Quarantine

We played hooky this morning.

The kids were not pleased. They complained about staying home and demanded to know why we weren't going to church.

"But we're not sick anymore!" they insisted. Their dad joined the chorus.

No, we're not sick anymore. But this tired mom has had about all she can take over the last few weeks. The pinkie finger is healing, the fever is gone, the tummy ache woes are less frequent, the ear infection is clearing up, the sniffles are waning, and the cough seems to be subsiding. It's been a week since we've made a trip to the emergency room, and three days since we've been to the doctor. These are not records, but around here, they are becoming numbers to be proud of. After a few long weeks of various illness and injury, things finally seem to be looking up.

I just need to know we're going to be okay for a few more days. So I extended our family quarantine for another 24 hours.

And the weather just happened to be perfect on this Sunday morning for traipsing over the river and through the woods and building mud castles in the backyard.

So much for all those complaints.

Family storytime

It makes for a sweet picture, but this moment is not nearly as cuddly as it looks.

Jacob isn't giggling about Balaam's donkey striking up a conversation with his rider. He's screaming to be let down.

Caleb is plugging his ears and humming in a desperate attempt to drown out his brother. 

Abby has retreated to her first and only coping mechanism, sucking her thumb as she prays silently that God would please send her a nice, quiet sister next time. 

And all the while, Daddy does his best to restrain a 4-year-old, a 3-year-old and a 1-year-old on his lap so he can get through one little story.

It might be time to rethink our bedtime routine.

Case closed

I finally figured out why, no matter how many times I clean, sort and reorganize my pantry, I can never locate anything on the second shelf from the bottom. 

His name is Jacob.

And I'm sure there's nothing I can do about it.

Fins to the left

It may have been the greatest day of his life. 

We stood just feet from the edge of the water, gazing down into the world's largest salt water aquarium habitat, a 6.3 million gallon shark tank that is home to four whale sharks and a host of other black tip reef sharks, sand sharks, manta rays, "sawsharks" (the largetooth sawfish that Caleb deemed his favorite) and other sea life.

It was feeding time at the Georgia Aquarium, and the sharks repeatedly swam right up to the edge of the tank, their fins breaking the surface of the water where we stood in a gesture Caleb was certain meant they were trying to say hi. So he waved back every time, and kept reminding us that in his shark hat, they probably thought he was a shark as well.

We stood there for nearly a half an hour while the workers climbed into their boats and headed out to give the sharks their breakfast. Caleb got a private lesson on what they eat (vitamins just like him!) and later wandered behind the scenes of all the exhibits, getting a back stage view of belugas, baby sharks, the coral reef, and even petting the starfish.

Special thanks to our very special tour guide for making this birthday present one our shark-loving little guy will never forget.

Happy Birthday, Caleb!

Caleb is everything I imagined a three-year-old boy would be.

He's rambunctious, he's loud, he's busy, he's smart, he's curious, he's messy, and he only ever wants to play with anything with wheels.

He loves sharks and Tow Mater and diggers and dirt and figuring out how things are put together (or how they come apart, more often). He adores his big sister, tolerates his little brother, loves to wrestle with Daddy and has an unlimited supply of snuggles for Mommy.

He looks exactly the way he looked at six months, and a year, and two years. He has the most unchanging, timeless face I've ever seen. He still makes the greatest cheese face ever, and he still loves it when I make his hair spiky after baths. It never lasts long. His hair has the texture of steel wool, and only wants to lay as close to his head as possible.

He's just as silly as ever, and still on the fast track to being the class clown. He and his sister have invented some sort of game in his closet that involves stuffed animals riding on something called a "Zog-Zoe." He won't tell us what it is, except that it's something you "zog" on. Abby's not quite sure, but she plays along, and Caleb is forever inviting her to come ride on the Zog-Zoe with him. She responds by following his lead and gathering all the pillows and blankets from her bed and setting up some sort of stuffed animal convention in his closet. This has gone on for months now, and the excitement of the Zog-Zoe in his closet shows no signs of waning. Occasionally when we're driving around town, he'll point excitedly at something at yell out "Look at the zog-zoe!" But we never know what he's talking about. I'm starting to think the confusion he's causing for everyone is half the fun of this game.

He's smart, probably because at three he's already spent a year in preschool and half a year in pre-k following along with everything his sister is doing. He recognizes and can write most of the letters of the alphabet, can count to 40 or so, recognizes and can spell his name, and recognizes the C-130s, F-22s and F-16s that frequently buzz our house. He solves mazes and puzzles like a champ, and has an insane amount of patience and determination when it comes to problem solving and figuring things out.

He loves to help, and is quick to grab the measuring tape or the drill whenever his dad is working on a project. He's measured our kitchen, backyard and garage more times than I can count, has helped assemble two twin beds in the past few months, and is first in line when Daddy needs someone to hold a flashlight while he crawls under the house to change an air filter. In the kitchen, nothing is baked that hasn't had some assistance from Caleb. He's my go-to ingredient dumper when I need an extra hand with a cake mix or a casserole.

He talks all the time, and only occasionally pauses to sing a familiar tune or one he's invented. "Can I have some water please" to the tune of the hymn "Hallelujah! What a Savior!" is one of my more recent favorite Caleb creations. ("Can I have some water please?/Because I am so thirsty/And I haven't had some yet/Can I pleeee-ease/Have some water?")

We celebrated his birthday just the way he would have it: a giant helium Mater balloon, a digger cake, a birthday crown that he wore all day long, and tomorrow, a trip to the aquarium to watch sharks eat their breakfast. Never has there been a celebration more perfectly suited to our little guy.

Happy birthday, Caleb! Thanks for bringing so much fun and silliness and joy into our lives!

Two out of three

I didn't set out to collect hospital bracelets. It just seems to be happening that way.

If we can't go more than four weeks (to the minute, practically) without visiting the Emergency Room, something is wrong. And we're adding another one to this family come July. I'm hoping to nip this Saturday-night-ER-field-trip thing in the bud by then. Although having the emergency entrance to the local children's hospital programmed into my GPS might be kind of a bad sign.

At least no one's finger got chopped off this time. A freakishly high fever and acute abdominal pain are no fun (just ask the four year old with those symptoms...she'll tell you how miserable she is). But they sure beat the blood and gore of our last visit.

Two hours and a popsicle later, they pumped her full of fever reducers, sent us home and told us to bring her back if it gets worse. 

I'm hoping that one bracelet with her name on it is enough for now. I'm a little tired of spending my Saturday nights in kids' triage.

Why we homeschool

Because sometimes, when I lay out my books and lesson plans and worksheets for our morning of Pre-K, my daughter has a better idea.

Sometimes, she looks me in the eye and says, "Mommy, I'm ready to learn today!"

"Great sweetie," I reply, glancing at the materials I've prepared. "Did you have something specific in mind?"

"I want to learn how to draw a frog," she tells me without hesitation.

Telling time will have to wait then. Today, we will learn how to draw a frog. 

And that smile she gave me when she figured out she could do it? 

That was my Teacher of the Year award.

A job to do

He gets it from his dad.

My nearly three-year-old can't stop thinking. And once he's thought of something, he has to try it out, and tweak it, and perfect it. There's hardly a moment of the day when he's not in motion, physically, and I know his brain is working double overtime behind the scenes.

It must be exhausting to be him.

Give him any set of random objects, and he'll find something to do with them. Something that involves small-scale construction, most likely, and something that will move his cars and trucks from one place to another more efficiently.

Little brother stole the ramps for his bridge? Not a problem. He tried an innumerable array of possibilities before settling on using alternate parts of the train track to do the job. (Caleb's not one to try the most obvious solution first, and he's not a huge fan of simple solutions. The more complicated a fix, the better, in his little world.)

To get to this arrangement, he went through cups, books, pillows, blocks, and even tried balancing one end of the bridge on his sister's leg. (She wouldn't hold still, so he moved on.)

He's calm, methodical, and precise. He's not easily frustrated by failure, but seems to file each unsuccessful try away in his mind for future use on some other problem.

And in his mind, the task at hand is the only important thing. Lunch and a screaming brother couldn't distract him from his job. He wasn't stopping until Mater made it over that bridge, and in exactly the right way.

Now if only he could channel that determination into some Stop Running in the House efforts, we'd be all set.

Solids, liquids and gases

Today's science lesson is brought to you by The Berenstain Bear's Big Book of Science and Nature.

It is because of this book that my kids know their months and seasons. It is because of this book that they can tell you the different characteristics of plants and animals.

It is why my daughter knows that frogs and toads are types of amphibians.

It is why my son knows plants make oxygen for us to breathe.

It is why they understand the basic types of machines, and how to build one.

And today, it is why they understand the three kinds of matter, how something moves from one state to another, and why helium balloons stay up in the air.

I'd love to take credit for their education, but pretty much everything they know, we owe to Mama and Papa Berenstain.

Stinky McStinkerson

It's been a really long three weeks. And we are all so very glad it's over. Especially Jacob, who seems to be surprised at the sight of his own hand after having his cast removed this morning.

Three weeks is a long time to go without use of your left arm. It's a long time to go without sucking your thumb. It's a long time to go without a bath.

(We'll pause now for a brief intermission while we sing "My Little Stinker" to the tune of "You Are My Sunshine.")

You are my stinker

My little stinker

A nice warm bath would do you well

We haven't bathed you

In three long weeks now

And you're really starting to smell

We now return to our regularly scheduled blogging...

Three weeks of learning to walk with all that extra weight on one side was just enough time to bring Jacob's crawling days to a screeching halt. It's impossible to crawl when your arm is fixed at a 90-degree angle.

Three weeks was just enough time for me to start viewing all the gray dents in my floors and walls as household scars of a childhood that will go by much too quickly.

Three weeks was just enough time for Abby and Caleb to learn to dart, duck and step aside quickly lest they be broadsided by the weaponized arm of an angry and frustrated little brother. Jacob has overcome his handicap tremendously in the time his cast has been with us, but the things he could not do--pick up and play with more than one truck at a time, or drive the big Mack truck, or catch himself when he fell--were nothing short of infuriating. It has been three long weeks of flailing, screaming, angry baby madness around here. My only solace has been naptime and bedtime.

And while we're on the topic of naps, I should note that three weeks was just enough time for Jacob to bid farewell to his morning nap altogether. The first few days post-injury, he struggled to fall asleep. For the next week and a half, he simply screamed his head off whenever I put him down for his morning nap. This past week, I've given up entirely, and spent the morning helping a very tired, cranky baby push through his exhaustion to make it to lunch. If I was clunking myself in the head with a big heavy cast every time I rolled over and couldn't even snuggle my blankie the way I'm used to, I might have trouble sleeping also.

But, it seems, three weeks was just the amount of time Jacob needed to begin healing. The cast came off to the tune of much screaming today, but the reports from the doctor are good. He said, once again, that Jacob's finger looks great. (And once again, I thought to myself that his finger actually looks horrific, but apparently it looks just the way it should at this stage of the growing-back-together process.) He told us to expect the fingernail itself to pop off in the next week or so, and to look for it to grow back in the next two months. In the interim, we'll have a chance to get a really good look at where the finger was severed and reattached through the nail bed. He told us a bandage was unnecessary, unless I couldn't stand to look at it. (This doctor seems to have me pretty well figured out.)

In short, he said the two things I most wanted to hear today: my baby is going to be fine, and I can bathe him now.

This is good news. The images burned in my mind of my son's mangled finger no longer ruin my appetite, and they don't keep me up at night anymore.

But the smell of a kid who hasn't been bathed in three weeks is enough to turn even the strongest of stomachs.