here because in the winter time everything is covered in moss) so I badly want to start gardening.  Of course it's too early for the gardening season to have really started up here, but that doesn't stop me from planning.  I knew I needed to see a little more color soon or I was going to go nuts, so I loaded Connor up and headed off to Watson's. 

Watson's is this gigantic glass and steel greenhouse palace set off in the farmland surrounding my town, and it's basically a nursery and home decor store and tea shop all rolled into one.  Getting there is a pleasant drive down Pioneer past all the little houses from the early 1900s-- including the dilapidated-but-still-gorgeous Victorian with all the gingerbread that sports a ten foot tall statue of an anatomically correct heart on a stake in the front yard.  Keep on going and you'll pass the place that I secretly want to buy even though we're happily settled (and also since it's two story would be completely impractical for us and would be way out of our price range anyway): the colonial-style farmhouse with the long apple-tree lined promenade. Once you get out of town, you hook a right where the road splits, pass the salmon hatchery, the hazelnut farm and the pink house, and right after the yard with the giant dead tree covered in wind socks you'll see what looks like a mile of glass roof winking just down the hill.  That's Watson's.

Watson's is pricey, but it's great to walk around and window shop in.  The only thing it's missing is a book store, and I think if it had one of those I would probably just appropriate one of their larger flower pots and move right in.  This is the time of year they bring out their brightest glazed pots, gazing balls and garden statues, and they look so fantastic after three solid months of nothing but green that I just want to buy them all and take them home, even thought they'd look absolutely ridiculous in my garden, which is not a fuchsia-colored-gazing-ball sort of place.

So Connor and I wandered around for an hour or so, reveling in the color and enjoying ourselves.  I ended up walking out with about twenty lily-of-the-valley bulbs, even though it's not really the season to plant them.  Lily-of-the-valley will live through anything.  Also they spread like gangbusters, so they'll be going in a contained section of my shade garden off the wheelchair ramp. 

I also bought a pack of trillium because I couldn't resist-- I absolutely love them.  I'd never heard of trillium before I moved up here as they didn't grow well in the relatively dry area of Texas I grew up in.  I went for a walk through a marshy area in the spring the first year we were here, stumbled upon a huge clump of them blooming like white stars under a grove of sitka spruce and was utterly enchanted.  It's probably not the right time of year to plant them either, but I don't care. 

I garden by the "whatever survives stays" method, and hey, it's worth a shot.

~Jess

In Which We Were Snowed In

Hi!

I am extremely happy to say that our Internet finally came back on this morning.  Our power flickered off and on this week but thankfully mostly stayed on, but our Internet has been down since Thursday.  Apparently a tree hit something important. 

Trees hit a lot of things in our neighborhood; our house is actually one of the only ones on the street that didn't lose at least one tree to the heavy load of ice and snow.  A few pine trees bent and broke in half, but it was the maples and cherry trees that suffered the worst damage-- most of them either lost huge branches or in a few cases, simply fell over.  We ended up getting about eight inches of snow, and then we got freezing rain for two days, which formed a thick layer of ice over the snow.  If you were careful you could actually walk (or more accurately, skid) along on top of the snow without leaving footprints.  It was crazy. 


We got off pretty lucky; I'll need to go up and check the roof because some of the neighbors' overhanging trees dumped a massive load of ice and snow on it once temperatures rose and it started melting, but otherwise we didn't have any major issues.  We're on high ground, so the flooding currently going on shouldn't affect us either.  Connor has been off of school since Tuesday, and Jer ended up home from work most of the week too, so we kind of had a miniature vacation. 

The temperatures are back up above freezing and the snow and ice are melting (hence the flooding issues), so the streets are mostly clear now.  The biggest issue is the downed trees-- many of them blocked roads and did a lot of damage. 

The pets had a bit of an adventure too-- a couple of days ago Jer and I were startled awake by a tremendous crash.  At first we thought a tree might have gone through a window.  After searching the rest of the house and coming up with nothing, I opened the door to Connor's room.

The gerbil tank was on its side on the floor shattered into several hundred pieces.  Loki was balanced on three legs on the plastic frame of the tank.  He was using the fourth to fish around in the shavings inside.  Apparently he'd snuck into the room when Jer went in to give Connor his medication, managed to wedge himself between the tank and the wall and then shoved the whole thing off the table.  He's nothing if not persistent.

I leaned over as far as I could to avoid the broken glass on the floor and grabbed Loki, who was too busy trying to catch a gerbil dinner to try and get away, and deposited him outside of the room.  Then I went back to play a fun game of "Stick My Hands In Paper Shavings And Broken Glass" to see if the gerbils had survived their unplanned aerial adventure.  Amazingly, when I clicked my tongue at them like I usually do before I feed them, two little heads popped out of the shavings.  Cranston had a tiny cut on his heel, but otherwise they were completely unscathed.

Those are some seriously lucky gerbils.

So they spent some quality time together inside their gerbil wheel while I cleaned up the mess and braved the weather to find them a new tank.  They're lucky the worst was over by that point, or they would have been stuck in our bathtub or something until we could leave the house again. 

Crazy cat.

~Jess

In Which We All Feel Under The Weather And Winter Is Coming

Jer, Connor and I spent a quiet Veteran's Day at home today.  The little guy was off from school, but the weather was pretty gloomy and rainy outside and everyone in the house is feeling a little under the weather, so we figured a laid back day was the way to go.  I was pretty sure that Connor and I just had some mild allergies and I actually felt pretty good today, but around bedtime my throat started getting sore and Jeremy began coughing. 

That man has a cast iron immune system, so if he feels like he's coming down with something than I'm sure the rest of us already have it.  We're supposed to have respite care tomorrow, but we may have to cancel depending on how we're feeling. 

So I'll pop in the store tomorrow and grab some lemons; any time I'm feeling sick I mix up a quick batch of honey lemon tisane and sip on it all day.  There's nothing like it for soothing a sore throat.  Sometimes I'll add a little ginger for an extra kick or a bit of vanilla sugar to smooth it out, but most of the time I keep it simple.  Or if I'm too sick to go to the store for lemons, I'll just eat honey with a spoon.  It's the best tasting cough medicine ever.

We did do a bit of work today-- we're slowly getting the house ready for the winter season, so we changed out the heating filter, replaced a lot of light bulbs and started raking up the leaves, which is quite the job in the Pacific Northwest.  I'll be cleaning out the gutters and winter-proofing our hose connections this weekend.  The nights are starting to dip pretty close to freezing, so it's about that time.  It doesn't seem possible that winter is coming up so soon!

~Jess