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2007-08-31 - 3.48pm previous entry next entry
Monkey Boys! And other stuff...
Matthew is napping, and Arthur is having Quiet Time in his room (which isn't as quiet as it really ought to be yet, but oh well! He's playing with his cars on the bed), so I might have to stop this at any time if Matthew wakes (or Arthur does something that means I have to go up and remind him to be quiet/not come out of his room, etc).
I just wanted to update on the doctor's appt on Tuesday (thanks for asking, Jenn!). Arthur was very concerned about the tick in the jar, which was definitely as dead as a dodo by the day of the appointment! He looked so worried as he peered in at it, and shook his head as he said to me, "It doesn't look very well... It doesn't look very well at all." He insisted we took it to the doctor's to see if she could make it better, bless his heart!! I personally looked on that dead tick with grim satisfaction, hating it for biting my precious boy! *sigh* He has a much more generous heart than I do. I hope I can parent him well enough so that he continues to have that wonderful trait into adulthood.
Anyway. We took the tick to the doctor and she examined his leg where it had bitten him. She praised me for getting the whole tick out and not leaving the head behind :) I told her I looked online for how to do it before I attempted it. She is writing to the paediatricians at the hospital to inform them about Arthur's case, and to ask them if they want to routinely screen his blood for Lyme Disease, but she says they probably won't. They tend to wait for symptoms to develop first, before screening and treating. If they DO want to test his blood (NOT a thrilling prospect in itself!), they will contact me directly at home.
Otherwise, we wait. She assured me that he was in the best possible "camp" - first of all I knew he had been bitten by a tick, and then I got the whole tick out within 24 hours, and now we know exactly what we're looking for and the timeframe to expect it, so he's got everything in his favour. She said most of the complicated cases were where people don't even know they had a tick bite, or the tick had been in for days/weeks (!!!), or symptoms had been going for a long time before Lyme Disease was even suspected. The earlier you start on antibiotics when it starts, the better, and if Arthur gets it, he will start instantly that I spot a symptom.
The timeframe for symptoms to start is anywhere between 3 and 32 days after the bite - quite a wide range. After 32 days (RINGED on my calender - I can't believe I have to wait till the end of September! It feels like forever away!) I can completely relax. We are on day 5 today, and he's fine so far. I am watching for fever, pain in the joints, general unwellness, or rashes of any type, anywhere on the body. I also have to check the site of the tick bite every day. If he develops Lyme Disease, the area will "react". There is no reaction there at the moment, so it will be obvious if it changes. The doctor said that it will start to look good after say 20-25 days if the bite area has not reacted yet. But I can't relax till the end of September.
I sooooooo hope he doesn't get it! I have the prayer chain at church praying about it. The doctor said only a tiny percentage of ticks at the park carry Lyme Disease, but I know my stuff, having researched aplenty online, and I KNOW that 30% of ticks there carry it. That doesn't seem so tiny to me. Anyway. I pray that he doesn't get it.
The doctor did have to tell him that the tick was dead though! ;) I don't think he understood the concept, but he seemed perfectly accepting of the fact that she couldn't do anything for it! We had to take it home again, and I have to keep it until the 32 days are over.
So that is the update on that!
I have a ton of stuff I could write, but I have had to go up to Arthur what feels like a BILLION times since I started this entry - he is being ultra sulky and whiney about Quiet Time today. This is part of a general sulky and whiney trend over the last couple of months that we are most definitely working on at the moment! I am attempting to nip it in the bud, but not having the best encouragements of success at the moment. BUT, I do not intend to go, "Ohhh, he's only two..." and wait for him to outgrow it, no siree!
Matthew wakes. We'll see what I can get done on the rest of this entry later.
Okay, back asleep for a little longer, and Arthur is playing sweetly with his cars, from what I hear through the door (""Are you thirsty?" said the car.... "Yes!" said Arthur!" - aww! Arthur narrates EVERYTHING these days, it's ever so sweet! He does have a drink and snack in there, by the way!).
We are almost back to square one on the move/job front. I still feel like we are called to where Neil is working, or certainly somewhere in the county, but hmmm. Neil's job turns out to SUCK. He has 3 months probation. I think he is just over 1 month into it. He has found out that he's the third in a row in his position - the last two did not finish their probation, but quit before that point! Neil is already thinking to do the same, if only he can find a new job, urrrgh.
The difference this time is that we are really really much closer to God on the whole deal. For nearly 2 weeks now, we have been putting the kids to bed earlier - usually by 7.30pm (what bliss!), which means a huge feat on my part to feed, bathe and change them ready for bed by the time Neil gets home, with dinner ready for Neil when he walks in too. But I'm starting to feel sooooooooo much better in the pregnancy department (nearly 17 weeks now, already!!) and that helps a lot. I'm managing it!! They are most often ready for bed, or just requiring their night nappies and teeth cleaned before bed when Neil walks in. He spends a little time with each of them and helps me get them ready, then I take Matthew up (Neil spends more time with Arthur, playing cars and reading with him) and breastfeed him in bed. Then I put him in the cot (WIDE awake, sometimes even not too pleased about going to bed!) and LEAVE THE ROOM!!! Yeah!!! I finally managed to get it to the point where I put him down and leave him to fall asleep. Oh my gosh, it has only taken me FOURTEEN MONTHS, and I'm so relieved! It has been a very slow, gradual process from around the time I found out I was pregnant. In the end, I'm glad it was gradual. It was more gentle for Mathie that way.
He takes a while to go to sleep usually, and if he cries and sounds persistant, we go in, pick him up, rock/walk him for a moment and then put him down in the cot and leave the room again. That's all we ever do, and sometimes there are a fair few trips upstairs to do that, but other times he gets the message pretty fast and goes to sleep. He usually falls asleep all mashed up into the top corner of his cot, the funny boy! So we go up once he's been quiet for a while and move him down the cot all limp and fast asleep :)
Arthur gets a Bible story (or 10!) with Neil while I settle Matthew. And then I go in and breastfeed him in his bed. I pray over him (aloud - he nods while he's nursing to all the points in my prayer that he agrees with, which makes me chuckle for some reason!) while he's breastfeeding, and then he's usually out like a light before I even take him off the breast. Now that he isn't napping anymore, he goes to sleep very quickly at bedtime. If I DO get the chance before he conks out, I take him off the breast and pat his back for a moment before going downstairs, but it's rare that he is still awake by the time I go down. That's okay. I know from a few occasions that if he happens to still be all wide awake at that point, I CAN tell him Mummy and Daddy are going downstairs to have our grown-up evening time, and he must stay in his bed and try to go to sleep (or wait for sleep to come), and be quiet as a mouse. If he comes out or makes a ton of noise, he will be disciplined.
We have finally got a grip on discipline (watch me say, "Waaaah, it's not working!!" a few months down the line, haha!), and they seem to really get it at the moment. Well, Matthew less so, but he's so little still.
Anyway, so bedtime is working better! And then we come downstairs, and often it's like SEVEN THIRTY!!! Unfathomable, over the last nearly-three years!! It's so nice. We then spend 30 minutes chatting about our day(s) - each getting plenty of chance to talk and get stuff of our chests and share difficult stuff with each other. Then we spend as much of the next 30 minutes as we need to praying about the stuff we just discussed. It's SO GREAT!!! We are both feeling so much closer to God because of it, and it's starting to feel second nature to bring every issue in our family life before God as it crops up. It's feeling normal to pray together daily for our children, and to persistantly bring up the subject of Neil's work/our move with God. He isn't showing us anything about it yet, but we'll pray and seek him on it daily anyway. I know he'll speak to us about it.
So that is that. It's much more brief than I wanted it to be (I have such a lot of smaller detail/thoughts and feelings about the subject that I would normally really want to share here), but I haven't got the time. I need to get Arthur from his quiet time as it has been over an hour now and he's sounding restless up there!
I just wanted to post a few photos of something from yesterday. Matthew is climbing like crazy these days - more than Arthur ever did, and I thought HE was bad! I can't stop him scaling things he really mustn't go near, but we can't lose or rearrange any more furniture in our small house! Anyway. I had to go to the loo, so I told the boys I was going up to the toilet for a wee. Almost as soon as I got up there I could hear Arthur calling to Matthew and then shouting up to me, "I can't stop him!!" so I came back down and Matthew was trying to climb onto the merchant's chest (huge chest of little drawers that we have) from the sofa arm, which is cluttered on top with paperwork and boxes of tissues, and a box of more solid bits and pieces in the middle at the back where the boys can't reach, even from the sofa arm! I got him down and disciplined him, and then went back upstairs. He did the same thing again before I got the loo (Arthur called again to let me know), and that time I explained to the boys that if they didn't let me go to the loo, we were in danger of running out of time to go to the swings (there had already been like a dozen interruptions to me getting washed and dressed before going for a wee, and the time was getting on). Obviously, Matthew is too little to understand that, but Arthur got the message.
I finished in the toilet and was washing my hands when I thought how nice and quiet it was, and got suspicious! So I called down, "What's going on down there?!" and Arthur yelled back, "NO!" - always reliable evidence of something fairly monkeyish going on! So I called, "But what are you doing, Arthur?" and he said, "NO! I'm not doing anything!" Hmmm! So, drying my hands as fast as I could, I called, "What's Matthew doing?" and Arthur called, "He'd not doing anything either!" Uh-oh!
I ran downstairs to discover that without really noticing it, I have suddenly got TWO monkey toddler boys who get into mischief! Two of them! Yikes! Matthew had evidently climbed up onto the merchant's chest, rummaged in the box of bits, found a family bag of chocolate Minstrels (which I had forgotten about MONTHS ago!) and emptied it over the sofa, floor and toy boxes! He and Arthur were hoovering them up! Matthew had already chewed and spat several onto the sofa and the floor (urgh!), so keen was he to get the next tempting looking chocolate into his mouth!
Monkey boys! I told them off first, and then cleaned up. I was putting things in the bin in the kitchen when Arthur came to the gate in the kitchen doorway and said to me, "Mummyyy? Mashew did say "Would you like to share some chocolate?", and I did say yes!" :)
Here are the photos, after the goop was cleaned off the floor/sofa:
My camera was being annoying and taking lots of blurry photos. Right after these photos, Matthew started doing his usual thing where he chases Arthur around the floor, sort of hanging onto the back of Arthur's nappy as Arthur tries to crawl away! He eventually wrestles him to the ground. Arthur is very good-natured about this! Matthew is such a different personality, he's so boisterous and assertive! Arthur is both too, but SO much less than Matthew. They're blurry, but here's a little sequence of "action" photos of the above!
Okay, the monkey boys are now downstairs with me, and getting restless, so I must stop for now and think of something fun to do for the rest of the afternoon. My brain is so blank on that kind of thing lately! Yesterday we went to some swings that we hadn't been to before, and the boys were both SO taken with a child's pushchair and baby doll! The first thing Matthew did was grab it by the crotch and carry it around with him!! Not sure what to make of that! ;) Arthur was SO sweet with it. He put it in the pushchair and insisted on pushing it everywhere. He didn't want Matthew to "help" at all. It was a baby that had a crying noise when it was in a dark area, and he looked so concerned when it started crying after he pushed it into the little house! Eventually he figured he could turn the pushchair towards the open door and it wouldn't cry any more. I saw him pat its tummy, bend at the waist to talk gently to it, and then kiss it sooooo gently on the face before leaving it there! Bless! I absolutely MUST get them a couple of dolls and a child's pushchair. I have been meaning to for at least a year, so I really must get around to it.
Okay, MUST go! Will update when I can again, hopefully soon!
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