school

Baby Buddies

| patmcg

Today was our mid-year teacher conference for Molly. We had the conference at 7:00 am so that Kit could participate before going to work. Claire and Molly were the very first kids to be dropped off at school that day!

We had a good discussion with Molly’s lead teacher, Karyn. We all agreed that we need to keep an eye on some of Molly’s “gross motor” skills such as putting some weight on her legs rather than let them dangle. We also agreed that Molly is doing great cognitively and socially and is having a great time at school watching her bigger friends. We learned that Molly has buddied up with Hudson, the other littlest baby in the class. Hudson was born a couple of months after Claire, but was bigger than Molly from day one! Molly and Hudson like to lay next to each other while they play where they can turn to look and smile at each other.

After the conference, Kit and I went in to visit Molly before going to work, and sure enough, there she was laying with Hudson. So I snapped this picture of the cute pair.


Riddle Me This

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Claire has started a new game in the car to and from school. She likes to play little guessing games based on letters. For example, today she said, “What’s a park near our house that starts with letter Z-Z-Z-Z Zee?” She says this sounding out the sound of the letter Z a few times, apparently something they do in school. I answer her quiz, “Zilker Park”, to which Claire says proudly, “That’s right! You got it!”  Another good one was, “I am thinking of something that starts with T-T-T-tee, and they have trunks, and there are lots of them all around.”  The answer: trees.

Sometimes the letters are a bit off. One time her hint was, “What’s an animal that starts with the letter L and has a trunk?” I was stumped on this one. Claire’s answer was an ELephant. I told her that elephant starts with an E, not an L, even though the first sound of the word sounds like the letter L, or “el”. Claire was slightly deflated by this but took note and moved on to some more additional questions for me.

You know, spelling really is confusing. I mean really, elephant starts with an E, not an L? That is just not right.


“It” Spreads Again

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Molly finally got the dreaded stomach virus that everyone else is getting.

She has a fever and has cut way back on eating. She is often very upset by the sight of the bottle and cries instead of eating, even after five or more hours without food. When she does eat, she vomits frequently, a couple of times a day. If you want to feed Molly lately, you better wear a rain coat!

Note from the future:


We eventually had to put Molly on Pedialite to keep her hydrated and out of the emergency room.  She started to get her strength back and managed a good solid recovery.  She missed a full week of school, including the temporary school closing, and got to know a few different temporary nannies.  After her full recovery, she started eating again really well, or “like a horse” as her teacher put it.

The Scourge Continues

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It is not just Molly and Claire who have been suffering from this and that malady over the past few weeks. Heck, even our dog Muffin has it or something like it. She is lethargic and has been vomiting at night! I still keep a plastic bag by my bed waiting for it to hit me. For now, I will happily settle for my constant low-level head cold.
But this is not just affecting our household. Their kids’ whole school is suffering. Almost half the teachers were out this past week, as well as over 30 kids, all due to an impressive variety of ailments. Lacking teachers and students, the school is running on emergency mode, and classes have to be combined. To “help break the cycle of contagion”, the school is closing for a four-day weekend from February 13 to 16. The healthy teachers and some cleaning crew are disinfecting everything in the school from top-to-bottom.

Here is a partial message from Claire’s teacher:
Just want to make sure that you all know that we will be closed on Monday, Feb 16th and now Tuesday, Feb 17th to better ensure that all of our children and staff can fully heal before coming back. There are quite a few different illnesses floating around up there. If you have means of keeping your children at home tomorrow, please do. BELIEVE ME–you do NOT want even the slightest bit of any of those illnesses, the worst of all being the flu. It’s absolutely horrible.

We all want to put the cold, wet, dark, dreary winter of 2009-2010 behind us!


The Dreaded Stomach Virus

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Just as Molly has more or less kicked off the remnants of her terrible RSV attack, and she is just getting back to eating and sleeping normally… Kit and Claire have now come down with an apparent case of a dreaded stomach virus, which may or may not be rotavirus. In my limited experience with these things, RSV and the stomach virus seem to be among the worst of the “peacetime” viruses. By “peacetime”, I mean something that does not automatically land you in the
hospital.
Here are the lowlights of this one:
  • Kit woke up early Monday morning vomiting profusely. She was sick enough to call in sick to work for the first time in memory. When she told her colleagues she was vomiting and had diarrhea, they quickly told her to stay home. They said something like, “Keep that thing at home.”
  • Then on Monday night at bedtime Claire was complaining that she was scared she was going to have nightmares. At 4 am I heard her moan in the stairway leading up to our bedroom, then as I got to the stairs, she vomited all over the stairs and started screaming and crying. This is the first time Claire has vomited since she was a baby, when then it was only ever once or twice. Kit stayed with Claire from 4 am to 6 am while I kept on Molly duty, who was finally just fully recovering from RSV.
  • Kit crawled into work on Tuesday. She took a shower and thought she looked pretty together. At work they told her, in a nice way, that she looked terrible.
  • Claire stayed home on Tuesday, the first time in memory that she stayed home from school. I had to drag poor Claire with me in the cold and damp weather to drop off Molly at school. Molly — miraculously, and for the first time in weeks — was consistently just smiling and happy. At school, Claire waited in the shoe-changing room just outside of the Molly’s classroom while I dropped off Molly, to avoid bringing those germs into the room.
  • Once back home, Claire spent almost the entire day curled up on an inflatable bed in front of the TV in the living room watching The Aristocats over and over. The idea was just to make her as comfortable as possible. She moaned with tummy aches throughout the morning. The aches subsided for the most part by afternoon, when she fell into a disturbed sleep in the living room.
  • Already behind at work and exhausted, I calculated that if either I or Molly got this nasty thing, then it would be real trouble. If Molly got it, I would sure miss another few days of work. If I got it, then I would sure miss work too and surely give it to Molly.
  • Although all the teachers already had suffered from the stomach virus in the past few days, and now Kit and Claire had it, this is when I started my freakish obsession with keeping Kit and Claire’s germs off of Molly. It was a challenge, and my hands ended up dry and cracked and literally bleeding from the constant hand washing. I was also doing endless loads of laundry. If Kit or Claire so much as touched something that Molly might later touch, it went in the laundry. I also disinfected the hard surfaces daily. I was so excited when I found the Clorox. I wanted to kill that nasty virus. I was out for blood, and now I had the good hard stuff. Kit said she had never seen anyone so excited to find bleach.
  • In the afternoon, I had to drag poor Claire through the cold and damp to pick up Molly, who was still miraculously smiling and just fine.
  • Claire fell asleep on the inflatable bed as I fed Molly and put her to sleep upstairs around 6:30 that night. We just transferred her to her bed and let her sleep the rest of the night in there with Kit on the floor beside her.
  • Miraculously, the next morning, Molly and I both woke up smiling and fine. I was keeping a plastic bag by my bed at all times though, since this thing had caught both Kit and Claire with vomiting a fit in the middle of the night.
  • On Wednesday, Claire’s tummy was mostly better. She managed to eat two tortillas in the morning. I stated home with her though because she seemed real worn out and was not eating much.
  • I had a babysitter, Kailey, up to the house in the afternoon so I could get focus a on work for a little while.
  • Kailey handled Claire’s nap. Claire sobbed when it was time to go to sleep, then refused to pick a nap-time story, then the babysitter left Claire in her room sitting up. She peeked in a few minutes later, and Claire had fallen asleep in the a very awkward, sprawled out position with no covers on. Three hours later, after the Kailey had left, I woke up poor Claire to drag her to school to pick up Molly again. Claire would have to wait in the shoe-changing room once again.
  • That night, I told Claire that we would probably send her to school tomorrow, and she went into a rare diatribe about how she hated school and she was really really sick and needed to stay home for five days. She said she really hates taking naps at school because she hates hate hates sleeping because it makes her tired. When pressed, Claire said she liked her friends at school and her teachers too, but she hated school. She wanted to have her friends over to the house instead. I guess it turns out that Claire loved lazing around watching TV all day. She was also very upset that we were putting away the inflate-a-bed in the living room.
  • Claire was still worn out but good enough for school the next day. She protested mightily at first, but once was got there, she seemed happy to be back.

Career Plans

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Claire has been thinking about being a working mom lately.

Her daily note from school today said Claire “went to work” while Carissa (her teacher) “babysat” her babies named “Dona” and “Roshashana”.

One night during her bath, Claire rattled off a few job ideas, but after some thought settled on being a teacher.

Yesterday, said Claire said she wanted to be a doctor and go to the hospital with her mom every day. Kit was really touched by this. However, she is suggesting that Claire look into an allied health field or a technician position rather than being a straight up doctor. The hours and stress have been getting to her lately. :-


Future Picasso

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Claire has showed a renewed interest in drawing lately. Ofter months of limited drawing, her drawings really have really taken off lately. Here are a couple of compositions she took home from school this week.

The first one is a family portrait.
It has her mom, her dad, herself,
and her baby sister Molly holding a bottle.

She also made this Picasso-eqsue drawing of a man eating a lilipop.

Not Liking the Car

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Molly has, as a whole, not enjoyed the car rides so far in her young life.  When I drop her off to school and pick her up, she spends most of the time in the car crying, then screaming a really odd scream with strange pitches and timbres.  Then comes the gasping and coughing, and more crying and screaming.  Trying to reach back and comfort Molly does not help.  In fact, a tap of  your hand seems to agitate her even more.  Then after 10 to 15 minutes, we are at school or home.  It is not an easy 10 to 15 minutes on me and Claire, but most of all on Molly.

Thankfully, Molly has just started to have some quiet car rides.  Maybe a little whimpering or light crying followed by quiet, when she either falls asleep or just settles down.  Today she was quiet almost the whole way home.  It was actually disconcerting.  I kept looking back to make sure she was okay.

This dislike of car rides is something I had heard about before from several people we know, so it must be pretty common.  Thankfully, Molly really likes her crib and settles down and sleeps in there with amazing consistency.  So I will take that trade any day.

Double Pumping

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Kit is still pumping to feed Molly. I hope Kit will forgive me if this is too personal, but Kit has taken untold steps to feed Molly breast milk over the last couple of months, and I wanted to recognize her heroic effort.

Due to her long hours on the job and Molly’s physiology, Kit has not been able to simply nurse Molly. It sounds like such a simple idea to breast feed, but several weeks of serious frustration, worrying, and discomfort on Kit and Molly’s part showed how difficult it can really be. Molly was not gaining enough weight and simply had to have some formula, but Kit was still spurred on to feed Molly as much breast milk as possible.


It may be a surprise to the uninitiated, but this whole breastfeeding topic is so full of controversy that it makes Republicans and Democrats look tame. Kit is no “breastfeeding nazi” by any means. In fact, she is often put off by the guilt-tripping attitude of the breastfeeding crowd. But this fall’s seasonal flu and N1H1 outbreaks, which can be deadly to infants, inspired Kit to get Molly her breast milk. Kit was dismayed by the exaggerated claims of the breastfeeding crowd, so as a scientist herself, she did a literature search on the topic. She saw nothing compelling about breast milk helping with intelligence or obesity, but she did find a credible scientific article suggesting that breast milk might objectively might help fight off sickness to some extent. The amount of help is not fully understood, and of course nothing is guaranteed, but just that glimmer of hope was enough for Kit find another way to get Molly her breast milk.

What resulted was pumping — lots and lots of pumping. Kit has never really complained about it, but her pumping regimen has been a tough haul. Kit is often up at 5:00 am, sometimes earlier, to pump before work. And then she comes home at 6:30 and heads straight up to pump. Dinner time usually involves Claire and I eating dinner together while Kit is off performing the grotesque ritual of pumping, and Molly (the sleepyhead) is napping. Kit shows up some 30-45 minutes later with a few ounces of breast milk in two plastic bottles, and then we warm up her stale dinner while I got Claire ready for bed. The whole thing was pretty disruptive to our whole family routine, especially for Kit. Early on, when Kit was still on maternity leave, she was actually pumping about 10 times a day, and each session took around 30-45 minutes. And then there is the cleaning, the endless cleaning. There are eight pieces that need to be hand cleaned and steam sterilized in the microwave each time Kit pumps, each piece having odd corners, flaps, and hard to reach areas. Admittedly, this one affects me the most, so I had to get it in here.

Through all of this, Kit must feel like a cow, a very sore cow. And she is a cow (I mean a mom) who has gone to great lengths for her calf (I mean baby) just in case it helps. The good news is that something is working because Molly has not gotten a common cold yet, much less the flu, even after weeks of day care. The breast milk may have had something to do with that. I would also give credit to hand washing. Thankfully, Molly’s school is full of hand washing nazis.