This weekend Liam went to a mini one day violin camp. This is the third year he has gone and the first year I have remembered to take my camera. He really enjoys it and it is fun to see how much he has grown from year to year. The first year he was barely doing rhythms and this year he is almost done with book one.
It may only be Tuesday, but it’s never too early in the week for a party at our house. I guess the boys decided at school today that the K house was the place to be after school today. So, at about 4:30, boys came pouring through our back door and headed straight for the PS2. They played Spiderman and Star Wars until about 5:15 and then everyone headed home. I love that we live in a neighborhood where the boys have so many friends close to them in age and that they all live right behind us. Our back door gets used more than our front door. 🙂
I was home this morning doing some picking up while the boys were at school and I started to hear this loud banging sound, kind of like a hammer. I am used to this since we have new home construction all around us, but this seemed to be a little bit louder than it should have been. I looked out the window and saw a truck in our driveway. I went outside and there is a guy ripping the trim off of our garage. I ask him what he is doing and he tells me he is supposed to take the trim off. I tell him a number of times in a number of different ways that he has the wrong house and he keeps insisting he doesn’t. Don’t you think if I was going to have the trim ripped off of my garage I would know about it? Anyways, he finally decides that maybe he does have the wrong house and calls someone. Yep, he has the wrong house. Yes, I think I tried to tell you that. He put the trim back on and someone came by to apologize. What else goes on around here when we’re not here?
Well, we had to go back to the drs office today. Colm fell off of the bars at gymnastics today and cut his head. I saw it happen. I didn’t think it was that bad because he didn’t start crying AT ALL. Not even a whimper. The next thing I know the instructor is carrying him out and there is blood all over both of them. The dr. got us right in and we got to go to the “treatment room”. I always wondered what the treatment room was. We walk past it all the time on the way to the regular rooms. Well, now I know. That’s where you go to get casts and stitches, or in our case, staples. Colm did not cry when the nurse cleaned up his wound. He did not cry when they put the staples in the his head. He screamed and fought, however, when they tried to give him some Motrin. The kid DOES NOT take meds. I will spare you a picture. It is really gross and kind of Frankensteiny. We have to go back in ten days and get the staples taken out. I can only hope and pray that he does as well then as he did today. He was so brave. I was truly impressed.
On Saturday, my parents took Colm for the afternoon, so it was just me, Sean and Liam. The decibel level greatly decreases when one of them is gone. Today, Liam was at a friend’s house for a while this afternoon and Sean took Colm to work with him. I was here all by myself. That doesn’t happen very often.
Hopefully this will be the last installment in this series. We went to the dr today and we got the results back from his foot culture. He just has a normal infection and not a super scary one and his foot is no longer red and puffy, soooo we can stop with the oral hive-producing meds and just put some Neosporin on it. Now, that said, if his foot gets red and puffy again we have to try the oral meds again. We also need to keep giving him Benadryl to keep his hives in check until all the medicine is out of his system.
The Rest of Her Life is one of those books that ends so beautifully and wraps things up so nicely. Some books leave you wanting for more. Some books end and make you wonder if the author just ran out of ideas. Again, this is not one of those books. It is well written from beginning to end and is a beautiful story of a family’s love and strength while enduring a horrible tragedy. The Center of Everything (by the same author) is also very good.
Liam’s teacher has been having me work with small groups of students concentrating on fine motor skills, exercising the muscles in their fingers, which will hopefully help them with their writing and pencil grip. We have done some stringing of beads, practicing their site words in sand, picking up beans with a spoon, etc. This week I taught them how to play marbles. They had SO MUCH fun. What I was in awe of while I was watching them play and laugh and have fun with this very simple game was that these kids don’t know what it is like to live without a laptop, Playstation, and DVD player and yet they were having a blast with marbles. Now, I am not delusional. I know that if given the choice, they probably wouldn’t choose marbles over their Playstation, but it was still fun watching them have so much non-electric fun.
Let me start at the beginning. This all started yesterday as we were walking out the door to go to church. Liam could not get his socks on because his foot hurt so bad. He had what we thought was a blister on his foot on Tuesday which his teacher put a band-aid on. I assumed it was a blister because his shoe had broken and it was rubbing on his foot. So, the “blister” is now infected and I took Liam to the dr and Sean took Colm to Sunday School. The dr we saw said it could be a blister or maybe a recluse spider bite. Most of the signs point to a blister though since he has not had a fever and there was no blood in his urine. She gives us a scrip for an antibiotic and sends us on our way with instructions to follow up with our regular dr on Wednesday. This morning Liam wakes up with hives ALL OVER his torso and back. Liam seems to think it is a bug bite. Apparently he is allergic to the antibiotics they gave us, just like Sean is. So, we head back to the drs, but this time we go to the walk-in at our regular drs office, but don’t see our regular dr. This dr is worried that Liam’s “blister” could be a staph infection and now we have to watch him like a hawk. She gave us some different antibiotics, but it doesn’t work on staph infections. The one he is obviously allergic to, however, does work on staph infections. So now we have to wait until Wednesday for the culture they took of his foot to come back to see what kind of infection it is. I really hope it isn’t staph because if it is I don’t know what we are supposed to do since he is allergic to the drugs that treat it. I have had quite a morning.
This is two hours after his first dose of Benadryl. You should have seen it before!