Seafood Sunday

Sardines for Will and Liam at lunchtime. Liam loves sardines. I'm pretty good about eating almost anything--well, anything but food made with or containing mayonnaise, or really any other condiment, including pickles--okay, I'm not so good about eating. As with many other things, I hope Liam turns out better.

I was pushing for mac and cheese for lunch when Liam spied the sardine can in the pantry and was all over it. I had to call Will in from the other room to help with the sardine eating, it's just not my thing. So, I'm sort of hopping from one foot to the other, antsy about fish bones and choking, and Will says "You just eat them." and before I know it Liam has stuffed a whole fish in his mouth and is munching away happily. He says: "I ate the taa-il, da-dee!" Right on.

In other seafood-related news, I have the shells from our shellfish birthday dinner last night scrubbed and soaking in the sink with some water and bleach. Once they're clean, I'm going to put them in a bag and let Liam stomp on them or hit them with a mallet or something and add them to the garden paths. I've always loved those shell paths that are all over the east coast, and I figure the round-ish gravel we have will wear down the edges over time so they won't be too sharp. They're all local shells. This is an(other) example of something I think is going to be really neat and everyone else things is a little bit crazy.

After they ate sardines, Will and Liam made faces at each other for quite a while. Two peas in a pod, or fish in a can, or whatever.

The highlight of the party was when the kittens sang Happy Birthday

My mother's birthday today. Happy Birthday mom, we'd be sunk without you, that's for sure. Dinner here and Will's mother prepared virtually everything, including an amazing cake, and schlepped it all to our house so that we didn't have to haul oxygen over to her house. Really nice.

The best part was how Liam reacted to the card from Will's parents: kittens singing Happy Birthday. You know: meow, meow, etc. Oh my goodness, you've never seen a baby laugh so hard. I couldn't get clear photos because he was moving and laughing so much. And he kept saying: "kit-tens don sing happy birfth-day! Sil-ly kit-tens!" Sometimes he sang along, first with words, and then with meowing of his own. But mostly he laughed and we all laughed with him. The next best part is that I think the kitten card went home with my mother. Yay! It was great and all, but we wouldn't want to have too much of a good thing.

I want to remember that it was just this time 3 years ago we found out we had been incredibly blessed and lucky that our IVF had worked. And then after about a month of true terror (the numbers they track were quite low and slow to double), and then 8 more months of regular terror, we were blessed and lucky again to have this sweet, cautious, observant, silly little person come into our lives. Thank you universe or whoever one thanks for this type of gift.

The last picture is Liam trying to snag the birthday crown from my mother's head. He thinks all birthday crowns (and birthday presents) should be for him.

"Pafh -- Paa"

"Pafh -- Paa" means "bath crayons" in our house. Liam loves them. He's getting pretty good with a lot of words but there are some that are just hold overs from before he could reliably make as many sounds and "path -- paa" is one of them.

I'm not sure exactly where this interest came from, and I hope it's not too much of a projection of my own interests, but Liam is interested in whales. Lately we've been talking a lot about whales, especially "or-ca whaale"s. We've been looking at pictures and videos on the computer (warning: you have to preview these since lots feature the whales, well, tearing seals apart and stuff like that) and talking about how whales work. They breath air. They have a blow hole ("bwo hoe") that they breath through. They use their tails for swimming and their flippers for steering and turning. They talk with each other in a special language. They eat fish and other things that live in the ocean. Liam has an old plastic orca whale left over from, I think, my college days (it's always been around somewhere) and he has been swimming it in the bathtub. Today he informed me that orca whales don't eat fish, they eat, wait for it, "pafh -- paa." Of course.

Raining like the season has well and truly changed today. These are the strong, steady fall rains. They drop a lot of water and tell the fall migrating fish that it is time. . .time to move back into natal streams and find their ways home. The big, spotted chinook have already gone up; we saw them in the bay a few weeks ago jumping and trying to stay away from seals. Now it's time for the smaller more brightly colored chum that use the lower parts of the streams, almost spawning in the estuary in some places. This weekend or next I'll take Liam here to see them.

We're having up and down days, trying to take them as they come. Will has been on oxygen all week, but at a lower rate (2.5 L instead of 4) and has been really working at getting stronger. Today felt good enough and was saturating well enough to be without oxygen for most of the afternoon. (He'll use it for sleeping.) I think he's feeling a little better and certainly relieved to have at least some days when he doesn't need O2 all the time.

Digging a big hole

Seems like this should be about so many things, but really it's about Liam's new obsession with digging.

A little background: Mollie the dog digs holes in the yard, for which she gets yelled at. A few weeks ago Grandpa DH and GG's cat escaped the house one night and, you guessed it, came back indoors with dirty paws from digging a hole outside, thus confirming for Liam that the job of all creatures who go outside is to dig holes. And, of course, the city continues to tear the you-know-what out of our street (The latest thing: they've removed all the pavement so now we live on a dirt road. Fun!) and every night parks 2 backhoes, 2 diggers, assorted dump trucks, and lately a grader, steamroller, and street sweeper right in front of our house. So, Liam is interested in digging.

Lately, every night when we get home he says: "out'sie, out'sie, dig . . . a big hole" (very long "o" in "hole"). And off he goes. He likes to pick up the dirt in his hands and put it in the front-end-loader and then transfer it (again by hand) to the dump truck. We have small piles of dirt all over the front walk, the porch, and the back patio. It is starting to get cold in the evening here and Liam's hands turn to little ice cubes. He cries real tears when he is made to come inside for annoyances like dinner, bath time, etc.

Will is still about the same. He says he feels a little better today, maybe. Saturation still in the mid 90s on 4L of O2, so it's stable. We're starting to get the hang of the O2 tubing all over the house and are very grateful that he is at home. Yesterday he sat outside on the back porch for a while and supervised the evening's digging.

We're home

Will was discharged from the hospital on Friday evening. About twelve days in this time. My parents braved rush hour traffic to go get him so I could pick Liam up at school, for which I am eternally grateful.

Will is still feeling really, really bad. He's on 4L oxygen continuously; this keeps his saturations in the mid 90s, except that they go down to the mid 80s pretty quickly with any activity. Grandpa DM helped me rig up the O2 tubing so I think it works okay. It's only 50 feet, so we move the oxygen concentrating machine and switch to a different set of tubing for when he goes upstairs. As we figure this all out more, I'm sure we'll get a better system. He is feeling crummy enough that he wants to just sleep a lot now.

It has been beautiful fall weather which we've been trying to enjoy. Fall is my favorite season, and I'm hoping to tap into a little bit of that if I can. Liam is on a play outside kick, and all he wants to do is "dig a big hole" (like Mollie the dog) and move the dirt around out of the garden bed, into the path, up onto the porch, etc. His hands turn to ice cubes and he has a complete fit when he is made to come indoors.

Last iv antibiotics tomorrow. Then it's just the oral antibiotics and the fluconazole for the cryptococcus infection. Unless things change a lot, we'll go to clinic probably a week from Monday and see what the doctors think. In the meantime, it's just rest and try to feel better.