Listing

1. I really am sort of listing. I am really really tired, although less so now than yesterday. This is what I did yesterday:

7:00: Woke up, got kids up and dressed and breakfasted.

8:00: Loaded Iyyar and Avtalyon into stroller and took Barak to bus stop. Put Barak on bus.

8:00-9:00: Went to bank, bakery, produce store, and fish store for Shabbos supplies, with Avtalyon and Iyyar in tow.

9:00: Dropped Iyyar off at playgroup.

9:15: Asnat came and took Avtalyon outside to play.

9:45: Heard huge screams from outside and found Avtalyon being carried in by Asnat, with blood pouring out of his mouth. Am told that he has smacked his face on stair while going up steps; examine tooth-shaped gash inside upper lip.

10:15: Took Avtalyon to doctor for conveniently timed 18-month checkup, and also to get his mouth looked at. Walked just over a mile to get there. Forget to bring paper order for my 1-hour glucose test, which I was going to do at the same time and is now about two weeks overdue.

10:45: Avtalyon's mouth pronounced close, but no stitches. The doctor thought about it for a little bit before deciding he'd be OK without. Also discussed issue of jaundice with doctor. More on this later. Got Avtalyon's polio shot #4, bringing him up to date on all immunizations.

11:30: Went to supermarket next to pediatrician to buy ice cream sandwiches, so that Iyyar's incredibly expensive dairy- and soy-free coconut milk ice cream sandwiches would not be the only ice cream sandwiches in the house when ice cream is to be distributed. His sandwiches are almost $1/each, and they are small. I bought 12 normal-sized ice cream sandwiches for $2.99. Avtalyon ate one of them on the way home, making a spectacular mess, but given his morning I felt he deserved it. Walked home, another mile and change.

12:30: Picked up Iyyar and went home.

1:00: Cleaned up Avtalyon and put him down for a nap. Spent next hour frantically cooking and cleaning. Made zucchini soup, salmon teriyaki, boiled potatoes for potato salad. Failed to fold laundry.

2:00: Went to meet Barak at bus stop. Bus did not stop at correct corner and ergo Barak did not get off; chased bus, screaming, at a full sprint for two full city blocks. (While in seventh month.) Caught bus and retrieved sobbing kindergartner. Gave bus driver piece of mind. More on this later, too.

2:15: Returned home with somewhat consoled but still traumatized kindergartner, turning him over to care of husband, who has promised to bathe children and mop kitchen floor. Hear Avtalyon waking up from nap. Leave for bus stop.

2:30: Get on bus to go to Target/supermarket #2. Poor timing, I know, but we were out of EVERYTHING.

2:45. Go to supermarket #2 for soy yogurts and the handful of other items only available at supermarket #2. Walk over to Target, buy a Diet Coke, and sit in the cafe for about twenty minutes feeling leg muscles seize.

2:45-3:30: Buy $130 worth of Target stuff: detergent, cereal, wipes, and other essential miscellany, including new sneakers for Avtalyon and Iyyar, which miraculously are available in the correct sizes in the same brand they already have. Knit two rows of glove cuff, then take cab home.

3:45: Walk into house to be mobbed by children demanding grapes. Appease children and start cooking IBS-friendly imitation of chicken marsala. Pleased to see that children have in fact been bathed and floor is mobbed. Praise husband fulsomely. Try sneakers on children and discover that despite being the correct sizes and the same brand of sneaker they just outgrew, new sneakers do not fit and will have to be returned.

4:oo-6:30: Finish chicken, rice and potato salad while appeasing children further. Wash dishes and floor again. Point out Shabbos yogurts and instruct older two children to pick up living room and bedroom of toys. Considering their ages, they do this pretty well--it takes less time than doing it myself, which is definitely a milestone. Reward said children with Shabbos yogurts. Feed Iyyar Iyyar-friendly piece of chicken, feed Barak and Avtalyon red peppers and cucumbers and cheese (on different tables). Eat snack-sized Mounds bar while nobody is watching. Slip one to Barak while nobody is watching with praise for fabulous cleaning job.

6:30: Realize what time it is and shriek in horror. Kitchen is clean but I have not showered. Shower at the speed of light, get dressed, and free husband from baby-monitoring duty. Light candles. Read Danny and the Dinosaur for the nth time and put children to bed.

7:00: Sit down in kitchen, fully resolved to never move again.

7:02: Two children come trickling out of room for potty/book runs and child #3 starts singing "boop! boop!" in his crib.

7:03: Get up, change diaper, and begin wrangling children back into bed. Meet with resistance. Offer resistance of my own. Begin World War III. Prevail.

8:00: Sit down again.

8:01. Husband comes home from maariv. Serve and eat dinner. It is yummy.

9:00: Husband's chavrusa comes over to walk with husband to oneg. Both leave at around 9:30. I clean up kitchen and silently pray that this is not the night that my neighbor goes into labor and I go over there to be with her kids while she and husband are at the hospital. Prayers are answered in the affirmative.

9:45: Collapse into bed, sweaty and exhausted.

12:00 AM: Wake up realizing that husband is not home and really really should be by now. Begin to panic in earnest at around 12:30 am. Husband comes home at 12:45. I am wide awake by now, in full neurotic terror mode and very very itchy (more on this later, too). He had no idea what time it was and apologizes profusely. Forgive husband. Go back to bed but can't sleep. Am still awake at around 3.

6:30 AM: Realize that Barak is standing next to my bed and probably has been for a while. Tell Barak through pillow that he can go into my office and get his little Lego and take it into the kitchen to play. Barak vanishes instantly and I get another hour and a half of near-sleep, during which I completely ignore sounds of chaos from throughout apartment, choosing to allow husband this vital bonding time.

8:00 AM. Drag self out of bed. Stumble into kitchen. Barak wants to know if we can go play.

"Where do you want to go?"

"To the Shapiros' house."

"Now?!"

"Can we?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm too tired."

"WHY?!"

Items 2, 3, and 4 TK. I'm too tired for those, too.

Gloveliness

I love sock yarn. I love the feel of it, the hand-dyed colors it comes in, and I love knitting it on those itty bitty needles (sick, I know, but true). I love how portable it is and how far it goes. What I don't love, however, is putting it on my feet, where no one can see it. So I don't knit a lot of socks.

I do knit other things with it, though. Baby sweaters and hats; sometimes kids' hats; and gloves. Oh, I do love gloves. They take forever and are incredibly fiddly--all those fingers! but when they are done they are, to my mind, about the nicest use to which sock yarn could possibly be put.

I just finished these. Nice gloves, awful picture. It's hard to see the colors but it's black and very dark reddish purple. Grandma E gave me the yarn, which she got in the Socks That Rock sock club and professed not to like. I can see the objection for socks--who wants to knit black socks?--but the colors show up beautifully outside, in sunlight.

Strangely, I myself have only two pairs of handknit gloves. I make them and then invariably think of someone who needs and deserves a really really nice handknitted gift and off they go. Just cast on a pair of these though, in some beautiful gold Koigu I got in the yarn swap with Cyndy lo these many years. (I'm still working my way through those boxes. It will take a while!)

Mmmm.

Mistakes

Last week, at Barak's kindergarten orientation, I heard--or at least I thought I heard--an announcement that on half-days there would be no busing for the kindergartners. This made perfect sense, since many of the bus drivers are not Jewish, half-days are mostly legal holidays, and of course the non-Jewish bus drivers are not going to be driving schoolbuses on Thanksgiving etc. So I told Barak last night that there would be no bus today, and this morning we all set out on foot on our way to his school--it's not far, much closer than where he was last year.

On the way, though, we saw--what's this? mothers and kids at bus stops. Hmm. I saw someone I knew. "Is there busing for [name of other school] today?" I asked, thinking her boys went there. It transpired that no, her boys (older than Barak) go to Barak's school, and there was his bus pulling up the street now. Um. Okay. Barak was perfectly happy about this and climbed on. I felt a little disconcerted but it was clearly his bus and his bus driver, so... okay. Off they went.

We were only a block away from home and it seemed silly to go straight back--nice day and all--so we went to the Other Produce Market, which is significantly farther away than our Usual Produce Market but has much, much better produce, and lower prices on some things as well. Unfortunately, the big drawback, much more than the distance, is its extreme unfriendliness to double strollers. The aisles are so narrow that if there is anyone else there with a cart you are stuck; more problematic, no one can pass you, and everyone who does want to pass you expects you to get out of the way for them, immediately, which I guess is not totally unreasonable but does make it extremely hard to shop--since you are always having to move away from the produce you are attempting to buy, you see.

At some point, after the third or fourth time relocating self and stroller, I had finally gotten myself within range of the black plums when the Mexican stock guy came past sweeping up fallen produce from the floor. I moved my stroller out of the way so he could go by, thereby putting the produce bins momentarily within reach of small hands, and then suddenly realized that Avtalyon had seized his opportunity. What's that in his mouth? A green... toy... no, not a toy... DEADLY GREEN JALAPENO PEPPER. Ack ack ack! I snatched it away from him at the same moment that the Mexican stock guy spotted it. I think he was at least as horrified as I was. Eyes wide, he shook his head at Avtalyon. "Bad idea, my friend." Avtalyon, of course, not having broken the skin of the pepper, was indignant. I eat peppers all the time! It's a great idea! What's up with this snatching away my pepper? It was right there in reach...

Anyway. I paid for my produce, we went home, I put Avtalyon down for a nap and Iyyar and I made pesto, cleaned up the kitchen, made lunch for Abba (for the record, white rice, sauteed-into-oblivion red peppers and onions, mushrooms, and a Trader Joe's fake Italian sausage--quite delicious if I do say so, and oddly reminiscent of paella) and folded some laundry. All the time, I was feeling uncomfortable about the bus. Would there be a bus in the afternoon? Maybe the announcement had just been "no afternoon busing?" That wouldn't make much sense, but... nightmare visions of Barak abandoned at school persisted. I decided to be on the safe side and called the office. "Is there afternoon busing today for the boys?" "Yes." "Okay. Thanks. Just wanted to be sure." So at ten to twelve, I woke up Avtalyon, stuck him in the stroller, got Iyyar into shoes and off we went to the bus stop.

Which seemed... strangely deserted. Why is no one else here? I sat there knitting at 12, 12:05, 12:10. Dismissal is at 12 and Barak is the very first stop, so he should really be here by now. 12:15. 12:20. I knocked on the door of a friend on that block. "Isn't there busing this afternoon?"

"There's busing."

"Why aren't you outside?"

"Dismissal isn't until 1:15."

"No, it's at 12. I looked at the calendar. Legal holiday, dismissal at 12:00." She frowned and went to get the calendar. I started to feel a sense of impending panic. "Huh. You're right. Legal holiday 12:00... for kindergarten. First through fourth is 1:15."

Oh. No.

She already had the phone. "Hi, this is... and Mrs. Uberimma is here and wondering about busing and... oh, he's sitting outside the office? Okay, I'll give her the phone." She handed me the phone, which Avtalyon promptly grabbed and pressed the "stop" button on, disconnecting her. She called again. Guess what: no busing for kindergarten in the afternoon. Barak is sitting on the bench outside her office, not having been picked up. I apologize, promise I'll be right there, and walk as fast as I possibly can the six or seven blocks to school, where Barak is sitting alone and morose on the bench, sweatshirt hood pulled up over his head. I apologize to the office lady, who is extremely nice about it and assures me that it was just a miscommunication and I wasn't the only one. I apologize to Barak. I explain to him what happened, but he doesn't really get it.

Barak was clearly upset, but not saying much about it, until we got across the main street and he decided to sit down on the sidewalk and refuse to move. Then, after the rational approach had failed and I started walking without him, he only came to me by rolling and crawling along the (extremely dirty) sidewalk, while screaming. Sigh. Home again, and I made lunch, and decided to let Barak have macaroni and cheese without spinach. I let him grate the cheese. I apologized again. I did screw up, but it wasn't for any want of trying to get it right; I should have specified kindergarten when I called, but didn't know I needed to, and the person at the office didn't know I was talking about kindergarten when I just said "boys."

Barak wanted to know why I hadn't just come to get him when the bus didn't come. I explained to him that I'd thought he was on the bus, I thought the bus might just be late, and I was afraid that if I went to the yeshiva, he might then get dropped off at the street corner and I wouldn't be there, and that would have been worse than him sitting in front of the office. I reminded him that we'd thought there were no buses, but then there were buses; I explained that I'd called the office and they'd told me that there was going to be a bus that afternoon and then there wasn't. "Someone made a mistake," I said again.

"Yeah," said Barak, accusingly. "YOU did."

What could I say? He was right.

Assorted

I keep meaning to post. Really, I do. And I mentally compose posts, or parts of posts, pretty frequently. I just never manage to remember them while I'm sitting at the computer. So I think I'll open this window and start a list and see where it leads.

1. Knitting. Did I tell you I visited Sarah in Michigan a few weeks ago? It was great. I knitted a lot. We ate yummy produce from a farm stand and I bought some new sock yarn and a book and one of these, which I love. I've been squeezing in a lot of knitting lately--if you're on ravelry, go look.

2. I feel like every third post I say something like, "Avtalyon is being really hilarious lately." But it's true, pretty much all the time. He's such a clown. He isn't just funny, he's funny on purpose, and deliberately does things to make people laugh. He also imitates Iyyar, which is, well, hilarious. Potbellied nineteen-month-old swaggering--yes, swaggering--through the living room in pirate hat while attempting Iyyar's signature tough-guy noises? You'd laugh too. He also imitates Iyyar's firetruck imitation. And does it really well.

3. Barak started kindergarten this week. Totally overwhelming for me--the long day, the schoolbus, all of it. He seems very happy. The first day he came home with a plastic bag full of woodchips and informed me that he and some other boys had found worms and he'd brought some home. I didn't see any worms in the bag, though.

4. Iyyar also started playgroup, at the same place where I sent Barak two years ago. I wasn't thrilled with it then, but then as now it is the best available local option. It's that, or send him someplace far enough away that it won't be walkable--which I don't want to do now for the same reasons I didn't want to do it then. So that's where he is. I'm seeing the same things I saw with Barak that I wasn't happy with then, but she clearly likes me now--I am never, ever late for pickup, which I think is mainly why, plus my checks never bounce and Barak was well behaved--so she took it quite well when I told her I was relocating the cleaning products in the bathroom out of children's reach. A couple of weeks ago Iyyar saw a bottle of Mr. Clean on the counter and asked, "Can I have some dat?" I am not taking more chances than I have to.

5. I am slowly putting together plans for who will do what with the kids when I am IY"H in the hospital having a baby, as well as plans for potential return trips to the hospital should the jaundice strike a fourth time. Which, let's face it, it probably will. What makes me insane is that despite the fact that I've had jaundice requiring treatment with every single child, and that two of those children had bilirubin levels that shot up 10 points in less than a day, well into the scary land of brain-damage-and-death potential, no pediatrician in my practice will go to bat with my insurance company to keep a newborn with elevated bilirubin in the hospital an extra day.

Let's be clear here. What I asked was, "Will you, if I have a baby with a bilirubin over 10 at 2 days, keep the baby under bililights in the mother-baby unit? This would mean that said baby could avoid going home to get sicker and sicker, a return trip to the hospital that would mean a peds admission to an almost certainly highly contagious floor, and the attendant risks/issues thereof." Clearly better for the baby in every way. But no. The answer is always no. Even though, with my track record, this is incredibly likely to be the case. Nobody will even try to get an exception from the insurance company. Avtalyon, by the way, had every risk factor on the list for jaundice, and the wouldn't keep him either. This is why I wanted to be proactive, so I wouldn't again be trying to fight the system while postpartum and still shellshocked from labor.

There is one pediatrician left in the practice--the one who dropped the ball the first go-round with Iyyar. I have an appointment with him on Friday.

6. Avtalyon is getting pretty verbal. He loves saying "thank you," which he pronounces in a way spookily reminiscent of my grandmother imitating my grandfather saying "thank you" in English. Tank ee-you! If I offer him a pacifier, he cries "puggie!" delightedly and then comes toward me with a wide-open mouth. If I ask him what's in his mouth, he sticks out his tongue. He also likes to keep me informed about what he's doing. For example, squatting down with a look of intense concentration, turning purple, and then gasping, "Boop!"

7. It's kind of incredible how much parve stuff is manufactured on equipment that also processes dairy. I went to Trader Joe's today with Iyyar to get the only totally dairy-free rice milk I've found and tried to also get him crackers. Trader Joe's sells a LOT of different kinds of crackers. Only one of them is totally dairy-free. We bought three boxes.

8. I've been giving both kids sunflower seed butter sandwiches for lunch (peanut-free classrooms). They are totally fooled and have not said a word. To make sure the moros know what they are, I wrote on both of the sandwich bags in black Sharpie, "Not peanut butter." Barak came home on Friday saying, "My morah says I can't have tr... tr... turmumps either. " "You can't have tree nuts?" "No." I think I should put a more informative note in his lunchbox tomorrow.

9. Barak has gotten really, really bedtime-resistant lately. We were away this Shabbos and he stayed up till 10:45 with no trouble at all. I tried to get him to go to bed, but he reeeeeally didn't want to, and I just didn't want to abandon the seuda to try to make him, which would have involved waking up the other two and then having to deal with that and probably not getting anything to eat myself. (And there was steak. I wanted some.) Next morning, he was up at 7, bright-eyed etc., to be offered a chocolate muffin (tell me again how this differs from a cupcake?) by the baalas ha'bayis. Not only was he fine all day long, but when we got home, after 10 PM, as I was speedily transferring Iyyar and Avtalyon into their respective beds from the cab, he settled into a kitchen chair and requested Lego (request summarily denied) and then cheese (I relented). He refused point-blank to go to bed, such that forcing him would have required a full-on battle that probably would have woken the other two. As I was considering this, the phone rang, and then I noticed Barak asleep in the chair--he does crack eventually. I hung up. He denied ever having been asleep. Kind of like his father. This morning again he was up at 7, but showing signs of collapse by around 4. As I've been writing this, he's come in here three times wailing for different things. Right now, he's in his room howling for the blanket he pished on the other day. "It's not cozy!" Sigh.

I just won't fight him every night. I refuse. If he doesn't get into bed, I ignore him, turn off all the lights and go work. He does go to bed eventually, but... ugh. Maybe I'm being lazy, or maybe I've just kind of had it for now.

10. I made it to nine, so there has to be a ten, right? Oh, how about the house? Which is a wreck. As always. I try. I try SO HARD. But it is SO HOPELESS. I could spend three hours a day cleaning and doing nothing else and I don't think it would really be clean. Tomorrow Iyyar and Barak have school but I am not working and I should get two hours of free time while Avtalyon naps. If I can avoid napping myself, I want to do a toy and book purge. We have way too much stuff in this house and some of it just has to go.

OW

I was standing behind Barak in the kitchen this afternoon, barefoot, watching him do a puzzle, when he shifted his chair slightly and one of the feet of the chair (is the bottom of a chair leg a foot?) landed smack on the base of my second-to-smallest toe. I heard a weird little crunch, which might have been, um, my toe breaking. It's been about five or six hours. It looks fine, just a little puffy; it hurts, but I can walk on it. Nothing I can do about it anyway, broken or not--but tomorrow I need to walk two miles thisaway for Barak's lice check and then two more miles thataway for him to meet his rebbe and then almost a mile home. MHH is working so there's nobody to do it for me; if he doesn't go to lice check he doesn't start school, and although I guess he could technically miss "meet your rebbe, see your classroom" he's really looking forward to it. Wonder if I can get someone else to check his hair for me...

Many and various

1. First off, the tzitzis party. It was a blast. Venue, of course, was the Doughnut Store, the kosher doughnut-and-other-junk place that we make a point of never ever going to, because, well, slippery slope and all. The only time we EVER go there with kids is when we are on our way to the airport, because they're open really early. Otherwise, just tzitzis parties, of which this is Party the Second. The only problem of course was that their doughnuts are milchig, so I had to stop by at the bakery in the morning to pick up doughnuts for Iyyar. I got two, and it was a good thing; I got a dozen chocolate-frosted doughnuts for the members of our party (three adults and eight kids) and since none of the adults had and the two babies didn't really either, most of the kids ended up having two, so Iyyar of course wanted a second one too. The ones I'd bought looked exactly like the ones we got there, so much so that he didn't realize they were different--when he helped himself to a second I just caught him sinking his teeth into a nice milchig one. Clearly he didn't eat any of it, though, because he was fine the next day.

Presents included, of course, the chicken tzitzis. And no, there is absolutely zero religious significance to this; in fact, these may very well be the only pair of chicken tzitzis ever in the history of the world. But Iyyar is into chickens these days, so that's what he wanted, and that's what he got. He also got a toolbox with worker-man hat and safety goggles; Avtalyon's kind of appropriated those.

2. Holy cow, soy is in EVERYTHING. Keeping a totally dairy-free diet is a pain but doable. Weeding out every little bit of soybean oil or soy lecithin is another story entirely. Earlier this week, after lunch, Iyyar got really quiet and climbed into bed with his blankies, as he hasn't done for a couple of weeks; closer inspection of lunchtime ingredients revealed "or soybean oil" halfway down the list of ingredients on the tomato sauce. The only other things he ate were plain pasta and allergen-free rice milk (and a plum, I think) so it's hard to see what else it could have been.

Cooking healthful meals for everyone every day has always been kind of difficult, logistically--I try my best but it's hard when the only way to keep an eye on the baby is to have him in the high chair while I cook, and once in the high chair the baby starts screaming to eat (understandable, but problematic when the food's not cooked yet!) So historically there has been a heavy emphasis on really simple meals (doodles cheese), things I can make at least partially the night before (pizza, carrot pancakes, chicken soup, hummous), and prepared foods (TJ's chicken nuggets, jarred tomato sauce, fish sticks etc.) Now, between Iyyar's diet and MHH's diet (he's been doing the IBS diet, which has really been helping with his own tummy issues) I find myself having to cook pretty much everything from scratch and/or making three different versions of every meal. I can't use prepared, well, anything, and I can't use cheese, and MHH can't eat any meat but white meat, and Barak won't eat any meat but bologna, and only eats about four vegetables, and... oh well, here's the rundown right now:

MHH: Soluble fiber at every meal; no red meat; no dark poultry or poultry skin; no dairy; no high-fat anything, or egg yolks; no fruit or fructose; limited whole grains; all legumes fully cooked and mashed, and vegetables have to be cooked and peeled.

Iyyar: No dairy or soy, but otherwise not too picky

Barak: No cooked vegetables except for carrots and spinach; no meat; nothing with sauce or (here's the kicker) ingredients that are not immediately identifiable upon inspection.

Avtalyon, B"H, will still eat anything. But you see my dilemma? What's left that everyone likes? Oatmeal, fruit, and Rice Chex, that's what. Logically I would say, Barak needs to learn to adjust to new foods--and he has been, somewhat--but it's not fair to him to take away all his favorite dairy things and make him eat a bunch of things he doesn't like when there are plenty of healthy things he does. He's picky but not insanely so, and I just don't feel like making mealtime into a battle right now, especially since he is gradually expanding his repertoire--he'll eat pizza with sauce now, for example, which is a pretty huge development.

Oh, and to make all this more interesting? BOTH IYYAR AND BARAK HAVE PEANUT-FREE CLASSROOMS THIS YEAR. So no peanut butter, and for Barak, possibly no tree nuts as well--we're not sure yet. And he's not supposed to have fleishig lunches either. AND he's supposed to have motzi every day. Seriously, what's left?

Probably what I'll do for Iyyar is send him with a lot of snacks--crackers and hummous and red peppers and a hard-boiled egg, and let him have his sandwich when he comes home at 1. Barak can have PB and crackers for breakfast if he wants. For motzi at school, I'll have to start sending him with bagels and cheese, which he won't eat in sandwich format but will eat separately (whatever!)

The hardest thing is dinner though. Last night, we had:

-peas with lemon-garlic dressing
-scrambled eggs with spinach and garlic
-baked sweet potatoes
-cold leftover noodles from lunch, which Iyyar found in the fridge
-sliced apples, cucumbers and plums

Sounds OK, doesn't it? Barak ate an apple and cucumbers. Iyyar ate leftover noodles. Everything I actually cooked? Avtalyon ate some, and then MHH came home, ate the eggs and un-peeled peas with olive oil, and was sick this morning. EPIC FAIL.

3. Okay, that was way too long of a #2. So I'll stop with #3 (this should have been "long and various" instead of "many and various.") #3 concerns the moderately noteworthy occasion of my entering my third trimester. I'm due the very end of November, which, precedent would indicate, means a reasonable ETA of mid-November. This I am happy and excited about. What I'm worried about is the logistics. Two other guys in MHH's kollel have had new babies in the last year. Neither took more than a couple days off. One had family come in for a few weeks; another has family already in town. We will have neither. Avtalyon was born on a Friday morning; MHH took off Friday and Monday and was back to work on Tuesday. And that was with the best possible timing--if I have a baby midweek he's likely to go back to work the day I get home. Assuming, IY"H, that all goes well and I come home in two days with a healthy baby, which, well, wasn't the case the last two times.

Nearly everyone who helped out in the past is either no longer in town or not available; Ada is in nursing school AND working full-time (don't ask me how she does this, I have no idea), Yehudis has moved across the neighborhood, Racheli is back in Israel and CB is married and in New York. Asnat is back, but has two other jobs and not much flexibility. Grandma E is turning 80 in a few weeks and Savta is teaching, so visits from either are out of the question.

I have no idea what I am going to do here. I am a planner by nature, but on this one I think I'm just going to have to hope for the best.

Who is that masked baby?

I feel the pacifier and the slightly drooly shirt just complete the look. Don't you?

Friday

This afternoon, post-tzitzis party:

"Iyyar, how does your tummy feel?"

Iyyar, grinning ear to ear: "It just feel okay! It not hurty me!"

Stay tuned for tzitzis party roundup. Sneak preview: Yehudis embroidered his tzitis. With his name. And a whole family of chickens.

Thursday

So far, so good. We are now at one full week without any tummyaches from Iyyar. And, I hope, counting.

We went to the allergist yesterday, to get her take on all of this; I'd made the appointment a couple of weeks ago, when I thought of it more as one last thing to do before starting more invasive testing. She thought we should still do an endoscopy, since so much of what's going on with Iyyar doesn't make sense; the most likely thing is a gut allergy to dairy and/or soy (since I completely eliminated dairy at the same time that I took out soy, I don't really know which it is), but that usually shows up by age 1 and in Iyyar it didn't show up until he was well past two; also, he tested negative for dairy, which he "should" not have done. She was also concerned about his nutritional needs, so sent me home with a can of hypoallergenic baby formula and instructions to give him two 8-oz glasses a day.

I got home and read the label on that and saw both dairy and soy on the ingredient list, along with the line:

"Nutramigen Lipil with Enflora EGG is a hypoallergenic, lactose-free formula for babies who develop cow's milk allergy." It goes on to say that allergenic ingredients have been specially modified to be better tolerated in allergic children.

Sorry, but no. Butter is pretty much lactose-free, and we all know how well that went over; the second ingredient is soybean oil. With only a week of Iyyar feeling OK, there is NO WAY ON THIS GREEN EARTH that I am going to give him this stuff in the name of healthy bone growth. He can have calcium-fortified oatmeal and OJ and he can have spinach and salmon patties with the bones ground in; he's not going to get osteoporosis or rickets or scurvy on a few months of chicken and potatoes and vegetables, either.

Anybody need a can of Nutramigen? I hear it's pretty expensive stuff, and I'd hate to just toss it in the garbage.

So far as the endoscopy, I'm holding off. It's only been a week. If a month or two months go by (please please please) with no problems, then I don't see any need to put him through that. If this doesn't last, then that's a different story, but right now I can't see any good reason to go ahead with it.

Tomorrow, at great long last: the Tzitzis Party. Iyyar is getting tzitzis, a Spiderman t-shirt and the fabulous box of worker-man toys; Barak has a 100-piece Iron Man puzzle; there will be doughnuts for everyone, and Morah and her kids are coming too. I mamash can't wait.

Wednesday

It's been a week since I gave Iyyar anything with soy or anything processed on dairy equipment (that I'm aware of, anyway). The difference is incredible. First off, he appears to be toilet trained now. Well--he is. He hasn't had any kind of an accident in days, stays dry at night and uses the toilet unprompted. He doesn't say anything about his tummy hurting or crawl into bed miserably after he eats. He's just... fine. And no diarrhea anymore either. He just says he needs to poop, goes into the bathroom, and a couple minutes later I hear a little voice requesting sorbet now, please.

Thinking back, I've been saying for a while, "but he was fine at Pesach!" And now that I think about it, well, there's NO SOY AT PESACH. Not much processed food, either. No rice milk. No funky nondairy yogurts. And when we were in Ithaca, he told me his tummy hurt a lot. What was he eating almost every day? Soy yogurt, which is processed on shared equipment.

I'm still sort of holding my breath, waiting for him to start saying his tummy hurts or that he can't poop. But... so far so good.

Very very quietly

A warning: this post is almost completely about poop. Continue on at your peril.

Last week, after we got back from Grandma E's, I had to either schedule an endoscopy or come up with something else to do next. It was a great visit, but it was clear that Iyyar wasn't feeling well for much of it. I was giving him Pedialax strips (senna-based), which were making him go, but also clearly hurt--not surprising, since unlike Miralax, which acts by reducing reabsorbtion of water into the large intestine, Pedialax acts by strengthening intestinal contractions. He was going, but he wasn't happy, and there was a lot of "my tummy hurty."

An endoscopy is so invasive--at Iyyar's age it means general anaesthesia and most of a day at the hospital. So I decided to schedule another appointment with the allergist first, and retest him for pinworms just in case. We've been to the allergist already--it was one of our earliest stops--but she hadn't done that much testing, and when we went I thought that dairy was the one and only cause and the problem had been solved. In fact, taking dairy out of his diet only moved the situation from "crisis" to "chronic issue." So it makes sense that, since dairy was clearly the chief culprit, maybe other allergies/food sensitivities might be involved. I made the appointment, and mentioned it to some friends, two of whom made suggestions: one was to try taking out soy, and one was to be a lot more careful about possible cross-contamination with dairy than we had been. I'd been reading labels, but not worrying about "produced in a facility that also handles dairy." So we ratcheted things up there.

It's impossible to say what's really done the trick, but Iyyar seems to be, well, toilet trained now. He just kind of did it himself over the last week. In five days, he went from screaming for a diaper every time he needed to go (and then being miserable for a few hours until he actually went) to jumping up saying "I needa poop!", running to the bathroom, and just... well... pooping. And getting sorbet. With sprinkles. The first time this happened was last Thursday and the party we had was quite impressive. I pulled out all the stops. There was singing, there was dancing, there was Sesame Street, there was sorbet, there was serious candy. As Barak said, happily, "It's almost like Purim!"

Then Friday night it happened again, and Abba came home from shul at 9 PM to find everyone in the kitchen with chocolatey faces, playing with a brand-new toolbox toy I'd bought for tzitzis party presentation--but Barak had been selling Iyyar on the "worker man toys" he was going to get when he got his tzitzis, and then Iyyar thought he was going to get them that night, and I wanted nothing but positive reinforcement so I handed them over. Woohoo! The positive reinforcement has now been scaled back to one treat per, um, performance, but nobody seems to mind. Today's Monday, and for the last five days it has been nothing but good. Iyyar's happy, and he's informed me that I can give his diapers to Avtalyon now. He won't be needing them any more.

Wow.

I'm not convinced that it's all OK and over with his stomach, though. For one thing, he's still having diarrhea, and the pattern over the last year has been spells of constipation, which are miserable, followed by spells of diarrhea, which he doesn't really seem to mind. I think it is possible that he just connected using the toilet with less painful elimination--we had a few conversations about how pooping on the potty doesn't hurt, etc. If, as the GI thinks, he's been deliberately withholding--which I really doubt is the case, but I'd be very happy to be wrong about that--it really could be problem solved. But if this is just part of the same cycle, well, we'll see in a few days, I guess. In the meantime, I'm keeping the soy and dairy completely out (which is harder than you'd think--many of the foods he likes and is accustomed to, like Rice Dream, soy yogurt, parve chicken nuggets, and rice milk cheese, are now out, along with every margarine that isn't loaded with trans-fatty acids). He's been getting way more apple juice than usual, and he's quite pleased about that--it's probably moving the diarrhea along, too.

Tzitzis party is tentatively scheduled for Friday. I asked Iyyar what he wanted on his tzitzis (my friend Yehudis does embroidery and has machine-embroidered trains and boats on other tzitzis for Barak). He asked for a chicken (I told you chickens had gotten big around here, didn't I?) I asked for a second choice. He thought Superman. Yehudis nixed that one. "My fingers couldn't do it." Then he said, well, maybe a steam engine like Charlie's? I hope he's happy with the train...

Farmer boys

Processing time

Sunday, Monday and Tuesday of our trip were, it is fair to say, composed of fairly nonstop new experiences. Even the whole day at Philadelphia airport, which was not a whole lot of fun, was at least exciting--lots of new things to see, a lot of stimulation for the kids. Then new beds to sleep in, new people to meet (only Barak really remembered Grandma E and Grandpa M from their last visit a year ago), a different environment, so many new things to see and do. They handled it great, in general.

But Wednesday morning did not start out well. Everyone, with the possible exception of Avtalyon, got out of bed acting like they already needed a nap. Kvetch kvetch kvetch, fight fight fight. You want me to do what? I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that. You want me to come? Um, no, I'm busy. Iyyar seemed to have noticed that there was nowhere for him to have a time-out so decided to push things until he got one, to see what happened; I exiled him to the base of the stairs. That worked, but as he was calming down, Grandma M came along and, not knowing why he was there, told him to move because nobody could go up and down the stairs. More hysterics, &c.

The original plan for Wednesday had been to play in Grandma E's yard/pasture in the morning and go swimming in the creek with a friend at lunchtime. By 9 am it was clear this was not happening. I was OK with taking three small kids creek-swimming with another friend with similarly-aged kids, not in tow; two responsible mothers to three kids I thought was OK. But not when the kids were not being cooperative. I called and we changed plans to having a picnic near a (fenced) waterfall, a good 20-minute drive away; I thought the drive might calm them down, and the environment would be a lot less dangerous. That was fun, and the kids enjoyed running around, but Barak spent most of his time with the copy of Strega Nona and the Magic Pasta Pot he found in the back seat. Behavior improved marginally, but not all that much.

Then my friend, who had to get back to work, dropped us off at Saba and Savta's house, where we'd arranged to spend the afternoon and then have dinner (spaghetti and meatballs, possibly Iyyar's favorite food ever. Actually, he can skip the spaghetti--he just wants the meatballs.) We walked in and discovered that she had pulled out three or four great big boxes of toys from when her kids were little--all those great old Fisher-Price toys I remember from the 70s, like the airport and the airplane and the baggage carts and all of that. And the barn, with the animals, and lots of little cars and tractors. The kids went straight from the door to the toys, sat down, and started playing. There were some minor altercations (the airplane, oh the airplane) and Iyyar's tummy was not in the best shape until he finally pooped after an hour or so, but basically they just played. After Iyyar was feeling better, he got in on the action in earnest and they played. And played. And played.

Savta and I had planned to go to the local supermarket, which has acquired a kosher section since I last lived there, and pick up snacks for the flight home. I had assumed we'd bring the whole contingent, since ordinarily nobody would have any thoughts about turning down a ride in the car to the store. But today? No interest at all. "Do you want to come in the car to the store?" They barely looked up. "No." "Do you just want to stay here with Saba?" "Yeah. I just want to stay here and play." Iyyar had about the same answer. I looked at Saba. He suggested we sit in the driveway for a minute before pulling out. Barak is now more OK with being places without me but Iyyar generally likes to go where I go, so I thought this was a good suggestion. Savta and I went out to the car, buckled in Avtalyon, and waited. Nope. We pulled out and went shopping. I kept checking my cell phone, but nobody called. Avtalyon promptly fell asleep in the carseat and stayed asleep the whole time we shopped.

We got back home and the scene was completely unchanged. Barak and Iyyar on the floor playing, Saba standing there, amused, observing. They'd barely noticed when we had left and they barely noticed when we got back. Saba went off to the bus stop to pick up Abba, who'd been gone for going on three days. They hardly registered when he walked in. Dinner went on the table and they ate--Iyyar his meatballs, Barak his plain noodles, Avtalyon a little bit of everything--and promptly went back to playing, until it was finally time to go back to Grandma E's at around 7. They'd been playing for five hours straight. Except for stopping to eat--and with an early lunch and no afternoon snack, they had to have been hungry--they'd barely looked up the whole time.

And not only did they play nicely, but when we left they were children transformed. They were happy. They were cooperative. They went to bed nicely. They woke up the next day perfectly delightful, which was good because that was our big day to visit the fire station and the farm. It was clear that what they'd needed hadn't been a good night's sleep--it had been a good afternoon of quiet, uninterrupted, left-to-their-own-devices, familiar play. They needed processing time for all the new experiences.

I can't tell you how much this struck me--how clear it was that they had needed, really needed, that time to play. It made me think about how I feel about knitting. When I'm really really busy, what upsets me the most is not so much the lack of sleep--although I don't love that--or time to see friends or anything like that. What I hate is when I am really truly too busy to knit, even a little. I need that knitting time. I need the time to sit and let my hands do their thing and let my mind wander. I need it so much that sometimes, even when any sane person would go to bed, I sit down and knit for half an hour first--and we are talking about late at night here, when I REALLY should be asleep. But I need the knitting time more. It's not just time to veg. It's time to let my brain catch up to where it needs to be.

Next Sunday, I'm meeting up with Sarah to go to an all-day fiber event. I'm leaving here at 5:30 am and won't be back till 7 PM. I'll have hours and hours and HOURS to knit. I can't wait. :)

Jiggity-jig

We are home after most of a week visiting Grandma E and Deb and various other friends in the town where I went to college and then grad school and then stuck around a little longer after that. It was great--lots and lots of kid-centric fun, followed by evening knitting on the couch, and with the added bonus of other adults around to do baby-chasing duty occasionally. I want to blog about it all more fulsomely, but right now I have a kitchen to clean up, and I want to upload all the pictures first. So, in the meantime, this, b'kitzur, is what we did:

Sunday: Woke up at 3:45 am to get a 4:30 cab to the airport for a 7:00 flight, with a connection in Philly that was to have gotten us to our destination by around 1 PM. Instead, spent the entire day at Philadelphia airport, with occasional calls to local friend K, who would have let us sleep on her floor if we'd gotten stuck overnight (but, nice as it would have been to see her, we are still glad it didn't come to that). We were supposed to have a 2-hour layover; thanks to a thunderstorm that closed the airport, it turned out to be 11 hours. The kids behaved better than many of the grownups we saw. This is not saying as much as you might think.

Monday: The beginnings of serious Small Boy Fun. Grandma E's son-in-law Charlie came over with an honest-to-goodness functional steam engine. He fired it up and drove it around the house and let the boys ride on it. Then he let Barak drive it. They both worship him now. The next day, when Charlie pulled into the driveway (sans steam engine), I heard Iyyar say, dreamily, "I want Charlie to come back. I want him to come back wif his steam engine."

Then Grandma and Iyyar and I went down to the local natural-food coop to get various kosher and dairy-free items, plus the popsicles I had promised the boys in reward for their relatively spectacular behavior the day before. We put Abba on a bus, because he was going to visit his own grandma for a couple of days, and then came back up to Grandma's, where we then loaded carseats and kids into friend Deb's car for an afternoon at her house spent splashing in water barrels, eating blueberries directly off bushes, harassing cats, bonding with bunny rabbits and, finally, building with Lincoln Logs. More on all of this later.

Tuesday: Morning at farmer's market, including a visit to the Twisty Balloon Man, who made a dog on a leash for Iyyar and a pirate sword with belt and holster for Barak. The dog, sadly, did not even survive the trip back to the car; the pirate sword made it to lunch but not beyond. Alas. Lunch of fabulous farmer's market corn (cooked in the pot Grandma E bought and kept new just for us--we are not worthy), green beans, peaches, and the cucumber we'd brought back from Deb's garden the day before.

Afternoon included a trip to the park with sprinklers, checking out the playground equipment, and general running around; then back to Grandma's for a dinner of yogurt, and then bed for the boys and a visit from some members of my old spinning guild for me. Lots of fun and a sleeve and a half knitted on current baby sweater.

Wednesday: morning spent running around Grandma E's enormous backyard with pasture, collecting walnuts from the tree and driving toy cars in the grass. Lunch at the waterfall with boys and a friend from a short-lived Job from Hell I had in New York (only good things to come out of job: said friend, and the discovery of an awesome kosher vegetarian Chinese place). Then we went over to Saba and Savta's house (TWO sets of honorary grandparents--my kids are doing pretty well, wouldn't you say?) for spaghetti and meatballs and playing-with-toys. I really want to blog about this further--much to say there, mostly about the workings of the busy mind. Saba went to pick up Abba at the bus station in time for dinner.

Thursday: left Abba, who did not fit in Grandma E's car, at home with his books while we went to Deb's local fire station for a privately guided tour of same by her brother-in-law. He opened all the bay doors, drove a truck out into the parking lot, and let the boys climb all over it--and try on fireman coats AND hats and even showed off his thermal camera. Boys were so stunned and awestruck they barely managed a thank-you at the end. I heard all about it later, though.

Back to Deb's, by request of boys, but by way of her friend up the road who has sheep AND goats AND chickens to feed. My own grandmother kept chickens until I was well into my 20s and one of the great highlights of visiting her as a child was getting to feed them and collect the eggs, so it was really nice--and a little melancholy for me--to watch the kids entranced by these ones. Then back to Deb's for a lunch of blueberries, directly off the bushes, hard-boiled eggs (including one from a chicken of our recent acquaintance), peanut-butter sandwiches and what Iyyar calls "tomato chips" (Bearitoes, which you can't get around here but I really like).

Off to the university campus, via the local yarn store (I got a magazine and a ball of sock yarn), where we met my friend Zhenya (old friend from my very first Russian class there). Ice cream for the dairy-tolerant and a popsicle for Iyyar, a walk around the gardens, and a visit to the Echo Tunnel. A very loud visit.

Then home to Grandma's, where we discovered Abba with meat tenderizer plastered on his face from a yellowjacket sting incurred while reading outside at the picnic table. Dinner of the last yogurts in the fridge for the boys, then baths and bed; Grandma E and I shared the box of tomato soup I'd bought on our first day, then there was laundry and packing and bed. Another 4:45 am departure, but a much smoother trip home; everything was on time, it could not have been easier, and we were back in our own home by 1 PM. I took a solo trip to the rarely-visited supermarket for supplies, then made bagels for Shabbos, with Barak watching from the kitchen table.

"Imma, when are we going back to Ithaca? I want to go back there. Can we go back soon?"

Can't imagine why he'd want to do that. Can you?

Productive

I didn't get much actual writing today, but I did get a lot of other stuff done.

1. Had meeting with HR regarding planned maternity leave.

2. Had meeting with main client regarding same. He was, surprisingly, unperturbed.

3. Finalized arrangements to have friend cover leave for me, for which she will get paid 2.5 times what I do. I don't think I'm getting any kickbacks, though. Ahem.

4. Called heating/cooling company to schedule clean and check of furnace/AC, which we haven't done for almost two years. It's all working fine, and the system is less than five years old, but it's a good idea, etc. They'll be here Thursday.

5. This isn't exactly productivity, but spent fifteen minutes happily scoping out the yarn store near work. I don't go there often, just because I don't have the time, but sometimes I get to indulge. Didn't buy anything.

6. This is not my productivity, but yesterday and today MHH made some phone calls regarding our hoped-for move to Israel next year. All were positive, and he'll be going to NY to discuss some aspects of this further. I'll know in a few weeks if there's what to talk about there, but so far, so good.

7. Cleaned kids' room and put away laundry. Yes, I still had un-put-away laundry from before the Nine Days.

8. Paid a bunch of bills. Where does the money go? I know where it goes. Food. It all goes on food. And none of it is eating out. It goes on milk, cheese, vegetables, grape juice, nondairy substitutes for milk, and rice. Many hundreds of dollars a month. Every month. And nobody is even a teenager! How is this possible? We are so not extravagant in our food purchases. I even make my own hummus, because it's so much cheaper (and, okay, tastes better). But still. We spend SO MUCH MONEY on food! And diapers, although right now Iyyar isn't going through nearly as many of those...

In other news, Iyyar threw up this afternoon, massively. I'm hoping it's because he drank too much prune juice this morning. That could do it, right? Right? He hasn't thrown up in months, so I'm hoping it's not part of whatever is going on with him GI-wise.

Wow

Last night Iyyar decided he wanted to sleep in underwear. I wasn't worried about any impending poop and he'd been keeping his pullups dry, so I said sure. And what do you know--he woke up in dry underwear! On backward, but he didn't seem to care. Then I took out his clothes, and after the mandatory 15-20 minutes of running around naked giggling, he got out a pullup (?!), put that on, and then put on his own clothes! Shirt backwards, pants on straight--easier to see which is the back when you're not pulling it over your head.

Wow! Red-letter day. Two firsts!

Oh, and yesterday Avtalyon said "thank you" for the first time. Barak and Iyyar always said some variant of "ta tum" so I was expecting that, but no. It came out, "keeyoo!" Reminded me of my grandfather's one English phrase. "Tank ee-yoo!"

A Very Short List

1. I got Iyyar's celiac results last night. His IGA quant was 80, which is well within the normal range. This test is by no means infallibly accurate, but it would indicate that no, he doesn't have celiac disease. This is great in that a) he won't have to live a gluten-free life and b) I won't have to start cooking for three different diets at every meal, but it does mean that there is no quick fix in sight.

Iyyar has also, almost overnight, started staying dry. He wears underwear, he goes to the bathroom unprompted, and, unbelievably, keeps his pullup dry overnight. Even Barak doesn't do that. I took him to the ENT (more on this in a minute) in underwear on Thursday and he did have a rather dramatic accident in that big fancy ENT chair, but really, it was my own fault--if I'd taken him to the bathroom on the way in he'd have been fine. At home he now wears underwear all the time, and even gets up at night to go pee on his own. Totally amazing. However, also really problematic, in that he now can and does control where he pees--and does it in the right place--but can't do it for pooping. And he's decided that he wears underwear now. And he is still cycling between miserable constipation and diarrhea on a weekly basis. So... yeah. Problematic. We have a followup visit to the GI on Tuesday.

2. Iyyar had his ENT followup on Thursday. It took all of about five minutes. The doctor looked in his ears, in his nose, in his throat, and pronounced all great. This was after an audiologist visit where his hearing was also pronounced great--he was obviously hearing things that I was not hearing at all, which I found a little freaky, but if I only notice a hearing problem in the audiologist's booth it's not much of a problem, right? (I do have a mild hearing loss in both ears, which was irritating in high school and large lecture classes in college, but frankly I'd almost forgotten about it--unless I'm on a bad phone connection I never notice it anymore.) Anyway, the ENT said, cheerfully, "That was a much better resolution than I expected!" I chose not to ask what he'd been expecting.

So far as the not-quite-normalness of his sleep study, I was advised to continue following up on the GI problems (which obviously we're doing--and it was the GI problems that brought us to the ENT to begin with), because perhaps the GI troubles are causing the breathing disturbances. But otherwise, nothing need be done. Great.

3. We went to the zoo today--"we" being me, Barak, and Iyyar, without Abba, who was home with Avtalyon, who slept for FOUR HOURS while we were out. I think he must have been just hanging in his crib with the pacifier for at least some of that time, but whatever the case, Abba got an awful lot of peace and quiet with his sefarim in the kitchen. Meanwhile, the three of us were taking a bunch of buses, eating graham crackers, and watching gorillas, penguins, and gibbons do their thing. Iyyar was totally into the primates, Barak mostly wanting to climb on things. We had fun, although Iyyar starting melting down halfway through the first bus trip. It's two buses and close to an hour each way--a long time to sit when you're three.

Score

Abba is off now, for the next five weeks, and I have every intention of taking advantage of his presence to do lots and lots of things--more excursions with the kids en famille, and also more 1:1 parent-child time. Today Abba took Iyyar to the pediatrician for a blood draw (the celiac test) and I went with Barak and Avtalyon on the bus to go to Trader Joe's. By all reports the blood draw went amazingly well; I called ahead to find out when Marlene, the Good Phlebotomist, would be around, and Abba says the whole thing took under a minute: she hit the vein on the first try and that was that. Barak and Avtalyon and I, meanwhile, went to TJ's to pick up tons and tons of oatmeal and high-soluble-fiber food (as we take a stab at the IBS diet--can't hurt, anyway, while we're waiting to see what the celiac results are).

Going to TJ's with Barak qualifies as a full-on Trip, partly because of the joys of bus-riding, partly because of those fun little shopping carts and the promise of a helium balloon and granola bar, and partly because of the close proximity of a most excellent thrift shop with bins of toys marked 25 cents, 50 cents, and $1. Our haul for today: one Little People train engine that plays a tune when you press the smokestack; one Evil Robot; three miniature Beanie Babies, specifically koala, cat, and leopard; one worker man helmet, and one blue plastic hammer. Total cost: $3.25, plus tax. Barak was in transports of ecstasy the whole way home with said Evil Robot ("Imma! Look Imma! He has a claw hand that opens and closes like this! He has an engine on his back! He's gonna fight the Hulk, Imma. I think he's gonna beat the Hulk.") When we got off the bus, I spotted Abba and Iyyar on their way home from the pediatrician's, and Barak got to present Iyyar with his worker man ensemble. He was, needless to say, delighted, and much high-volume banging (nothing to bang on? No problem! just bang into the air and yell "bang! bang!" really really loudly) ensued.

Speaking of high volume, have I mentioned--I'm sure I have--Iyyar's earsplitting firetruck impersonation (intruckation?) Lately I've heard another version of it--from Avtalyon, while driving his own little cars around the floor. It's pretty amusing, watching this potbellied little person squatting on the floor, engrossed in his plastic concrete mixer, sounding its siren.

One other thing about the trip--the "promise of granola bar" part. I let Barak put a box of peanut butter chocolate chip granola bars in his little cart, as I always do, and then put them in his own backpack for transport. Once we got outside, he started asking me, "When are we going to have our snack?" and pointing out convenient locations. "There's a bench right there, Imma. There's a park. Can we go play in the park? We could have our snack in the park." I said I thought we should save our snack for when we were waiting for the bus, a time of enforced and otherwise boring bench-sitting. He didn't really want to wait that long, but just as the preoccupation with the granola bar got really overwhelming, we were at the thrift shop and the Evil Robot discovery distracted him. Anyway, once out of the store we did sit down on the bus stop bench, and Barak requested his granola bar. "It's in your bag," I told him. "You're in charge of snack." "Oh!" he said, a little surprised. "I forgot." He opened his bag, pulled out the box, opened it, and took out a granola bar--and handed the first one to me.

Am I allowed to say it? So sweet. And on the way home, as Avtalyon got more and more irritated with his prolonged confinement in the stroller, Barak played with him so nicely. I had Avtalyon's stroller facing sideways, so that he was right next to a seat, and he had his little train in his hands. All he did, for at least half the trip, was put the train on the edge of the seat, let go, and let the slope of the seat bottom take the train to the other edge of the seat--out of reach. Then he'd look beseechingly at Barak, who would hand it back to him. Again. And again. And again. A few times he'd say, "This is the last time. If you drop it again I'm not giving it back to you any more." But then, you know, Avtalyon would look very sad, and give him this very winning look, and he'd relent, and give him the train again, and Avtalyon would giggle, and Barak would giggle, and the next thing you know, well... Barak was playing another round of Drop the Train and Get It Back.

I think Avtalyon is training him well for future Abba-hood. Don't you?

With a feather

My phone just rang, at 9:24 on a Sunday night. I picked it up, and it was Iyyar's ENT.

"Hi, this is Dr. ENT!"

"Hi. Uh-oh. You're calling me on a Sunday night. This can't be good."

(I know, friendly, aren't I?)

"Actually, no, it is good. I'm calling because I just read the sleep study and it's good news."

"Really?"

"Really. I have the report right here and I can read it to you."

"Um... but why are you calling me at 9:24 [I was in the kitchen looking at the clock on the stove] on a Sunday night?"

"Because I knew you were worried."

WOW.

How's that for nice?!

Remember how annoyed I was at this doctor the first time I met him? We still have pretty incompatible personalities--I don't deal well with any kind of jokeyness where my kids are involved--but I hereby fully and finally retract anything negative I might ever have said about him.

Wow. So so nice!!!

Results, he said, showed "resolution of severe obstructive sleep apnea." AHI (obstructive episodes per hour, overall) was 4, down from 24 before. (Anything over 5 is a problem.) He spent all but one minute of his study with oxygen saturation over 90, and one minute below. He said, "This is what I would call borderline normal. It's not perfect, but as long as he feels okay, is waking up well rested, and seems okay to you, it's good enough." We talked a little bit more about his GI issues, and he mentioned that the GI tract and the airway are related, so if his GI tract is inflamed that can cause airway tract inflammation as well. But if anything, he thinks it's the GI causing the airway inflammation, not the other way around.

Bringing him back in on Thursday for a followup checkup (as already scheduled), and a hearing exam (ditto). And tomorrow, Abba's going to take him to get his blood drawn for the celiac disease test.

In other exciting news, when Iyyar woke up this morning, I asked him, very casually, if he wanted underwear or a diaper. He wanted underwear. Fine. Breakfast came with juice, and after breakfast I asked him to go sit on the potty. He didn't want to, but a dramatic reading of Commander Toad and the Space Pirates (formerly Barak's favorite book, now Iyyar's, and I could probably read it in my sleep) convinced him. Just as the door of the Star Warts whooshed open for the pirates to come whooping hopping slithering sliding in, he looked up, startled. "I pishing!" And indeed he was. Chocolate chips all around. And another round of juice, too, to keep things, ah, moving along.

Forty minutes later or so, I suggested another potty trip. He said no, but then I found him in the bathroom, tugging at his pants while peeing on the floor. A step in the right direction, surely. I went to get clean underwear and pants and in the meantime stood him on the stool and asked if he wanted to try pishing standing up (which he's never managed before, despite multiple attempts under Barak's enthusiastic tutelage.) And then--eureka!--"Imma! I pishing!" I'm sorry if this is a little too graphic, but the look of total delight on his face as he watched the pee arcing into the toilet bowl was something to be seen. It was absolutely, hey! Look what I can do!

He went three more times today, twice actually getting his clothes out of the way first, and then once more at bedtime--earning himself a pullup to sleep in, for the first time ever. You cannot imagine--or maybe you can--just how exciting this was. Of course, he then promptly pooped in it, and then when I changed him pooped in the next one. But I am not worrying about that. One thing at a time.

Wednesday

I have a few minutes of work time yet--not enough to really get going on something new. I'm waiting for someone to return a phone call, anyway, and don't know what to do next until he does. So... a few updates.

1. When Barak was three and a half and Iyyar one and a half, Grandma E came to visit. During the course of her visit, Barak devolved from a reasonably pleasant and civilized small child to a three-foot-tall monster toddler. He threw a tantrum in Target, spent more time out than in, whined, nagged, ignored me and... yeah. It was lovely. I thought, okay, he's trying to get attention--he'll get back to normal after the visit. Nope. He didn't really get back to normal until, oh, a few months after Avtalyon was born. When he turned four.

Iyyar is not yet three and a half. He's not even quite three and a quarter. But he seems to be entering That Stage. The I Don't Want To Do Anything You Tell Me stage. The I Don't Have To Listen To You Stage. The Let's See What Imma Does If I... stage.

Did I mention we're going to visit Grandma E in about three weeks?

It's really good that I have the blog, because when I look at how Iyyar is behaving (and let loose a primal scream that makes the neighbors wonder if they should call 911) and how Barak is behaving (generally speaking, nicely) I wonder what I am in for. Then I look back at the blog two years ago and remember how difficult (read: awful) Barak was at more or less the same age.

It's not him. It's the stage. I just need to keep telling myself that for the next six months...

2. Speaking of Iyyar, I truly do not see how I am going to toilet train him. He has the general idea. He often tells me he needs to poop on the potty and even runs to the bathroom. But pooping hurts him. A lot. And so he cries and wiggles off and, an hour or more later, poops in his diaper. What to do? Once I tried, physically, to get him to stay on when it was so obvious he was going to go any second. But he held it in, and that set off a few days of constipation that ended in a suppository and a lot of screaming. Lesson learned--I won't do that again. But if he's not in underwear in SEVEN WEEKS, he's not going to school next year. His slot will go to someone on the waiting list. I can't have two kids at home all day, every day, all winter, especially not when I am due in November. I don't know what to do--I don't really have a Plan B here.

3. Avtalyon, for all his snuggliness, is not, at the moment, a super-snuggly baby. If I want snuggles, I have to carry him around; if I try to sit down and get some quality cuddle time, he'll usually slide off and go play. Last night, for the first time in months, he wouldn't settle down. He'd been constipated for days (can I write about ANYTHING but poop?!) and then had a day of raging diarrhea caused by the blueberries and cherries I'd given him to help move things along. He was crying in his crib with yet another dirty diaper, which I changed; he was happy to go back into his crib, but cried and cried as soon as I left. So I came back in, picked him up, and sat down in the rocking chair, fully expecting him to take this as an opportunity for further playtime. Nope. He actually flung his arms around me, gave a happy sigh, burrowed into my armpit, and fell asleep. Bliss.

4. Four has to not be about poop! That means... um... well, work is safe! Four can be about work!

Work is crazy. Work is super crazy. People at work are crazy. People outside work are crazy. It's all just... all kinds of crazy. I'm trying to think of something else I can say that isn't identifying but I can't, so let's just leave it there. With CRAZY.

5. I am so into knitting right now it is hard to describe--probably because I have so little knitting time. My ravelry queue is stretched out to THERE and unless I quit my job and hire a full-time babysitter, there is no way on earth I'll finish it before I'm due, or even in this lifetime. And, predictably, what does uberimma do when she has no time to knit? She scratches the knitting itch by buying knitting things, of course. I just got two new knitting books AND put in a small Schoolhouse Press order (a little bit of Plotulopi/Icelandic Unspun to round out what Jasmin brought, so I can make a sweater with it). Pattern for said sweater is in one of the new books. In the meantime, I have on the needles:

-an Eris for me, out of green Ultra Alpaca
-a newborn baby sweater, in green and yellow sock yarn
-a pink hat for Shanna's daughter
-a green hat for Shanna's son
-mittens for Barak (mittens themselves are done, just need the second liner)

I also have, in the Want To Knit Right Now category, yarn and pattern for a Lett-Lopi vest, which I plan on making A-line for a postpartum belly-camouflaging fall garment. With all three of my kids, I woke up the morning of the bris realizing I had absolutely nothing I could possibly wear and look civilized in. This is an attempt to avert that crisis situation. Think I'll get a girl this time?

6. MHH finishes work this Friday and is up for a five-week break. One of those weeks will be spent visiting Grandma E and Deb, and there are many local daytrips planned (there is so much to do locally that we never do, simply because I can't wrangle everyone on multiple buses alone).
One of the planned highlights, however, is a trip to a fiber festival with my friend Sarah. Yes! With Sarah! Without children! I will pack my bags, get on a train, go several states away, and knit and knit and knit.

If I remember to pack my passport, that is.

Quality control

I just spent some time looking through posts from last year. And was... a little embarrassed. Not by how bad they were, but by how much less bad they were then than they are now. There were more of them. They were better written.

I do keep this blog for myself. I keep it as a record of my life, of my kids' growing up, of the little things that I know I would otherwise forget. I also keep it as a way of staying in touch with friends, because I am, with very few exceptions, lousy at staying in touch. This way, Grandma E and my sisters-in-law and the friends who are interested can all know the cute things the kids are doing, without my having to email them each individually--which I would never manage to do.

But I also keep it because, as a professional writer who writes almost exclusively as someone else, I want to have a way to write in my own voice. I want to be able to remember what my writing, my own writing, my own voice, sounds like. Lately, my own writing hasn't sounded that great. And it isn't surprising that I'm down to fewer than twenty regular readers. And I can't help but think, is this my writing now? Is this my voice? Do I even have my own voice anymore, or has it morphed into the voices of various men old enough to be my father?

I know that most of it is that I don't have a lot of time. Any time I spend blogging is time stolen from speeches, from housework, from the kids, or, most likely, from sleep. But, to use a quote one of my clients likes, anything worth doing is worth doing well.

I'll try to do better.

Um... what?!

I took Iyyar for his followup sleep study last night. Sleep study #1, as you may recall, was something of a horror show, with upwards of 80 episodes of apnea per night, in addition to his refusal to go to sleep, keep the wires on, etc. I wasn't there for that one--Abba took him, since Avtalyon was still nursing too much for me to leave him overnight.

We fully expected study #2 to be a formality. I took him, and he was out like a light in less than fifteen minutes. The tech put almost all the leads on him without waking him up, but the nasal cannula did him in, and once he was woken he was restless from that. I'm not sure how much of an impact the wires etc. had on the results, but when I asked the tech how things looked as we were about to leave, he said, "Oh, he still has it." Still has what? "He still has obstructive sleep apnea." His O2 desaturated down to 88, which is better than 72 but still not what you want to see. And while the tech was sure he wasn't rousing 80 times an hour, he also was sure it was "a lot more than 5" which is the cutoff. I asked for a ballpark and he said he hadn't counted yet.

I'm not sure what is next. Iyyar has an appointment with the ENT in a couple of weeks, for both a checkup and a hearing test. I know his hearing isn't quite normal--he does fine mostly but I've noticed him not hearing things and other people have mentioned it to me too. And we also have a followup with the GI doctor the week after that.

I know he's better and doing the T & A was worth it. He visibly sleeps better, doesn't snore anymore, and did have that huge growth spurt right after surgery. But he's still tired, still cranky, still climbing into bed in the afternoon and falling asleep during time-outs. And he's still flying off the walls the rest of the time. But he's a three-year-old boy! Surely they all bounce around sometimes, and get tired sometimes, and nap sometimes. It's so hard to know what's normal and what's not. What I know is not normal is the digestive stuff. It's not normal that he only poops when on Miralax. Which is, so far as I'm concerned, like Tylenol--it makes him feel better but isn't actually addressing the underlying issue.

Anyway. Time for me to leave my lair. Anybody know of any connections between OSA and, um, IBS?

All clear

I took Avtalyon to the doctor this morning to get his ears rechecked and they were pronounced just fine. Yay!

I wanted to take Iyyar in to get his bloodwork done, too, but a) it's raining and b) I had an appointment for myself, too, and it seemed a little more than I could reasonably handle. So we need to go back this week sometime, when the Good Phlebotomist is there.

Beety

I made picked beets last week. I really love pickled beets. I always thought it was a Hungarian thing, but Avtalyon, who has never even been to Hungary, liked them too. He liked them so much that, when presented with a bowlful, he employed the two-fisted hand-over-hand eating technique in which one hand shoves beets into mouth while other hand grabs more beets from bowl, continuing with this until there are no more beets left, at which time the hand discovering a beetless bowl presents said bowl for refilling (before the other hand has even finished cramming the last few in the gaping beety maw).

He ate a LOT of beets this way. Afterwards, we had this:





And then, of course, the dreaded beet diaper. "Imma! Imma, look Imma! Avtalyon pooped PURPLE!"

Even more disorganized than usual

But better than nothing, right? Right?

1. Barak's latest Lego creation is a laserbeam airplane. It's a pretty impressive airplane with a flower piece on front. This is the thing that shoots the laser. He's done a lot of little Lego lately, mostly courtesy of his star chart Lego but this past week courtesy of some birthday money from Bubbe & Zayde. I got him a set of pirate Lego, soon to be discontinued. It was much bigger than the kind I usually give him for star charts, and I didn't want to up the ante with that, so I gave it to him as a late birthday present. He was, naturally, thrilled, and happily crept out of bed after the other two were asleep erev Shabbos to tackle it. He did it all by himself, by "looking so so carefully at the constructions."

2. Avtalyon is being HILARIOUS lately. He really seems to be feeling better and, par for his course of trying to be like his big brothers in all things, has started doing Lego. By this I mean that in the last couple of days he has figured out how to attach Lego. When he does this, he does one of two things; either he attaches it into a tall stack and brings it me or someone else available to take it apart for him (this is harder than putting it together?); or he puts it together into an amorphous blob and drives it around the floor, saying "Beep! Beep!"

3. Avtalyon also just started saying "meow" and "please!" which comes out sounding like "bee!" He still has zero patience for waiting for anything while in his high chair, but now sometimes inserts a few hopeful "bees!" into the frantic wailing.

4. Iyyar has really had some setbacks on the tummy front this week. As in, back to screaming and constipation. I called the GI doctor back this week and talked to the nurse clinician. "It's been eight months and he's still not OK. I'd like to bring him back in, and also, I think we should look more into the possibility that he might have celiac disease." He's showing so many of the signs that I wanted her to try a different test to be doubly sure--there are a few. We talked about his antibody levels, which were tested for in February. Except--surprise! They weren't! They didn't get enough blood! And nobody told us that the tests were canceled! In fact, we were told that if no one had contacted us, then everything was normal! Does this ring a bell with anyone else here?

We've been giving him Miralax this week, which has brought him from constipation to diarrhea. An improvement from the point of view of his comfort, but it still doesn't give any answers or any long-term solution. Also looming on the horizon: preschool. If he isn't toilet trained by the end of August, he can't go. I don't even want to think about that possibility. I'm bringing him back in for another blood draw Tuesday (fun for everyone!) and he's going back to the GI doctor at Children's in July.

5. Barak's latest invention on the fantasy animal front is the dragon cheetah tiger. I know that they are black and they have big teeth and they are scary, because he drew one for me. VERY big teeth. Don't meet one of those in a dark alley.

6. I told you this was going to be disorganized, right?

7. I am way way way behind on work. WAY behind. I've been distracted, and I've been tired, and I'm burned out on this year. And I want a break, but one is not forthcoming.

8. It is the time of the Annual Ant Invasion. Barak and Iyyar think this is great. I do not. I also don't like it because I don't want to teach the kids to smash bugs for fun. But I do a lot of bug-smashing these days. Fine line, etc.

9. A friend of mine from grad school came for a brief visit today. It was really, really nice, and my kids were as beautifully behaved as they've ever been in their lives. She was impressed. "They're so good!" I did tell her that they're not like this all the time, but I admit to the shepping of some nachas in that regard. They really were being awfully good.

10. Oh, I forgot this--it should have been attached to #1. Last Friday, when Barak was doing pirate Lego, we had dinner guests. We had made early Shabbos but even still, by the time we sat down to eat it was after 8. Barak sat with us for kiddush and motzi and then sneaked off to the kitchen (with my permission) to do his Lego. I let him stay up until 11 PM. Crazy, I know, but he was totally fine the next day. And he had a blast.

What this made me think of was the Make-A-Plate. You know those melamine plates that you made in nursery school, or that your kids made? I made mine in 1976, and it was a picture of my mother in a blue dress and high heels with curly hair. Barak's obviously criminally negligent preschool did no such project, so I ordered the kit online and we did them at home. Iyyar's is covered with scribbles. Avtalyon's is handprints--I stuck his hands on an inkpad and then on the paper templates you are supposed to use. Barak's plate is a drawing of a house erev Shabbos. It is dark outside (colored in blue) and the Imma is lighting candles on a table. There are brothers in bed, and one brother who is not in bed. This, he informed me, is the brother who is getting out of bed to play little Lego in the kitchen.

Deja vu all over again

I think Avtalyon's about to blow another eardrum. This is getting a little old, don't you think? First he ruptured two, and got 10 days of Amoxicillin. On day 7, I brought him in for a checkup, and he had one ear clear and one still cloudy; on day 13, he ruptured another ear. That got him 14 days of Cefprozil. We are now on Day 8 and he is giving every indication of being on the brink of yet another rupture. I called the doctor earlier asking for a referral to see an ENT; she said she'd request it but I should bring him in in the morning anyway, so they could switch his antibiotic. Not sure to what.

It's been a rough week. A lot has been going on, most of it, frankly, bad; the major thing has been a death in the community that has everyone pretty shaken up. Without getting into too many details, a mother a little older than me with kids a little older than mine got up out of bed one day and died, in front of her kids, for no clear reason, with very little indication beforehand that anything was wrong. She was not someone I was close to or had a lot in common with, but we have known the family for years, my husband worked closely with her husband for several of them, and she was a really, really good mother. Better than me, and too good to lose. That's terrible enough, obviously, and there are other aspects of it that have blown a lot of my own mother/child/no mother issues out of the water. I haven't been sleeping well or thinking about much else. Compartmentalizing has never been my strong suit.

In the absence of any ability to do anything helpful for the family, beyond paying shiva visits and getting on the list to make meals, I've been trying to work on other things; I invited a few Shabbos guests who really need invitations, and have been trying so, so hard to focus more on the kids and what they need from me. Which has been hard, because Barak and Iyyar are currently in a state of ongoing conflict--not constant, but much more frequent than has been the case historically--and Avtalyon, for whatever reason (ears, probably) has been really, really fussy. Plus I'm just very tired. The busiest time of the year at work is ending now, and while that is good it means that the pile of put-off tasks must be dealt with. The laundry never seems to end, and now that I'm in my fifth month (yes, I'm just sneaking that one in there) I can't just get by on five or six hours of sleep. This morning I was just too tired to think so I decided to lie down for fifteen minutes (at around 9:15). Need I even tell you what happened? The two-and-a-half-hour nap was awesome, but I have to make those hours up somewhere.

Oh, and we still need to figure out a way for my kids to see their grandparents this summer. We have a trip scheduled to see Grandma E in early August, but getting to see Bubbe & Zayde is a lot more complicated logistically; my MIL does not fly, their home is not somewhere we can stay with the kids (they'd be happy to have us, but it doesn't work practically), the one friend who lives nearby has a new baby of her own and almost certainly can't host us, and neither MHH nor I have flexible vacation schedules--if it doesn't happen between mid-July and mid-August, it isn't going to happen until next summer. The initial plan was to meet up with them in Boston, but that isn't working out for a number of reasons, even though it would have been by far the easiest and most enjoyable thing (IMHO, anyway). I feel awful putting a visit off indefinitely. The kids haven't seen their grandmother since before Avtalyon was born, and haven't seen their grandfather since we were in Israel. It's not like any of us lives on Mars. It's not like we all have a superabundance of family, either. Just not sure what to do about it.

Pause while I try to think of something cute or cheery to end this with...

Oh, the firetruck. I can tell you about the firetruck. That really was cool.

We had an absolutely awesome surprise visit to the fire station last Thursday. There is a single-engine company about five or six blocks from us, on the way to Barak's new kindergarten, where I had to drop off some registration forms last week. On the way there, we saw the firetruck parked on a corner, and saw firemen get out. This was from a few blocks down the street, as we were coming up toward the intersection of the main commercial stretch. Neat! we said. We'll get to watch firemen! A few minutes later, as we approached the corner, we saw them all get back into the truck. Oh well, show over--oh. No. Wait. What's that they're holding?

Ice cream cones. They had, apparently, stopped on the way back from a call for ice cream. I caught the look on Barak's face. "Barak, do you think that's fun? I bet that would be fun. Would eating ice cream cones in a firetruck be about the most fun anyone could have?" Barak, somewhat dreamily, agreed. Then we discussed further and upon careful reflection decided that the absolute most fun, the pinnacle of fun that one could have in this lifetime, would in fact be eating ice cream AND chocolate chip cookies in the back of a firetruck.

Got that? Good.

So we went on our way, passing the fire station, where we got to see the truck backing into the bay (remember, it is on the way to school--this is all along the same semi-major street). We dropped off our forms. We came back, on the other side of the street so as to get a better look through the doors at the firetruck. It was a warm day, and the door was still open. What the heck, I thought. I poked my nose inside and saw a fireman sitting by the door doing a crossword. Can't hurt to ask, can it?

"Excuse me? Would it be okay if my kids looked at the firetruck?" He got up. "Sure! Come on in."

We went in, Iyyar and Avtalyon in the double stroller and Barak holding on, all of them looking sort of... stoned. They all really like firetrucks, if this needs mentioning, and none of them was expecting this. Even Avtalyon, who can actually (sort of) say "firetruck" now, was awed by the big red machine. They stood and gazed, openmouthed. The firemen looked at them.

"Do they want to go inside?"

Um.... WHAT?!

Long story short, he let the bigger two play in and on the firetruck for at least 20 minutes. He even let them sit in front and pretend to drive. He answered their questions. He let them look around the bay. He asked me if I had a camera to take pictures with (I didn't, but I did have a phone and used that). He was SO NICE.

We are planning to make cookies to bring them this week, so that next time the firemen get ice cream, they can sit in the firetruck and eat cookies and ice cream and have the most fun anyone could possibly have. I think they deserve it.

Avtalyon

Avtalyon is asleep now, with his first dose of Cefprozil (twice a day for two weeks) inside him. Fortunately he loves this kind of medicine too, although as with the Amoxicillin he tries to grab the empty medicine dropper so he can chew on the bulb.

I know I haven't been blogging much lately. I've been busy with work, the kids need and deserve my attention, and I'm still knitting more than I really should. And both Barak and Iyyar were sick last week--fevers, stomachaches, etc. So... yeah. Not much with the blogging.

I feel bad, though, not documenting this incredibly cute and funny phase in Avtalyon's rapidly-vanishing babyhood. He's sixteen months old, and just stopped nursing this week--a couple of days ago, in fact. He's still so much a baby in so many ways--he weighs 25 lb as of his last checkup, he's still got hardly any hair, and he just got in his seventh tooth (bottom left). And he's still really little and soft, and has a hilarious potbelly, and gives great kisses, and is just amazing to snuggle.

He's just enough of a baby that when he does non-baby things it still really startles me. Mostly, probably, because of the contrast between him and Iyyar and Barak. Today, I had to take Barak and Iyyar with me to the pediatrician, because of the short notice and all. Barak is still feeling under the weather and was not thrilled about the walk; Iyyar and Avtalyon were busily pestering each other in the double stroller, and even the really short wait we had in the exam room before the doctor came in was too long. Barak and Iyyar both wanted to climb up on the exam table, Iyyar was pushing the stroller around, Avtalyon wanted to bang the mouse on the keyboard, etc. It was already a little hairy in there when the doctor came in, and Avtalyon was in no mood to have his ear poked at. When the doctor was done looking at him, he (Avtalyon, not doctor) wiggled out of my arms and hustled across the room--to get my large, pink, quite heavy backpack, haul it back across the floor, and push the handle into my hand. Subtle, isn't he?

He's also been mimicking things the boys say, usually with no apparent idea of what those things mean. That's why we often here a phrase that sounds suspiciously like, "I needa go potty!" Other favorites are "I want it!" and "I don't want it!" ("Ah na wa na!") Today, though, when he went over to grab Iyyar's Batman car, it was pretty clear that he knew what he was saying: "Mine!"

Right now he seems to want nothing more than to be big, or at least, big enough to play with his brothers. Sometimes they let him in on their Lego and block activity--sometimes not. Sometimes he is forced to resort to grabbing a kippa and running away with it to get them to pay attention to him. (That one works really well.) He loves fruit, and cucumbers, and grated cheese, and noodles, but not his high chair--as soon as he's done eating, or has emptied a bowl, or has no further need of something on his tray, over the side it goes. "No" has proved unproductive, so I've resorted to removing his entire tray instantly upon the first infraction. We'll see how that one goes, but I'm not about to mop my floor after every meal and snack.

Oh, and he loves shoes. I think it's more the association with going out--often, after he's got his shoes on, he'll go straight to the back door and wait there. Sometimes he picks up his sun hat on the way, which is kind of funny because when the sun hat is on his head, outside, the sun hat immediately becomes the bane of his existence. It's kind of, "Okay, here's my sun hat, let's go!"--but that doesn't mean I'm going to wear it once I'm out there, you understand.

Pretty soon he'll be too big for me to want to post pictures of him on this blog, but here's one from yesterday, of him modeling the engineer's cap sent to us by Grandpa M a couple of years ago.


Pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

What, again?

Last night Avtalyon was fussy again, as in, waking up every few minutes crying, settling back down, then crying again. I gave him Tylenol at around midnight and then he slept through till 8 am--and woke up happy. With a ton of brown goo oozing out of one ear.

ANOTHER ruptured eardrum? Seriously? Three days after he finished a 10-day round of amoxicillin? I brought him in last Wednesday for a well baby visit cum ear recheck, and the pediatrician said one ear was clear, the other cloudy. And the nurse, when I called this afternoon, said that the antibiotics can kill the bacteria without taking care of the inflammation. Um, okay.

Back to the pediatrician this afternoon, with everyone in tow, even though Barak and Iyyar are just getting over being sick themselves and are not going to appreciate the shlep--especially not Barak, who's going to have to walk the mile each way. Oh, and it's looking pretty threatening out, too.

What I'm more worried about though is what effect multiple eardrum ruptures have on hearing. It can't be good. Wonder if he'll send us to the ENT and Avtalyon will end up with tubes...