Category: Kids

Eating At The Table

As mentioned previously, Henry has joined us at the table, and after about a week it seems to have stuck. In fact, he thought it was high time. It’s as if he’s always sat there.

It’s a little crowded, and tricky when the girls are eating something he can’t have, but we’ve done pretty well.

It’s astonishing just how much he loves chili, which in the last incarnations doesn’t seem to have bothered him at all. Other than spices and maybe brown sugar, that’s not a surprise, and any problem should have been modest anyway. More concerning is that one of us touched him without washing peanut butter off our hands and he got temporary, fairly dramatic hives where the presumed skin contact with peanut butter happened.

He has tried dried papaya with no apparent problem. Forget what else there’s been new. He thinks pasta is the greatest, even plain. Oh, he’s been eating a lot of homemade applesauce and some slivers of peeled Macintosh apple. Gave him slivers of raw carrot the other day. If I buy hot dogs (decent all beef ones, checking ingredients), he eats an entire one as part of a meal now.

We had an excess chicken breast thawed the other day, so I boiled it to make chicken salad the next day. Since he can’t have mayonaise, I made him some with canola oil, plus celery salt, garlic powder and poultry seasoning, which I also used in the other batch. He demolished a thick half-sandwich and it was sad I’d not saved him extra. I’ll have to try the oil trick with tuna, if there’s a sale and I can restock it. Looks like it’s one of those foods that’s gone up lately. The amount of oil is enough to moisten and make it act like it would with mayo binding it, but not enough to make it seem oily. Like an invisible binder.

More pictures sometime today, probably. Need to do stuff. It’s a weird day because I had a not-interview at 4:30 AM. That is, it was a see the operation and if you’re not scared then come apply for this part time, wee hours distribution center job. I napped subsequently, but not well. When Deb gets home, I’ll run down and apply, then it’s a background check, interview some morning at 2 AM, and presumably starting after that. Time to feed the kids, start a pot roast for supper in the crockpot, and do some other things that’ll feel useful.

Art Kids Pictures

Sadie Art

I scanned in two of Sadie’s latest drawings…

The top one is me handing her a lollipop.

The second one started as a blank on which I had written “Henry” and drawn a circle, before whatever interrupted my session with him. Starting with the circle, Sadie drew, left to right, herself with a pink sippy cup with a pink lid, Valerie with a pink cup with a purple lid, Henry with a blue cup with purple lid, Deb with a blue cup and me with a yellow cup. She drew the grass and our blue house, sun and blue sky, and, having seen me draw “m” birds exactly once when I’d have told you she was paying no attention, a bunch of birds. I think the rest was practice making letters, the extent of which I’d not noticed until I scanned it.

She’s done some cool stuff on the computer, more patterns and shades and stuff than identifiably drawn items, but mostly that gets blown away without being saved. I made her copies of these and put them on their computer (we have them sharing a single one now, rather than the overkill of three or even two, after Henry killed Sadie’s and Valerie’s started dying a natural death) so if she wants she can modify them there, or be inspired by them. She’s excited. I suspect Santa has in mind the possibility of a kid’s easel kind of thing for her this year, but we’ll have to see.

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The Little Ones

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Being Four

I’ll be interested to see how much it sticks, but last night I taught Sadie about digits, how every number is made up of 0 through 9, how to count to 100, and about using fingers as a math aid. She was fascinated.

Kids

Big Boy

Henry officially ate at the table with us for the first time tonight. He did great! That means he also had a plate, just like the girls, and a spork.

Basically we got the “duh, what were you waiting for” reaction from him.

He’s using the booster, which we took out a few weeks ago in anticipation. When it’s not being used as such, they use it as a tiny chair or stepstool. It’s a squeeze, but we managed to get all three kids along one side of the table, so it needn’t pull out from the wall. He sits between me and Sadie. She’s so excited to have him there, it doesn’t matter that she’s in the middle.

So now we’ll clean up the high chair, hang onto it a few days or so in case, then it’ll be up for grabs or off to the dump (it’s seen better days, having been a hand-me-down even for Sadie, though still functions). That’ll free up a spot for some other furniture, like the utility table we used to put there. Not that it has much utility until they are all old enough to allow the storage baskets under the table to be used, but hey. We’ll gain a ton of storage space in a couple years, maybe less.

He’s also dead set on using the potty sooner rather than later. The girls were never as aggressive about it, as far as I can recall.

Next thing you know he’ll be sleeping in the bedroom with the other kids. He’s borderline ready for being able to wake and wander out of the room without it being a big deal. It’s more of a problem that he’s an agent of chaos if, say, he joins them for bedtime stories. That still keeps everyone awake longer. He’ll get there though. The three of them make a great team. In separate rooms they all woke up around the same time today, and when Sadie was sad and cold, he leaned against me and put on a show to make her laugh. You could see him studying her reaction, processing the feedback and adjusting what he did accordingly.

I’m probably forgetting some benchmarks, and didn’t even bother to get into the current food and medical stuff. He went nuts for lima beans tonight, and thinks graham crackers are one of the best things ever, for instance. He seems to be able to eat canned peaches in heavy syrup safely. Eating several peeled green seedless grapes bothered him a bit, but not so much that he can’t have a couple grapes like that if the girls are eating them. Last week he thought the beefy chili I made was awesome, and he seemed to tolerate it well in modest amounts, but I think there was a delayed reaction to the spices and it’s one of the things that in the past week have had him a bit on the red-faced side more than I’d prefer to see. Overall, he’s already grown less sensitive. If it weren’t for the emergency room visit for the eggs, we’d almost be downright relaxed about food issues. Too bad about the eggs though.

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Frosting

That second picture made me think of my paternal grandfather so strongly I went and found one to include here (no larger one, had to size up as it was).

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Valerie On Lap

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Tabletop Boy

Henry was proud of himself for having climbed on the table to play with Sadie’s new dominoes. Scary, huh?

blogging Kids

Was Going to Post

Henry says that is not allowed. But then, neither is anything else. Besides holding him so he can fall asleep no put me down no pick me up no put me down hey shiny thing ah relaxing yay let me go play now hey you’re in the kitchen cool…

Business Controversies Money News Politics

Bailout Poll

John Hawkins did a flash poll, in which I participated, on the bailout. Interesting results, more skewed than I had expected. The last question, though, looks like people answered based not on where they stood, but what they thought public perception must be.

Related to that, it is heartening to see that Barney Frank’s role in the crisis, and its roots in the Carter administration, ballooning from tinkering in the Clinton administration, close ties to Frank, Kerry, Obama and others, and connection to the likes of 9/11 scoundrel Jamie Gorelick are becoming widely known.

Birthdays Pictures

Sadie is Four Today!

Time flies! It was four years ago today that Sadie arrived reluctantly among us. She was sooo much younger a year ago. It’s amazing.

Happy birthday Sadie Rose!

Birthdays Kids

Pre-Birthday

Tomorrow is Sadie’s birthday. A couple of cousins have birthdays near now as well. It’s Sunday.

This means cake at my grandmother’s, where we are going for dinner, except we are supposed to be there at 11:00, which means I already need to have drank all my coffee and showered and started trying to herd kids, because it takes hours. Though we’ve gotten better. Key is probably to make sure diaper bag is ready and clothes are selected now, not later.

Tomorrow we will have cake here.

Then Saturday there’s a cookout and pumpkin picking party at my brother’s, oriented to the kids. It was originally at 2 PM, but there will be a bonfire, so 3:30. After the bullshit with people with firepits all around us, making us sick with smoke all summer! How ironic is it to be invited to a party of the same variety?

Anyway, we’re in a conundrum, because that throws the thing late enough to mess with the evening. I’m thinking to eat and get pumpkins and pretty much leave so the time is reasonable, but that relies on kids not freaking because they know there’s more. Also need to figure out what to bring for food to share, and how to cover the gas.

Ugh, time to start gulping coffee. You’d think almost an hour into being up I’d have had my first cup. And a shower, or I am not going anywhere, no matter what day it is.

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Hmmm…

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“I Cutest”

Good picture for this exchange today.

Me: “You’re the cutest!”
Valerie: “I cutest!”

Kids Medical

ER Aftermath

Well, it’s the morning after the emergency room run. He actually looked worse in the end than the pictures showed, and was engulfed in places not pictured.

By 10 PM it had subsided significantly but still looked bad. That was time for a new dose of Benadryl, then he participated in some book reading and hell raising before getting in bed with Deb.

He slept like a rock until 8:30, when we both got up, well ahead of his sisters.

No more hives.

Okay, not exactly no sign, since looking closely in some of the worst areas it’s like there are ghostly scars, redder skin than it should be. Presumably that will fade.

Not only did we not wake him for a 4 AM dose of Benadryl, but also I haven’t bothered with one this morning. If there seems to be the slightest reason, I won’t hesitate.

We probably won’t even worry about filling the prescription, since that was due to be given at 6 PM today only if he still had hives.

All that’s left, besides avoiding eggs, is calling the doctor Monday to arrange allergy testing. That, and I’m curious whether anyone on my side has ever had egg allergies. I know about some allergies or sensitivities to milk, clams, garlic and onions, raw tomato, but can’t remember eggs… or maybe I am thinking my older brother had that problem. Hmmm… Anyone?

Medical Pictures

Not Hysterics

I had to take Henry to the ER this evening. As far as we can tell, he is allergic to eggs. He ate far and away his largest serving of eggs so far, scrambled, at noon. He was reacting full-blown about the time Deb got home. We gave him Benadryl, and it no more than slowed it some this time. This is what he looked like after we got home:

This is extreme, but yeah, we aren’t kidding about the sensitivities and allergies. Morton Hospital was awesome. I drove him over there and we got right in. They gave him prednisone, and we have to give him Benadryl every six hours until it subsides and another dose of prednisone if needed about 6 PM tomorrow. We are to call the doctor Monday and arrange allergy testing, now that he’s over a year old. It took no time, and he mostly had fun and charmed people. As I type this, it’s finally starting to recede a bit.

Update:
Um… recede in places. His belly is massively worse.

Kids Medical

Eggs

Apparently Henry has limited tolerance for them.

Even as the whole milk products thing seems to be getting milder.

Horrendous hives. Benadryl has its work cut in for it.

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Henry Scales Table

Last week I caught Henry climbing onto one of the kitchen chairs, so naturally I grabbed the camera to document it, arriving in time for his proud arrival onto the chair. From there he tried for the table, which was actually easier. The goal was apparently my niece’s computer.

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Shoeless

Valerie removed her shoes and socks in the car, then insisted on carrying her shoes in herself. I was allowed to have her socks.

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