The tooth fairy was here

The tooth fairy was here tonight. I confess I'm sort of looking forward to seeing Samantha's expression tomorrow morning when she wakes up and finds a shiny gold dollar coin in her special tooth holder pillow :-)

Today was a bad day for her as far as knee pain goes, which means it was also a bad day for her as far as behavior goes, which means it was a bad day for me as far as keeping my cool with her goes. So much for signs of progress. Tomorrow will be better.

Sam and Joshua and I will be spending a lot of time together over the next couple of days since Amy leaves in the morning for New Jersey to attend a friend's wedding and won't be back until Wednesday, just in time for Samantha's next MRI.

That's in addition to appointments with the behavioral therapist on Monday, the accupuncturist on Tuesday, and the neurologist on Thursday. Poor Samantha -- doctors of one sort of another almost every day this week. This is going to be a long week, and no five year old should have to go through what she's going through.

Teeth!

An update. Joshua is up four, and Samantha is (almost) down one. Samantha raced up the stairs when she got home yesterday to tell me she had a loose tooth. Add as much breathless excitement and sparkly eyes to that statement as you can imagine and that is about what she looked and sounded like. She keeps poking at it. She asked Matt last night if the tooth fairy would come and yank it out of her mouth while she was sleeping. I thought she was worried about it, but Matt said, no, she sounded actually hopeful at the thought. After lunch today she finally was grossed out about something. Her tooth bled a little from being moved so much while eating. She was fine two seconds later. The tooth really is quite loose and may come out today. The tooth behind it looks huge to me, but maybe because the others are just so tiny. Samantha informs me that the going rate for a tooth is one dollar. Oh really? If Oliver is jealous about the tooth, she will give him half of her dollar. She misses him alot.

Joshua is still zipping around while crawling, although he stands more and more often. He had a fever last week which turned out to be Roseola; he got a little rash a few days after the fever broke. He's fine now. He went to Sabrina and Sasha's birthday party this morning with Samantha. We spotted him as he climbed on all the equipment and rolled around. The other kids are so nice and careful about not stepping on him.

He is making some sounds that seem like words. Sam was saying dumptruck over and over as she dumped water on her soapy head in the bath. I swear Josh mimicked her exact intonation. Jessica, Marie's youngest girl, told me that Josh said "peek" to her the other day, but he hasn't wanted to share that with Mommy yet.

The tooth fairy lays in wait

Samantha has her first loose tooth, a lower central incisor. She is so excited about this she can hardly stand it. She asked me tonight if the tooth fairy would come and pull it out while she was sleeping. I couldn't tell whether she thought that would be a good thing or a bad thing.

It's still too early to tell if her knee is getting better or if the medication is starting to work.

Last night she had a pretty bad night, waking up at 2 am crying almost as hard as I've ever seen over her knee hurting, despite having had Motrin at bedtime. I gave her some Tylenol to help dull the pain, but it still took a good half hour for her to calm down and be able to sleep again. On the other hand, Amy says that she had almost no OTC medication today -- a dose of Motrin at 1 pm from our nanny even though she hadn't been asking for it (it's sometimes proven wise to give it to her preemptively before she's in severe pain) and nothing else all day until bedtime. No Motrin, no Tylenol, and no complaints about her knee hurting. It's hard to express what a huge development this is unless you've lived with a small child who's been in chronic pain for months.

She went to bed late tonight and based on last night's experience we gave her some Motrin just to improve the odds that she makes it all the way through the night. We can live with her getting it once a day for a while if she needs it -- it's maxing out on the dosage every day for weeks at a time that gets us worried about unpleasant side effects.

Overall I think the jury is still out on her knee right now. Unless the pain largely disappears between now and next week I think we're going to go ahead with the lower lumbar MRI that the neurologist ordered, and I still want to see a second opinion about the possibility of intra-articular osteoid osteoma, since the description of symptoms fit Samantha's condition very well, and it's a form of osteoma that's evidently diagnostically very challenging.

On an entirely different topic, Joshua just loves corn on the cob. He holds it in his little hands, looks intently at it, then lunges for it and tries to take bites out of it with his four tiny incipient teeth. He does pretty well for himself, eating almost an entire ear tonight. Of course he ended up with corn kernels all over this hands and face, down his clothes, in his hair, and -- I'm not making this up -- inside his ears. But he was an awfully happy little boy, and I have to say it was one of the funniest things I've seen in a long while.

Thirteen hours

A most remarkable thing has happened.

Samantha apparently went 13 hours today without any Motrin at all, and with only one dose of Tylenol somewhere in the middle. This may not seem remarkable to you, but it's astonishing to us. It's been months since she has been able to go more than 8 hours without Motrin, and she's usually required Tylenol somewhere toward the 5 hour mark to get her through. Thirteen hours without significant pain feels like some kind of breakthrough.

What changed? Beats me. She did have an appointment with her acupuncturist earlier this week and he repositioned the acupuncture beads he had previously applied. Could they be having an effect at last? It's almost too much to hope for.

We'll see what happens tomorrow. It may be that this is just a fluke, a one day reprieve. But it's the first reasonably good day Samantha has had with her knee in I've lost track of how many months, and at this point any sign of hope is worth holding onto even if it turns out to be grasping at straws in the end. If only she can sleep through the night tonight ...

Wish us all luck.

Baby food? We don't need no steenkin' baby food

Joshua has now decided that if he can't pick it up in his hands and put it in his own mouth, it isn't food. He'll have nothing to do with baby food, baby cereals, or anything else soft or mushy that has to be eaten with a spoon. He looks at the spoon, presses his lips tightly together, turns his head away, and pushes the parental hand holding the spoon away from his face with an expression of tremendous disdain.

On the other hand, if he can pick it up, he'll eat it. Recent favorites include strawberries, blueberries, slices of pear, whole plums peeled and cut in half, fresh peaches peeled and cut in half, bananas, cheerios (of course!), various sorts of teething biscuits, sliced tomatoes, hard boiled eggs, challah, and slices of American cheese. Oh, and pizza. He's very big on mushroom and cheese pizza. He ate pretty much an entire slice of it for lunch today.

Who knew that 10 month olds eat pizza?

Blueberries

Joshua is having a blueberry phase right now. He can sit down and eat almost a whole pint of blueberries which is just what he did the other day. So, it is the next day and the conversation with daddy goes something like this:

Amy: Did you know that blueberries come out black after they pass through the intestinal tract?
Matt: I did not know that, nor did I really need to.
Amy: <giggle>
Amy: It also stains his little tuchas blue. Did you know that?
Matt: -insert patient and long suffering tone here- No, I didn't know that either.
Amy: Well, it does. We have a blueberry blue boy butt here.

Sam starts dancing around the room singing, blue boy butt, blueberry butt!

It's not highbrow entertainment, but it gets us through. Well, me and Sam. Matt is very clear that he will have none of this. Which somehow makes it that much funnier for the rest of us.

Joshua loves climbing the stairs. He will zip up them every chance he gets, and he is very good at climbing them.

Sam had a friend over, Timmy, age 3 and a half. She was so sweet to him. She told him jokes just right for a 3 and half year old and made sure to hold his hand when he needed to. She is so thoughtful. They had a serious conversation about her uncle who died in WWI (great uncle) and Tim's dad's dad who died a million months ago. Sam wanted to know if he was a soldier. Tim said yes, he was a soldier. Sam asked if they fought together in WWI and knew each other. I was thinking about laughing, but they were so serious and respectful of their topic that I was actually pretty impressed. Driving by graveyards lately can start some very interesting conversations with a five year old.

Sam had a hard day. She was not able to get past 3 hours without having knee pain, and making it to the four hour mark to get Motrin or Tylenol was very difficult. Several times she spent at least a half an hour crying and screaming. This was especially difficult when she woke up Joshua who didn't really appreciate getting woken up with shrieks of pain, so he joined in with his own shrieks of dismay. Being in a small car all together gave it a particularly loud crescendo. I feel shell shocked right now. Thank goodness for bed time.

Sweet words

Samantha is having a rough time with her knee the last couple of days. I keep having to put her in time out and things are a bit rough between us. So, when Sam looks over at me and says, "I love you, mommy" it is no surprise to me when I start to tear up. Sam goes a bit further. "You know when I was little and I'd cry? Every time I cried, I was saying "I love you, I love you, I love you!" Well, that one tipped me over the edge and I definitely had the little drops on my cheeks. I said I love you too.

Where does she get these things to say?

Joshua is standing up now and then on his own without holding onto anything. He is now doing that about once a day. Two teeth are working their way through the top gums. Poor guy seems to take that all in stride. The only thing that really gets him upset now is Sam's screaming. He starts to scream in sympathy.

Back to the drawing board

The dealer took the car back without giving us too much grief. They did, however, keep our deposit, which I suppose they're legally allowed to do. So it was an expensive lesson in car buying -- if you live in an older house with single-car garage doors, drive the damn car home and make sure you can fit it through the door before you buy it.

We'll probably go back to the drawing board at some point before too long and see if we can find something with three rows of seating that meets our other criteria. Right now I just don't want to think about it.

On other notes, Joshua has about 4 teeth coming in now, and is utterly fascinated with my Blackberry. He's never even touched it, but every time he gets near me he gravitates toward the belt clip and tries to grab it. He's obsessed.

AAUUUGGGHHHH!!!!

We went down tonight and did all of the paperwork for the Entourage. It's a very pretty car, and Samantha was so excited. We drove it home.

It doesn't fit through either of the garage doors.

AAAUUUGGGHHHH!!!!!

Tomorrow morning first thing we have to drive it back to the dealer, all of 1.2 miles away, and try to undo the deal, get Amy's car back, etc. At best I expect we'll have to forfeit our deposit. At worst .... I don't even want to think about it.

Random bits of flotsam and jetsam

We finally bit the bullet and bought a new car. Surprising even ourselves, we ended up picking a Hyundai Entourage even over the Honda Odyssey. I can't really say why, when all objective criteria say that for the price we were quoted (less than $2000 more than the Entourage) we should have picked the Honda, but there you go.

One of the factors that probably came into play was the fact that the Honda salesman was a typical sort of car salesman, a little bit obnoxious and off-putting, while the guy at the Hyundai dealership was considerably more personable and more straightforward. He got a few facts wrong about the competition, but he didn't tell us any lies about the Entourage, and I got the feeling that if we had a problem he would actually try to make it right. We'll see, of course -- it could be that we've been completely hoodwinked and will regret the decision as soon as we start driving it. But based on a lot of research and reviews, I don't think so. There's a huge difference in resale value, of course, but since we tend to drive cars until they die or the family outgrows them rather than trading them in every 3 years, that's probably not as big a factor as the much better Hyundai warranty. After years of expensive Audi and Saab repairs, I'm sort of looking forward to five years of warranty coverage.

We pick the car up tomorrow if all goes as planned. I'll report back on the results later.

On other notes, we've seen no progress at all on Samantha's knee pain, despite increasing the doses of both amitriptyline and neurontin as the doctor advised. If anything, the pain seems to be worse over the past couple of days, and Samantha's behavior has become more frenetic, and she's sleeping less well. I don't know if the manic behavior is a result of sleep deprivation or a side effect of one of the medications, though amitriptyline is supposed to induce drowsiness. Not in this kid. I'll be calling the neurologist tomorrow to report the latest (lack of) results, and my guess is that she'll probably go back to the drawing board on a treatment plan. At least I hope so, because what we're doing isn't doing a damn bit of good for Samantha so far.

On other other notes, Joshua continues to develop day by day. He's gotten curly hair, a bright smile, and deep laugh when tickled. Tonight at dinner he played peek-a-boo ... by which I mean he grabbed a napkin off the table, put it over his own face and head, then pulled it down so he could see me and giggled. Then he did it again. And again. And again. It was very clear that he'd figured out the game of peek-a-boo and was playing it with me. How cool is that? (I'll try to post video of this if I can figure out how to upload it to YouTube and then add a reference to it here.)

Ugh ...

Amy found a tick on Samantha's head tonight while washing her hair. Ugh. Disgusting creatures. And of course now we're mildly freaked out about the possibility of Lyme Disease, although in reality it's very unlikely, since even if a tick is infected it generally has to remain attached for 24 hours or more to transmit the bacteria. However, since I already know two people who have contracted Lyme Disease, and since it's the absolute last thing we need on top of everything that Samantha is already dealing with, it would be just our luck for it to happen.

Fortunately the tick came off intact. We have it in an empty spice jar full of alcohol, and Amy's going to take it by either the vet or the pediatrician's office tomorrow to see whether it's of a type we should be concerned about.

On brighter notes, Samantha really does amuse me sometimes. Yesterday we ran into our neighbor John, who is obviously really fond of Sam. He told her that he wanted to put up a flag for the holiday, and since Samantha would able to see if from her window he playfully asked her whether that was okay. She didn't anything for a while, so he said "You're still thinking about it, huh?" to which she replied "Well, I'm not sure. You didn't say what kind of flag, so I'm not sure what it will look like."

Well, it amused me, at least. So did the following little rhyme, which she made up last night when Tucker was being particularly ... uhm ... "aromatic":

Fee, fie, fo, fum
I smell Tucker's stinky bum.

Where does she come up with these things?