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2006-03-06 - 11.30pm previous entry next entry
NOT colour-blind, yay!!!! :D
Just a quick entry (haha!) to say thank you for the comments on the pictures of Arthur last entry, and that I owe people emails which I promise I WILL get around to!! If that's you, then I am soooo sorry! I will get there soon! And also, I heart the BT man, who brought me a new modem today at no cost (!!!!!) and fitted it and showed me how to use it, and now I have lovely jubbly internet access 24/7 again! Yaaaaaaay! I hate when I can't get online.
And ALSO, huge congratulations to Jemma on the slightly early arrival of little Jove!!! So exciting! :) New babies, yay!
I am sooooo pleased because I think I have been given a fairly good sign that Arthur ISN'T colour blind this afternoon! It's a wait-and-see game, you see, because my mum is a carrier (girls carry, boys suffer, in general - unless both parents have it (father suffering from it and mother carrying), and that's the only way a girl could actually be colour-blind). My brother is colour blind (mainly red/green (and thus brown also) - he absolutely can NOT see a difference between the two, but also blue/purple to some degree) and I remember him colouring in a tree trunk green and the leaves red when he was little, and not knowing anything about it. It was a normal thing for him to ask me which colour pencil he was holding before he started using it, when we were doing our homework or something. I also remember he would get really picked on by "friends" over games of Space Invader or stuff like that. He could not tell the red baddies from the green friendly aliens and would shoot the wrong things or let the baddies get too close, thinking they were friendly :( His friends used to tear strips off him for it, and Bennie never stood up for himself over it, and I remember wanting to smack their heads in for it! He used to play Little League football (soccer) and his team wore red. If they played the green team he was basically in trouble! Poor Bennie. I felt for him soooo much over it. He wanted to be an electrician for a while but he found out he would not be able to, being colour blind. He is a computer programmer instead :)
Anyway. So Mummy carries the colour blindness gene on one of her two X chromosomes, and therefore her children each have a 50/50 chance of getting the X chromosome with the colour blindness gene. It's sort of luck-of-the-draw with each child therefore. My brother picked that X, unfortunately. I can't really know if I did or not. If I did, then all of my children will have the same 50/50 chance of taking my X with the colour blindness gene, like with my own mother. Any sons I have could be colour blind, and any daughters I have could be carriers to their own children. The only way to find out is if I have any sons who are colour blind. Then I will know that I did! If I only had daughters, I would have to wait until they had sons to see if any of THEM were colour blind or not. If I have several sons who are not colour blind, it's not definite, but I think I would assume that I didn't inherit it. Anyway, so Arthur is the test. I have been hoping and praying that he isn't colour blind since I found out I was having a boy during my pregnancy with him.
The health visitor told me they can't test for colour blindness until a child is at least 3, but they usually don't actually test it until primary school! That's AGES!!! I'm SURE it's possible for him to tell me if he can see a picture amongst the red and green coloured bubbles on those pictures BEFORE age three! But there we go, that's the way it is done. I planned to watch out for myself and see if I could tell one way or the other. I didn't expect to have any clue until he really knew his colours though, much later on. But amazingly, this afternoon the perfect opportunity arose! He was busy building towers of Duplo again in their individual colours. He builds red and green towers separately, and has not mixed them up yet, so I had wondered if that was a good sign, but I figured it was too vague a thing to pin it on, one way or the other. But anyway, today he was building a green tower, and searching through the pile of Duplo bricks for more green ones. The last green one was stuck together with a red one, and he spotted it, put his green tower down carefully, and pulled the red and green bricks apart. He didn't hesitate in putting the red one back on the pile, and sticking the green one on his green tower!!!! I know it's not 100% confirmation, but I feel soooooo thrilled and hopeful that he must not be colour blind if he did that! If he is colour blind, I know from my brother that he simply would not be able to see the difference between those two colours, and he picked them apart easily and with careful thought over which was which. I am soooooooooooooooo happy!!! I phoned my mum IMMEDIATELY and she said it did sound like he couldn't possibly be colour blind :) We were both so excited over it! Yay yay yay yay yay yaaaaaaay!
Of course, even if he ISN'T, it could still be that I am a carrier and he just inherited my X chromosome that DOESN'T have the colour blindness gene. So we will wait and see all over again with Matthew. I think I will relax a lot more if Matthew is not colour blind either. Anyway I am just so so so so so so happy about that! I had to write about it here :)
I am having a Braxton Hicks contraction. La-la-la.
Arthur has a horrible cold, poor love. Neil's cold is all but gone, already!! They are soooo obviously different colds. Today I decided to have Arthur take his nap with his head on a pillow like Neil and I sleep, to elevate his head and ease his breathing. He is soooo snotty and can't breathe at all to breastfeed or sleep. It's the first time we've given him a pillow to sleep on, so I wasn't sure how well it would work. But it went amazingly well! I checked on him a million times, worrying that he was face down on it and suffocating, but I know that he is old enough to sleep safely on pillows now, and would turn over in his sleep if he couldn't breathe for any reason. I don't know if it was the pillow or just the fact that he isn't well, but he had a THREE HOUR NAP today!!!!!! He has never ever ever ever slept that long in the day before! Even as a new baby! I was hovering round the bedroom and worrying after 2 hours (typical!) and eventually I phoned my parents and Daddy told me not to worry - Arthur wasn't well and it was GREAT that he was taking extra sleep to help him get better. I should leave him sleeping as long as he needed, and not wake him up! Even if it meant bedtime was a little difficult. So I did, and he woke after 3 hours! It took him nearly an hour to wake up properly too, and he was quite unlike himself during that time, just lying on the floor on his side and watching TV all glassy-eyed :( I got worried again but then he perked up and was as lively and cheerful as ever :) I will be so glad when he gets over his cold! Of course in two days we go back to Playgroup again to seek out new germs, haha! I HOPE we do not come away with any this time.
He is sleeping on the pillow again now, and has been asleep for nearly 4 hours so far :) He is definitely breathing better for it, although he does have a cloth wipe soaked in Karvol (decongestant stuff for little ones) near him too, so that helps! We are thinking we might consider giving him a pillow of his own to sleep on at night now. But we'll see. He seems soooo much more settled and he doesn't roll around the bed so much, waking himself up when he gets wedged in the corners! Hopefully that might be a good thing for when we transition him to the single mattress. Wow, he is getting such a big boy! He sleeps on a full-size mattress under a full-size duvet cover, with his little head on a grown-up pillow! He looks sooooo tiny though, against the big pillow, and with his little shape humped up under the big duvet :) Sweetie-boy. I love to look in on him and see him sleeping peacefully.
Oh I forgot to say ages ago that we turned Arthur's car seat to forward-facing when he got his latest plaster cast on last month. We had no intention of switching him from rear-facing for a LONG time yet (see this fab article for why) but with his leg in plaster, he couldn't curl it up enough to fit against the back of the seat. So we had to turn him forwards while he had his cast on. I was not happy to do it though. Anyway it was soooooooo much easier to put him in and take him out of his car seat, and he loved seeing everything out of the front of the car, and we just haven't had the heart to turn it back to rear-facing yet. I am not sure that we will now. I feel that we should, for his best safety, but I don't know - I think he is so happy facing forwards that he would complain if we turned him around. Although he is pretty easy going about things so maybe not. And anyway, that's not a good enough reason not to. What IS a better reason is that I am now struggling to get him in the seat FORWARD facing with my growing bump, and I know I would just hurt my back trying to twist round to get him in rear-facing now. So I think forward facing will be better for ME for the rest of my pregnancy. But I wish he could stay rear-facing a bit longer. It's just the safest way for him to be, and he is a pickle for wriggling his arms out of his shoulder straps - VERY dangerous, but way more so if he's forward facing. I am buying this nifty gadget to stop him doing that though :) It's weird not to see him in that rear-view mirror anymore while I'm driving, but lovely to just glance over my shoulder when I'm stopped at a traffic light and see his whole self smiling at me :)
Neil has nearly got his new bike sorted for cycling to work. We have taken him to work a few times recently, which sucks somewhat, but I suppose it has its good points too, as we are then up and about (non-blearily!) earlier than usual and we are at the supermarket bright and early while the shelves are all bursting with fresh stocks! That part is fun. But I NEVER feel like getting myself and Arthur into the car that early in the morning to start with! It's probably good for me though. Anyway I will be glad when Neil has his bike ready. Then all that's left for me to do is worry like a crazy woman about his safety on the roads. *sigh*
I need to sewww. But I haven't got the energy. And quite honestly, squatting down to cut templates out of fabrics on the floor is wreaking havoc on my oesophagus, due to pregnancy-induced acidy-type-issues! I am getting too big to faff about on the floor now, but we don't have any surfaces big enough for cutting fabric. But the sewing urge is not being met therefore. I sense the impending surge of another Sewing Bug where you will not see hide nor hair of me for DAYS while I sew like crazy and get nowhere near enough sleep, hehe! It usually comes to a head like that if I don't get my sewing urges dealt with ;) Plus I am expecting another shipment of luscious fabrics (and a new nappy pattern!!) THIS WEEK from the States, so that will settle it. I will HAVE to sew :)
Another Braxton Hicksy thing. I need to go to bed. And drink some water first! Vitamin C too. I felt really achy around my glands yesterday and yucky, as though I was coming down with something, but I took extra Vit C before bed and I felt okay again in the morning! I feel kind of achy again now so I think I'll do the same again. There is no way I have missed being exposed to Arthur's cold, as we are still sharing saliva (nice!) just as much as ever - he feeds me his food from his spoon, and gives me rather wet kisses, and he is SO drooly at the moment anyway with that new molar coming through, that it's hard to find anything (furniture, clothing, utensils, etc!!) WITHOUT cold-germ drool on it! So I will be very pleased if I somehow manage to fight this cold off without getting it. I am going to take more Vitamin C and go to bed! And I neeed to update my pregnancy diary soon. Tomorrow is the last day of my 2nd trimester - can you believe it?! Matthew will be here before I know it... Which is kind of scary. But WONDERFUL too!!
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