Boring

Well, I've spent the last two...three? days being completely boring.

Three days. We barely made it out of the house on Wednesday - just got out in time to run to Blockbuster and then to Girliness' last soccer game of the season. Yesterday Toddlerness was sick, and I took her with me to an appointment in the morning and then to get some cough drops (which she likes). She had a lovely fever and alarmed the nurse at my appointment quite nicely, but by the time we went to bed she was almost fully recovered. And today we went shopping for (more) long sleeve dresses for Toddlerness and running shoes for Becca, and to Blockbuster again.

Did I mention I'm really digging this thing where I can exchange an online (mailed-to-me) movie for an in-store movie for free? I'm loving not having to order movies for Toddlerness. And yes, I put her in front of the TV a lot. I have homework to do and I can't do all of it at 3am. It won't hurt her to watch a movie a day, I swear it.

Even if she does occassionally hum theme songs while she's nursing.

I totally aced a Midwifery Care exam earlier this week. Which is a good thing, because the subject - the mechanics and physiology of labor and birth - is really important. And these exams are notoriously difficult. But since I still am not in a clinical practice, I feel like I don't really know it yet. At least I have seen a few births and do know what a few of these things look like. I suppose even when you aren't a midwife or studying to be one, if you're interested in the subject matter you just notice things like how the head turns as it comes out. So I've got the visual in there somewhere. But at this point I'm semi-itching to see some real life...anything.

I feel like my energy from earlier this month is ebbing away, and I'm hoping that is a temporary state. But for now, my house is a wreck and that isn't helping. And my dryer decided to go ahead and die on me - sparking and maybe-flaming-a-little on the way - so yeah, laundry will be a challenge until we get that one figured out. For now, since the sparking and maybe-flaming-a-little episode happened after most of the laundry was done, the main laundry challenge is folding (GOD I hate folding).

And, you guessed it, I'm up at 3:30am writing this because I have once again consumed coffee to stay lucid through my assignments, completed my assignments, and found myself totally not ready to sleep yet. Well, I kinda completed my assignments. I finished everything that is actually due tomorrow. But there are things that I *should* do, so I'm gonna go do them I think. And then try to sleep a few hours before the kids wake up. At least they've been sleeping pretty late recently.

So, Boyness...

Yeah, his adenoids are really big, so we're going to remove them. They're almost certainly the reason he's having hearing issues.

It wasn't his hearing that prompted the dairy elimination - it was over-the-top hyperactivity/lack of impulse control/frenetic energy kind of behavior. And the dairy had in the past brought on the lack-of-hearing episodes reliably, so we still think he's allergic - just that the dairy wasn't the only thing making his ears not drain properly.

Assorted News and Crap

The Boyness Scoop:
So a while back we noticed Boyness wasn't hearing so well again, and it was consistent over a couple of weeks even without dairy exposure. I took a look in his ear and saw some fairly alarming things, so we did a week of diphenhydramine (an over the counter med, which worked the one other time we'd tried it). But after that week, when I took a look in his ear the negative pressure had persisted and I was alarmed to see something that I thought could be a cholesteatoma. A couple days later, his ped came up with the same thoughts (without me telling him first...sigh), so he sent us off with some nasonex and a promise to get our referral in to an otolaryngologist. That referral took a little over a week, but it took us an additional two weeks to get in...which brings us to Monday.

So, we went to see Dr. Jennifer Heydt in Bellevue. Their office is awesome, the staff is awesome, and they did a great job making sure we knew what was going on and why. A couple hours of tests, look-sees, and conversations later, we had decided to schedule surgery to place ear tubes (she said that what I and the ped had seen was not an abnormal growth but rather a portion of the middle ear not normally visible - the persistant negative pressure had drawn the membrane back that far), and to do an xray to help determine whether he needs his adenoids removed (she suspects adenoid hypertrophy has been blocking his eustacean tubes).

Boyness did a great job sitting in a little soundproof booth for a lengthy amount of time, raising his hand for beeps and repeating back words and all that stuff. He apparently has no nerve damage but his hearing is significantly impaired; presumably relieving the pressure on the tympanic membrane will resolve this entirely.

We left her office and arrived at the radiology consultants approximately 10 minutes after the xray tech had left for the day. Go figure. So we returned yesterday and I'm waiting now for Dr. Heydt to get the xrays and interpret them for us.

His surgery is scheduled for Oct. 24th. Now the only question is whether it will be the ears and the adenoids, or just the ears.

Other Scoopness:

I compiled the kids' school supply list - yes, only just now, but honestly who cares, they are learning - and it is awesome. If this actually works out the way it is supposed to, I should get their stuff in a couple of weeks. There are tons of cool things on their lists!

Snap Circuits
Young Scientist Kits
Logic Links

Microscopes and water testing kits!
Sentence and punctuation learning tools! Writing prompts!
Art supplies!

What fun! I hope.

I also signed them up for swimming lessons and sent in the reimbursement forms. Hoping I did everything right and will get my reimbursements promptly as well.

Zoo in Seattle Drizzle

We went to the zoo yesterday with ~L~ and her kidlets.

I LOVE, love love love, the zoo in the "winter". Nobody is there, even on the weekends. We have so few people to contend with. And it isn't like we're in snowsuits - it was still 55-60 degrees. Animals tend to be out and moving around. Even when it is "raining"...well, Seattle rain is not like the rain in Hawaii. You can stand in it for an hour and only reach the outer borders of damp (you certainly don't feel it through your clothes).

My only regret was that we didn't go early and hit up the zoomazium. Which we will probably do some time this week just to do it. I do get some good not-kids-on-me time while they're in there.

Today we are braving the drizzle again, this time down at the Wild Waves Fright Fest. The kids have been looking forward to this ever since we aquired the tickets a month ago. There are things to love about the drizzle and the rainy and the dreary. It clears out those who aren't as willing to put up with it.

More Wierd

So yeah, last night I dreamt that the school moved to a remote small-mansion-like house and cars had to be searched before we went in. The kids came - all our kids were running around all over the place. The school had hired this wiry gray-haired doctor to teach us, but his teaching got stranger and stranger until he was telling us the story of the time he removed skin from his face to see what was underneath...then drank whiskey until his friend could take him to see another doctor and get it fixed up. There were kids running in and out of the room while he told us about menthol breath drops as effective birth control. And I was panicking because I didn't know how we were going to get rid of this nutjob.