Andy & Jessica

This morning I brought Asher to his 1 year well baby check-up.  It’s a month late, but I had to give his earlier appointment to Jude so Jude could have his required history and physical before his surgery and MRI.  Asher is doing great, but I didn’t realize how little he is.  He’s at the 5th percentile for height; 10th percentile for weight and 50th percentile for head size.  I know he burns a lot of calories chasing after his big brothers.  He got several pokes today — all the standard immunizations.  I was all set to have them give him the flu shot (actually they were just ready to stab him with it) when I learned we’d have to come back in a month for a booster shot.  No thanks.  Hopefully that was the right call.  Then, after they got done stabbing him with needles, they told me that I needed to take him down to the lab for a finger prick for a hemoglobin check, which is standard at the 12 month appointment.  No thanks, again.  I told them I had expected they would do the finger prick at the same time as the other needle jabs so we would be skipping that one as well.   Seriously.  Who comes up with these non-kid-friendly procedures at children’s clinics?  Maybe I’m just more sensitive to this stuff given everything Jude has been through, but it seems so obvious to me to do all the pokes at the same time.

To me while on the phone while I was at work, “Can we talk until you come home.  I’m just kidding.  Well, maybe.”

Jude talking about Levi, “He’s kind of like a little parrot.”

I’m worried that we approached this cat allergy thing totally wrong with Jude. He’s just distraught at the thought of having to give them up because of his allergies and was sobbing about it most of the night. He even said he’d take a poke every second if we could keep them. I think I may have told Jude that God had designed him to be allergic to cats and we can’t really change that and then in response to that Jude told me, “Well, you can’t change my heart and I love them.” It’s just really strange since, until we got back from Indiana, Jude hadn’t really paid much attention to the cats. But, I think that after we got back from Indiana, he felt bad for them that they were left alone the whole time and tried to give them attention every day. He has even asked me on a daily basis since then, “Mom, can you pet Elli?” He also recently asked when their birthdays were and wanted to start celebrating them. He also asked recently (and before finding out he was allergic) to see picture of them when they were younger. This is going to be much tougher than I thought it would be.

We’ve been wondering why it is that the boys are sick all the time, but mysteriously were not sick at all in Indiana. I almost hate to admit it, but my mom and dad were right – AGAIN! They have been giving me a hard time for years about our 2 cats and claiming that the boys were allergic to them. I thought they were crazy, but I secretly hoped they were right since I had grown tired of cleaning up after the cats. I wanted my house clean again and didn’t have time to pet the cats anyway. Well, only because we had met our $12,000 family out-of-pocket maximum for the year, I decided to have Jude tested for allergies. His allergies are:

1. Cats – off the charts allergy
2. Dogs – very high allergy
3. Horses – high allergy
4. Outdoor mold – allergy, but 70 times less than his cat allergy

The allergy doctor has recommended that Jude stay away from cats, dogs and horses. Although it appears that I will get my way (a cat free house), I’m not sure that I like it (yes, I’m hard to please). Jude has bonded with the cats and I hate to disrupt his life with everything he has been through. Andy gave Jude the preliminary report to Jude that he is allergic to cats and Jude busted into tears and even said he would “take pokes” to get to keep the cats.

Tonight Jude and I went to a HopeKids event at SkyZone.  It was my first time there and it was so amazing.  The event was from 7-9.  Jude bounced for 2 hours and was a sweaty mess.  He loved playing dodgeball and tag on the huge trampolines.  With about a half hour to go, I learned they had opened the jumping up to parents and I was in in an instant.  It was more fun than I had imagined it would be.  Since even the walls are made of trampolines, we could bounce off the walls.  30 minutes of jumping was the best workout I’ve had in 6 years (since before I was pregnant with Jude).  Actually, come to think of it, it is the only workout I’ve had in 6 years.  Total blast!

On the way to SkyZone tonight:

Jude to me: “Who first created the telephone?”

Me: “Alexander Graham Bell.”

Jude: “Ha!  I knew that.  I learned that on BrainPOP.” 

Me: “Then why did you ask me, my Dear.”

Jude: “To see if you knew!”

At SkyZone tonight:

A MN Gophers volunteer to Jude: “What’s your name?”

Jude: “You’ll have to ask my mom.  I can’t pronounce it right now.  My Js sounds like Ds, ” and then he bounced away.  (He’s right.  Strangers often think his name is “Dude” when he tells them what his name is.)

 

I should have suspected something had run amuck when Levi came to me in the kitchen (while I was making a 2 week supply of cinnamon french toast) and requested the broom.  I thought, “Oh, what a good boy.  Isn’t that cute that he wants to pretend to clean up.”  I went back to work, just glad that he was keeping busy so I could keep cooking.  Several minutes later, Andy came upstairs and asked what had happened to the carpeting in the family room.  I asked what he meant and then went to investigate.  Sweet little Levi was still sweeping the popcorn that he had spilled all over the family room carpeting.

Levi was in desperate need of a diaper change tonight, but was also in the middle of watching Cars 2 in German on the iPad so I just let him watch it while changing his diaper.  But, I couldn’t help but be struck at the irony of it.  Little Levi can navigate an iPad (he had set himself up with the movie Cars) and can navigate the world wide web, but apparently can’t figure out how to use the potty.  Strange.  Since Jude was 3 before he was trained, we were hoping for better with little Levi.  Not at this rate.

“Mom, how do you grow?” (To which I responded something like, “you eat good foods.”) He then responded, “You better eat better food because I’m catching up!”

I was somewhat surprised to see, when I visited Jude’s online government school website, that the 1st grade curriculum had replaced the kindergarten math, phonics and language arts curriculum. That will be a big improvement, although I suspect that it will still be pretty easy for him, but we can go at his own pace and cruise through it if we want, I presume. Hopefully he’ll be less bored now.