I wear my sunglasses at night

Jayden and I were looking at pictures of Gamma and others tonight during dinner (thanks Auntie Ellen for posting so many on your facebook page, it saves my evening time and time again!).  We passed by one picture of Jayden and Auntie and Auntie was wearing her sunglasses.  Jayden saw that and immediately wanted his sunglasses.  So Auntie, this series of photos is dedicated to your and stylish self.  :)

I put on my head!

Mommy, Mommy, I put my sunglasses ON!
(Yeah, Jayden, sort of on, except totally crooked and not really on at all since one hand is covering one of your eyes.)

It's nighttime (he says when he has them over his eyes).  It's daytime (he says when he has them on top of his head).

I see it!
So I turned the camera on my phone around so he  could see the picture as it was being taken.  He basically uses it as a mirror and poses for the camera!

I smile!  I happy!  I put sunglasses on top of my head.

And to be clear, the word "sunglasses" is really "sungwasssss."  But whatever makes him happy, considering a few minutes earlier he was wailing (with actual tears running down his cheeks) because I cut a piece of his taquito so that it would be easier for him to eat.  He wanted me to put it back together, but it turns out once a taquito is cut you really can't do much to put it back together.  Poor kid.  He leads a rough life.

Kind of a big deal

Soooo, turns out Jayden fractured his arm.  Not awesome.  To be fair, we don't know that for sure, but we think it's an accurate diagnosis.  Turns out Jayden cannot  fly after all.  At least not without support.  Yesterday we were unloading groceries and lunch and Jayden tried to climb into his highchair, with the table on.  He's done this millions of times.  While we always discourage it, we haven't been able to prevent him from doing it.  Since hindsight is 20/20, we should have just taken the table off whenever he's not in it.  But we didn't.  And so he tried to climb in.  And he slipped.  And fell from the top of the highchair.  He was pretty upset and seemed to be favoring his right arm.  We kept looking at it and asking him if it hurt.  He couldn't really tell us.  But he wouldn't eat, he wouldn't nap, he wouldn't really calm down.  So we finally took him for a drive and he passed out for close to two hours.

Sleeping beauty.

He fell on it again later and cried - more than he normally would from falling - but it still wasn't bruised or swollen and he was still mostly his happy self.  This morning he was running around the house, we were about to leave to go to the park, and he fell into a soft bench that we have.  And he cried almost hysterically - way  more than he should have for falling into something so soft.  So our trip to the park got derailed and off to urgent care we went.

Two hours later, our suspicions were confirmed.  He has a small fracture in his radius (the bone that goes from the elbow to the thumb), what the physician's assistant called a "buckle fracture."  Basically that means that when he landed the bone (radius) hit into the wrist and the ends kind of splayed out a little.  According to childrenshospital.org, it means: One side of the bone bends (buckles) upon itself without breaking the other side.

At urgent care we had to wait for quiet a while, but then they took xrays and wrapped him up in a splint.  He was NOT excited about the splint at first, and definitely not the sling, but he warmed up to it eventually.

Waiting patiently to be examined.

Mommy, Take. It. Off.
(he did actually pull off the cushioning once - I don't know what the nurse was thinking when he half wrapped it and then left for two minutes.  I used my "medical expertise" (aka my experience wrapping my own ankles in high school) to rewrap him.)

I am NOT happy, Mommy.

We walked over to lunch afterwards, and as soon as he was fed he began feeling a lot better.  Towards the end of lunch he looked over at me and held up his left arm and said "Mommy, dis one?"  And I had to explain that his left arm was healthy so he didn't need a splint on his left arm.  He of course then said "mommy, it hurts..."  A few minutes later he was standing in the middle of the restaurant (a little taco place, nothing fancy) jammin' to some 80s pop song and saying "daddy, dance me!"  Clearly he recovered well.  He passed out in the car ride home, as we expected/hoped, and slept for close to two hours.

When he woke up we hung out on the couch for a bit and then we ran around outside, playing with one of the little lemons from our tree and throwing Jasmine's toy for her.  I honestly think Carmen and I felt worse about the whole thing than he did.

The physician's assistant gave us her opinion, but we'll wait for a call tomorrow morning from the radiology expert.  Once we get that call, we have a list of pediatric orthopedic surgeons at Children's Hospital who we will call to schedule an appointment to get the official word.  We're both really hoping that he gets a brace as opposed to a cast.  But we'll see what the doctor says.  Interestingly, the physician's assistant said that kids Jayden's age have a lot of cartilage so it can be very difficult to feel anything.

After leaving the urgent care office, I suddenly wondered if the physician's assistant was evaluating us for child abuse at the same time.  I mean, not that it really appeared that Jayden was abused, but that anytime a small child comes in with a broken bone I'm sure it crosses their mind.  I am grateful that no questions were asked.  As I was holding Jayden after he got the splint and sling on, he was pretty sad and was wailing.  A single tear fell down his right cheek and onto my arm.  Which then made me start crying.  It sucks to feel helpless.  Except that I guess we aren't helpless since we're getting him medical treatment.  But I can't just fix it, which is what I'd like to do.  Thank goodness he recovered quickly and actually turned out to be pretty happy the rest of the day.

Learning to drink one-handed since the splint prevents him from gripping most things.

In other news...
At daycare, Julia puts Jayden on the potty seat a few times a day.  They get a "premio" (prize) whenever they sit on the toilet.  She's been doing this for a while, but this past week it actually started to show results!  On Wednesday he actually went potty in the potty three times.  And on Thursday twice.  And on Friday once.  Of course over the weekend he didn't do it at all.  But I wasn't as good as I should have been.  When he is home for the long Thanksgiving weekend I am going to have to be very good and put him on the potty as often as I can.  It definitely disrupts the day, but it's worth it if we can get him potty trained.  He's smart enough to figure it out, it's just a matter of his parents taking the time to teach him.  It'll happen.  It has to happen.

On Saturday we did get to see some Christmas decorations.  Since it is almost Thanksgiving after all, it was past time for Christmas decor.  Jayden enjoyed the lights and stars on the giant tree:

Southern California at its finest.  Palm trees in the foreground and a giant Christmas tree in the background with a stained glass ceiling.  

Julia said it was fine for Jayden to come tomorrow, which is good.  I have a couple of meetings in the morning, but I'm hoping to take him to the doctor in the afternoon.  Hopefully there's an appointment open for us.

I'm sure there's something I'm missing, but between the excitement of the fracture, the lack of sleep (Jayden hasn't slept past 6 am for the last few week or so and has been waking up in the middle of the night off and on for the past week), I can't think of what it might be.  I'll just keep remembering to take pictures so at least I can share some stories.  Happy Thanksgiving week!

Surviving the weekend

Usually it's the opposite, but this weekend (for me), it was all about surviving the weekend.  I think I mentioned it, but I started getting sick at the beginning of last week.  Wednesday I almost literally felt like death.  Thursday/Friday I started to feel better, so I was hopeful.  And then yesterday I started getting worse.  Last night I woke up at 2 am and my ear was killing me, I couldn't swallow and I thought my throat was closing up.  I was a little worried I'd had an allergic reaction to something.  Soooo, I finally went to the doctor this morning and it turns out I probably have a bacterial infection called "uvulitis."  I am almost certainly spelling that wrong.  But it's where your uvula, the thing that hangs down at the back of your mouth/top of your throat gets swollen.  Welll, when it gets swollen, it hangs lower and blocks your throat and makes it super painful to swallow - and can easily be linked to ear pain, since the ear/nose/throat are all interconnected.  It's really gross if you think about it too much, so please, for your sake, try not to think about it.  I am now on antibiotics, which I pray kick in yesterday.  The pain and discomfort makes me lightheaded, dizzy and nauseous (and funny enough, so do the antibiotics...).  So yeah.  I was "surviving" the weekend while still full-time mothering.  :)

Jayden decided it would be great to be awake at 3 am on Friday night.  And not just awake, but ready to be up and doing stuff, getting his clothes and diaper out of the drawer and everything.  So I spent until about 4:30 am convincing him he should go to sleep and another 30-45 minutes laying on the floor of his room while he finally fell asleep.  The good news was that he didn't wake up until 8:00 am, but that extra 1-1/2 hours didn't totally make up for the interrupted sleep.  Oh well.

The good news for you is that it meant I didn't get in the swimming pool for swimming lessons so I could take pictures!

I forget what he was so excited about here; this was the beginning of the lesson so Carmen and Jayden were just playing in the corner.  But something made him happy.  :)

Kickin' his feet.  He's always happy on the turtle. (that yellow thing is a giant foam turtle, for those of you who haven't been to our little pool).

Action shot!  Jumping off the turtle to Daddy.  He did this probably 456 times.

Actual swimming, with only a little bit (aka entirely supported by) of support by Daddy.

The rest of the day was low-key: lunch, nap, playing, dinner, bedtime.  But during that playtime, I pulled out something I'd bought for him a while ago but never had the opportunity to use.  It was those foam animals that start out as capsules and then, when submerged in warm water, turn into various animal shapes.  I wasn't sure what he was going to think, if he'd enjoy it or if he'd have patience to get to the animal stage.  But it turns out he loved it.  And I explained that it took some time and that you had to have patience.  So then he started saying "patience, mommy.  have to be patient."  He's hilarious.  It was also awesome to watch him watch the animals unfold - "ohhhhh!  ohhhh. myyy. gosh!"  It was great.

Waiting for the last couple of animals to unfold.  And telling me not to take a picture.  He was very serious about it.

All done!  Now we're just playing with the animals.  And tonight at dinner he dumped them all back in a cup of water and was playing with them wet and dry, squeezing them out, etc., all over again.  So the good news is that these little animals aren't just good for one night!

Today was low-key as well.  We went for a long family walk this morning, I went to the doctor for 1-1/2 hours while Carmen and Jayden played tunnel and ran some more outside.  After I got home, Jayden ran some more while we both showered and then we went to lunch.  And of course he passed out about 3-1/2 minutes before we got to the restaurant.  He passed out hard, though and slept for an hour on my lap in the bench at the restaurant. Oh well.  He woke up right after Carmen paid, so we stayed a little longer to feed him something.  Since he was then awake, we stopped at the park and the grocery store on the way home.

Climbing the stairs at the park.  He's so steady and so good at climbing.  He also climbed this crazy ladder thing that made both Carmen and me nervous - but he did it twice without our help.  The one thing about him is that he's pretty cautious; so if he doesn't think he can do it, you can trust that he'll stop and ask for help.  When he gets to a ledge that he thinks is too high, he'll wait until I'm there to hold on to one of his hands.  So as much as we still need to spot him in case he does slip, we also can be somewhat trusting of his own judgment of his abilities.

I love this picture.  You can barely see him, but it's such a cool perspective.  He's hanging from the bar at the top of the tunnel slide.  This was a pretty cool slide.  He probably only went down it 27 times in the 30 minutes we were there (and I'm only slightly exaggerating).

The beginning of my dream of making him a "sports" fan, not a "men's sports" fan or a "women's sports" fan, but just a sports fan.  We sat down and watched a girls' little league softball game.  And he was engaged, except for when he couldn't see the ball.  Then he kept saying "I can't seeee it!"  I'm trying to tell him it's "basketball," whether it's women's basketball or men's basketball.  We'll see how long that lasts.  Probably not that long.  But at age two it's totally working!

And now it's back to work tomorrow.  He did ask to go to Juju's today and I had to pretend to call her and tell him that she wasn't home so we couldn't go over to her house.  I felt a little bad, but it was easier to explain that than that she really doesn't want to see him on Saturday or Sunday.  :)  Hope you all had good weekends.  And I wish you well in surviving the last full work week in November!

Master chef in the making

or not at all.

This was Jayden's concoction tonight.  He'd already eaten a full dinner and I undercooked the pasta so I was happy for it to be an art/science experiment for him.

He later was grabbing handfulls of the mixture, which for those of you who are wondering, is pasta, alfredo sauce and milk and squeezing it and making the squishy, wet pasta slurpy sound and saying "I skeeze!"  He was having such a good time.

Tonight was one of the few nights that he was actually in a good mood almost the entire time I was with him.  This whole week he's been getting fussy and clingy almost the minute I walk in the door.  But today he was happy the whole time, playing with me, "helping" me make dinner and generally just being cheerful. The only thing that has changed is bathtime.  He hates it.  He screams when we put him in, he won't sit down and tries to climb out the entire time he's in there.  When it's a one-on-one situation I basically just have to hold him with one hand and pray that I generally wipe the rest of him with the washcloth to get the majority of the dirt off.  I don't know what caused that, since he's always loved the bathtub, but Ms. Stacy said he's acting more fearful in the water too, so maybe he's developing some kind of fear or going through a water phase or something.  I can't think of anything that happened that scared him, but maybe something did.

In other news, in case you didn't know, Jayden is also one of the sweetest little boys ever.  Obviously he's very attached to his mama, but he's cute to everyone else too.  ;)

Blowing a kiss to Daddy (who's in Atlanta) before bedtime.

He is very concerned, and very observant.  If he hears me make any kind of noise that might indicate that I'm injured ("ow," "oh man!" "oof," etc.), he says "mommy, you ok?!?" with serious concern in his voice.  Since it's usually just that I've stubbed a toe, bumped my hip on a corner, closed my finger in a cabinet, etc., my answer is always "yes, I'm fine."  But it's so cute that he understands the concept of an injury and that he checks in to see if I'm okay.

I got an email recently about toddler development that said that by now your child should be able to put two words together to form a phrase, like "mommy eat" or "doggie go" or something like that.  For once it actually didn't cause me concern but reassured me, since Jayden regularly strings together 4 and 5 words to say things: "Jaff-mine and Daddy go downstairs?" "I-I-I, I no crying any-mo.  I happy."  "whehr my taxi car?  I no can see it!?!"

More evidence of his observance-ability.  Since we drive so much down here he has noticed the color of stoplights.  So when we stop on the drive home he says "red wight?"  And when I start driving again he says "gween wight? go!  we go fast!"  I have taught him that red light means stop and green light means go, but he brought it up first and it has stuck with him.  It is impressive.

In any case, this week has been incredibly rough.  And just when I think I should give up, quit my job and never leave the house again, we have a good night like tonight and I think, hmm, maybe I really can do this after all.  Oh parenthood.

Yup, another one

I wasn't going to post again tonight, but I actually accomplished something today and I wanted to share.

So today started out okay. Jayden got up a little early, but nothing terrible and he was pretty cheerful.  By the time we got downstairs he was a hot mess.  He cried, more or less, for about 30 minutes straight.  He refused to eat.  He refused to walk.  He didn't want to sit in the stroller.  He wanted me to pick him up.  But if I picked him up, he wanted me to put him down.  He didn't want to sit in his chair.  He didn't want to sit in my chair.  He didn't want to sit.  He didn't want to stand.  He didn't want to put his jacket on.  He asked for oatmeal and then refused to eat it.  He didn't want water.  He didn't want yogurt.  When we did walk (he was in the stroller), he got mad at me when I put the sunshade up.  He got mad when the sun was in his eyes.  Literally anything I did was wrong.  Finally he sat down in his chair.  And ate his oatmeal in about 42.7 seconds.  Like I guessed, he was hungry.  He finally calmed down.  As we were getting in the car to go to my office, he looked at me and said "Mommy, I no crying anymore.  I-I-I happy."  And I replied "really?  are you sure?!?"  A few minutes later, as we were driving and looking out the window at buses and motorcycles, he said "Mommy, I, I a big boy."  I think Juju tells him to be a big boy and that big boys don't cry.  I kind of hate that message, because I don't want Jayden to think he shouldn't cry.  But at the same time, I'm sure he'll hear that message everywhere and it's just up to me to counteract it.

A quick rundown of the day. Jayden was pretty good - after the office we ran a bunch of errands and had lunch.

Carrying the doggie bags that he picked out.  Turns out giving him a responsibility - a purpose in life - makes him a whole lot happier.

My last stop was at the grocery store.  I wasn't going to go, because it was close to naptime, but Jayden had been wide awake in the car so I decided I'd run in to get it out of the way.  Once again, he wouldn't run, he wouldn't walk, he wouldn't ride, etc.  Finally I got him in the cart and almost immediately he started passing out.  His head kept falling forward or sideways and once or twice he might have hit his head on the shopping cart handle.  Poor kid.  I practically ran through the grocery store, checked out as fast as possible and drove reasonably fast home.  We got home a little before 2 and Jayden slept until 4:30 pm!  So that explains a lot of the disaster this morning and throughout the day.  Thank goodness he had the chance to sleep this afternoon, then.

He still hadn't eaten a full meal with me so I was not looking forward to dinner.  I was making risotto and he wanted to help, so it dawned on me that maybe if he helped me make dinner then he'd be invested in it and he'd actually eat it.  So he brought his stool in, grabbed a second wooden spoon and helped me stir the risotto.

For anyone who might be worried, I was extremely careful and warned him repeatedly about how hot the stove was and that he should only touch the end of the spoon so that he didn't come close to the pan.  I know some people would say I shouldn't let him within five feet of a hot stove.  But how else is he going to learn?  And how awesome is it that he helped me make dinner?!?

...and it worked!!!!!  I was so happy.  I called my mom, even though I'd already talked to her twice today.  Finally, something worked!  And it almost sort of helped me too!  He ate a bowl of the risotto and even had a little bit more.  So that was my accomplishment today.  If I got nothing else done, I got Jayden to eat dinner.  Ah, motherhood.

But then after dinner we had some more time, so we goofed off a bit:

Smiley, fuzzy hair!

He specifically told me that he wanted to take a picture for Gramma, and this is the smile that I got.  Not bad.

And, finally, bubble funnies in the bathtub.  When I didn't take a video, he ended the whole thing saying "oh my gosh."  But of course whenever I turned the camera on he wouldn't say it.  Oh well.  You can imagine him finishing his giggling (and honestly, is there anything better than his giggling?!?) and then saying, almost under his breath, "oh . . my . . gosh."