Booty Scoot (and Boogy) April 14, 2011

Layla is really getting around!  She is not really crawling, although she does crawl backwards sometimes.  But who needs crawling when you can get where you want to go while sitting upright?! She just sits on her bottom and bends her legs from side to side until she has wriggled herself to where she wants to be.  It’s so efficient and yet subtle that you will swear she didn’t move and yet she is easily 10 feet from where she started.

She is not showing much interest in standing yet.  Sometimes I will have her sitting in front of me and I will take her hands and pull her to a standing position.  She will be happy for a few seconds before she starts whining and moving her butt toward the floor.  Yesterday I put my laptop and phone on the couch (two things she simply can’t resist) and tried to use those to entice her to stay standing holding onto the couch, but even that didn’t really work.  She’s just not too fussed about being on her feet just yet – so be it!

Hayden’s surgery April 13, 2011

On Monday Hayden went to Riley Children’s Hospital to have urological surgery and have his ear tubes taken out.  He was supposed to have the urological surgery in January, but we ended up postponing it so we could combine it with having his tubes taken out so he would just have to have general anesthesia once.

We had to be at the hospital at 5:45, so it was quite an early start for us considering the hospital is 45 min away.  Hayden wasn’t allowed to eat or drink before surgery, so that was one good thing about it being so early since he wouldn’t have to be hungry for an overly long time.

We tried to prepare him as much as we could the day before.  I tried to talk about every detail I could think of, from the hospital gown to the toys they give him to the bed on wheels that would take him to the operating room to the mask they would put on his face before he fell asleep.  He really seemed to take it all in because we weren’t there very long before he was asking where the bed on wheels was (no wonder, since I had likened it to a train).

Right when he got there he got a little dolphin beanie toy and a toy car, plus we had given him a monster truck so he had a lot to be excited about.  He was happy and calm, lounging on my lap watching cartoons and playing with his car and monster truck before surgery, but they still gave him a drug 1/2 hour before they took him away to calm him.  They weren’t sure about giving it to him since he was pretty relaxed, but we went ahead anyway since we thought it would help him be less stressed when we parted ways.  About 15 min after he took the drug, he was sitting on John’s lap looking through an I-Spy book and he just slowly fell forward until his head hit the book.  It looked like he had fallen asleep while reading, but his eyes were open.  Obviously the drug was working!  We all had a giggle about that, including him.

They took him away at 7:30 and did his ears first.  After about 45 min we talked to the doctor (after some miscommunication about where we should wait, we didn’t get to talk to him in person but they got him on the phone for us – not ideal but what are you going to do) and he said everything went fine.  The urology part we knew would take longer, so John and I went to get some breakfast.  Riley has a cafeteria and a McDonald’s.  Isn’t a McDonald’s in a children’s hospital a little like a cigarette machine in an oncology wing?  ANYWAY, the breakfast food in the cafeteria didn’t look very good, so John and I sucked it up and went to McDonald’s for the first time in – well, really I don’t know how many years but it is well over 5 for me.  I had an Egg McMuffin, hold the Canadian bacon, and it tasted good but my goodness how salty!  I don’t know how an English muffin, egg, and cheese can be that salty, but they sure make it that way.  I’m glad that I have the knowledge that too much salt in a diet is a bad thing, otherwise I would be getting those more often just because it tasted good!  Am I digressing? 🙂

I want to say it was a little after 10 when the surgeon came to see us to say it was over and Hayden had done well.  He said they make you wait 30 – 45 minutes after surgery to see them there, but I think it was only 10 minutes or so after he left that they said we could see him.  The recovery nurse said he woke up really fast after the anesthesia and didn’t seem upset when he came to, so that must have been why it wasn’t as long for us.  It was so good to see him – that time apart was stressful, even though we knew he was in good hands.  I predict in 100 years they will allow a family member or close friend in the operating room with the patient, because it would be good to have someone with you when you are having surgery and it is SO hard for parents to be separated from their kids when they are undergoing it.  Think of how much OB deliveries have changed in the last 50 years.  They used to knock out the mother, the father was in the waiting room, bar, or work, the baby was kept away from its mother, etc.  Now things are radically different.  Did I digress again?

So yes, it was such a relief to see him again.  He was his usual calm self.  He was wondering why he didn’t have clothes on, but other than that didn’t really say too much.  It wasn’t long before he was going from that immediate recovery area (where he was hooked up to machines to monitor vitals) to another recovery area where he could watch tv and eat popsicles.  After a little while there we were able to go home.

My mom had watched Layla for us, which she said went very well.  We came home and Hayden got some paintable monster trucks that he was super excited about.  He did puzzles with Grandma, painted his trucks, ate a very small amount of lunch, and eventually watched a movie on my lap for a few minutes before we both fell asleep.  He remained in good spirits throughout the day, even though he was obviously in pain during parts of the day.

Recovery will take a couple of weeks, due to the nature of the surgery.  His pain does seem to be getting better each day, though.  Each morning when he’s first woken seems to be the hardest, but today when he woke up there didn’t seem to be any pain which was a great sign.  I still gave him some medicine since he went to preschool and I didn’t want to risk it.

So, everything seemed to be a success, and we are so glad it’s behind us now!

Tooth April 7, 2011

In future news, Layla will have gotten her third tooth tomorrow (or the next day or the next).  I can see some white just under the gum on her upper middle left tooth.  (Since it’s been hard for me to find time to blog I am just getting this on here while I have a moment, even though it hasn’t broken through yet!)  It’s amazing to me that she still only has 2 teeth, because Hayden got his first 2 teeth, what, 5 months?  And then he got the next 6 shortly after that, all at once.  Layla has taken much longer and it doesn’t seem like she is getting a lot at once like he did.  As such, she doesn’t seem to be as uncomfortable as I remember Hayden being when he was teething.  They are alike in many other ways though.  I was commenting to John a few days ago that Hayden has always been really solid in the middle, and for a long time I remember thinking how whispy Layla felt when I picked her up.  She just needed some time to catch up, because now when I pick her up I feel that same solidness in her that Hayden always had.

I’ll Have What She’s Having

Who knew the secret to getting a preschooler to eat anything was to have a baby and then when that baby gets old enough to eat solids you feed that baby things you want the other kid to eat?  Wow, it’s so easy. 😉  Layla is eating all sorts of foods now, and I can’t give her anything without Hayden piping up that he wants it, too.  Suddenly he’s eating carrots and plain brown rice and avocado and anything else we put in front of Layla.  We had tried everything to get him to eat carrots, to no avail.  But, heaven forbid we give them to Layla and not to him (gasp!), because “I like carrots!”  He even tried plain tofu once when I gave it to her.  I tried to tell him he might not like it, but he insisted he did – that was before he tried it.  Then he ate it and decided he didn’t, in fact, like it. 🙂  Shocking.  He always wants to eat the little baby crackers, rice puffs, and graham cracker sticks that really are made for babies, but I don’t let him have many of those purely because they kind of expensive, especially considering how many he would eat if he had free reign.

Here is a picture of Layla enjoying pancakes during a Sunday morning breakfast outing.  Her Nanny Mad is notorious for loving pancakes, and Layla is giving her a run for her money!  “All the pancakes are mine, Nanny!”