Birthday boy!

Joshua is one year old today. It's hard to believe -- it doesn't seem that long since he was born. That means it's also a year since we've slept through the night, even without Sam's knee issues. No wonder I'm tired all the time.

Some things that Joshua is doing at one year old: holding his own bottles, starting to drink out of a cup, crawling up and down stairs, getting down off our very high king sized bed by going backwards down the bed steps (under adult supervision, of course!), standing up almost unsupported, and starting to make sounds that sometimes sound like the words dada, ella, and (according to Amy) thank you. He's not quite walking yet, but that may be because he's so quick and so mobile by crawling that he doesn't feel the need yet. He is, fortunately, very gentle with the dogs, and except when overtired is a pretty happy, good natured baby who smiles easily.

Meanwhile, Samantha has a second loose tooth, and she has her Kindergarten orientation day next week and starts school a week from Monday. Tempus fugit.

Pie Race Photos

Martin Flohr took some pictures at the MassBike pie race last weekend, including two of me and Samantha. He's give me permission to post them here. (Click on the photos to view the full sized versions.)

Samamtha looks rather serious in the one where she's eating pie at the finish line -- I think she was a little annoyed that we hadn't come in first.

All images are copyright 2007 by Martin Flohr. You can see the rest of his pie race photos here.

Best wish

Samantha tells me this morning that wishes do come true. Oh? What wish? I got a baby brother, mommy! She really does love him, even when he keeps turning up the sound on the television while she is watching a beloved Dragon Tales.

And the "Young and Awesome Award" goes to ...

Today has been a very busy day.

We got up this morning, dropped Joshua off with a friend from the babysitting co-op who offered to look after him all day, and headed off to the MassBike Fifth Annual Bike Festival and Pie Race. It's a serious bike festival full of serious cyclists, but a few "citizen cyclists" show up as well.

We got there late, but late turned out to be just in time for the 8 mile ride plus canoe trip. So Amy and Samantha and I (Samantha on the trail-a-bike), along with the 10 or so other people who signed up for this ride, biked four miles through Concord to a boat house where we all rented canoes and paddled down the river and back for an hour, then biked four miles back to the starting point. (If 12 or 13 people sounds like a small crowd, it was. The 20 to 45 miles trips were much more popular.)

We got back to the starting point in time for the bike festival lunch, and than Samantha and I did the Pie Race. The Pie Race is a (supposedly, but just you wait) six mile course where you bike for about 2 miles, get off your bike and eat a piece of pie, bike for another two miles, eat another piece of pie, bike the last two miles back to the starting line and eat a last piece of pie. It's a timed race with prizes for the fastest times. Throwing up from too much pie disqualifies you immediately.

Everyone involved in the race was thrilled to see Samantha participating. They've never had anyone that young do the pie race, and they've never had anyone do it on a tandem bike. So she was very popular with the organizers and the other participants. A number of people took pictures of her before the race, and someone who was shooting video (who was also the leader of our family ride and canoe trip) "interviewed" her as part of the video.

Samantha was great on this race. She really wanted to win -- she's just a wee bit competitive about these things -- and we were making surprisingly good time to start with, particularly given that we were on a trail-a-bike and the first leg of the trip was largely uphill. We were also #1 to leave the starting line, and she was thrilled that there was no one in front of us. She kept telling me that we "left in a cloud of dust".

But we -- like the three or four people who'd passed us by this time -- took a wrong turn at about the three mile mark when we mistook a chevron painted on the road for the triangle that marked the course of the pie race. We ended up biking about a mile uphill in the wrong direction before the road dead ended in a T-intersection. The fact that there were no race markings at the intersection finally made us all realize we'd taken a wrong turn, so we headed back to look for the marker we'd missed. We eventually found it, but between going two miles out of our way and the additional fatigue of that uphill portion we probably added at least 10 minutes to our time.

We also scared Amy a bit when people who left long after us started coming in to the finish line and saying they hadn't passed us along the way (which they hadn't, since we weren't on the course anymore). She actually called my cell phone to check and make sure we hadn't gotten lost. By that time we were back on course, although she happened to call in the middle of a hard uphill climb that took everything that Sam and I had to get to the top.

Still, we pedaled like hell and ate our pie and finished the race, and Samantha was amazing. She pedaled the whole way, including all of the uphill segments, and when we decided on the last straightaway that we were just not going to be the last people in, she pedaled her heart out as we raced ahead to pass two or three other cyclists before reaching the finish line and eating our last piece of pie. Our final time was 40 minutes 20 seconds, which isn't bad given the detour. (The winning male competitor finished the course in just over 18 minutes, sans detour.)

Amy told me that as we came down the road on that last section people watching the race or competitors who'd already finished were shouting and cheering for Samantha, saying "Look at her pedal! Look at her go! Isn't that great?", and when we got into the finish area about 15 different people took pictures of her -- pictures on her bike, pictures eating pie in her biking gloves, pictures taking off her helmet. She was one of the hits of the Pie Race, I think.

The even made up a special award for her, the "Young and Awesome" award, complete with a prize consisting of a set of bike maps for routes starting in Arlington, and a pretty nice folding hex wrench tool set. She was positively beaming.

I'm hoping that some pictures or videos of the event will show up on the MassBike web site at some point. If they do I'll link to them from here.

Now I'm going to climb into the shower and then go over to Babies R Us to try to buy a crib tent, because "thud" is never a sound you want to hear when a one year old is involved.

I had to give this a try. It really is easy to add photos! This is a picture of Samantha and her cousin, Dylan, at Justin's graduation party. Abbie made a wreath for Samantha out of some alfafa she found in the horse pasture. Isn't she talented? Sam looks a little funny from the nasty spider bite she got earlier that morning, but I still love this photo. Samantha and Dylan always have a blast together.

First word is DaDa

Matt is just being modest and trying not to hurt my feelings, but Joshua's first word is definitely 'DaDa.' We ate dinner at Krazy Karry's tonight, and Matt went outside to make a phone call. Joshua kept looking at Daddy through the window and saying "dada" in a wistful sort of voice. Then he would stuff a part of a french fry in my mouth and giggle and grab it out of my mouth. He has the best giggle. He lights up the world with his giggle.

Grease Monkey

We have it confirmed. Joshua is a boy. Okay, so maybe the penis I noticed when he was born should have been a clue, but really, how sexed is a baby anyway? I guess this is a clue that Josh is no longer a baby and in the toddler zone. He was on the floor for a couple of minutes tonight in the basement while I switched the laundry. He went near his Daddy's bike, and the next thing I see, he has grease from his wrist to his cheek. Must be in his genes. I come from a long line of auto mechanics. Grease flies onto him if he goes near a bike or car.

And what about the monkey part? Well, this little guy, petite, really, terrifies his nanny and his mommy today when he hurls himself over the crib railing and lands head first on the floor. Amazingly enough, he is fine, but he is now sleeping on the floor with the big stuffed dog right next to his mattress in case he decides to throw himself off the mattress to land the five inches to the floor. NO MORE BOOBOOs! says Mommy. And Marie. I know we won't get our wish, but I can hope.

Nothing to say

I really have nothing worth saying today, at least nothing worth putting down in writing. I just really like this picture of Samantha and wanted an excuse to post it.

So here it is.

Is it real or is it random?

Tonight I came home from work and went upstairs. As usual, Joshua heard my voice and came racing over to me on hands and knees and stood up holding onto my leg. What's different about tonight is that he looked up at me and said "dada" for the first time. And I'm not sure, but I think that later on when I was in one room and he was in another, he crawled up to the closed door and said "dada" again.

It may be nothing more than random syllables as he explores the different sounds he can make. Then again, it may not. We'll certainly be on the lookout over the next few days and weeks for any other signs of impending language.

It's hard to believe that he's going to be a year old in just 11 more days. Maybe that explains why he needs a haircut already :-)

Send in the clowns

As long as we're posting video, here's a bit from a couple of weeks ago when Samantha and her friend Benjy decided to engage in a little at-home face painting. They're nothing if not thorough :-)

Joshua David Alexander Landau: Agent of Entropy

Submitted without comment ...

Growing up overnight

Yesterday on the way home from dinner Samantha was talking about my car, because it was beeping incessantly to tell me I have a brake light out. (I don't, but that's another story.) She asked how old the car was and I told her that it was now seven years old. Without stopping to think, and without missing a beat, she said "Wow, that means it's two years older than me."

When did she learn to do simple arithmetic in her head?

Right now she's in the living room reading a book to Joshua. And I mean reading the book to Joshua.

Today after lunch we're going to the Y so she can use the rock climbing wall. That's another thing we haven't been able to do all year.

And Joshua just raced across the room on all fours and is currently trying to climb up my leg, so I'll have to stop there for now.

Today was a good day

I think we have our daughter back. The child whose world was circumscribed by pain, whose days and nights were measured in minutes since the last dose of Tylenol or minutes until the next dose of Motrin, has given way to the old Samantha. The bright, quick, often charming, frequently stubborn, sometimes infuriating, always in motion Samantha. Sure, she's a scary smart rather temperamental five year old, but she's our scary smart rather temperamental five year old again, and she's turned out to be so resilient that the months of pain and sleeplessness have barely left a mark on her.

Today we went biking together with the trail-a-bike. Only after we were on the bike path did I realize that this is the first time we've gone biking together all summer. Last year we were out at the park or the playground or the reservoir or the bike path, or sometimes at multiples of these, every nice weekend day of the summer. This year we've had to be so hesitant, so tentative about doing things with Samantha because of her knee and the constant risk that her medication would wear off at an inopportune time. Having found a way to manage her pain, while not as good as a diagnosis and "cure", is still like magic for us.

I'd thought that we'd do the short trip down the bike path to Lexington Center and back, maybe 20 minutes or so each way. But Samantha fairly insisted that we bike all the way to the end, out in Bedford, and back again. So we did. We saw chipmunks and squirrels, stopped to see the horses that pasture up against the bike path in Lexington, waved to the cars on 128 as we crossed the bicycle bridge overthe highway, and took a water break out in Bedford at the old unused railway car that marks the end of the path.

Then we turned around and rode home to meet Amy and Joshua in Arlington Center for dinner. It's a total distance of about 17 miles and takes about 90 minutes with the trail-a-bike. So Sam biked for 90 straight minutes today, and she was great the whole time. She pedaled almost all the way without complaint, except that her fingers were cold where they extend outside her cycling gloves.

Later in the month we're probably going to do a family bike-a-thon / cycling race. Sam has her heart set on winning. I'll have to help her understand that just finishing the course together will be a victory for us, and she shouldn't expect to come in first. But finish we will: the short course is just six and a half miles or so, and for Samantha that ain't nothin'.

Today was a good day. We have Samantha back. Thank you, Dr. LeBel.

Pebbles in and out

Joshua is really excited about taking things out and putting them back in. The Eeyore phase I call it, for Eeyore and his birthday balloon. Remember? Piglet pops the balloon, and Pooh eats all the honey, but Eeyore is delighted because he has an ampty pot and something to put in it. Joshua crawls to the dog park and picks up the pebbles on the edge, carries them to the plastic kiddie pool and tosses them in. He does this over and over. He stops, reaches in, picks up the pebbles in the pool and throws them on the flagstones. I toss in a small bucket, just to see what he will do, and he gives me the biggest grin, like what a great thought, mom! He picks up pebbles from the flagstones, puts them in the bucket, then pours them on the kiddie pool. Makes great noises, either way. He is so intent on this, like a mad scientist mixing some potion. What a cutie! He is no longer so focused on anything with hinges. Now he has definitely moved on to what fits inside other things.

Our friend Barbara might not think he is such a cutie for a little while. I dropped him off around 3:30 today. He was very tired. He did not like being in a new place with a strange person when he was so tired and he told Barbara this very clearly at the top of his lungs for an hour. I am so sorry, Barbara, if you are reading this. He usually will just conk out. I never thought about what being in a new place would be like for Joshua. He is too easy to take for granted. I picked him up a little after 5pm and he was sleeping very sweetly. Kudos to Barbara!

Samantha is sleeping through the night, mostly. I think she is quite worried about what the teachers will think about her in school. She has it in her head that the teacher won't like her and no matter what we say, she keeps worrying. Poor kid. This is a big change for her. And us! What will I do without Sam for 5 days, whole days, all year! I can barely be apart from her for 3 hours.

Warm

I wake up this morning after sleeping soundly since Josh's feeding at 2am. I feel warm and cozy, even on my neck. That's odd. Why is my neck warm? There is a weight too, and soft hair. Yup, It is Sam. I like having her close, but I start to wonder, if this is where her head is, where are her feet? I wake up enough to lift my head. Sure enough, she has stretched out her entire length, even to pointing her toes in her sleep, crossway's on the bed. We each have about a foot of space and our little, small girl is taking up, maybe 48 inches? of our king size bed. Those toes must have given Matt black and blues, but he sleeps on, the stoic snuffles of the Dad. I reach out and just drag her feet over, placing her head on the pillow. She says "good morning" clearly, but she falls asleep again immediately. I doubt I really woke her up.
She does this in her own bed. I have gone in and had to lift her head from the floor and put her head on the pillow again. I do all of this without waking her. I should get her a round bed. It would suit her sleep habits best.

Pavlov's dogs have nothing on me

It's amazing how we've all been trained to react to certain things over the past several months. Tonight at bedtime Samantha looked at me and said "Daddy, my knee hurts a little." I instinctively cringed and began to wonder if the past few days have just been an aberration, or if she was developing some sort of resistance to naproxen, and began to think about where I'd put away all of the other pain medications in case I had to get them all out again tonight.

A little more inquiry revealed that "my knee hurts" really meant "my shin hurts below my knee because I was racing around today like a crazed banshee and banged it against something." Crisis averted. Naproxen continues to act as the wonder drug, and Sam is sleeping through the night. It's true that she often doesn't go to bed until sometime between 8 pm and 9 pm and that she rises with the dawn (often coming into our room to try to climb into bed with us at dawn, or sometime before), but she's always been like that.

How I ever ended up as the parent of a morning person I will never understand. But the start of the school year is just over the horizon so I'm going to have to become more of a morning person myself soon enough. Preschool started at the relatively civilized hour of 9 am and it was always okay to be 5 or 10 minutes late if that's how it worked out, but kindergarten begins at 8:10 am and tardiness is not an option.

Joshua, meanwhile, is having a tough couple of days. He's not sleeping well, and he keeps chewing on his fingers. It's possible he's got another set of teeth ready to come in. They really do change on you overnight, don't they?

Three little words

Some people think that one of the keys to a happy life of contentment is hearing three little words on a regular basis.

But I'd say that right now, for me, one of the keys to a happy life is not hearing three little words on the regular basis. What three words are those? "My knee hurts."

Samantha has been off Motrin and Tylenol and on naproxen instead for three days, and in those three days she has complained exactly once about her knee, and even that was a fleeting "My knee is getting a little sore", which may simply have been from crouching down under bushes picking berries. She never mentioned it again, and she's slept through the night for two nights in a row, which is truly remarkable. Amy and I still aren't getting much sleep because of Joshua, but at least only one of the kids is up in the middle of the night now, which is a godsend.

We still have to get to the bottom of this and identify the generator of Sam's knee pain so we can arrive at a long term solution that's better than just pain management, and over time we have to try reducing the naproxen dose to find the smallest quantity that does the job, but in the meantime the new medication is allowing her to function normally for the first time in ages.

I feel like we're finally at a point where she can start to have her life back again, where she'll be able to go to kindergarten in the fall without having to take medicine during the middle of the school day every day, where we can consider letting her go rock climbing or do dance or gymnastics classes again, or just have sleepovers with friends again. She's really missed those things, especially the sleepovers, and I want her to have them back. So here's hoping that the meds continue to work as well as they have so far.

Violet Beauregarde has nothing on Joshua

We went berry picking today at a local farm. Raspberries, strawberries, and blueberries were ripe, and we spent a couple of hours there picking all three. Joshua, as you know if you've been reading this blog, is very big on fruit right now and since we were out in the fields around lunchtime we were feeding him berries as we picked them. Now normally this wouldn't be a big deal, because how many berries can an 11 month old eat? The answer in his case is "a surprisingly large quantity".

I kept filling a quart box with blueberries (did you know that it helps to be tall and have long arms when picking blueberries? You can get to all of the really nice, plump, ripe berries that are either too high off the ground for most people to reach, or buried too deeply within the blueberry bushes for most people to reach) and then finding that it wasn't quite full anymore. Joshua was grabbing fistfuls of berries with both hands and stuffing as many of them as possible into his mouth. He looked like a little curly-headed chipmunk with his cheeks full of berries. I probably should have offered to pay the farm extra for the blueberries he ate, since he can go through a pint of them when he's on a roll, but I didn't think of it until just now.

And of course tomorrow Samantha will have the pleasure of singing her "Blueberry butt boy" song all over again. It's a rich, full life.

Sleep that knits up the ravelled sleave of care

The big news of the day: Samantha slept through the night last night, for the first time in months.

One day does not a trend make, and she did wake up at around 5:30 am saying her knee was bothering her a little, but she slept from 8:30 pm to 5:30 am and when she did wake up she wasn't crying or screaming in pain. Maybe the naproxen is really going to work. The next week or two will tell.

Joshua is an eating machine today. Breakfast consisted of almost a cup of blueberries, half a pint of raspberries, somewhere in the neighborhood of 2 eggs (scrambled), one and a half slices of cheese, and a piece of toast. Where does he put it all? He's only 11 months old, and he's just not that big!

Imagine -- Doctors who read their email

I love doctors who read their email. Samantha's neurologist has already replied to my question of an hour or so ago about tizanidine and agrees that as long as Sam falls asleep okay, it's reasonable to just try using the naproxen to keep the discomfort at bay through the night and not use any other sleep aids at all. If for some reason this doesn't work, we can always add in the other medication starting with a very small dose and titrating up to find the smallest quantity that lets her sleep through the night.

I want a new drug

Samantha had another MRI yesterday, this one of the lumbar spine. You see, the nerves that end in the knee begin in the lumbar spine, and her neurologist wanted to check for thickening of the nerve roots, obstructions or projections in the spine impinging on nerves, and other such potential causes of referred pain.

The procedure went okay. Samantha really didn't want to be sedated -- she has my determined lack of fondness for needles -- so they tried it without sedation. During the first part of the scan she was a little twitchy because of the noise in the machine, perhaps because she just had a single pair of foam earplugs instead of both plugs and ear covers. Whatever the reason, she was moving around too much and about halfway through they took her out and said we were going to have to put her to sleep. This upset Samantha quite a bit, and she began to cry. At that the techs agreed to try once more without sedation, and this time they thought to use the ear covers as well. Samantha was great; she lay still as a statue for the second half of the scan. The upshot was that they didn't get clean data for the T1 scans, but the radiologist said that was okay as long as the T2 scans were good, which they were.

Today we went for the followup appointment with the neurologist. The MRI, as we might have predicted, was perfect. Samantha has a textbook lumbar spine, and no nerve issues that she can see. Between this and the lack of relief afforded by the neuropathic medications like neurontin, the neurologist is back to thinking the pain is somatic rather than neurological in origin, so we're changing horses on the medication plan and going with a stronger anti-inflammatory instead.

The new plan is to try naproxen to replace both the Motrin and the Tylenol, because as much as we all want Samantha off of anti-inflammatory drugs as quickly as possible, if they're the only thing that relieves her pain right now then it's better to use a stronger lower-dose version that provides enough relief for her to sleep through the night. So we're going to start with a low dose and titrate up until we hit a number that provides 12 or so hours of pain relief. As an aside, if she ends up still only getting 5 or 6 hours relief even from naproxen that's a strong indication that there's more of a psychological component to the pain than we'd assumed so far.

I'm still convinced that there's a real physiological generator, because I can't believe she's developed such a finely honed internal clock that her mind can create pain on cue just at the time that Motrin should be wearing off. It's not like she gets it at the same time every day or has these pain episodes at the same time every day, as if she were a dog salivating at feeding time. Still, it'll be interesting to try to get empirical (pharmacological) confirmation that the pain is primarily organic.

Along with the naproxen, the neurologist wants to try a low dose of tizanidine (a muscle relaxant, aka Zanaflex) to help relax Samanatha and let her sleep through the night. Although now that I think of it, if the naxproxen is knocking down the pain for 12 hours at a time she shouldn't really need tizanidine to sleep. She's got no problem falling asleep at night -- it's staying asleep that's the issue, because she wakes up in the middle of the night every night from the pain.

I'll have to talk to the neurologist about this and see whether to use the tizanidane or hold off on it at first and only add it should it seem necessary. I'm pretty determined not to over-medicate Samantha. Yes, she needs pain relievers to keep her knee from driving her crazy, but we want to stick to the minimum number of medications possible and the smallest doses that allow her to live her life normally.

As for Joshua, he's doing great. He's going to be walking soon, I think, and he remains a happy, smiley, laughing boy. He's definitely turned into a daddy's boy lately -- if he hears my voice in the other room he crawls toward me at lightning speed, and he cries if I walk by and don't pick him up. He's not quite sleeping through the night, but getting closer. He usually wakes up only once per night, and he often goes back to sleep pretty easily most of the time after a few sips of water and a few minutes of snuggling.

He still only eats things he can pick up in his hands. He's a fan of all kinds of fruit right now, and decided that he liked my noodle kugel. (Thanks, mom, for teaching me how to make that when I was a kid. It was and remains my version of comfort food.) But feed him something that requires a fork or spoon and he purses his lips, closes his mouth tightly, and pushes the spoon away from his face.

Except for ice cream. That he will eat from a spoon. Somehow he knows that it's ice cream long before it gets near his face, and he sits with his mouth open, waiting for it, like a baby bird.